Gone With the Windsors

A long wait while Ida was fetched to the telephone by one of her Russians. She screamed for joy when she heard my voice. Lunch tomorrow.

19th May 1932

Treated Ida to the Dorchester. She has dyed her hair black and wears costume jewelry, having lost everything in the Crash, but seems very gay. She said, “Money’s a curse, Maybell. I’m a free spirit these days.”

Of course, I don’t know that Ida ever had that much money.

She’s taking me to the Argentine Embassy on Monday. She says attendance at one cocktail party begets invitations to ten more, so there’s no faster way to meet people and canapés also solve the question of dinner.

No call from Wally.

21st May 1932

To the Crosbies. Freddie Crosbie is very sweet in that dithering English way. He has no chin and makes only four hundred a year as Member of Parliament, but Pips obviously adores him. They must be very glad of her money.

The house is all beige and cream, what Pips calls “neutrals,” and is run in the modern style. There’s no withdrawing after dinner, which I very much applaud. I’ve never liked all that sitting around drinking tea, waiting for the men to finish their cigars.

The great shock of the evening was seeing Judson Erlanger after all these years. He never had what one could call chiseled features, but he did once have a certain amount of dash. Now he looks like a big, pink man in the moon and is married to Hattie, formerly Chandos, who has crooked teeth and a permanent wave and dukes in the family. Pips says Hattie’s people go back years. But surely everybody’s people go back years?

Still nothing from Wally. I begin to wonder whether Pips copied down the address correctly.

24th May 1932

How I missed Danforth Brumby last evening. Ida and I had no sooner arrived at the Argentines than she set off across the room in search of potato chips and left me at the mercy of a Latin with shiny hair and built-up shoes. What is one supposed to say to these people? Brumby would have struck up a conversation about silver mines or the price of beef, but I felt quite at a loss. Was finally rescued by an American press attaché called Whitlow Trilling, also married to an English girl. He knows Judson and Pips, but Wally’s name meant nothing to him. Perhaps this whole Wally business is a red herring.

Violet came in before I was dressed, wanting to discuss something called Royal Ascot. Ascot is a race track, and there’s a week of races there next month. I wouldn’t mind going. Brumby and I went to Saratoga once and it was quite fun.

Violet said, “Oh I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Maybell. Melhuish and I will be in the Royal party, you see? And I’m just not sure what best to do with you.”

I said, “You make me sound like a surplus chair. It’s very simple. I’ll join the Royal party, too.”

But she says that’s out of the question. That one cannot invite oneself along, nor even propose that one’s dearest sister, recently bereaved and newly arrived in a foreign land, be added to the invitation list.

She said, “Let me have a word with Lady Desborough. She’s always very sweet about accommodating an extra.”

That word “extra” again.

I said, “As a matter of fact, now I reconsider. I expect to be rather busy that week, so don’t give it another thought.”

She said, “Will you? Nobody’ll be in town, you know? But it’ll be a great weight off my mind. Their Majesties absolutely depend on us for Ascot, you see. Well, Melhuish has known them all his life.”

Violet never tires of displaying her tired old stock of claims to grandeur. How she met Melhuish when he was traveling with the Prince of Wales. How Melhuish’s father was equerry to two Kings, which as I understand it amounts to nothing more than being a royal errand boy. How Melhuish has known the Duchess of York since she was a baby in her bassinet.

She forgets how differently things might have turned out. If I hadn’t stayed home to represent us at Lucie Mallett’s wedding shower, I’d have been at Sulphur Springs myself. Who knows, I might have caught the Royal eye, never mind Donald Melhuish’s. Not that I’d have wanted either of them. They say that crowns are unbearably heavy to wear.

I notice anyway that the Prince of Wales seems to have dropped Melhuish. Violet says it’s not a question of “dropping.” She says friends grow apart when one of them becomes a family man and the other continues to run with a fast set.

I said, “I assume you’ll leave me with a cook at least, and a maid while you’re being indispensable to Their Majesties?”

She said, “I’ll leave you with everything but a driver. And you’ll have Flora and Doopie for company.”

