The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  Eventually they organised a better plan: their luggage had all labels removed and was loaded casually in small batches into taxis which went off to wait in a pre-arranged rendezvous on the outskirts of Madrid. Then by a series of subterfuges the Prince got away. Rita made her exit in disguise through the hotel kitchens and jumped into the Cadillac driven by Emrys, who was waiting with the engine running – they were pursued by ‘a screaming crowd who realised they had been cheated of a glimpse of the famous film star’.6 Eventually they shook the followers off and reached the home of Aly’s friend, where they stayed for some days undiscovered by the press.

  Having got away, it would have been sensible to lie low, but Rita had set her heart on attending a bull fight. They got into the arena in Toledo without being noticed; however, as they took their seats wolf whistles started, and the band struck up the theme to Gilda. The entire stadium, now alerted to Rita’s presence, began chanting ‘Gilda! Gilda! Gilda!’ while stamping their feet rhythmically. The noise was deafening and Rita’s inclination was to flee, but Aly gripped her arm and told her to sit. All went well until the matador slew the bull and presented Rita with the bloody ear. Emrys Williams said he nearly vomited, but Rita behaved as though she was acting a part in a movie: she stood up and formally received the trophy. Emrys recalled the dramatic moment: ‘Her eyes were shining with a sort of fierce pride. Her whole body was taut and I could see the muscles quivering in her outstretched neck. She held her head high with her chin tilted upwards. It was obvious that all her Spanish blood had warmed to the traditional drama of the bull ring.’7 This was a signal for hundreds of people to rush towards Rita and Aly, and it became a mad stampede as the crowd stood in the ring looking up at them, chanted and threw their hats in the air in a wild crescendo of noise. Rita was terrified, and even Aly began to look alarmed. They got away with the help of a posse of Guardia Civil, drove into the countryside and stopped at a small hotel. The ancient receptionist took one look at Rita and said to Emrys ‘Gilda? Gilda señor?’ The chauffeur felt there was no escape for them.

  They drove on to Seville, where Rita’s relatives lived, and were swamped at every turn by excited crowds and the press. On the day that her ninety-two-year-old grandfather Senor Cansio visited the city Aly and Rita decided to take her entire family out to lunch. The restaurant was quickly surrounded by crowds, but the police and Emrys kept interlopers out of the walled garden. Rita was happy and relaxed, and after the meal various elderly aunts and uncles danced to show how accomplished they were. As a climax Rita’s grandfather – who had taught her the flamenco in California – got up to dance for them. ‘Grandpa was a sensation,’ Emrys wrote, amazed that such an old man could be so spirited and lithe. ‘At last Rita herself took the floor,’ Emrys recalled. ‘Hollywood hadn’t taken the Spanish blood out of her veins. She danced like a real Spaniard – not like the film star ... her skirt had wings as she spun round and her long loose red hair floated above her shoulders. The dance and the night were hers.’8 Everyone stood and cheered and shouted ‘Olé! Olé! Olé!’

  Prince Aly watched this and then took his chauffeur by the arm, whispering in his ear: ‘I’m getting a divorce ... I’m going to marry Rita.’

  * Shifra Haran had formerly been Orson Welles’s secretary and transferred to Rita Hayworth when the couple parted. She is quoted extensively in biographies of the couple.

  † In his memoir (written many years later) Emrys Williams recalled that he had collected Rita from a Villefranche hotel, but contemporary newspapers confirm that Rita was staying at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes on this date. Some weeks later she transferred to La Reserve at Villefranche, from where Emrys Williams would have chauffeured her several times.

  ‡ Widow of the 6th Baron, who had died in 1941.

  14

  ‘A Marriage has been Arranged’

  From Spain Aly and Rita travelled to Portugal and then flew to America, where Rita was due to start rehearsals and costume fittings at Columbia Studios prior to filming her latest movie. During the time they were in Hollywood Rita worked every day at the studio and Aly, who was virtually unknown on America’s west coast, enjoyed the novelty of being able to go anywhere he liked without being recognised. He also made friends with Rebecca, and was a big hit with the child, which went a long way in changing Rita’s attitude towards him. He became her rock when the studio made demands on her and upset her, and his love-making consoled her need for security and reassurance. They spent an idyllic month together, when they were not disturbed and Aly devoted his entire time to her. Rita glowed with happiness.

