2 Marie-Louise Vallantin (1890–1977). Hostess who held a literary and artistic salon from the beginning of the First World War until shortly before her death. Married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet.
1 The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), Federico Garcia Lorca’s last play, was the story of a widowed mother and her five daughters whom she cloistered in the house after her husband’s death and ruled with a rod of iron.
2 The father of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) was a tyrant who tried to prevent any of his children from marrying.
1 ‘Come to dinner with your legitimate companion,’ i.e. ‘wife’.
2 Odette Wallace (1911–2000). Married to Jacques Pol-Roger of the champagne firm. She was introduced to Winston Churchill by Duff Cooper in 1945 and thereafter Churchill insisted that she be invited whenever he visited Paris.
3 Léon Blum (1872–1950). First Socialist Prime Minister of France 1936–7. Imprisoned by the Germans during the war, he emerged after the Liberation as one of the country’s leading veteran statesmen.
4 Alvilde Bridges (1909–94). A protégée of Princess Winnie de Polignac, rich lesbian patron of the arts, who was living at Jouy-en-Josas near Paris. Expert on gardening and garden design. Married to Anthony, 3rd Viscount Chaplin 1933–50 and to James Lees-Milne in 1951.
5 Cecil Beaton’s romance with Greta Garbo had been interrupted after the photographer published several portraits of the actress in Vogue without her permission.
6 Marguerite (Daisy) Decazes (1890–1962). Often described as one of the best-dressed and sharpest-tongued women of her day. Married to Prince Jean de Broglie 1910–18 and to Reginald Fellowes in 1919.
7 Hugh Sherwood (1898–1970). Liberal MP. He had a long affair with Daisy Fellowes who used to refer to him as ‘H.L.’ (Hated Lover). Married to Patricia Chetwode 1942–8.
1 ‘Madame, you are a – a – rude woman.’ In 1914, the editor of the Figaro was shot by the wife of the politician Joseph Cailloux, about whom he had been running a series of exposés.
2 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The philosopher descended, like the Mitfords, from the Stanleys of Alderley and was, therefore, a distant cousin.
3 Evelyn Waugh (1903–66). The novelist was on the board of Chapman & Hall, the publisher of Nancy’s edition of the Stanley letters.
1 The sisters’ aunt Dorothy Bowles had told Nancy that Mosley had tried to seduce Unity.
2 Harold Acton (1904–94). The writer had been a friend of the family, and of Nancy and Diana in particular, since the late 1920s. After living in China before the war, he returned to Italy where he divided his time between Florence and Posillipo.
3 In Memoris of an Aesthete (1948), Harold Acton described being tipped out of his whiff while sculling on the Thames and seeing his craft swept downstream where it ‘shattered to splinters’. Nancy and Diana loved hearing him retell the story in his Italianate accent which made even ordinary observations seem amusing.
1 Gaston Palewski. ‘Violet Trefusis says the Colonel is getting so English he ought to be called Colonel Mitford while I get more foreign every day & should be La Palewska.’ (Nancy to Deborah, 23 August 1946)
2 A hundred kilometres an hour.’
3 Mona Travis Strader (1897–1983). Elegant beauty from Kentucky who wed her way to fame and fortune. Her husbands included the billionaire financier Harrison Williams, Count Edward von Bismarck and Umberto de Martini, an Italian doctor.
4 Deborah had miscarried one of the twins she was expecting.
1 Deborah’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Cavendish, was sometimes nicknamed ‘Thicknesse’. The name was extended for a while to all Elizabeths.
1 Violet Trefusis’s house outside Paris which she willed to so many people that Nancy suggested they form a union.
2 Wuthering Heights (1847).
3 Jean Tharaud (1877–1952). Journalist and prolific author who wrote books with his older brother, Jérôme (1874–1953).
4 ‘Did you know that Palewski was a communist? I didn’t.’
1 Diana’s eight-year-old son Alexander, nicknamed after the Daily Mirror comic-strip hero, had been sent to boarding school. ‘It was pure torture. He was dressed up as for market and his new clothes so stiff he could only walk in that way children do when they are teed up. I had to leave him behind among terrifying strangers. They didn’t seem cruel, but so vague.’ (Diana to Nancy, 2 May 1947)
2 Nancy had considered buying the Moulin de la Tuilerie, a house near Paris, from the painter Drian. It was later bought by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
3 ‘What a slim waist.’ Nancy had ordered the model ‘Daisy’ from Christian Dior’s first ‘New Look’ collection.
