Authors: Frances Osborne
It was almost inevitable that, at some point in their wide-ranging
sexual careers, Idina and Tom should sleep together. In any case, Idina owed little to Cimmie.
On Saturday, 26 May 1928, Idina drove down to the Mosleys’ for the extended bank holiday weekend of Saturday to Tuesday. The need for discretion had subsided. Divorce had become common and some marriages, such as that of Tom and Cimmie, even seemed to have found a certain strength in their open acceptance of sexual infidelity—if adultery wasn’t treated as serious, it somehow remained not serious.
Even though Idina had already found a new admirer, she was not yet confident enough to turn up alone. She also knew that, given Tom’s reputation, it was unlikely that she would be the only flirtation he had lined up for the weekend. She arrived with Ivan Hay, Joss’s uncle.
One of Idina’s rivals who was slinking into Tom’s sight lines was the twenty-three-year-old Georgia Sitwell, wife of the writer Sacheverell Sitwell and now sister-in-law to the writers Edith and Osbert. Inspired by the literary circles into which she had married, Georgia kept a detailed and opinion-rich diary. When she arrived at Savehay that Saturday afternoon to discover Idina, her hackles rose: “Lady E [Idina was now Lady Erroll
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] has been married 4 [sic] times and is reputed to have had lovers without number … a fair heavily made-up face covered with blue-white powder, chic, empty; dissipated, hungry-looking spoilt and vicious. She has dyed hair and no chin but with all looks like a pretty chicken, the same colour, the same contours, the same consistency.”
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Fair or foul, it was, however, Idina, twelve years older than Georgia and with the experience behind her of all those husbands and lovers without number, who won the battle for Tom.
On Sunday morning the dozen or so guests arose to the first baking-hot day of the year. After breakfast Cimmie Curzon produced an array of bathing suits. They changed with alacrity: “Tom evidently fancies himself very much in bathing shorts & displays with pride a sunburnt muscular torso,” Georgia wrote, whereas another guest, the photographer Cecil Beaton, looked “dangerously thin in a bathing suit which hung off him in folds.” As for Ivan Hay, whom Georgia could not stand (partly due to his arrival with Idina and his subsequent failure to keep her occupied and away from Tom), he displayed an “enormous pot belly.” The party leapt into the river at the end of the garden and “shot the weir on rubber mattresses, very good fun.”
Then, just as Georgia was emerging from the water, Idina appeared. She had risen neither for breakfast nor for the swimming expedition, thus implying that she had needed to recover from an active night
before. Now, “she sauntered down elegantly at about 11:30, very chic in black and white chiffon.” Tom, parading his pecs and biceps, gave her his full attention until midday, when another car rattled up to the house and out stepped Irene Curzon. She had inherited the title of Lady Ravensdale and with it the nickname Raveners. With her was Edith Baker, newly married to a scion of a banking dynasty known as Pop d’Erlanger. Edith Baker was “very pretty and so young looking.” Tom started “trying it on with her” straightaway, wrote Georgia. This was a situation Idina could handle. She threaded her arm through Tom’s and chattered, giving “him as little opportunity as possible” to pursue Edith. Edith was not, however, as much the ingénue as she looked. At twenty-eight she reckoned she could hold her own against Idina (poor Georgia Sitwell was now very much on the sidelines), and after lunch Edith sat down at the piano and played. One guest sat “enthralled for hours.” It wasn’t Tom, but it was a male admirer, and one was all it took to raise Tom’s competitive hackles. At the end of the afternoon some guests suggested an expedition to the boat club at Bray for cocktails. Idina announced that she would like to go, too, and Tom started to follow her automatically, but as he did so Edith piped up that she needed to wait behind for her husband to arrive. “Tom was torn between the two,” wrote Georgia, who “heard Cimmie in an aside say that she really could not choose between them for him.” In the end he stayed. So Idina remained too. And when the cocktail expedition finally returned at 9 p.m., Tom seated himself between the two women at dinner. As Tom flirted with Edith, her new husband, Pop, sitting opposite, grew “angrier and angrier.” Pop could not cope with either Tom’s flirtation with Edith or the crowd of friends. He found Cecil Beaton mystifying, asking in an extraordinarily loud voice: “Is C.B. a fairy?” Eventually Pop insisted upon driving Edith back home that evening instead of staying the night. The way was open for Idina.
