Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  The Aylen family was upset when Ernest became engaged to May — especially his father, Sam Aylen. The elder Aylen, a puritan, was disturbed by the fact that May’s husband had just committed suicide. That was enough reason, in his view, to prove that May wasn’t the right choice as a wife for his son.

  There was another reason for the Aylens’ opposition. According to Ernest Aylen’s niece Katharine Eden, “My mother always used to say that May had some Indian blood in her. I don’t know if it was true, but her people had been in India for generations — and she was a bit dusky, you know? It affected the family’s opinion of her, believe me.”

  Ernest refused to back down. He liked “exciting” women, he said, and he found May fascinating. Ernest’s father remained skeptical, but he did attend his son’s wedding to May on Thursday, November 1, 1906, at St. Jude’s Church in Portsea. The bride was three days shy of her twenty-third birthday.

  May later expressed amazement at how well she and Aylen got on in the beginning of their marriage — “except for one thing.” May hadn’t learned to appreciate sex any more than she had as a virgin bride, and Captain Aylen found himself, like Harry Cooper, a very frustrated husband. At most, his wife would agree to sex once a month; to avoid having to “submit” more often, she would slip down to the kitchen and rub uncooked meat on her nightdress, then tell Aylen that it was “that time of month.”

  As she had with Cooper, when May did have sexual relations with Aylen, she would “grit my teeth and clench my hands.” Finally Aylen bellowed at her, “You’re like sleeping with a wet umbrella! All you can say is ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hurry up!’ I’d rather be in bed with a dead policeman!”

  But Ernest Aylen was a more sanguine man than Harry Cooper, and he was able to live at first with his wife’s aversion to sex, ever hopeful that things might improve. “She was the love of his life,” Katharine Eden said. “She was an exciting sort of woman.”

  That, in fact, was what kept the marriage intact. Now that May was a twice-married young matron, she had come into her own as a person. She was a woman Aylen could talk to as he would a man, a woman who challenged him, both intellectually and by temperament, as a man would. Aylen found her stimulating company, especially in an era when most women, even after marriage, were submissive and servile. Sex aside, May was a perfect wife for Ernest Aylen.

  She tried to be a good mate in other ways as well. She worked hard to win over his relatives, and had some success. Shortly after the wedding, the couple visited Ernest’s parents, staying at a hotel nearby at “great expense,” according to Ernest’s mother, who wrote to a friend after the visit to tell of her sorrow that some family members had shunned May and Ernest: “Mr. Good, nor Daisy and Kate did not call on them. Of course I did not expect them to, and never should have asked them to.”

  The elder Mrs. Aylen was pleased, though, that “all our old friends did so, and I thought it very kind of them, and it made things more comfortable for us.” May, she found, “makes Ernest a very good wife. . . . She is most economical, makes anything do.”

  THOSE TALENTS WOULD BE put to good use during the dark days of World War I. Ernest Aylen, who had made major the year before, was captured by the Turks after the Siege of Kut in 1915, and languished in a prisoner-of-war camp for over a year, where he read Rudyard Kipling (“the only thing that kept me sane”) and kept a diary in which he wrote of his love for May. As a doctor, he cared for his malnourished and sickly compatriots and tried, against all odds, to improve the conditions in which they found themselves.

  Major Aylen’s service in Kut won him the Distinguished Service Order, Britain’s second-highest military honor. When he was released from prison in exchange for Turkish prisoners and sent home on discharge, he looked, according to his niece, like “an absolute skeleton. They had been practically starved to death. He brought a biscuit that they’d given him to eat and you had to soak it in water for an hour before you could even bite into it.”

  May was aghast at her husband’s condition, and she nursed him for over a year until his health and weight were restored. As part of his recuperation, they went to visit his sister Winifred Aylen Good, Katharine Eden’s mother. As Mrs. Eden recalled, “My father was a country parson, and Uncle Ernest and Aunt May came to stay with us at the rectory in Northamptonshire. Aunt May could be a bit extravagant. But she always looked very smart. I remember she wore Russian boots, which had just come into fashion, and a sort of Russian hat when she went to church. The villagers were absolutely astonished by her — they’d never seen anything like it before.”

