by Jeremy Scott
On the night-time promenade above the beach and expanse of moonlit sea, a mariachi band is grouped beneath her window. Extravagantly costumed as Mexican bandits and fired up on tequila, its membership is swollen by a handful of revellers in evening dress, including Baron Elie de Rothschild, dragged on from the same nightclub as the band. Guitars, bongo drums and castanets are pounding out a deafening rhythm, disrupting the tranquillity of the dormant town, and every window in the hotel is occupied by bewildered guests staring down at the disturbance. The upturned faces of the rackety group below show ghost white in the lamplight, all raised toward Barbara upon her balcony. At their centre stands the figure of Rubi, arms spread wide, serenading her in full-throated song.
By the extravagance of the gesture he wins her fragile heart and spell of tenure in her bed plus, quite soon, her hand in marriage.
Zsa Zsa Gabor has left Deauville to return to Los Angeles, and during the nights that follow Barbara comes to know full well the subject of Doris Duke’s incautious boast, confided while married to him:
He loves to please women, because by pleasing them he pleases himself. He is the ultimate sorcerer … priapic, indefatigable, grotesquely proportioned. His lovemaking secret is that he practises an Egyptian technique called Imsak. No matter how aroused he becomes, he doesn’t allow himself to complete the act. What he enjoys about it is the sense of control he achieves over his own body while exciting the woman beyond control, beyond the threshold…
To be led by the sorcerer into fairyland always has formed Barbara’s escape, though even with the aid of drugs, that elusive destination has been proving ever harder to achieve of late. Now, in a troubled time, here it is delivered to her. She’s gained the world’s most notorious lover and to compound her satisfaction her triumph is not private – when it would have meant little – but shared with the press. Their liaison is reported in countless column inches and she, that legend known as Barbara Hutton – aged forty-one but in appearance a raddled fifty – is back where she belongs on the front page of the tabloids.
She had continued to receive unremitting press coverage ever since her debut. Her conspicuous extravagance made her loathed throughout America. On her twenty-first birthday she would come into $40 million, but until then her fortune was controlled by her father, Franklyn. Famous she might be, but the situation was frustrating.
In the summer of 1932 she was staying in the Paris Ritz with Franklyn and her stepmother, Irene. She had her own entourage, a chauffeur and bodyguard (both her fathers’ spies), a footman, and her loyal maid Tiki. She had her own Rolls-Royce fitted out in rosewood and ivory, but she was not free. Franklyn watched over her, suspicious as a surly guard dog. He was especially suspicious of Alex Mdivani, of all the tribe of Mdivanis in Paris at that time. Father had served the Tsar as a cavalry officer; after the revolution the family escaped from Georgia to become refugees in Paris. They made it onward to America where Mother unhesitatingly registered with Immigration as Princess Mdivani. Her three sons registered as Princes, the two daughters as Princesses, but Father refused to play in the charade. He is quoted as saying, ‘I’m the only man who ever inherited a title from his children.’
The siblings were close and Roussie was the brains, unscrupulous, manipulative and utterly without principle. Glamorous too, with sculpted cheekbones and bobbed black hair. A dark androgynous beauty, she could have been a boy. Striking to meet, but you sensed the vividness to be a façade, there was something hidden about her. Her brother Prince Serge married the film star Pola Negri, dumping her when she lost her fortune in the Wall Street Crash. Prince David wed the actress Mae Murray, relieving her of $3 million. Princess Nina married a lawyer specialising in pre-nuptial agreements and divorce, conveniently for all. And Prince Alexis had by now married Louise van Alen. An heiress related to the Astors and Vanderbilts, she gave him a string of polo ponies and a Rolls-Royce as wedding gifts. She was rich, but by the Mdivanis’s exacting standards, not very rich.
In Paris Roussie set up Barbara from the start. She accompanied her mark shopping, helped her choose clothes. She offered understanding and warmth to a vulnerable girl, who was unused to both. She became her confidante, learning her tastes and hopes and fears – then passing these on to Alex. His courtship was based on the best of information. Based also on cold-blooded sexual skill – he was immensely attractive to women. Barbara was strongly drawn to him yet did not want to betray her childhood friend Louise. But her conscience was at war with her taste for drama. A man who knew her well says, ‘Barbara’s interest … was aroused by his marriage to Louise van Alen. If a man was available and offered no resistance, she lost interest … If she saw something she wanted, she went after it.’
