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The staff at London’s Savoy Hotel were used to the demanding and outrageous behavior of their wealthy clientele, but the couple staying in Suite 41 were the talk of the establishment.
Mixed couples were rare in 1923, particularly in the sumptuous surroundings of The Savoy, so the glamorous Parisian and her Egyptian husband would have caused a stir even without their furious feuds.
One lunchtime, the couple, Prince Ali Fahmy and his wife, Marguerite, were arguing so loudly that the leader of the Savoy’s orchestra intervened, whereupon Marguerite dramatically said: “My husband is going to kill me in 24 hours.” .
In fact, it was Prince Ali Fahmy who was later found dead in a pool of blood.
Threat to the royal family: the courtesan Marguerite
That night, after the couple returned from seeing an operetta, ironically, The Merry Widow, they started yelling at each other again over dinner. Marguerite grabbed a bottle of wine and threatened to smash it over Ali’s head. ‘If you do,’ she growled back, ‘I’ll do the same to you.’
He stormed out of the hotel and returned at 2 a.m., at which point screams were heard from his suite. The couple went out into the hall, along with Marguerite’s barking dog, and were met by John Beattie, the night porter.
Beattie went to call the night manager, but as he turned the corner he heard three shots and ran back to find Ali slumped against the wall in a pool of blood, a hole through his skull.
Marguerite was holding a pistol, which she flung to the ground, yelling in French, ‘What shall I do? I have shot him!
When the princess was arrested and taken to Holloway Prison, it seemed obvious that she would be found guilty of murder and hanged. But incredibly, despite her damning circumstances, she was acquitted.
Why? It seems that Marguerite owed her life and freedom to the intervention of the Royal House, to protect the reputation of her former lover, the future Edward VIII.
The Prince of Wales in military uniform, France, First World War,
As Buckingham Palace prepares for the final salvo from a modern troubled prince (Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir hits shelves on January 10), a century ago, the royals had to face the consequences of the actions of another somewhat rebellious young prince. whose love life threatened to plunge the Royal Family into scandal.
In his book on the case, The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder, former lawyer Andrew Rose makes a compelling case that courtiers conspired with the judiciary to secure miscarriage, in order to protect Prince Edward.
This extraordinary intervention had its roots in World War I, when Edward, known to friends and family as David, was a staff officer in France.
His fellow officers were determined that the prince, then 20, would take the opportunity to be in France for his first sexual encounter. He was duly taken to a brothel, where a prostitute named Paulette freed him of her virginity.
From then on, Edward became obsessed with sex. A few months later, on leave in Paris, he met 24-year-old Marguerite and was fascinated.
Marguerite’s husband, Prince Ali Fahmy
The daughter of a taxi driver and a cleaner, she had become pregnant in her teens while working as a maid. Her baby grew up elsewhere and she, Marguerite, became a prostitute to survive in Paris. A stunning beauty with a seductive manner, she soon graduated to a high-class brothel where she was groomed to become a successful courtesan, well educated in the arts of the bedroom.
She was photographed wielding a whip and soon became famous as a dominatrix. Rich lovers showered her with jewelry and money, and her success allowed her to live in a large apartment with servants.
With the outbreak of war, Paris became a magnet for upper-class Englishmen on leave from the front, including the wealthy Duke of Westminster and his aide-de-camp, Ernest Bald. Marguerite, who now calls herself Maggy, entertained both gentlemen and was introduced to Prince Edward by the Duke when he arrived in Paris on leave in April 1917.
For the next 18 months, Edward and Marguerite were lovers, meeting whenever he could escape to Paris, where they drank champagne and he drove her around in his Rolls-Royce.
During their relationship, he wrote 20 very indiscreet letters to Marguerite—’Mon Bébé’—in which he criticized her father, George V. She sent him not only letters, but also erotic literature.
When Edward broke off the relationship to focus on his new English mistress, the married Freda Dudley Ward, he asked her to destroy his letters, but she didn’t. Instead, Marguerite began to blackmail him.