  The neighborhood children were taken with this stylish woman, too. “She was very sweet to us, and great fun,” said Mrs. Eden. “We loved her. But she didn’t like children. She put up with us because we were just there today and gone tomorrow. Uncle Ernest always begged her to have children with him, but she refused. It was the great sadness of his life.”

  On November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed between Britain and Germany that formally ended “the war to end all wars.” With his country again at peace, Major Aylen was appointed to Britain’s India Army, where he would serve as a medical corpsman and specialize in dermatology. He and May left London for New Delhi. On the train en route, while eating dinner with Ernest, May noticed a “dark-skinned hand” reach through the curtains that separated them from the next compartment. She grabbed her fork and stabbed the hand until it was pinned to the wooden sill beneath the curtain. May went to summon an attendant, but by the time they returned, the intruder was gone. Her husband, May admitted, “was not pleased at my action.”

  Railway journeys back and forth through India became commonplace for the Aylens. Compartments were long and spacious, each with a large attached bathroom and four electric fans that could be turned in any direction. The fans were godsends, May said, because railway travel in India “is not pleasant in summer.” The temperature inside the cars sometimes reached 120 degrees; it could be brought down to 100 degrees by training all four fans on a 160-pound block of ice that sat in a huge tin tub in the middle of the compartment.

  May’s sojourn in India between 1918 and 1920, despite what she called its “hot monotony,” provided her with the most gracious life she had enjoyed since girlhood. Along with the other officers of the British raj, Major Aylen and his wife lived as virtual royalty, surrounded by white-turbaned, dark-skinned servants who took care of their every need. May loved the obsequious natives, who bowed and scraped before her, called her “memsahib” — the master’s wife — and carried her aloft in a palanquin so she wouldn’t strain herself walking in the heat. In India, May Aylen was in her element.

  But her marriage was crumbling. As the years passed, May’s abhorrence of sex didn’t lessen; Aylen told his wife that if call-house girls deserved the finest champagne, she wouldn’t get a crust of bread. When May contracted malaria shortly after their arrival in India, the one redeeming aspect of the illness, she later said, was that it offered her an excuse to avoid sex with her husband.

  Ernest and May spent more and more time apart, with May usually out dancing at the weekly servicemen’s socials. “To keep the soldiers out of trouble with the local women,” May said, “the officers’ wives used to put on little sketches and concerts in the barracks every Saturday night.”

  One afternoon, the Aylens’ chauffeur came to May with his resignation. Eager to keep him, May offered him more money, but he refused it — that wasn’t why he was leaving. “I am freezing to death every night waiting for your husband,” he told her. While May was out, the major would have the chauffeur drive him to a lady’s house and would keep him waiting in the cold until three or four o’clock in the morning. (In the northern regions of India, the winters can be as cold as the summers are hot.) May told the man to stay on and raised his salary. She also gave him two wool blankets and — almost every night — a thermos of hot coffee to keep him warm while he waited for Aylen to complete his missions.

  Stories of May’s nights out filt
ered back to her husband — stories of her flirtatiousness and her drinking, stories that suggested she was being publicly unfaithful. According to Katharine Eden, May “was always going off with other men. She had lots of — I don’t know if they were lovers, but boyfriends.”

  As before, it is unlikely that May’s relationships with other men were anything but platonic, but Ernest Aylen couldn’t know that, and May had acquired quite a reputation. One of Aylen’s fellow officers later described May as “the joy of the regiment,” and Aylen’s suspicion that his wife might be cheating on him while she refused him sexual favors threatened to undo him, just as it had Harry Cooper. Life in the Aylen household grew very tense. May drank to calm her nerves; and her strong will and contentious temperament, which Aylen had found attractive at first, turned ugly when she was drunk. Recriminations flew; Aylen called her a “whore”; May screamed back that he was “sleeping with every black nigger in India.” Finally, according to May, Aylen tried to kill her by giving her oleander tablets — which can cause insanity or death — as treatment for an illness. Their butler recognized the pills and snatched them away from her.