Alex’s continuing flirtation with Barbara was galling to Louise, but she kept her cool with admirable restraint. Louise said nothing, continuing to sign the cheques funding her and Alex’s extended honeymoon. But her relationship with Barbara was no longer warm.
In July 1932 Barbara was a guest of Roussie and her huband Sert at Mas Juny, the castle they had restored on the Costa Brava. Alex and Louise were members of the same house party. One day, after lunch on the shaded terrace, the clan dispersed to the poolside or their rooms to take a siesta. A couple of hours later Roussie rounded up her guests for a drive to Barcelona. As a group they strolled across the lawn to Barbara’s guest cottage to collect her. Carolling blithely, Roussie threw open the door and led them in. Barbara and Alex were surprised naked in each other’s arms. Or rather Barbara was though not Alex, for the scenario had been scripted by Roussie and himself. By the end of the year Alex and Louise were legally separated and Nina’s husband was busy negotiating Alex’s $2 million divorce settlement.
Now that he was available Barbara wasn’t sure she wanted him. He arrived in New York to press his claim and presented himself at 1020 Fifth Avenue to call on Franklyn Hutton. He was made to wait. When Franklyn stomped into the room he cut short Alex’s civilities to demand, ‘What do you want?’
‘Your daughter,’ Alex answered. Barbara maintained that it was the only honest thing he’d ever said.
She played hard to get, taking off for the Far East with Tiki and a couple of friends. Seeing the quarry escaping him, Alex hurried to Roussie. His pay-off from Louise had not yet come through and he was low on funds; she staked him to the chase. Alex was lying in wait for Barbara in Thailand, when the liner docked.
Franklyn Hutton was in his office in New York when he received the radiotelephone call from the American Consul in Bangkok. ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ the man said, ‘but your daughter is here and wants me to marry her to a Prince Mdivani. She is under age and needs your consent.’
Franklyn exploded, demanding to speak to Barbara. Instead he got Alex on the line who, still smarting from his treatment in New York, issued an ultimatum: he would marry Barbara without consent unless Franklyn announced his daughter’s engagement and the family’s plans for a full-scale public wedding. That same evening Alex dispatched a cable to Roussie in Paris, HAVE WON THE PRIZE. ANNOUNCE BETROTHAL.
The couple were married in a civil ceremony in Paris. This was followed by an elaborate religious wedding at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral attended by reporters, photographers and a crowd of 8,000, most of them young women hysterical with excitement.
The incomprehensible ceremony at the Russian Cathedral was followed by a launch party at the Ritz where an extra suite had been rented to display the couple’s wedding gifts, many of which turned out to have been charged to Barbara’s petty cash account at the hotel. They left for their honeymoon from St Lazare station accompanied by seventy pieces of luggage, each embossed with a gold crown and identified as belonging to Prince or Princess Mdivani. What happened next Barbara related to several people – but only long after the event.
Understandably so, it is not a wedding-night admission any twenty-year-old bride would be greedy to confess. It seems that in their sleeping compartment a bottle of chilled champagne stood open and B
arbara had changed into a ravishing satin and lace negligee which Roussie Sert had helped her choose … when Alexis sat down at the foot of the bed and looked her over coolly. ‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘You’re too fat.’
It is hardly surprising the remark had a traumatic effect upon her, she was devastated by it. From that moment she went on a crash diet of black coffee, cigarettes and RyKrisps which she kept to almost with variation to the end of her life. It changed her personality and wrecked her health, but it sure worked. Two months later she weighed 100 pounds and was described by Elsa Maxwell as having transformed herself into ‘an astonishing exotic beauty (her husband, however, is still the same queer, ambitious, reckless character he was when married to his first wife)’.
Barbara came into the independence and freedom from her father’s restraint she so long had craved – and remade herself. ‘It’s going to be fun being a Princess,’ she told reporters. Princess and Prince Mdivani were a gift to the press. What media and public required of her was performance. It came easily to her. She and Alexis acquired an entourage of secretaries, valets, maids, chauffeurs, and set out to replicate the Grand Tour in style. They travelled – to Lake Como, Florence, Venice, Rome, Morocco, Turkey. On arrival they rented a house or a floor of the best hotel, and gave parties. It was high season, the best people were in situ and in every destination they stepped into the heart of the action.
