Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
cynic when in reality she was nervously insecure. In his version of their first meeting in Barcelona, she offered to get him a job as a journalist if he would act as a propagandist for the Allies. In fact, as he writes elsewhere, he was already working as a journalist for the magazine Destino and she merely helped him with innocuous articles on English pipes, Virginia Woolf and the childhood of Winston Churchill.162 They began to go out together and she soon fell in love with him and was to remain so throughout their long and unhappy marriage. That José Luis was utterly fascinated by her is revealed by the fact that, in his books, he romanticises her past in the most wildly colourful fashion. He places her in the Spanish Civil War in August 1936 at the massacre of Badajoz under threat of being shot as a spy by the Nationalist Colonel Juan Yagüe. Her time as a nurse in the Hadfield-Spears ambulance unit becomes a dark period in Paris during which it is insinuated that she was a secret agent. Her organisation of the Polish hospital in Scotland becomes service with General Anders’ forces, despite the fact that Anders was imprisoned in Russia at the time and went into action in Italy only long after Pip had left the Poles. Most fanciful of all is the invention that Pip served as a lieutenant with the Spanish Republicans in the Free French forces that liberated Paris. Even more outrageous is a report of a conversation with Pip about her behaviour during the Spanish Civil War. On learning that José Luis was seeing her, his father, the Barón de Segur, allegedly exploded that she had slept with – in one book, half the Spanish Army, in another, the entire Nationalist forces. It is clear from her diaries that Pip did not sleep with anyone in Spain. However, when asked about her sexual adventures, the fictionalised Pip – in an entirely uncharacteristic tone of pompous self-assurance and insouciance – tells her lover, ‘Yes. I have had my adventures, just like everyone else. When death hovers over your head every day, certain moral values undergo changes about which it is useless to speak in peace-time.’ The hard-nosed Pip of his various later accounts is unrecognisable as the vulnerable romantic of the diaries. Indeed, Vilallonga’s fictionalised Pip has more in common with the coldly domineering Baronesa de Segur of his memoirs and novels.163
According to Vilallonga, they married because, with the war coming to an end, she was planning to return to London. It is possible that her position in the Consulate had been rendered difficult because of his indiscreet boasting about her work.164 In one of his books, he claims that, faced with separation, she asked him to marry her. In another, when she announced that she had to go home, he begged her not to leave him. In one version, he responds by saying that he loved her but was not in love with her, and puts into her mouth the reply ‘So what? That is no reason for us not to live together.’ In another, he attributes virtually the same words to himself. What is absolutely clear is that he saw in Pip a way to facilitate his desire to escape Spain and his family to become a writer. He makes no secret of the fact that he was enticed by the idea. Moreover, Pip’s open-minded and forthright conversation attracted him.165
It may well be that the idea for turning an affair into a marriage came from neither Pip nor José Luis. The romance caused sufficient gossip to provoke the concern of Princess Bea and Prince Ali who immediately set about rectifying the situation. In the summer of 1945, Pip was summoned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The Infantes took charge of the relationship, enveloped Pip in their protection and imposed a Spanish-style engagement. This meant efforts to ensure that the couple never met alone until their marriage and José Luis, to his intense chagrin, was lodged for two weeks in a flea-ridden pensión. On the eve of his wedding, the bridegroom was finally allowed to sleep in the Palacio de Montpensier. However, he claims that, on leaving his room en route to the bathroom, he found Ataúlfo’s elder brother Álvaro seated on the landing with a shotgun to prevent him escaping – a story undermined by José Luis’s frequent remarks about his joy at marrying for money and escape from Spain. To justify the claim that he was being forced into marriage against his will, he alleges that Prince Ali was desperate to see Pip married to anyone but his son because she was really his illegitimate daughter. In fact, it is unlikely that Prince Ali harboured any hopes of Ataúlfo ever marrying at all and Tommy Howard de Walden’s paternity of Pip is not in doubt.
At the Catholic society wedding on 20 September 1945, Pip, in white, was given away by Prince Ali. Photographic evidence does not suggest that the radiantly beaming José Luis was a pressed man. It is Pip who looks assailed by doubts.166 In the conditions prevailing at the end of the Second World War, it was impossible for any of her family to travel to Spain for the ceremony.167 Hearing that Vilallonga’s father, the Barón de Segur, was fiercely opposed to the match, Tommy Howard de Walden wrote him a stiff letter of protest and challenged him to a duel. In a conciliatory reply, the Barón said that he was not in any way opposed to Pip but was merely trying to protect her, as he would any decent girl, from the martyrdom of marriage to his wastrel of a son.168
In his brilliantly written, but otherwise deeply callous memoirs, Vilallonga had the grace to write of Pip as ‘a marvellous person whom, without a second thought, I made deeply unhappy’.169 The scale of egotistical irresponsibility portrayed in his own book makes it quite clear that Pip’s life had just taken an irrevocably tragic turn. The wedding night was spent in an hotel in Cádiz. José Luis claims, equally revealingly whether it is true or false, that, after Pip fell asleep, he went out to spend the night in a brothel with some French prostitutes. From Cádiz the couple travelled to the Hotel Palace in Estoril in Portugal, where they spent a bizarre honeymoon. They arrived with little money and found that getting visas for London was not easy. Until eventually rescued by an emissary of Margot Howard de Walden, they were trapped in Lisbon for nearly six months. They were living in a luxurious hotel on credit which, given the family connections of both, was not as difficult as for some of the guests. Pip tried to eke out their finances at the casino having been given a system for playing roulette. Her occasional small successes were not enough to prevent her having to pawn her evening dresses. In the circumstances, it is difficult to believe José Luis’s highly entertaining account of a life of high-society extravagance, in the frequent company of the exiled royalty of Europe.
José Luis alleges that he now began a poorly concealed affair with Magda Gabor, the sister of Eva and Zsa Zsa. The affair began with him, ever the gentleman, claiming to have demeaned his wife further by telling Magda that he found himself in the appalling situation of having to sleep with someone for whom he felt not the slightest attraction. At every opportunity, he says, he escaped to see his lover and a disconsolate Pip knew. Just as he was about to tell her that he planned to run away to New York with Magda Gabor, Pip announced that she was pregnant.170 In José Luis’s colourful account, making much of his great sacrifice in giving up Magda, he told Pip that ‘the affair was over’ but, as he wrote later, ‘What stupidity! Everything had just begun. My alienation from her became ever greater.’ Curiously, this did not deter him from staying with Pip for a further seventeen years. Nevertheless, he did, by his own account, engage in serial infidelities, with, amongst others, the same Magda Gabor he had just undertaken never to see again.171
Pip and José Luis left Lisbon in early April 1946, reaching England a few days later. When she finally reached home, Pip was already noticeably pregnant. The family was in Dean Castle, a small fortification at Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, Scotland, and, according to José Luis, had sent a car to collect them. This is strange given the total lack of petrol for private use in immediate postwar Britain. On the lengthy journey, (an improbable seventy-two hours in his memoirs) José Luis claims to have delighted himself reading about his father-in-law’s properties in a copy of the Almanaque de Gotha which he conveniently found in the car along with other books. Apart from the fact that the properties of English aristocrats are not listed in that volume, the Howard de Walden car did not carry a copy. It may be, however, supposed that he faithfully reflects his feelings at the time when he writes of thinking: