Noble Blood - The Mistress, the Murderer

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

King Edward VIII is notorious for abdicating the British throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman. But Wallis Simpson was far from his most notorious paramour... Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeartRadio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. Before we begin, just a quick note of housekeeping, Noble Blood is on Patreon. So go to patreon.com slash Noble Blood Tales for episode scripts, a little bit of bonus content, and bonus episodes where myself and a friend of mine go over episodes of the television series The Tudors. Also, if you want Noble Blood merch, that's available at dFTBA.com. We have tote bags, pins, and mugs.

I use my beheaded Maria Twinnett mug, I think every day for coffee. And finally, I have a book coming out. So if you enjoy the podcast, I really think you'll enjoy this book. It's called Anatomy a Love Story, and it's all about the underbelly of the dawn of medicine in 19th century, Edinburgh. And if you're interested at all, there's been a weird issue with the supply chain of publishing. And so pre-orders are really, really important right now. So if the story interests you at all, please take a look and maybe pre-order it. We actually moved the publication date up.

It comes out January 18, 2020. And now on to the episode. On July 9th, 1923, a fashionable foreign couple staying in London went to see the operetta, The Merry Widow. The pair was well known, notorious even. They were fixtures in gossip columns and at fashionable parties. Though the couple styled themselves as the prince and princess Fami Bey, the husband wasn't actually a prince. He, Ali Fami Bey, was, well, a bay, which is an honorary title like governor in Egypt. He was exorbitantly wealthy, born into a family rich from the cotton industry,

and he was a playboy in his early 20s who had traveled to Western Europe and who had fallen in love with a French woman 10 years his senior. That woman was named Marguerite Alibert. By 32, Marguerite already had to be. a string of famous lovers, and she had quite a reputation. She had worked as one of the most elite courtesans in Paris, a sex worker in a brothel that catered to only the wealthiest and most aristocratic of callers. By the time she met and married Ali Famibé, she was already quite comfortable financially thanks to the settlement of an earlier divorce. Whether she married

Famibe for money or love, it was fewer than six months. before the marriage imploded in on itself. The couple fought viciously, sometimes violently. The night of July 9th, a porter in the Savoy Hotel where they were staying, heard them shouting at one another. And then the porter heard something else. Three gunshots. Prince Ali Famibe had been shot by his wife.

This would be enough of a scandal to be an interesting episode. of Noble Blood, a marriage gone wrong that ended in murder. But there's one wrinkle to the story that makes it one of the largest royal scandals of the 20th century. The extent of the scandal wouldn't be fully uncovered until 2013, and even today, details are missing. Letters have been burned, police files conveniently misplaced. Because, you see, one of Marguerite Alibair's earlier lovers was a man who used the pseudonym the Earl of Chester while cavorting with the Demeemond in Paris. Marguerite would have called him David. You might know him as the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Windsor or the future King Edward VIII, the man who would ultimately abdicate the throne of England so that he could

marry his twice-divorced American paramour, Wallace Simpson. King Edward the 8th isn't short on scandals, There was the aforementioned giving up the crown for a divorcee, and then there were his shocking Nazi sympathies during the Second World War. But his relationship with Marguerite Alibir led to another scandal that's largely gone ignored by the public, thanks to a careful cover-up by the British royal family. With the death of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov family just a few years in the past, the situation for all of the royal families of Europe remained precarious at the beginning of the 1920s. With no real power, the British monarchy relied on public goodwill and popularity.

It was just then that Marguerite Alibert was going to stay on trial in England for the murder of her husband, and she just so happened to have kept all of the incriminating love letters that the Prince of Wales had written to her. It was a formula for disaster. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The future King Edward VIII, who I'll just refer to from now on as the Prince of Wales, his title at the time of this story, was a late bloomer sexually. He was an awkward, formal boy, fastidious about his figure, and also self-centered and narcissistic in a way that made him short-sighted.

He lost his. virginity at age 22 at a meeting with a French sex worker set up by two palace aides. He was eager to continue to sow his wild oats, so to speak, with the many high-class courtesans in Paris, where he was stationed for much of World War I. While England and the rest of Europe was experiencing cataclysmic violence and never before seen death in trench warfare, The heir to the throne had nominal military duties in France, and instead spent most of his time enjoying the nightlife. That was where the young Marguerite Alibert,

going by the nomadigere Maggie Meller, caught his eye. Marguerite was a petite woman with long Auburn hair. She was several years older than the prince, who was by then 23, and she was well known for being sexually adventurous. I read one description of her as a, quote, renowned boudoir gymnast. Marguerite was born in 1890 to a working-class Parisian family. Her mother was a housekeeper, her father was a cab driver.

