The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder

by Andrew Rose

  The Prince was physically a late developer and some royal biographers have commented on his apparent lack of body hair, noting that, during his time at Dartmouth in 1911 or 1912, the Prince suffered from mumps.76 There have been suggestions of possible sterility and the effects of a lack of testosterone, coupled with loose talk about something ‘wrong with his glands’ on reaching puberty.77 Complete sterility and loss of testicular testosterone after mumps is unusual.78

  A waspish memoir by a former private secretary suggests that the Prince suffered from arrested development, both mentally and morally, illustrated by ‘his ability to sleep … for many hours on end, his childish habit of strumming eternally on … the bagpipes, accordian etc, his mulish obstinacy if asked to change any plan on which he had set his heart’. Although his doctors were said to have noted ‘certain physical signs’ to support this contention, the only example given in the memoir is ‘the fact that he hardly ever had to shave’, which is hardly convincing evidence of a serious glandular disorder.79

  Given the Prince’s emotional limitations, speculation about the physical effects of mumps or of some other, unknown, condition overlooks a few significant factors. First, the Prince was very fair and may not have had much body hair in adult life. Second, his extreme vanity may have led him into ‘manscaping’ his body at various times. Third, and most important of all, the evidence revealed later in this book provides no support for the contention that the Prince was sexually inadequate.

  Quite the reverse.

  * * *

  Paris was the venue of choice for young army officers with money to spend during their short periods of leave. When the Prince thanked Jacques de Breteuil for his birthday greetings in June 1916, he wrote, ‘Quelle joie de passer 2 jours à Paris pour voir vos parents ETC!!’ (‘What fun to spend 2 days in Paris seeing your parents ETC!!’).80 The following month, he congratulated his friend Captain Bailey for having had ‘the hell of a time in Paris’, hoping that ‘you are all the better for it, tho’ perhaps a trifle tired!!’. He added wistfully, ‘You must have “met” some d-d fine women I bet!!’81

  One event, however, which was recorded in the pages of the London Gazette for 3 June 1916, deeply discomfited the Prince, now promoted to the rank of Captain in the Grenadier Guards. He was ashamed of having received the wholly unmerited award of a Military Cross, writing bitterly to his friend Captain Bailey, ‘All I can say about my M.C. is that I wish to hell that it had been given to you and not to me who has no more earned it than a pol [prostitute] in London.’82

  Among that day’s list of recipients was the name of Captain Ernest Herbert Campbell Bald, Reserve of Officers, late of the 15th Hussars, who won his MC for his role in a dashing expedition in western Egypt under the command of his friend, the Duke of Westminster. After the war, the future Major Ernest Bald MC would play a significant role behind the scenes in a drama involving the Prince’s first mistress, a scandal that risked serious damage to the reputation of the British monarchy.

  That summer, during the terrible Somme offensive, the Prince was posted to chateau after chateau – Louie, Marieux, Bryas, Etineham. Kept away from active service, he endured a form of luxurious captivity, unable to play a serious military role, curiously resembling the fates of medieval Scottish kings, such as David II and James I, both of whom idled away their youth in castles, prisoners of the English, constantly seeking ways to alleviate the challenges of boredom.

  Château Louie, near Poperinghe, was only a few miles from the front line in an area subject not only to the noise of bombardment, day and night, but also to the risk of German air-raids. With that backdrop, the Prince dined with officers of the 3rd Grenadier Guards, including Raymond Asquith, on 21 July 1916. Just before returning to the trenches, the officers organised an open-air ball in camp, accompanied by bagpipes. Whether or not the Prince joined in the dancing (probably an all-male affair), he would have enjoyed hearing the pipes, which he had learned to play at Oxford. He might have been less amused to know about a humorous reference to him in Asquith’s letter. Diana (the future wife of Duff Cooper), a vivacious and beautiful young woman, had many admirers in Society. Asquith slyly added ‘the Prince of Wales’ (your ‘future’?)’ to his description of the impromptu dance at the chateau.83

  Eventually, in August 1916, the Prince was transferred to a camp near Meaulte, which was near Amiens and in fact not far from the front line. Here he would remain (subject to two further spells of chateau life, including a week spent accompanying the King) until May the following year. ‘You know how it sickens me not to be allowed back to regimental duty myself,’ he wrote to Captain Bailey in October 1916 in a spirit of self-deprecation, ‘not that I should be the least use, for I’m a wretched specimen really…, an embusqué [shirker] sitting on one’s ass the whole time!!’84

