Doves of War: Four Women of Spain

In any case, her life, both professional and personal, was about to take a dramatic turn. At some point in late 1943 or early 1944, she ran into José Luis de Vilallonga, the handsome and dissolute playboy son of a rich Catalan aristocrat, the Barón de Segur. There exists a photograph from January 1944 of them together at a party. According to José Luis, they met at a cocktail party at the home of the Catalan publisher Gustavo Gili. Tall, elegant, with the pencil moustache fashionable at the time, she found him irresistibly good-looking. He was also seductively charming, as many other women were to discover to their cost. José Luis wrote later: ‘that evening, she would have done better to have gone to the cinema or stayed at home because I was going to make her miserable and humiliated for the rest of her days … I regret infinitely that I made a good and loyal woman suffer so much for the dreadful error of falling in love with me.’159

Perhaps José Luis’s cruel treatment of Pip was connected to the fact that she bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, Carmen Cabeza de Vaca y Carvajal. Pip’s sister Gaenor was once shown a photograph of the Baronesa, whom she had never met, and asked to identify it. She thought it was Pip. José Luis de Vilallonga later wrote of how his childhood was marked by his mother’s coldness and indifference. ‘As a child, I would have given anything for my mother to take me in her arms and kiss me.’ Oddly, in his memoirs, he denied that any of his wives resembled his mother.160 It is tempting to speculate that, in his systematically appalling treatment of Pip, he was somehow trying to punish his mother for the coldness that so scarred his childhood. He described himself as ‘a hardened alcoholic who, without ever taking precautions of any kind, had slept with more whores than a porcupine has quills’. It is interesting that, when he boasts of his insatiable appetite for prostitutes, he admits always to having asked for women who were tall, blonde and blue-eyed, like Pip and like his mother.161

In his memoirs, Vilallonga portrays Pip as a self-possessed cynic when in reality she was nervously insecure. In his version of their first meeting in Barcelona, she offered to get him a job as a journalist if he would act as a propagandist for the Allies. In fact, as he writes elsewhere, he was already working as a journalist for the magazine Destino and she merely helped him with innocuous articles on English pipes, Virginia Woolf and the childhood of Winston Churchill.162 They began to go out together and she soon fell in love with him and was to remain so throughout their long and unhappy marriage. That José Luis was utterly fascinated by her is revealed by the fact that, in his books, he romanticises her past in the most wildly colourful fashion. He places her in the Spanish Civil War in August 1936 at the massacre of Badajoz under threat of being shot as a spy by the Nationalist Colonel Juan Yagüe. Her time as a nurse in the Hadfield-Spears ambulance unit becomes a dark period in Paris during which it is insinuated that she was a secret agent. Her organisation of the Polish hospital in Scotland becomes service with General Anders’ forces, despite the fact that Anders was imprisoned in Russia at the time and went into action in Italy only long after Pip had left the Poles. Most fanciful of all is the invention that Pip served as a lieutenant with the Spanish Republicans in the Free French forces that liberated Paris. Even more outrageous is a report of a conversation with Pip about her behaviour during the Spanish Civil War. On learning that José Luis was seeing her, his father, the Barón de Segur, allegedly exploded that she had slept with – in one book, half the Spanish Army, in another, the entire Nationalist forces. It is clear from her diaries that Pip did not sleep with anyone in Spain. However, when asked about her sexual adventures, the fictionalised Pip – in an entirely uncharacteristic tone of pompous self-assurance and insouciance – tells her lover, ‘Yes. I have had my adventures, just like everyone else. When death hovers over your head every day, certain moral values undergo changes about which it is useless to speak in peace-time.’ The hard-nosed Pip of his various later accounts is unrecognisable as the vulnerable romantic of the diaries. Indeed, Vilallonga’s fictionalised Pip has more in common with the coldly domineering Baronesa de Segur of his memoirs and novels.163

According to Vilallonga, they married because, with the war coming to an end, she was planning to return to London. It is possible that her position in the Consulate had been rendered difficult because of his indiscreet boasting about her work.164 In one of his books, he claims that, faced with separation, she asked him to marry her. In another, when she announced that she had to go home, he begged her not to leave him. In one version, he responds by saying that he loved her but was not in love with her, and puts into her mouth the reply ‘So what? That is no reason for us not to live together.’ In another, he attributes virtually the same words to himself. What is absolutely clear is that he saw in Pip a way to facilitate his desire to escape Spain and his family to become a writer. He makes no secret of the fact that he was enticed by the idea. Moreover, Pip’s open-minded and forthright conversation attracted him.165