So there it is. It doesn’t bother me. I’m sure Royalties must be death to the natural gaiety of friendship. Better to stay at home and be one’s true self, even if it does mean being left with a child to supervise, and an imbecile, and a staff of Bolshevik insurgents.

25th May 1932

Minnehaha at last! She said, “Maybell, you must think me such a slouch, but I’ve been sick. This is my first good day for a week.”

Stomach ulcers, apparently. I didn’t think she looked too bad, though. Still skinny, still parting her hair in the middle, still as tidy as a tinker. Little gray suit, white shirtwaist, good shoes. Her skin isn’t brilliant but then it never was.

Lunch was a riot, we had so much to talk about. She’s been married to Simpson for four years, his name is Ernest, and she’s never been happier. Of course, she said that when she married the aviator, but it was all far too hasty.

The first summer we were “out,” 1915, she got an invitation to visit a cousin who was stationed at Pensacola, Florida, and she was off like a shot. Wally always adored a uniform. The next thing we knew, she was back with a diamond on her finger, engaged to a lieutenant in the Aviation Corps. That was Win Spencer.

The wedding was at Christ Church, and I was supposed to be a bridesmaid, along with Mary Kirk, but then Grandma Patterson died and I had to go to the burying, so Lucie Mallett stepped in at short notice. I wasn’t altogether sorry. The gowns were yellow, which has never been my color, and our bouquets were snapdragons. Somehow whenever I see a snapdragon, I think of Wally.

We lost touch after that. I said, “You could have written.”

“Well,” she said, “it wouldn’t have made an edifying read. I knew the first week I’d made a mistake.”

I think the honeymoon comes as a shock to every bride. It was years before I felt able to enjoy the Pocono Mountains again. But with Win Spencer, there was the additional problem of drink. They went to a resort in West Virginia, which was dry, but apparently he’d thought to bring along his own supplies.

She said it was the stress of flying that had turned him to alcohol. It was the usual thing to toast the flag before anyone went up in one of those crates, but Win would always have a couple more shots, to settle the first one.

She sounds to have had a pretty good war though. He was posted to California and they say the beaches at Coronado are divine. Then he was sent to China, and she thought it’d be more fun to tag along than sit it out on Soapsuds Row with all the other Navy wives, so she followed him. There was never any stopping Wally. In fact, advising her against something only made her all the more set on doing it. Like the time she borrowed Nugent Wilson’s suit and crashed a Bachelors’ Club ball dressed as a buck.

She says China was a real adventure. Hong Kong, Shanghai. There was a war going on, people getting shot in the streets, heads appearing on pikes, and there was typhoid. She ended up in Peking, had an affair that didn’t work out, and then decided to call it a day with Win. He was drinking more than ever. She went back to the States, got a divorce, and was staying with Mary Kirk for a while, getting back on her feet, when she met Ernest, who has business interests in London. So here she is.

I said, “You never looked up Violet? She’s Lady Melhuish, you know, in Carlton Gardens?”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. But I don’t think Violet ever really approved of me, and these days she’s so grand. Frankly, I’m looking to create a livelier circle. I’m more interested in what people are than who their grandfathers were.”

I’m invited for Saturday. She says I’ll find Ernest very knowledgeable on wine and literature.

Loelia and Bendor Westminster to dinner at Carlton Gardens. She’s his third duchess and very young. They say she married him for his money. Poached salmon again. Violet might take time off from her committees one of these days to review her recipe book.

26th May 1932

Flora fell crossing the Mall, and came in crying. Even Doopie couldn’t soothe her. “Mummy, I crazed my knee,” she kept sobbing, but there was cold comfort to be had from Violet.

“Did you, darling?” she said. “Jolly good. Now off you skip. I have Fishermen’s Orphans this afternoon.”

Every day there’s something. Consumptives, Highland Crafts, Unmarried Mothers.

A note pushed under my door when I woke from my nap. HULO written in wax crayon. The poor child spends too much time around Doopie.

28th May 1932

Wally’s apartment is in Bryanston Court. A dull building in a dull street. Wally’s on the second floor with a cook, one live-in maid, a daily, and a driver for Ernest. A claustrophobic entrance hall filled with white flowers and ivory elephants. A modest drawing room, mahogany and striped silk mainly, but one glorious lacquered Chinese screen and a table full of gorgeous little jade doodads. All bought for a song, I’m sure. Her China years may be glossed over whenever Ernest is around, but she doesn’t make any effort to hide the booty.