  The script for the film was late and the couple decided to take a holiday in Mexico, only to endure similar attentions as in Spain. They flew to Cuba, where the same thing happened. In the end they returned to Hollywood for Rita to start filming and it is clear during all these trials that Rita had become more and more dependent on Aly.

  When she finally got to see the film script, she hated it. It was not the sort of part she was known for and she turned the film down on grounds that it was not in her best interests. The studio boss Harry Cohn – almost certainly a former lover of Rita’s and still jealous – decided to take his revenge with press releases which stated that she had failed to turn up for work, thus endangering a costly production and hundreds of jobs. She was portrayed as a typical Hollywood diva too lazy to work and Rita, who was actually one of the most hardworking of Hollywood stars, was hurt at being described as spoilt and indolent. It was bad publicity, especially as her divorce was finalised at the same time. Aly, who wanted to return to the Riviera, capitalised on her angry insecurity and was able to persuade her to go back to France with him, bringing Rebecca.

  Rumours of a marriage between Aly and Rita swirled across two continents and they were the hot topic in every newspaper as they returned to Europe. When they arrived at the Château de l’Horizon they were again besieged for weeks. Photographers sneaked in by fishing boat and climbed the steps beside the swimming-pool chute, or crept along the railway bridge after dark to wait for the gate to open, then charged in and hid in the shrubberies. They even managed to smuggle in a well-known Cannes prostitute and took a photograph of her by the front door of the villa, as though she had been visiting Aly. Finally, they organised a combined attack: a convoy of taxis drove over the bridge and a fleet of boats came in by sea, coordinated to arrive at the same time, all crammed with reporters and photographers bent on getting a story for their editors. Aly and his staff had no way to repel this force, and it was only ended by Emrys Williams brandishing his service revolver and threatening to shoot someone. There was a stand-off and eventually, realising that someone had to compromise, Emrys told them that if they left at once the Prince would give them a statement the following day. They left the grounds but hung around the gate. It was hardly surprising that these journalists – many from international capitals who had been sent to cover the Aly and Rita circus – refused to leave. Who was going away tamely to tell their editors they hadn’t been able to get a story? Emrys told Aly that he would have to do something: give them a story, or this situation would never end.

  That evening Aly and Rita were smuggled out lying under blankets in the back of the gardener’s old station wagon and driven up into the hills to Yakymour, to tell the Aga Khan that they were to be married. Emrys Williams, meanwhile, drove out at high speed in the Cadillac and as he intended, was followed. He led the fleet of press cars on a chase to Monte Carlo, where he lost them in the narrow side streets, and when Aly and Rita later returned to the villa there was no one to be seen. The next morning the Prince met the press corps alone, saying that Rita had flu and could not join him. He announced that he and his wife Joan had divorced, on the grounds of having lived apart for more than three years, and that His Highness the Aga Khan had given permission for his marriage to Rita Hayworth to go ahead.

  For a time the reporters vanished, the staff at the villa were left in peace to make their arrangements and Aly threw himself into pla
nning a sumptuous event. His tailors flew from London to fit him for his suit. The couturier Jacques Fath came down to Cannes accompanied by several of his mannequins to model styles, with bales of material and a retinue of assistants to fit Rita for her wedding dress and trousseau.

  Chef René hired dozens of staff, not only to help with the forthcoming wedding breakfast but for the guests who came from all over the world and called at the villa in the weeks and days preceding the wedding. All the hotels in Cannes and Antibes were booked up and the event was billed as the wedding of the century. Certainly it was the forerunner of several other weddings of the century, such as that of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly in 1956, in that for a while it seemed to capture the interest of the whole world.

  Months earlier, when Rita and Aly went to Spain, Pamela Churchill had been left more or less alone and in charge of the villa. She had developed a pleasant daily routine, driving into Cannes after breakfast to visit the hairdresser or to shop and meet a friend or two for lunch or coffee. In the afternoon she would swim and play with young Winston or chat to any visitors, and then dine in one or other of the neighbouring villas or with other friends along the Côte d’Azur. One afternoon she was alone, sunbathing on the pool terrace, when she heard the engine of a powerful motor boat switch off close by and realised someone had arrived at the l’Horizon jetty. She looked up as the most beautiful man she had ever seen emerged into view from the pool steps.