It may well be that the idea for turning an affair into a marriage came from neither Pip nor José Luis. The romance caused sufficient gossip to provoke the concern of Princess Bea and Prince Ali who immediately set about rectifying the situation. In the summer of 1945, Pip was summoned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The Infantes took charge of the relationship, enveloped Pip in their protection and imposed a Spanish-style engagement. This meant efforts to ensure that the couple never met alone until their marriage and José Luis, to his intense chagrin, was lodged for two weeks in a flea-ridden pensión. On the eve of his wedding, the bridegroom was finally allowed to sleep in the Palacio de Montpensier. However, he claims that, on leaving his room en route to the bathroom, he found Ataúlfo’s elder brother Álvaro seated on the landing with a shotgun to prevent him escaping – a story undermined by José Luis’s frequent remarks about his joy at marrying for money and escape from Spain. To justify the claim that he was being forced into marriage against his will, he alleges that Prince Ali was desperate to see Pip married to anyone but his son because she was really his illegitimate daughter. In fact, it is unlikely that Prince Ali harboured any hopes of Ataúlfo ever marrying at all and Tommy Howard de Walden’s paternity of Pip is not in doubt.

At the Catholic society wedding on 20 September 1945, Pip, in white, was given away by Prince Ali. Photographic evidence does not suggest that the radiantly beaming José Luis was a pressed man. It is Pip who looks assailed by doubts.166 In the conditions prevailing at the end of the Second World War, it was impossible for any of her family to travel to Spain for the ceremony.167 Hearing that Vilallonga’s father, the Barón de Segur, was fiercely opposed to the match, Tommy Howard de Walden wrote him a stiff letter of protest and challenged him to a duel. In a conciliatory reply, the Barón said that he was not in any way opposed to Pip but was merely trying to protect her, as he would any decent girl, from the martyrdom of marriage to his wastrel of a son.168

In his brilliantly written, but otherwise deeply callous memoirs, Vilallonga had the grace to write of Pip as ‘a marvellous person whom, without a second thought, I made deeply unhappy’.169 The scale of egotistical irresponsibility portrayed in his own book makes it quite clear that Pip’s life had just taken an irrevocably tragic turn. The wedding night was spent in an hotel in Cádiz. José Luis claims, equally revealingly whether it is true or false, that, after Pip fell asleep, he went out to spend the night in a brothel with some French prostitutes. From Cádiz the couple travelled to the Hotel Palace in Estoril in Portugal, where they spent a bizarre honeymoon. They arrived with little money and found that getting visas for London was not easy. Until eventually rescued by an emissary of Margot Howard de Walden, they were trapped in Lisbon for nearly six months. They were living in a luxurious hotel on credit which, given the family connections of both, was not as difficult as for some of the guests. Pip tried to eke out their finances at the casino having been given a system for playing roulette. Her occasional small successes were not enough to prevent her having to pawn her evening dresses. In the circumstances, it is difficult to believe José Luis’s highly entertaining account of a life of high-society extravagance, in the frequent company of the exiled royalty of Europe.

José Luis alleges that he now began a poorly concealed affair with Magda Gabor, the sister of Eva and Zsa Zsa. The affair began with him, ever the gentleman, claiming to have demeaned his wife further by telling Magda that he found himself in the appalling situation of having to sleep with someone for whom he felt not the slightest attraction. At every opportunity, he says, he escaped to see his lover and a disconsolate Pip knew. Just as he was about to tell her that he planned to run away to New York with Magda Gabor, Pip announced that she was pregnant.170 In José Luis’s colourful account, making much of his great sacrifice in giving up Magda, he told Pip that ‘the affair was over’ but, as he wrote later, ‘What stupidity! Everything had just begun. My alienation from her became ever greater.’ Curiously, this did not deter him from staying with Pip for a further seventeen years. Nevertheless, he did, by his own account, engage in serial infidelities, with, amongst others, the same Magda Gabor he had just undertaken never to see again.171

