Bendor was only 29 at the time of his son’s death – his thirtieth birthday was on 19th March, soon after that sombre day in Cannes – and most people assumed that he would father another heir, and that the young couple’s life would resume as before. Certainly, Daisy’s diary entry for 14th November 1909 suggested that there was reason to be hopeful. ‘My happy surprise is – that little Shelagh writes she is almost certain she is getting a baby – and oh, I am so glad, please God it will be a boy … I only hope that she will grasp at the little rays of sun in her life and be thankful for every bright day.’ In fact, Shelagh’s grief had not abated; she still thought she could hear her dead son’s footsteps along the long, shadowy corridors of Eaton, and her nights in London were solitary ones. As soon as her pregnancy had been confirmed, Bendor ceased to sleep in the same house as her, nor did he dine with her; or indeed have any contact with her at all, except when they were entertaining guests.
Perhaps the marriage might have recovered if the third child had been a boy, but on 27th June 1910, Shelagh gave birth to a baby girl, christened Mary. Shelagh’s mother Patsy Cornwallis-West wrote to Daisy: ‘Shelagh’s little baby … is, alas, a little girl! … she has only seen it once in the dark, and Bendor not at all … God help them both.’
God did not come much into the unravelling of their marriage, although Bendor, who was unexpectedly capable of exhibiting devout faith, did attend Holy Communion with one of his lovers, Gertie Millar, the most popular musical comedy star of the day. The daughter of a Bradford millworker, Gertie was already famously alluring when she met Bendor, and their affair lasted for several years, until she discovered that he was involved with the ballerina Anna Pavlova. There were also rumours that the Duke was in love with Pamela Lytton, the woman who had devastated Churchill when she rejected his proposal, marrying instead the 2nd Earl of Lytton, with whom she had two sons.
In January 1913, Bendor wrote to his wife from his remote hunting lodge in France (a relatively new acquisition, where he established a pack of a hundred Cheshire hounds and 40 horses, along with numerous servants in Grosvenor livery, all of them in constant readiness should His Grace wish to hunt boar in the surrounding forests of Mimizan). His letter was firm and to the point. ‘I think you will agree with me that our present mode of living is impossible, and cannot go on any longer … As I cannot for a moment imagine that living at my two houses alone in London and the country can be a source of satisfaction to you, I have requested my solicitor to make you such an allowance as would enable you to live as you should, in the utmost comfort.’
His offer of £13,000 a year was turned down by Shelagh’s solicitors, and she wrote to her husband, asking him to reconsider his decision. ‘I write to make one more appeal to you for the children’s sake, if not for your own and mine. I beg you to return to me. If you do so, I am willing to allow all bygones to be bygones, and do what I can to make you happy.’
The Duke refused, and the legal wranglings continued; although there was some happier family news the following month, when Bendor’s much-loved half brother, Percy Wyndham, announced his engagement to Lord Ribblesdale’s daughter, Diana Lister. On 16th April 1913, the day before their wedding, Bendor hosted a celebratory dinner for both families at Grosvenor House. Afterwards, the groom’s father, George Wyndham – by then an eminent politician, though at 49 a far more disillusioned figure than he had been at the time of his own marriage – wrote to Wilfrid Blunt about his son’s forthcoming wedding: ‘It is just possible that they have “hit off” an alliance of Heroic Love combined with matrimony. If this should prove to be so, they are lucky. In any case they are happy and exuberant for the moment. As a rule people do not know how to love; as an exception they love now here, now there; as a rarity almighty lovers find each other after both are married. It is extravagant to suppose that Percy and Diana are going to be lovers and, also, husband and wife. But it is pleasant to contemplate the hypothesis.’