  The Prince’s last letter to the Marquis de Breteuil, the man who had entertained him so generously before the war, was written on his birthday, 23 June 1916. In very affectionate terms, the Prince described his recent visit to Egypt, the heat of which was unfavourably compared with the incessant rain and bitter cold (‘un froid de loup’) of Flanders. The Marquis died early in November 1916. Perhaps symptomatic of the Prince’s changing attitudes to an older generation of advisers, the event passed unremarked in his diary.

  At about this time, the Prince was accorded a second equerry. The Hon. Piers Legh, known as ‘Joey’, was another Grenadier Guards officer of his acquaintance. Tall, of slender build, with a receding chin, Joey Legh resembled the stereotypical silly-ass English aristocrat. He was more intelligent than the Prince, which is not saying a great deal, and has been described as being, if not exactly a half-wit, ‘at any rate a three-quarter-wit’.85 Legh was a man of dry humour, ‘a marvellous raconteur’ of imperturbable character, whose facial immobility surely helped make him ‘redoubtable at poker’.86

  Legh, already familiar with the Paris demi-monde and without doubt a man of the world, became a close confidant during the Prince’s military career. Philip Ziegler has elegantly described how the Prince finally discovered the facts of life. ‘Towards the end of 1916 … Claud Hamilton and Joey Legh decided that his virginity had been unhealthily protracted, took him to Amiens, gave him an excellent dinner with much wine, and entrusted him to … a French prostitute called Paulette’, said to have been permanently attached to an RFC officer and therefore only ‘on loan’ to the Prince.87

  Amiens, if not quite Paris, had become a very popular destination for officers with twenty-four-hour leave passes. In September, Raymond Asquith, Oliver Lyttelton (the future Lord Chandos) and another Guards officer persuaded the Prince to lend them his grey Daimler car for the short journey over to the cathedral city, where they booked themselves into a comfortable hotel for the night. Asquith, during a wholly plantonic encounter, took a fancy to ‘a perfect femme du monde accompanied by sweet champagne and all manner of lingeries…’88

  The Prince seems to have enjoyed more than one encounter with Paulette in Amiens, but reconstructing a timetable of these early amorous adventures is not easy. Although he kept a wartime diary, written up in some detail, until mid-June 1917, the Prince later ripped out parts of the narrative, some of which seem to have related to sexual escapades. The sequence of missing sections suggests that the ‘excellent dinner’ at Amiens might have taken place on 18 November 1916. Omissions occur in respect of four dates in mid-December, on one of which the Prince is known to have been with Paulette, with a further deletion at the end of that month, which also seems to refer to a meeting with her.

  Other missing passages occur in February 1917, after he had returned to chateau life, now posted to the 3rd Army Artillery School at the Chateau de Hautecloque, near St Pol and 70km from Amiens. As Paulette was another officer’s ‘keep’ and presumably had to be given back, the Prince may have started looking closer to hand for female company, this time in Arras. One of the diary deletions hints at a trip there on the weekend of 10–11 February 1917. In a letter w
ritten a day later to Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort (later to become the Queen Mother’s racehorse trainer), the Prince recorded that ‘we always get Sundays free for joy rides’.89

  Hautecloque was, in the Prince’s opinion, ‘a luxurious chateau which is easily the best billet I’ve ever struck in France; a good room & a large fire mean a g[rea]t deal these arctic days!!’90 Although he never ceased to complain about being kept away from the fighting, the Prince’s correspondence with contemporaries from 1916 onwards suggests a coarsening of attitudes, a burgeoning enjoyment of the comfortable lifestyle available behind the lines, and increasing devotion to pleasure. After his first encounter with Paulette, the Prince – to use a homely sporting expression – resembled a dog put to a bitch for the first time. ‘He was never out of a woman’s legs,’ was the trenchant recollection of Lady Diana Cooper.91 So started the obsessive pursuit of women, of all sorts and conditions, which would become the overriding objective of his private life.

