Queen Bees: Six Brilliant and Extraordinary Society Hostesses Between the Wars – a Spectacle of Celebrity, Talent, and Burning Ambition Read online

  Perhaps Edith was reluctant to challenge Charley’s infidelities because she knew from observation how nasty a soured marriage could be. Her father-in-law, the sixth Marquess of Londonderry, had married Lady Theresa Chetwynd-Talbot, a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1875. Theirs was an arranged marriage, and typical of the advantageous matches made within their social class at that time. It was not unknown for members of the upper classes to indulge in romantic affairs, whether platonic or physical, once both of them had done their duty by providing several children, ‘the heir and a spare’. However, absolute discretion was expected on the part of all participants. It was important to avoid scandal by hiding illicit affairs from gossipy contemporaries and social rivals and, even worse, one’s own servants.

  Within a decade of her marriage, by 1884 Lady Theresa had fallen in love with the Hon. Henry Cust, a notorious ‘ladies’ man’. Irresistibly charming, it is believed that he was the real father of Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duchess of Rutland. Henry was simultaneously enmeshed with Gladys, Countess de Grey, who found and stole a cache of love letters written to him by Theresa Londonderry. Jealous Gladys entertained her friends by reading out selected extracts, but when this palled, she bundled up Theresa’s letters and had her footman deliver them to Lord Londonderry in person. He read them, rewrapped them and left them on Theresa’s dressing table with a note attached which read, ‘Henceforth we do not speak’.

  According to salutary accounts of the time, for the next three decades, until his death, Lord Londonderry uttered barely a word to his wife except when absolutely necessary. Polite society had some sympathy, but Lady Londonderry had transgressed, not only by having an affair but also by being caught out in a way that humiliated her husband. However, the truth was less sensational: by the late 1890s the husband was once again writing to his wife with some affection, and he added numerous codicils to his will to ensure she would be well provided for after his death. They were never to be truly close again, and a palpable froideur existed between them in private, but the proprieties had to be observed nevertheless and the couple still met their social obligations, entertaining at the highest levels. Year after year, wearing the famous Londonderry jewellery, flashing with diamonds, arch-Tory society hostess Theresa welcomed the great and the good to one of the Parliamentary balls for which Londonderry House was famous, standing at the top of the famous stairs, flanked by her husband and the Prime Minister of the day. For patrician women of Theresa’s generation, duty, rank and protocol were the glue that held society together. No wonder she was likened to ‘a highwayman in a tiara’.

  It was a spirited American woman, born Nancy Langhorne, who revolutionised British politics. Through her marriage to Waldorf Astor she became first the doyenne of Cliveden, the magnificent Italianate house in Buckinghamshire, and later the first woman to take up her seat as an MP in the House of Commons. Queen Victoria would not have approved; indeed she had deplored the sale of Cliveden to an American millionaire, who was to be Nancy’s father-in-law. William Waldorf Astor had inherited a vast fortune from his father in 1890. He no longer felt safe in America, as his children had been threatened with kidnap, and he wished to live as an English gentleman. With his wife, Mamie, and their children Waldorf, John Jacob and Pauline, he leased Cliveden in 1892, and the following year the Astors bought it for $1.25 million, worth approximately $41 million today, or £28 million.

  Oblivious to royal disapproval, the Anglophile Mr Astor had his magnificent collection of Italian art and antiques shipped to Cliveden. Money was no object to this connoisseur, and he paid for Old World treasures with his New World dollars. He added to the grounds a 200-foot-long carved stone balustrade dating from the seventeenth century that he had bought from the Villa Borghese in Rome. He installed Italian statues and Roman sarcophagi, and planted gardens, trees and topiary. In 1897 William commissioned a huge and exuberant fountain from the American sculptor Thomas Waldo Story; combining marble and volcanic rock, the Fountain of Love seethes with risqué Belle Epoque carved figures. Among the modifications to the interiors of the house was the installation of a complete, ornate eighteenth-century room from the Chateau d’Asnières, outside Paris, where Madame de Pompadour had lived. Covered with carved and gilded boiseries, it became Cliveden’s elegant French Dining Room. Territorial and tetchy by nature, William had a wall topped with broken glass built around much of the estate to deter curious locals; they responded by giving him the nickname Walled-off Astor.