Less than two months afterwards, George Wyndham died in Paris, while on holiday there with Bendor. His death, at first thought to be caused by heart failure, then by a blood clot, was unexpected, and a bitter blow to Bendor, to whom Wyndham had been a constant and loving friend, if not quite a surrogate father, for over a quarter of a century. A fortnight later, Bendor and Shelagh’s solicitors finally agreed on the terms of a legal separation, and a kind of calm was restored as the rituals of the Season continued, the balls and polo parties, grouse shoots and tennis tournaments. But with the British declaration of war against Germany in August 1914, those familiar routines were utterly disrupted. Bendor rejoined his regiment, and paid a visit to Winston Churchill, by then First Lord of the Admiralty, just before reporting for duty. At the French front he saw much of his half-brother, but for a tragically short time, as Percy Wyndham was killed in the early weeks of the war, on 14th September. ‘He went in good company with several of his friends in a way most befitting to him, with a heap of Germans slain around him,’ wrote Bendor to his sister Cuckoo. Wyndham’s death left his wife, Diana, a young widow (thus setting in motion the odd sequence of coincidences that introduced Diana into the lives of Boy Capel and Coco Chanel; for it was Capel who was to become Diana’s second husband). But this, and other deaths in battle of the Grosvenor family, did nothing to stop Bendor’s vigorous commitment to the war; indeed, he seemed energised in a manner that he had not displayed since he last served as an officer, in South Africa. This time, his enthusiasm for motoring found expression in his instigation and financing of a squadron of armoured vehicles, which saw action in France and then in Egypt, where Bendor deployed them to rescue 91 British prisoners-of-war. Bendor was recommended for a Victoria Cross for his bravery, and Sir John Maxwell, who led the British forces in Egypt, wrote of him: ‘A less determined or resourceful commander might well have shirked the responsibility of taking cars on the first occasion 30 miles, and on the second 115 miles, into unknown desert with the uncertainty of the cars being able to negotiate the country and the amount of resistance that was likely to be encountered. I venture to think these actions constitute a record in the History of War.’
In the event, Bendor received the DSO, and after protracted bouts of tropical fever, he left North Africa and went to work for Churchill at the Ministry of Munitions, accompanying him to meetings with Clemenceau in Paris (where it is entirely possible the Duke might have encountered Boy Capel). Churchill, recalling these war years in later life, gave some indication of the admiration he felt for one of his oldest friends. ‘If he had not been a Duke he would have got the VC in the First War. He is incapable of expressing himself, but he is always thinking a hundred years ahead.’
This observation might also apply to the Duke’s relationships with women, at least in his determination to have a son to inherit his title and estates, and ensure his influence on future generations of the Grosvenor family. The woman that he chose to be his second wife was Violet Nelson, the youngest daughter of a wealthy self-made man, Sir William Nelson. She had been married once, to George Rowley, an Old Etonian and officer in the Coldstream Guards, with whom she had a son, born in 1915. Violet was an excellent horsewoman as well as an attractive member of smart London society; and at 29, there seemed no reason why she should not give Bendor the heir he so desperately desired. After her divorce, Violet married Bendor on 26th November 1920 at a registry office on Buckingham Palace Road. (The bride wore a blue and green plaid dress, a fur stole and a black hat with a brown veil; the groom was in a dark overcoat and bowler hat.)
The union produced a new yacht, but no baby; perhaps in consequence, Bendor lavished much money and attention on his boat, which he christened the Flying Cloud. One of the largest private yachts in the world, it had a crew of 40 and white sails flying over a white wooden deck, pristine as a virginal wedding dress or a newborn’s christening gown, rising above the piratical black hull. ‘This is a most attractive yacht,’ wrote Winston Churchill to his wife while aboard in August 1923. ‘Imagine a large four-masted c
argo boat, fitted up in carved oak like a little country house, with front doors, staircases & lovely pictures. She can sail 12 knots and motor 8, & accommodate 16 guests. Benny very charming & Violet too …’
Four months later, when Chanel met Bendor in Monte Carlo, he immediately asked her to dine aboard the Flying Cloud, which was anchored close by. They had been introduced by Vera Bate (née Arkwright), a friend of Bendor’s and others in the small world of the British aristocracy, who was working for Chanel, less as a model (though she was a handsome, statuesque figure in her Chanel outfits) than as a facilitator whose social connections were invaluable. Chanel described it thus to Paul Morand: ‘I have employed society people, not to indulge my vanity or to humiliate them (I would take other forms of revenge, supposing I were seeking them), but … because they were useful to me and because they got around Paris, working on my behalf.’
