The Grit in the Pearl E-Book

Lyndsy Spence

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 447

Beschreibung

The shocking true story behind A Very British Scandal, starring Claire Foy and Paul Bettany Margaret, Duchess of Argyll's life was one of complexity and controversy. Born Ethel Margaret Whigham, the only child of a Scottish self-made millionaire and a beautiful high-society woman, her childhood was rich and splendid – but empty. She was a daddy's girl with an absent father, living with a jealous mother who sought to remind Margaret of her every shortcoming. As she grew up, her name was a byword for class and beauty; she was the debutante of her coming-out year, and her marriage to Charles Sweeny literally stopped traffic. But it was not to last: Margaret needed more. What followed was a story of tragedy, scandal and heartbreak as Margaret swung from lover to lover, society to society. This culminated in her notorious divorce case of 1963, where her soon-to-be-ex-husband produced his pie`ce de résistance: a Polaroid of her in a compromising position with two other men. In The Grit in the Pearl, Lyndsy Spence takes a look at a woman who was ahead of her time. Using previously unpublished sources and personal transcripts, this is the story of a fragile woman who was to come up against the very highest echelons of English high society – and lose.

Leseprobe

First published 2019, 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Lyndsy Spence, 2019, 2020

The right of Lyndsy Spence to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9106 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

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‘She was an absolute demon; knockout green eyes, mesmeric – you could not but stare into her eyes.’

Vanity Fair’s obituary of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Careless People

2 An English Girlhood

3 The Season

4 Fate

5 Mrs Sweeny

6 Idols of Consumption

7 War

8 The Golden Age

9 Crowning Mistake

10 The Duchess

11 Cat and Mouse

12 Slipstream

13 Treachery

14 ‘Here Comes a Brand New Woman’

15 Old Foe

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Although the scandal surrounding Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, occurred half a century ago, it continues to haunt those who were involved. Many people were reluctant to speak of Margaret, hardly surprising given the themes of libel and slander that were common in her life. On that note, I should like to thank those who helped me by sharing their anecdotes of Margaret, candidly and confidentially, for offering an insight into her character, and also to those who granted me permission to reproduce photographs: April Ashley; Janet Bowler at Tiree Historical Centre; Steve Chibnall; Lord Gowrie; John Halsey; Beverley Jackson; Danny Johnson; Colin Jones; Nicholas Maxwell; Keith McIntyre at Scottish Field; David Niven Jr; Michael Thomas; Michael Thornton; Allan Warren; Kim Booth; Julia Camoys Stonor, and Professor Sally Wheeler. I also extend my gratitude to Lady Violet Manners for her early enthusiasm in the project.

1

Careless People

Before Margaret existed, her mother Helen thought babies were a luxury; something to be anticipated, a rarity.1 She waited for seven years before conceiving Margaret, her first and only child, and until the birth harboured a romantic notion of babies. Motherhood, however, was not what Helen had imagined and she thought her child a disappointment. ‘The top was what I was supposed to be,’2 Margaret later wrote. But Helen was intent on exposing Margaret’s shortcomings – instilling insecurity within her and reminding her that, despite her father’s adoration, she was nothing special. The child was a competitor, a usurper in what had become a female-dominated household. Margaret knew her place: ‘There was nothing very dazzling about me. I had no high rank, nor indeed any rank at all. Far from being the possessor of great beauty, my photographs show me to have been rather a plain little girl.’3

She was born Ethel Margaret Whigham on 1 December 1912 at The Broom,4 a house on her maternal grandparents’ 30-acre estate in Newton Mearns, Scotland, 7 miles outside of Glasgow. Then a small village, it smacked of ordinariness, even dreariness; the several big houses and the railways and roads leading to Glasgow and Ayrshire provided employment for the working classes, and the area was popular with the middle classes who commuted to their jobs in the city. Given the lifestyle Margaret was born into, and the woman she was to become, the place of her birth was symbolic of herself; a girl from a family of mixed fortunes who, albeit briefly, rose to one of the highest ranks of the aristocracy.

Margaret’s father, George Hay Whigham, was an industrious man and a self-made millionaire. This ingenuity was perhaps the result of his forefathers’ precarious fortunes, beginning in the twelfth century when they were given the lands of Dundas by King David I of Scotland and ending with his father, David Dundas Whigham, who had lost his inheritance of almost £1 million in the City of Glasgow Bank collapse of 1878.5 Therefore David, who had read law at St Andrew’s University, could not afford to study for the bar and instead entered the wine trade, working for Oliphant and Company of Ayr, and later forming his own wine merchant firm, D.D. Whigham and Fergusson.6 George’s mother Ellen (née Murray-Campbell) came from a rich family who owned the Ayr Racecourse; however, her sister inherited it all and gave it to a dogs’ home to spite her family for the lack of attention they paid her. Thus in 1879 George, the youngest of ten children (six sons7 and four daughters) was born to parents who had known wealth and who, at the time of his birth, were grappling with the economics of raising a large family. Stories of their hardship might have been exaggerated, for the 1881 census listed the Whigham family as living at Dunearn, a spacious cottage, with a parlour maid, a cook, a governess, and a nursery maid. At the age of 17, George left school and worked for 30s a week as an apprentice civil engineer at Forman & McCall, a Glasgow firm which headed the commercial development of western Scotland. Having served his time of five years, George was appointed resident engineer on the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire Railway. He also attended night classes to study accountancy, and, by the age of 25, he was not only a qualified civil engineer but also a chartered accountant. George was tall, dark and handsome; his clever brain saw him ascend the corporate ladder, but it was his looks that caught the attention of society women.

