by Andrew Rose
SEM, ‘a funny little monkey of a man’,266 could be savage and his art sometimes provoked victims, or lovers of victims, to fury. He observed people unaware that they were being watched. He would wait for weeks, even months, and then ‘suddenly I think, that woman, she was like a horse, or that fellow, he resemble [sic] a camel. Then I draw.’267 Duff Cooper noted a ‘hectic evening’ there in August 1922, ‘a free fight’ between a banker called ‘Bamberger and an American a propos of a caricature that SEM has done of Idina’.268 The American had mistaken the banker for the artist. Lady Idina Gordon269 had been represented as a heron, and, in consequence, declared an unrepentant SEM, ‘everybody would remember Idina as a heron for the rest of her life.
In addition to Marguerite’s marital disharmony, another high-profile union was on the rocks, this time between the super-rich Maharajah of Kapurthala and his wayward wife. The former Anita Delgado, in her youth a beautiful Spanish dancer, was a woman with a lively private life, about the same age as Marguerite. SEM, who knew both women well, used the caption une desenchantée (a disillusioned woman) as an echo of Les Desenchantées, title of a popular romantic novel by Pierre Loti. Marguerite and Anita were both women cast off (or in danger of being cast off) by their wealthy protectors. The link was not by chance, for SEM chose his victims with the greatest care.270 Marguerite, depicted shrewishly, featured as part of a double bill in typically cruel caricature, with the well-padded form of Anita, looking rather like an overfed turkey.
The last few days of June had seen a considerable improvement in the Parisian weather. ‘C’est samedi et il fait beau’ (‘It’s Saturday and the weather’s fine’), wrote the Parisian lady of 3 rue Duphot on the day Marguerite, Ali and their retinue were seen off at the Gare St Lazare by Dr Said and his wife, Ali’s sister. They did not foresee the drama that would take place across the Channel. ‘There seemed to be the usual misunderstanding, but nothing unusual,’ remembered the doctor.271
9
England 1923
Marguerite, in her first-class cabin aboard the cross-Channel steamer plying between Le Havre and Southampton, knew that she had some potentially powerful allies in England. She had kept in touch with Major Ernest Bald, close to Bendor, a close friend of the Prince of Wales. In June 1923, Major Bald had taken up residence in his London club for the Season. The social column of The Times noted his presence at a dance held at Claridges Hotel, joining a preferred list which included the Duchess of Norfolk, Viscount Churchill, Lord Clifton, Lady Lilian Grenfell, Lady Clodagh Anson, The Hon. Lady Lloyd-Mostyn, Lady Malcolm and Mrs Stanley Baldwin, wife of the Prime Minister.272
A few weeks earlier the Daily Mail had trumpeted ‘The 1923 Season has begun’, in the middle of a dismally wet April, brightened only by the wedding of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Prince’s younger brother ‘Bertie’, now Duke of York, assisted by his bachelor brothers, the Prince of Wales and Prince Henry. To celebrate the occasion, the principal chef of the Savoy Hotel, M. François Latry, successor to the incomparable Escoffier, prepared such unlikely delights as poussin de printemps Glamis Castle and fraises glacées Elizabeth.273
For the new Season, wet or dry, more dances and receptions were planned since the golden year of 1914. If the April newspapers were correct, 130,000 American tourists were expected to arrive in London at any minute.
The war, of course, had been the great divide. Britain’s various Expeditionary Forces had been literally decimated: one in ten had been killed – some 800,000 young men – and the overall casualty figure was one-third of the enlisted total. Though France, Germany and Russia had suffered proportionately worse losses, the psychological impact of the war on British society was immense. If the crass lyrics of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ had epitomised the thoughtless mood of 1914, its glum post-war successor was ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, an artless elegy for lost youth and vanished hope. A brief boom temporarily shielded demobbed soldiers from the unemployment that would become so persistent a feature of the interwar years. Already in 1923 over a million people were out of work. In August, an unemployed ex-Colour Sergeant of Marines leapt to his death from a road bridge in Kent. A pawn ticket for eight wartime medals was found on his body.