  For the moment, however, London outpaced Paris as the object of his off-duty interest. ‘London is absolutely the only place to spend one’s leave,’ he declared to Boyd-Rochfort, adding, ‘Oh for the end of this fucking war; I am getting so sick of being exiled in France!!’92 Nevertheless, he managed to get away for a couple of days to the Hotel Continental at Le Touquet (a future favourite destination), followed by eight days’ leave in London, safely cocooned with his parents in Buckingham Palace.

  During this period of leave in ‘Blighty’, on 19 March 1917, the Prince’s diary records an evening spent at Prince’s Restaurant, 190 Piccadilly, then a fashionable rendezvous for dinner and dancing. (‘Isn’t there a bishop or somebody who believes we shall meet all the animals we have known on earth in another world?’, wrote ‘Saki’ in one of his Reginald stories, ‘How frightfully embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince’s…’)93 Among the company helping to celebrate the 38th birthday of the Duke of Westminster was Lord Edward Stanley, son of Lord Derby, appointed British Ambassador in Paris the following year. (Stanley was soon to marry ‘P’, Portia Cadogan, one of the Prince’s cast-off obsessions.) Another guest was Godfrey Thomas, already a close friend of the Prince. Shortly after the war, Thomas was appointed the Prince’s first Private Secretary and would in later years become only too familiar with the indiscretions of the increasingly feckless Prince.

  Known to intimates as ‘Bendor’ (from the name of a famous racehorse) and one of the richest men in Europe, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, had been a frequent visitor to France for many years. From early in the Great War, Bendor had been in command of a fleet of Rolls-Royce armoured cars, commissioned by him and generously donated to the war effort. Unsuitable for use on the trench-ridden terrain of the Western Front, this mobile force was ideal for desert-based operations. In March 1916, with his ADC, Captain Ernest Bald, Bendor had led an overnight 120-mile dash across the desert, raiding a camp of the Senussi, a pro-Ottoman tribe. For several months, the Senussi had been holding hostage, as ‘living skeletons’, a large number of British sailors, seized after their ships had been torpedoed by German U-boats in the nearby Sollum Bay.94 It was a daring operation and Bendor was awarded the DSO, narrowly missing a VC.

  After a bout of fever in June that year, Bendor was shipped back to France, where he had a shooting lodge (designed by the famous architect Detmar Blow) on a large estate near Mimizan in Les Landes, later to become a popular destination for the Prince. In the course of convalescence, Bendor was to be seen at Nice and Cannes. Joining his friend Captain Bald in Paris during the latter part of 1916, he enjoyed the company of a certain Marguerite Alibert, alias ‘Maggie Meller’, a grande cocotte very much in demand at the time …95

  Fifteen years older than the Prince, the aristocratic libertine Bendor was already a close friend. Though his personal courage was never in doubt, he proved to be a dangerous role model for a young Prince already rebelling against the advice of more conservative elders, such as the King, Lord Stamfordham (the King’s Private Secretary) and Regy Esher.

  Tall and brutally handsome, with ‘blue eyes and a debonair manner’,96 the modern epithet ‘male chauvinist’ brilliantly describes the actions and attitudes of a supremely arrogant man. Serial womaniser and heavy drinker, he regarded wives (there would be a total of four), mistresses and sundry squeezes with equal contempt, treating them as little more than objects strewn across the path of life.

  His first wife, Constance Cornwallis-West (sister-in-law of Lady Randolph Churchill), bore him two daughters and a son, who died as a child in 1909. The failure to possess a living male heir was a bitter blow to Bendor’s ego, but even before the boy’s death he was enjoying numerous affairs both in England and in France. In Paris, he was fond of using the Hotel Lotti, just off the Place Vendôme, as a base for amorous assignations, but just as happy to patronise high-class brothels, such as the notorious establishment at 12 rue Chabanais, often used by Edward VII when Prince of Wales.97

  One of Bendor’s most bizarre habits was that of locking out unwanted wives. In March 1913, late one night, Constance Westminster was refused admittance to Grosvenor House in Park Lane and had to find shelter, via the milk-train, at the Duke’s enormous country seat, Eaton Hall in Cheshire. Here, ‘the edict had not gone forth’, the words of a shocked Alan Lascelles, who considered that Bendor ‘ought to be whipped round London’ for his behaviour.98 Ten years later, the Duke’s second wife, Violet Nelson, was locked out of Bourdon House in Davies Street, Mayfair. With the help of a servant, she climbed in through a window, assisted by a friend, one Cyril Augustus Drummond. Bendor promptly locked the pair in the drawing-room, telling Cyril, ‘Take her. She likes fucking.’99

