Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [133]
Bend’Or asked to see Gabrielle again. Again she hesitated. Her hotel suite was then swamped with flowers, which continued arriving on her return to Paris. A stream of letters, orchids and baskets of fruit was delivered all the way from Bend’Or’s home in England, Eaton Hall, in Cheshire. Salmon caught by his own hand arrived in Paris by plane. The duke was in Paris at Easter, apparently to accompany his friend the Prince of Wales. He enlisted Vera Bate and the prince to help him charm Gabrielle, and then he personally delivered a huge bouquet of flowers to her at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Finally she weakened and accepted an invitation to another dinner aboard ship, this time for a hundred guests in the harbor at Bayonne, near Biarritz. As the evening ended and the guests all left, Bend’Or performed one of his habitual tricks: he had his crew weigh anchor and set sail along the coast. His incredible persistence and particular brand of romance had finally paid off. He had won over Gabrielle.
A friend’s commentary on this relationship is interesting, but how accurate it is we don’t know: “With Westminster Coco behaved like a little girl, timid and docile. She followed him everywhere. Her life was a fairy tale. Their love was not sensual.” Meanwhile, Gabrielle would say, “If I hadn’t met Westminster I’d have gone crazy. I had too much emotion, too much excitement. I lived out my novels but so badly! With too much intensity, always torn between this and that, between this man and that, with that business [the House of Chanel] on my back . . . I left for England in a daze.”2
Although the undercurrents of change were already at work in England, after the First World War, life for a number of aristocrats appeared to go on as before. The Duke of Westminster was a man even richer than his monarch, and Eaton Hall, an enormous country house—he liked to describe it as “St Pancras station”—continued functioning along much the same lines it had in the previous century. With a huge number of staff, as late as 1931 there were still ten housemaids and thirty-eight gardeners, with other offices in the house retaining a similar quota of staff. In that year, 1924, Bend’Or’s second marriage, to Violet Rowley, had ended after only four years. While Violet was a woman of great personality and energy, she had failed to provide the male heir the duke so desperately wanted, and her “decided character made life difficult. It was a marriage that needed at least one emollient partner.”3 The duke’s first wife, Shelagh West, and her relations had spent years bleeding him of funds. This experience had gradually turned him from being a trusting and generous man into one very wary of being used.
In the present day, when many find large assets and great privilege distasteful, Bend’Or is usually portrayed as unrelentingly monstrous and is caricatured by his vast wealth, yachts, houses, affairs and the number of his wives (there would be four). Yet we frequently make the mistake of judging the past by the same standards as our own. L. P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between is apt here: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Undoubtedly, the Duke of Westminster had many limitations and faults, but it is difficult to view this man and his strange life with real perspective without taking his times into account. In paying Bend’Or tribute, one of his most distinguished employees wrote of those who worked for him at Eaton Hall:
Everyone enjoyed the distinction of working in one of the greatest of great houses, where everything