A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (54 page)

On the morning after, Moura was as alone as she had been in 1919. Lockhart was slipping ever further away from her. After his divorce, he had set up home with ‘Tommy’ Rosslyn in Surrey, and they met only occasionally when he travelled up to London. There were no longer any of the night-long soirées they had enjoyed before the end of the war.

At the age of fifty-four, Moura began another metamorphosis. All her adult life she had been accustomed to being part of a vast social world, full of interesting people. Being attached to figures like Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells or even Lockhart provided access to the kind of acquaintances and influence that she craved. Now H. G. was gone, she found herself in a near-vacuum, which she quickly set out to fill.

She began to cultivate a new persona for herself as a matriarchal hostess. She had for years been a giver of drinks parties, luncheons and dinners, and an organiser of outings and gatherings. Now she made it the centre of her existence. She became known for her salon. Trading on her air of mystery and intrigue, and exerting the magnetic charm that almost everyone was susceptible to but almost nobody could explain, she turned her modest and rather untidy little Kensington flat into one of the hubs of the postwar social world. Actors, writers, film directors, politicians, spies – they all came. It wasn’t just her charm and intrigue that drew them; it was her contacts. She seemed to know everybody, and her salon enhanced her ability to make matches between writers, directors, producers and publishers.

It also brought her work. Besides the crisis in her social life, she needed additional earnings to boost her income. H. G. had left her several legacies in his will, but they didn’t add up to very much. There was £3,000, free ‘of all duty in her lifetime’, to put into an annuity, another £1,000 in cash, plus two-eighteenths of his total estate, which worked out at £6,240.
²
Had she given in and married him, she would have inherited most of it, and been a wealthy woman now. Moura liked money, but she valued her liberty more.

The annuity would yield a small income, but not nearly enough to live on even modestly; for a woman with Moura’s tastes and habits, it wouldn’t cover her drinks bill, let alone the rent on a Kensington flat or any of her other expenses. The total amount wouldn’t last long at her rate of spending.

Moura had foreseen this, and was already shifting sideways from editing and translating books to working on film scripts as well. Her acquaintance with Sir Alexander Korda went back to the 1930s. They were a similar age, both émigrés from the revolutions of eastern Europe. Korda had been born Sándor László Kellner in Hungary in 1893. He had built a career for himself in film-making and developed an interest in left-wing politics before fleeing to Austria in 1919 when White forces overthrew the socialist government. He was ambitious and talented. He adapted his name, taking his surname from his first wife, the actress Maria Corda, and lived the life of a rich man even when he was poor. His clothes were the best; his belief was that if one looked the part then one became the part. Through the 1920s he and Maria developed their careers, first in Austria and Germany and then in Hollywood. In 1932 Korda came to Britain and started building up his own empire. By the outbreak of war he was Britain’s first and greatest movie mogul.

How he became acquainted with Moura isn’t known. Possibly their paths crossed socially, perhaps in Germany in the early 1920s when she was negotiating film deals for Gorky; or perhaps it was a political connection. Before the fall of the Communists in Hungary, he had been involved with plans to make films adapted from works by Gorky and Tolstoy. Certainly Korda and Moura had become friends by 1935, when she introduced him to H. G. Wells and helped bring about the films
Things to Come
and
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
.
³

Korda’s practices often stretched the boundaries of professional ethics. According to Frank Wells (H. G.’s son, who worked for Korda), if he believed that a finished film might not make enough money, rather than release it he would store it as a phantom asset which he would then use to lever finance from the banks.
⁴
Lockhart also knew Korda, and had heard many stories about his methods of obtaining financial backing. In 1938 he met an accountant who had represented the creditors when Korda’s production company London Films was in trouble; he told Lockhart that Britain’s cinema industry had lost the banks and insurance companies about £4 million. Most of it had been lost by Korda and his fellow Hungarian Max Schach. In the accountant’s opinion, Korda was by far the worse man of the two – an evil crook.
⁵