  The family divided their time between Cliveden and their town house, 2 Temple Place, in London. However, their happiness was short-lived, as Mamie Astor died shortly before Christmas 1894. Without his beloved wife’s moderating influence, William Astor became gradually more doctrinaire and eccentric. He would invite guests to stay for the weekend, but impose a schedule that dictated exactly what they could and could not do while under his roof. His children were similarly ruled with a rod of iron. Ironically William Astor had far more in common with Queen Victoria than either of them might have supposed. He disapproved thoroughly of the Prince of Wales’s rather fast ‘Marlborough set’, with its worldly members such as Mr and Mrs Greville and their great friends George and Alice Keppel; indeed, Astor described her as nothing more than a ‘common strumpet’, who was not welcome at his house.

  When in 1899 he became a British subject, his decision was reviled by the American press, and he took to sleeping with two loaded revolvers beside him, in case of assassination attempts. William Waldorf Astor was determined to infiltrate the higher echelons of British life; in 1892 he bought an influential magazine, the Pall Mall Gazette, and turned its editorial tone from Liberal to Conservative. He appointed the ubiquitous playboy and Tory MP Harry Cust as its editor.

  William’s eldest son, Waldorf Astor, was introverted and shy, like his father, but he also had a strong social conscience and was drawn to public service. He was popular with his contemporaries at both Eton and Oxford, where he joined the Bullingdon Club, hunting with the Bicester and rowing, but this affected his health as he strained his heart. He returned to Cliveden to pursue the life of a country gentleman, shooting and hunting in winter, helping to run the estate, making short trips abroad. In addition, in 1905 he was diagnosed with TB, for which it was recommended he spend several months a year abroad. In December 1905 young Waldorf met Nancy Langhorne Shaw on a transatlantic crossing and was smitten. But by the time she met Waldorf Astor she was also a twenty-six-year-old divorcée with a six-year-old son, Bobbie, in tow.

  Nancy was the daughter of Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, a former tobacco planter whose estate, run with slave labour, had been adversely affected by the American Civil War. He became a tobacco auctioneer, then a railroad contractor and made a substantial fortune, which he invested in Virginian real estate. With his wife, Nancy Witcher Keene (who was of Irish extraction), and their five daughters and two sons, the Langhornes moved to a house called Mirador, near Charlottesville.

  Like her sisters, Nancy was beautiful and spirited. She was small, slim and blue-eyed, with aquiline features and an acerbic wit. She was highly competitive at sports, a fine horsewoman and an excellent mimic. Nancy was sent to a finishing school in New York, then stayed with her eldest sister, Irene, a great beauty who married the artist Dana Gibson, who used her as his model and muse for the Gibson Girl pictures. Through her sister Nancy met Robert Gould Shaw II, a handsome Bostonian of distinguished background. She married him on 27 October 1897, when she was only eighteen.

  The marriage went awry almost from the outset; Robert had concealed from his naive and inexperienced fiancée the fact that he was an alcoholic. On the second night of the honeymoon Nancy ran away and returned to her family home, Mirador. Mr Langhorne sympathised, but encouraged her to return to her husband, which she did with some reluctance. After the birth of their son Nancy and Robert separated, and in 1903, after six years of marriage, they were divorced, as Robert wanted to marry his pregnant mistress. Nancy was granted custody of litt
le Bobbie, and Robert was ‘enjoined and restrained from interfering with Mrs Shaw’ by the judge. Two days after his divorce Robert remarried, and Nancy was free.

