The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder
Page 37
Georges-Michel’s book appeared as a cheaply bound paperback, part of a crime collection that included accounts of the Dreyfus affair, a life of Laçenaire (the legendary thief graphically depicted in the 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis) and the fate of the Borgias. This second memoir seems to have made little impact in France,559 and none at all in England. Marguerite, now well over 40, was beginning to slip from public gaze.
Raymonde, who had married Raymond Fischof La Foux in December 1929, bore a close resemblance to her mother, although her eyes were blue rather than grey-green. As Marguerite aged, she became more jealous of her daughter’s looks and an unbridgeable gulf developed between the two women. Raymond La Foux took an active part in the Resistance during the Second World War and later became an economic adviser to François Mitterrand, the future President of France.560
The Duke of Windsor married Wallis Simpson on 3 June 1937, after the Abdication. After their honeymoon in Austria, the pair returned to Paris, taking a suite at the Hotel Meurice, but for social entertainment ‘they preferred the Ritz with its gay and crowded bar’.561 The next year, Marguerite moved to an apartment conveniently sited above the premises of Van Cleef & Arpels, at 22 place Vendôme (built as a nobleman’s residence, the ‘Hôtel de Segur’) and opposite the Ritz, where she, Wallis and David would from time to time find themselves sharing the same space in its bars and restaurants. In France, during those long years of exile the Duke had to endure regular reminders of his fateful wartime affair with ‘Maggie Meller’.
In September 1939, Marguerite gained a new neighbour. At the outbreak of war, Noël Coward had been appointed as head of the ‘Enemy Propaganda Office’ (the vaguest of job descriptions) in Paris. Coward was relieved to discover that the Ritz remained open, although the rue Cambon side (where Coco Chanel lived) lay in darkness. In the hotel restaurant, Coward and his English colleagues ‘ate caviar and filet Mignon and drank pink champagne’ as though war had never been declared. With the help of Madame Guinle, an old friend, Coward found a six-room flat in the Place Vendôme.562 Fortunately, it was ‘opposite the Ritz, which had an excellent air raid shelter. Coward took the flat, moving in with his factotum, Cole Lesley. They inherited a maid, Yvonne Garnier, a talkative Lyonnaise.563
Coward’s neighbour on the other side was Marguerite. When Cole, Lesley, Coward’s factotum asked Yvonne why their neighbour had killed her husband, the maid replied firmly, ‘Parce qu’il a toujours fait l’amour par la derrière’ (‘Because he always made love by the back passage’)564. Tactfully, neither Coward nor Lesley ever mentioned the shooting directly to Marguerite. On Sunday mornings, she would be heard playing, on the piano, the wistful (and doubly appropriate) song Someday My Prince Will Come.565
After the collapse of France in June 1940, Coward’s flat was requisitioned for the use of the Gestapo, but Marguerite managed to stay on for the duration of the war, occasionally hosting card parties for friends in her apartment.
The Ritz became an outpost of the Nazi administration, led by General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, and only a few carefully selected non-German civilians were allowed to enter the building. Coco Chanel, an approved resident, took a suite of rooms, where she entertained her current beau, Baron von Dincklage. Marguerite seems to have been allowed access to the Ritz, keeping her eyes and ears open, memories that served her well after the war when many were anxious to forget relationships forged with the occupying power.
After the war, Marguerite settled down to a quiet routine, habituée of the Ritz and a familiar figure, usually accompanied by a favourite lapdog. The Windsors, who first took a suite at the hotel in the spring of 1946, stayed for some three years before taking a rented house at 85 rue de la Faisanderie, later moving to the mansion on the Bois de Boulogne which would be their last Paris home. They also leased, then bought, a mill on the Chevreuse, not far from the Château de Breteuil, where the young Prince of Wales had spent part of his first visit to France. ‘The Duke kept his ranch in Canada until 1962 and they spent a considerable amount of every year in America, but France had become their home.’566
If the Duke recognised his first mistress in the chic venues of Paris, life with the redoubtable Wallis precluded any further attentions on his part. Nevertheless, fate had further surprises in store for the fading Prince Charming. In 1947, Cynthia Gladwyn (wife of a future British Ambassador to France) wrote a barbed description of the ex-King. ‘Old, wrinkled and worried with hair that had appeared to have been dyed.’567 As has been well documented, the Windsors gravitated towards rich expatriate Americans (and vice versa) in Paris. As long ago as the Great War, the Prince had eagerly adopted Americanisms (for example, by writing ‘ass’ for ‘arse’)568 and during their affair in 1917, as we have seen, Marguerite had noticed him cutting up his food in the American manner, eating with a single hand.
