Authors: Jim Wilson
As a replacement for the supercharged Phantom, Kruse bought, in September 1928, another exotic ‘Roller’ – a special short chassis ‘Sports Phantom’ tourer, one of only four ever built by Rolls-Royce. This car, with its fabulous looks, complimented by a special paint finish of Curzon blue and enhanced by highly polished aluminium wings, was capable of 90mph. Maybe it is fanciful to think that this car inspired Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but with its stunning appearance it was certainly a car to dream about. However, Kruse was still not satisfied. Four months later he acquired another Phantom I, and later the same year, in an incredible display of the financial resources he was prepared to outlay, he took delivery of a couple of Phantom IIs. At the end of 1930 he laid out further cash on another Rolls-Royce, this time a magnificent Phantom II Continental, perhaps at last the ultimate touring car.
Touring was really his passion. He had little interest in the Monte Carlo Rally, although he had on occasions competed or entered vehicles. His real love was Alpine driving. He was beginning to become disillusioned in his search for a purely British-built, high-performance grand tourer which would fulfil all his demands, and he started to look more and more favourably on Continental manufacturers. The more he experienced driving on the Continent and in the Alps, the more he appreciated the touring performance of some of the finely engineered models being created by Continental builders like Lancia, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz.
For Jack and Annabel Kruse, life in London and at Sunning House was very comfortable. Their wealth, contacts and outgoing personalities made them welcome in the top echelons of society. But Jack’s business increasingly took him into Europe. As a leading director on the board of Rothermere’s Continental version of the
Daily Mail
,
he was travelling extensively, often in company with his wife, and Annabel particularly relished their trips to the south of France. The French Riviera was a playground for the fashionable, sophisticated, moneyed classes from England, as indeed it was for the rich and influential from all over Europe. From the mid-1920s Jack and Annabel were regular visitors to the Côte d’Azur, as was Lord Rothermere. Both the press proprietor and his employee had luxurious villas there.
Rothermere, although estranged from his wife and still devastated by the loss of his two eldest sons in the war, was not averse to the attentions of attractive young women. Indeed, throughout his life he had many lady friends, some of whom were his mistresses. Despite his brusqueness he could be a vivacious companion and a ‘good mixer’, overcoming his inherent shyness. Without doubt Annabel was among those upon whom he lavished attention, and it almost certainly went beyond mere flirting and showering her with expensive gifts. The press baron was a complex character who liked to have familiar faces around him. One of his biographers described him as having a generous nature, although he never believed his own value extended beyond what he could give to another person. More and more the measure of his love became how much he could spend or lavish in presents and hospitality.
7
He was famous for his lavish tips and it was said he employed a member of staff for the sole purpose of giving away money! He had more than enough of it to worry about how to spend it all. By 1926 his fortune was estimated at between £15 and £26 million.
8
Rothermere’s villa in the south of France, La Dragonnière situated at Cap Martin, was relatively small considering his huge fortune. The Kruses were frequent visitors there. The villa had gained its name from a legend which claimed that in the mists of time a terrifying dragon had been slain there. The myth added to the fairytale quality of the place. It stood in 2 acres of orange groves, 200yds from the sea, overlooking Monte Carlo. With the profusion of flowers clustered round its walls, their scents strong in the sunshine, and the sea close by, the place had a romantic atmosphere. It was this spirit that captured Churchill whenever he visited Rothermere there, and inspired him to get out his easel and paint. The press baron was a passionate gambler, and one of his favourite haunts was the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, where the amounts he waged on the tables were legendary.
With Rothermere putting his financial expertise to work, advising his colleague on the investment of his capital, Jack and Annabel were financially secure, comfortably rich enough to make their mark and keep up with the super wealthy. They enjoyed escaping to the playgrounds of the south of France and made many friends in the distinguished company they kept there. Indeed, it was part of Jack Kruse’s job with the European
Daily Mail
to ensure that he had good contacts across Europe. In her book about the Harmsworth brothers,
The Great Outsiders
, S.J. Taylor describes the Kruses as ‘a dazzlingly rich couple that would have been at home amongst the pages of a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald’.
