Lady Lindsay of Dowhill
Lady Lindsay of Dowhill, better known as Loelia
Duchess of Westminster, who has died aged 91, wrote a remarkably candid volume
of memoirs, Grace and Favour (1961), which is a valuable record of high life
between the wars
An
Edwardian by birth, Loelia Ponsonby became a leading 'Bright Young Thing' in
the 1920s and went on to marry the 2nd Duke of Westminster - the legendary
sybarite 'Bendor', whose yacht features in Noel Coward's play Private Lives.
Coward also
wrote the foreword to the Duchess's well-received memoirs. He did so, he said,
'cowed by the steely inflexibility of her tone and a look in her eye that I
suspect caused the late Duke of Westminster some uneasy moments'. Another
friend, Ian Fleming, used her as the model for Miss Moneypenny in the James
Bond books.
Loelia Mary
Ponsonby was born on Feb 6 1902, the only daughter of the courtier Sir Frederick Ponsonby, later
1st Lord Sysonby. 'Fritz' Ponsonby was assistant private secretary to Queen
Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V, and wrote Recollections of Three
Reigns.
Young
Loelia once occupied the lap of Edward VII and amused His Majesty by seizing
his beard and demanding: 'But King, where's your crown?' Her childhood - spent
variously at St James's Palace, Park House at Sandringham
and Birkhall - was, as she recalled, made irksome by a succession of fierce
foreign governesses. She escaped from the stiffness of her parents' world into
the hedonism of 4the Bright Young People'.
Their
pranks included treasure-hunts and impersonating reporters to obtain interviews
from famous people. The older generation were duly shocked, although in her own
old age Loelia Lindsay insisted that it was 'just light-hearted fun'.
Her own
contribution was to invent the 'bottle-party' in 1926, when, for economic
reasons, guests were bidden to bring their own drink. The first guest was the
author Michael Arlen, bearing a dozen bottles of pink champagne.
Towards the
end of the 1920s Loelia met Bendor Westminster, a selfish, spoilt, twice-divorced
playboy, though a generous landlord and gallant officer. The diarist 'Chips'
Channon summed him up as 'a mixture of Henry VIII and Lorenzo Il Magnifico'.
The Duke
courted Miss Ponsonby in style, showering her with diamonds. A typical incident
occurred one night in her sleeper en route for Venice when she woke with an uncomfortable
lump digging into her: it was an emerald and diamond brooch.
They
married in 1930 in
a blaze of publicity, with Winston Churchill as best man. The new Duchess
became chatelaine of the Gothic palace
of Eaton in Cheshire,
as well as houses in Scotland,
Wales and France, to say
nothing of the steam yacht and a sailing ship.
But the
marriage was not a success. The Duchess found Bendor a man of changing moods -
charming and generous one moment, furious and cruel the next. Their choice of
friends differed considerably. James Lees-Milne described the Duchess's married
life as 'a definition of unadulterated hell'.
The
marriage was dissolved in 1947. By this time the Duchess had established a new
life for herself, in considerably reduced circumstances, at Send Grove in Surrey, where she was a skilful hostess with impeccable
taste.
She was an
expert needlewoman, with a knack of incorporating beads into flowers and
leaves. The actor Ernest Thesiger gave her his collection of beautiful
multi-coloured beads and she once threaded 20 shades of mauve into a dusky
rose.
A talented
horticulturist, she transformed a muddy rubbish dump at Send into a magnificent
garden. She would bind roses high up a tree-trunk and then allow them to tumble
over, giving the impression of a floral waterfall.
In the
1950s Loelia Westminster worked as a feature editor for House and Garden, and
covered Grace Kelly's wedding in Monte
Carlo. Besides her memoirs she published an evocative
album of photographs, Cocktails and Laughter (1983), edited by Hugo Vickers.
She found
much happiness in her second marriage, in 1969, to Sir Martin Lindsay of
Dowhill, 1st Bt, Arctic explorer, Gordon Highlander, Conservative MP and
historian of the Baronetage. He died in 1981.
Hugo
Vickers writes: Some years ago I was discussing the new style of obituary with
Loelia and she fixed me with a steely eye, and announced: 'Now I'm counting on
you for a good spread when the time comes.' I rise to the challenge.
