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

by Andrew Rose

  The glittering styles and titles of Muriel’s dinner guests duly reflected her social aims. The Prince, of course, was Guest of Honour, joined by the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Portland, Lord ‘Fatty’ Cavan, Prince Obolensky, Lord Crewe, Ettie, Lady Desborough, Lord Revelstoke, Lord Alington, Lord Romilly, and Sir Robert Horne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fredie Dudley Ward was there (her name discreetly tucked away in the middle of the guest list) and the presence of Michael Herbert no doubt disturbed the jealous Prince, despite a supporting team of Godfrey Thomas and Joey Legh. Pamela Beckett, happily restored to the bosom of her family, joined the thirty or so diners, whose ranks were supplemented after dinner by a gaggle of other luminaries, including Marquess and Marchioness Curzon, Prince Paul of Serbia, the Earl of Lonsdale, and an assortment of de Traffords, Granards, and Lytelltons. Also present, but not yet worthy of mention in the printed record, was the American arriviste, witty diarist and mega-snob, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. Years later, using curious phraseology, ‘Chips’ recalled that stormy night in 1923 when ‘I, the Prince of Wales, and Prince Paul were dancing at Muriel Beckett’s ball’.290

  Once back at the Savoy, Ali’s patience snapped during a late supper and a loud argument broke out, worse even than the contretemps at lunch, causing heads to turn at this strictly unofficial cabaret, now a twice-daily performance. Ali roundly told Marguerite that as his legal wife she should not go to Paris on her own. He wanted her to have her operation in London so that they could spend the remainder of the Season in England. Marguerite maintained that she was going to Paris the next day, whereupon the argument degenerated, as so often before, into mutual vituperation. Eventually, Marguerite picked up a wine bottle from the table, shouting in French, ‘You shut up or I’ll smash this over your head.’ ‘If you do,’ replied Ali, ‘I’ll do the same to you.’

  No doubt to the relief of the restaurant’s staff, the Fahmys and the ubiquitous Said then went down to the ballroom, where the Savoy Havana Band was entertaining hotel residents and guests. Without doubt, the band would have played (probably several times) ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’, the smash hit of the moment. This utterly banal tune, whose lyric crudely mocked fumbling attempts at English by an immigrant Greek greengrocer in New York, was an enormous success. Why this should have been so remains a mystery, but by mid-July 1923 sheet-music sales were running at the rate of 37,000 a day. The song was recorded by five British bands between July and September and was a regular feature of dance-music broadcasts until well into the following year. Queen Mary took the trouble to learn the words and, duetting with Lady Airlie, cheerfully sang ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’ at the top of their voices for the ‘joy of shocking’ a stuffy member of the Royal Household.291

  More discriminating dancers might prefer Gershwin’s ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’, the bouncy ‘Toot-Toot-Tootsie, Goodbye’, or, in more reflective vein, ‘Three o’clock in the Morning’, a slow waltz of enduring popularity. Unfamiliar today, but featured in the summer of 1923, were ‘Dancing Honeymoon’, ‘I Ain’t Nobody’s Baby’, ‘Oh Star of Eve’ and, perhaps most forgettable of all, ‘Oogie oogie Wah Wah’.

  A tense and gloomy threesome sat on their white and gold lyre-backed chairs at one of the numerous tables in the ballroom. Ali tried to defuse the situation by asking Marguerite to dance, expressing the vain hope that they could make things up, but she curtly refused. Although she had refused to dance with Ali, she later took the floor with Said. He tried to persuade her to be reasonable and stay on in London. ‘Nothing doing!’ came the determined response.

  Shortly before 1 a.m., Marguerite announced that she was going to bed. Said escorted her to the lift and returned to Ali for a brief heart-to-heart. Ali seemed very depressed, concerned that, with Marguerite going back to Paris alone, the marriage was finished. The two men went back to the foyer, from where it was evident that a tremendous thunderstorm was raging outside. When it rains, taxis become a rarity in London and almost an extinct species during a thunderstorm, but the Savoy is a powerful magnet and, even on this wild night, there were one or two cabs hopefully waiting under the entrance canopy. Said Enani went to bed immediately after his chat with Ali, but his younger master had other ideas. He was seen by hotel staff, still wearing formal evening dress, standing for a short time in the entrance lobby at 1 a.m., before the Savoy’s doorman ushered him into a cab, whose driver was instructed to take Ali in the direction of Piccadilly.