Pip and José Luis left Lisbon in early April 1946, reaching England a few days later. When she finally reached home, Pip was already noticeably pregnant. The family was in Dean Castle, a small fortification at Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, Scotland, and, according to José Luis, had sent a car to collect them. This is strange given the total lack of petrol for private use in immediate postwar Britain. On the lengthy journey, (an improbable seventy-two hours in his memoirs) José Luis claims to have delighted himself reading about his father-in-law’s properties in a copy of the Almanaque de Gotha which he conveniently found in the car along with other books. Apart from the fact that the properties of English aristocrats are not listed in that volume, the Howard de Walden car did not carry a copy. It may be, however, supposed that he faithfully reflects his feelings at the time when he writes of thinking: ‘Mama could be proud of me. I had set myself up for life. At least so I thought.’ He was enraptured by the magnificence of Dean Castle but astounded by what he perceived as the coldness of his hosts. He claims to have been greeted by Lord Howard de Walden dressed in a full suit of medieval armour, holding The Times with hands clad in iron gauntlets. In his account, an exaggeration of the anecdote told by Augustus John, his host wore different suits of armour all the time, even changing for dinner into an especially shiny one. His grotesquely amusing account presents the entire family frequently communing with ghosts.172

He was devastated to discover that, although her father was extremely rich, the bulk of his fortune would be inherited by Pip’s brother John. That Pip was merely to inherit an amount of money that assured her what he bitterly dismissed as ‘a mediocre comfort for life’ led José Luis to comment revealingly in his memoirs that this was ‘not at all part of my plans’. With a quite delicious lack of irony, he follows the bitter statement that ‘it’s one thing to marry a rich woman and quite another to marry the daughter of a rich family’ with the assertion that he did not marry Pip for money. Forgetting his earlier story of the shotgun marriage in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, he asserted that he married her out of snobbery – the hope of annoying his father with photographs of Chirk Castle, alongside which the Barón de Segur’s Palacio Falguera looked like a watchman’s hut.173 While at Dean Castle, according to José Luis, Lord Howard de Walden asked him point-blank if he had married Pip just for her money. He writes that, although fully aware that the dignified reply would have been to turn on his heel and leave the castle, ‘the Spanish gentleman was in no position to burn his boats and leave himself on the beach with his feet in the water like any old ship-wrecked man’. He admitted to his father-in-law that he had indeed married his daughter for her money but also because they were good friends and she constituted an opportunity for him to break free from his family and from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the Spanish aristocracy.174 Lord Howard de Walden was appalled by his son-in-law’s ready admission that he was a gold-digger. He altered his will to prevent Pip, now twenty-nine, getting access to her money before she was forty.175

José Luis claims that, during a ball given at Dean Castle, while Pip was asleep on a sofa elsewhere, he passed a night of passion with Lady Audrey Fairfax, the wife of Admiral Sir Rupert Fairfax. Pip’s sister Gaenor pointed out that there were no balls held in Dean Castle in 1946. After they left Scotland, the couple spent several weeks in London, staying at the Mandeville Hotel. While there, José Luis maintained the social life to which he was accustomed by accepting large sums of money from Pip. Given that this situation could not be sustained, that José Luis had no way of earning a living in Britain and that Pip’s health required a warm climate, he proposed that they emigrate to Argentina.176

Tommy Howard de Walden owned a small shipping line, the South America Saint Line. In consequence, his son, Pip’s brother John, was able to arrange a passage for Pip and José Luis to Argentina. He also arranged for there to be two medical men, Dr W. L. Roche and Dr W. D. Mulvey, and a nurse aboard. The ship, the SS Saint-Merriel, set sail from Liverpool for Buenos Aires via Las Palmas and Rio de Janeiro. Pip’s labour started before the ship had reached the Canary Islands. The medical staff turned out to be of little help, since one doctor was in fact a dental specialist and the other an ophthalmologist. The nurse, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the young Margaret Rutherford, managed to break her leg just before Pip went into labour. Her son John was born at sea on 22 June 1946. It was a difficult birth and Pip was in danger of losing her life. An attractive fellow passenger, a fashion designer called Esterre ‘Terry’ Erland, helped with the labour. When the ship reached Las Palmas, there was a christening at which Terry Erland became John’s godmother. His godfather was, thanks to Margot van Raalte and by the proxy of the ship’s captain, Don Juan de Borbón. When the ship reached Bahia in Brazil, while Pip lay still convalescing on board, José Luis claims that he went ashore and slept with Terry Erland. José Luis made no secret of this and, for Pip, suffering a degree of postnatal depression, the effect was devastating. Even if she had not done so in Portugal, before reaching Argentina, she realised that she had made a dreadful mistake and that Prince and Princess Orléans-Borbón had been right about José Luis. However, with her boundless optimism, she determined to make the best of the marriage.177