By the 1940s, the Duke was speaking with an American accent habitually using Americanisms. One well-connected transatlantic friend was Anthony J. Drexel Biddle II, husband of Margaret Thompson, a leading figure in the post war American community in Paris. Tony Drexel Biddle, a Philadelphia socialite, became US Ambassador to Poland in 1937. After the war, Tony Drexel Biddle was employed in a succession of diplomatic and government posts, including the implementation of the Marshall Plan, helping to aid the reconstruction of war-blighted European countries.
Though the Drexel Biddles divorced, both remained friends of the Duke and Duchess. In September 1951, as Hugo Vickers has noted, ‘he [the Duke] and the Duchess dined with Margaret Drexel Biddle’.569 By this time, Raymonde Laurent (using her maiden name after her own divorce in 1949) was living at Neauphlé-le-Château in a large house where she was looked after by staff including her mother’s former chauffeur and maid. Tony Drexel Biddle was a neighbour, and Raymonde’s son, Raoul Laurent, then a small boy, remembers meeting the Windsors with Drexel Biddle at Neauphlé-le-Château. Raymonde, as has been noted already, bore a striking resemblance to her mother. Raoul Laurent is sure that, apart from Drexel Biddle, all present knew about the relationship between mother and daughter (not to mention mother and Duke), but not a word was said …
At the age of 70, Marguerite retired from her life’s work, declaring that, from then on, ‘I shall sleep alone in a single bed.’ She died, aged 80, on 2 January 1971. After her death, Jean Patay, her last lover and director of the Crédit Commercial de France, a major French bank, destroyed the few surviving letters written by the Prince. Patay also got rid of photographs and (perhaps saddest of all) Marguerite’s studbook, in which – much as Cora Pearl had done during the Second Empire – she had kept a unique record of her clients and their sexual preferences.
At the time of her death, Marguerite was still receiving handsome annuities from five or six former lovers.570 By way of a final twist to her relationship with the Prince, Marguerite had died in the American Hospital, situated in the fashionable suburb of Neuilly, an institution where both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would receive treatment in their few remaining years together.
The deuil [obituary] announcement posted in Le Figaro accorded Marguerite the evocative title, ‘la Princesse Fahmy-Bey’, but her tactical conversion to Islam had been shortlived. Fully reconciled to Mother Church, Marguerite – ‘a Parisian to my fingertips’ – was buried by Christian rite, alongside other members of the Alibert family, in the Paris cemetery of Saint-Ouen.571
The story of Edward and Mrs Simpson is a well-ploughed furrow, extensively harvested and mercifully outside the scope of this book. Although Wallis cannot be considered to have been a courtesan, she and Marguerite nevertheless had a good deal in common, perhaps even as ‘sisters under the skin’. Edward’s neurotic, self-pitying, neo-masochistic character proved to be the perfect foil for the ambitions of both women.
Both were refreshingly un-English (unlike safe, complaisant Fredie Dudley Ward) and not in the least ‘correct’, and at times noisy and ill-behaved. Both were deeply self-centred. Both were social climbers. Both could be a
musing, charming, witty, graceful. Both loved luxury, jewellery, clothes, the high life. Both were strong and manipulative personalities, liable to be loved or loathed. Both were determined women not afraid to take on and dominate male admirers.
In the ultimate analysis, Wallis and Marguerite were damaged characters, both scarred by unhappy experiences early in life. Wallis married an ex-King, a man she did not love, may even have despised. Cherished royal titles eluded her. Marguerite’s vanity resulted in bitter estrangement from her family. And, despite having committed the perfect murder, Marguerite failed to secure the fabulous wealth and full social acceptance that she craved.
Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
The Château de Breteuil, south of Paris. The Prince lived in ‘Chester Cottage’, (the pavilion on the left of the picture) during his first visit to France as ‘Earl of Chester’ in 1912.
Credit: Alamy/Claude Thibault
With the air of a future princess, the young Marguerite Alibert was already well-known in the Parisian demi-monde when this picture was taken in about 1912.
Credit: Courtesy of Raoul Laurent
Marguerite shows her gentle side in this elegant studio portrait.
Credit: Courtesy of Raoul Laurent
A much tougher image of Marguerite: note the cravache [horsewhip].
Credit: Courtesy of Raoul Laurent
Raymonde Laurent, Marguerite’s daughter, was sent to a private school in England. This photograh dates from 1920.
Credit: Courtesy of Anne–Marie Tillé
Marguerite, mannishly dressed in riding clothes, poses alongside her limousine and her chauffeur, a scene dating from around 1922.
Credit: Courtesy of Anne–Marie Tillé
‘Prince’ Ali Kamel Fahmy bey. The young multi-millionaire playboy married Marguerite in Cairo in December 1922.
Credit: Daily Graphic: 11th July 1923
Marguerite and Ali snapped near the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun in February 1923. The body language is manifestly negative.
Credit: Daily Sketch: 10th September 1923
The Browning .32 semi-automatic pistol with which Marguerite shot her husband.
Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Rose
The Prince of Wales pictured in his study at York House, St James’s Palace, in about 1923.
Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Rose
The Fahmy trial makes the headlines in September 1923.
Credit: Daily Sketch: 17th September 1923
‘The Great Defender’, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC (on the left), with Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC outside the Old Bailey during Marguerite’s trial.
Credit: Daily Sketch: 17th September 1923
Said Enani, Ali Fahmy’s loyal secretary. Victim of a very effective character assassination by Marshall Hall.
Credit: Daily Express:11th September 1923
Marguerite’s sister, Yvonne Alibert, acknowledges cheering crowds outside the Old Bailey after the verdict.
Credit: Daily Sketch: 17th September 1923
Marguerite as femme fatale: a portrait by Vladimir Barjansky circa 1930.
Credit: Courtesy of Raoul Laurent
Defiant to the end, Marguerite pictured in her later years. Her apartment, 22 Place Vendôme, was directly opposite the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
Credit: Courtesy of Raoul Laurent
Notes
Abbreviations
E
Edward, Prince of Wales
FDW
Mrs Dudley Ward
BL
British Library
NAM
The National Army Museum
CAC
The Churchill Archive Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge
CUL
Cambridge University Library
TNA
The National Archives (UK)