  While Ali was away, Marguerite was putting pen to paper. She was writing to Dr Gordon, as yet unaware that his patient had decided not to go into the London nursing home after all. As the translation reveals, Marguerite was now being a little less than frank about the substance of the disagreement with her husband:

  Gerard 4343 lundi soir

  Savoy Hotel, London WC2

  Docteur

  Les événements ce sont precipités et mon mari refuse de prendre la responsibilité de mon opération. Je dois donc regagner ma famille, c’est à dire demain je pars pour Paris. Veuillez m’excuser au pres du Docteur qui avait bien voulu me donner ses soins et croyez Docteur

  à mes sentiments reconnaissants.

  M. Fahmy

  P.S. Veuillez Docteur avoir l’aimabilité de donner au Docteur pour son derangement le compte m’est personelle et ancien

  Le Docteur Gordon, 26 Southampton Street, Strand WC2

  [Doctor

  Affairs have come to a crisis. My husband refused to take the responsibility for my operation. I am therefore returning to my family. That is to say, tomorrow I leave for Paris.

  Will you excuse me to the doctor who was kind enough to look after me and, believe me, yours gratefully, M. Fahmy.

  P.S. Will you please pay the doctor for his trouble? This account is a personal one.]

  If she was implying that Ali had refused to pay for the operation in London, Marguerite was not telling the truth. While he may have been reluctant to have his wife treated in Paris, away from him, the evidence suggests that he would have been only too pleased for Marguerite to be operated on in London. Marguerite, of course, had to give some excuse to Dr Gordon for her perverse conduct. She enclosed a cheque for £15. Marguerite also penned a polite note to her friend the Maharajah of Kapurthala, apologising for not being able to accept his invitation to dinner the following night.306

  Shortly after 2 a.m., with almost continuous thunder and brilliant flashes of lightning all around, Ali returned to the Savoy and went up to their suite. Soon another violent argument broke out between husband and wife, while Ali’s black valet crouched in the corridor outside the door, waiting to be discharged from service for the night.

  Half an hour later, John Paul Beattie, night porter at the hotel, was taking some luggage to another suite on the fourth floor of Savoy Court, apparently for some late arrivals that stormy morning. As he came out of the lift, almost opposite the Fahmys’ suite, the door suddenly opened and Ali, wearing a brightly coloured dressing-gown over a white silk djellaba, came rushing out, closely followed by Marguerite, still in the white satin evening dress she had worn to the theatre. Marguerite’s little dog ran about yapping noisily.

  ‘Look at my face,’ cried Ali excitedly to the astonished Beattie. ‘Look what she’s done.’ Ali pointed to his left cheek, on which could be seen a slight red mark, and also a mark near his right eye. Marguerite interjected in rapid French, which Beattie did not understand, gesturing towards her face, but he could see no sign of any injury.

  ‘Please get back into your room,’ asked Beattie, mindful of other guests, despite the storm, ‘and don’t kick up a disturbance in the corridor.’ By now, Marguerite was trying to pull Ali back into the suite, but he was in no mood to return, insisting that Beattie should send for the night manager, Arthur Marini.

  There were two adjacent lifts on the fourth floor and, as one was descending, Beattie was able to attract the attention of the lift attendant, who was told to pass the message on while the porter continued with his work,
wheeling his luggage round the corner, a sharp left turn, then along another short stretch of corridor (with the door to suite 42 and, beyond it, the emergency stairs), and round to the left again on his way to number 50.

  As he rounded the second corner, Beattie heard a low whistle and, looking back, saw Ali Fahmy stooping down outside the door of suite 42, apparently whistling to Marguerite’s lapdog, which had been following Beattie along the passageway. The porter continued on his way, but after going only about 3 yards, he heard, above the roar of thunder, the unmistakable sound of three shots, fired in rapid succession.

