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

by Andrew Rose

  Marguerite had come to Egypt, just as she had done in 1915 and 1921, to become the mistress of a rich man. Ali Fahmy differed from his predecessors, not merely because he was very young, handsome and super-rich, but because – shortly after Marguerite’s installation at Zamalek – he asked her to marry him. The real reasons behind his proposal will probably never be known, but the very intensity with which he expressed his feelings suggests some inner conflict which could not be resolved by marriage alone, especially marriage to a woman who, despite her air of charm and sophistication, had made her name as a high-class Paris whore.

  Marguerite, for her part, had the simplest of motives for becoming Ali’s wife. Though she was already a rich woman, she had an expensive lifestyle and a daughter to maintain. Marguerite, who had been the mistress of a future king, had high social ambitions and Ali’s wealth might open doors of Paris salons currently closed to her. So she accepted Ali’s offer of marriage, but prudently engaged the services of Maître Michel Assouad, a Cairo attorney of considerable guile.

  Ali’s family strongly opposed this marriage to a non-Muslim foreigner of dubious antecedence, an older woman, whom they suspected (with good reason) of being little more than a gold-digging hustler. But Ali would not be deterred, even though the faithful Said Enani did his best to fight a corner for the family. The civil ceremony was fixed for 26 December 1922, with a religious marriage planned early the following year.

  The Cairo winter season had begun, almost the very day Marguerite arrived with her younger sister.252 The active social scene at first masked deep and irreconcilable differences in temperament between Marguerite and her fiancé. One common bond was a love of the bright lights and in the last weeks of 1922 they could be seen dining and dancing in Cairo’s best hotels and restaurants.

  There was an added excitement for partygoers that year, an attraction that was drawing more than the usual complement of well-to-do tourists. On 5 November 1922, an archaeological expedition headed by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon had discovered the entrance of a large and apparently undisturbed ancient royal tomb in the famous Valley of the Kings. An outer section of the tomb was officially opened at the end of the month and there was intense speculation as to what might be revealed in the inner chamber, an exploration scheduled to take place early in the New Year. Westerners were already beginning to call this the ‘Tut-Ankh-Amun Season’.

  A dancing craze had taken hold in Egypt, just as it had in Europe. ‘Cairo is not particularly up-to-date; it generally takes Dame Fashion a little while to travel across the Mediterranean,’ observed one English-language newspaper, but the writer conceded that the ballroom of the Semiramis Hotel, where Ali had his first sight of Marguerite the previous December, gave a creditable impression of Paris or the West End of London.253 The dances were attended by people of all nationalities, but the British, a conservative bunch, disliked the sexually charged exhibitions of dancing at teatime, tending to restrict their appearances on the dance floor to after dinner.

  Shepheard’s was a hotel particularly favoured by Ali, whose fluent English enabled him to stay well informed about British attitudes, a useful conduit of intelligence during his time as press attaché to the French Legation. Built in the 1840s (and destroyed in the riots that followed the Suez crisis of 1956), Shepheard’s was very popular with the British, serving as a sort of annexe to the High Commission.

  The popular RAF Jazz Band played for the foxtrotting young in the hotel ballroom. If this suggested a peaceful social life, the impression was misleading. The British community in Egypt was decidedly nervous about the rise of militant nationalism in Egypt: a number of British officials and soldiers had been murdered in recent years and street demonstrations, strikes and riots were frequent occurrences in Cairo and Alexandria.

  Ali and Marguerite were less vulnerable than British expatriates to the prevailing tensions. In December, Ali persuaded two Italian opera stars, Nino Piccaluga, the romantic tenor, and his wife, Augusta Concato, to join an expedition by river boat to the pyramid of Saqqara. Here an elaborate banquet was served, complete with orchestra and dancers, in a restaurant once the home of the great French archaeologist Mariette. Later the party descended into the tombs, where by candelight Piccaluga and Concato sang mourir si jeune et belle, the final aria from Aida, which Radames and Aida sing before their entombment. Within a few months, Ali – a young and handsome man – would die violently before his time.

