Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
too expensively in the market.
“One doesn’t introduce someone like that into one’s family,” Eugène regretted. But that is what he had done. When they were on a ship sailing from Hong Kong to Shanghai this tangle of sexual competition and deception took a sudden unexpected turn. Eugène fell ill with pneumonia. In a privately printed memoir with the title I Loved My Stay, Bubbles records how her round-the-world adventure came to an end in the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai. “Everything began to crumble about me.” Nursing him, Miss Purdue reported to Mitzi that he seemed to be very upset, “He fears that he is not the only one in your heart.” Mitzi immediately lost her temper and went to talk to him “with a look of sheer fury on her face,” and a parting shot to Bubbles and Miss Purdue, “Don’t worry! I’m not going to hurt your patient.” Not quite fifty-three, Eugène died in the hotel on 1 March. A fortnight later the women sailed across the Pacific, with Eugène’s body on board. At Honolulu Frank joined them, and Bubbles confined herself to saying that at that sad time he was “a great help and comfort.”
In the eyes of his children their father had been a victim, and victimhood did not suit him. Mitzi did not ask herself if he had died an unhappy man on her account. From the moment Eugène fell ill Mitzi stopped writing her diary. When she resumed four months later in July, she granted herself absolution. Although actually the main actor in the emotional struggle that had come to its unforeseen end in Shanghai, she depicted herself as passive. She was able to repress guilt by denying the way she had manipulated her husband and his lover. As though it was all the doing of these two men, she had been swung on an emotional seesaw of suffering and salvation, and on page after page she repeated herself in the manner of this passage: “God bless those who are left me. I thought I could never write again, but I must note these last days, must put down each detail of these peaceful, sweet, helpful hours. Without you, my angel, I could never have lived on, have stayed alone without my adored one…. Be blessed for the blessing of your sweetness, for each understanding look, for each comprehensive kiss, for those long dear talks about our adored one.” In one or two rooms at Royaumont, photographs of Eugène had a tombstone formality. He became something of an unperson, to the point that Alan used to say, “If we had known Eugène we wouldn’t have liked him.”
That July, she and Frank decided that the strain of events had exhausted them and they had to escape. Just as she had shown him her Vienna so he would retrace for her sake some of his early life in England. The hotel in Eastbourne where they stayed, the rustic cottage they wondered whether to rent, were far removed from anything in her experience. During a walk on Beachy Head he told her that once before on this very spot he had heard an inner voice saying, “Do not despair, someone needs you,” whereupon he took her in his arms, “and now I know you were the one.” Whether by chance or design, the image he presented of himself corresponded exactly to the image she cultivated of him. At the age of six he had been sent to St. Andrew’s, a preparatory school nearby. They went visiting. Whether naively or not, she lets drop that the Brown family running the school “wondered at a lady friend of Frank’s.” However, Miss Brown was impressed by Mitzi’s deep mourning and upgraded her from Baroness to Countess. Mitzi came away satisfied that Frank had been “a delicate sensitive child,” and the separation from the mother he loved so tenderly was “the first great sorrow of his youth.” It is impossible to decide whether guilt, schizophrenia, or plain absence of self-awareness was impelling her coincidentally and frequently to switch from devotion to Frank straight into this sort of counterpoint about Eugène: “Oh! My Cocky, I cannot think of you without thinking that I can never, never, never stand the terrible cruel crisis. Oh! my darling, how could you die, where are you. In my heart more than ever alive as long as I live.”