One woman in particular stood out; her name was Helen Marion Hannay, the daughter of Margaret (née Richardson) and Douglas Mann Hannay, a rich cotton merchant. Helen was beautiful, capricious and spoilt; her parents had given her everything she wanted but they were not prepared to let her marry a penniless man. Thus after a conference with Douglas, George was given an ultimatum: he could marry Helen if he were to earn £500 a year,8 a daunting task for any young man. In January 1905 George left for Egypt, determined to earn the figure set, but he must have detoured and travelled to New York, as the Civil Engineer List of 1905 recorded him as working for the Cuban Railroad Company at their offices on Broadway.

Given the privileged circumstances in which George’s parents were born, it came as a surprise when they, too, discouraged marriage between their son and Helen. They doubted a rich man’s daughter could make George happy. And they were also sceptical when George wrote from Khataba, where he was engaged as manager of the Wardan Estate Company, to say he expected an increase in his salary. ‘A little too strongly couleur de rose,’ his mother remarked. Eighteen months later, on 8 August 1905, George and Helen were married, after which she became estranged from her parents and was cut off financially. The couple lived in genteel poverty in Egypt, and Helen recalled those years, childless and living off George’s modest salary, as the happiest of her life.

In the spring of 1912, Helen and George moved to New York, where he was to assist Sir William Van Horne with the design and construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They stayed with George’s brother, Jim, the editor of Town and Country magazine, at the apartment on Park Avenue that he shared with his wife, Frances, and newborn daughter, Sybil. Soon after their arrival, Helen became pregnant, an untimely discovery, as George was planning to leave for Cuba9 to work for the Cuban Railroad, and his scheduled departure would coincide with the latter stages of her pregnancy. Thus Helen had little choice but to return to her parents’ home in Newton Mearns to await the birth of her baby.10 The homecoming was far from the enthusiastic event Helen had anticipated during the lonely, homesick days in New York, confined to her brother-in-law’s apartment while George worked long hours. It soon became apparent that she had come home not to see her parents and restore their relationship, but to take advantage of their hospitality. The Hannays knew they were being used, and they continued to resent Helen for eloping with George, whom they thought not good enough and after the family’s money. Their appraisal was not only snobbish but hypocritical, as for several generations the Hannays had been merchants in Glasgow, and Douglas’s mother Marion (née Paterson Scott) was born in the Gorbals,11 which had a reputation for being a dangerous slum.12

A baby did not signal a new beginning for the two families, and neither did Helen’s gesture of naming her child Ethel Margaret, after her sister and mother, for Margaret Hannay was to remain a distant figure in both her daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives. Perhaps relieving Helen of the conflict surrounding her child’s birth was her superstitious nature,13 as she believed Margaret, born on a Sunday, was destined to be ‘bonnie and blithe, and good and gay’. Six weeks later, on 1 February 1913, Helen and her baby sailed from Liverpool to New York on board the RMS Mauretania.14 As with the dilemma surrounding Margaret’s birth, the place of her childhood was undecided. George remained in Havana, and Helen in New York, though she planned to join him there.15 However, he returned to New York, where he wanted to stay indefinitely, as by then he was a rich man, having merged his interests of engineering and accountancy.16 It was in America that Margaret’s childhood began, and a part of Helen’s life ended.

*

The first home Margaret would recall was a fourteenth-floor duplex apartment at 1155 Park Avenue, Carnegie Hill, named after the mansion Andrew Carnegie had built on 5th Avenue and 91st Street. The opposite of the sleepy life led at Newton Mearns, of riding and hunting, and the grey industrial sprawl of Glasgow, this American city suited Helen and George’s temperaments: cold, ambitious, modern. Its aesthetic was forever changing, adapting to trends rather than tradition; in 1913, the Armory Exhibition opened, puzzling aesthetes accustomed to the fanciful art from La Belle Époque, with its abstract nude paintings and Cubist Surrealist styles. Unlike British society, a lack of title or high birth did not limit the Whighams’ social standing in Manhattan, and George’s money opened doors that would have otherwise remained closed. They were listed in the Social Register – it was not quite Burke’s Peerage but it carried a certain exclusivity for those who were rich and, preferably, ‘WASP’ (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

During those early years in New York, in the shadow of the First World War, Margaret had become Americanised; she spoke with an American accent – although Helen would attempt to rid her of this – and she played in Central Park. Her earliest memory of the city was not of its tall buildings, dominated by the Woolworth Tower (the Chrysler and Empire State buildings were yet to be constructed), and the wide tree-lined avenues of the Upper East Side, but of the deafening noise. Night after night Margaret lay awake in her brass bed, listening to ships’ horns as they navigated the Hudson and East rivers, the haunting sound evoking thoughts of dying and death. This morbid curiosity with death and the sorrowful thoughts Margaret had did not strike her as strange. She was never sheltered from the adult world of her parents, and although only 2 years old when war was declared, she became a spectator to the effect it had on them, her father in particular. It forced George and Helen to decide whether or not they would remain in New York rather than uproot Margaret and return to Scotland; the latter, George felt, was in the best interests of his own patriotism. His brother, Walter, had gone to France with the 51st Highland Division and was gassed at Ypres and invalided out. During this period, his brother Jim was writing and editing Metropolitan Magazine, a left-leaning publication17 accused by highbrow writers of having no standards, and he used his articles to promote the message of war and to convince Americans to join the cause. An article entitled ‘Is America Honest?’ prompted a response from President Woodrow Wilson, and he attempted to suppress Jim’s journalism under the Espionage Act. Margaret, as young as she was, recalled the excitement that a world war brought; she listened to ‘Over There’, a patriotic song played on her parents’ phonograph, its rousing lyrics warning of the ‘Yanks’ taking up arms. Finally, after much deliberation, Helen and George decided to remain in New York, and he was relieved when his adopted country entered the war on 6 April 1917, even if he did not enlist to fight, as the idea of living in peace while his countrymen died inspired feelings of guilt.