Indeed they were the action, young, beautiful, excessive and inordinately rich. Alex when he wasn’t sulking was delightfully high-spirited and charming; Barbara, unshackled and liberated, proved herself a brilliant hostess and extravagantly imaginative as a party-giver. They were a dazzling couple who received all the attention their looks and activities deserved.
Each morning the day’s papers and periodicals were served to them with breakfast and they scanned their notices. In the US media their publicity continued scathing, but there was a lot of it. The tone in the continental press was different. The Depression lay over Europe in a stagnant cloud, shutting out the sun. In this grey world of troubled people these photographs, reports and newsreels depicted a pageant remote as fairyland yet answering to a need to believe that fairytale was real. Among the masses whose lives amounted to nothing the adventures of the Princess and her Prince were absorbing as a hit movie.
In November 1933 Barbara became twenty-one, gaining control of her fortune of $50 million (worth at least $1 billion today). She tipped her father $5 million in recognition for the way he had managed her capital, gave a million to charity – which received no acknowledgement in the press – and $1.25 million to Alexis, who had already received a dowry of a million on marrying her plus an allowance of $50,000 a year.
Alex was sitting pretty but the New Year started badly for his brothers Prince David and Prince Serge, who were charged with embezzlement and larceny in connection with an oil promotion fraud. Their wives Mae Murray and Mary McCormic (both of whom they were in the process of divorcing) had with other investors put up capital to found the Pacific Oil Company. Oil had been struck and the company was showing promise as a legitimate enterprise but the temptation to rob it blind had proved irresistible. ‘The Mdivanis are suave and cosmopolitan,’ said Mary McCormic ‘But the Asiatic male regards himself above all as a male and his wife as a slave. When I married Serge the continental veneer soon wore off…’ As it did from Prince David. In her divorce from him, Mae Murray testified that among other indignities she’d been socked in the face, locked up and raped. The poor woman ended up penniless, sleeping on a bench in Central Park.
The Mdivani trial promised to be messy. To escape involvement Barbara recruited her prankster cousin Jimmy Donahue and took off for Japan, with Alexis travelling separately in a false name, pursued by a bailiff with a subpoena as witness to the fraud. When husband and wife were reunited in Tokyo it is testimony to Barbara’s by now international renown that they were provided with motor cycle escorts, given a royal welcome and entertained to lunch by the Emperor. At a press conference she mentioned her plan to adopt a Chinese baby during the trip because ‘the Chinese have such a long and honourable civilisation’. As Japan was about to go to war with China, the remark did not go down well, nevertheless the hotel was besieged by thousands of women trying to sell her their children and had to be cordoned off by the police for five days.
Deciding against a baby, Barbara shopped extravagantly instead, while Alexis tagged along, missing polo. The party travelled on to India where they stayed with a series of maharajahs, one of whom maintained his own polo stadium. He was a man Alex could relate to and they became instant playmates. Barbara missed her husband not at all. Boredom, a disease she’d contracted young, had become a chronic affliction. She’d obtained Alex, found him to be a disappointing, unamusing match, and tired of him. There was no bond to repair, for no bond beyond desire had existed. Anyway, to Barbara it was unthinkable to work on a relationship, it was simpler to bin it and pick the next.
She had her interests, and Jimmy was better company. Alexis already bored her. A few months later, in Venice, she gave him a fourteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal as a pay-off but, irritatingly, he didn’t see it that way and dug in stubbornly. She became detached, cold, barely polite, but he was tenacious. So she had to make it clear, not just to him but to the world, that the marriage was over. She threw a party for 2,000 guests at the Paris Ritz to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Jack Harris’s orchestra was flown in from London, as were the Yacht Club Boys from the US and Hoagy Carmichael, the world’s most celebrated jazz pianist. Three chartered airplanes shuttled in the guests from all over.
At the white-tie dinner before the ball, Barbara’s guest of honour, seated to her right, was a stranger with a lean aristocratic face and noble profile. There was avid speculation on who he was – no one seemed to know. When the music started Barbara led him onto the floor to dance. Alex, seated at another table, watched. All watched. The number ended, but the couple remained on the floor to dance the next. They danced together all that night while Alex, unable to keep still, paced behind the tables, his face contorted in fury.
