Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [141]
Meanwhile, Loelia’s forthright cousin Lady Ponsonby was unimpressed by both Loelia and her new husband, and also by the growing idea of celebrity. Writing of the wedding party at Saint James’s Palace, she said that although the Duke
as a Rake may be, attractive & having style . . . his large flabby face mottled with dissipation . . . made me wonder . . . Apparently outside the registry office was the largest crowd ever seen at a wedding . . . To arouse real enthusiasm you must be either very rich or very immoral—& if you are very rich, very immoral and a Duke—most people now go off their heads .21
Sixteen years later, Gabrielle would say of her life with Bend’Or that she had grown tired of “that squalid boredom that idleness and riches bring about.” Despite Gabrielle’s wealth, idleness was never to be her problem; she never ceased working with great purpose, which was to secure herself, and others, in the modern world in which they found themselves. Thus she would say of Westminster’s life, “You have to wonder whether . . . this absurd fairyland . . . is not a bad dream.”22
I had satisfied a great core of lethargy that hides beneath my anxiety, and the experiment was finished . . . Fishing for salmon is not life. Any kind of poverty, rather than that kind of wretchedness. The holidays were over. It had cost me a fortune; I had neglected my house, deserted my business, and showered gifts on hundreds of servants.
Yet Bend’Or told Gabrielle he wouldn’t be able to accustom himself to living without her. Gabrielle knew that this was because her willingness to say no to him impressed him. “It was a shock for him; it threw him off balance.” 23
As the duke’s lover and his equal in many ways, for several years Gabrielle shared the life of a man a good many regarded as nothing more than a selfish playboy. Gabrielle did believe that once she was gone, Westminster permitted some of the rich man’s parasites to encircle him again. But a devoted employee and friend would write of him:
He was in charge of the greatest landed fortune in the country for fifty-four years, from the reign of Queen Victoria to that of Elizabeth II, from an aristocratic to an egalitarian, if not socialist, society. Whatever his services to his country in war, his personal qualities and defects, he should be judged by his success or failure discharging the responsibilities brought by his wealth.24
And after ceasing to be his lover, Gabrielle would say of him, “We have remained friends. I loved him, or thought I loved him, which amounts to the same thing.”25
While Westminster was married to Loelia Ponsonby for seventeen years, they had separated long before they were finally divorced. In Westminster’s fourth wife, Anne Sullivan, he would at last find a woman who was willing to appreciate his qualities and negotiate his foibles, and with whom would he spend six good years before his death, in 1953.
23
The Crash
“The upheaval of values characterizes our era, some say. A somewhat naive statement, since only one value dominates our times: money—first through the plethora, then through its lack.” So wrote the diarist Elisabeth de Gramont, in her measured and sardonic tone, when the fevered pitch of the twenties finally reached its climax in November 1929, after the Wall Street crash. Gramont told how the preceding decade had seen “all values, the only ones left in this world . . . going up like a column of mercury,” and described the luxury cars—the Rolls-Royces, the Hispano-Suizas, the Mercedes—and the spendthrift lifestyle of the speculators and the war profiteers, and how artists called it a golden age because “from the masterpiece to the daubed, everything