Throughout Margaret’s childhood, she was a loner, though she preferred the term independent. The latter could hardly sum up her abilities, for she was never taught to fend for herself – all her life she could not boil a kettle, prepare a basic meal, and she never made her own bed. But she was solitary, and this isolation nurtured a stubborn and rebellious character. This streak of rebellion was apparent early on, when at the age of 2 she chose her own name, insisting on being known as Margaret instead of Ethel, despite its origins as an Old English word for noble. She achieved what she had wanted, and perhaps Helen thought the name Margaret (Greek for ‘pearl’) the nicer of the two, for ‘Ethel … must have been chosen in a moment of madness’. She had no friends, for she disliked other children; they touched her toys and made a mess of the nursery. She liked things to be neat, orderly. This transferred on to her clothes, and from a young age she was drawn to pretty dresses; her childhood ambition was to wear a pair of high-heeled shoes and Helen’s taffeta petticoat. She was particularly fond of a trio of teddy bears (she disliked dolls), and they had their own knitted clothes and sets of bedroom furniture.

There was nothing unusual about Margaret’s childish fixation with the bears, whose fur was bald from her kisses, but it established a love for inanimate objects, placing far greater importance on material things. On one occasion, when the family was setting sail for England, Margaret insisted the bears come too, along with trunks of their clothes and their pram. George put his foot down and refused to bow to Margaret’s demands concerning the bears. ‘If my teddies don’t go, then neither do I,’ she told her father, and he relented when faced with a tantrum on the gangplank. It was a universal response from a spoilt child, but the lesson was greater: Margaret had won. The only rule imposed on Margaret was punctuality, especially at meal times. If she were late she would be criticised for being inconsiderate not only to her parents but also to the servants, who were, as Helen said, of far greater importance to the household than she was.

Margaret’s identity as her parents’ only child was so strong that she dreaded the intrusion of a sibling, and as punishment, Helen often threatened her with a brother or sister. Those words, although frivolous, had a devastating impact on Margaret, and she grew more possessive of the world she inhabited between the walls of 1155 Park Avenue. Helen was outspoken and possessed a critical eye which caught the minutest of details, and Margaret came to dread her mother’s candour. ‘Nothing was sacred,’ Margaret later said. ‘Rome would be dismissed as very cold and a boring pile of old stones.’ The atmosphere within the household was dependent on Helen’s moods, and Margaret entered her mother’s bedroom each morning to greet her, not knowing if she would be ‘bright and loving’ or ‘complaining and bad-tempered’. If Helen had a difficult night, Margaret and the servants were expected to be quiet, and if she awoke in a pleasant frame of mind, they knew her mood could change in an instant.

Many dismissed Helen as emotionally unstable. However, Margaret thought her ‘fey’, as Helen could be whimsical and at times was ‘easily impressed by anyone or anything’ – a contrast to the hardness she applied to motherhood. A jealous streak ran through Helen, the result of having sacrificed so much to marry George, and despite the happiness she felt in Egypt during those first years of marriage, the arrival of Margaret changed their dynamic and she was no longer the star of his life. As with her toys, Margaret did not wish to share her father, and he did not discourage her possessiveness. The love and devotion he gave to Margaret were gradually taken from Helen, and Margaret herself did not think her mother deserving of it. George appeared to exist only for Margaret, his prized possession, and Helen felt excluded from their private world. ‘I absorbed a great deal from being with grown-ups. That’s how I learnt,’ Margaret recalled. ‘I heard them talking and I used to listen quite hard.’18 It did not help Helen’s plight when George taught Margaret how to argue without raising her voice, a concept foreign to her, for her chief emotions ran the gamut of moody silences to hysterical outrage. Margaret thought her father reliable and kind; he rarely lost his temper, but when he did it was wicked and volatile, though never directed at her.

As Margaret grew older Helen sought to improve her physical appearance – ‘She always wanted me to look my prettiest’ – and aged 6 she was given a permanent wave, as Helen disliked her straight hair. This obsession with Margaret’s looks was enforced early on, as Helen, considered the ‘ugly duckling’ of the Hannay family, never felt attractive compared to her brother and sister, who were both praised for their good looks and athletic abilities. And Margaret became, by her own admission, ‘a self-confessed vain little girl’. Helen’s fixation with Margaret’s outward appearance satisfied her sense of control, but she was frustrated that her child spoke with a stammer which had developed after Margaret was forced to write with her right hand instead of her left. As with most things, Helen thought it curable, and she consulted a specialist who suggested immobilising Margaret’s right arm, therefore forcing her to resume writing with her left hand. For unknown reasons it was never attempted, perhaps thought of as a gimmick by the Whighams despite being a popular treatment.19 The market for peddling goods and cures to those with speech impediments was filled with empty promises and fraudulent practices. Booklets released in 1917, the year in which Margaret began treatment for her stammer, ranged from Straight Talking Stammerers to a correspondence course between the stammerer and a speech therapist. As with any abnormality in speech (widely thought of as a ‘masculine weakness’,20 or a flaw in Margaret’s character) it was the topic of much shame (often referred to as a ‘handicap’) and was a popular theme of entertainment among music-hall performers and comedians. In the light of the First World War, and with stammering being a chief affliction in those suffering from shell shock, a warning was issued in the press: ‘Those who entertain wounded soldiers should be careful to avoid certain forms of entertainment which are regarded in ordinary circles as harmless and mirthful.’21

