by Andrew Rose
In addition to the delights of room service, the newly arrived Fahmys – briefly on their best behaviour in a foreign land – had the choice of two world-renowned restaurants within the hotel complex. The lively Savoy Grill (sharp left at the Strand entrance foyer) was crowded with business types at lunchtime, personalities from media and theatre adorning the evening supper tables. The Grill offered its lively clientele no music, but in the Savoy Restaurant, with its panoramic view of the river, a sedate orchestra played ‘Hungarian melodies … [of] melancholy sweetness for a clientele unkindly described as “a few truly smart people and a crowd of well-dressed … nonentities”.’281
Sparkling or dull as the diners might be, the menu – set out entirely in French, of course – included a four-course Diner du Jour on offer at 15/6 (77.5p) (Vin Blanc par Carafe 3/6), with the alternative à la carte, on which the most expensive item was chicken, suitably dignified as Poularde de France Dorothy, which came in at a hefty 30/- (£1.50).
The smart set, after the latest dance music, would make their way along the broad corridor from the restaurant, downstairs to the magnificent ballroom, decorated in a style that cheerfully commingled Louis Quatorze with his great-grandson, Louis Quinze, displaying a wealth of Corinthian capitals and gilded moulding. Here the Savoy Havana Band held sway. BBC broadcasts secured excellent publicity for the hotel and a lucrative recording contract with Columbia, the most prestigious record company of the day.
On their first evening at the Savoy, Ali and Marguerite chose to take dinner in the hotel restaurant, the summer light still affording diners the breadth of views over the river. Later that evening, as on all the nights of her brief stay at the Savoy, Marguerite gently placed under her pillow a .32 semi-automatic Browning pistol, loaded with six bullets.
In London, after a dreary June, ‘July made its debut yesterday in half-hearted fashion. For an hour or two in the afternoon, the sun managed to burst through a pall of clouds, but the temperature was below normal, the Kew maximum being 65°…’282 The Fahmys, not expecting too much of an English summer, sought entertainment in theatres and nightclubs. As if in desperation, they went out, accompanied by Said, on every night of their short stay together.
Likely attractions at the theatre included the revue Brighter London at the Hippodrome, where Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, led by an amiable 280-lb giant from Denver, Colorado, had been playing to packed houses since April, and George Gershwin’s Stop Flirting? at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in which London theatregoers could see the young Fred Astaire dance with his sister Adele.
The Fahmys did the rounds of the nightclubs. London Ciro’s, in Orange Street, off Leicester Square, was enjoying a record season that year and was a possible venue early in the week. The Fahmys may also have gone to hear Jack Hylton’s Band, recording stars since 1922, play at the Queen’s Hall Roof, a very popular rendezvous at the side of the famous concert hall where Sir Henry Wood conducted the Proms each summer. There the cabaret included The Trix Sisters and Divina and Charles, who, later that year, earned the peerless accolade ‘Banned in Bournemouth’, when the local watch committee responded apoplectically to their apache dance, ‘Rough Stuff’, performed with the help of cracking whips.
On Tuesday 3 July, a letter postmarked Paris arrived for Marguerite at the Savoy. It was written in French and unsigned:
Please permit a friend who has travelled widely among Orientals and who knows the craftiness of their acts to give you some advice. Don’t agree to return to Egypt for any object or even Japan. Rather abandon fortune than risk your life. Money can always be recovered by a good lawyer, but think of your life. A journey means a possible accident, a poison in the flower, a subtle weapon that is neither seen nor heard. Remain in Paris with those who love you and will protect you.
Marguerite excitedly showed it to her husband, who cynically replied that she had probably written it herself. The letter has a distinctly bogus air about it and, if not Marguerite’s handiwork, may have derived from one of her circle of friends at home in Paris, perhaps a former lover who knew about the marital breakdown. There may have been a more sinister purpose, with the letter pre-prepared as part of the ‘programme’ Marguerite had hinted at to a Cairo manicurist and in conversations with Ali’s friend, Mahmoud Abul Fath.283
Towards the end of the first week in London, the Fahmys, still together for the moment, went to the exclusive Riviera Club at 129 Grosvenor Road SW, formerly the home of a brother of Lord Derby. The elegant single-storey house, on the site of some old wharves, faced on to the Thames. The former drawing-room, which became the club’s ballroom, enjoyed an excellent view of the river, if not quite ‘Venetian in its beauty’, as the Referee would have its readers believe. The Prince of Wales was among those who sometimes made the pilgrimage to Pimlico, an open secret to the press (‘a very eminent person indeed is to be seen there very often…’). It seems that HRH was not present when the club’s patrons were treated to the spectacle of a Fahmy row, in the course of which, as the couple stood in the hall overlooking the Thames, Ali shouted, ‘I’m tired of you – I’ve a good mind to throw you in the river.’
