18
Diana Guinness, Trophy Mistress
After the collapse of the New Party in the 1931 election, Tom was courted by both major parties. The Tory chief whip, David Margesson, asked him to rejoin the Tory Party and Tom told Harold Nicolson he had been approached to lead the Labour Party. Neither of these prospects appealed to him. His mind was finally made up for fascism. As Nicolson wrote: “He wishes to coordinate all the fascist groups with NUPE and thus form a central fascist body under his own leadership.”
It was a decision toward which Tom had been advancing for several months, reinforced by a visit to Rome three months earlier (in January 1932) with Nicolson and Christopher Hobhouse, one of the many unsuccessful New Party candidates in the election of the previous autumn. He admired the energy and efficiency of the Italian fascists, and he was also conscious of the growing youth movement in Germany.
When he returned to England, the New Party was formally disbanded (at a meeting on April 5), although its youth section, NUPA, started seven months earlier, was kept on in a reduced form; and his political association with Harold Nicolson came to an end. As Nicolson had written to a friend: “I do not believe in fascism for England, and cannot consent to be identified with anything of the sort.”
Tom flaunted such identification. Even though fascism, with its growing connotations of violence, was a word offputting to most English ears, he determined that there should be no ambiguity about the new movement he intended to lead. What if the name “fascist” deterred many? He only wanted true believers, dedicated to his view of Britain’s future—and prepared to back him in his quest for personal power. The same motivation led him to brood on the question of a uniform—it eliminated physical expressions of class difference and would allow his “stewards” to recognize each other. Not least, the quasi-militaristic appeal of a uniform would attract both the young and those happy to raise their fists in defense of his controversial policies.
Cimmie, though she found it difficult to follow Tom in his new enthusiasm, believed that her life was taking a happier turn. The wounding quarrels had subsided and Tom was once more a gay, loving, considerate and witty companion. Her pregnancy had made her depressed and irritable, but ironically her ill health had drawn them together. She had been unwell for months and suffered from fainting spells; now she was diagnosed with serious kidney trouble and a caesarean operation was recommended, which would have resulted in the loss of her baby, too young to survive. “Tom is faced with the awful dilemma of sacrificing his wife or his child,” wrote Harold Nicolson on March 8. Bravely, Cimmie took the decision not to have the operation.
What she did not know was that Tom’s pursuit of Diana Guinness was proceeding apace. From that first dinner party where they had argued so strenuously, their paths had crossed constantly—at lunches, at dinners, at cocktail parties. It was not long before he had persuaded her to lunch with him—long lunches during which he elaborated on his theories, with all the intellectual clarity and vigor of which he was a master, and with all the animal magnetism that had drawn so many women to his bed.
Diana was a peach ripe for the picking. Desperate to escape the confines of her upbringing into the wider world, she had married, as she thought, for love. Fascinated by Bryan Guinness’s circle of intellectual and aesthetic Oxford friends, feted by London society, she had found her feet in a world where she felt she belonged—smart, artistic, intelligent and fun-loving. Bryan, by contrast, would have liked nothing better than to lunch or dine every night with his beautiful young wife; Diana found such possessiveness stifling. “Who ever heard of married couples lunching together?” she would say scornfully.
At the same time, she was conscious that her life lacked direction. She was enthralled by Tom’s intellectual brilliance and soon convinced by the force and clarity of his arguments; and when he told her that she alone could help him achieve his objectives, she felt as though she had been enlisted in a crusade. She had found the cause and the man; together, they were irresistible.
Not that Diana Guinness was the sole focus of Tom’s attention. He was writing a book, The Greater Britain, in which he expounded his ideas and philosophy; and there were also other women friends. Throughout March and much of April, Georgia Sitwell clung resolutely to her position as chief mistress—even if it meant hearing stories of her lover’s liaisons over lunches at the Ritz or seeing him with someone else (“saw Tom with Miss Charles at Café de Paris”). Cimmie, near her time, waited quietly at home.
The Mosleys’ third child was born on the morning of April 25, 1932, by caesarean section. Tom; his mother, Maud, Lady Mosley; Baba and Irene were all gathered in Smith Square by eight-thirty. The operation was performed at nine-fifteen and an hour later her delighted family was shown a healthy curly-haired boy weighing just over seven pounds. It was the last real happiness Cimmie would enjoy.
