Episode 93: World's Best Kept Man
At another sunny beach enclave, a romance blooms into a twisted love triangle between a prince and two heiresses.
#BarbaraHutton, #PrinceAlexisMdivani, #LouiseVanAlen, #lovetriangle, #DorisDuke, #ElsaMaxwell, #ParisHilton
Summers 1931 & 1932, the interchange of people and events cause a blurring of timelines. At fashion designer Jean Patou’s residence, sparks between Prince Alexis Mdivani and Barbara Hutton reverses a love triangle much to the humiliation of Princess Louise Van Alen Mdivani a little over a year into her marriage.
Other people and subjects include: Elsa Maxwell, Princes Roussadana “Roussie” Mdivani Sert, Josep Maria Sert, Prince Serge Mdivani, Prince David Mdivani, Daisy Van Alen, James “Henry” Van Alen, William “Sam” Van Alen (*not mentioned directly), Doris Duke, Nanaline Duke, Jessie Woolworth Donahue, Frederick Vanderbilt, Audrey “Chico” Kilvert, Silvia de Rivas de Castellane, Lost Midnight Brigade, Alice-Leone Moets, William Fisk, Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, Gary Cooper, Cholly Knickerbocker, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Caroline Astor, Place Etats-Unis, Waldorf Astoria Sert murals, Biarritz, Cannes, various unreliable sources, complications in reconstructing timelines, social media, artificial intelligence, Paris Hilton, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle
Archival Music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Extra Notes / Call to Action:
Ti’s Hot Mess History https://www.youtube.com/@TisHotMessHistory/videos
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Publish Date: September 02, 2023
Length: 24:39
Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 1 Music: Sunshine by Jack Hylton, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20s
Section 2 Music: One In A Million by Brian Lawrance, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 3 Music: You Hit The Spot by Carroll Gibbons, Album The Age of Style – Hits from the 30s
End Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
AS THE MONEY BURNS
Podcast by Nicki Woodard
Episode 093 – World’s Best Kept Man
Outline
Beach party
Rumors and secrets
00:00
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast by Nicki Woodard. Based on historical research, this is a deep exploration into what happened to a set of actual heirs and heiresses to some of America’s most famous fortunes when the Great Depression hits.
Each episode has three primary sections. Section 1 is a narrative story. Section 2 goes deeper into the historical facts. Section 3 focuses on contemporary, emotional, and personal connections.
00:31
Story Recap
While Newport has a resurgence of millionaires, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton dodge fortune hunters by going to Europe.
Now back to AS THE MONEY BURNS
Title
00:45
World’s Best Kept Man
[Music Fade Out]
Episode Tag
At another sunny beach enclave, a romance blooms into a twisted love triangle between a prince and two heiresses.
01:02
[Music – I’ve Got An Invitation To Dance by Roy Fox, Album The Great Dance Bands Play Hits of the 30s]
Section 1 – Story
[Music Fade Out]
01:20
Bright sunshine beams down on the polo fields and beaches in Biarritz, France.
Details blend between the summer of 1931 and 1932. Same people, same places, many of the same activities, so much a blur until certain defining acts stand out.
On a Monday afternoon, a luncheon occurs at the William Fisk residence which includes their unchaperoned guest chubby budding fashionista heiress Barbara Hutton and visitor the roly poly society hostess of boundless energy Elsa Maxwell. Elsa is also a close friend of Barbara’s maternal aunt Jessie Woolworth Donahue, but Elsa seems unaware of Barbara’s recent fame as Elsa has been living more in Europe these days.
02:10
Nonetheless, Elsa takes an immediate liking to the shy heiress so enamored with many of Elsa’s popular musical friends like Noel Coward and Cole Porter. Elsa makes note of the plump earnest young lady with the tiny hands and feet and beautiful deep blue eyes. Elsa invites Barbara over to a party the very next day Tuesday at fashion designer Jean Patou’s elaborate home, where Elsa is staying.
Barbara at first demures fearing she will know nobody and might be a bother. Elsa reassures her and notes that the Countess Dorothy di Frasso will be there with her not so secret lover Gary Cooper as well as Princess Louise Van Alen Mdivani and Prince Alexis Mdivani. Barbara’s ears perk up. Suppressing her enthusiasm, she says she knows of the latter couple but pretends not to know them.
03:04
That night when finally alone, Barbara pulls out hidden letters and clutches them wistfully. When daylight quickly arrives, Barbara dutifully appears at Patou’s residence but remains rather distant from the other guests. She seems fretful and nervous as Elsa tries to help her relax.