During the sea voyage to Argentina, José Luis met a retired Hungarian cavalry officer, Count Laszlo Graffy, who was planning to breed and train horses on the pampas. He persuaded Pip that they should become the Count’s partners in the enterprise. On reaching Argentina, at first their expenses were met by the agent of Lord Howard’s shipping line. They acquired a flat in Buenos Aires, were able to buy land on the pampas for their stables and riding school, install a prefabricated house and buy a car. They suffered considerable privation since Pip could gain no immediate access to either her own funds or the help of her family since money could not be sent out of England until she had established herself as a British resident abroad. She had very little money and José Luis had none, since his family were outraged by the manner of his marriage and had effectively cut him off.

Since José Luis was repelled by the thought of childcare and Pip could not cope with John’s crying, they left him with a series of nurses. Their own experience of parenting hardly prepared them for any other response. Moreover, their own relationship was in increasing difficulty.178 José Luis, in his memoirs, asserts that when he made love to her, he could not disguise his indifference. Nevertheless, she was soon pregnant again. They hardly spoke to each other. José Luis claimed that he abhorred his son (although photographic evidence suggests otherwise) and spent ever more time in Buenos Aires.179 Pip’s skill with horses contributed greatly to the initial success of the business at Los Cardales where she worked with Graffy and the various Hungarian and Polish cavalry officers employed at the stables. However, money was so tight that, in an effort to make ends meet, Pip went into partnership with Terry Erland to open a fashion-design business and dress shop under the name Susan Scott Designs.180

Tommy Howard de Walden died on 6 November 1946. Because he had not made prior arrangements, the amounts that he left to his daughters were severely diminished by death duties.181 Pip was to be left £50,000 – a considerable amount of money in 1946, about £1 million in 2001 terms – but it was tied up in the family estates. In any case, postwar austerity restrictions on capital movements prevented it being taken out of the country. Tommy did, moreover, leave Pip his studio in Cadogan Lane. Because, when the news arrived, Pip was suffering a difficult pregnancy and had been ordered by her gynaecologist to rest, José Luis went to London alone in the early summer of 1947 to wind up the estate. He stayed with Margot Howard de Walden at her house in Welbeck Street and soon established a warm friendship with a bisexual Austrian aristocrat called Count Boisy Rex. Boisy vaguely knew the family because his elder sister, Countess Marie Louise Rex, was married to the father-in-law of Pip’s cousin, Charmian Russell (née van Raalte). José Luis used the impoverished Boisy as a cicerone to the gastronomic, sartorial and erotic delights of postwar London. Needless to say, he did not stint himself. After the reading of Tommy Howard de Walden’s will, the cornucopia that was the studio in Cadogan Lane lay at the mercy of José Luis and Boisy. The house contained a wealth of modern art although some were fakes and the collection may not have included the Max Ernst, Braque, Otto Dix, Rothko and Jackson Pollock canvases, Hogarth and Picasso drawings and Rodin sculptures ‘remembered’ by José Luis. José Luis did not hesitate to move into the house with Count Rex nor, with his help, to sell off paintings in order to finance the rebuilding of his wardrobe. Given his vocation as a dandy, this proved to be a fabulously expensive endeavour.182

Since there was no detailed inventory of the contents of the Cadogan Lane house, there was little or no control over what José Luis was able to sell. He lived, as he put it, ‘without restraint’ (‘desenfrenadamente’). Eagerly encouraged by Boisy, he escaped the austerity of postwar London and together they wallowed in delights available only to those with unlimited supplies of ready cash – restaurants supplied by the black market, clandestine gambling dens, nightclubs that never closed, and women. He claims that one of Lord Howard’s drawings went to pay one year’s rent on a furnished flat in Piccadilly for one of his lovers – a famous popular singer. Another paid for him to spend some time in Madrid and Barcelona where he stayed in the best hotels and replicated his London hedonism. While in Barcelona, he received a telegram informing him that Pip had given birth to a daughter. Born on 6 August 1947, she was called Susanna Carmen (for José Luis’s mother), Margarita (for Pip’s mother) and Beatriz (for Princess Bea). He returned to Buenos Aires via London. Before leaving, José Luis claims to have given Boisy Rex a priceless painting by Max Ernst the proceeds from which he used to establish himself in the world of greyhound racing. José Luis did give John Scott Ellis an umbrella which John immediately spotted as having belonged to Tommy. It was a small compensation for the fact that John had to meet the considerable debts left by José Luis.183