Mitzi’s children could not fail to observe how Frank had supplanted Eugène. That their father’s male lover should captivate their mother was the subject of endless speculation. Bubbles was virtually alone in having a good word to say for him. Born in 1907, she was a greater beauty than her younger sisters and made them aware of it too. Back in Austria in the autumn of 1929, Mitzi and Bubbles stayed at Langau, the home of Alphonse and Clarice Rothschild. A suspicious Mitzi asked Bubbles if she was in love, and discovered that she had fallen for Eduardo Propper de Callejon, a Spanish diplomat and supposedly the lover of Clarice Rothschild. A man of the world, he was thirteen years older than Bubbles. Mitzi invited him to lunch at Meidling, “to have a look at him,” she wrote. “He upset me terribly. To lunch we also had Alice Townshend, the widow of General Townshend of Kut [where he and his troops surrendered to the Turks in 1917] as she is née Cahen d’Anvers [an eminent Jewish family] of Paris. She is more British than the British. At lunch I heard this Spaniard say, Remember and note my words, in ten years it will be the end of England. Alice after lunch said, Throw that creature out, he is out to marry Bubbles.” Frank was in Munich and in October she summoned him to come and to make “his friend Bubbles” understand that she should give up Eduardo. But he concluded otherwise: The couple would be happy, and besides, “You are in business with interests all over the world and a diplomat can come in handy.” That was enough to settle it. On December 28 the Abbé Mugnier, a veteran of the Proustian circle, married Bubbles and Eduardo in the church at Asnières, two or three miles from Royaumont. Eduardo was a Catholic through his mother, with Jewish origins through his father. He insisted that Bubbles become Spanish but said he would never put pressure on her to convert to Catholicism. Mitzi had chosen the date for the wedding, but because it fell within the year of Eugène’s death as usual she soon convinced herself that others were behaving with the express purpose of causing her to suffer.
In the summer of 1930, Max summoned Frank to his house in Paris, and the fact that he was still in bed when Frank arrived must have spoken volumes. He had an ultimatum to deliver and it would not take long. He was now the head of the family, he said, he had been made unhappy by Frank and he did not want his younger sisters to go through what he had gone through. Frank was asked to leave at once for Royaumont, take away clothes he had left there and never come back. Instead he went to Mitzi’s flat in the Rue de Surène, where she found him lying on a chaise-longue looking ill. “It might kill you, the sorrow of it all,” he began. Playing on her emotional neediness, he explained that Max adored her and always felt that too much of her love went to him, Frank. Nor could he see how he had made anyone unhappy. Here was a clever appeal to take his side while finding a plausible excuse for the behaviour of the Sonny she claimed to adore. She fell in with it: “Long and silently, I kissed his hands and then very gently I told him, Max has married us.”
The indignant Mitzi immediately confronted Max: Did he expect that she was never again going to see Frank? Unconditionally surrendering, he apologized and would make what amends he could. He and his younger sisters a few weeks later accompanied Mitzi to the Bayreuth festival. They then stayed at the Grand Hotel in Nuremburg. As though the scene ordering him to depart had never occurred, Frank came over from Berchtesgaden where he was with friends, and moved into the hotel. “I went to bed at 10,” Mitzi noted, “he undressed and in that red and white pyjama that suits him so beautifully he lay on the bed beside mine. I cuddled up in his arms. Utter confidence. Utter pure joy. My heart was beating much faster than his…. I prayed pressing his head to my heart. He stayed there. All at once he jumped up and said, ‘Must go now, my darling.’ How I longed for him to stay but when he says he wants to go I know it’s right towards our pure oneness that he goes [sic].”
Max’s bid to stand in for Eugène as head of the family had failed. Father and son owed their way of life to Mitzi. Had either of them insisted that the relationship between her and Frank was destructive and intolerable, she had only to resort to the power of her money; she could cut them off at any time, in which case they would have to earn a living. When all was said and done, here was a competition for resources. Frank had nothing to lose, everything to gain. Eugène, and then Max, had everything to lose, nothing to gain. A penitent Max soon went to Montreuil and she gloats that he “begged my pardon so sweetly.” Unable to stand up to his mother, for the rest of his life he never quite gained independence and his rightful status.
“My children!” she was expostulating in June 1931 about what she felt was their continued resistance to Frank, “Why are you all so complicated, theatrical, méfiants [mistrustful] and egotistical … they have it well in their minds that he speaks against them to me.” She attributed this to