The following evening the house party was joined by the poet Stephen Spender, who “arrived from London looking beautiful.” Cimmie served cocktails as her guests unpacked the dresses her mother had worn as Vicereine of India before she had died, twenty-two years earlier. They were “gorgeous beyond words being Edwardian, being for the Indian court, being for a Vicereine, & being for Lord Curzon’s wife. Yards of brocade, gold tissue, embroidery, tulle & every exquisite material imaginable.”
Cimmie had planned that her guests should wear them at dinner that night. The waists were, however, only nineteen inches around.
Georgia Sitwell alone managed to do one up properly: “It was torture but well worth it.” The rest of the guests, men included, each chose a dress and clambered into it as they could. Cecil Beaton and Stephen Spender were “at their best in these fantastic dresses. Stephen had a wreath of artificial flowers in his hair & Cecil had picked every blossom from Cimmie’s lilac walk & stuck it either in his ‘bosom’ or on his head.” Tom abstained from the cross-dressing. Instead he matched the level of decoration by appearing “as a sort of toreador.” At dinner he sat again beside Idina but, Edith Baker having been whisked away, Georgia found herself promoted to his other side. As the meal ended, neither woman moved. The three of them sat there discussing “young men” until Stephen and Cecil rose, resplendent in their vicereinal attire, and “went through all their stunts” until 3:30 a.m. The next morning Georgia left with her husband. Idina stayed on with Tom.
Neither Idina nor her sexual appeal had diminished. However, the fallout of her split from Joss was far from over.
While Cyril Ramsay-Hill finally divorced Molly, citing her adultery with Joss, Idina stayed in London, at Oggie’s, until the end of July, making occasional trips to Fisher’s Gate to see Dinan. Joss, too, was in England, checking into hotels with Molly under the pseudonym Mr. and Mrs. Hay. On 23 November he sailed for New York on the United States Lines’
Leviathan
, also under the name of Hay instead of the now ignominiously whipped Erroll, and alone. On 24 November Molly followed on the Cunard liner
Aquitania
. Six weeks later, at the beginning of January 1929, Idina’s bankers in Kenya foreclosed on Slains. She did not return. Every brick and stick of furniture there had been put together for a life with Joss. That was over. Slains was put up for auction.
The same month the
Daily Express
printed a lead article headlined “
EARL’S WIFE AS MANNEQUIN
.”
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It claimed that Idina was about to leave London for the French Riviera, where the winter season was in full flow, to work as a mannequin for Molyneux. Her job would be to parade clothes up and down the catwalk at his morning and afternoon
défilés
for customers. This was no surprise, the
Daily Express
continued, as Idina had “a much-envied gift for wearing clothes attractively. It has been remarked of her that the simplest gown becomes distinguished when she puts it on, and a Paris dressmaker once offered to dress her for nothing if she would only wear his creations.” It would be only “a minor excitement in a life… little hampered by convention.”
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In 1929 the suggestion that Idina was about to become a leading model was far from flattering. Instead it implied that she had become
so penniless that she needed to earn a living and that she was going to do so by displaying her body. The allegation was that she was selling herself—akin to calling her a prostitute today. Idina, a woman who did not usually give a damn about what the papers said about her, sued.
Joss then asked for a divorce so that he might marry Molly. Idina instigated proceedings. And, for the next six months, she was in and out of the law courts. It was during this time that Beaton photographed her (see page 261). Idina, quite literally, sat on a mirrored floor. Her knees are bent, one foot tucked under her, the other extended to the side, her shoe pulling at the footstrap of her silk jodhpurs. Her arms fall by her sides, her hands, hidden in long chiffon sleeves, steadying her balance. Under her chiffon jacket she wears a sequin-embroidered vest, a single string of thick pearls around her neck. Her hair is short, coiffed in lacquered waves over her ears, around her face, and across her forehead. She is looking to the side, and far into the distance, not even the glimmer of a smile on her lips.
On 25 June 1929 Idina obtained a decree nisi from Joss “on the ground of his adultery with Mrs. Edith Mildred Mary Agnes Ramsay-Hill at an address in Sloane-street in April, 1928.” After a decade of exuberance Idina had reached a nadir. The sole comfort—apart from Dinan—was the settlement from the
Express
a fortnight later, which at least provided her with some money. In the summer of 1929 any money at all, it was felt, could be turned into a small fortune.