Then a long stretch Rolls Royce pulls up to the residence. Immediately, bounding out of his luxury vehicle Prince Alexis abandons his wife and beelines straight for the waiting Barbara. Unaware of their real history, Elsa gives the formal introduction to what she assumes are actual strangers. Barbara’s face lightens up. The ever-charming Prince spends the whole time talking intensely to his darling friend. They whisper intimacies and secrets like childhood friends.
03:54
Meanwhile Louise distracts herself socializing with the other guests. Ever polite, the great-granddaughter of Gilded Age society queen Caroline Astor, Louise has plenty of social graces as well as money. But she seems a bit weary from her nearly year long marriage. The endless Lost Midnight Brigade partying coupled with Alexis’s spending seem to have an expiration date of fun to the gentler heiress.
Current Newport society queen and Louise’s mother Daisy Van Alen along with Louise’s brothers were not too pleased at the sudden forced marriage between Louise and the Prince, despite the prince being longtime school chum and roommate of Louise’s brothers in London. The Van Alens wanted Louise to marry someone a little more in their social and financial standing, as Alexis is an impoverished and dispossessed Russian royal and has been sponging off them for years. Nevertheless, Alexis and his 4 siblings have married very well. Only Louise’s inheritance far outstrips all of Alexis’s in-laws, especially the Hollywood wives of his brothers Prince Serge Mdivani and Prince David Mdivani. And there will be more lucre to come when Louise’s great uncle Frederick Vanderbilt passes. Smugly, Alexis has far surpassed the “Marry Mdivanis” moniker marrying into the wealthiest and most prestigious of the sibling marriages.
05:18
During their honeymoon, Louise shares her fairly substantial fortune with Alexis and sets up a joint bank account, from which he goes on a spending spree buying polo ponies and a wardrobe far substantial and beyond what even the most flamboyant spend all year. Alexis proudly shows off his bright and shiny new things, his watch, his polo ponies decorated with crown logos the size of a witch’s cauldron. Alexis is a little perplexed when his friend the stylish and amusing heiress Audrey “Chico” Kilvert playfully asks if the crowns are a bit too small.
05:52
In Paris, the newlyweds move into the Place des Etats-Unis, where Alexis spends in abandon re-establishing his lost imperial glamor. He buys a large dining table, one where he sits at one end and Louise at the other, and the far distant middle might be their solo guest. The space between so large they need a microphone to have a proper conversation. The Prince even insists that the footmen wear elaborate uniforms of outdated knee breeches and stockings from a past century that are only in vogue in the most current of true royal occasions like debutante presentations at Buckingham Palace. Upon one late evening, his guests those from lifelong privileged backgrounds are more than willing to fix themselves up and not disturb any resting servants. However Alexis runs impatiently around pushing buttons until a butler shows up to help him put on his coat before leaving for his nightly activities.
06:51
The constant extravagant spending is enough to alarm Daisy, who back in Spring 1932 arrives to visit the couple and discuss futilely the importance of money management. Impetuously, Alexis throws fits and has tantrums forcing Daisy not to stay longer than a little over a week. Nope, Alexis revels in his status of what is easily the world’s best kept man and in the style he has long dreamed of being accustomed. No longer a Van Alen guest, but someone who has the full right of a husband over his wife’s fortune especially according to Paris and French law, custom, and practice. Later Cholly Knickerbocker reports that Daisy has come to accept her son-in-law with open arms, as he seems to have charmed her as well.
07:38
At Patou’s outing where guests search for jewel treasures in the sand, a weary Louise tries hard to ignore her husband’s attention to Barbara, and worse everyone notices. Elsa invites the confidantes to join the others for a swim, but Barbara insists they continue their conversation. The afternoon passes when suddenly Alexis jumps up and calls to Louise, and they promptly leave in their Rolls. Elsa checks on Barbara who has tears in her eyes. Their utterances remain secret – could it have been Barbara’s failed romances, Alexis’s enduring love for former flame Silvia de Rivas now de Castellane, or the state of Alexis’s marriage.
08:22
Very soon, Alexis regularly joins Barbara and escorts her from place to place. They are seen dining at one locale or another. Dancing late into the night. Barbara too often joins the Mdivani dinner parties. The mystical sculptress and his sister Princess Roussie Mdivani Sert also takes an interest and regularly talks with the young heiress at these gatherings. Roussie’s husband Josep Maria Sert is the Spanish painter who recently completed the celebrated murals for the new Waldorf-Astoria’s opening in October 1931. Barbara is enamored and quickly begins to confide wholeheartedly into Roussie.