After the birth of her baby, Micky, and blissfully conscious of Tom’s attentiveness, she wrote to him on May 11, the twelfth anniversary of their wedding, to say what a happy day it had been and how much she wanted the next year to be happy “for us two as private people and for you publicly. How I long for it to be better than beastly 1931 and how much I want above all else for loveliness and understanding and sympathy to be with us and between us.” A fortnight later, she left for the Villa d’Este to try and regain her health.
Irene, still pining after Gordon and battling against her tendency to seek solace in alcohol, was deeply depressed. To add to her misery, she was suffering from piles. She was worried, too, about the cracks that seemed to be appearing in her younger sister’s marriage. Baba had complained of Fruity’s “insane jealousy”; the truth was that the obvious attraction she held for other men, and her response to them, roused all his underlying insecurities. As for Baba, her dominance over him was now well established: when Irene gave Fruity a lift to London one day, he let slip that Baba became angry if he lunched, however innocently, with another woman.
But these disturbances were mild compared with the months ahead. Arthur Rubinstein, with whom Irene had been conducting a sporadic but passionate love affair for years, had been less than attentive recently, and at one party even rude and indifferent, though this blow to her pride was soon forgotten in concern over Cimmie, back from the Villa d’Este with a back so painful that she could scarcely sit up, or even lie down flat. At Denham that weekend of June 19, all Cimmie could do was lie and sunbathe, though the house was full of friends as usual, and as usual Irene was shocked by the loucheness of the Mosleys’ set. “Georgia and Sachie came to dinner, the talk was nothing but gossip and ‘muck.’ ”
Worse still, Irene had become aware that her brother-in-law’s pursuit of Diana Guinness was serious—and that Cimmie did not know this. On June 28 Irene canceled lunch with Tom, as neither she nor Baba had decided what attitude to adopt.
Tom’s affair with Diana was even more intense than Irene or Baba guessed. On July 7, the Guinnesses gave a housewarming party at their new house in Chelsea, 96 Cheyne Walk, to which they asked all their friends, including the Mosleys. Diana was dazzling in gray chiffon and diamonds that set off her blond, moon-goddess looks to perfection. At some point during the evening, she and Tom made a commitment to each other—not for marriage, as Tom had made it clear that his marriage to Cimmie was lifelong—but as lovers “forever.”
Diana, to whom furtiveness was unknown, made little attempt to conceal the fact that she was seeing Tom. Knowing that marriage was out of the question, she did not see herself as a threat to Cimmie; well aware of Tom’s reputation as a philanderer, she assumed—when she thought about it at all—that Cimmie would regard her as just the latest in Tom’s line of conquests.
Meanwhile, she was gloriously happy and the disapproval and growing unhappiness of her husband meant little to her, caught up as she was in the heady experience of a grand passion and the thrill of a political cause. In true Mitford fashion, she shared much of her idealism with the sister of whom she was seeing mo
st at that time, the ardently pro-Nazi Unity.
To add to Irene’s feeling of being unloved and unwanted, she now learned that the forty-five-year-old Arthur Rubinstein was marrying a girl of twenty-three. Irene had always believed that he would never marry, preferring a life without commitment, and indeed on his wedding morning, after picking up the wedding rings from Asprey’s and taking his future brother-in-law to lunch at Quaglino’s, he recorded that he was “suddenly panic-stricken at the thought of losing my freedom.” Generously, Irene bought the happy couple some green candlesticks from Fortnum and Mason and sent the bride a ruby-and-diamond brooch of her own with a warm and charming letter. The couple’s wedding reception on July 27, given by Lady Cholmondeley, a friend of both Irene’s and Rubinstein’s, was at 4 p.m. It was a huge and lively affair, packed with ambassadors, writers, musicians, society figures and artists. Rubinstein’s young bride, Nela, who thought Irene looked “biggish, handsome and sort of manly,” thanked her profusely for her brooch and letter, little suspecting the tumult of emotion behind her gracious public face. When Nela was out of earshot, Rubinstein managed to whisper to Irene that he must see her that evening between seven-thirty and eight. He was a man who was always deeply concerned about his ex-lovers, but as a very wary letter-writer he preferred tête-à-têtes.
