Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston

drawings went to pay one year’s rent on a furnished flat in Piccadilly for one of his lovers – a famous popular singer. Another paid for him to spend some time in Madrid and Barcelona where he stayed in the best hotels and replicated his London hedonism. While in Barcelona, he received a telegram informing him that Pip had given birth to a daughter. Born on 6 August 1947, she was called Susanna Carmen (for José Luis’s mother), Margarita (for Pip’s mother) and Beatriz (for Princess Bea). He returned to Buenos Aires via London. Before leaving, José Luis claims to have given Boisy Rex a priceless painting by Max Ernst the proceeds from which he used to establish himself in the world of greyhound racing. José Luis did give John Scott Ellis an umbrella which John immediately spotted as having belonged to Tommy. It was a small compensation for the fact that John had to meet the considerable debts left by José Luis.¹⁸³

      In José Luis’s absence, Pip had tried to recapture his love by preparing an environment in which he could pursue his dream of writing. This took – he says – the form of three railway carriages – two sleeper cars and a restaurant car. One of the sleepers had two large rooms and a bathroom; the restaurant car became a kitchen and dining-room, the other sleeper was left as it was. To facilitate José Luis’s writing, a magnificent study was prepared and a young Italian woman, Lucy Babacci, contracted to be his secretary. In no time at all, he says, she was his lover. He insinuates that this was with the complicity of Pip who, after her recent labour, had no desire for sexual relations. Little of this coincides with what Pip told her sister.¹⁸⁴ While José Luis philandered and wrote, Pip threw herself into looking after the horses, her dress shop and, to a lesser extent, the upbringing of the children. The dress and fashion business worked well until Terry Erland decided to return to Europe in 1949. The financial difficulties were exacerbated in 1950 by a decree that obliged companies to employ three Argentines for every foreigner. It signalled ruin for the stables. The business was sold to Colonel Graffy and, on the insistence of José Luis, they moved to Paris since neither he nor Pip wanted to live in London or Barcelona.¹⁸⁵

      Leaving Pip to wind up the estate, José Luis seized the opportunity to go on ahead to Paris in April 1951. José Luis’s attitude to his children had been at best lukewarm so John and Carmen were sent to England to live with Gaenor while Pip and José Luis tried to rebuild their fortunes, both emotional and financial, in Paris. There he wrote his first novel, Les Ramblas finissent à la mer. He claims that, realising that he did not want to share a life with Pip and their children in a Parisian apartment, he immediately persuaded her to live somewhere where he might visit them occasionally. The facts are that they separated only after seven years of deteriorating relations spent in different Parisian apartments. The relationship was doomed since José Luis was concerned only with establishing himself as an actor and a novelist – yet neither of them seemed prepared to bring it to an end. Along the way, he led a life of epicurean dissolution. According to his own accounts, he was taking money from a series of rich, older women, including someone called Kitty Lillaz and the actress Madeleine Robinson, whom he passed off as his wife. Pip knew but suffered in silence. Finally, on her fortieth birthday in 1956, she got access to her money and she bought a flat for them both in the rue Alsace Lorraine in the Bois de Boulogne. José Luis borrowed much of her remaining money and promised to return it when he inherited from his father. This he never did. To compensate for not seeing her children in school term time, Pip regularly indulged them with extravagant holidays skiing in Switzerland or Austria in winter, swimming at St Tropez or Monte Carlo in summer.¹⁸⁶ When she did have access to her own funds, according to José Luis, Pip frittered them away in acts of absurd generosity, of which he was often a beneficiary himself¹⁸⁷

      José Luis also claims to have still possessed a large portfolio of drawings, watercolours and oils taken from his father-in-law’s collection which facilitated his high-society existence. Once he had eventually found success as a novelist and journalist and insinuated himself into the world of cinema, divorce from Pip was inevitable. What is really astonishing – and suggests that there was more to the relationship than he admits – is that it took him so long to seek a divorce. In his memoirs, he depicts Pip’s presence as an intolerable invasion of his privacy. If this is true, for a woman as insecure and as desperate to please as Pip, it must have been unbearable as, in the most adolescent fashion, he flaunted his many lovers. He claims that things reached a peak when, one night in Paris, no doubt driven by his own guilt, he tried to strangle her.¹⁸⁸ Again the truth about the end of the relationship was less dramatic. In 1958, he appeared in a very minor role in Louis Malle’s Les Amants starring Jeanne Moreau. In 1961, he had an equally small role in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s.189 José Luis was increasingly away on location or else with one of his many lovers. Pip had long since suggested that, given the needs of her health and the children’s welfare, they should live in the South and there was no way that he would leave the capital.

      Eventually, in 1958, Pip bought some land at Auribeau-sur-Siagne near Cannes. In a last effort to hold on to José Luis, and to make a home for her children, she created a splendid house out of two workmen’s cottages knocked into one. The land had the small river Siagne running through it and, on the other side of the small valley from the main house, there were two small houses where the children stayed. José Luis did not live with the family at Auribeau although he visited frequently, having found another rich older woman, Countess Rosemarie Tchaikowska, with a house nearby. When he did visit, he would childishly challenge Pip by often disappearing in search of conquests in Cannes.¹⁹⁰ Increasingly alone with her children, Pip was not happy. There were occasional affairs but nothing could console her for the loss of her husband. Although a very competent mother, her son remembers Pip as sparing in her affections. His abiding memory is of her sitting at a desk and turning towards him, ‘her knees like the double barrels of a shotgun’. He cannot remember her ever kissing him. His daughter recalled ‘she was there, she was fun, but did not take part in the everyday nitty-gritty of life till much later on. All that was taken care of by the nuns at boarding school or the servants at home.’ In that sense, Pip was following in the footsteps of her own mother. She really came into her own as a mother when her children grew older and were able to have a more ‘adult’ relationship. Both her daughter and her niece remember her to be ‘loving and understanding’ and a fount of boundless fun and someone with whom they could always talk about their troubles. The children were sent to boarding school in England and they would meet for spectacularly expensive holidays. Pip drank heavily, although never before 6.30 p.m., and never betraying the effects of alcohol. When she came to England to return the children to school after some holiday jaunt, they would stay at the Mandeville Hotel where she had once stayed with José Luis. She would leave them watching television while she went out in a desperate attempt to recreate the glittering social life of her youth.¹⁹¹