As it happened, Vera’s origins were gossiped about in Paris in a not dissimilar way to Boy Capel’s; though in her case the facts are more readily excavated from the ash of ancient scandals. Her mother, Rosa, was a younger daughter of Captain William Baring of the Coldstream Guards, himself the grandson of the merchant banker Sir Francis Baring. In 1878, at the age of 24, Rosa married Captain Frank Arkwright, also a Coldstreamer. Their first child was a son, Esme, and their second (at least for official purposes), born in 1885, was Sarah Gertrude (thereafter known to all as Vera). In fact, Rosa and her first husband were already estranged at the time of Vera’s birth, and divorced that same year. There was some speculation that Vera was fathered by the first Marquess of Cambridge, Prince Adolphus of Teck, but it seems equally likely that her actual father was Colonel George Fitzgeorge, whom Rosa married on 25th November 1885, just a couple of months after Vera’s birth. Fitzgeorge was a man whose own origins were somewhat complicated, for he was the illegitimate grandson of King George III. But whether or not he was her father or stepfather, Fitzgeorge was also bankrupt, leaving Vera with no option but to earn her own living.
In 1916, she married an American, Fred Bate, an officer in the US army, who was subsequently employed by the American broadcaster NBC in London. The Bates had a daughter, Bridget (who was to become a model, for Man Ray amongst others, and then an artist in her own right); but Vera spent a great deal of time away from her husband and daughter, as she was when she encountered Bendor during the Christmas season in Monte Carlo. Westminster joined Vera and Chanel at their table, and promptly issued the invitation to his yacht; Chanel accepted, later telling a convoluted version of the story to Paul Morand. In this account, she changed Vera’s name to Pamela (perhaps because, by the time of her conversations with Morand, she had fallen out with Vera), and declared that the entire transaction was down to money: according to Chanel, Vera/Pamela said to her, ‘Do me a favour. It won’t cost you anything. If you do it for me, I shall be given a present … Westminster has just arrived. His yacht is lying at anchor off Monaco. He wants to meet you. I have promised, in exchange for a reward, to take you to dine there.’ Chanel was amused by such plain speaking, she said, although not surprised. ‘I was accustomed to Pamela, accustomed to seeing women purely as monsters.’
If Chanel saw women as money-grabbing monsters, then she may also have had mixed feelings about her lover at the time, the Grand Duke Dmitri, who was dependent on her financial support, as were a variety of others (Diaghilev, Stravinsky, et al.). But as was clear from her very first dinner with Westminster, her substantial wealth was entirely eclipsed by his. For here was a man, like Boy Capel before him, who could provide her with absolute financial security, even if she chose not to accept it, yet whose fidelity could never be guaranteed. Chanel’s hesitation, for several months, before embarking upon an affair with the Duke is suggestive, amongst other things, of her uncertainty when faced with this complex equation of loss and gain, or the unanswerable question of whether love, like money, could be counted upon. In the end, she told Claude Delay, she favoured Westminster over Dmitri – ‘I chose the one who protected me best’ – but she could never fully trust either. There were good reasons not to do so – both men were incorrigible womanisers – and yet perhaps there was something in their lack of commitment that was familiar to her. After all, despite the determination with which she had obscured her origins, Chanel remained her father’s daughter, bearing the name and legacy of a man who had vanished from her life; a man who had broken his promise and her belief that he would return having made his fortune.
It was as impossible for Chanel as it was for anyone to ignore Westminster’s wealth and power, however resolved she may have been to remain independent. ‘Westminster is the richest man in England, perhaps in Europe,’ she said to Morand, before adding a caveat in parenthesis: ‘(No one knows this, not even him, especially not him.)’ In fact, everyone knew it, including Bendor, for his inheritance was an essential part of his identity, emblematic of his sense of himself. Having made this odd disclaimer, Chanel continued, ‘I mention this firstly because at such a level wealth is no longer vulgar, it is located well beyond envy and it assumes catastrophic proportions; but I mention it above all because it makes Westminster the last offspring of a vanished civilisation, a palaeontological curiosity …’
As she described Westminster to Morand in 1946, her ambivalence about him (and about Englishmen, or possibly all men) was threaded through with genuine affection, of the kind that Chanel rarely expressed at that point in her life, when her unhappiness had solidified into bitterness, even malice. ‘Ten years of my life have been spent with Westminster,’ she said, eliding the many years thereafter, and with them his third marriage (in 1930, to Loelia Ponsonby, the decorous daughter of a royal courtier) and the Second World War. ‘Beneath his clumsy exterior, he’s a skilful hunter. You’d have to be skilful to hang on to me for ten years. These ten years were spent living very lovingly and very amicably with him. We have remained friends. I loved him, or I thought I loved him, which amounts to the same thing. He is courtesy itself, kindness personified. He still belongs to a generation of well-brought-up men. All Englishmen, for that matter, are well brought up, until they reach Calais at least.’