4 Neville Heath; a murderer who had been hanged the previous year.
5 Maud (Momo) Kahn (d.1960). Elder daughter of the legendary American financier Otto Kahn and a close friend of Nancy. Married General Sir John Marriott in 1920.
6 3rd Baron Derwent (1899–1949). Diplomat and writer. Engaged to be married to Carmen Gandarillas.
7 Hervé Alphand (1907–94). French politician and diplomat who was Deputy Foreign Minister at the time.
1 After losing this baby – the second twin she had been expecting – Deborah gave birth to a stillborn child in 1953, bringing to four the number of children she lost.
1 Lord Redesdale had held one of his frequent sales of furniture and objects.
2 Stuart Preston (1915–2005). Art critic on the New York Times whose friends called him by his rank in the American army during the war.
3 Robert Boothby (1900–86). Conservative Unionist MP 1924–58. His career as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Food came to an end in 1941 when he was accused of improper dealings over Czechoslovak gold.
4 John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich (1929–). Only son of Duff and Lady Diana Cooper. Travel writer, historian and broadcaster.
5 Peter Watson (1908–56). Stylish heir to a margarine fortune who underwrote and edited Horizon. As a young man, he was once bold enough to ring up Nancy. Lord Redesdale answered and, without moving his mouth from the telephone, shouted, ‘Nancy, it’s that hog Watson wants to speak to you.’
1 The British government had set rigorous limits on overseas travel and no currency was to be made available for travel outside the sterling area unless approved by the Exchange Control.
1 Adelaide Stanley (1906–81). A cousin of the Mitfords and girlfriend of Peter Rodd. Married Maurice Lubbock in 1926.
2 Christian Dior’s second collection kept the nipped waist of the ‘New Look’ but had even longer lengths and fuller skirts.
3 Love in a Cold Climate (1949).
4 Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip, which took place on 20 November 1947.
5 Brian Howard (1905–58). Writer who reached a peak of brilliance at Oxford then dissipated his talent in drugs and drink. He committed suicide after the accidental death of his lover.
6 Philippe d’Orléans, nephew of Louis XIV, was Regent during the minority of Louis XV. Like Palewski, who began his morning telephone calls to Nancy with, ‘Alors, racontez’, and Sauveterre in The Pursuit of Love who expected Linda to keep him amused with stories, the Regent was a famous libertine whose last words, ‘Well, tell’, revealed his love of gossip.
1 Nancy moved into 7 rue Monsieur on 19 December 1947; it remained her home until 1967.
2 Marie Renard stayed with Nancy as cook and housekeeper for twenty-two years.
3 Audrey Evelyn James (1902–68). Married to Marshall Field III 1930–34 and to Peter Pleydell-Bouverie 1938–46. She was the sister of Edward James and had lent Nancy her flat on the quai Malaquais overlooking the Seine.
4 A farewell ball given by the Coopers who were leaving the embassy after three years en poste.
5 Strikes had closed down public services in Paris, including rubbish collection and power supplies, and troops had been brought in to deal with communist riots.
1 Diana was staying in a rented house in Belgravia
where there was no hot water.
2 Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge (1904–92). Anglophile author of a volume of souvenirs, Un Gentilhomme Cosmopolite (1990).
7 rue Monsieur, VII
1 The American weekly newsreel series.
2 Nancy was finding Love in a Cold Climate more difficult to write than The Pursuit of Love.
1 Believe me, Madame, fashion today makes it impossible for people to go out.’
2 ‘My dear, very left-wing, he’s an Orleanist.’ Although there had not been a king of France for a hundred years, Parisian society still argued about who the rightful heir to the throne would be were there still a monarchy. The Orleanists supported the claim of the descendants of Louis-Philippe, who reigned as the last king of France, 1830–48.
3 Henri Sauguet (1901–89). Composer of the Diaghilev ballet Les Forains (1945) and a brilliant mimic.
4 Count Curt Haugwitz-Reventlow (1895–1969). Danish-born second husband of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.
1 Mosley’s new party, the Union Movement, held its first meeting in London’s East End, an area where Mosley had found support before the war.