  Always high-strung — she had often thrown temper tantrums during the marriage — May soon collapsed with a nervous breakdown. Her doctor ordered her to Bombay to rest, and it was there that she decided to leave Ernest and return to London. When Aylen came to see her, he discovered her railway tickets and confronted her. Her admission that she was leaving sent him into a rage, and he tried to push her out a second-story window. May fought back furiously. “I kicked him in the you-know-where and fled,” she said.

  Finally, the Aylens agreed to live apart, and in early 1920 May returned to London to regain her emotional equilibrium. Just before she left India, May met Ernest’s new commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Lawford, a knighted World War I hero. Lawford was, at fifty-four, seventeen years May’s senior, and married. He was also handsome, mustachioed, and dapper, called “Swanky Syd” by his men. At their initial meeting, both he and May felt a strong attraction.

  Sir Sydney’s marriage was an unhappy one, and over the next three years he discreetly saw May whenever he was in London. He was a debonair, imposing figure, regal in his much-decorated uniform, beloved by his men for his courage and his compassion for them, respected by royalty and statesmen alike. He was wealthy, with large landholdings throughout England. Most impressive of all to May was his title. Sir Sydney’s wife was properly addressed as Lady Lawford, and she was accorded all the respect due the name.

  Early in December 1922, Sir Sydney asked his sister Ethel, the Honourable Mrs. Lubbock, to invite May to a weekend at her country estate, where he was also a guest. May and the general spent most of Saturday together, strolling through the garden, bundled up against the windy damp. They sought warmth in a small chapel on the edge of the grounds and remained there talking for two hours.

  As the sun began to set, they joined the other guests for conversation and a cocktail before dinner. Mrs. Lubbock’s supper was a long, leisurely affair with five sumptuous courses accompanied by both red and white wines. There was a dessert wine, followed by an after-dinner drink and more conversation.

  By eleven, May was feeling quite tipsy and excused herself for the evening. Sir Sydney did the same, engaging her in conversation once again as they ascended the huge winding staircase to the bedrooms. When May reached the door to her room, she realized that the general hadn’t continued down the hall but was standing right behind her. She opened her door and without a word let Lawford follow her inside. “My lips trembled and my fingers turned to ice,” May remembered. But she allowed Sir Sydney to make love to her. Two months later May Aylen, thirty-nine years barren, discovered she was pregnant with Sydney Lawford’s child.

  TWO

  Whenever soldiers who had fought for Britain in World War I gathered at a local pub to down a few pints and reminisce, someone would recount the amazing story of Brigadier General Sydney Lawford’s heroism in the first Battle of Ypres, in which the British suffered severe losses as they tried to halt further German advances into France.

  As General Lawford led his men in a charge against German trenches, his horse’s head was blown off by shrapnel. The animal continued to run for nearly a minute, while its rider stayed on horseback until what remained of the beast collapsed and nearly crushed him. Lawford immediately got up, jumped on another mount — “as if nothing had happened,” one of his lieutenants related — and continued the charge.

  Lawford’s bravery was only one reason for the respect and affection his men felt for him. His aide-de-camp, Sir Jocelyn Lucas, wrote warmly of his recollections of the general during the Battle of Ypres. “When nearly every officer in the brigade had been killed or wounded, he personally led a successful charge against the German trenches, armed only with his cane. On the retreat from Ghent and Ypres, he stayed up all night fighting to get a train to save the wounded from certain capture by the enemy. He succeeded. Immaculate in appearance and jaunty in carriage, he was a great sportsman and a fine horseman. He will be remembered, with affection and admiration, by all who served under him.”

