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

by Andrew Rose

  Clothed entirely in black, with only her large, intriguing eyes visible, Munira was driven early the following afternoon to Ali’s large suite of offices, in the business quarter of Cairo. The white-bearded cadi formally asked her if she had received her dowry. Her answer, duly recorded in a register by the cadi’s clerk, was in the affirmative, although she would later claim that she had only been paid the equivalent of £450, instead of the promised £2,000. She also alleged that Ali, without warning, had suddenly insisted that she should forgo her right of divorce. There was said to have been a long argument about this, after which, browbeaten, she was cajoled into accepting the provision.

  An Islamic marriage contract does not automatically give a wife the right to divorce her husband (who is always permitted to divorce his wife): it is for the woman to claim the insertion of such a clause, which many brides have been reluctant to do. Although it appears that the religious settlement did not give Marguerite the right of divorce, her own account of the episode seems improbable, not only in the light of her assertive nature, but because her lawyer, Maître Assouad, was present throughout the proceedings. Whatever the position might have been in Islamic law, the civil contract, drawn up according to the Egyptian legal code, clearly protected Marguerite’s right to divorce her husband.

  In the presence of Ali’s brother-in-law, Dr Assim Said bey (a Cairo gynaecologist), lawyers for both parties and the bridegroom’s closest friend, Said Enani, marriage documents were signed in front of the cadi. Ali and Munira became man and wife, according to Islamic rite. Marguerite was now to be known as ‘Munira Hanem El-Faransawiah’, recorded as ‘non-virgin, daughter of Farman [sic] … French subject’.257 The party made its way to Shepheard’s Hotel for the wedding feast, a junket which lasted well into the small hours and at which, in defiance of religious proscription, the ‘costliest wines’ were served.

  Next day, they took the train to Assiout, between Cairo and Luxor, where the dahabeeyah was waiting for them. Using the motor-boat intermittently for excursions, the honeymoon party reached Luxor with decidedly frayed tempers. This time Ali and Marguerite came to blows. Ali had tried to lock his wife in her cabin during the journey, provoking violent resistance. The arguments continued at Luxor, when he pompously forbade her to leave the ship, posting members of the crew at each end of the gangplank.

  With so many Europeans around, including some very distinguished acquaintances, it seems highly improbable that Marguerite was ever a true prisoner. Even by her own account, she was never physically abused by the servants and, as appears from the divorce-minded letter that she wrote to her lawyer, her main fear appears to have been a public scandal, news of which might trickle back to the gossips of Paris:

  Dear Maître [Assouad]

  I have to bring to your notice very grave incidents. For the last three days, I have been a prisoner on board. I am absolutely unable to get out. Threats were made and to avoid a scandal, I had to go inside. This evening I have to go to bed at 7 o’clock. I have on my arms the marks of my husband’s gentleness. I ask you to send here one or two persons, who will have this condition established, so as to make use of it …

  On 16 February 1923, the inner chamber of the great royal tomb was formally opened. Although the greatest artefacts would not be revealed for some months, it was clear that this had been a major archaeological find, though some Egyptian newspapers were tartly critical of Lord Carnarvon’s style and motives. Al Ahram complained that, by giving the London Times a monopoly of access to the team’s discoveries (in return for a handsome consideration), Carnarvon had forced them to take the news regarding their national treasures from non-Egyptian sources: ‘He [Carnarvon] has come to regard the tomb as his own creation’, was one caustic comment.

  British newspaper moguls fell over themselves to get in on the act. First Lord Beaverbrook, then Lord Rothermere, trumpeted his imminent arrival in the land of the pharaohs. ‘Lord Beaverbrook is expected to arrive in Cairo next week…’, said the Egyptian Gazette on 22 February, later announcing that ‘a wireless message has just been received by Shepheard’s Hotel that Lord Rothermere is arriving at Port Said … in two days’ time…’258

  The Fahmys’ second visit to Luxor was noticeably less successful than the first had been. Marguerite’s maid returned to France for a holiday on 10 March, leaving her mistress feeling isolated and without a confidante. There were some lighter moments, as when the pair made a second trip out to the newly opened tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun: as if to mark the occasion, Marguerite had climbed into a nearby open sarcophagus and lay down inside it. Clad in riding habit and with her arms folded in front of her, she became the subject of a zany snapshot. But the bickering soon began again. Ali wrote to Yvonne Alibert on 16 March, describing the trip, together with a little macho blustering, an evident nostalgia for Paris and a romantic flourish:

  … but I quarrelled all the time. I showed her I could act with energy and this is what is needed with women. I hope you will make a journey with us next year. Give me details about the pretty women in fashion [in Paris]. If you see […], tell her my heart, my soul, my sentiments are at her feet and I am still in love with her. I hope she has not forgotten me …

  The Luxor season wound down after mid-April, as the heat became steadily less tolerable. The dahabeeyah returned to Cairo, a bad-tempered voyage in which the vessel was frequently marooned on sandbanks. Ali, in sulky mood, behaved badly to his wife, his crew, and to any hapless native boatmen or fisherfolk who chanced to get in his way.

  Once back in Cairo, claimed Marguerite, Ali renewed his acquaintance with the seedier type of dancehall and café, in which prostitutes, both female and male, and hashish were freely available. Hashish could be either smoked or chewed and some low dives offered manzoul, normally an inoffensive sweet paste, transformed into a kind of ‘space-cake’ of opium, hashish, even strychnine, taken ‘for its aphrodisiac properties’. The user of hashish, reported the Egyptian Gazette, ‘sees visions, voluptuous or merely grandiose … To promote the hallucinations, the walls of hashish-smoking dens are often covered with pictures of elephants, dancing girls and other imagined accessories of regal pomp…’259 And there were new opportunities for the well-to-do. ‘Since the War, the [Egyptian] upper and middle classes … have succumbed to the lure of morphine and cocaine … [a habit] imported with the French prostitutes who flocked to Cairo in the winter of 1919–20…’260

  Marguerite, although not fully confined within the traditional boundaries of the Egyptian wife, was getting dangerously bored. Occasional outings to the theatre with one of her sisters-in-law, who had slightly unfrozen from the early days of their acquaintance, were no substitute for the gay life in Paris. By late April, fashionable society had already left Cairo for more temperate climes.

  One night, escorted by Ali’s diminutive Nubian valet, Marguerite went to the cinema. Ali’s close friend, the sculptor Mukhta bey, unwisely took her back to Zamalek in a taxi. Ali, who had returned home earlier than expected, was waiting for his wife in the grounds of the mansion. A violent argument took place during which Ali punched his wife on the face, an ugly incident, even if Marguerite’s allegation that she had sustained a dislocated jaw seems to have been a later embellishment.

  At last, the day came to set off for summer in Europe. On the morning of their departure, Marguerite’s heart missed a beat when Ali capriciously announced that he had decided not to go after all, but at 7.30 a.m. on 18 May 1923, the boat-train pulled out of Cairo on its way to Alexandria, with the Fahmy entourage on board. Just after 1 p.m., their ship was making its way out into the Mediterranean, bound for Brindisi, Venice and Trieste, with its onward rail connection to Paris. The vessel was the SS Helouan, on which Marguerite and her sister had travelled to Egypt six months before. On this voyage, Ali and Marguerite fought so much that they became the talk of the ship and the captain had to be called in to act as umpire.

  8

  Stormy Weather

  The Fahmys argied and bargied, clawe
d and scratched, bit and kicked their way from the heat of Egypt to a chilly, wet Paris, where they took a suite at the Hôtel Majestic, the scene of Ali’s first formal introduction to Marguerite the previous July. Marguerite, delighted to be back in her home town, exchanged scandal with her women friends, discreetly renewed some valued male acquaintances, bought another horse for 12,000 francs (£150), ordered several new dresses and, while the going was still good, expanded her collection of jewellery. Her personal wealth was now estimated to be in the region of 3,000,000 francs (£37,500), a very comfortable sum in 1923.

  Despite the ever-present risk of friction, the couple made regular appearances at the smart nightspots, dancing into the small hours most mornings in the swing of the Paris June Season. They would go to Claridge’s, the Carlton, the Club Daunon, Le Perroquet and Ciro’s, from which they emerged early one morning arguing furiously. As they were motored home by Marguerite’s loyal chauffeur, Eugéne Barbay, Ali was heard to shout angrily, ‘I’ve had enough of you,’ before getting out of the car, slamming the door shut, and walking off into the night.