In the early 1920s, there was a fierce determination, if not to forget the war, at any rate to get back to ‘normal’, inducing a pervasive nostalgia for the world before the Great War, perhaps prompted by the thought that it was something that the boys who had died in France, Flanders, Palestine and Mesopotamia would have wanted. Newspapers and magazines habitually drew comparisons between life pre- and post-war, usually to the detriment of the present, depicted as shallow and decadent. ‘And what did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’ was the damning question posed in the famous Punch cartoon, in which a small boy unwittingly skewers his father, a well-dressed ‘shirker’ comfortably seated in a peacetime armchair, whisky-and-soda in hand.274 Fortunately for the Royal Household, British readers were not to know what the Prince of Wales had been doing during the Great War, enjoying the favours of a Paris mistress, exploring a variety of sexual adventures in a smart apartment and an expensive brothel, all safely behind the lines.
In this bitterly retrospective atmosphere, many found inspiration in what Signor Musssolini was doing for Italy. The podgy dictator had no more fervent admirer than Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the mass-circulation Daily Mail. ‘This young, vigorous ardent Italian,’ wrote the noble lord in 1923, ‘did more than save Italy … he saved the whole Western world … The idea that he is a blustering, flag-waving agitator is foolishly wrong.’275 Lord Rothermere was particularly impressed by the Duce’s ‘caution … skill and … gentleness’ and he was not the only fan. Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, saluted Italy’s ‘strong man’ and Winston Churchill was, for a time, ‘favourably impressed’ by the blackshirt leader.
In contrast to Mussolini’s machismo, British youth was seen as decidedly effete. Worries arising from this perception could sometimes be oddly worded. A clergyman, preaching at Windsor in September 1923, was worried that many young men were being ‘lured by the attraction of the opposite sex to the tennis court and the foxtrot, when they ought to be playing cricket’.276 At Oxford, another reverend gentleman roundly condemned contemporary morals, complaining bitterly that ‘girls go about as if to attract men’.
There was a widespread feeling that moral standards were in hopeless decline. In July 1923, the Bishop of Durham warned that the nation’s sexual morality was ‘on the brink of complete disintegration’.277 That month, the self-appointed inspectorate of the London Council for the Protection of Public Morality was duly scandalised (though presumably not surprised) by the goings-on in London’s parks and open spaces. Such bien-pensant groupings often had powerful supporters. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin (such a fine name), a perfervid moralist, was a keen supporter of another high-minded caucus, the National Vigilance Association, or ‘NVA’, whose unexceptionable work among young prostitutes was marred by religious bigotry.
The equivalents of today’s tabloid press played the old game of prudery and prurience: in 1923, transvestism seems to have been Grub Street’s favourite sin, with lurid reports of cross-dressing in Surrey and Wiltshire. Sensational news of a bank robber in drag filtered across the Atlantic from Chicago. The President of the Methodist Conference warned that ‘the nation’s girlhood is exposed to terrible risks of alcoholism, indulgence, midnight follies … and licentiousness’.278 ‘The Midnight Follies’ was in fact a cabaret, of more or less complete propriety, which entertained late night diners at the luxurious Hotel Metropole (now the Corinthia Hotel) in Northumberland Avenue. Patrons paid 30 shillings (£1.50) each to dine, dance and watch two high-quality ‘turns’, entertainment ending at 12.30 a.m. on the dot.
The war had brought in all manner of restrictions on social life, not least in regard to the liquor trade, supposedly a result of the 1915 ‘shell shortage’, which the Prince had so rashly reported in a let
ter to his friend Jacques de Breteuil. Emergency licensing restrictions were crystallised in the 1921 Licensing Act, the product of an unholy alliance in Parliament between total abstainers (such as Lady Astor) and the ‘beerage’, the brewing lobby well represented in the House of Lords. Weekday closing time in London was set at 11 p.m., but, as so often in England, a class distinction crept into the draft legislation and a ‘theatre-supper’ clause was inserted, providing for a ‘Supper Hour Certificate’, whereby the well-to-do were granted an extra hour’s drinking time by paying for a meal that was a legally required accompaniment to the liquor.
By mid-1923, the major London hotels provided dinner-dance facilities, competing for business with nightclubs proper, such as the Embassy in Bond Street, already a favourite haunt of the Prince of Wales. Though the Prince thought the Embassy the ‘Buckingham Palace of night clubs’, the venue was little more than a luxuriously appointed basement. On a balcony, above the hubbub of diners, was the bandstand. The male clientele wore evening dress, dinner jackets for some, though the ‘full soup and fish’ of white tie and tails was socially more acceptable. Women now wore their hair short, in styles of which the boyish ‘Eton Crop’ became the most extreme form.