Margaret was taken to London and placed under the care of Lionel Logue, a speech therapist in Harley Street who, although he had no formal training,22 would later treat King George VI. The sessions were unsuccessful, and the reason behind this is unclear, but owing to Margaret’s reputation of ‘never [appreciating] the true value of anything in life’,23 it can be assumed she did not apply herself to Logue’s exercises. The doctor who almost cured her was Sir John Weir, the Physician Royal to four British monarchs who, at the time of Margaret’s treatment, had recently become interested in homeopathy. She went to see him at the London Homeopathic Hospital, where he was a consultant physician, and he prescribed her two types of white powder, to be taken twice daily.24 The medical world remained unconvinced of his remedy, and George and Helen thought they were placebos. But Margaret claimed it worked and her stammer did improve. However, Sir John changed the powders without telling her, and her stammer became worse. She then decided to give up on finding a cure and accepted that she was a stammerer. Helen, though, was far from understanding and her only response was impatience.

Not only did Margaret have a speech impediment, but Helen also thought she lacked a sense of humour. A psychiatrist was consulted and it was suggested Margaret be taken to the cinema to watch Charlie Chaplin comedies while her parents observed her small, unsmiling face. Books were her preferred recreation, though Helen worried that the strain on Margaret’s eyes was too great and she would have to wear spectacles if her reading habit continued. The latter would be another physical flaw,25 from Helen’s point of view, and Margaret’s reading time was rationed, which, to her, was the ‘worst punishment’. From Helen’s perspective the ‘worst punishment’ might have been having a child with whom she shared so little in common. It was said that Helen liked to laugh at herself and others, using humour to emphasise her own and other people’s shortcomings. Margaret credited her mother with being witty – even if she did not find her jokes funny – and thought it a cruel and intimidating character trait. For Helen, whose relationship with her parents made her something of an outcast within the Hannay family and who was often ignored by her husband, this non-existent familiarity with Margaret must have inspired a lack of maternal warmth and enforced the emotional distance between them.

Whether or not Helen attempted to bond with Margaret remains unclear, though for the first six and a half years she cared for her child herself26 before going to London in 1919 and hiring a governess, a Miss Jean Scott,27 to accompany her back to New York. Miss Scott would remain with Margaret until she was old enough to attend a suitable day school; she was briefly enrolled in the Brearley School and was withdrawn as the curriculum was too challenging. In many ways the Whigham household was a solitary world, with the exception of a nurse28 for Margaret during her babyhood and a maid for Helen,29 who was accustomed to staff as before she married she had a nanny, a governess30 and a lady’s maid who had been engaged to care for her clothes. The census for this period listed George, Helen and Margaret as travelling often without any mention of servants – although living in hotel suites for months at a time while they were in England and Europe put staff at their disposal.

It was during a trip to London in 1920 and staying at the Ritz Hotel for the summer that Helen interviewed potential nannies, as English nannies in American households carried a certain cachet.31 Margaret hid behind a curtain, watching the women come and go, until Miss Winifred Randall entered the room and she was immediately charmed by her sweet face, blue eyes, and youth. ‘She’s the one, mummy,’ Margaret cried, ‘please take her.’ Miss Randall would become Margaret’s friend, confidante, and mother figure; ‘I felt that at least I had a real friend who understood me and upon whom I could depend.’32

During the summer of 1920, George left his family in London and returned to New York to investigate a new process, invented by the Dreyfuss brothers, for producing artificial fibres. The brothers, who began working from their father’s shed in their native Switzerland, first attracted attention for inventing cellulose acetate, which became a staple in the motion-picture and photography industries, and the product was later sold to the expanding aircraft industry. Within a few years they turned their scientific research to refining viscose-acetate, a form of artificial silk, which came out of a tube. George realised the potential for the product within the garment industry, and after several meetings, he sensed that the Dreyfusses were not businessmen and later extracted the Swiss patent at the cost of their original work, from which he profited. Over the next six years, George gambled his money on the product, by then named Celanese, and appointed himself as president of the Celanese Corporations of Britain, America and Canada. He earned millions overnight when its shares on the stock market increased from 6s to £6.

The arrival of Miss Randall and George’s interest in the Celanese Corporation changed the dynamic within the Whigham household. Helen became jealous and irritable, feelings that were provoked by Margaret’s love for Miss Randall and George’s devotion to his new business venture, which saw him neglect her more than before. There were times Margaret feared Miss Randall would pack her bags and leave, particularly when Helen’s mood became too much to bear and she had to act as a buffer between mother and daughter. Margaret’s only escape was Miss Robinson’s dance class at the Plaza Hotel, where, at the age of 10, she met her first boyfriend, Bruce Bossom. They played the Ouija board for fun, asking the mystical device if they would marry; Ouija said ‘yes’, but when Margaret danced with another boy, Bruce struck him and knocked out two of his teeth.