  SYDNEY LAWFORD WAS BORN on November 16, 1865, at Tunbridge Wells in the county of Kent, and christened Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford. Also born in England that year were Rudyard Kipling, who would write about an India Sydney Lawford came to know well, and the future King George V, who became Lawford’s friend.

  Lawford was born into the rarefied world of landed gentry, the finest schools, the most exclusive men’s clubs. His wealth had originated with his grandfather Samuel Lawford II, a Kent banker. Samuel’s sixth son, Thomas Acland Lawford, had married Janet Turing Bruce and settled in Kinellan, Wimbledon Common, where they in turn had four sons — Archibald, Herbert, Sydney, and Ernest — and three daughters, Jessie, Evelyn, and Ethel.

  The Lawfords were far wealthier than the Bunnys. They traveled in more exclusive circles, playing host to the top echelons of the aristocracy and royalty. Whereas the Bunny girls married military men, several of the Lawfords married titles. Sydney embarked on a military career with a strong assist from his uncle Edward, a general, and after his graduation from Wellington College, passed the series of rigorous examinations required for acceptance into The Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He was admitted in 1883 as a cavalry cadet.

  Life at Sandhurst was a microcosm of the privileged world of the British upper classes. Young, eager Sydney Lawford caught his first glimpse of the college’s stately buildings as he rode in a carriage with other wide-eyed cadets past thick rows of birch, pine, and larch trees. The campus, set on a sprawling plain, included two lakes, shooting ranges, and parade grounds. It had been, since 1812, the premier military school in Britain; students left the institution as certified “officers and gentlemen.”

  Handsome, dark haired, well built, six feet tall, Lawford looked resplendent in his cadet uniform of gold lace, pantaloons, and pillbox cap. He owned his mount and had a batman who served as his valet, blacked his boots, cleaned his rifle, maintained his uniform, and emptied his slop bucket in the morning.

  Sydney and the other cadets scrambled out of bed every daybreak to the sound of reveille, and by nine o’clock were in formation for parade maneuvers, followed by gymnastics, horsemanship, and practice skirmishes. At four o’clock, they sat for high tea served on sterling silver platters; then they studied for two hours before dinner. In the evenings, mirroring their fathers’ men’s club rituals, the cadets would retire to dens where they read, discussed military strategy or the politics of the day, and played billiards and whist.

  A military education in mid-1880s England was a purely theoretical exercise. Britain had enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace since its last war with France had ended in 1814, interrupted only by the Crimean War of 1854-1856 and the Indian Mutiny of 1856-1857. This sustained tranquility frustrated patriotic young men trained for warfare. Winston Churchill, who entered Sandhurst ten years after Sydney Lawford, once said of
his military schooling that it was “a pity that it all had to be make-believe, and that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end forever. . . . Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war against Napoleon in front of one!”

  It was a view shared by Sydney Lawford. He was a young man learning skills that he might never be able to use. An ambitious soldier, he knew that it was valor in battle, not schoolboy exercises, that would distinguish him and elevate him to the rank of colonel or general.

  After he graduated from Sandhurst with honors in 1885, at the age of twenty, he joined the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. His army life was a replica of his school days: maneuvers, practices, maintenance of a superb readiness for combat — and a seemingly futile wait for a war, any war, to call him to battle.

  That would come, but first Sydney Lawford took a wife. In 1893, the nearly twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant married Lilian Maud Cass, a clerk’s daughter and spinster six years his senior. The marriage took place on September 30 in St. Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge.

  Little is known about Sydney Lawford’s marriage to Lilian Cass. In all his published biographical material, including his listing in Burke’s Peerage and his official Royal Fusiliers biography, no mention is made of her. What can be reconstructed is that they had no children and lived most of the time at their country estate, Bath House, in Hounslow, Heston — and that, seven years after their marriage, on November 26, 1900, Lilian died at Bath House of carcinoma of the lung. Sydney later omitted Lilian from his biographical sketches because of the stigma the Victorians attached to multiple marriages.