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Husband number two was handsome, dashing Pali Pálffy, a Hungarian count with a big estate and a passion for blood sports, the two of them enjoying some jolly times with Göring and Goebbels at the International Game Exhibition in Berlin. This marriage ended when Pali fell for that notorious femme fatale, Louise de Vilmorin, about whom Etti does her best to be fair, her good intentions strained to the limit when Louise appears again, this time to seduce Etti’s third husband, Tommy Esterhazy. But Tommy gets his come-uppance during the war, imprisoned by the Nazis, ‘possibly because of his connection with Louise,’ Etti coolly observes from the comfort of her lakeside hotel in Zurich. She meanwhile marries and divorces a third Hungarian count, before returning to America where she targets husband number five, who to Etti’s disgust prefers eating hamburgers at home ‘rather than spending a lot of money in restaurants’. Another divorce — ‘It was always such a bore getting these divorces. Somehow they took such a long time to come through’— and then on to husband number six, Arpad Plesch, the richest of them all.
With a house on the Avenue Foch and a villa in the south of France, a string of race horses and a fabulous wardrobe, Etti was happy at last. As Mme Plesch, ‘when I wanted something,’ she recalls, ‘I just bought it.’ The fact that her husband was a notorious scoundrel blacklisted for years for dubious dealings in both Britain and America is hardly mentioned by Etti, indeed only revealed here through the meticulous researches of Hugo Vickers, who trawled through FBI files, among much else, to get at the truth.
Written without a glimmer of humour, wonderfully lacking in introspection, Horses & Husbands is nonetheless fascinating. This is partly due to Etti herself, heroically self-centred, and partly to the picture she provides of a Ruritanian lost world: at the Esterhazy castle, for instance, when she and her husband retired for the night, it was the custom for the servants respectfully to line up against the walls, ‘all the way from the drawing room to our bedrooms’, however late the hour. So picturesque and traditional, as Etti rightly remarks.
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