File References
CRIM
Central Criminal Court
DPP
Director of Public Prosecutions
FO
Foreign Office
HO
Home Office
MEPO
Metropolitan Police
J
Judicial Proceedings
1. Daily Mirror, 2 April 1912.
2. Hare, Augustus, J. C., North-Eastern France (George Allen 1890) p. 30.
3. Adler, L., La Vie Quotidienne dans Les Maisons Closes (Hachette 1990) p. 175.
4. Le Figaro, 2 April 1912.
5. Belin, Jean, My Work at the Sûreté (trans. Eric Whelpton) (Harrap 1950) p. 13.
6. The Times, 2 April 1912.
7. CAC ESHR 2/19, Esher; War Journal, 16 February 1918.
8. Godfrey, R. (ed.), Letters from a Prince (Warner 1999) pp. 272, 296.
9. The Times, 2 April 1912.
10. The Times, 22 June 1912.
11. E, A King’s Story (Cassell 1960) p. 66.
12. Thompson, J., Imperial War Museum Book of the War 1914–18, p. 3.
13. Le Figaro, 2 April 1912.
14. Ziegler, P., King Edward VIII (Collins 1990) p. 34.
15. Ibid.
16. Donaldson, Frances, Edward VIII (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1974) p. 40.
17. Le Figaro, 2 April 1912.
18. The Times, 2 April 1912.
19. Ziegler, op. cit., p. 34.
20. E, op. cit., 15 December 1947.
21. E to Marquis de Breteuil, 24 June 1912, Breteuil papers.
22. Henri-François de Breteuil, Un Château pour Tous (Editions Philippe Gentil 1975) pp. 214–15.
23. E to Marquis de Breteuil, 21 November 1912, Breteuil papers.
24. Ziegler, op. cit., p. 37.
25. Frederick Wishart OBE to J. A. G. F. Rose, c. 1920.
26. Dennis, G., Coronation Commentary (Dodd Mead 1937) p. 219.
27. Ibid., p. 222.
28. The Crawford Papers (ed. J. Vincent) (Manchester UP 1984) p. 319, quoted in Ziegler, op. cit., p. 39.
29. E to Marquis de Breteuil, 5 April 1913, Breteuil papers.
30. E to Marquis de Breteuil, 11 April 1913, Breteuil papers.
31. CAC ESHR 2/19, Esher: War Journal, 19 February 1918.
32. Ziegler, op. cit., p. 43 (quoting from E’s diary for 23 August 1913).
33. E to Sub-Lt Philip Harlock, 26 January 1912, unpublished extract.
34. RA GV/ADD/COPY/136, E letter to Capt. the Hon. Wilfred Bailey, 17 June 1919.
35. Kuhn W, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004) ‘Brett, Reginald Baliol, second Viscount Esher (1852–1930)’.
36. CAC ESHR 2/19, Esher War journal, 27 April 1917.
37. RA EDW/PRIV/DIARY, E diary, 19 September 1912 (quoted in Ziegler, op. cit., p. 41).
38. Lees-Milne, J., The Enigmatic Edwardian (Sidgwick & Jackson 1986) pp. 352–3.
39. E to FDW, 29 January 1930, unpublished extract.
40. CAC ESHR 6/9, E to Esher, 21 November 1914.
41. CAC ESHR 6/9, E to Esher, 1 February 1915.
42. Maurois, André (trans. Wilfrid Jackson), The Silence of Colonel Bramble (John Lane 1920) pp. 5, 7.
43. Officers’ letters were not normally censored. It is possible that the Prince’s first letter passed through the hands of the ‘base censor’, an anonymous individual in a base unit responsible for overseeing the censorship of letters (Information from Jerry Murland).
44. E to Jacques de Breteuil, 25 June 1915, Breteuil papers.
45. CAC ESHR 6/9, E to Esher, 14 October 1915.
46. E to Jacques de Breteuil, ibid., Breteuil papers.
47. NAM 2003-01-195, E to FDW, 25 December 1918.
48. See Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 54–5.
49. Ziegler, op. cit., p. 66.
50. Clarke, A. (ed.), A Good Innings (John Murray 1974) pp. 138–9.
51. Fitzroy, Sir A., Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 802–3, quoted in Donaldson, op. cit., p. 116. Frances Donaldson doubted the story, but the epis
ode is confirmed by Philip Ziegler. See Ziegler, op. cit., p. 55.
52. Thomson, B., The Scene Changes (Doubleday Doren 1937) p. 245.
53. Quoted by Vickers, H., in The Secret Diary of David Windsor (Mail on Sunday undated extract 1989).
54. Brock M and E (ed.), H H Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford UP 1982) p. 106.
55. CAC ESHR 6/9, E to Esher, 25 June 1915, Esher papers.
56. Murphy, C. and Bryan, J., The Windsor Story (Granada 1979) p. xvi.
57. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), The Great Lover from 1914 and Other Poems (Sidgwick & Jackson 1915) p24
58. See Godfrey, Rupert (ed.), Letters from a Prince (Little, Brown 1998) passim.
59. NAM 2002-02-924, E to Capt. Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, 28 May 1917.
60. E to FDW, 21 September 1919, quoted in Godfrey (ed.), op. cit., p. 240.
61. Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That (Jonathan Cape 1929; Penguin 1960) pp. 103–5.
62. Bruce, J. M. and Dilling, W. J., Materia Medica and Therapeutica (Cassell 1921) p. 95.