Loelia's
life was almost a classic 20th century Cinderella story. It was, she readily
admitted, one of rare privilege.
Yet the
contrasts were too extreme for comfort: a stern childhood, the seemingly
fairy-tale marriage, the sorrow that followed - including incidents that would
make some of today's court cases look tame. She told me she had consigned to
paper the story of a night when the Duke of Westminster, in one of his rages,
tried to strangle her.
Loelia was
a mixture of two souls. On the one hand she was insecure, an inheritance from
childhood. 'I was most unhappy,' she recalled. 'I never learned a thing. And I
was out of everything for a very long time because I was too shy to speak.'
Her parents
were so strict that they often put her in the wrong unfairly. In later life, as
a defence mechanism, she sometimes wrongfooted her friends.
On the
other hand, she had infinite patience and imagination, and made needlework
designs of great finery, even picking out the clouds in a sky with strands of
her own hair. Her house at Send was full of painstaking work -a wonderful
hand-woven carpet, a mirror adorned with shells hand-picked by her in Australia. Her
beautiful collection has been bequeathed to the National Trust.
As a
hostess she had the skill of a conductor, imperceptibly bringing the silent to
life, so that everyone had their say. Nor was she lacking in confidence; I once
saw an American guest reach for the decanter of wine, whereupon her restraining
hand descended with some alacrity. She lived in a world in which feuds consumed
considerable energy, 'cutting dead' was part of the vocabulary and the morning
telephone buzzed with enjoyable gossip in her rich, melodic voice. She was
celebrated, too, for such aphorisms as 'Anybody seen in a bus over the age of
30 has been a failure in life'.
By her own
choice Loelia spent her last years in nursing homes, first in Surrey and
latterly in Pimlico, where the matron gave an annual Christmas party at which
delicious champagne flowed and the atmosphere was about as far from a geriatric
establishment as you could hope to find.
Though
Loelia always claimed rather to dislike Margaret Argyll, another resident, they
were thrown together in their last days.
Matron told
me she had taken them out to tea: 'The Duchess of Argyll wanted to go to the
Ritz and Lady Lindsay to Claridge's, but I took them both to the Carlton Towers and they had a wonderful time.'
In her
rooms Loelia recreated the atmosphere of Send in miniature, with her favourite
furniture, pictures and needlework. 'To think,' she would say, 'that at one
time I used to own half London,
with 50 valets, and now I am reduced to one room.'
She
retained a youthful enjoyment of life, regularly visited by old friends 'that
I've known since I came out of the egg'.
Some of her
reminiscences were broadcast on BBC Radio 4, such as the occasion at a ball at
Balmoral when all her party, as a joke, decided to kiss Queen Mary's hand on
presentation. When Loelia's turn came, she found, to her lasting horror, that
she had left the perfect impress of red lipstick on the white-gloved royal
hand.
Looking
back on her life on her 90th birthday, Loelia reflected on the contrasts of her
life: 'Rich as Croesus, then not a penny . . . That was all verv exciting, I
must say. It ended badly, but things like that do end badly. I never could have
done any better. I was out of my depth the whole time. It had moments, there's
no question about it. I can see how lucky I've been compared to other people.'
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Phillips/Topical
Press Agency — Hulton Archive — Getty Images
"A
bath of nobility": Coco Chanel and the Duke of Westminster at the races in
1924.
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Was Coco Chanel a Nazi Agent?
By JUDITH
WARNER
Gabrielle
Chanel — better known as Coco — was a wretched
human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic,
ridiculously snobbish and given to sins of phrase-making like “If blonde, use
blue perfume,” she was addicted to morphine and actively collaborated with the
Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
And yet, her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look
to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women’s fashion, and to this day have
kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and
élan.