While Korda lived like a lord – still looking the part and becoming the part – his creditors often lost everything. It didn’t seem to worry him. Along with his old name and his marriage to Maria Corda, the man who had got his start making Communist propaganda films had abandoned left-wing politics long ago. He became a thoroughgoing Conservative, and in 1942 his friend Winston Churchill arranged a knighthood for him. Some people in Britain considered it distasteful to give a knighthood to a divorced Hungarian Jew who made films for a living.
⁶

The award was ostensibly for services to the British film industry; in fact, it was for his war services. He had produced and directed a number of propaganda-driven films, including the popular
That Hamilton Woman
(also released as
Lady Hamilton
), starring Vivien Leigh in the title role and Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson. Churchill had greatly admired the film. The parallels between Napoleon and Hitler were obvious and one line in the film was allegedly suggested by Churchill himself: ‘Napoleon can never be master of the world until he has smashed us up – and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators, you have to destroy them.’
⁷

Making timely films wasn’t Korda’s only contribution to the war. Churchill had persuaded him to engage in covert activities while in America. In 1940, on Churchill’s instructions, MI6 had set up a secret section in New York, called British Security Coordination; part of its job was to sway opinion in the United States away from isolationism and towards joining the war. Korda’s role was to act as a secret courier between British and American intelligence, and to allow his New York office to be used as a clearing-house for intelligence information.
⁸

A bad odour seemed to emanate from Korda’s empire. Those who sensed it were deeply wary of him. Lockhart was among them. In October 1947 – possibly through Moura’s influence – Lockhart was invited to a meeting at Korda’s penthouse suite at Claridge’s.
⁹
He had been offered a job as an adviser. His former employer Lord Beaverbrook told him to demand a salary of £5,000, since Korda was so rich. But by November, although Lockhart had resigned from his column with
The
Times
, he was having qualms about taking the job. His friend Brendan Bracken (former Minister of Information, friend of Churchill and vehement opponent of the Attlee government’s nationalisation programme) warned Lockhart not to take the work, and advised him to back out of the contract he had signed. In Bracken’s opinion films were unclean. Or at least Alex Korda was. Lockhart concurred; he withdrew, saying goodbye to a salary of £12,000.
¹⁰

If Moura detected the bad aroma, it didn’t faze her. A woman who had been intimate with Yakov Peters and done the bidding of Stalin was hardly likely to be deterred by a faint whiff of off-colour business practices. And she wasn’t alone. Accountants and members of the ruling class might hold their noses in his presence, but Sir Alexander Korda was at the centre of Britain’s postwar film industry, and most of the great names of the era worked with or for him. Among others, Carol Reed and David Lean directed, Terence Rattigan had written screenplays, and the roster of actors included Ralph Richardson, David Niven, Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, Robert Donat and Jack Hawkins. Many who knew of his shady dealings loved him all the same. Richard Burton, from whom he made $500,000 by selling him to 20th Century Fox, called him ‘the loveable larcenous Sir Alex’. Korda bought a Canaletto with the proceeds and showed it smugly to the young actor. ‘Enjoy it my boy, you paid for it.’
¹¹

Another of Moura’s friends who worked for Korda – quite possibly through her influence – was Cecil Beaton. He had avoided working in films, regarding film-makers as vulgar (although he adored movie stars). Korda’s initial approach to him confirmed this impression: ‘I want to buy you,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to be bought,’ Cecil objected, ‘and I’m terribly expensive.’ But bought he was, for a high price (just as well, since he needed the money badly), and produced exquisite designs for the 1948 film
Anna Karenina
, starring Vivien Leigh (Moura was an adviser on the film). Cecil eventually grew to like the man who had purchased him.
¹²

Korda liked Moura and enjoyed hearing her gossip. He gave her a job as his resident literary agent and script editor. She also did translations, but most importantly she was employed to keep Sir Alex happy.
¹³
It was a little like her relationship with Gorky all over again, but without the requirement to manage his household and be his mistress. And also, of course, without the sense of being in the presence of a towering, mercurial literary genius and national hero. Although Korda gave her a desperately needed income and enabled her to enlarge her social world, it was a step down for Moura.