2 Lady Redesdale had been to San Francisco to visit Jessica, the first time they had seen each other for nine years.
1 Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete.
1 After Unity’s death on 28 May, Lady Redesdale had consulted Hugh Cairns (1896–1952), the professor of neurosurgery who had attended her after her suicide attempt, to find out more about the causes of her last illness.
1 ‘Care of.’
2 Duff and Diana Cooper had returned to France to live in the house they had rented for weekends while he was ambassador.
3 A vitamin and mineral supplement.
4 Following the Soviet blockade of Berlin, anti-communist hysteria and fear of a Russian invasion was at a height. Some people were contemplating suicide rather than risk falling into Russian hands.
5 Pierre Laval, the Vichy politician, tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide on the morning of his execution by firing squad.
6 ‘And even that seems a lot to ask for.’
7 An exhibition of the paintings of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was showing at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
1 Since the Mosleys’ passports had been confiscated when they were imprisoned and the authorities had refused to issue new ones after the war, they were planning a trip to the Channel Islands where passports were not required.
2 Aranka Hajos (d.1975). Robert Treuhaff’s mother was married first to Albib Treuhaft and to Albert Kliot in 1944. She owned a hat shop in New York and went to Paris regularly for the fashion shows.
3 A milliner in Berkeley Square.
4 Marshal Tito had fallen out with Stalin but the Bulgarian premier, Georgi Dimitrov, was still in favour.
5 Jonathan Guinness had been planning to travel to Czechoslovakia.
6 The correspondence of Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, Princess Palatine (1652–1722), was first published in the nineteenth century.
7 The heroine of Love in a Cold Climate.
1 Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948) was dedicated to Nancy.
2 The Mosley boys’ tutor.
1 Lord Redesdale broke his pelvis after falling from a horse.
1 The Mosleys did not sell Crowood until 1951 but Mosley was restless and often talked about moving house.
2 ‘Three moves = one fire.’
3 Nancy was translating Mme de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves (1678) for Euphorion Books, a publishing company set up by the Mosleys after the war, initially to publish Oswald Mosley’s My Answer (1946). Diana’s translations of Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais and Le Curé de Tours were published by Euphorion in 1950.
1 Adelaide Lubbock, Peter Rodd’s current girlfriend.
2 Anne Cavendish.
3 ‘I went to the ball in black tights & a black beard hoping to have a success with the chaps. But they thought I was Edward James & fled.’ The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, p. 119.
4 Antonio de Gandarillas (1886–1970). Opium-smoking, gossip-loving Chilean diplomat.
1 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error; the autobiography of the first President of Israel was published in 1949.
2 Edwin Montagu, Venetia Stanley’s husband, and Bernard Baruch were both anti-Zionist Jews, opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state.
3 Mosley had discovered that although no ship or aeroplane would take him without a passport, he could not be stopped from entering or leaving England at will. He had bought a boat and was planning to sail to Spain and Portugal, where he had been given permission to land.
1 Love in a Cold Climate, in which Nancy introduced Cedric Hampton, a composite portrait of her homosexual friends.
2 Bruce Gould (1898–1989). Editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, 1935–60.
1 Daisy Fellowes’ house, Donnington Grove, Berkshire, was famous for its luxurious comfort.
1 A comedy by André Roussin first performed in 1948.
2 Nancy was writing the preface to her translation of La Princesse de Clèves.
3 Nancy had undertaken to produce a film treatment around the idea of a boy who does his best to keep his divorced parents apart. Her script was refused but she developed the story into a novel, The Blessing, which was subsequently bought by MGM and made into a film.
1 Nancy wrote that Sir Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, renowned for his harsh economic policies, had told the embassy staff not to meet him when he arrived in Paris. ‘They all thought that he must be doing it for austerity but it was really because he needs a good walk every day, so he & his wretched secretary arrived on foot from the Gare du Nord (miles as you know).’ (Nancy to Gerald Berners, 30 October 1949)
2 After months of illness, Gerald Berners died on 19 April 1950, mourned by Nancy and Diana, who wrote, ‘I loved him better than anyone outside the family. I am so sad, but for myself and not for him.’ (Diana to Lady Redesdale, 21 April 1950)
photograph of Lord Berners taken by Diana in the Munich Botanical Garden, 1933.