  He ran back in the direction in which he had come and, as he rounded the corner of the short corridor, saw Marguerite throw down a large, black handgun and stumble towards him. On the floor, just by the door to number 42, some 24 feet away from his own suite, and with his head towards the direction of the stairs, lay Ali, on his right side, crumpled against the wall. He was unconscious, breathing stertorously, and bleeding profusely from a head wound from which protruded fragments of brain tissue and splintered bone. Alongside him lay a pool of blood in the corridor, about 5 feet from the door of number 42.

  Beattie pushed past Marguerite, who was shouting hysterically in French, picked up the pistol, and put it in one of the two adjacent lifts. Marguerite made as if to follow him, but he caught hold of her arms and led her towards the stairs, where there was a service telephone. Keeping hold of Marguerite with one hand, Beattie told the hotel telephonist to send for a doctor and ambulance. Amid the flood of voluble French, Beattie recognised the English word ‘cloak’ and took her back to suite 41 so that she could get her wrap.

  Arthur Marini was in the night service room when he received a message from the hotel reception that he was urgently wanted at suite 41. Thinking that he was being called in to calm yet another Fahmy altercation, he hurried up the stairs to the fourth floor, where he was horrified to find Ali, terribly injured, lying just to the night manager’s left as he emerged from the staircase. Turning the corner of the corridor, he saw Beattie leading Marguerite out from number 41. ‘Go and telephone the police at Bow Street,’ said Marini crisply, ‘and tell the general manager to come here at once.’

  Marguerite had some explaining to do.

  11

  Femme Fatale

  Crying out in French, over and over again, ‘What shall I do? I’ve shot him’, Marguerite clutched desperately at Marini’s sleeve as he tried to persuade her to return to the drawing-room of the suite. Gelardi, the general manager, was slow to get to the scene, but his two assistants, Clement Bich and Michael Dreyfus, soon arrived. Dreyfus, in his room at the hotel, unable to sleep because of the heat and the thunder, had himself heard the loud, arguing voices, then three shots. Not able to tell where the sounds had come from, he had taken the lift down to reception: the liftman, warned by Beattie, already knew that there had been trouble outside suite 41. Dreyfus, after giving instructions to the reception staff, ran up to the fourth floor in time to find Marguerite, bending over Ali’s body, holding his head and repeating ‘Q’est-ce que j’ai fait, mon cher?’ (‘What have I done, my dear?’)

  Beattie was ordered to bathe Ali’s face in cold water, upon which it became clear that he was gravely wounded both in the head and in the nape of his neck. Marguerite, grabbing at Clement Bich’s arms, again said, ‘What have I done?’ Bich replied, ‘You know that better than I do,’ at which Marguerite raised her hands to her face, saying desperately, ‘J’avais perdu ma tête. J’ai lui tire.’ (‘I lost my head. I’ve shot him.’) After she had been escorted back into the suite by Marini, Marguerite kept asking to go back into the corridor, but she was prevented from returning to Ali’s stricken body. Instead, Marini agreed to telephone Said’s room. Said, already in bed, was alarmed to hear a strange man’s voice saying an urgent ‘hello, hello’, seconds before the receiver was seized by Marguerite, who shouted excitedly, ‘Venez vite, venez vite. J’ai tire à Ali.’ (‘Come quickly. I’ve shot Ali.’)

  ‘We were quarrelling over the divorce,’ she unwisely told Marini, before suddenly asking, ‘Where is my revolver?’ As if in a daze, she hunted through the drawers of the wardrobe and looked under the pillow, saying, ‘I kept it there always, as I am so frightened of him.’ Her composure was now beginning to return. Marguerite changed out of her evening gown into a jade-green blouse and skirt (bought specially for her return to Paris), put on some lipstick and tidied her hair, and awaited the arrival of the police.

  At the Savoy, ‘cases of death … were … hushed up [and] bodies … removed surreptitiously’.292 Ali, his face covered, was being taken away on a stretcher as Said arrived panting outside suite 41, out of breath after running, almost falling, down four flights of stairs. A bystander idiotically told him, ‘Everything’s all right.’ At the same time, Sergeant George Hall, hot foot from Bow Street, was marshalling the gathering in the fourth floor corridor, a small crowd that would have included a number of bemused and horrified guests. Dr Gordon, too, was soon on the scene, where he was surprised to find Fahmy’s Nubian valet still waiting, crouched outside the door of the suite. Nobody paid the slightest attention to the silent youth, of whom Ali had once said, ‘He is nothing.’