  It was almost as if Ali and ‘Mme Laurent’ were having their honeymoon before the marriage, but living together was already beginning to expose strains in the relationship, problems that would grow rather than diminish as the months went by. Ali was turning out to be intensively possessive of his new love, as if to play down the rackety image of his past, while Marguerite was hedging her bets. Despite that notorious row at the Deauville Casino, she had not lost contact with her old flame, Jean d’Astoreca, and an unfortunate incident happened during mid-December. While out shopping in Cairo, she dropped a telegram and left the premises unaware of her loss. The finder noticed that it was signed ‘Jean’ and that the message was expressed in very affectionate terms. When it was restored to Marguerite, on a later visit to the shop, she was visibly embarrassed.

  Whether or not Ali found out about this indiscretion, the couple certainly had a major argument three days before the civil wedding, a dispute sufficiently serious for Marguerite to book a return passage on the SS Helouan for herself and her maid. The row may have blown up, as a French woman friend recalled, because Marguerite was ‘addicted to flirting’ and expected Ali to put up with her well-practised ways.

  The quarrel was patched up in time for a large pre-wedding reception and dinner at Shepheard’s on Christmas Day 1922. Ali unwisely confessed to his fiancée that his friends had been betting on whether he would be able to keep her, but, once the capable Maître Assouad was satisfied that the civil contract was in order, there was to be no hesitation on Marguerite’s part. Although the Prince of Wales had been her finest trophy, marriage to the heir of the British Crown was impossible, and Ali made a very desirable second-best.

  Marguerite brought the Prince’s letters to Egypt and most of the correspondence seems to have been handed to Maître Assouad for safe-keeping. As will be shown later, Marguerite was on very close terms with Assouad. With her customary caution, she would have been wary of depositing such valuable items in any of Ali’s properties. Two or three letters, however, were kept separately, perhaps left in Paris in the hands of a trusted friend, such as the singer Hélène Baudry, or Madeleine Martelet, who had introduced her to Ali. This was a prudent course to take. Marguerite would not put all her eggs in one basket.

  Marguerite undertook to produce evidence of her divorce from Charles Laurent (this was resolved by the roundabout declaration of the French consul that she was ‘free from any bond of marriage’), while Ali agreed to pay her a dowry of £8,000, with £2,000 to be paid on signing the contract, the balance on his death or if he should divorce Marguerite. Ali’s lawyer insisted on a clause by which Marguerite stood to lose the £6,000 and her right to alimony if she divorced him. Ali would not be ‘kicked out’ quite as easily as Charles Laurent had been, but the prize of his fortune made up for this slight restriction on her freedom of action.

  Another major provision of the contract was that Marguerite should convert to Islam, ostensibly because of a term in the will of Ali’s mother excluding Ali from her inheritance if he married a kufar, but it also served to strengthen Marguerite’s position if Ali, with his reckless taste for speed or from some other cause, should happen to predecease her. Marguerite, a lover of Parisian haute couture, was not obliged by contract to wear Islamic dress. She retained her French nationality. All in all, she had been well advised and, far from being a defenceless Frenchwoman in a foreign land (as she would later claim), she had not only the services of an experienced Cairo lawyer, but the support of a former lover (possibly General Cherif pasha),254 who acted as witness at
the civil ceremony, a favour for which Ali may not have been too grateful.

  Five nights after the civil marriage, Shepheard’s was packed with 1,200 diners celebrating a rowdy New Year’s Eve. Some young British bucks doused diners unfortunate enough to be sitting near the fountain in the Moorish Restaurant, while bread rolls and cotton-wool pellets were hurled from table to table in the ballroom, used as an overflow dining area. After supper, a ‘jazz band’ belted out the latest favourites, ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’, ‘My Sweet Hortense’, and ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’.

  There was barely ankle room for dancing under the great chandelier, decorated in ‘magnificent cascades of bougainvillaea [with] a profusion of flowers everywhere’. At midnight, the lights were dimmed and two dozen white doves released from a balcony, an effect rather spoiled by the wags who lowered a squealing piglet (not the most tactful of gestures in a Muslim country) on a rope from an upper fanlight. Bags of red and white confetti were emptied on the heads of the crowd, ‘everybody whistled and screeched, cushions were thrown about and a rugger scrum indulged in by the … men’. In the early hours, a full moon lit the departing gharris, as guests forsook the hotel for Ciro’s nightclub or, more romantically, journeyed out of town to gaze upon the pyramids by moonlight.

