A tenuous connection between UK nobility and Louise Brooks

In the 1920s, various European nobility including a few members of the British nobility came to the United States either on vacation or in exile. And a few even married Hollywood film stars, as when Gloria Swanson married Henri, Marquis de la Falaise, and Mae Murray married Prince David Mdivani.

With the recently passing of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in mind, I was surprised to come across a passage in a biography of Philip's Uncle, Louis Mountbatten, commonly known as Lord Mountbatten. (If you want a feel for how he fits into the story of the current British royal family, watch a few of the last episodes of The Crown, where he is a prominent, behind-the-scenes character and a mentor to Charles, Price of Wales.) The biography I am referring to is The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves by Andrew Lownie. In the book, the author discusses a trip Mountbatten's wife, Edwina, took to the United States: 

"In February 1930, Edwina sailed to New York with Marjorie and her husband Brecky, criss-crossing the country via Chicago to California and Mexico to New Orleans and Florida. She now had two new film-star admirers, Ronald Colman and a good-looking friend of Douglas Fairbanks, called Larry Gray. Gray was then at the height of his career as one of Hollywood’s leading men, playing opposite Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Marion Davies and Norma Shearer, and it was he, rather than Colman, who captured Edwina’s heart and accompanied her when she stayed with Randolph Hearst – whose mistress was Marion Davies – at his fantasy home, San Simeon. ‘Italian villas, French chateaux and Greek Temples all thrown into one,’ as Edwina told Dickie."

The reference to Brooks is what caught my keyword attention, though apparently, Brooks and Edwina likely never met. Edwina was also a good friend of the UK newspaper baron and later cabinet minister Lord Beaverbrook, who did know Brooks during her days with the Scandals in 1924 -- that is, before Brooks herself went to England where she danced at the Cafe de Paris in London before who knows who of the British upper crust.

Brooks herself, seemingly, maintained something of an interest in the British nobility throughout her her life. Her notebooks for October, 1957 for example contains entries of her watching television coverage of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the United States. However, it wasn't really nobility that interested Brooks, but rather women in power and how they acted and how they were treated.

Louise Brooks, holding court later in life