Marguerite did not pay much attention to the threat: two or three nights later, she travelled to an out of town nightspot on the banks of the selfsame Thames, The Casino at Molesey. The party included Ali, Said Enani and another Egyptian, Gallini Pasha. On the way, they stopped the car to look at Hampton Court Palace. Here another dispute began, blows were exchanged, and Gallini tried to separate the warring couple.
The Fahmys and their party experienced the novelty of being ferried across to the island on one of the hotel’s private punts and this open-air excursion may have been prompted by a change in the weather, the start of a ten-day heatwave. Harold Nicolson, congratulating himself on having written in one day 10,000 words of Byron, noted the rapidly increasing heat, soon to become ‘boiling hot’.284
The Fahmys had made plans to visit the Embassy Club at 6 Old Bond Street, the Prince’s favourite nightspot, during the second week of their stay. M. Gelardi of the Savoy had recommended them, as potential members, to the famous ‘Luigi’, who endeared himself to London’s high society by his agreeable manner and strong sense of discretion. Events conspired to prevent what might have been an interesting confrontation between the Prince, his former mistress, and her new – and very jealous – husband.
On Thursday, further upstream at Henley ‘… the morning was overcast, but late in the day the sun came out gloriously, the Americans arrived and the world of fashion seemed assembled on the lawns and in the boats by the riverside…’ The transatlantic oarsmen were described as ‘serious, wide-shouldered young men in low-crowned felt hats and horn spectacles … whose accent was a quaint combination of Harvard, Yale, and Oxford or Cambridge’.285 Those young men either not in training or careless of it might well have slipped up to town that Thursday or Friday, joining the likes of the Fahmys for dancing at the Grafton Galleries or for cabaret at the Metropole Hotel’s ‘Midnight Follies’.
Friday saw the temperature reach 84°F at Kew and, as usual, London found itself unprepared. ‘[The] traffic chaos seemed worse than ever, the fumes of the endless motor traffic mingling with the tropic heat…’286 With no air-conditioning to dispel the sweltering atmosphere, London life grew more than usually sticky. Marguerite, already suffering from a very personal complaint, found that her discomfort had acutely increased.
Dr Edward Francis Strathearn Gordon was a physician and surgeon with consulting rooms at 26 Southampton Street, on the north side of the Strand, opposite the Savoy Hotel entrance. In 1923, he had the good fortune to be the hotel’s doctor, a post that he held for many years afterwards. He was well liked and a practised exponent of the bedside manner demanded by the Savoy’s rich and often temperamental clientele.
Marguerite Fahmy summoned Dr Gordon to see her on Wednesday 4 July. It was an afternoon consultation and Ali kept well out of the way elsewhere in the suite. As might be expected, the doctor spoke exc
ellent French, murmuring sympathetically when Marguerite showed him the bruises on her arms, inflicted during some of the more recent matrimonial barneys. She also gave chapter and verse about Ali’s generally disgraceful behaviour. It was unlikely to have been the first time that Dr Gordon had come across this kind of injury, accompanied by complaints about the violent conduct of a husband or lover. But Marguerite’s allegations also included a distinctly uncommon element, intimately connected with a painful condition.
Marguerite had developed external haemorrhoids, which were in an inflamed state, as Dr Gordon could plainly see. He examined her again on each of the next two days, telling Marguerite that if no improvement had occurred by the following Monday, 9 July, the advice of a specialist surgeon should be sought. Haemorrhoids, hardly the most fashionable of complaints, are extremely common, come and go rather unpredictably, and often affect women who have given birth. Earlier that summer, in Paris, Marguerite had undergone ultraviolet ray treatment (a medical fad of the day, administered by a special quartz applicator), but it does not appear to have had the desired effect.
At the Savoy, she alleged to Dr Gordon that her husband had ‘torn her by unnatural intercourse’. Marguerite said that Ali was ‘always pestering her’ for this kind of sex, implying that he was not interested in vaginal penetration. She repeatedly asked Dr Gordon to provide ‘a certificate as to her physical condition to negative the suggestion of her husband that she had made up a story’. The document, useful in divorce proceedings, might have also served for the purposes of her more sinister ‘programme’ against Ali.