Other London nightclubs favoured by the Prince included Ciro’s in Orange Street, the Grafton Galleries, the Queen’s Hall Roof and, perhaps the most exclusive of all (including the Embassy), the Riviera Club, which overlooked the Thames from its elegant rooms in Grosvenor Road.
During the war, clubs of all sorts – authorised or unlawful – had mushroomed in the East End, catering for the hordes of restless young servicemen on leave in Town. Many were simply unlicensed drinking dens or, like ‘Ma’ Meyrick’s notorious ‘43’ in Gerard Street, simply flouted the rules. Some were illegal casinos, some were what would later be called ‘clip-joints’, and a few catered discreetly for homosexual men, a feared and despised minority which, according to the puritanical weekly John Bull, ‘should be hunted out of clean and decorous society’. Some clubs tolerated drug use: cocaine was available on the streets, with cannabis (or ‘hashish’) not yet on the list of prohibited substances. The popular press regularly ran sensational features alleging a drug menace, usually associated with black and Chinese immigrants.
By 1923, London already had a sizeable community of African or Afro-Caribbean origin. The term ‘black’ at that time was used indiscriminately to embrace virtually anyone with a skin darker than pink. Thus Egyptians, such as Ali Fahmy, were ‘coloured’ or ‘black’, as were all Asians in the Indian Empire. The term ‘coloured’ also embraced Chinese and Japanese. Indeed, almost the entire population south of the Mediterranean and East of Suez was liable to be described in these terms.
Contemporary references to ‘black’ people in the British press make dismal reading. ‘BLACK DEVILS AND WHITE GIRLS’ headlined John Bull that autumn, alleging that ‘coloured men are still lurking in our cities. Living depraved lives on the immoral earnings of the white girls they have lured to their betrayal.’ In London, these ‘degenerate negroes’ lived in the streets around Tottenham Court Road and the eastern end of Shaftesbury Avenue, areas ‘honeycombed with black men’s … nightclubs … and thieving lodging houses … They run gambling houses, they trade in dope, they spread disease.’ This crude racism was not confined to John Bull. Other newspaper reports spoke of ‘negro haunts of crime … hotbeds of evil’, adding, for good measure, that an accused black man was ‘a member of a jazz band’.
An unmistakably sour note of sexual jealousy can be detected amid the racial stereotyping and reports of ‘flashily-dressed, bejewelled negroes’,279 men who – as a shocked Daily Mail revealed in September 1923 – were found to be dancing with white women at the ironically named ‘British Colonial Club’ in Whitfield Street, Soho.
The principal feature of London life in 1923 which distinguished it from the pre-war world was the extraordinary popularity of dancing. ‘Bulldog Drummond’, the loutish creation of the pulp novelist ‘Sapper’, could boast that he and a girlfriend had ‘jazzed together’, but English dance music was performed in homespun ways, betraying the influence of brass and military bands, often far removed from the vitality of the Afro-American rhythms, the true roots of ragtime and jazz.
Tunes were often catchy and robust, but there was a brittleness about popular music at the time. Jerky, staccato foxtrots and one-steps were the most popular dances, though the sentimental waltz (often spelt ‘valse’) and the sinuous tango provided some relief. The craze of the ‘shimmy-shake’, which had taken New York by storm in 1919, was now being challenged by the ‘blues’ or ‘blues trot’, which first made its appearance in London ballrooms during July 1923, a foxtrot played ‘a quarter slower … and jazzed up to quaint effect’. The blues proved to be a temporary diversion before the arrival from America of the super-athletic, shin-busting Charleston eighteen months later.
Dancing, in this early post-war period, had become an almost manic phenomenon, resembling medieval displays of mass hysteria, perhaps due to the widespread sense of release after the war’s end. Early in July 1923, the Daily Mail noted disapprovingly that ‘everyone dances on almost every possible occasion. Dancing teas, dancing dinners and dancing suppers … succeed each other in a giddy whirl.’ The Observer reported that ‘almost every West End hotel runs a dinner dance and in many cases a tea dance as well’. A ‘Harley Street woman specialist’ was of the opinion that ‘a great deal of evil … goes on in the modern dance hall’ and a ‘psychoanalyst’ informed readers of Lloyd’s Sunday News that consulting rooms ‘were filled with dance-hall wrecks’. Despite the alleged risks to mental and physical health, the young loved to dance.