FIVE
1950–1959
Letter from Nancy to Diana.
Nancy’s love of Paris never waned and her wild Francophilia, which extended even to the weather, was a running joke among the sisters. She was as much in love with Gaston Palewski as ever and suffered as much as ever from not being loved in return. In 1958, Peter Rodd finally agreed to give her a divorce but it brought her no closer to marriage with the Colonel. He was a busy man: elected a Deputy in 1951, he was sent as ambassador to Rome in 1957 where he stayed until 1962. He was also deeply involved with Violette de Pourtalès, a married woman, whose flat was inconveniently close to Nancy’s and who eventually became his wife. Nancy often preferred to stay at home in the evenings rather than run the risk of seeing him with another woman. While her emotional life may have been unfulfilling, the success of her career helped to make up for the Colonel’s absences. The 1950s was a golden decade for her writing: two novels, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, became international bestsellers; the Sunday Times commissioned her to write a regular column about Paris, which led to many more offers of journalism; and The Little Hut, her adaptation of a French comedy, was a box-office sell-out in London and brought in generous royalties. When she found she no longer had the inspiration to write novels, she embarked on Madame de Pompadour and Voltaire in Love, meticulously researched biographies written in the easy, conversational style of her novels. She also perpetrated her most successful tease ever with an article on the English aristocracy in which U and non-U – for upper and non-upper class – was introduced into the English language.
Success brought Nancy a financial security and confidence that helped to ease the lingering jealousy she felt towards her sisters and towards Diana in particular. In 1951, this was put to the test when the Mosleys bought a property on the outskirts of Paris and settled there for much of the year. In spite of Nancy’s dislike of Mosley –
a feeling that was reciprocated – the sisters enjoyed each other’s company too much not to see each other often. Nancy did her best to keep Palewski away from the Mosleys – although they became friends after her death – and in spite of Diana being the sister Nancy came closest to confiding in, she never admitted the extent of her unhappiness over her one-sided relationship with the Colonel. Because she and Diana saw each other so often and spoke on the telephone most mornings, they now exchanged far fewer letters. By the mid-1950s, Deborah had replaced Diana as Nancy’s favourite correspondent.
In 1951, after fourteen years of marriage, Pamela and Derek were divorced. Their move to Ireland had not been a success; after a while Derek had become bored with a life that revolved around horses and dogs, and he missed his scientific work. He had also fallen in love with another woman, Janetta Kee, née Woolley, whom he married as the third of his six wives soon after his divorce from Pamela. Until 1960, Pamela stayed on at Tullamaine, sharing her life with Giuditta Tommasi, an expert with horses who worked at a riding school near Dublin. Of Pamela’s relationship with Giuditta, Diana told a friend, ‘I don’t know if they were lovers but it really was a kind of marriage.’ Jessica was more forthright and wrote to her husband in 1955 that her sister had become ‘a you-know-what-bian’. Pamela made frequent trips to the Continent to visit her close friend Rudi von Simolin in Bavaria, stopping off on the way to see Diana and Nancy.
The Mosleys’ move from Crowood in 1951 was sad for Diana and a terrible wrench for her sons Alexander and Max, aged twelve and ten, for whom it was their first settled home. They bought a seventeenth-century bishop’s palace in Clonfert, Ireland, and the Temple de la Gloire, a Directoire folly in Orsay, fifteen miles outside Paris, which had been built for Napoleon’s General Moreau. The move was prompted by Mosley’s realization that social and official hostility in Britain would not dissipate in a hurry and that life would be more congenial abroad. For the next nine years, the Mosleys would divide their time between Clonfert, the Temple de la Gloire, a flat in Paris and a flat in London. Alexander and Max met their parents for holidays in France or Venice but stayed in Ireland with a tutor until they were sent to boarding school in 1954. For Mosley, the early 1950s was a period of reflection. In 1953 he started a monthly magazine, The European, which was principally a vehicle for his political ideas. Diana edited the magazine during the six years of its existence, contributing regular book reviews and a diary, which gave her a platform from which to take swipes at her bêtes noires: the British Establishment, democracy, left-wing politicians, America, schools, churchmen and the other villains in her canon. Mosley returned to active politics in the general election of 1959 when he unsuccessfully contested the London borough of North Kensington, campaigning against Commonwealth immigration.
The Mitfords Page 26