Regardless of this false start, Margaret learned to enjoy the company of children. As a birthday treat, she was permitted to invite her friends to the New Amsterdam theatre to see Sally, a Broadway musical starring Marilyn Miller. Sitting in a private box, she was transfixed by the golden-haired Miller, dressed in a diamond-studded gown and singing ‘Look for the Silver Lining’, and she elbowed her friends out of the way for a better view. Helen brought Margaret down to earth when she told her Miller’s hair was dyed, then a scandalous thing for a woman to do, and perhaps a nod to her lowly origins as a chorus girl and reputation for being ‘a foul-mouthed harridan’.33 As well as her friends at her dance class, Margaret also befriended a young girl with blonde hair, dark eyes and a mournful expression. Her name was Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, whose mother Edna Woolworth Hutton had recently died under strange circumstances; she was believed to have suffocated due to mastoiditis, but rumours persisted that she committed suicide by jumping from the window of her suite at the Plaza Hotel. Miss Randall thought Barbara a peculiar little girl – following the death of Edna (whose body she had discovered), she lived with her grandfather Frank Winfield Woolworth at his mansion on Long Island, and after his death in 1919 she would live at a series of boarding schools – and not a good influence on Margaret. The attempt to discourage Margaret from forming a friendship with Barbara was to be in vain, for she was drawn to her pathos. Both were lonely children, the product of troubled mothers, and conditioned to believe that money made everything better.

Friends, however, could not distract Margaret from the tension at home. It had become clear to Helen that George was having affairs with several women, prompting screaming rows, and there was no attempt to conceal their fighting from Margaret, who had become highly strung and sensitive, and as a result, her stammer grew worse. After a particularly volatile fight during a holiday in St Moritz, Helen packed her things and left with Margaret. Aside from wanting to protect Margaret from any hint of scandal, Helen must have known that taking her away would punish George. It appeared to work, for he went after Helen and brought her and Margaret home, though his promise to remain faithful was an empty one for he continued his extramarital affairs, and in 1924 he was listed as corespondent in a divorce case.34 The frustration Helen felt from George’s philandering and by Margaret’s hero worship of him must have inspired a deeper feeling of bitterness and resentment. Margaret accused her mother of being ‘very selfish’, and George thought his wife difficult; but neither considered Helen’s stance as being that of self-preservation. Either way, it must have prompted her latest remark to Margaret, which occurred around this period. ‘No matter how pretty you are, Margaret,’ Helen said, ‘and however many lovely clothes we give you, you will get nowhere in life if you stammer.’35

By then Margaret was attending the Hewitt School, founded by Miss Caroline D. Hewitt, an Englishwoman who had worked as a governess for a prominent New York family and taught private classes in a townhouse on the Upper East Side. In 1923 Miss Hewitt opened an exclusive day school for girls at 68 East 79th Street, a venture that was partly funded by George. In spite of George’s faults as a husband he was determined that Margaret would be offered the chances he did not have, and that she would want for nothing. He told her of the early experiences which shaped his outlook and parenting approach; the shame of being sent to boarding school wearing his elder sister’s hand-medown boots, and of his father’s wedding present to his new wife: material for her to make curtains for their bedroom.

As Helen had not received a formal education36 she failed to match George’s enthusiasm for the Hewitt School, and according to Margaret she was ‘almost illiterate’.37 What Helen missed in academia she made up for with her shrewd brain for business and her perceptiveness of people, something both George and Margaret lacked and they were therefore dismissed by her as gullible. ‘Don’t touch him. I don’t like him. He’s a crook,’38 Helen would say when George consulted her on a business deal. She also had a talent for encouraging people to confide in her, which she used against them or to promote George’s business interests, and she was credited with helping to build his empire. Perhaps this justified Helen’s flippancy toward Margaret and the reason for dismissing her due to her speech impediment and lack of a sense of humour. ‘I can’t bear you when you’re not amusing,’39 might have summed up Helen’s approach to the female sex. She felt proud when Margaret was praised for her appearance, as her looks and how she dressed were something which Helen controlled. As for everything else, Helen simply could not muster the energy to make an effort to understand her daughter.

Despite Margaret’s nervous temperament and the personality flaws which Helen pointed out, her academic career showed promise; she had won the first prize two years running for her albums on exotic subjects, such as Egyptian and Greek history. The albums, accompanied by essays, were illustrated with clippings from newspapers and magazines. Determined to win the first prize for a third year, Margaret chose to make an album on medieval history. She went to the school library and selected a leather-bound book on the subject, and carefully snipped the illustrations and pasted them into her jotter. The result was not what Margaret had anticipated and, summoned to Miss Hewitt’s office, she was greeted by Helen, who sat stony-faced. Not only had Margaret cheated but she had committed vandalism: the book was a rare edition and irreplaceable. As with most things in her young life she failed to grasp the severity of her actions, and with a shrug, she said: ‘Ça va.’ When they returned home, Helen locked herself away in her bedroom, unable to look at Margaret or address the shameful act her daughter had committed. After several days of ignoring her, Helen re-emerged and set sail for Europe.

*

The beginning of the 1920s coincided with Margaret’s adolescence; it was the era of Prohibition and the sale of alcohol was forbidden in America. This inspired an underworld of organised crime, and American cities became overrun with bootleggers who smuggled alcohol from Canada and the West Indies. There were substitutes: bathtub gin, moonshine, far more lethal than the real thing, and speakeasies run by gangsters, which were illegal drinking dens disguised in hidden rooms and often raided by police. There was Chumley’s on Bedford Street, the Stork Club on 58th Street (later 53rd Street) and the Cotton Club in Harlem, popular with writers, actors, and high society alumni.

