The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  King Fahd made only one visit there before his death in 2005. His son, King Abdullah, is the present owner, but he owns another large palace in Cannes and rarely visits. I was told by local officials that in return for the town of Vallauris dropping a prosecution for major building work carried out on the Château de l’Horizon without the necessary planning permission, the King graciously agreed to pay for an extension of the Coastal Footpath – the Littoral Méditerranée – along the beach at the base of the wall housing his swimming pool.

  Just as I was finishing this book in July 2015, a small furore erupted on the site, which made the UK national news. Because of an impending visit by the Saudi royal family to the villa, security guards had blocked access to the small public beach among the rocks to one side of the property. It was considered too dangerous for the royal family, although, arguably, for many decades personalities of equal importance mixed happily with such local residents as cared to venture across the rocks.

  A petition deploring this closure of a public beach (used only by locals because of access difficulties) was signed by one hundred thousand local residents, but the King had approached the French President personally and the beach was closed for several days.

  I smiled to think that the Château de l’Horizon is still making headlines.

  Postscript

  What happened to some of the major personalities in the book after 1960.

  Rita Hayworth

  After the collapse of her marriage to Aly Khan, Rita returned to Hollywood to star in a comeback picture, Affair in Trinidad, opposite Glenn Ford, with whom she had starred in her blockbuster, Gilda. Her constant rows with studio boss Harry Cohen caused her frequent suspension and the picture was late in production, but it was much publicised and ended up grossing a million dollars more than Gilda. She went on to star in a string of successful pictures alongside such stars as Charles Laughton, Stewart Granger, José Ferrer, Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon, but her career was badly affected by her tumultuous marriage to Dick Haymes.

  Haymes was a singer with two previous wives, a hefty alimony bill and a massive outstanding tax bill. Rita paid off most of his debts and the pair married in Las Vegas in September 1953. Even her money was insufficient, and at the time Rita was fighting a custody battle with Aly Khan over Yasmin she and Haymes were also fending off – and sometimes hiding from – sheriff’s deputies who had warrants to arrest Haymes for debts. When Haymes struck Rita in the face during a quarrel at a nightclub in Los Angeles, Rita walked out on the marriage. She was by then desperately short of money, so she returned to work in Hollywood and also did some television.

  She married producer James Hill in 1958 and intended to retire, but this marriage was also unsuccessful and she filed for divorce three years later, citing extreme mental cruelty. There was plenty of supporting evidence for Hill had been witnessed by many, including Charlton Heston, heaping obscene abuse on Rita in public while she wept into her hands. Again she returned to making movies but years of personal problems and heavy drinking had prematurely aged her, and the intrusiveness of movie camera close-ups made her look older than her late thirties. In an interview for a German television programme in 1967 she was still beautiful and poised, but she noticeably struggled to remember some words. In her last movie, The Wrath of God (1972), her health and mental state was so poor that some scenes had to be shot a line at a time. There was a good deal of negative publicity when soon afterwards she was removed from a flight for drunken behaviour, and for some time afterwards she was reagarded as a hopeless drunk. Eventually, however, it was realised that her alcoholism had masked the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Through these traumatic years, when she flew into violent uncontrollable rages, Rita was cared for devotedly by her daughter Yasmin, who wrote of her enormous relief when Rita was finally diagnosed in 1980. Soon afterwards Rita’s eldest daughter Rebecca (her child by Orson Welles) saw her mother for the first time in many years; she was not recognised, but after a while Rita began to understand who she was and sat with tears running down her face. Rita died in February 1987 at the age of sixty-eight, from complications arising from Alzheimer’s.

  Gene Tierney

  Following her break-up with Aly Khan, Gene attempted suicide and was treated for severe depression; this included a series of electric shock treatments approved by her mother. Gene blamed the onset of this ‘touch of insanity’, as she later described it, on the life she had been leading in Hollywood and her personal relationships. In 1958 she returned to Hollywood, where she had been offered the lead role in Holiday for Lovers, but the stress was too much for her fragile mental health and she relapsed.

  In 1958 Gene met the Texas oil baron W. Howard Lee, who was married to Hedy Lamarr. After his divorce, he and Gene married in 1960 and the couple lived quietly and happily in Houston, Texas until Lee’s death in 1981. Gene suffered occasional bouts of depression for the remainder of her life, but in a television interview (still available on YouTube) said that as long as she lived a quiet life she was able to deal with the condition.

  A heavy smoker, Gene died of emphysema in Houston in November 1991.

  Daisy Fellowes

  Daisy remained friends with Winston Churchill to the end of her life, and there are a number of friendly letters between them in the Churchill Papers, invariably signed with a drawing of a daisy flower in place of her name. They continued to meet on the Riviera when Winston was holidaying there, but never in England since Clementine deprecated Daisy and her lifestyle.

  After Reggie Fellowes died in 1953, the sixty-three-year-old Daisy suffered a series of depressions and several times attempted suicide (Daisy’s mother had committed suicide when Daisy was a young child). In the late Fifties Daisy left the Riviera for good and moved into her vast Parisian mansion on the rue de Lille where she died, aged seventy-two, in 1962.