  After the civil wedding, the process of conversion to Islam of the woman who had once considered herself ‘devout … in a mystic sort of way’ proceeded according to the regulations. Marguerite was obliged first to consult a priest of her own religion, who would be given the opportunity of trying to persuade the intending convert to remain Christian. At the house of the civil governor of Cairo, Father Maréchal of St Joseph’s Church vainly attempted to keep Marguerite within the folds of the Mother Church, but to no avail. Assuring the priest that she would not betray the faith of her childhood, raised as she had been by the Sisters of Mary, Marguerite confessed that this was all about money. Since Ali risked losing his inheritance if he married a Christian, Marguerite felt she had to take his interests into account. Nevertheless she gave the church a handsome donation. In return, the priest, undaunted, presented a breviary to Marguerite, now formally sundered from the body of the Holy Catholic Church.

  On 11 January, after proclaiming in Arabic ‘There is one God and Mahomet is His Prophet’, Marguerite added another to her string of noms de plume. She had become ‘Munira’, after her husband’s mother, and to mark the occasion had herself photographed demurely wearing the choudri.

  Within a week of Marguerite’s conversion to Islam, Ali was writing a revealing letter to Yvonne Alibert, in terms that suggest a reason for the younger sister’s rapid departure from Cairo. Ali’s emotional immaturity and his wife’s unwillingness to change her ‘bad habits’ were rapidly propelling the marriage towards disaster:

  … You may rest assured, my little Yvonne, that I have no reproach with regard to you. I would much like you to have spent the winter season with us, but the question of my marriage with Munira – ha, ha, ha – caused a delicate situation which, being considered, perhaps it was in your best interest to return to France. Just now I am engaged in training her. Yesterday, to begin with, I did not come in to lunch or to dinner and I also left her at the theatre. With women one must act with energy and be severe – no bad habits. We still lead the same life of which you are aware – the opera, theatre, disputes, high words and perverseness. We leave for Luxor next week.

  Accept, my dear child, my affectionate sentiments …

  Ali was probably writing jokingly to Yvonne, but any attempts to ‘train’ his new wife were doomed to failure. Five days after he had written to Yvonne, a terrific quarrel erupted, in the course of which each spouse threatened to kill the other. As with so many of their arguments, jealousy was at the root. Marguerite rushed up to her room and, mindful at this early stage of the need to keep a record of events with a view to divorce proceedings, wrote an emotional denunciation of her husband:

  Yesterday, 21 January 1923, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he took his Bible, or Koran, I do not know which, kissed it, put his hand on it and swore to avenge himself on me …

  Unconvincingly, she declared that ‘this oath was taken without any reason, neither jealousy, bad conduct, nor a scene on my part’, adding a postscript which showed where her priorities lay:

  PS Today he wanted to take my jewellery from me. I refused, hence a fresh scene.

  Calm had been briefly restored when, at daybreak on 25 January, the steam-powered dahabeeyah cast off, on a major voyage up the Nile to Luxor. Ali took command, clad in tarboosh, pyjamas and a pair of red heelless slippers, or babouches and, with evident pleasure, successfully negotiated two of Cairo’s awkward bridges before going below for breakfast. The pride of Ali’s little fleet, the boat was crewed by some twenty-five Nubian sailors, whose complement included a chef, six cooks and two stewards, one of whom was styled Maître d’hôtel, both in uniforms bearing Ali’s self-designed monogram. Fahmy had his valet aboard, Marguerite was accompanied by her maid Aimée, and, unsurprisingly, Said Enani completed the party.

  After ten days of tortuous progress, the craft drew near to its destination and, eager to exchange the comparative loneliness of the dahabeeyah for the cosmopolitan society of Luxor, Ali helped Munira into his speedboat, which had been towed up from Cairo. Together they went ahead of the yacht, making for the jetty in front of the Winter Palace Hotel. Here two of Ali’s sisters, Madame Said and Madame Roznangi, were waiting with warm greetings for their brother but conspicuously less affection for his bride.