  Gordon found Marguerite to be ‘excited and dismayed…’ He recalled that she kept exclaiming, ‘Oh, what have I done?’, but was evidently not completely out of her wits. She handed her doctor the letter in which earlier that fateful morning she had written of her intention to leave London for Paris. Marguerite was very eager, at this crucial early stage, to get across the story that Ali had refused to allow her to have the operation in London. Marguerite was going to keep her head, whatever happened.

  Ali Fahmy had been removed from the Savoy in an LCC ambulance, as discreetly as circumstances permitted. At 2.55 a.m., still clinically alive, the dying man was seen by Dr Maurice Newfield, the house physician in the casualty department of Charing Cross Hospital, which then stood 200 yards from the Savoy, in King William Street. Dr Newfield would have realised at once that there was little to be done for Ali, unconscious and still bleeding profusely, brain tissue bulging from the wound in his left temple. Bandages were applied, and blankets and a hot water bottle put round him, but Ali died at 3.25 that morning.

  Fifteen minutes later, Marguerite arrived at Bow Street police station by taxi, escorted by Sergeant Hall and Dr Gordon. At Bow Street, the matron, Mrs Greenwood, had been sheltering in the inspector’s office, fearful to remain alone in the matron’s room during the storm. If Marguerite had been a male prisoner, she would undoubtedly have been incarcerated in one of the evil-smelling cells, lined with glazed brick and devoid of adequate sanitary facilities, which lay beyond the custody area and its ‘No Spitting’ notice.

  Marguerite was more fortunate. She and the matron huddled in a corner of the inspector’s office, while Dr Gordon, later to be a vital witness at Marguerite’s trial, played the role of detective and tried to find out what had happened. Marguerite was anxious to show her doctor a fresh scratch on her neck which, she claimed, had been inflicted by Ali. In her bedroom, she said, he had approached her ‘in a threatening manner’. Marguerite had snatched up her pistol, fired a shot out of the window, hoping to frighten him, and, thinking that the gun was now unloaded, pointed it at her husband and pulled the trigger ‘several times’, after which Ali fell to the ground. At first, she thought he was shamming. When she realised she had shot him, she said, ‘I then gave the alarm by telephone.’

  For someone who had undergone a shocking experience, Marguerite was able to give Dr Gordon a surprisingly coherent account of her side of the story, a version, not yet complete, that would later form the germ of her defence. And she needed a good lawyer. Dr Gordon, well versed in the ways of the rich in trouble, suggested that Marguerite should instruct Freke Palmer as her solicitor as soon as possible. At that time, Palmer probably had the largest and certainly the most fashionable criminal practice in London. Luckily for Marguerite, money was no problem, as Palmer’s
services did not come cheaply. Palmer was no altruist and the Poor Prisoners’ Aid Scheme held little attraction for him. His long experience extended back to the 1880s and he had worked on innumerable murder cases with the leading criminal barristers of his time.

  Shortly before 4 a.m., Dr Gordon broke the news to Marguerite that her young husband had died. She wept. The doctor then wrote out a two-page statement (on the approved police form no. 992) in a fastidious but attractive hand, amazingly legible for a medical man. As the thunder began to die down, Marguerite dozed for a while in her corner of the inspector’s office, until the change of shift at 6 a.m. brought an inevitable disturbance and the offer of a welcome cup of tea. Dr Gordon, who had left the station after writing his statement, probably telephoned the solicitor at his home, before snatching an hour or two’s sleep. Freke Palmer was instructed to begin the arduous process of establishing a defence to the capital charge of murder.

  By this time, the exceptionally violent weather, which had convulsed southern England for over twelve hours, was almost over. From late the previous afternoon, there had been a series of isolated electrical storms in Surrey and Sussex. At Croydon Aerodrome, an Instone Air Liner from Cologne and a big twin-engine Rolls-Royce Handley Page just managed to land before a thundery squall struck at 7.15 p.m., but soon the really severe storm began to sweep over the Channel from northern France, reaching the coast at about 9 p.m.