The speed at which society was changing troubled Helen, and she voiced her disapproval at the scenes unfolding at smart parties. Her rung of society was being infiltrated by gangsters who had become rich overnight, and it was a familiar sight to see debutantes passed out drunk in cloakrooms. She used it as an excuse to leave New York, appealing to George’s sensibilities regarding Margaret and how she was at an impressionable age. Things were not much better in London; drugs were rife among high society and on the nightclub scene, and while gangsters largely supplied alcohol in Prohibition America, in London drug dealers came in the guises of waiters and hostesses. The most prominent, Brilliant Chang, known as Billy to his clients, ran a Chinese restaurant and employed a number of drug dealers before his deportation in 1926,40 and another dealer, a Jamaican named Eddie Mann, was referred to as ‘the most wicked man in London’. However, when Margaret was of age to partake in the nightclub scene, the popularity of cocaine, known as ‘snow’, had declined.

Given the bad influences which existed in both New York and London, perhaps Helen’s wanting to leave was due to George and a new generation of American women known as flappers who, in terms of their loose morals and pleasure-seeking ways, were the biggest temptation of all. Whatever Helen’s motives were, she achieved her own way. On a summer’s day in 1926, the Whighams sailed to England, and Margaret watched as the skyline that had been her home for almost fourteen years slipped out of sight.

2

An English Girlhood

Margaret was 13 years old when she came to live in England. By then she had crossed the Atlantic fourteen times, an underwhelming experience for a child so worldly, and she dismissed ocean liners as the equivalent of taking a train to Glasgow: ‘It was absolute peanuts’. The Whighams had left Prohibition behind in New York, and in London the twenties were beginning to roar. It was a summer of political upheaval; their arrival coincided with the General Strike of 1926, in which the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called a strike to force the British Government to prevent the reduction of wages and worsening conditions for coal miners. For nine days London came to a halt: trains and buses were driven by undergraduates, society women operated telephone switchboards, and debutantes ran canteens for strike-breaking lorry drivers. It is doubtful the Whighams felt the fallout between the TUC and the government, but, as in New York, change was in the air.

The family moved into a house on Charles Street, Mayfair, which George planned to lease until he found a permanent address. As Margaret had known from her summer holidays in London, the social season began in May and reached its peak in June and July, with the smart set departing for the Continent in August. She was too young to partake in this rite of passage for girls from her background, but her parents still wanted to adhere to the traditions of the British upper classes, which would be a steppingstone for when Margaret came of age. She was therefore enrolled in Miss Wolff’s classes, which catered to girls from wealthy families, and her classmates included Cecil Beaton’s sisters, Nancy and Baba; and Lord Birkenhead’s daughter, Pamela Smith. The establishment, founded by Helen Wolff and her brother, occupied two upper floors on South Audley Street, off Park Lane, above a saddler’s shop. Miss Wolff, an eccentric who carried lorgnettes to hone in on her girls, had a ‘tongue as sharp as her nose’, and despite being an ‘excellent, though exacting, teacher’ she was ‘impatient of slowness and a little too openly delighted with originality’.1 Although the establishment was considered a finishing school for young ladies, the curriculum was formal: English, mathematics, geography, art, languages, and elocution. The girls were unruly, and Pamela Smith disrupted lessons by asking to go to the lavatory every half an hour; each time, she spent twenty minutes sliding down the bannisters. In her memoirs, Margaret wrote that she was ‘very happy’ during her term at the school, even if she did not shine as a pupil. She excelled, however, at dance lessons with Madame Vacani, who was London’s most prominent dancing teacher in those days – her future pupils included Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and a young Elizabeth Taylor. There, Margaret was taught ballroom dancing (her favourite) and social etiquette. In 1929 she performed in Miss Vacani’s matinee at the London Pavilion, in a segment entitled ‘lawn tennis girls of the 1880s’, and the photograph appeared in The Sketch.

After a period of living in London George moved his family to Ascot, a stark contrast to the hustle and bustle Margaret was accustomed to. ‘They tried to keep me out of London,’ Margaret recalled, though George’s favourite pastime of golf was his main reason for leaving. He bought Queen’s Hill, a mansion surrounded by 30 acres of land, overlooking the Ascot racecourse and within close proximity to the golf course. There, George played the part of a landed gentleman, perhaps hoping to emulate the aristocratic families Margaret would become acquainted with, or so Helen had hoped. Rich as he was, his money was not an attractive feature on the social scene: extreme wealth – or rather, overt displays of wealth – was deemed ‘New York-ish, ill-mannered, and ill-bred’.2 It could open doors for Margaret; it afforded her world travel, reservations at the finest establishments, fashionable clothes (‘it went without saying that well-dressed children had common mothers’),3 but it would not endear the Whigham family to what the British considered ‘old money’. However, working in Margaret’s favour was the shift in social sensibilities, which had changed after the First World War. It was the era of the Bright Young Things, and class barriers were becoming ambiguous, often for shock value: royalty mixed with film stars, and actresses married aristocrats. And so, while George’s own generation looked down on his vast wealth and self-made origins, Margaret was being launched into an entirely different sphere.

By this time Margaret’s personality was firmly established. She respected nobody except her parents, a stance that was enforced by George and Helen, who expressed little to no regard for authority – ironic, as George’s paternal grandfather was a Justice of the Peace. From George’s perspective the term ‘no’ did not exist and Margaret decided that she, too, would trample over such restrictions. In Margaret’s world, anything could be bought, most things were replaceable, and everything was taken for granted. As she grew older, and when the excuse of immaturity could no longer be applied, she was accused of being rude (years later she befriended J. Paul Getty and told him he was a bad father), deceitful, and lacking a moral compass. Such things were learned in the nursery, for the fundamental traits of Margaret’s character were always there: a lack of a sense of humour, her cheating at the Hewitt School, the hold she had over her father, and the affection she inspired in Miss Randall. She also harboured a phobia of becoming bored – surely all the money in the world could not keep her occupied – and cynicism has the ability to dim even the brightest of jewels.

