Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis
positively.
In 1934 a competitor claimed Cordy, the national champion, “deliberately attempted to kick him off his machine.” The competitor also accused Jack of illegal blocking. A rematch was called and Cordy lost.59
Though satisfied with his career, Cordy was ready to add a beautiful girl who would watch him from the stand and start a family. Cordy told her he wanted lots of babies. Lili smiled and didn’t tell him what she wanted was “adventure” and “limousines.” There was no room for babies in her future.60
She loyally stood by Cordy during various injuries. The following year he would be thrown fifteen feet in the air, his bike landing square on his face, knocking out his front teeth, which gave his already charming smile—his best feature, Lili thought—a sweet vulnerability. Truthfully, the ruggedness and the danger of the sport was what excited her and she felt a growing respect for her boyfriend. Soon she too was screaming in the stands as the riders dragged their feet behind to slow down and stop. The Milne brothers revolutionized the sport by riding “foot forward.” Cordy would badly burn his legs on an exhaust pipe and the following year Jack would get hit by another rider and break his back.
Idella complained to Lili that staying with Cordy provided no “financial stability.” She thought Lili was “wasting her time.”61
The more Idella complained, the more Lili wanted him. She was attracted to the “forbidden,” turned on by his bad-boy image. Idella would gripe and Lili would shrug her shoulders and throw up a wall of impenetrable silence. She learned that not saying anything was a powerful tool. It put her in control by not allowing someone to get to her. Of course it was an isolating tactic, one that would cost her dearly.
The relationship wasn’t progressing where Lili thought it should despite trips to Big Bear and Palm Springs at high speeds, clinging to Cordy’s waist, arms around his red jacket with the Short Snorters’ emblem on the back.
One New Year’s Eve, Lili, Cordy, his brother, and their race buddies spent the festivities in San Bernardino drinking cheap wine. Sometime after midnight, Lili persuaded Cordy to drive her home. She clung precariously to his back as they raced toward Pasadena at speeds that whipped her hair and caused her eyes to sting. She was terrified. Cordy decided to detour out into the desert. Over a bump Cordy felt Lili lose her grip and he lost her. She felt a tremendous pain in her shoulder. With scrapes on her arms and legs she was badly shaken up.
She got up furious, swearing at him, hitting him mildly on his back and telling him she wasn’t getting back on that machine. She insisted they walk the entire way back to Pasadena.
Alice was waiting on the porch when they arrived. When she saw Lili in tears she rushed forward.
Lili was immediately taken to the hospital. She had broken her collarbone. She would always say how that night was the turning point. She used Cordy’s guilt to her advantage.
She decided no more traveling on the back of bikes to save a buck. Cordy was thrifty and she couldn’t stand it. To her money was to be enjoyed. It would be one of many differences that would drive a wedge between them.
CHAPTER SIX
In 1934 Ian’s sister (and Dardy’s namesake) Rosemary von Urach arrived from Europe. She was hoping to make it an extended stay. According to her sister, Frederika (Erica), Rosemary wanted to get into the movies.
Lili was taken by the blonde and glamorous woman with the “expressive purple eyes.”62 Rosemary was witty and clever, wore a fur coat, and traveled with enormous trunks, her manners gracious and elegant. She was a beautiful, enchanting woman, a genuine princess, and, as yet undiagnosed, schizophrenic.
ROSEMARY BLACKADDER VON URACH HAD BEEN BORN THE MIDDLE child of Anne Wilson and John Blackadder in Scotland. She was high-strung and extremely intelligent. She had studied at Girton, “degrading” for a couple terms, meaning one had permission to have the term disregarded, in Rosemary’s case, due to health reasons.63 She studied English and modern and medieval language Tripos.64
What remains of Rosemary’s school records is a slim file that notes she toured “over Europe with a puppet show” after leaving Girton and then became a journalist writing “middle” articles for the Saturday Review and Evening Standard.65 For the Daily Express she was hired to interview famous people for the Manchester edition. She often illustrated her own articles.
Conversant in a multitude of languages, Rosemary was well-traveled, studied art and Italian in Florence. In Paris she studied painting and roomed with composer Gustav’s daughter Anna Mahler.
Close with her mother throughout her life, Rosemary relied heavily on Anna, often writing for money. She was accused by her sister Erica of being frivolous and manipulative, the same charges later leveled at Lili by others.
At a party at the German embassy in Paris, Rosemary met her prince—a real live prince—whom she fell in love with. They married in Oslo, Norway, in 1931. The two-years-younger German Prince Albrecht von Urach came from an impressive—albeit impoverished—background.
Lili’s step-aunt Rosemary
Born in 1903, the sixth of nine children, young Albrecht spent his days at the family’s fabled Lichtenstein castle outside of Stuttgart.
Albrecht was handsome, tall, and light-haired. He was an expressionist painter, photographer, war correspondent, and diplomat. His princess mother was aunt to Prince Albert I of Monaco, for whom he was named (and at one time stood next in the line of succession). Albrecht joined the Nazi party in 1934. Interrogated for war crimes at the end of the war, he would suffer no ill repercussions for his Nazi association and began a successful career with Mercedes-Benz.
Rosemary and Albrecht’s marriage might have lacked money but there was no shortage of adventure. Albrecht continued painting, though they sold poorly.
In 1932 Rosemary gave birth to daughter Marie-Gabrielle “Mariga,” who would one day marry Hon. Desmond Guinness, son of the gorgeous and glamorous Diana Mitford, one of the famous Mitford sisters.
Having a child did little to settle the relentlessly traveling couple. They lived in Germany but left for Venice and Mahler’s apartment in 1934 where they both continued as freelance journalists.
According to her sister, Rosemary had an idea to get into the movies and thus planned a trip to California to stay with brother Ian. When nothing panned out she lay around on Ian’s and Idella’s sofa shooing her curious nieces (Barbara and Dardy) away. “Go away, little girls. Go away.”66 She wasn’t interested in her own child, let alone someone else’s.
Lili thought this fragile, eccentric, glamorously made-up woman was wonderful. She envied the princess’s title, travels, and clothes. Though Rosemary had obligations of husband and daughter they didn’t hamper the ethereal young woman collapsed in languor on Idella’s couch. One can only imagine what Idella thought. And though they weren’t related by blood Lili was greatly influenced and infatuated by Rosemary, the most exotic creature to cross her path. Here was a woman, practically a relative, who had managed to escape her provincial family to lead an adventurous life trotting around the globe, draped in chic clothing. Rosemary was the epitome of the independence—and glamour—Lili dreamed of.
Rosemary was soon gone, continuing her travels with her big trunks to the Far East and then Berlin where her husband and daughter waited.
In 1934 the von Urach family set up home in Japan, where Albrecht worked in the German press office as a journalist. He was sent to China to cover the Chinese-Japanese war. For unhappy Rosemary, being left behind was lonely and increasingly difficult. Daughter Mariga weathered her mother’s mercurial manners and “impulsive behavior.” The isolated child would write her father a letter saying she was “terrified” of