The newlyweds then went on to a dinner Rubinstein was giving at Quaglino’s where, he later recorded: “I got really drunk for the first and last time in my life.” But not too drunk to slip away on the pretext, whispered to one of his friends, that he must go and console one of his old flames, desperate that he was getting married. As his biographer points out, while his wedding dinner was actually taking place, Rubinstein was in bed with this unknown woman.
It was, of course, Irene. After the wedding reception she had gone home in a passion of tears, waiting in a state of nervous distress for Rubinstein. “I got frantic at Arthur who only turned up at 7.50,” records her diary. “Oh! the agony of that talk when it transpired he once thought of wanting to marry me and he had not the courage because of my name. I told him I would have gone anywhere with him and all the time I felt the urge to keep him, oh! keep him with that blasted dinner hanging over my head.” Later, Rubinstein eventually confessed to friends what had happened. “I slept with my ex-girlfriend that afternoon. The reason I did it was to prove to myself that I wasn’t trapped by my marriage.”
It was back to the bottle again. When she arrived at Cowes at the end of July, she found Cimmie and Baba waiting for her there. “I had anguish for an hour as with utter sweetness they attacked me on my ‘trouble’ and begged me to get cured. They were really marvellous.” Back in London, she dined with Cim and Tom at Quaglino’s, and after Tom had left for Paris Cim told her that Tom had been “exquisite to her since the baby and she had not been so happy for years.”
Next day Irene went with Baba to see Dr. Ironsides, a physician with a reputation for assisting patients with such problems. Baba managed to see him alone for half an hour before Irene came into the room and the doctor then tried to persuade her to enter a nursing home or have a nurse at home, but Irene fought both these ideas vigorously. Her determination paid off—temporarily. Soon she was in the country, playing tennis and swimming and feeling “as fit and well and happy as a two year old.”
She was also doing her best to help her brother-in-law. A number of years earlier she and Tom had had what would now be called a one-night stand after a hunt ball at Melton, and his personality and sexual magnetism still exerted a powerful tidal pull on her. His incipient fascism was not yet the brutal, racist affair it was to become, and he expounded his plans to alleviate the misery of the Depression and the wretchedness of the unemployed with idealistic vigor. So when her friend Israel Sieff told her that he was head of a group of fifty equally worried industrialists who were looking for a leader, she promised to put him in touch with Tom, although the meeting had to be postponed when she arrived back from the country to find she had been burgled. By the time the burglars were caught and most of the jewelry found, Cim and Tom had left for their annual European holiday.
In 1932, they took this in Venice instead of Antibes. As Cimmie was still not well enough to travel by car, it was agreed that Tom would drive and she and the children follow by train. What Cimmie did not know was that Tom had arranged to meet Diana Guinness, driving there with her husband and two friends, running into her as if by chance at Arles or Avignon.
But at Avignon Diana developed diphtheria. Terrified that a letter from Tom would arrive at the hotel, she managed to get a message to him through her friends that she would meet him in Venice when she was well. Tom, who got her message in Arles, drove on to Cannes and, a week later, met the Guinnesses, again as if by chance, on the Venice Lido where all the fashionable world congregated to swim.
For Cimmie, it was a hideous awakening. It was impossible for her not to realize that her husband and Diana Guinness were conducting a passionate affair. They seized every pretext to disappear and, once around a corner, would slip into the nearest gondola to spend the afternoon in one of the little hotels with which Venice abounded, only reappearing, glowing, and with the flimsiest of excuses, at dinnertime. It was the end of the fool’s paradise in which Cimmie had been living. Still in pain from her back and the kidney infection, ungainly with the weight she had put on during her pregnancy but not yet shed, and older than the dazzling, elegant Diana by twelve years, Cimmie must have realized that the comparison did not favor her.