Marguerite was the oldest of three, with a little sister and a little brother. Later in life, she would exaggerate and embellish her own childhood. She would make her life sound exciting, even romantic. Marguerite would say that her brother was a soldier killed during the Great War, But the truth was far sadder and more mundane. Marguerite's brother didn't live long enough to serve in any war. He died when he was four years old, hit by a truck when he was out playing in the street,

while a teenage Marguerite was supposed to be watching him. The grief was overwhelming, something Marguerite had to compress and lock into a box somewhere deep inside herself. The rest of her family blamed her for her brother's death. and as punishment or penance, she was sent to live with nuns, the Sisters of Mary. Life under the nuns was grueling and emotionally fraught. They berated her daily with their thin lips and spittle, telling her that her sins were the cause of her brother's death. But they also gave her an education, and it was there that Marguerite would learn the foundations that would come

to serve her well in her society life to come. She learned to say, They say that Marguerite had a pleasant mezzo-soprano that she would eventually put to you singing in nightclubs and at parties, performing to catch the eyes of possible customers. But before all that, while Marguerite was still a teenager, the nuns placed her as a domestic servant in the household of a lawyer named Henri Jules Lingua, although in Marguerite's version of the story, she was the beloved goddaughter of Madame Linguay. But Marguerite's position there wouldn't last long. She was kicked out of the house when she became pregnant at age 16. We don't know who the father was, but the way Marguerite told it, he was a childhood friend who became a colonial administrator in India, also killed in the Great War.

It's almost certainly a lie or an exaggeration. With no employment, Marguerite returned to her family home with her infant daughter, Raymond. Her family could barely provide for themselves, let alone for a baby, and so Ramon was sent to stay on a farm in central France. It would be years before Marguerite, as an adult, would be able to send for her daughter to come back to Paris. It was at some point during this period that Marguerite's charm and attractiveness caught the attention of a Madame D'Nard, the mistress of a high-class brothel in the 16th arrondissement. According to Dinar, Marguerite was instantly comfortable among the upper class.

Marguerite became, according to Dinar, quote, the mistress of nearly all of my best clients, gentlemen of wealth and position in France, England, America, and other countries. One of Marguerite's clients was the married businessman Andre Mellier, whose last name Marguerite would borrow temporarily. Miller was wildly jealous, and he would eventually pay Marguerite off with 200,000 francs to end their dalliance, and she would kick herself later for not negotiating a higher fee.

But Marguerite would soon have an even more powerful lover, the Prince of Wales himself. After seeing the woman he called Maggie Mellar, he asked his friends to arrange a lunch between the two of them at the Hotel de Crean in Paris. Those were the sort of machinations that were common at the time among the aristocrat, as cover for the very common practice of employing sex workers. Marguerite and the prince hit it off instantly.

They had a lot in common as people. They were both vain and vaguely frivolous. But perhaps more importantly in this context, she provided the prince with a wealth of sexual experiences and experimentation. It would be a trend throughout the prince's life that he gravitated toward older, sexually dominant women, and according to sources, Marguerite was no exception. The pair was together for 18 months,

throughout the First World War while the prince was stationed in Paris. In that time, he wrote Marguerite around 20 letters, in which he called her Montbebebe, and, with the poor judgment that I would argue, would characterize the rest of his life, in which he also shared detailed war secrets, and made insulting comments about his father, King George V.

The prince, with the arrogance of youth, assumed that because he was sending the letters through the king's messenger, a service of couriers employed through the British Foreign Office who hand-delivered important documents, that the letters were entirely secure. He was wrong.

When the prince's attentions moved on to another paramour, a married woman named Frida Dudley, Marguerite wielded the letters as weapons to prevent herself from being cast aside and ignored with nothing to show for it. In a letter to one of his advisors anticipating blackmail, the prince wrote, quote, Oh, those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago. I'm afraid she's the 100,000 pounds or nothing type,

though I'm disappointed and didn't think she'd turn nasty. Of the whole trouble is my letters, and she's not burnt one. But then something would happen to Marguerite that would make blackmail less appealing. She met a man who seemed keen to marry her. A young Air Force officer named Charles Laurent, whose family just so happened to be filthy rich. They owned a department store, and, ironically enough, the Hotel de Criand, where Marguerite had first met the prince for lunch. With a high-profile marriage as a dangling possibility, Marguerite didn't want to invite the possible scandal of blackmailing a royal prince.

And so the issue to the prince's relief was dropped. Marguerite married Charles Laurent for a brief, unhappy few months, after which, to the vast relief of Laurent's scandalized family, the marriage was dissolved. But Marguerite would leave the marriage with a hefty payout, rich enough to begin to live her life independently in an apartment on the fashionable Henri Martí, living with servants, a full-time groom, two limousines, and a closet full of Couture Chanel.