Soothing ointments brought a little relief to Marguerite during that very warm weekend. Friday’s heat was such that a train was derailed near Lewes because the rails had buckled in the heat, tar melted in the streets and four ladies playing tennis doubles in Burton-on-Trent were suddenly engulfed in hay, the remains of a haystack which had taken off in a summer whirlwind. At Wimbledon, women spectators fainted, but, braving the soaring temperatures, the mighty Suzanne Lenglen careered around the court in a calf-length skirt, walloping Kitty McKane in straight sets, 6–2, 6–2, to win the championship.
On Saturday, Kew recorded a temperature of 89°F. Women brought out the parasols, prettily decorated with Japanese paper, which had stood undisturbed in umbrella stands since the blistering summer of 1921. Combining the dictates of fashion with propriety and comfort was not easy, but much could be achieved with lightweight material. ‘Diaphanous dresses’ made a rapid appearance and the Daily Mirror’s Wimbledon reporter could describe ‘the pretty girl in gold gossamer, so to say, whose waist was over the hips and skirt touching the ground’. For men, straw hats and panamas came into their own and one exhibitionist was observed strolling along the Strand in full colonial outfit of ‘white duck’ suit, canvas shoes and sola topi. At Henley, a fairly conservative occasion, ‘a few bolder spirits donned tennis shirts open at the neck’.
Sleep did not come easily on these humid nights. In the roof gardens of Kensington, merrymakers in evening dress stayed up till all hours, regularly sending out for new supplies of ice to cool their drinks. One Clapham resident gave up the attempt to sleep and sat, wearing his pyjamas, in a garden chair until daybreak, drinking iced lemonade. For daytime relief, the British Museum was voted a first for coolness, closely followed by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Sunday’s temperatures were a little lower, at 80°, but blue skies had given way to angry masses of cloud: thunderstorms broke out, two people were killed by lightning in the Midlands, and a fireball exploded in the clock tower of Dunsford Church, near Exeter. There was a brief electrical storm over London in the early hours of Monday, a day that brought no respite, for the temperature rose again to 84°. Not everybody was behaving decorously; fifteen lads, aged between 16 and 19, appeared in court charged with ‘wilfully trespassing upon the towpath of Regent’s Park canal for the purpose of bathing’. They were an unlucky sample of about a hundred youths who had been seen ‘bathing with nothing on and using obscene language…’ The defendants were each fined 2 shillings and advised to use the public baths.
Milk was often already sour by the time it was delivered: ‘it goes bad when you look at it…’ reported the Daily Graphic. That Monday the Oxford v. Cambridge cricket match, a great social occasion, opened at Lord’s. ‘Summer frocks made a conspicuously cool contrast to the regulation morning dress worn by most men…’ Dame Clara Butt (whose Junoesque form towered above her slightly built husband), Mrs Stanley Baldwin, Field-Marshal Lord Plumer and the Duke of Rutland were snapped by the press photographers, as was the Jam of Nawanagar, better known as Ranjitsinhji, legendary cricketer of the 1890s.
The Fahmys took a cooling drive that morning, returning to the Savoy at 1 p.m., in time for lunch in the restaurant with Said Enani. Marguerite’s discomfort as she sat at the table did nothing for her temper and the customary quarrel broke out. Probably as a diversionary tactic after promptings by the restaurant’s head waiter, the orchestra leader came over to the Fahmys’ table, bowed low, and asked politely in French whether Madame would care to select a tune for the band to play.
In an act of pure melodrama, Marguerite looked up demurely and said, ‘Thank you very much. My husband is going to kill me in twenty-four hours and I am not very anxious for music.’ The conductor replied, ‘I hope you will be here tomorrow, Madame,’ a model of hotel diplomacy.287 Marguerite told Ali, ‘I’m going to leave you and you’ll pay dearly for it.’ Her husband, for once, responded half-heartedly and went up to his room for a nap after lunch.
At 3.30, Dr Gordon arrived at suite 41, accompanied by Mr Ivor Back, a consultant surgeon: after a brief examination, Mr Back recommended an operation. Marguerite agreed and Dr Gordon telephoned a London nursing home there and then, arranging for Marguerite to be admitted the next day, to have the necessary minor surgery on the Wednesday. Marguerite asked Mr Back if he would provide her with a certificate as to her physical condition, but it seems that the surgeon politely demurred, just as Dr Gordon had done.