Ernest came home at seven and presided over the drinks’ tray. He’s pleasant enough, dapper, a little too fat in the face to be handsome and he almost certainly dyes his mustache. To hear him speak, you’d take him for an Englishman. He showed me some of his first editions while Wally interfered in the kitchen. She always did love to cook. After her mother remarried, she’d often come home with me during vacation, and one time she took over our kitchen and made terrapin stew, because she heard Father saying it was his favorite dish in the whole world and nobody ever cooked it for him.

I reminded her about that. She laughed.

“Nineteen-twelve,” she said. “I can tell you exactly. After Mama moved to Atlantic City with that four-flusher.”

Her stepfather was a drinker and an idler called Rasin. Goodness knows what Mrs. Warfield saw in him. Wally used to say she prayed he was a seedless Rasin, because she was in no mood for any baby sisters and brothers. He was dead within two years anyway.

Ernest said, “You two certainly do go back a long way.”

Indeed we do. Back as far as her mother’s sad little boardinghouse, though I’d never dream of bringing up that kind of embarrassment now.

29th May 1932

Decided it was time to pick the brains of someone from the old crowd, so I placed a call to Lucie Mallett. Violet fretting in the background about expense, quite unable to understand why a letter wouldn’t do just as well. She knows I always pay my way. I just wanted to find out if Lucie knew anything about Ernest.

She said, “All I know is, Wally came back from China with her insides in some kind of disarray, crossed the state line to get a divorce, and wasted no time in helping herself to someone else’s husband. She met him at Mary Kirk’s.”

I said, “I know that. But who is he?”

“A nobody,” she said. “And he left a child and an invalid wife, just because Wally Warfield snapped her fingers. Scandalous.”

I said, “I’ll tell her you said hello.”

“Please don’t,” she said.

Another note under my door. HULO ARNT.

30th May 1932

Lunched with Pips and Wally at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly. I do feel a light touch is called for with mosaics, unless you’re decorating a temple of worship.

The girls were a little stiff with each other at first, but a bottle of hock wine soon got them talking about past times. Pips remembered something I’d quite forgotten: how Wally talked Homer Chute into masquerading as her cousin and picking her up from Oldfields in his Lagonda one Sunday. They were gone all day at the pleasure beach and Wally came back with a tintype portrait of herself sitting on Homer’s knee. Not that Pips was backward with the boys. She had more fraternity pins than any of us.

Wally says she doesn’t know how long she and Ernest will be in London but she’d really like to liven things up while she’s here, and leave her mark. Pips suggested costume parties, but she hasn’t seen Bryanston Court. It’s far too small for a crush. Anyway, Wally says unlimited drink is death to conversation. She prefers elegant little dinners where she can draw people out.

Wally believes the secret of success as a hostess is to mix important people with a sprinkling of interesting types from lower levels. Also, in the matter of food and presentation and entertainment to have the courage to season the expected with the unexpected. She says the King of England would be happy to come to dinner if he thought he might meet Mahatma Gandhi and be served a good, tasty hamburger on a Minton plate. Pips says Mahatma Gandhi doesn’t eat hamburger.

After lunch, Wally took us to see an adorable gramophone she’d found in Wigmore Street, completely portable, in a lizard-skin case. I couldn’t resist. But I’ve entrusted it to Wally, because if I bring it to Carlton Gardens, Flora will expect to play with it and it will soon be broken.

Pips was on the telephone the instant I got home. She said, “Minnehaha’s as slow as ever to pick up a check, I see. And I hope you’re not going to buy her every toy in the store. You’re too generous, Maybell. Always were.”

Well, what’s a little money between friends? And I’m only lending her my gramophone.

2nd June 1932

Shopping with Wally. Ernest seems to keep her on a very strict allowance and goes through the account books at the end of each month. Thank heavens Brumby was never so particular.

Flora sitting on the stairs watching for my return. She announced that she’d been making “gakes” and had one saved for me up in the nursery, but I was too exhausted to climb more stairs. I said, “I’ll come tomorrow.”