  Traumatised by her experience and now harbouring what would be a lifelong aversion to alcohol, Nancy side-stepped the stigma of divorce by travelling to Europe. In 1904 she and her younger sister Phyllis rented a hunting box in Leicestershire. Nancy and Phyllis were dashing and skilful horsewomen, and they became popular with the local hunting fraternity. Nancy met Edith Cunard, the sister-in-law of Maud. Edith initially suspected the dashing Virginian’s motives, saying, ‘I suppose you’ve come over to England to take one of our husbands away from us?’10 The freshly divorced Nancy replied, ‘If you knew what difficulty I had getting rid of my first one, you wouldn’t say that’, and as a result the women became good friends. The American sisters were particularly valued as an asset at the dining tables of their hunting friends, where their vitality enlivened many an otherwise predictable evening.

  Nancy’s sparkling personality and ready wit captivated Waldorf Astor when they met on board a transatlantic ship in the autumn of 1905, and they were engaged within four months. They shared the same birth date, 19 May 1879, but were completely different in character: he was quiet and conscientious, tactful and thoughtful; Nancy was volatile and spirited, prone to saying exactly what she thought. Throughout her life she vacillated between being an opinionated and manipulative extrovert with a mischievous capacity to provoke outrage and a deeply sincere and spiritual individual who genuinely cared about people less fortunate than herself.

  Waldorf dreaded telling his autocratic father about his love for Nancy, but William accepted his son’s choice, declaring, ‘If she’s good enough for you, Waldorf, she’s good enough for me.’ As proof of his sincerity, he gave his son’s fiancée a spectacular tiara that cost $75,000, the centrepiece of which was the famous Sancy diamond, weighing 55 carats; it is now in the Louvre. This gem had belonged to James I and his son Charles I, and was worn by King Louis XV of France at his coronation. As the bride had been married before, Waldorf and Nancy’s wedding took place with little fanfare on 3 May 1906 at the elegant All Souls Church, Langham Place. As a wedding present William gave them Cliveden, and an endowment of several million dollars; Nancy referred to her indulgent father-in-law as ‘Old Moneybags’.

  Nancy’s manner was frank and acerbic, and could be alarming. Edwin Lee, the family’s butler, once informed a new member of staff that Waldorf Astor was ‘every inch a gentleman’, but his verdict on the mistress was: ‘she is not a lady as you would understand a lady.’ Despite their personality differences, the marriage was successful. Rose Harrison, her maid, described Nancy as ‘hot-blooded by nature’, and she had five children with Waldorf, as well as her son from her first marriage. However, both Nancy and Waldorf were intensely private and fastidious by nature, and disliked sexual innuendo or vulgarity of any type. They were also inclined to keep their emotions in check in front of servants. Nancy was resolutely faithful to Waldorf and jealous of other women’s attentions. Before his marriage, Waldorf had been friendly with both Queen Marie of Romania and the Astors’ near neighbour Ettie Desborough, but Nancy made it very plain where his loyalties lay and saw off both her rivals.

  Adventurous Maud Burke took a more elastic approach to her marriage vows. The future Lady Cunard was born in San Francisco on 3 August 1872, and details of her early life are sketchy, as many public records were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. Her father was of Irish extraction, but he died when Maud was in her early teens. Her mother, who was half-French, was petite and pretty, and expertly cultivated a clutch of male admirers, who competed to provide for her and her daughter. One of Mrs Burke’s protectors was William O’Brien of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the most important and productive silver mines in the USA. It was suspected by some that little Maud was actually O’Brien’s child, as she resembled him and inherited a large sum of money after his death. She never explained the origins of her apparent wealth.

  Another of Mrs Burke’s gallant protectors was Horace Carpentier, who had been a general in the American Civil War. His fortune was made by buying and selling land; he encouraged Maud’s burgeoning passion for both music and great writers, introducing her to Balzac, Shakespeare and the poets of the ancient world. Her favourite novel throughout her life was Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson, which she first discovered in Carpentier’s library. It is a tale of a virtuous low-born heroine who overcomes many vicissitudes to triumph by marrying the aristocrat who had attempted to seduce her, and being accepted and admired by the upper classes.