Exploring
the contradictory complexities of this woman, at once so very awful and so very
talented, should make for fascinating and enlightening reading. After all,
Chanel’s life offers biographers a trove of juicy material. Chanel was a
creative genius, her own expertly polished self-presentation perhaps the
greatest triumph of her brilliantly inventive mind. She was born in 1883 in a hospice for the
poor in the Loire Valley, to unwed parents of peasant stock and, upon her
mother’s death, was placed at age 12
in a convent-orphanage to be raised by Roman Catholic
nuns. This left her with a lifelong fear of losing everything. The point is
nicely captured by Hal Vaughan in “Sleeping With the Enemy,” who quotes her as
saying: “From my earliest childhood I’ve been certain that they have taken
everything away from me, that I’m dead.”
She was put
to work as a seamstress at age 20 and took the name Coco
from a song she liked to sing in a rowdy cafe patronized by cavalry officers.
One ex-officer, the wealthy Étienne Balsan, installed her in his chateau,
taught her to conduct herself with high style on horseback and, generally, gave
her the skills she needed to make her way up through society. Balsan also
introduced her to Arthur (Boy) Capel, a friend who soon became Chanel’s first
great love, and who also, conveniently, set her up in a Paris apartment and
helped her start her first business venture, designing sleekly simple women’s
hats.
It wasn’t
long before Chanel took Jazz Age Paris by storm, liberating women from their
corsets, draping them in jersey and long strings of pearls and dousing them
with the scent of modernity, Chanel No. 5. She caroused with Igor Stravinsky
and Pablo Picasso, designed costumes for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and
amused herself with the cash-poor White Russian aristocracy. As her personal
fortunes rose, she turned her attention to making serious inroads into British
high society, befriending Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales and
becoming, most notably, the mistress of the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard
Arthur Grosvenor (known as Bendor), reputedly the wealthiest man in England.
Bendor’s —
and Chanel’s — anti-Semitism was vociferous and well documented; the pro-Nazi
sensibilities of the Duke of Windsor and many in his circle have long been
noted, too. All this, it appears, made the society of the British upper crust
particularly appealing to Chanel. As Vaughan notes, after she was lured by a
million-dollar fee to spend a few weeks in Hollywood in 1930 — Samuel Goldwyn,
he writes, “did his best to keep Jews away from Chanel” — she found herself
compelled to run straight back to England, so that she could wash away her
brush with vulgarity in “a bath of nobility.”
It wasn’t
much of a stretch, then, for Chanel, during wartime, to find herself the
mistress of the German intelligence officer Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a
charming character who had spied on the French fleet in the late 1920s, and who
found himself pleasingly single in occupied Paris, having presciently divorced
his half-Jewish German wife just before the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. It
wasn’t any particular betrayal of her values, or morals or ideals either, for
Chanel to find herself traveling to Madrid and
Berlin to
engage in cloak-and-dagger machinations with her country’s occupier.
The story
of how Coco became Chanel has been told many
times before over the past half-century, most recently (and, sad to say, much
more engagingly) in last year’s “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life,” by the
British fashion columnist Justine Picardie. The story of how Chanel
metamorphosed from a mere “horizontal collaborator” — the mistress of a Nazi —
into an actual German secret agent has been less well known, though earlier
writers have reported that she had worked for the Germans. It’s here that
Vaughan makes his freshest contribution, using a wealth of materials gleaned
from wartime police files and intelligence archives, some of which were only
recently declassified by French and German authorities, to flesh out precisely
how and why she became an agent, and how she sought to profit from her German
connections during the war.
Vaughan ably charts Chanel’s clever
opportunism as she works, first, to free her nephew André Palasse from a German
prisoner-of-war camp, and later seeks to use the Nazis’ Aryanization of
property laws to wrest control of her perfume empire away from the Jewish
Wertheimer brothers. Yet his account of her one real mission for the Germans —
a 1943 covert operation code-named Modellhut (“model hat”) in which she was
meant to use her contacts to get a message to Winston Churchill from the SS
stating that a number of leading Nazis wanted to break with Adolf Hitler and
negotiate a separate peace with England — emerges neither clearly nor logically
from his highly detailed telling. Too many diplomatic documents are reproduced
at too much length. Contradictions are not clearly sorted out. Vaughan seems to
have felt as though his rich source materials could speak for themselves, but
they don’t — and he doesn’t succeed in lending authority to the accounts of
contemporary witnesses who were, undoubtedly, unreliable.