She was in agony. “If only you would be frank with me,” she wrote to Tom after they had returned home. “If you had said you would like to take Diana out for the day Sunday I would have known where I was. Oh darling, darling, don’t let it be like that. I will truly understand if you give me a chance, but I am so kept in the dark. That bloody damnable cursed Ebury [his flat in Ebury Street]—how often does she come there? Do you think I just forgot all about her between the Fortnum and Mason party and last night? I schooled myself the whole week never to even mention her in case I should say something I regret.”
Her misery was compounded by a full confession from Tom. In an effort to reassure her that his continual affairs were no more than diversions, he decided one evening to make a clean breast of them. Cimmie was shattered by his revelations. “But they are all my best friends!” she wailed. She was so upset that she stayed at home instead of accompanying him to a dinner party; here Tom met his friend Bob Boothby, whom he asked to go and comfort Cim.
“What have you done to her now, Tom?” said Boothby, who loved Cimmie and had watched Tom’s affair with Diana unfold in Venice.
“I have told her all the women I have slept with,” replied Tom.
“All, Tom?” asked Boothby incredulously.
“Yes, all,” replied Tom. “Except, of course, for her sister and stepmother”—a reference to his early flings with Grace and Irene.
Ill and miserable, Cimmie went with her two elder children to a spa called Contrexeville in eastern France to try and regain her health and, if possible, her joie de vivre.
While she was away the promised meeting between Tom and Israel Sieff finally took place—an encounter that both found promising. Three weeks later, on October 1, Tom’s book The Greater Britain was published. The first edition of five thousand sold out immediately. Simultaneously, Tom launched the British Union of Fascists, with a flag-unfurling ceremony in the old New Party offices in Great George Street, Westminster. Cimmie made designs for a fascist flag, and both the Mosleys discussed how to turn John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” into a fascist anthem, with words by their friend Osbert Sitwell.
The British Union of Fascists held its first public meeting on October 15, in Trafalgar Square, attended by a smallish crowd standing in a fine drizzle. Georgia Sitwell, who had driven back with Sachie after a long beach holiday in Europe, noted rather jealously in her diary for that day: “Daddy and I went to hear Tom harangue crowd in Trafalgar Square. Few people—and of cours
e Diana G. new girl.” Tom made his speech on the plinth at the bottom of Nelson’s Column. He was soberly dressed in a dark suit and tie, with a white shirt, but around him were eight men in black shirts, worn with gray flannel trousers.
Though that first meeting was peaceful, few that followed were. There was shouting and heckling at the next one, on October 25, in the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street—and the first hint of a racially divisive policy. “Fascist hostility to Jews was directed against those who financed communists or who were pursuing an anti-British policy,” said Tom, in his first public reference to Jews. Irene was worried, even though Maud, Lady Mosley, who was also there, told her that the reports of trouble were greatly exaggerated.
Three days later, Irene recorded: “Tom swaggers like a schoolboy . . . throwing two lads down the stairs at Farringdon Street. All this swagger and vanity for Mrs. Bryan Guinness and Doris Castlerosse. When he is such a magnificent orator and if he had vision could have carried the entire hall with him without descending to these blackshirt rows he seems to revel in. And none of his friends will tell him what a ridiculous figure he makes of himself.” When Israel Sieff came to see her on October 31 she realized that, in spite of all her efforts at bringing them together, this source of support was now closed. “I wished he could reclaim Tom and get him out of this awful musical comedyism. After his inane jibe to the heckler as coming from Jerusalem, Sieff told me he was now so bitter he will not give him money for his industrial investigations. Oh! how tactless Tom is. It makes me sick.”
At the end of October the Guinnesses gave a ball at their country house, Biddesden, in Wiltshire. No one seeing the faces of Tom and Diana as they greeted each other, or the white, wretched countenance of Diana’s husband, Bryan, could have mistaken the relationship; and, as usual, the lovers disappeared during the evening.
Cimmie, now fitter, was making a determined effort to regain her former looks and style. She had spent time planning her new winter wardrobe, which she bought in Paris. The final touch was an impressive blue-fox-fur coat from Bradleys. Whether it would enable her to compete with Diana Guinness was another matter. On November 11, after lunching with Tom at the Ritz, Georgia Sitwell got a closer look at his new beloved. “Went to see Diana Guinness, looking lovely. Sensible, human but youthfully arrogant.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 20