  Tall and slender, hard-muscled and tanned with dark curly hair, he introduced himself as Giovanni (‘Call me Gianni’) Agnelli. From the tittle-tattle of Riviera social life Pamela could hardly not have known who he was: the twenty-seven-year-old grandson and heir of the founder of the Fiat empire, and one of the richest young men in Europe – and certainly the richest man in Italy. He lived in a seventeenth-century palace in Rome and his fortune was then rumoured to be about three billion dollars.* With his sports cars, yachts and private aeroplane, he was hardly ever out of the gossip columns. He gambled in the casinos with stakes that were more than a year’s salary to most people, night-clubbed with beautiful actresses and models, and ran with a fast crowd of men which included Porfirio Rubirosa,* Aly Khan, Darryl Zanuck and Errol Flynn (both Zanuck and Flynn famously prowled the Mediterranean on their respective luxurious yachts), the Marquis Alfonso de Portago* and the Brazilian playboy Prince Francisco ‘Baby’ Pignatari.

  Pam was twenty-eight, and at the height of her physical beauty. Although usually drawn to older men, she was instantly attracted to Gianni, and the magnetism operated both ways.

  There were many who said that Pam was drawn to Gianni because of his money and her two biographers were certainly at pains to point this out, claiming that everything she did during the five years they were together was financed by him. It was Gianni, they wrote, who paid for the fabulous homes in Rome, Turin and London, and the lease every summer of Château de la Garoupe on the Cap d’Antibes, for the purchase of La Léopolda, the old palace that had formerly been the home of the Belgian King Leopold II, for the designer clothes Pam wore when featured in fashion and society magazines such as Vogue, for the costly jewels he gave her, and for the superb apartment in Paris which became her base for many years as she flitted constantly between Turin, London and the Riviera.*

  Pam’s brother Eddie was convinced, however, that whatever she got from the relationship with Gianni, Pam ‘truly adored him’,1 and despite agreeing to terminate a pregnancy in the first year of their relationship, she always thought and hoped that the relationship would eventually lead to marriage. He believed that Gianni behaved as any rich husband in love with his wife would do, happily accepting the bills she ran up to make their various homes, and herself, beautiful for him. Pam had been raised as an aristocrat in an English country manor house, and now she filled Gianni’s properties with designer furnishings, works of art and banks of beautifully arranged fresh flowers fit for entertaining the world’s leaders. Girls of her class at that time were educated to look after and entertain men, and run their homes, and that was what Pam did with great style. As a move towards marriage she converted to Catholicism and had her marriage to Randolph Churchill annulled, pleading that she had been very young at the time, and that her initial doubts had been overcome by Randolph’s persuasion. Coincidentally, Gianni made a very large donation to the Church at the time this papal annulment was granted, but with hindsight, although he had certainly considered marriage it seems clear that Gianni could never have married Pam because of ferocious opposition from his family. His parents were dead but he had four sisters, all of whom insisted that their brother must make a happy marriage to an Italian virgin. They considered Pam to be a sort of red-haired she-devil.

  During those five years when Pam was wife to Gianni in all but name, it was certainly not a one-way street because, indisputably, she was a social asset to him. Pam knew everyone worth knowing in English, European and American society and politics, partly through her own family connections, partly as the beloved former daughter-in-law of Winston and Clementine Churchill, and partly through her former intimate relationships with several influential Americans. She was polished and confident, and spoke fluent French without an accent. Many of the numerous guests who visited Gianni over the years – some of whom became invaluable contacts for him – he met through Pam. In short, they were a good partnership, who were widely regarded as a permanent couple and treated as such. She did not merely live with him as his mistress, but ran his various homes, furnished them and managed the bank accounts allocated for the purpose as though she were his wife. Gianni was never happier, and although his sisters refused to formally receive Pam* her family welcomed him as a valued friend and he was a frequent visitor to the Digby home at Minterne Magna for the rest of his life. Nothing else pleased Gianni half as much as the weekend Pam took him to Blenheim Palace to stay with the Duke of Marlborough, or when she introduced him to Winston Churchill at Chartwell. Still, although socially adept even Pam needed help when asked a tricky question for a party at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Who took precedence, the Aga Khan or the Duke of Windsor? She knew whom to ask, though, and the response from Duff Cooper was very precise: ‘His Highness the Aga Khan is regarded as God on Earth by his many million followers. But an English Duke, of course, takes precedence.’2