A hammering on my door five minutes later, and there she stood, with a lump of warm gray dough in a paper case.

Tonight dinner with Violet and Melhuish’s friends, the Belchesters, who can’t wait to know me.

3rd June 1932

Anne Belchester’s busybodying and charitable works make Violet look like a positive lady of leisure. She wanted to know about my Baltimore committees, but I told her, it isn’t everyone who’s suited to committees. There are talkers and there are doers, and I’m a doer. All that time spent shuffling papers and drinking tea. I’d sooner sign a check.

Billy Belchester said, “Careful now, Maybell. You’ll have writer’s cramp by the time Anne’s finished with you!”

Melhuish said, “Violet gives her time, that’s the thing, and her expertise. All the money in the world is no use if it’s not wisely marshaled, and the thing about Vee is, she’s terribly good with lists.”

Anne Belchester said, “She is. She sometimes mislays them, but when they come to hand, they’re absolutely first-rate.”

Oh well, glory in the highest to Violet and her lists. I do my bit. I sort through my closets every fall and give to Christmas Goodwill. Quality woolens, shoes hardly worn, hats that aren’t keepers. I just don’t make a fuss about it.

Pips is getting up a party to go to Ciro’s tomorrow night. So far the Judson Erlangers and Wally and Ernest. Ida is an unknown.

5th June 1932

We closed Ciro’s last night. There was a wonderfully droll ensemble playing with homemade banjos. The Moses Jackson Coon Band! Judson and Hattie brought along the press attaché, Whitlow Trilling, and his wife, Gladys. Ida turned up with an Argentine who smelled of brilliantine. Ernest had business papers to peruse, so cried off at the last minute. No great loss. He’s so serious. People don’t always want to be discussing Pluto’s Republic.

According to Whitlow, a new First Secretary just arrived, and it’s someone Wally knows from her Navy days in San Diego. Benny Thaw.

Pips said, “Is he an old flame?”

Wally says absolutely not, but she’s going to look him up.

The birds were singing as I arrived home, so I looked forward to a restful day in bed, but Wally was on the telephone at ten, slave-driving me to go shopping for lingerie, and then a military parade started up. Violet says it was the Major General’s Review. Men and horses tramping across Horse Guards’ Parade. Drums, bugles, shouting, all bad enough in themselves, but Doopie and Flora came back from watching and proceeded to reenact it in the corridor outside my room. Doopie always did get overexcited by military bands.

Violet is walking around with a furrowed brow, because the Rutlands are dining tonight, all the way from their castle in the country, also the terrifically von Bismarcks, but someone has chucked, leaving her with thirteen, and I’m far too tired to make up the numbers. I don’t have the strength to lift a soup spoon.

Caught my heel in the hem of my charcoal silk getting out of the car this morning, and there is apparently no girl among the overfed rabble of servants in this house who knows how to mend. Not one.

Light rain.

6th June 1932

I am completely recovered. Dr. Collis Browne’s soothing nerve linctus certainly lives up to its promises.

Now I’ve tried it I shall never be without it. And while I slept, Doopie has quite expertly repaired my ripped hem. I shall buy her a box of candy.

Wally on the phone first thing. She sent a message of welcome to Benny Thaw and he replied immediately with an invitation for drinks. She seemed particularly excited about his being married to Connie Morgan.

I said, “Do you know her?”

“No,” she said, “but I soon will. This should get the American scene here fizzing. Those Morgan girls all have money and style.”

Lunched with Pips, who says she doesn’t know anything about Connie Morgan, but what her sisters have is money and reputations. Gloria Morgan was married to Reggie Vanderbilt until he drank himself to death, and Thelma Morgan was Mrs. Bell Telephone but is now Lady Furness.

She said, “And we all know about her!” Then Ida turned up, raving about a miraculous new oxygenated face cream, and we somehow never got back to the subject of Thelma Furness and what it is we’re all supposed to know.

Took a tray of fruit fondants for Doopie.

Violet was out at her Distressed Pit. Flora knows the days of the week by her mother’s committees.