In an attempt to cure Margaret’s boredom in the countryside and to answer her whims, George bought her three puppies. She loved the dogs, and all her life she had a passion for animals and was kind to them. ‘I wondered sometimes,’ her friend Brodrick Haldane wrote, ‘if she ever trusted or truly loved anybody other than her father and her dogs.’4 Helen thought them a nuisance and forbade the dogs to bark when she was taking her afternoon nap, which Margaret thought an impossible demand. ‘So I used to practically sit on them while she was having this nap,’ she recalled.5 Appealing to her father to go against Helen and side with the dogs did not work and he advised Margaret to comply with her mother’s wishes, as it would mean an easier life for them all. Their new surroundings meant mother and daughter were in one another’s company, albeit in a large house, for long periods throughout the day. There were few distractions on their doorstep, unlike in London and New York. And, realising she could not reason with Helen, Margaret began to write letters to her, which she showed to George when he came home from the office. He read the letters and told Margaret to wait three days before sending them, and she knew her attempts to argue with Helen using the written word would only intensify her moods. The letters remained unsent and Margaret’s resentment unresolved.

Margaret could have been forgiven for being self-centred and unsympathetic toward her mother. Not only did her youth allow for such churlishness, but it was Helen’s decision which had uprooted her from New York and then London. There is no evidence to suggest Helen was a social being; sometimes she attended parties, but she preferred to remain at home and in bed. Her mood swings might explain why she experienced periods of solitude, and she seemed to lack a circle of female friends. There was to be no companionship with her daughter, not even as Margaret grew older, and she was tormented by the fact that her husband was seeing other women. Divorce meant social exclusion, but it would have been impossible for Helen to obtain one even if she wanted to, as until 1937 women could not divorce their husbands on the grounds of their infidelity, and only a man could use such evidence against his wife. Therefore Helen would have needed a viable reason such as bigamy, incest, sodomy or cruelty, and none of those applied to George. But if divorce had been an option for Helen it would have threatened to diminish her life. She had given up so much for him and her stubborn nature would not admit defeat, and alimony was not the same as having access to his millions – which she had helped him make – and it would have blighted Margaret’s chances in society. The latter was a rare motherly gesture on Helen’s part, but still a small element in a list of reasons not to divorce him. ‘My life is so hard to live and such an empty place,’6 could have easily described Helen’s existence. However the gift of hindsight was a useful tool, and as with Margaret, Helen’s behaviour did not inspire affection or understanding in others. She was simply her own worst enemy.

Meanwhile, Margaret remained in an emotional limbo between childhood and adolescence. Her appearance was that of an older girl, with her permanent-waved hair and sophisticated clothes, but she continued to dote on the teddy bears from her youth. Then one day she forgot to bring the bears inside and they spent an evening on the lawn, and were discovered the next morning soaked with dew and completely destroyed. This, Margaret would recall, signalled the end of her childhood. Helen must have thought so too, for she approached Margaret and ‘did the awful thing’ of telling her about sex. Margaret could not fathom why her mother had done this, and she did not want to hear about it.7 ‘It’s this awful thing we women have to put up with. We close our eyes and bear it,’ Helen said.8 As she had done with her warning about Margaret’s stammer (‘you will get nowhere in life …’), there was a motive behind Helen’s information. Was she trying to make Margaret understand the sacrifices she made for her, that she merely put up with this side of married life to ensure they had nice things? Or was it a ruse to change Margaret’s perception of her father, in that he would enforce something so ‘awful’ on to Helen? Either way, the information troubled Margaret and it would remain with her for a long time.

During this period the Whighams thought Margaret was growing up too fast, and to remedy this they took her away from Ascot and London for fresh air in the German countryside. George and Helen took the cure at Baden Baden, a popular destination for the rich and famous who sought to restore their health and fix their ailments at the many spa hotels and sanatoriums. It marked a period of Helen and George taking ‘pleasure and health’ trips, and as the years progressed Helen opted for warmer climates. ‘I was told it would be sweltering in Perth,’ Helen said of an Australian jaunt.9 ‘I am chasing the sun, and the more heat-waves I encounter during my visit the more I will like it.’10 While her parents were taking their exercise and drinking the prescribed tonics, Margaret took solitary walks in the Black Forest before breakfast and in the afternoons she joined her parents for sightseeing excursions. Sometimes George would take her to the opera, as they both loved music, and Helen would remain behind at the hotel. On another occasion, Margaret recalled motoring to Nuremberg, where a large crowd forced the car to stop, allowing her to catch a glimpse of Adolf Hitler as he delivered a speech at one of his first rallies.

They also frequented the Alpine resort town of St Moritz and took lodgings at Suvretta House, an hotel half an hour away, hoping it would keep Margaret away from the tea dances and gala evenings at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, then a popular place to be. But Margaret was far more resourceful than Helen and George gave her credit for, and she slipped away to the Palace Hotel to enjoy sophisticated evenings with the smart set. Her defiance remained unchallenged and George decided it would be best to relocate to the Palace, so Margaret could enjoy herself under their watchful gaze. Her mornings were spent learning to ski and during her lessons she was not short of admirers who volunteered to teach her: Gene Tunney, a former heavyweight boxing champion; Viscount Carlow; the Marquis of Donegall; and Bobby Cunnigham-Reid.