Just a year later, she made the acquaintance of Ali Famibe, an Egyptian cotton heir, with an annual income of over two million pounds. Famibe was in his early 20s, but he lived like he had been in the upper class his entire life, generously spending his money and running in elite social circles. Within six months of meeting the 32-year-old Marguerite, he overrode the objections of his family and married her, first in Europe and then in a Muslim ceremony in Egypt. The mitchmatch was obvious from the start. Coming from a more traditional family, Ali Famibe had anticipated that marriage would mean his wife would settle down and become more domestic. less of the flirtatious socialite Marguerite had always been.

In a letter to Marguerite's younger sister Yvonne, Famibeye playfully wrote that he believed Marguerite could be tamed. But in the meantime, he was bitterly jealous. The way Marguerite writes it later, Fami Be was emotionally abusive, and he kept her all but captive. But it's also worth noting, I think, that that characterization of the relationship,

after the fact, would be a very convenient narrative given what happened next. The couple was staying at the fashionable Savoy Hotel in London in July of 1923. They went to the opera to see the merry widow and returned to their suite later that evening. A porter in the hallway overheard a violent shouting match, but he couldn't make out exactly what the couple was saying. But there was no mistaking what the porter heard next. three gunshots. One, two, three. The porter rushed into the room to see Ali Famibe

slumped against a wall, bleeding from a shot to the head. Marguerite was standing with a browning 32-caliber pistol in her hand. I've lost my head, she allegedly said. I've shot him. Medical attention arrived and they brought Ali Famibe to the hospital where he died an hour later. The authorities then came for Marguerite, arresting her and charging her with the murder of her late husband. It was a chaotic night at the Savoy, with police sirens and lights going off through the night. But there was another chaotic scene happening in London, one that was happening with much less public attention. The official household of the Prince of Wales had gotten word that his former mistress had shot a man, and they went to

into crisis mode. Immediately, the prince's summer schedule, which had included several visits to Wales, was cancelled, and the prince was, instead, booked on a three-month stay in Canada. They bought him a ticket on an ocean liner out of Liverpool for as soon as humanly possible. The goal was crisis management, preventing anyone from discovering that the prince had been sexually involved with a scandalous murderous. They knew all too well that if Marguerite Alibair was found guilty, she would be sent to be hanged at the gallows. And nothing is more dangerous than a woman with nothing left to lose. Eight weeks after Marguerite was arrested at the Savoy Hotel, she was put on trial at the old Bailey. Her defense lawyer was a man named Edward Marshall Hall, nicknamed the Great

defender, already famous in England for the high-profile cases he had worked on. One of those high-profile cases was for another sex worker, an Austrian woman, for whom in 1894, he successfully had a murder charge downgraded to manslaughter. Famously Hall had turned to the jury and pled, quote, look at her gentlemen. God never gave her a chance, won't you? Other famous cases for Hall included the Brides in the Bath murder. in which the defendant had three wives who all suspiciously drowned while taking baths, and a murder that's often referred to as the Green Bicycle case,

in which the victim was seen riding alongside a man on a green bicycle before her death. Hall's client was a man who had been traced to the victim, and who had, inconveniently enough, thrown his distinct green bicycle into the river soar with the serial number filed off after the case had been made public. The client was acquitted. All of which is to say, Marguerite was well-represented by a tenacious and well-practiced man when it came to murder charges.

His defense for the Princess Fami Bey was that her husband was a brute and a sexual pervert, and that her first two shots had been into the air to scare him off attacking her. When he kept coming at her, only then did Marguerite point the gun at him and shoot, mistakenly thinking that she was out of bullets. The actual core of the defense strategy was rooted in exploiting extremely racist imagery. Hall paints Famibe as a cruel and unnatural foreigner and that his poor white wife was helpless to protect herself against him.

To quote one of Hall's racist comments, I dare say the Egyptian civilization is one of the oldest and most wonderful civilizations in the world, but if you strip off the external civilization, you get the real Oriental underneath. Another quote, her great mistake, possibly the greatest mistake a woman could make, was a woman of the West in marrying an Oriental. Paul's defense alluded unsubtly to the prince's sexual appetites being unnatural, playing into a racist trope about sodomy and polygamy, both being practices from the East come to corrupt the poor-chaste white women in the West.

Hall argued that Famube was a pervert, and Hall also ensured that the jury never thought of his poor former wife as anything but a woman of pure virtue. Any mention of her previous sex work was forbidden from being included in the trial, let alone any possible elusive. to her one-time relationship with the Prince of Wales. This is where writer Andrew Rose makes his most stunning claim in his 2013 book, The Prince, the Princess, and the Perfect Murder. Rose suggests, based on interviews and evidence he was able to uncover, in conjunction with the evidence that he found to be strategically missing from the record, that a covert arrangement was made between Marguerite Alibert,

and the royal family. The royal family's reputation at the beginning of the 1920s was of the utmost importance for the preservation of the monarchy. Labor and populist movements were gaining popularity throughout Europe, and the murder of the Romanovs by the Bolsheviks in Russia sent shockwaves throughout every royal family. After all, Zarr Nicholas and the Serena Aliki were both King George V's first cousins.