All the while Louise with a fixed grin takes in all the slights and keeps her opinions to herself. Louise has been well trained to be the gracious Newport and socially elite sophisticated hostess. At first, the idea of truly being with the athletic and charismatic Alexis and the exciting nightlife were exhilarating. Only now, Louise might long slightly for her simpler Newport routine. It is great when Alexis’s beaming smile focuses on her, but now Louise feels the bitter cold like the shadows on the moon.
09:37
By late August 1932 over in Cannes, another now fashionable heiress the tall and no longer awkward Doris Duke is spotted in a bois de rose crepe de chine skirt with box pleats and button down blouse while dining with her socially ambitious mother Nanaline Duke, who too makes a statement in jade green pajamas, a floppy straw hat, and green and white beaded necklace.
Another set of Cannes regulars, also a mother and a daughter discuss and argue the rumors about all the gossip they hear regarding Prince Alexis, Princess Louise, and Barbara. The daughter is none other than Alice-Leone Moets, a former girlfriend of Louise’s brother James “Henry” Van Alen. While dating Henry, Alice-Leone witnessed the early years of Alexis, Henry, and Louise and presciently told a resistant Louise that she would marry Alexis one day. Alice-Leone defends the royal couple as true loves, but her mother disagrees and delivers a staunch warning, “You’ll see, he will walk out on Louise and marry Barbara.”
Hmmm, could royal hearts be so fickled?
10:53
[Music – Nightfall by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics]
Section 2 – History & Historiography
[Music Fade Out]
11:07
Oh, what is the story? The real story? That is the question that started this long deep dive into the past. And what an overly entangled even semi-incestuous mess I found myself in. But also inspiration.
Our intertwined tales are a complex web – interconnected and enmeshed. Every time one thing seems resolved, another attachment or break in the link changes the direction and paths.
11:39
This love triangle – rectangle has been one of the more complicated stories to set straight. There are the general and more common references. The buildup of sources resources pointing to one timeline and one version of events, and then several times I learn and uncover information that shows things were far more complicated.
Does it really matter? I ask over and over again as I retell and reconnect all these little threads. In one sense, no overall the result is the same. But in another way, it completely makes all the difference.
12:24
Why? It’s human nature. We don’t care just what happened but the why. Who had agency when. Who is the predator and who is the prey. How the chronology evolves. Were their alternate decisions that could have been made, or was everything a fait accompli.
And that can be an uncomfortable conundrum. To truly figure out the timeline, I rely most on the one tiny thing that makes things absolutely clear. Newspapers. Now they too can be inaccurate and definitely more than enough times will get the motive or details wrong. But they help in clarifying the most important thing – AN INDISPUTABLE DATE.
13:17
I regularly and ongoing scour newspaper databases trying to find all that I can on our main characters. Since I first began developing the idea in October 2013 and ever since confirming and reconfirming facts and especially most importantly the dates.
I can have dates about two different things, but then know what they have in common. When Barbara Hutton bowed at Buckingham Palace, she was sad and upset – most considered it the pressure of the royal event. In truth, the date coincides with Louise Van Alen marrying Prince Alexis Mdivani at her family home Wakehurst in Newport, Rhode Island.
And now it is the summer of 1932 when one of the most dramatic turns in this storyline will occur. I continue trying to unravel the story and the myths around it. Every time getting tangled in the details. Those ever seemingly slippery things, but the emotional facts always remain the same.
14:27
And in this storyline, there is speculation on this faux introduction of Barbara Hutton to Prince Alexis Mdivani. When did it all begin? Many don’t know the prior history, but everyone settles this Summer 1932 as the definite beginning of all that happens next.
The Patou encounter has been dated first as Summer 1928 by Elsa Maxwell (completely wrong explained in an earlier episode), then other biographies and articles indicate 1932 which has questionable origins and covering up of secrets, and then one little newspaper article mentions that on Tuesday, October 6th, 1931 the guests Princess Louise Van Alen Mdivani and Barbara Hutton at Patou’s treasure hunt with a few more sources also indicating that same year. There are also ongoing interactions described and attributed similarly in both 1931 and 1932 – the sudden mingling of Barbara and the Prince. It gets frustrating when I think I have a timeline hammered out to then be thrown a curveball as when that Patou reference came up late in research last year redating the events back to what I thought might have actually been but seemed wrong when I had again reviewed the situation last year and disappointedly I had to push off this moment for another year.
16:02
Arrgh, the obsessive compulsive need to have things confirmed and re-confirmed then still have things go wrong. Nevertheless, it wrings true in that this a story wrapped around rumors, gossip, and alternating “truths” thus making getting to the facts that much harder.
The scandals and the betrayals. The known and especially the unknown.
The timeline presented by most sources was a rapid, escalated, and dramatic storyline. But only a select few hint that the pursuit began one year sooner in a more covert way.