“Bunday, Pit Ponies, Doosday, Blood, Wesday, Falling Women and Not Forgottens.”

She was stuck for a minute with Thursday but Doopie helped her out. Something called “Lebbers.”

They seem to be great friends and have a most amusing sign-language they use from time to time. How simple their lives are! I have to dine with Lord and Lady Anglesey and Violet’s gruesome in-laws, while they can play with their dolls and have sugar sandwiches for tea. There is something enviable about the life of an imbecile.

Of course, Flora will never learn to speak clearly listening to Doopie’s version of things. I may take her in hand.

Violet finally came home at six.

I said, “Don’t you think Flora’s rather backward with her speaking? She just copies Doopie, you know?”

“Oh,” she said, “they’ll sort that out when she goes to school. They did Rory.”

I said, “Well I feel sorry for her. She never goes anywhere.”

Violet said, “What nonsense. Doopie takes her across to St. James’s Park. They walk to Duck Island almost every day. And she was invited to the Yorks for tea yesterday but would she get dressed?”

I said, “That’s because no one has taught her properly. She sees you running out to committee meetings, hair uncombed, egg yolk on your blouse. It’s no wonder she thinks she can go to tea parties in bloomers and a liberty bodice.”

“Maybell,” she said, “Will you please go and bathe. Salty and Elspeth are coming at seven.”

I said, “First tell me if you ever heard of Thelma Furness and if so, what’s her scandalous story?”

She made a great business of closing the door to the drawing room, then said,

“Lady Furness is a friend of the Prince of Wales, but not the kind we mention in front of the children. Why do you ask?”

I said, “No reason. Wally knows the husband of one of her sisters. She probably thinks this is going to be her entrée to royal circles. She’s as ambitious as ever. She keeps quizzing me about our connections with the throne.”

“Well,” she said, “first of all, you have no connections. Secondly, those who do have them never speak of them. And thirdly, I would say it’s a very steep climb from acquaintance with the husband of a certain person’s sister to meeting Royalties, too steep even for Minnehaha.”

Violet has always taken herself far too seriously.

She said, “I hope it goes without saying, Lady F. is never to be mentioned in this house. And Maybell, hot water costs money. Please don’t have your bath too deep.”

Chance would be a fine thing.

7th June 1932

Flora has renamed one of her dolls “Lady Furness” and has banished it to the back stairs. I grow fonder of the child.

9th June 1932

All the talk is of Race Week. Violet said someone called Lightfoot might be willing to escort me to the Guards’ luncheon tent, but I recognize crumbs when I see them falling from my sister’s table. Three times today she’s asked, “Are you sure you won’t let Ettie Desborough squeeze you in?” Guilt.

Wally says, without a white badge, Royal Ascot isn’t royal at all, so why bother? The white badge is the Open Sesame to the inner sanctum, the Royal Enclosure, but seemingly impossible to get unless one is on intimate terms with the Prince of Wales. So we may just ignore Ascot. We’ll borrow Ernest’s driver and go shopping for bibelots in forgotten backwaters.

12th June 1932

Wally and Ernest went to drinks with the Benny Thaws and met the unmentionable Thelma F. Wally says Connie and Thelma are both adorable and she’s meeting them for lunch on Monday. Pips says if they’re lunching with Wally, someone had better warn them to take along a fistful of their Morgan dollars.

Violet and Melhuish’s luggage has been taken to Windsor, not a great amount of it for three days of banquets and royal carriage rides. Wally says fashion is everything at Ascot, but I’m certain Violet hasn’t bought a single new gown. We might have had such fun shopping together, but no. She didn’t even ask my advice about hats. Wally would have been much more fun as a sister.

13th June 1932

Violet and Melhuish left after lunch for Windsor. Ida Coote has been angling to stay with me while they’re out of town. She seems to have become some kind of nomad since she lost her money, always offering to air people’s villas or walk their dogs. She said, “You won’t want to be alone in that great big house, all those empty rooms, all those portraits with eyes that follow you.” But I’m not going to be alone. I shall have Violet’s staff to lick into shape. Anyway, Ida has only two topics of conversation: Ida and men. It’s all right for the occasional lunch, but a slumber party would be unendurable.