The young Prince of Wales then was a key figure when it came to presenting the British royal family as likable. He was in his 20s, attractive, and the heir to the throne, the equivalent in the modern era to what a young Prince William once was. And here was a murderess on trial for her life, not only with a history of a relationship with the prince, but with over a dozen incredibly incriminating letters from him, in which the prince proves to be. wildly irresponsible with terrible judgment. Andrew Rose postulates that in exchange for the letters and the prince's name never coming up in the trial, the royal family worked behind the scenes

to ensure Marguerite Alibert's acquittal. As it stands, all of the passages from the Prince of Wales' wartime diaries referencing Maggie have been ripped out and several important documents from the Metropolitan and police special branches report on Marguerite have either been destroyed or removed from the archives. It's clear that there has been a systemic attempt by those in power to remove evidence relating to the pair's relationship. Unlike there was with the actual murder, there is no smoking gun to prove Andrew Rose's

claims, although, at least in my mind, it seems more than likely. Marguerite had these tremendous indus bargaining pieces and her life was at risk. Whether it's beyond a reasonable doubt or not is up to you, but the evidence, at least as it stands to me, is that the royal family engineered one of the most notorious cover-ups in history and permitted a vast miscarriage of justice. Whether it was the racism or external influence, the jury took less than one hour to reach the verdict of not guilty. It's a challenging situation to frame discussing whether or not Marguerite was actually guilty, especially when she raises the claims of domestic violence. But at least from my perspective, as it stands,

the racism used in her defense was grotesque, and her claims were backed up not with any evidence but with horrific stereotypes. that played into the age-old fear of protecting white women's bodies for men of color, even when in this situation, the white woman was the one literally holding the smoking gun. That certainly was Andrew Rose's conclusion. He had an earlier piece of writing on the murder, in which he characterized it as a crime of passion. But after completing his research for his 2013 book,

Rose concluded that, in his opinion, it was a murder for gain, an execution, a perfect crime that Marguerite Alibert got away with because she had blackmail over the heads of some of the most powerful people in the country. Marguerite would go on to sue the Fami family for her late husband's fortune, which would be dismissed as the Egyptian court flatly rejected the verdict of the British court and determined that Fami Bay's death was a murder. But as an acquitted woman, Marguerite lived the of her life in financial comfort being looked after by at least four wealthy gentlemen in succession until her death at age 80 in 1971. Her apartment, which faced the ritz in Paris,

still contained one or two of the prince's letters, which she kept as an insurance policy. They were destroyed after her death. As for the Prince of Wales, he also, eventually, more or less disappeared from public life. When King George V died in 1936, famously given a mixture of cocaine and morphine by his doctors to hasten his death so that it would make the morning papers as opposed to the less respectable evening papers, the Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. But he abdicated even before his official coronation. He chose instead to marry Wallace Simpson, a woman with two living ex-husbands which is forbidden by the Church of England. Normally, that wouldn't really matter,

but the King of England is, after all, the head of the church. And so Edward VIII abdicated, choosing to live the rest of his life as the Duke of Windsor. His younger brother became King George VI, the father of the current queen, Elizabeth II. Edward VIII's life of scandal threatened to undermine the British monarchy when it was at its most fragile

and it also may have helped a murderer walk free. That's the strange story of the Prince of Wales affair with Marguerite Ali Baer, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little more about the Prince and Princess Fami Bay. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance and then there's your body having its own program.

I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents Soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the Hipsons High School. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years.

later. We're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it.

Do you want a white collar something here? Just hit it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. Can you pull? I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious.

Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You are. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The murder of Ali Famibay in London coincided with another major event with regards to the relationship between. Egypt and Great Britain. Just the year before Fami Bay's death, two Englishmen discovered Tutton Commons' tomb. It was one of the most thrilling archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, the first burial chamber unsealed in Egypt for Western eyes that hadn't been previously emptied by tomb robbers. According to People magazine at the time, within King Tut's tomb were, quote, treasures so rich and wonderful that the first to behold them uttered cries of amazement. But some say the tomb also carried with it a curse, death upon anyone who entered or associated with it. Six weeks after the tomb's opening, one of its discoverers, Lord Carnivon, died from a mosquito bite.

A number of famous high-profile tragedies have also been ascribed to the curse. King touch revenge on those who had disturbed him. Prince Ali Famibe and Marguerite Ali Bear, as newlyweds, had visited the tomb in February of 1923 immediately after its opening, just weeks after they were married. They also hosted Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter on their yacht for lunch. If you're the superstitious type, you might consider it noteworthy as a data point that Ali Famibe

was dead within the year. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkayali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the Eyeheart.

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong, stance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.