In José Luis’s absence, Pip had tried to recapture his love by preparing an environment in which he could pursue his dream of writing. This took – he says – the form of three railway carriages – two sleeper cars and a restaurant car. One of the sleepers had two large rooms and a bathroom; the restaurant car became a kitchen and dining-room, the other sleeper was left as it was. To facilitate José Luis’s writing, a magnificent study was prepared and a young Italian woman, Lucy Babacci, contracted to be his secretary. In no time at all, he says, she was his lover. He insinuates that this was with the complicity of Pip who, after her recent labour, had no desire for sexual relations. Little of this coincides with what Pip told her sister.184 While José Luis philandered and wrote, Pip threw herself into looking after the horses, her dress shop and, to a lesser extent, the upbringing of the children. The dress and fashion business worked well until Terry Erland decided to return to Europe in 1949. The financial difficulties were exacerbated in 1950 by a decree that obliged companies to employ three Argentines for every foreigner. It signalled ruin for the stables. The business was sold to Colonel Graffy and, on the insistence of José Luis, they moved to Paris since neither he nor Pip wanted to live in London or Barcelona.185

Leaving Pip to wind up the estate, José Luis seized the opportunity to go on ahead to Paris in April 1951. José Luis’s attitude to his children had been at best lukewarm so John and Carmen were sent to England to live with Gaenor while Pip and José Luis tried to rebuild their fortunes, both emotional and financial, in Paris. There he wrote his first novel, Les Ramblas finissent à la mer. He claims that, realising that he did not want to share a life with Pip and their children in a Parisian apartment, he immediately persuaded her to live somewhere where he might visit them occasionally. The facts are that they separated only after seven years of deteriorating relations spent in different Parisian apartments. The relationship was doomed since José Luis was concerned only with establishing himself as an actor and a novelist – yet neither of them seemed prepared to bring it to an end. Along the way, he led a life of epicurean dissolution. According to his own accounts, he was taking money from a series of rich, older women, including someone called Kitty Lillaz and the actress Madeleine Robinson, whom he passed off as his wife. Pip knew but suffered in silence. Finally, on her fortieth birthday in 1956, she got access to her money and she bought a flat for them both in the rue Alsace Lorraine in the Bois de Boulogne. José Luis borrowed much of her remaining money and promised to return it when he inherited from his father. This he never did. To compensate for not seeing her children in school term time, Pip regularly indulged them with extravagant holidays skiing in Switzerland or Austria in winter, swimming at St Tropez or Monte Carlo in summer.186 When she did have access to her own funds, according to José Luis, Pip frittered them away in acts of absurd generosity, of which he was often a beneficiary himself187

José Luis also claims to have still possessed a large portfolio of drawings, watercolours and oils taken from his father-in-law’s collection which facilitated his high-society existence. Once he had eventually found success as a novelist and journalist and insinuated himself into the world of cinema, divorce from Pip was inevitable. What is really astonishing – and suggests that there was more to the relationship than he admits – is that it took him so long to seek a divorce. In his memoirs, he depicts Pip’s presence as an intolerable invasion of his privacy. If this is true, for a woman as insecure and as desperate to please as Pip, it must have been unbearable as, in the most adolescent fashion, he flaunted his many lovers. He claims that things reached a peak when, one night in Paris, no doubt driven by his own guilt, he tried to strangle her.188 Again the truth about the end of the relationship was less dramatic. In 1958, he appeared in a very minor role in Louis Malle’s Les Amants starring Jeanne Moreau. In 1961, he had an equally small role in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s.189 José Luis was increasingly away on location or else with one of his many lovers. Pip had long since suggested that, given the needs of her health and the children’s welfare, they should live in the South and there was no way that he would leave the capital.