One spur to the dancing craze was the coming of radio. The London station of the BBC began regular broadcasts in November 1922 (‘2LO calling’) from studios in the Strand and the first dance music was transmitted shortly before Christmas. Two months later, the BBC moved to Savoy Hill, a narrow street opposite the Savoy Hotel. The BBC and the hotel shared the same electrical generator and, from April 1923, ordinary ‘listeners-in’ were able to get a taste of the high life when the Savoy Havana Band began broadcasts that became hugely popular.
A simple overhead microphone was fitted to the ceiling of the hotel ballroom and a BBC announcer (suitably attired in white tie) waited backstage to announce the numbers that had been played, poised to operate a cut-out switch if any of the dancers misbehaved by bawling something undesirable at the microphone. According to one early announcer, it was not shouted obscenities that were feared, but a much graver possibility, stigmatised – in a very British way – as ‘the chance of a possible advertisement’.280
10
Stompin’ at the Savoy
On the morning of 1 July 1923, the Fahmys took up residence at the Savoy Hotel. With them was Said Enani and also an entourage including the chauffeur and Marguerite’s current personal maid, Mlle Aimée Pain (allotted a room on the hotel’s eighth floor, sharing accommodation with other guests’ servants). Their suite (which cost 9 guineas a day) was on the fourth floor of Savoy Court, luxuriously furnished apartments attached to the hotel, decorated in the pastiche Adam style then popular. As Marguerite and Ali emerged from a lift, they were directed to the door to their suite, number 41, on the opposite side of the corridor, slightly to their right. The hotel understood that ‘Prince’ Fahmy and his wife intended to remain until the end of July, when the Goodwood Races brought the London Season to a close and Society emigrated to the grouse moors or to Continental resorts such as Deauville and Le Touquet.
Ali had brought his personal valet, the unnamed illiterate Sudanese youth, part of the Egyptian household, who would spend much of his time crouched in the hallway outside his master’s door, patiently waiting to be commanded. Marguerite’s Paris chauffeur, the handsome Eugéne Barbay, was available to drive the party about London and also responsible for exercising Marguerite’s beloved lapdog.
The entrance to the suite was formed by a double s
et of doors, one of which opened outwards into the main corridor. Inside, a marbled bathroom could be found immediately opposite the entrance, to the left of which lay a short passage leading to the principal bedroom, its doubled bed covered by silk sheets, on which guests sometimes lay ‘private embroidered pillows’. This was very much Marguerite’s room, as her young husband chose (or was allotted) a second, slightly smaller, bedroom next to the bathroom.
From the suite, looking down on to Savoy Place, there was a fine view of the River Thames, flowing lazily beyond the broad sweep of the Victoria Embankment, busy with cars, taxi cabs, lorries, horses and carts and trams. Eastwards, the elegant but now crumbling Georgian structure of Waterloo Bridge spanned the river, on the other side of which could be seen Waterloo Station, newly rebuilt, and – like a lighthouse that had lost its way and wandered inland – the Shot Tower, a stumpy London landmark of the time.
The Savoy has accommodated the royal, the rich and the famous for well over a century, but – despite the best efforts of its management – has fallen prey to scandal from time to time. Oscar Wilde stayed there in the early 1890s, originally in room number 361, where he entertained a depressing collection of rentboys, hospitality that formed a basis for the prosecution’s case against him in 1895. Mata Hari, the exotic dancer and supposed German spy, had visited the Savoy in 1915 and 1916. A more recent embarrassment was the discovery of a woman’s body in her apartment in Savoy Court, the block where Marguerite and Ali would later stay. Billie Carleton, aged 22, already a well-known soubrette of the theatre, had overdosed on cocaine after a night out at the Victory Ball of November 1918, held at the Albert Hall.
By 1923, the Savoy’s autocratic and highly efficient manager, George Reeves-Smith, must have hoped that damaging scandals were in the past. He was to be disappointed by what happened outside suite 41, Savoy Court, in the early hours of 10 July that year.