Of course, she knew the stories about his two wives and multiple mistresses; and although Bendor was beguiling, she had already lost her heart to an Englishman, who then broke it twice over. ‘I am sure it was Boy who sent Westminster to me,’ she told Claude Delay, as if the English still stuck together, even in the afterlife. But to Paul Morand, she declared, ‘Westminster liked me because I was French. English women are possessive and cold. Men get bored with them.’
Was she thinking of one Englishwoman in particular: of Diana Capel? In a curious quirk of coincidence – or as she saw it, fate, orchestrated by Boy Capel from beyond the grave – she had found herself being pursued by Diana’s first husband’s half-brother. This might have had no significance, were it not for the fact that Diana had represented a way into the British aristocracy for Boy Capel; but the entree offered to Coco by Bendor was infinitely grander. Even as she tried to remain aloof, he wooed her with the fruits of his land and his riches; at times quite literally, sending baskets of exotic produce that he had picked himself from his hothouses at Eaton, and gardénias and orchids from his gardens. Once, during the Duke’s ardent courtship of Chanel, a crate of fresh vegetables was delivered to her in Paris. When the butler unpacked its contents, he discovered a large uncut emerald hidden in a jewel case at the bottom. On another occasion, Chanel’s manservant answered the door to find a vast bouquet of flowers hiding the face of the deliveryman, and was just about to tip him when he recognised him as Bendor. A few days later, the Duke called on Coco at Rue Cambon with the Prince of Wales at his side, as if to prove that he was a royal equal, even as he paid court to her; soon afterwards, she finally succumbed to his charms.
By the spring of 1924, Coco and Bendor were an item: he was seen at rehearsals for Le Train bleu, the Ballets Russes production for which she had designed the costumes; and she joined him for cruises
aboard the Flying Cloud A yacht, she later remarked to Claude Delay, was by far the best place to begin a love affair. ‘The first time you’re clumsy, the second you quarrel a bit, and if it doesn’t go well, the third time you can stop at a port.’
But it did go well, and doors opened for her everywhere. At Eaton, she slipped into the role of chatelaine with the same ease as she wore her silk fringed evening gowns, in sapphire blue or black, designed so as not to crease when they were packed for travelling. She rode and hunted at Eaton and accompanied Bendor to the races; and after he bought another Scottish mansion, Rosehall, in 1926, she decorated it with her characteristic style, introducing what was said to be the first bidet in the Highlands in an en-suite bathroom, with hand-blocked French wallpaper on the bedroom walls, and beige-painted drawing rooms downstairs. ‘This is a vy agreeable house,’ wrote Winston Churchill to his wife, whilst on a fishing trip to Rosehall in May 1928. ‘Only Benny, Coco & one of his ADC’s, Ernest Ball. The air is most exhilarating, keen and yet caressing … Coco got three fish yesterday. This place is 45 miles from Loch More but both rivers are available. This morning it is raining wh[ich] is good for fishing.’
Chanel with Winston Churchill at Eaton, 1929.
Churchill had already observed Chanel approvingly on a boar-hunting expedition to Mimizan, and thereafter in Paris, where he visited her at her workrooms in Rue Cambon. On 27th January 1927, Churchill wrote in a letter to his wife: ‘The famous Coco turned up & I took a gt fancy to her – A most capable and agreeable woman – much the strongest personality Benny has yet been up against. She hunted vigorously all day, motored to Paris after dinner, & is today engaged in passing & improving dresses on endless streams of mannequins. Altogether 200 models [outfits] have to be settled in almost 3 weeks. Some have to be altered ten times. She does it with her own fingers, pinning, cutting, looping, etc. With her – Vera Bate née Arkwright. “Yr Chief of Staff?” Non – “One of yr lieutenants?” Non. “Elle est là. Voilà tout.”’
Coco Chanel Page 14