  When Maud was eighteen, her mother married a stockbroker called Charles Tichenor, but instead of joining their household, Maud moved into the home of her ‘guardian’, Carpentier, a somewhat unorthodox arrangement even by modern standards. She continued to travel with her mother, and while they were staying in London in May 1894, Maud met the Irish novelist George Moore. She admired his work, and she swapped two of the placement cards at a formal luncheon at the Savoy so that they would be seated next to each other. By the end of the meal, the forty-two-year-old bachelor was smitten by the pretty young blonde American in a dress of pink and grey shot silk; she told him, ‘George Moore, you have a soul of fire!’ He ardently pursued Maud across Europe, but marriage was out of the question as both mother and daughter had a more advantageous match in mind. George Moore realised that she needed to find a wealthy titled husband in order to establish a salon, which was her true ambition. He wrote:

  she had a course and a destination, and I knew well it would have been selfish to delay her. Wiser by far it would be to seek a husband for her, a springboard from which she could leap […] I mentioned a name and her eyes brightened. ‘Do you think so?’ Then I knew my hour had sounded.11

  While in New York, Maud attracted the attentions of Prince André Poniatowski. He was the grandson of the late King of Poland and possessed a keen business brain. Maud returned to her home town, and when the Prince wrote to her from Paris to say he was planning to visit San Francisco, Maud was sure he was coming to propose marriage. Unwisely she dropped the hint to friends, but was mortified when a local newspaper speculated about their engagement, and the Prince vigorously denied it. In fact, he had fallen for a star of San Francisco society, Beth Sperry, the sister of Mrs Harry Crocker; the Sperrys and the Crockers regarded the Burkes as nobodies.

  To save face, Maud countered that her ‘guardian’, Horace Carpentier, did not approve of Prince André and had threatened to disinherit her if they married. By the time the Prince’s true engagement was announced, Maud and her mother were in New York, three thousand miles from the source of their embarrassment. The whole experience was a salutary lesson; personal charm could only take an ambitious young woman so far without either classy antecedents or a considerable fortune, preferably both. What Maud needed was a husband, a wealthy one, whose own social standing would propel her almost effortlessly into the upper strata of society.

  With her ability to charm older men, such as Carpentier and Moore, twenty-three-year-old Maud Burke made an immediate conquest of Sir Bache Cunard, aged forty-three, when she met him on the rebound in New York. He was the third Baronet Cunard, the grandson of the Canadian founder of the great shipping line and heir to the family business. Being extremely wealthy, he took little active part in running the family firm, devoting himself to the traditional pursuits of the English squire, playing polo or fox-hunting with hounds at his country estate, Nevill Holt, a romantic fifteenth-century manor house in Leicestershire.

  Despite the two-decade age difference and their total lack of common interests, Bache was determined to marry his ‘Pocket Venus’. Maud appears to have been similarly keen, although her motivations were inevitably different. Bache’s sister wrote to Maud shortly after the engagement was announced, pleading with her to call it off on the grounds that her brother was best suited to bucolic rural pursuits, while his fiancée needed the vi
tality of city life. Maud refused, saying, ‘I like Sir Bache better than any man I know.’ Even on the eve of her wedding, she chose the word ‘like’, not ‘love’.

  The wedding took place on 17 April 1895, with a ceremony in New York; the Burkes were keen to renounce any ties with San Francisco. Sir Bache and the newly minted Lady Cunard spent a few days in New York, then set sail for England. As was customary among the titled classes, arrangements were made to launch the newcomer in society, and on 22 May 1895 Lady Cunard was among the group of débutantes ‘presented’ at Buckingham Palace.

  Country life with Sir Bache was a far cry from Maud’s metropolitan pursuits in San Francisco, New York, Paris or London. Ever since he had inherited Nevill Holt from his brother in 1877, Sir Bache had remorselessly pursued the fox across rural Leicestershire and Rutland with his hunting chums. From his home Sir Bache could hunt six days a week without missing breakfast or dinner. He had a nasty accident in 1887 when hunting with the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, being knocked unconscious in the field, but that didn’t deter him, and neither did marriage. By the 1890s it was becoming easier to entice people to stay in the country for the weekend, because of the development of the railways, so an invitation to Nevill Holt from the Cunards was prized by the sporting fraternity.