But she made the best of it, as only she could. Korda’s nephew Michael was present at a drinks party at the Claridge’s suite in 1947, when he was thirteen. It was a typical affair, with film directors, actors and politicians – including Brendan Bracken, here despite the uncleanness of the host. (Moura spread a rumour that Bracken was Churchill’s illegitimate son.) Carol Reed was in attendance, and Vivien Leigh was expected to turn up (although her fragile emotional temperament made her unpredictable). Even in this company, when Moura arrived she managed to make herself the star. When the butler opened the door, she exploded into the room with a theatrical flourish and swept over to embrace Alex and his brother Vincent, engulfing each of them in one of the hungry bear hugs that were becoming her trademark. She wore what appeared, in the eyes of thirteen-year-old Michael, to be a floor-length black tent with a panel of gauze, and carried a beaded bag and a gold lorgnette. Her accent, which she had cultivated all her adult life, dripped with the flavour of Russia. ‘D-aaaah-ling,’ she said to the astonished Michael, dropping onto the chair next to him, ‘give me just a little v-oooh-dkah and a bite of caviar, just to restore an old lady who has had a terrible long taxi ride all the way from Kensington.’
¹⁴
He complied, and watched as the ‘old lady’ drained the glass in one gulp and asked for another.

All evening she made herself the focus of attention by feeding Korda’s addiction for gossip. Everybody else was drawn to her as well. Her gravelly accent, voluminous size and deep throaty laughter, gained through years of heavy smoking, made her an object of fascination rather than ridicule, and her acute intellect allowed her to hold the attention of the guests at every gathering.

After dinner the company moved into the drawing room, where Moura joined the men, lit a big cigar for herself and listened to the conversation. After all, a dispenser of gossip must collect it too. Everything was of interest, but most of all politics, and she had a talent for teasing out indiscretions (as Duff Cooper had discovered). She never missed or forgot what was said, no matter how much vodka she had consumed.

Michael Korda, who came to know her well after he grew up, recognised that Moura had never lost her love of Russia, but believed that her loyalty to Britain was strong. She had not changed with the passage of the decades. Michael was fascinated by her ability to hold people’s attention, especially if the guests were men of fame, power and influence. She regaled them with incredible stories laden with embellishment and garnished with lies. Michael felt that she was less interested in women than men, and was something of a
saloniste
or courtesan. ‘She was a kind, fascinating, brilliant woman on the outside but inside she had a core of stainless steel.’
¹⁵

Moura was a
saloniste
in the fullest sense, although she had shed her role as a courtesan. And her salon, whose regular home was at Ennismore Gardens, she took with her wherever she went.

Moura’s loyalty to Britain came under scrutiny in 1947. All three of the children had become British years ago – Tania and Kira through marriage, and Paul through naturalisation. Moura, apparently realising only now, after more than a decade, that London would always be her home, finally decided to apply.

She was interviewed by Special Branch as part of the process.
¹⁶
She took the meeting only slightly more seriously than she took her social conversations. Unable to produce either a birth or a marriage certificate, she gave an account of her life in which facts were spiced up with lies. On this occasion, the untruths were slight. She had gone to stay with her sister in Berlin at the age of sixteen, where she had met her first husband, which was true. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, she had been arrested and remained in prison for ten months because of her association with Lockhart, which was a mixture of truth and outrageous fiction. She described her life with Gorky, and her move to Estonia in 1921, where she claimed to have worked for ‘a Dutchman’ selling diamonds and gold. This was the only time in Moura’s life she admitted to the role she had been tasked with by Maria Andreyeva and the
valiuta
programme.