Despite her
indisputable collaborationist activities, and after a brief period of
uncertainty during which she was questioned by a French judge, Chanel
eventually got off pretty much scot-free after the war, once again using her
wiles to protect herself most expertly. She tipped off the poet and anti-Nazi
partisan Pierre Reverdy, a longtime occasional lover, so that he could arrange
the arrest of her wartime partner in collaboration, Baron Louis de Vaufreland
Piscatory; she paid off the family of the former Nazi chief of SS intelligence
Gen. Walter Schellenberg when she heard that he was preparing to publish his
memoirs. (It was Schellenberg who had given her the “model hat” assignment.) Vaughan could have done better in providing the context to
the seemingly incomprehensible ease of Chanel’s reintegration into French
fashion and society, telling more, for example, of the widespread desire for forgetting
and moving forward that held sway in Charles de Gaulle's postwar France.
These
weaknesses — of authorial voice and critical judgment — run through “Sleeping
With the Enemy.” Vaughan, a retired diplomat who has made his home in Paris, has allowed his
writing to become a bit too imbued with the reflexive verbal tics and general
vive-la-séduction silliness of his adopted country. “Sometimes the kitten,
sometimes the vamp, and often the vixen, . . . she must have melted Bendor’s
knees” is how he captures Chanel in her 40s; “beautiful and sexy, her
silhouette stunning,” he appraises her in her 50s. (Indeed, his English often
sounds like French — the most cloying sort of breathy French — in translation.)
Despite all he knows about Chanel, Vaughan often appears to be as beguiled,
disarmed and charmed by Coco as were the men in her life — not to mention the
countless women who have sought over the decades to cloak themselves in her
image. And like them, he never gets beyond the self-protecting armor of her
myth.
Judith
Warner, a former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, is the author, most recently, of
“We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”
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BENDOR Duke of Westminster
In 1925, he
was introduced to Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel after a party in Monte Carlo and pursued
her. He was as extravagant with her as he was with all of his lovers. He
purchased a home for Chanel in London's
prestigious Mayfair district, and in 1927 gave
her a parcel of land on the French Riviera at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where
Chanel built her villa, La Pausa. His romantic liaison with Chanel lasted ten
years. An illustration of both Westminster’s extravagance and orchestrated
technique in the courting of women has endured in the form of various
apocryphal stories. He purportedly concealed a huge uncut emerald at the bottom
of a crate of vegetables delivered to Chanel. Disguised as a deliveryman, Westminster appeared at
Chanel’s apartment with an enormous bouquet of flowers. His ruse was only
uncovered after Chanel’s assistant offered “the delivery boy” a tip.
On 16
February 1901, the Duke married Constance Edwina (Shelagh) Cornwallis-West
(1876–1970). They had three children:
Lady Ursula
Mary Olivia Grosvenor (21 February 1902[1] – 1978), married, firstly, William
Patrick Filmer-Sankey in 1924 and was divorced in 1940. She married, secondly,
Major Stephen Vernon in 1940. By her first husband she had two sons, Patrick
(who married the film actress Josephine Griffin)
and Christopher Filmer-Sankey, the younger dying in her lifetime. Her child by
her second husband died young. Lady Ursula's descendants by her first husband
are the sole descendants of the 2nd Duke. They reside in the UK, Australia
and Sweden.
Edward
George Hugh Grosvenor, Earl Grosvenor (1904–1909),[1] who died aged 4, after an
operation for appendicitis.
Lady Mary
Constance Grosvenor (27 June 1910 – 2000).
On 26
November 1920, the Duke became the second husband of Violet Mary Nelson
(1891–1983). They were divorced in 1926.
Westminster married Loelia Mary Ponsonby
(1902–1993) on 20 February 1930. The couple were unable to have children and
divorced in 1947 after several years of separation.
He married
Anne (Nancy)
Winifred Sullivan (1915–2003) on 7 February 1947. She outlived him by fifty
years.
The Duke
was known for multiple love affairs and spectacular presents. After Coco Chanel
he was fascinated by the Brazilian Aimée de Heeren who was not interested to
marry him and to whom he gave significant jewellery, once part of the French
Crown Jewels.
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