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 the nannies whose moral code was far too rigid to accommodate Frank. This was a moment for divide and rule. She took Poppy alone of the children to Montreuil and after a happy evening together “ever so tenderly told her the nannies had to be pensioned off. First she turned to stone and said nothing.” Just seventeen at the time Poppy then screamed, “We are always alone, nobody loves us but Nanny, she is everything to us,” and went on, “You do nothing but laugh since my father’s death.” Since that death, Mitzi wrote expertly shifting the blame, this was “the most cruel blow I have had. I left her.”
Back at Royaumont three days later, with what she considered “a world of tenderness,” she told the nannies that they had to leave. Nanny Stainer replied, “You will never manage to part me from the children.” Jessie was even more blunt, “I don’t know why I listen to your palaver,” and banged the door. Whenever this scene was mentioned in years to come, Jessie would emphasise that she could never have left the children. And next morning Poppy returned to the charge, “For seventeen years you have done nothing but kill me!” To Mitzi, she “was like a lunatic for days.” Fault lines were out in the open.
In fashionable places such as Naples, Capri and Venice, offering museums, opera houses and five-star hotels, Mitzi had only to announce her arrival with Frank for them to receive invitations from other rich or prominent local people. At the time Egypt was effectively governed by the British almost as though it were a colony, and some with social aspirations were in the habit of going out there for a winter season. Frank was one such, travelling to Egypt as before with his old lover Paul Goldschmidt. Wherever he was, work proceeded in his absence at Montreuil. The “dream house” proved too small and inconvenient. A footbridge from its garden led over a sunken street to a park and a row of cottages. Mitzi had bought the park and three of the cottages, which were then pulled down. Supposedly an architect, Frank had designed a much larger new house to be built on the site. His original drawings, it is said, omitted a staircase, and Frank had wanted to have shutters and windows that opened outwards. Mitzi told me one day that Frank had gone ahead with the building regardless of expense at the height of the Depression. As the works were nearing completion, a bill of particulars shows that she still owed just over two million francs. She was fretting about paying when a letter arrived from Hungary with a huge payment to compensate for laying a railroad across one of her properties. By the end of 1932 she and Frank had moved into Montreuil, and in January 1933 they had a civil marriage in the town. In the same month that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Mitzi became English; suddenly, thanks to Frank, “my country has ever been England.” A short year later, she had accommodated herself to “Our England … each time you are in London you feel, if possible, prouder to have an English passport.”
The change of nationality was accompanied by conversion to the Christian faith. She would be free from those Jewish nerves that were always troublesome. In her diaries she persuaded herself that she wasn’t escaping but once again was quite right to be doing what she wanted to do. “It’s queer how in my heart I never felt driven to the Jewish religion. I only protect the race the moment anyone attacks it, but I don’t like them.” In June 1933 she asked herself, “A Hitler, who can understand?” In common with many frightened and wishful Jews everywhere, she was interpreting Nazism as the personal aberration of Hitler. She and Frank could visit Bayreuth and drive through Nazi Germany as though it was still the country they had always known and the stormtroopers and swastikas were local colour, not worth a second glance. The danger was apparently unimaginable even to someone so well travelled and cosmopolitan. Yet what the new British and Christian Mary Wooster imagined was the final step in a welcome process of assimilation was only impersonation.
Marriage to Frank drove the somewhat pointed hinting of sexual repression out of her diaries. “I thought that our oneness was something so wonderful that physical union could not better it,” she had confided to herself. She told Father Cardew, the priest who received her into the church, that the relationship with Frank had not been physical, and he took it that Frank had displayed the manners of a gentleman, waiting until he had made an honest woman of her. At Montreuil on 17 May 1934 and still confiding to herself as usual, she resorts to explicit language, “The first time I was yours at last was on a 17th. The first time in our new house.”
Long after Frank’s death, in the fumoir at Royaumont, we were gossiping about some contemporary of Mitzi’s who was said to have had an affair with her gardener. “Quand on a eu Frank on n’a pas besoin du jardinier” (When one has had Frank there’s no need for the gardener.) Mitzi’s sudden vulgarity seemed altogether out of keeping, the kind of thing she thought people ought to be saying in those liberated days. As though passing off the wisdom of a lifetime’s experience, on other occasions, and especially to her grandchildren, she was in the habit of stating as it were ex cathedra: “Homosexuals make the best husbands.”
FIVE
Reputed Father
Heb