  She is still known for her fabulous collection of bespoke jewels, created for her – often to her own design – by the great jewellers such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Lacloche, Boucheron, and Mauboussin, which perfectly captured the style of between-the-wars Modernism. It was arguably among the best collections of fine jewels in the world and when a piece occasionally reaches the salerooms today it can easily generate as much excitement in the press as one of the pieces owned by Daisy’s friend the Duchess of Windsor.

  Pamela Digby Churchill

  After her relationships with Gianni Agnelli and Élie de Rothschild failed, Pam travelled to America, where she made her home. Just a few days before Aly Khan’s death in May 1960, Pam married the Broadway impresario and producer Leland Hayward, whose greatest hit was The Sound of Music. Until Leland’s death in 1971 the couple lived in great luxury at his country estate, called Haywire after his early Broadway production. It was a happy marriage and Pam ensured that everything revolved around her husband – even to the detriment of his children. During Leland’s lifetime Pam’s relationship with her stepchildren was cordial enough, but following his death their association became extremely acrimonious and Pam’s stepdaughter wrote a bitter memoir, titled Haywire, which openly accused Pam of robbing Leland’s children of valuable items left by their father.

  In 1971 Pam met up with her first real love, Averell Harriman, now aged seventy-nine and, like Pam, recently widowed. Pam and Averell took up their old relationship and were married six months later, at which point she became a United States citizen. Again, the marriage was happy and again there were problems when the children of Averell’s previous marriage felt ousted by Pam, which created deep antagonism. Following Averell’s death in 1986 Pam became embroiled for years in bitter legal arguments over his will. She had been left sixty-five million dollars and Harriman’s children accused her of wasting thirty million dollars of their trust fund in ill-advised investments, leaving them only three million.

  During her marriage to Harriman Pam had become active in Washington society, and in particular within the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. She became a
mover and shaker in her own right, founding and running successful fund-raising campaigns and a political action committee called Democrats for the 80s (and later Democrats for the 90s). She was named the National Democratic Club’s Woman of the Year in 1980 and in 1993, and for her help in his presidential campaign – it was said he never would have succeeded without Pam’s stamp of approval – President Bill Clinton sent her to Paris as United States ambassador. She was a stunning success.

  On 3 February 1997, while swimming in the pool at the Ritz, Paris, she suffered a brain haemorrhage and died two days later.

  President Clinton sent Air Force One to collect Pam’s body from Paris, and she was received in Washington with full military honours. The New York Times said her funeral ‘was the closest thing to a state funeral Washington has seen in years’. No previous American ambassador had ever been so honoured.

  It was Pam’s misfortune to have two hostile biographers. The first biography began as a cooperative venture: Pam was to supply the information and documentary materials, and the professional biographer was to do the writing. Some months into the project Pam’s brother Eddie and her sister Sheila persuaded her to pull out as they believed it would reflect unfavourably on her position. She cancelled her agreement and the biographer went on to write an unauthorised biography of Pam anyway, in a context which could not be described as sympathetic. The second biography, perhaps taking its cue from the first, was also an unflattering portrait, concentrating on Pam’s numerous love affairs and the deeply subjective evidence of her disaffected stepchildren – the equivalent of writing a biography of Kennedy via his bedroom conquests, as told by the lovers’ husbands and children.

  Men were indeed important milestones in Pam’s life, and she learned much from most of them about art, wine and music – all this she regarded as part of her education. But apart from her indisputable abilities as a courtesan she was a success above the ordinary in her own right. Ask any Parisian about Pam’s contemporary achievements as ambassador and you will more often than not receive a glowing commendation. In Washington she was revered as a political hostess by Democrats and highly respected, albeit grudgingly, by Republicans. Her former lovers remained good friends and were welcomed by her family years after the love affairs had ended.

  Elsa Maxwell

  In October 1956 Elsa met Maria Callas. She was surprised that Callas wanted to see her, for she had just written an unfavourable review of the diva’s debut at the New York Met. The two women became close friends, but for Elsa it was more than a friendship: she became infatuated with Callas and followed her on tours, bombarding the singer with love letters (‘the greatest love one human being can feel for another’ she wrote in one of them) and telephone calls. Elsa could never resist playing Cupid, however, and just as she had once introduced Aly Khan to Rita Hayworth in one of the era’s great fated romances, she topped it when, at a Greek ball that she threw at the Hotel Danieli in Venice, she introduced Maria Callas to Ari Onassis. Both were in reasonably happy long-term marriages at the time – Callas to Giovanni Meneghini and Onassis to Tina. It was a doomed meeting which would eventually ruin both their lives, as well as those of their partners.

  Over the next months, as Maria cancelled appearance after appearance, earning a reputation for being impossible to work with, Elsa escorted her around Paris where they dined with some of the Rothschilds, attended the races as Aly’s guest, took tea with the Windsors and attended every important party going – seldom getting to bed until 4 a.m. Later Elsa told Joan Sutherland that she blamed herself for the decline of Maria Callas’s voice by introducing her to the world of jet-setters.

  It was in the spring of 1959 that Onassis invited Callas and her husband to join him and Tina, along with Winston and Clementine, on a cruise aboard the Christina. Elsa was in Monte Carlo and dined with the party before the yacht departed, but she was not invited to sail with them on that occasion. The rest is history.

  In 1961, while dancing the twist with Onassis, Elsa suffered a mild stroke which left her very lame. Nevertheless, as she recovered her career went from strength to strength as she became a major personality on late-night television chat shows whenever she was in the USA. Her series of books were all brought back into print and sold well on the back of her new popularity.

  Despite her decline in health she was still partying in the late summer of 1963, still visiting old friends such as Princess Grace of Monaco on a birthday trip to the Riviera, still pulling strings and conducting introductions in the Ritz Bar in Paris, still organising and acting the grande dame at events such as the April in Paris charity ball in New York, which she had helped to found, though in October 1963 she attended it in a wheelchair. A week later she was admitted to hospital having suffered a heart attack and she died there two days later. Her lifelong friend Dickie Fellowes-Gordon was her sole heir. Elsa left only ten thousand dollars, and Dickie outlived Elsa by twenty-eight years. She gradually sold off her assets including the house in France, and she died in distressed circumstances in London in 1991, aged one hundred.

  Elsie de Wolfe

  In June 1939 Elsie, aged seventy-two and dressed in her shorts and conical hat, was doing handstands on Maxine’s terrace while she and her friends waited to see how Maxine would fare following her stroke. A few weeks later, on the night of 1 July 1939, Elsie threw her second annual Circus Ball at her beloved Villa Trianon in Versailles. From 10 p.m. until breakfast was served at 5 a.m., seven hundred guests, including Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and the Windsors, partied at what proved to be the last great soirée of the pre-war Paris social season, and indeed of the era. She had built a ballroom in the garden for the occasion and the garden entertainments featured a circus ring among trees that were softly uplit to provide a magical atmosphere. Beautifully dressed and bejewelled guests, seated on gilded chairs and wearing fur wraps to keep off the damp of a summer night, watched clowns, acrobats and the famous grey Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna perform. Inside the exquisite house vast containers filled with ice kept hundreds of bottles of champagne at the correct temperature, and the salons were trimmed with great garlands of flowers and massive floral arrangements by Constance Spry. Elsie had a simple aim: perfection – and it was generally conceded that she achieved it.

  As the Germans swept into France the fortunate few who were able to do so made their escape. Elsie and her husband Charles Mendl headed for California, where she renovated a crumbling mansion in Beverly Hills and somehow contrived with the aid of friends to rescue a stool that had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had been left behind at Villa Trianon. Since the villa was occupied by Nazis at the time this was quite a feat. When the stool arrived in California Elsie spent a morning moving it around the room so that it could get air and sun following the traumas it had suffered on its journey.

  Elsie’s American citizenship, which had been lost by her marriage to Charles, was restored by special act of Congress, but as soon as the war ended she could not wait to get back to Paris and her beloved Villa Trianon. She found it in a poor state after five years of occupation by German High Command, followed by a brief spell housing General Eisenhower and his staff. Despite her increasing frailty (she was by now in her eighties) she spent four years renovating her house to return it to its former state, and she died there in 1950. At her specific request no funeral was held as she said she preferred her friends to remember her ‘in their hearts’.

  Charles had retired as a diplomat before they fled to California in 1939, but in an unlikely turn of events found work in Hollywood playing the role of an archetypal British aristocrat in several films including Notorious in 1946 and Ivy in 1947. He died on 15 February 1958 in Paris.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor

  Wallis was never accepted by the Royal Family. In 1945, after they returned from the Bahamas to France, the Duke wrote a best-selling autobiography, titled A King’s Story, which was published in 1951. Perhaps encouraged by the success of this, Wallis a
lso wrote her autobiography, The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956), though Diana Mosley told me the book said more about the ghost writer than about Wallis herself, or the vibrant personality of the woman who captured a king. Since then, an entire literary industry has evolved about this couple whose story continues to enthral millions of readers.

  After they sold La Croë they settled in a beautifully converted ancient mill house near Paris, although as they aged they told close friends they wished they had opted for the more kindly climate of the Riviera. The Duke of Windsor died in Paris on 28 May 1972 of throat cancer. His body was flown to England in an RAF aircraft for the funeral and interment at Frogmore, in the private burial ground of the Royal Family. Wallis flew to London for the funeral accompanied by Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary. Wallis was no longer afraid of flying for, as she told Mary, she had nothing now to live for.

  Wallis stayed at Buckingham Palace and was driven by Prince Charles to Windsor on the eve of the Duke’s funeral to see her husband’s body lying in state at St George’s chapel. The authorities had underestimated the amount of interest in the occasion: more than sixty thousand people came to pay their respects. Apart from one short private day visit to view her husband’s grave in 1974, using an airplane loaned to her by the Queen, the Duchess remained in Paris, becoming increasingly frail and withdrawn from her friends. She ended her life being cared for by her lawyer, almost a prisoner in her own bedroom. For some years prior to her death on 24 April 1986 even her friends were refused entry to her house on the grounds that Wallis was too ill to receive them. She was buried alongside the Duke at Frogmore.