16:43
Should it matter? I guess that depends on if you have ever had your heartbroken. Does it ever really make sense? But it also begs to question, who benefits from the more common story and what it purports. Or another set of facts that reveal the real machinations that lead to more enhanced sense of betrayal and the predatory nature of a true fortune hunter.
The truth can be awfully painful. Too painful to truly be accepted, and many might go in denial or prefer a neater cleaner tale or even a more salacious dirtier version. Either way, most will hold on to whatever version of the truth they prefer due to their own biases or justifications of their own actions or situations.
Only the question remains, do we have to believe their version of the truth even if it might not be real, especially if it only seems to effect them on a very personal level. Or is there any value in knowing the truth, the real, blatant, honest, unadulterated truth?
18:00
I have always known where the story was going. But certain twists didn’t make sense. I wanted more, so much more. I yearn so much to understand. And luckily, I did find it. Why do I consider it lucky? Because the real tale is far more rich and complex. And with that all the more human and relatable.
I have been tracking Barbara Hutton’s location via news articles as that is the best way to know her physical access to things and people. With so many eyes on the uber rich heiress, she is far easier to track, while the other characters will go missing and not be quite as documented. Though all that technical information cannot determine or reveal the psychological or emotional connections involved. In constantly reviewing old and new sources, I glean more and more layers to the story even now. This scenario could have been as far back as a year in the making with letters being the primary connection. So no matter where she was, she was still attached.
But then there is a moment, the match is striked, and a new fire burns. And everyone involved will get scorched in the process.
19:36
[Music – The Girl Friend by Savoy Orpheans, Album Charleston – Great Stars Of The 1920s]
Section 3 – Contemporary & Personal Relevance
[Music Fade Out]
19:58
Ahhhh, the never ending efforts to reconstruct a past from a few documents and unreliable memories retold decades later. Such a tricky situation. It is amazing though in reviewing the past from the perspective of today the similarities and the differences.
Today, we have an overabundant and plethora of reliable and unreliable information mostly due to social media. Somewhat photographic and documented records of where, when, and with whom someone might have been.
And yet, we know that really doesn’t prove all that we might think it does. There is plenty of cultivated image making while also obfuscating realities. A false positive of certain situations and dynamics.
20:48
Makes you wonder about all those modern influencer celebrities and others who put too much out there only to learn later their alternate realities. Recently, the heiress entrepreneur Paris Hilton has been documented speaking normally. Could it be possible her ditzy-ish spoiled persona is in fact more a persona? Well, damn, she is one of the very few heirs and heiresses who has built an empire all unto her own. So think about it… She definitely gets it, seems to have plenty of it, and keeps on going.
While others especially Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are perpetually spinning trying to redefine their brands. Their ongoing instability and conflicts hint the underneath doesn’t match the public image.
21:40
We can and should be more skeptical in our worldwide media age. And oh my, with the new technological era we are embarking on with AI / artificial intelligence, we are going to be in for a doozie in trying to discern and clarify what if anything is real. But back during the Great Depression the channels of information were much more limited and restricted. Yet there seems to be more going on than what first appears so simple. But as technology changes and evolves, human nature stays relatively more of the same.
We are no longer heading towards the tipping point when all the chaos will begin. We’re there. Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride. If you thought it might be hard to keep all the players straight, wait until you see the whirlwinds that turn into tornadoes with plenty of devastation. All resulting in multiple broken hearts.
And with that I have one important question, and please come to any of the social media with your answer(s) –
How do you prefer your betrayal served – hot, cold, or extra steamy?
22:59
There are so many stories to tell and yet so little time to tell them all. Fortunately, there are other storytellers out there who also weave well researched and great tales. I recently discovered YouTuber Ti’s Hot Mess History who dives deep into various seedy pasts with multiple episodes on particularly delicious stories. All I can say is WOW and ENJOY. Recently she has been covering tales related to some of our Titanic people. Hot messes, what an understatement.
Links available in the notes and transcript. Once again, that is Ti’s Hot Mess History.
https://www.youtube.com/@TisHotMessHistory/videos
If you enjoy As The Money Burns, then please share, like, & subscribe.
Hook
23:50
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
Next when we return to AS THE MONEY BURNS…
Despite small implosions everywhere, some hide their true situations while prancing around like prized ponies at a horse show.
Until then…
Credits
24:08
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast written, produced, and voiced by Nicki Woodard, based on historical research. Archival music has been provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, check out their website at www.pastperfect.com.
Please come visit us at As The Money Burns via Goodpods, Twitter (now known as X), Facebook, or Instagram. Transcripts, timeline, episode guide, and character bios are available at asthemoneyburns.com.
24:39
THE END.