  By the time Aly and Rita returned from Spain, the Pam Churchill and Gianni Agnelli partnership was in full bloom. They had even been on a short cruise together, mainly to avoid a threatened visit by Randolph, who was bent on persuading Pam to remain married to him. This new relationship came as a relief to Rita, for Pam had been one of the women at the villa who had made her feel inadequate, and although this was not intended by Pam there was some understandable initial competitiveness.

  After Gianni came on the scene Pam and Rita became good friends and would remain so for the rest of their lives.

  * Before it turned over its manufacturing process to cars at the end of the Second World War (when few had a car, but everyone wanted one) Fiat had manufactured trucks, tanks and military vehicles in both world wars, but especially benefited from lucrative commissions through Mussolini.

  † A diplomat of the Dominican Republic, he was a racing driver, polo player and noted playboy jet-setter.

  ‡ The Spanish racing driver.

  § Young Winston was removed from Gibbs School in Queens Gate, London, and sent to Le Rosey, the exclusive Swiss boarding school attended by Aly Khan’s sons. This move was not looked upon kindly by his grandparents, until they met the English nanny recruited by Pam, and were promised that the child could spend summer holidays with his father (who was about to remarry). Then they knew all would be well.

  ¶ They did meet once, accidentally.

  15

  Wedding of the Century

  On 27 May 1949 the Château de l’Horizon was the focus of world press interest. At dawn an army of trucks snaked along the road and across the railway bridge as they lined up to unload tons of fresh food, huge baskets arranged with l
ong-stemmed roses, cut flowers by the hundredweight and scores of ornamental trees and shrubs. Two set pieces, each fifteen feet long and containing thousands of white carnations and roses, picked out the initials A and M, for Aly and Rita (her baptismal name was Margarita); mounted on pontoons, they were floated in the swimming pool into which – as the first guests started to arrive – ten gallons of eau de cologne were emptied, filling the air with exquisite fragrance. Aly had made all the arrangements himself.

  In the days leading up to the 27th wedding presents arrived by the hundred, along with thousands of telegrams from all over the world. Aly read them all, but he was unimpressed with the diamond earrings sent to Rita by the Aga and the Begum as their gift to the couple – he had rather hoped for a large cheque, in the region of a million dollars. The wedding cake, made in Paris in great secrecy, had been flown to Cannes on a private plane and collected by Emrys Williams. The vehicles in Aly Khan’s garage were kept so busy that when the Prince departed to dine at La Croë with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor all his cars were occupied with prewedding errands. At the last minute he sprinted across the bridge to stand on the main road and flag down a passing taxi to take him to Cap d’Antibes.

  Two days before the wedding there was a private screening in Cannes of Rita’s latest film (probably the first screening in France), The Loves of Carmen* attended by Rita, the director King Vidor, a number of wedding guests and staff of Château de l’Horizon. In the film, which follows the story of the opera Carmen, Rita plays a dishonest and tempestuous gypsy girl who seduces an innocent soldier, Don José, and leads him to commit murder for the love of her. The male lead was played by Glenn Ford, who had starred with Rita in Gilda, and this was the first film chosen and co-produced by Rita’s own production company, the Beckworth Corporation, which gave her a say over the content of the production (indeed, she was co-producer). She hired her father and uncle, both professional flamenco dancers, who had taught Rita to dance from the age of six, to choreograph the traditional Spanish dances. The scene in which she first meets Don José and dances to attract him is a cinema classic, and Aly’s chauffeur believed that it was this dance that she recreated when she danced in Spain for her family and Aly, and precipitated his decision to marry her.