Newspapers reporting on the party next day listed the names of the Beautiful People who had attended, identifying the guest of honour who had been so signally favoured as the forty-year-old Count Kurt Haugwitz-Reventlow. It was clear to her public that a new chapter in Barbara’s life had opened.
The party of six and their mountain of luggage occupied a private coach hitched to the rear of the German train, which had been booked in the name of Count and Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow.
It was the summer of 1935 and, two weeks before, Barbara had divorced Alex in Reno in a ceremony taking eleven minutes that cost $100,000. Her testimony stated: ‘When I got married I had no conception of love. A strong desire for independence from my family was the main reason I married Prince Mdivani. I realised it was a mistake even before the wedding … he married me only for my money…’ Unlike most divorce statements, it was an accurate characterisation of the facts. Her marriage to Count Reventlow took place the next day at 8 a.m. attended by twenty-four armed special deputies and a scratch mob of bleary-eyed pressmen who had succeeded in making it to Nevada in time for the ‘secret ceremony’. ‘Now at last I have found happiness,’ Barbara told them. ‘My search is ended. I know this is safe and sure.’
Soon after the ceremony the happy couple (plus the ever-faithful Tiki, her secretary, Reventlow’s valet, and the gay jester Jimmy Donahue) sailed for Europe, where they transferred to the chartered railroad car in which they were now crossing Germany, headed for Denmark and Reventlow’s family castle where they would spend their honeymoon. Their train stopped for a few minutes at a country station and, soon after, Reventlow glanced up to see a stranger beckoning him from the door of the compartment. Identifying himself as a Reuters reporter, the man showed him a press bulletin. Reventlow read it, digested the news, and took the message to his wife. ‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘it’s Alex Mdivani. He had a bad accident. Al
ex is dead.’
Alex’s two-year marriage to Barbara had netted him rich rewards: a palazzo in Venice, a Rolls-Royce, a speedboat, a string of polo ponies and $3 million in cash. After she’d dismissed him he’d taken up with Maud, the beautiful wife of Baron Heinrich von Thyssen, the armaments and steel tycoon. He brought her to stay at his sister Roussie Sert’s house in Spain. The two set out to return in Alex’s Rolls. He was gunning the big car at 80 mph when outside Gerona something caused him to swerve. The Rolls struck the verge, lifted off and slammed into a tree, coming to rest upside down. Alex was decapitated and Maud Thyssen mangled and unconscious when they pried her from the wreckage.
Roussie Sert was first to hear of the accident. Jumping into her car she raced the thirty miles to Gerona, there to find the headless body of her adored brother sprawled on the hay in a peasant’s cart. Maud Thyssen was badly smashed up and lost an eye. When she came to in hospital she asked for the suitcase she’d had with her, which contained $180,000 worth of jewellery. It was never recovered.
Roussie was devastated by Alex’s death. They were partners in transgression, she never recovered from the horror of his end. Barbara’s affection for her wanton husband was long gone, but his violent end cast a shadow on her arrival at Castle Hardenberg. Reventlow’s brother Heinrich was there to welcome them to the ancestral pile, installing the just-married couple in the master bedroom which he had vacated for their greater comfort. Of which there were not that many signs, Barbara observed.
For American heiresses to acquire a European title and live in an ancestral castle had been seen as a desirable move since the Belle Époque, denoting a significant step upward into a more aristocratic level of society. At this time there were many impoverished aristos with holes in their socks and a decaying residence falling to ruin on an encumbered continental estate. Marriage suited both partners, who fully understood the terms of the contract between them. The American Dorothy di Frasso, a close friend of Barbara’s then and later, wed the penniless but amiable Count Carlo, thirty years her senior, then spent the million or two dollars necessary to restore his sixteenth-century ancestral mansion outside Rome so that the dining room could accommodate a couple of hundred, and launched herself as an A-list international hostess. One of her frequent guests was Mussolini, which caused the FBI to run a file on her. ‘She is notorious for her nymphomaniac propensities, lecherous parties and publicity seeking,’ the Bureau noted. Dorothy’s husband, the Count, was well selected as distinguished cavaliere servente in their chosen lifestyle. Solicitous to his wife’s pleasure, he encouraged her to enjoy the more outstanding of their guests upstairs and was never happier than when in his favourite sexual position, crouched outside her bedroom door with his eye to the keyhole.