For the past ten years, while the flappers had danced until dawn in city nightclubs and on country-house lawns, the stock market had climbed. All one needed, it was said, was a little capital and guts and nothing could go wrong. But two months after Idina’s life had hit this new bottom, the world’s stock markets, too, began to tremble, and in late October 1929 Wall Street crashed. The Roaring Twenties, all their excess of money, music, and mollifying liquor, and Idina’s Kenyan dream with them, had been reduced to a whimper.
Chapter 20
E
ven after three failed marriages, Idina still yearned to marry again. Marriage, in theory, would provide her with a guarantee of the companionship and affection that she yearned for. Without this and, unlike her mother and grandmother, lacking any vision to pursue, her life felt empty. And she still believed that she might find the right husband with whom she could make a life. If anything, brokenhearted as Idina certainly was by Joss’s departure with Molly, her marriage to him had shown that it was possible to have a dream life even if only for a short time. But 1930 did not start well for Idina. In February Joss married Molly in London and the two of them returned to Kenya to live in Oserian—Ramsay-Hill gave up his share in the house. Six months later Idina’s mother, Muriel, died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-eight. A few years earlier, she had moved every stick of furniture at Old Lodge onto its lawns and held a public sale of her possessions to raise funds for the Labour Party. She had then sold Old Lodge, donated that money as well, and moved to a house in the London suburb of Wimbledon. Although she shared the house with the American Mary Dodge, it was a lonely life and death despite its achievements. Loneliness was what Idina feared and longed to avoid. As she later wrote to her son David: “Nobody knows better than I how bloody difficult marriage is! Yet I still think it is probably the only real solution to happiness—the whole thing [is] one has to be so damned intelligent and subtle about it all.”
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Muriel had kept some money to live off and left most of her remaining funds to the politically active Buck, “knowing he will make good and wise use of same”
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in his own pursuit of Labour politics. Avie, who had originally been left ten thousand pounds, now found herself cut out of Muriel’s will, perhaps because she had recently left Stewart Menzies and eloped with a country squire called Frank Spicer, who had inherited a substantial sum himself. Idina was left some money—not outright but as an interest in a Brassey family trust. The amount itself was five thousand pounds—not a fortune—and Idina could not even touch the capital but was entitled only to the income. Muriel had left more money, however, to Dinan—twenty thousand pounds of the trust and the income from this to be used for her upkeep until she married, when the capital would become hers. Charles Gordon and Joss had eaten their way through the ten thousand pounds of Brassey capital that Muriel had already given Idina. Giving the money to Dinan instead was a device that would prevent any future husband Idina might take from spending the rest.
In the interim Idina and Dinan could together live well, especially if they went back to Kenya and started farming. Idina had no desire to live a single life on a farm several miles from her nearest neighbors, and three months after her mother’s death she married for the fourth time. Unlike her previous three husbands, all Scotsmen, Donald Haldeman, sometimes known as “Squashy,” was the English-born son of an American shirt manufacturer. Divorced himself, he had been a “white hunter” leading safaris in Kenya for several years and, like Idina, adored the country.
On 22 November 1930 they wed in the register office in the small Sussex town of Steyning. Buck gave his sister away for the second, if not third, time and witnessed the marriage. The new couple then left for a honeymoon in the United States, whose press shivered with anticipation at the marriage of such an infamous woman to one of their own. “Idina has been the wife of two captains, an earl and now has become the bride of an American resident. All inside seventeen years and she’s still young and beautiful” ran a widely syndicated story entitled “Love Failures of the Countess.”
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And after that, for the third time in just over a decade, Idina sailed to build a home in Kenya with a brand-new husband.
Idina was clearly in love with Donald. And enough in love to think that this new husband was a man to whom she could be faithful—or perhaps she had no understanding of what Donald expected from marriage. Like Joss, Donald had been educated at Eton. Unlike Joss, he was
not a compulsive womanizer, ready to wander off at a moment’s notice. Quite the opposite: he was fiercely possessive of Idina. For the sexually driven Idina to marry a possessive husband was nothing short of folly.