  Bendor’s third wife, Loelia Ponsonby, became very scared of him, and was at times frightened simply to come home. On many occasions as Loelia was attempting to get her key into the lock of the front door of Bourdon House. ‘My hand trembled so much that I could not get it in.’100

  Though Marguerite could take care of herself, Bendor cowed other mistresses, exhibiting a sadistic tendency in his relations with women. Although the Prince could adopt an abject, fawning, seemingly submissive pose when infatuated, the Duke’s malign influence can be detected in the younger man’s increasingly crude, sometimes abusive treatment of discarded favourites.

  At the Duke’s raffish birthday party, gossip among the all-male company must have centred on Paris and its sensual attractions, already sampled by a high proportion of the guests. The impressionable Prince, newly initiated and about to return to France, needed little encouragement to move upmarket, away from workaday ‘pols’ in the dull, damaged northern cities of Amiens and Arras. His aim was now to explore the superior delights offered by la ville lumière, the City of Light. On return to service life in France a few days after the Westminster birthday dinner, getting to Paris became the object of the Prince’s most fervent desire. He must have a ‘pol’, a ‘keep’ there, a woman he could brag about to his male contemporaries.

  In April, he determined to take full advantage of three days’ leave, making preparations for the long drive from St Pol to Paris. If the Prince was to find the woman, arrangements had to be made post haste. That weekend, it seems, he contacted his old friend, François de Breteuil, whose knowledge of Parisian society far outstripped that of Joey Legh, Claud Hamilton, or even Bendor.101

  The Prince was about to embark on the first great sexual obsession of his life, his affair with Marguerite Alibert, ‘Maggie Meller’, an expert in the arts of love and – in every sense – a woman of the world.

  3

  She-Devil

  The Prince of Wales was born in White Lodge, a handsome Palladian mansion in Richmond Park, west of London. The woman who would become his first mistress saw the light of human day in one of a row of cast-iron beds, crowded into the public ward of a massive and forbidding metropolitan maternity hospital in the south of Paris.

  ‘A Parisian in mind, in taste
, to the fingertips’,102 her real name was Marie Marguerite Alibert, but she would become known to the Paris demi-monde as ‘Maggie Meller’ and (in later strivings for respectability) ‘Mme Laurent’, ‘Mme Fahmy’, even ‘the Princess Fahmy bey’. Her date of birth became a movable feast (sometimes 1892 or 1895), but the official record establishes incontrovertibly that she was born just before midday on 9 December 1890.103 Outside the foetid warmth of the great Paris maternity hospital of Port-Royal, near Montparnasse, bitter easterly winds kept the street temperatures around zero. The baby, known to her family as Marguerite, was the eldest surviving child of Firmin Alibert, cocher de fiacre [cab driver], and his wife Marie Aurand, femme de ménage [charwoman].

  The family lived for a time in the rue d’Armaillé, in the 17th arrondissement, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Marguerite had a much younger sister, Yvonne, born in 1900, with whom she had a stormy relationship, eventually becoming completely estranged. A brother was said to have been killed during the Great War in an attack south of Rheims. One of her two highly coloured attempts at autobiography mentions a second brother, also allegedly a victim of the hostilities.

  Family sources confirm, however, that Marguerite had just one brother, who was killed, at the age of 4, by a lorry while playing in the street, an accident blamed on Marguerite’s wilfulness in failing to look after him properly.104 As a result, she claimed, Marguerite was sent to board with the Sisters of Mary, 73 rue des Ternes, not very far from her home, a religious house where the nuns solemnly reminded her each day that her sins had dispatched her brother, the ‘little angel’, to heaven.

  Marguerite may indeed have been entrusted into the care of nuns after this or some other juvenile misdemeanour. She aptly described her character as ‘mercurial’ and Paris, of course, hosted all sorts of temptations. Understandably perhaps, Marguerite resented her sojourn among the nuns, ironically describing this period as ‘a great start in life’, gleefully recalling that the institution was later turned into a garage. The experience had a few good points: Marguerite was given the smatterings of an education and taught to sing, developing an attractive mezzo-soprano in which she would warble ‘sacred solos’.