9
And only a work of fiction could have dreamed up the consequences of Annabel’s friendship with a remarkable, manipulative woman who was well known among the influential circles who frequented the luxury hotels, villas and casinos of Monaco. Annabel and Jack had a close friendship with Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst. They saw her frequently in London, Paris and the French Riviera – it was a friendship that would fatally capture Rothermere in a web of intrigue, and eventually take him all the way to Hitler’s inner circle and into the Führer’s confidence.
For large parts of the year, whenever Jack’s commitments in Europe allowed, the Kruses immersed themselves in the high life of the top resorts on the Mediterranean coast. They frequented the casinos, hotels and fashionable bars, and inevitably they attracted to their circle others from all parts of Europe who were drawn to this arena of the rich and famous. Among those exotic personalities was their close friend, a princess of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who had her holiday villa in Biarritz. Only 5ft 5in tall, she possessed a magnetic personality, and her classic Grecian profile, striking Titian hair and beguiling charm engaged and fascinated all who met her. The princess had an intriguing reputation as a femme fatale, a temptress used to being showered with flowers, jewellery, furs and flattery from wealthy suitors who courted her as much for her title as her charismatic personality. She avidly accepted all the gifts that came her way, though some of those who lavished presents on her soon found that while their gifts were welcome, they were not! She was bold, adventurous, manipulative, persuasive, and, though few realised it then, she was potentially dangerous. The princess was a woman who would use her sophisticated charm and her seductive wiles to gain access to those she felt might repay her attention, and if she set her sights on meeting someone and winning them over to her wishes, her strength of character usually ensured she succeeded. She had the reputation of having exploited and rejected a catalogue of suitors, tapping the financial resources of many of them in the process.
In Monaco the princess welcomed warm relations with Annabel, because while they had common interests and enjoyed one another’s company, the princess could see it gave her the ideal opportunity to get close to, and eventually to become acquainted with, the influential and extremely wealthy Lord Rothermere. The princess was skilled in positioning herself to meet and be introduced to those she chose to target. Her contacts book was filled with a cosmopolitan list of people of influence and wealth – entrepreneurs, financiers, politicians, diplomats, statesmen and European aristocracy and royalty. This was a world in which she moved with ease, using her charm, her social skills and inevitably her title to impress and to persuade.
However, Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, to give her the full title bestowed on her when she married into the family of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, was not all she seemed. She had been born in Vienna in September 1891, when that city was the highly civilised and cultured centre of a great empire. But Stephanie was far from being born into the aristocracy. There was no silver spoon in her mouth, no high-level family tree in her background. In fact, she was the illegitimate daughter of Ludmilla Kuranda, a Jewish woman from Prague, who had had an illicit affair with a Jewish money lender by the name of Max Wiener while her real husband was serving a prison sentence for embezzlement.
Stephanie’s Jewish parentage is beyond doubt, although later she contrived to convince the Nazi hierarchy, even Hitler himself, that she was of pure Aryan stock. The princess herself would never admit to Jewish blood. It was her half-sister, the writer Gina Kaus, who provided the evidence. Shortly after his illicit affair with Stephanie’s mother Ludmilla, Wiener married another woman and a second daughter was born; this was Gina. Many years later, Gina confessed that Princess Stephanie was indeed her half-sister, though she added ‘maybe she never knew it’. Gina went on to say that her Jewish father was an unsophisticated man. He had occasionally mentioned his affair with Ludmilla to Gina, and her understanding was that a sum of money probably changed hands when Ludmilla’s husband, released from prison, undertook to accept Stephanie as his own daughter. Gina Kaus was born in Vienna in 1893. She became a successful novelist in the 1930s but the Nazis publicly burned her books together with those of many leading Jewish and anti-Nazi writers. She immigrated to California in 1938. Two of her novels,
The Devil Next Door
and
The Devil in Silk
, became bestsellers in post-war Germany, and in 1956
The Devil in Silk
was turned into a successful film starring Curt Jurgens and Lilli Palmer.