Mortified, Edward told his assistant, ‘Joey’ Legh: ‘She’s the £100,000 or nothing type, I’m afraid.’ This was a massive sum, equivalent to over £9 million today.
But then, suddenly, the blackmail threats stopped: Marguerite was going to marry a rich man. However, she was cunning enough to keep the Prince’s letters for herself.
Marguerite soon discovered that married life did not suit her. They divorced and she returned to her life as a courtesan.
In 1922 she met the young Egyptian playboy, Prince Ali Fahmy, a billionaire. Although he wasn’t technically a prince, he was fabulously wealthy and, in love, showered her with diamonds. They were married in Cairo in early 1923, after she had converted to Islam.
But the marriage quickly deteriorated, and when they arrived in London in July for the summer season, Marguerite was frequently seen with bruises and Ali with a scratch on her face.
At The Savoy, she called a doctor who diagnosed her with haemorrhoids, a condition caused, she said, by her husband’s insistence on “unnatural sexual intercourse”. An operation was arranged to remove them for July 11, but the shooting took place at dawn that day.
Marguerite was arrested, though not before removing her blood-stained Chanel dress. Ali was taken to the hospital but died hours later.
When the news of Marguerite’s arrest became public, the royal house panicked. If the prosecution uses her sordid past to paint her as a scheming scarlet woman capable of murder, the Prince of Wales’s reputation would be dragged through the mud.
Revelations that he had drunk champagne with a Parisian prostitute while troops suffered in the trenches would have been extremely damaging. Ernest Bald, her former lover, was sent to Holloway Prison, where it is believed he struck a deal with her.
Author Andrew Rose believes that Marguerite agreed to deliver the Prince’s letters, in exchange for a guarantee that his scandalous past would not be mentioned.
Marguerite arranged for the compromising letters to be sent to London, where Eduardo himself vouched for their authenticity. He then himself was sent on a visit to Canada for the duration of the trial.
Although there are no official documents to confirm this theory (embarrassing royal secrets are frequently removed from the archives), there is a revealing letter from Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary.
On September 9, the eve of Marguerite’s trial at the Old Bailey, he wrote to his wife, Grace: ‘My dear child, I heard a piece of news in London the other day that may amuse you. The French girl who shot the supposed Egyptian prince of hers and who is going to stand trial for murder, is the elegant woman who was the Prince’s “refuge” in Paris during the war… and they were very afraid that he would be dragged away .
“It’s lucky he’s gone to Canada and his name is kept out.”
The trial was a sensation. Weeping beautifully and resorting to smelling salts, Marguerite claimed that she slept with a loaded Browning pistol under her pillow in case of jewel thieves, and that she had shot Ali in terror for her life when he turned on her after she demanded the divorce.
However, in truth, she had shot him three times in the back as he crouched over the dog.
Marguerite’s lawyer described her as a ‘poor and wretched woman’, the victim of a violent ‘Oriental’ husband who was not only bisexual (her lawyer cleverly hinted at a sexual relationship between Ali and her male secretary) but forced her to have internships. unnatural sex.
No mention was made of Marguerite’s volatile behavior, except to admit that she was “not of very strict morals”.
Playing on the jury’s racial biases, he urged them to “open the door and let this Western woman come back into the light of God’s great Western sun.”
Meanwhile, the judge blatantly swayed the jury by calling Ali’s sexual behavior “shocking, disgusting and disgusting…a cruel and abhorrent act.”
The jury acquitted Marguerite, and she returned to Paris, where she tried to reclaim Ali’s fortune. Her family, distraught over Ali’s violent death, managed to prevent this, so Marguerite simply resumed her life as a courtesan.
As for Edward, he continued to pursue unsuitable women. The Establishment’s cover-up to save his reputation was ultimately in vain, as 13 years later he would relinquish his crown for the sake of another manipulative and domineering woman: Wallis Simpson.