  Moored opposite the hotel, among the other luxury craft, the dahabeeyah boasted an impressive list of guests. Lord Carnarvon accepted an invitation to lunch, and the lavish shipboard parties given by the Fahmys during their two visits to Luxor that February were attended by some of the best-known personalities of the ‘Tut-Ankh-Amun Season’, including Howard Carter, the popular and gregarious Maharajah of Kapurthala (a great Francophile who, to Marguerite’s delight, spoke excellent French), a Greek archaeologist, a distinguished Egyptian poet, various financiers and an assortment of local dignitaries. In a diary entry for 6 February, General Sir John Maxwell recorded that ‘[Howard] Carter came over … had tea with Ali Kamel Fahmy and Mahmoud Abul Fath on their [sic] richly decorated steam dahabeah’.255

  The reason for this visit is unclear. Maxwell, a career soldier, had served in Egypt for many years, becoming C-in-C British forces there in 1908 and again at the beginning of the Great War. Appointed C-in-C and Military Governor of Ireland immediately after the 1916 Easter Rising, he took responsibility for the execution of fifteen of the leading rebels, earning the nickname ‘Bloody Maxwell’. By 1923, at the age of 63, he had retired from active duty, but had close links with Allenby, the High Commissioner, and British officials. Maxwell may have used the visit to sound out educated Egyptian opinion on matters of importance to British Imperial interests. The fact that he was accompanied by Howard Carter, already famous as the discoverer of Tut-Ankh-Amun’s tomb, testifies to the importance of the meeting.

  In between hosting these entertainments, the Fahmys, evidently gripped by the prevailing Tut-Ankh-Amun fever, hired a pair of donkeys, on which they travelled to Karnak and the Valley of the Kings. En route, they were spotted by an English journalist, H. V. Morton, later to become well known as a travel writer and a shrewd observer of humanity, with a gift for the syrupy phrase, already very much part of his style in 1923. Morton described ‘one of those crystal-clear mornings which come only in Egypt, bringing with them a sense of indescribable dancing happiness. There was not a ripple on the blue waters of the Nile, the miles of sugar-cane stood motionless and not a breath stirred the tall, feathered palms on the road to Gurnah…’

  After an hour’s ride between the baking-hot rock walls that lead into the famous valley, he saw a little way ahead of him a man and a woman mounted on donkeys. ‘At first,’ recalled Morton, with a hint of racism, ‘I thought he was a European. He was wearing a grey sun helmet, a well-cut shooting
jacket and a pair of Jodhpur riding breeches.’ He heard them speaking French and asked an English friend if he knew who they were. ‘The Fahmys,’ came the reply, delivered patronisingly with ‘the peculiar smile with which a white man in the East refers to a mixed marriage’.

  Morton asked his friend if they were part of the Egyptian royal family. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bey. Pots of money … I’ll introduce you.’ The prevailing contempt felt by the British for most things Egyptian can be discerned in Morton’s thumbnail sketch of Ali:

  [He] impressed me as a very polished upper-class Egyptian, not very dark, clean-shaven and possessing in a marked degree that dangerous magnetism of the eye which attracts more white women than most untravelled people imagine. He was too well dressed to look exactly right. Like most Oriental men, he reeked of scent …

  Ali discussed London and Paris, speaking of the journey back to Cairo for the Islamic wedding, now near at hand. No, they were not staying at the Winter Palace, declared Ali with evident pride, as he swished the ever-present flies away with an ivory-handled whisk of white horsehair. ‘I have a yacht.’ Morton was very suspicious of this glib, disgustingly rich foreigner. ‘All the time he talked, he smiled,’ and, subtle Easterner that he was, ‘had a trick of looking at your mouth when you were speaking to him…’

  Marguerite was very quiet, possibly because the journey had tired her, but she was a practised rider and may just have been out of sorts, in no mood for polite chatter. Morton spoke to her in English, but in French she replied that she did not understand and, after a few commonplace remarks, settled down to watch the porters removing artefacts from the great royal tomb.256

  After four or five days of this crowded social programme, a telegram arrived on 9 February stating that preparations for the religious wedding were complete. The couple, leaving their luggage on the dahabeeyah, boarded the train de luxe for the thirteen-hour journey back to Cairo, arriving at nine o’clock on the evening before the ceremony.