1
Her mother’s actual husband was a lawyer, Hans Richter, a Catholic whose family came from Moravia. Shortly before her marriage to Richter, Stephanie’s mother rejected her own Jewish faith and also became a Catholic. On his release from prison, Richter generously accepted the child as his own. Despite his term in jail, Richter was able to resume his rather lucrative legal practice and continued to earn a good income, certainly sufficient to give his family a comfortable standard of living. Stephanie had a fairly sheltered upbringing in Vienna, growing up as an only and somewhat spoilt child. ‘School,’ she wrote later, ‘was something of a trial because I was a very erratic pupil. Abysmally poor at mathematics, for some reason I excelled at physics. My other strong points were history and P.E.’
2
After completing her schooling in Vienna, her parents sent her for several months to a college in Eastbourne in the south of England, where she became fluent in English and familiar with English customs and manners. In fact, Stephanie had a talent for languages, and by the time she was 21 she spoke several fluently; an asset she exploited fully in the life she embarked upon later. For a time she studied the piano at the Vienna Conservatoire. Her mother had ambitions for her as a concert pianist, but her hands were too small and narrow to allow her to span an octave with ease and it became clear this would prevent her from ever being able to aspire to a professional career in the concert halls of Europe.
Stephanie took little interest in handicrafts or household skills. But she was keen on sports and she excelled at tennis, swimming, riding and especially ice skating. Her prowess at performing graceful waltzes on the ice at the Vienna Skating Club drew many admirers, chiefly from the opposite sex. It seems to have been an early lesson for her that she possessed the ability to capture the interest of men, a talent she repeatedly used to good effect, and frequently to her financial benefit, in the years ahead. While on a summer holiday at the lakeside resort of Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, Stephanie, who was then only aged 14, entered a beauty contest and won. It was the first public recognition of her beauty and poise, and it made a deep impression on her. From then on her confidence and self-belief grew, fostered partly by studying ballet at the dance school attached to the Vienna Court Opera. Years later, in unpublished notes on her life, she claimed that at the age of 15 she set herself a goal – to marry a prince. ‘By the age of sixteen,’ she wrote, ‘I had something of a reputation as a beauty.’
3
So how did this friend of my Great-Aunt Annabel, from fairly lowly, inauspicious beginnings in Vienna, transform herself into a princess of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; admired, known and courted across the capitals of Europe? Stephanie first came into contact with members of the exclusive, aristocratic and at that time highly structured society in Vienna through her stepfather’s law practice. One of his clients was the widowed Princess Franziska von Metternich, a lady Stephanie referred to as ‘The Grande Dame’. The princess took Stephanie under her wing. She made the young girl her protégée and tutored her in etiquette and manners. Stephanie, under the princess’ patronage, learned how to behave in aristocratic circles. ‘I remember her as a grande dame who used to invite me to treats as a little girl and later on to parties and balls where I flirted outrageously with all the eligible young men.’
4
People were enchanted by her smile, her personality and, what counted just as highly in Vienna society, her ability as a horsewoman. The first nobleman to show interest in the teenage Stephanie was the Polish Count Gizycki. As he was old enough to be her grandfather, she unsurprisingly rejected his proposal of marriage.
The death of her stepfather, Hans Richter, left the family in a poor financial state, but, as at other times in her remarkable life, fate dealt her and her mother an ace. Her mother’s brother, Robert Kuranda, whom the family had not heard from for years, arrived back in Austria from South Africa a rich man, having established a lucrative business on the African continent. Finding his family in reduced circumstances in his old home, he made generous provision for his sister and his niece. Stephanie invested her share well. She also astutely made it her business to get close to her mother’s sister, Clothilde. Her aunt had been married briefly to the Vienna correspondent of the London
Times
, and she owned a house in Kensington, London, an apartment in Berlin and a villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee, near Berlin. Clothilde had style and the means to maintain it. She was well known for throwing wonderful parties to which she invited the most famous dancers of the day – prominent ballerinas like the celebrated Anna Pavlova. She also broadened Stephanie’s education by taking her on her travels in Europe to places like Venice, Berlin, Paris, Kiel, Corsica and Prague; widening Stephanie’s knowledge, her fluency in languages and her appreciation of what it meant to move easily in aristocratic society.