However, Margaret’s skiing lessons were soon abandoned in favour of the Corviglia ski club and the company of young Argentine men. She found them more sophisticated than English boys, and they taught her to tango, then a shocking dance owing to its lowly origins in Buenos Aries and its reputation as ‘the mating dance’. Years later, she said, ‘Everybody danced – and fast, there was no shuffling about.’11 Her talent as a dancer was admired by Billy Reardon, the former partner of dancing star Irene Castle, and who had taken the job of concierge and greeter at the Palace Hotel. He asked Margaret to partner with him for an exhibition waltz at the Cresta Ball, the biggest social event of the St Moritz season. For Margaret, who remained spellbound by musicals since that first glimpse of Marilyn Miller on Broadway, there could only be one answer: yes. So confident in her ability as a dancer was she that Margaret agreed without consulting Helen first, and despite her mother’s natural pessimism, she was surprised when Helen agreed she could do it. There was to be one rule: Margaret had to wear bloomers with elasticated legs underneath her tulle yellow dress, to preserve her modesty while Reardon swung her around the dance floor. It was her first experience of applause and she begged Reardon to do an encore, but he refused. She was given a pair of silver birds as a memento of her brief period as a dancing star.

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The arrival of September was bittersweet, as it removed Margaret from close proximity to Helen, which must have been a relief, and she was placed at Heathfield School. George continued his quest of turning Margaret into a well-educated young woman, but she was no longer interested in school. It would be ambitious to excuse this lack of interest as a result of her being reprimanded at the Hewitt School, for the incident did not pique her conscience at all, and unless there were prizes to be won, what was the point in applying herself academically? English schools were stricter than the liberal and artistic approaches of their American counterparts, and Margaret could not see the benefits of learning mathematics or science, or even partaking in games. Helen most certainly would not have approved of the latter, and it is difficult to imagine the young Margaret, dressed in her gym clothes, playing hockey and doing star jumps on the school lawn. Her poor performance in cricket and lacrosse meant she could never become a prefect or win the Lily Badge, the highest academic honour at Heathfield.

The gung-ho atmosphere failed to impress Margaret and she did not want to take part in the school’s ethos, promoted by its founder Miss Eleanor Wyatt, of female camaraderie – the school had founded the Scouts Patrol, a decade before the Boy Scouts began – and of teaching the girls ‘to see the sky’. Margaret did not view the school as encouraging but, rather, as a controlling menace in her young life. The building was shabby, a complete contrast to the luxurious setting of the Hewitt School, and the classrooms were heated by a singular tepid radiator, in front of which only the prefects were allowed to sit.12 And the religious Miss Wyatt, to whom the girls were devoted,13 wore a long black veil knotted on top of her head so she could visit the school chapel at any time. Hoping to enforce a similar pious outlook within the pupils, Miss Wyatt ordered them to attend prayers twice daily, for which they wore starched caps that were otherwise kept in wooden cigar boxes.14

The girls, many of whom were boarders, were content to follow the rules, but Margaret could not understand their conforming to a lack of privacy, scheduled baths and being told when they could wash their hair. The latter irritated her, even though it caused her no inconvenience. Her rebellion signalled her as an outsider and troublemaker, and, unlike at the Hewitt School, she had no friends at Heathfield. ‘I don’t like women in a mass,’ she said. She was brought to and from school in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, and the lack of friendliness she felt was due to her being far more sophisticated than the others. For reasons unknown, it had been previously agreed upon that Margaret could attend lessons only until lunchtime; however, this soon upset the morale of the school and the other girls felt she was being given an unfair advantage. As the car drove away, she shouted: ‘Bye-bye girls! Enjoy your hockey and your lacrosse. I’m off to a matinee in London.’15 This continued for two months until the Whighams were delivered an ultimatum: either Margaret would remain at the school as a boarder, or she would have to leave. She left and was taught at home by an elderly governess. ‘I learned more in two weeks than I had in months at Heathfield,’ Margaret later wrote.

There would be no more teddy bears and no more school. Margaret turned her attention to boys, a pastime encouraged by George, who thought her friendship with the opposite sex was harmless. He often drove his Rolls-Royce to Eton to fetch a few good-looking boys for Margaret’s tennis parties, despite Ascot being out of bounds to Etonians: they hid under a rug until they were out of sight. Among the small coterie of boys were Hamish St Clair Erskine, the son of the Earl of Roslyn; Desmond Parsons, brother of the Earl of Rosse; and Alistair and David Innes-Ker, the Duke of Roxburghe’s nephews. The young men, with the exception of the Innes-Ker brothers, were homosexual and were keeping company with pretty girls (Diana ‘Dinnie’ Skeffington, and Nancy and Diana Mitford were among the favourites of Hamish and Desmond).

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It was another boy, David ‘Winkie’ Brooks, the troubled nephew of Nancy Viscountess Astor, who caught Margaret’s eye. Aged 17 to her 14, he was an alcoholic and had begun to attract negative attention due to his louche behaviour. Years later, in 1936, with his debts mounting and inability to hold down a job, he jumped to his death from a hotel window in New York. It was Winkie’s devil-may-care outlook, though concealed from the Whighams, that attracted Margaret and she began to accept his social invitations. They went to London to see West End plays, and were chaperoned by Winkie’s young aunt, Nora Phipps, whom Margaret thought ‘more fun than the rest of us put together’.16 It became clear to the youngsters that Nora was not ‘fit to send anyone of Winkie’s age out with’,17