  One of Marguerite’s friends later recalled those troubled days in Paris. ‘[She] was playing with fire and making the Prince crazy with jealousy … Her marriage to this wild youth of 23 [sic] was a mistake and worse – a crime. Heedless of everything, she went on in her married life like an emancipated Parisienne. She received all her admirers with smiles…’ Ali felt himself to be humiliated. ‘I was a witness to many scenes,’ continued the friend, ‘and, though I assured the Prince that his wife was flirting and nothing more … his ideas were so narrow that they had no relation to the society life he was leading. One day he insisted that his wife, who was wearing a gown very slightly décolleté, should put a shawl over her shoulders…’ Marguerite did not easily accept these attempts to restrict her freedom in Egypt, still less so in her native Paris. ‘I can’t go on living like this,’ she confided to her friend at the end of the month, ‘We must get a divorce.’

  Ali, a strange mixture of martinet and libertine, was himself the butt of his wife’s criticism. He had always been generous to the principal members of his all-male entourage, rewarding them with cash and other presents at his whim. Said Enani was the principal beneficiary, but the others, including the boy valet, were not left out. Marguerite grew increasingly resentful of the intimacy between Ali and his staff, which now included a ‘minder’, one of whose nicknames, ‘Le Costaud’, reflected his strapping build.

  Ali’s fondness for wearing jewellery was a trait common enough in rich Egyptian men, but Marguerite felt that it ought not to be extended to subordinates. Harsh words ensued and Marguerite’s will prevailed. ‘He had a habit, which I succeeded in breaking,’ she said imperiously, ‘of letting his suite adorn themselves with some of the contents of his jewel cases.’261

  Marguerite was particularly suspicious of Said Enani. His friendship with Ali, for the association between the two men went well beyond that of master and servant, predated his acquaintance with Marguerite by several years and, what was more, Said was very close to the surviving members of Ali’s family, a rich and powerful lobby not greatly enamoured of the new Madame Fahmy. She resented the way they talked together in Arabic, which she could not understand, as well as Ali’s frequent late-night practice of slipping up to Said’s room for an hour or so before returning to his wife.

  Ali’s relationship with his secretary seems to have been platonic, but Marguerite complained that he was spending time with ‘men of bad character’. She had flatly refused his suggestion, made after a visit to the Folies Bergère (one of Marguerite’s beats in her professional days), that they should go on to ‘a certain disreputable resort in Paris to which as a rule only men were admitted’.

  By mid-June 1923, Marguerite wanted rid of Ali. She kept in touch with Maître Assouad in Cairo and engaged a French private detective, a M. Gasser, whose instructions seem to have been to follow Ali and report on his sexual encounters. If it came to a divorce, Marguerite’s own past and her present fairly louche behaviour would undoubtedly be a handicap: if, on the other hand, she could show that Ali had been unfaithful, perhaps even associating with homosexual men, her chances of a substantial pay-off would considerably increase. To avoid scandal, Ali and his family might be willing to settle on terms a good deal more generous than those provided for by the strict wording of the civil marriage contract.

  On 17 June, Ali left Paris for a few days in Stuttgart, glad to be away from the domestic maelstrom and able to indulge another of his passions, high-performance cars. He was uneasy at the prospect of what Marguerite might get up to, alone and unchaperoned in Paris, and Said Enani was charged with the unenviable task of trying to secure Marguerite’s chastity during her husband’s absence.

  Ali’s obsessive jealousy gnawed at him while they were apart. He wrote her a bitter letter, warning that if she kept on seeing other men, he would publicly call her a very rude name – this was perhaps ‘une salope’ (a slag). It was a timely threat: one of the glittering social events so loved by Marguerite was to take place on Saturday 23 June and she would have been anxious not to give the scandalmongers yet more ammunition.