After the consultation was over, Marguerite, with a sudden perversity, decided to use the operation as a pretext to return to Paris. After ordering train tickets for herself and her maid, she took Said Enani with her on a shopping trip to Selfridges, where she bought some new clothes for the trip. They returned for tea at about 5 p.m., after which Marguerite calmly kept an appointment with the hotel’s hairdresser.
Shortly before 8 p.m. that evening, the trio met up in the Fahmys’ suite, the men in full evening dress (tailcoat, white tie, starched white shirtfront and waistcoat), Marguerite wearing a white satin evening dress, embroidered with small pearls, designed for her by ‘Coco’ Chanel, now the star of Paris haute couture, at a cost of 8,000 francs. On an oddly still, humid evening, they were chauffeured to Daly’s Theatre, which then stood in Coventry Street, just off the north-east corner of Leicester Square. At 8.15, the curtain rose on a musical comedy which turned out, with hindsight, to have been a grimly humorous choice. It was The Merry Widow.
This was a popular revival of Lehár’s operetta, starring pert Evelyn Laye (a day short of her twenty-third birthday) and handsome Carl Brisson. Even on a Monday night, the house would have been well attended as the three took their seats in the box reserved for them by the ever-efficient Said. The first duet, titled ‘A Dutiful Wife’, was soon followed by ‘Maxim’s’, a celebration of Parisian nightlife, which must have been a pointed reminder to the couple of the city in which their relationship, now so bitter, had begun only a year before.
In the warm, sticky atmosphere of the crowded theatre, Marguerite would very likely have shuffled uncomfortably on the plush upholstery of her gilt chair. The first act lasted about three-quarters of an hour and her irritability surfaced in the first interval. Ali told her how much he wanted her to remain in London, but Marguerite angrily insisted that her mind was made up and that she was going back the next day. She probably asked Said to send a telegram at once to Paris, notifying friends of
her impending arrival. The telegram was dispatched ‘at nine p.m. on the evening of July 9th’.288
Not to be outdone and with the tit-for-tat attitude characteristic of the Fahmy marriage, Ali immediately ordered three telegrams of his own to be sent to Paris. It seems that the faithful Said either telephoned his employers’ instructions to the Savoy or hurried down to the West Strand telegraph office, which was open twenty-four hours a day. Ali’s cables were each timed at 9.10 p.m. and contained an identical message, which reveals that relations between the couple were now near to breaking point.
The wording was English and read: ‘NOTHING TO BE DELIVERED TO MY WIFE ON MY ACCOUNT DURING MY ABSENCE. FAHMY.’ The addresses were Cartier of the rue de la Paix, Van Cleef & Arpels of 22 place Vendôme, and Louis Vuitton of 70 avenue des Champs Élysées. The first two firms held substantial quantities of jewellery on Ali’s behalf, worth in all around £5,000. Vuitton was holding a gold-fitted handbag, valued at 162,000 francs (£2,025), and the company had recently been commissioned to prepare a similar bag, bearing Marguerite’s monogram, at an estimated cost of 157,000 francs (£1,962). It appears that this latter item had been ordered just before Ali’s trip to Stuttgart in June. While he was away, Marguerite had called at Vuitton, saying that she wanted it there and then. On being told that it would take another fortnight to complete, Marguerite appeared very annoyed and left the shop.
The last two acts of The Merry Widow are set in Paris, a fact that did nothing to calm the growing tension between husband and wife. As they left Daly’s, towards 11 p.m., the distant growling of thunder could be heard above the noise of homeward-bound theatregoers. Over in Mayfair, one of the Season’s great dances was well under way at the home of the Hon. Rupert and Mrs Beckett at 34 Grosvenor Street, a fine Georgian town house sadly marred by heavy Edwardian embellishments. The considerable Beckett fortune derived from ‘trade’, interests in the Westminster Bank and ownership of the Yorkshire Post, but Mrs Beckett was closely related to the Marquess of Anglesey and socially ambitious. The Becketts’ youngest daughter, Pamela, had been noted in the past by gossip columnists as dancing with the Prince, but she seems to have had emotional problems. In October 1921, then aged 18, Pamela (who had just ‘come out’ as a debutante) abruptly disappeared from her Mayfair home and was ‘lost’ for two days before being discovered by police wandering aimlessly in the distinctly unfashionable north London suburb of Cuffley, near Potters Bar.289