  Le Bal du Grand Prix, held amid the splendour of the Paris Opera, was the last great event of the Paris Season, taking place on the eve of the Grand Prix of the Longchamps race meeting, an event at which tout Paris could see and be seen. For the occasion, Jean-Gabriel Doumergue (who, with the artist Georges Scott, had staged the Second Empire Ball at Biarritz in September 1922) employed the exotic theme of the Far East in the Eighteenth Century, enabling the great ladies of France to appear in a series of tableaux that uneasily linked Imperial China to the Court of Versailles. A staircase and walls draped in black velvet symbolised the eastern night, and a procession of rajahs and nautch girls gave way to the France of Louis XV, whose mistress, the notorious Madame de Pompadour, was represented by ‘none other than Mlle Cecile Sorel [the noted French actress], borne in a palanquin by negroes…’, amid a painted, powdered and bewigged retinue gorgeously costumed in the fashion of the 1750s.262

  There were elaborate representations of the treasures brought back from India by Joseph Dupleix, the French adventurer defeated by Clive, and of the court and theatre of China. In one of the latter, the Comte Étienne de Beaumont presented the Prince of Wales’s American friend, Nina Crosby, now Marquise de Polignac, and other society beauties in extravagant oriental costume. The final tableau, and the most spectacular, depicted the flowers and birds of the Orient. ‘Then appeared floral cascades of lotus, of chrysanthemums, of orchids, [with] pagodas, porcelain bridges, parasols, roses, fountains…’263 Women, gilded eyelids and vermilion-coloured nails aglint, were dressed as subtropical flowers and fantastically coloured birds. Then, at 2 a.m., it was time for the company to foxtrot into the dawn on any one of a number of dance floors, each with its own orchestra.

  Convulsions at the ball seem to have been avoided, but two nights later, during a heated argument in their suite at about 2 a.m., the Fahmys came to blows. Marguerite pulled her pistol out from under its usual hiding place, the pillow of her bed, pointed it at Ali and threatened to shoot him. Things were getting out of hand. Ali would appear in public with scratches on his face, while Marguerite on occasion sought to disguise bruises with cream and powder. There was a disturbing tendency to wave guns around: Ali also had a pistol, probably a .25 automatic, whose butt was elegantly decorated with mother-of-pearl and gold-leaf chasing.

  A violent scene took place in the lobby of the Hôtel Majestic, in front of Ali’s sister, Aicha, and his brother-in-law, Dr Said, who were also staying there. People were startled to see a well-dressed couple loudly insulting each other, heedless of passers-by. Ali, carrying out his earlier threat, shouted that she was nothing more than a tart, while she called him ‘un maquereau’ (a pimp) and, very likely, ‘un pédé’ (a pederast), ‘un salaud’ (a bastard) or ‘un salopard’ (a sodomite). Ali, now furious, grabbed at her left wrist, wrenching o
ff an expensive bracelet – his recent gift to Marguerite – and threw it contemptuously back at her. Dr Said and Said Enani had to separate the pair as they tried to smack each other’s faces.

  Dr Said took the view, supported by the rest of Ali’s family, that a separation was desirable. ‘The cause seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that being a Christian woman and having taken the Mohammedan vows, she would not fall in with her husband’s wishes, as it is generally understood that a wife must strictly obey her husband. He did not like her to go out alone, particularly as he knew of her former conduct and this, I believe, is the cause of the whole trouble. She resented this surveillance upon her and wished to follow her usual bent…’264

  Marguerite’s friends and acquaintances in Paris were also getting worried. One woman, signing herself ‘Nouile’, wrote on 30 June from 9 rue Duphot, a smart address close to the Élysée Palace: ‘Tu sais que mon amie Fahmy est au plus mal avec son mari ça ne marche pas de tout ce ménage. J’ai grand peur pour son peau. C’est à ce point que ça barde!…’ (‘You know that my friend [Marguerite] Fahmy is on the worst terms with her husband … the two don’t get on together at all. I fear greatly for her skin. It’s got to the point of an armed contest!…’)265

  It was about this time that the second series of SEM’s album Le Nouveau Monde appeared, its coloured lithographs eagerly scanned by the fashionable world, scandal-mongers and journalists. Since the belle époque of the 1900s, the mordant brush of Georges Goursat had satirised the foibles of the rich and famous, as seen in the great hotels, fashionable restaurants and theatres of Paris and at resorts such as Deauville, Cannes and Biarritz.