Denise Orme (1884-1960) was an English turn-of-the-century musical comedy star who achieved lasting fame through her titled marriages and children. She was born Jessie Smither, the only daughter of Alfred Smither and Jessicah Pococke, on August 25, 1884 in the Hackney district of London, which would later be the birthplace of diverse show business personalities such as Jessica Tandy, Anthony Newley, Dame Eileen Atkins, Marina Sirtis, and Idris Elba. Her parents were musical: her father, described variously as a legal clerk, a servant, and a bartender, was also an organist and her mother, a piano teacher.
Jessie, in addition to being pretty and charming, was a talented singer and musician. In 1899, she attended the Royal Academy of Music, where she won a violin exhibition. Later while she studying at the Royal Academy of Music, her singing attracted the attention of George Edwardes, the period’s premiere impresario of the popular theater. He would foster her career upon the musical stage.
Jessie followed in the footsteps of her younger cousin, Ethel Rose Kendall (1890-1931) who had gone on the stage and assumed the name Eileen Orme. She would marry into aristocracy, the Honourable Maurice Henry Nelson Hood, son and, at that time, heir of Arthur Wellington Alexander Nelson Hood, the 2nd Viscount Bridport (1839-1924), a descendent of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s brother. Maurice predeceased his father, killed at the age of 34 in World War I at the Battle of Gallipoli. Eileen (Ethel) was the mother of Rowland Hood (1911-1969) who became the 3rd Viscount Bridport and the 6th Duke of Bronte (a title bestowed upon Admiral Nelson by the King of Sicily, Ferdinand III in 1799). He was a naval office and, as a politician, served in the conservative government of Neville Chamberlain, pre World War II.
Jessie, therefore, took the stage name of Denise Orme and made her debut in 1906 in the chorus of a revival of a recent French operetta The Little Michus (Les p’tites Michu), set during the French Revolution. It was staged at Daly’s Theatre, which Edwardes had built with his now deceased partner, renowned, but notoriously tyrannical American theatre manager Augustin Daly. Later in the run of the play, Denise assumed a principal role. And by the end of the year, Denise Orme was starring in See See, a musical at the Prince of Wales Theatre, one of George Edwardes’ West End properties, which had hosted the first English musical comedy in 1892. (Recently renovated, it is still in operation today). In October of 1906, back at Daly’s Theatre, Denise had one of the major roles in The Merveilleuses, another musical set during the French Revolution, this one based on a 1873 play by Victorien Sardou, with music by Austrian Hugo Félix. Also, at this time soprano Orme was among the artists who contributed to a 1906 gramophone recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
At the turn of the century many members of the British aristocracy were dating actresses and chorus girls. Some of the “stage-door Johnnies” famously married their show business girl friends, seldom with the approbation of society and family. On April 24, 1907 Denise Orme secretly wed at a register office an aristocrat, The Honorable John Reginald Lopes Yarde-Buller (1873-1930). He was the son and heir of John Yarde-Buller, the 2nd Baron Churston, and the Honourable Barbara Yelverton, daughter of the first Naval Lord, Admiral Sir Hastings Yelverton (born Hastings Henry) , and Barbara Yelverton, Baroness Grey de Ruthyn, widow of the Marquess of Hastings and famous for being a geologist and an early collector of fossils. Denise’s husband was an officer in the British army who had seen distinguished service in the Boer War and had been an aide-de-camp to The Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India and to Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Arthur, The Duke of Connaught.
Denise retired from the stage for a time, but after the birth of her first child, she made her return in October of 1908, appearing in George Edwardes’ musical, The Hon’ble Phil at the Hicks Theatre in London. She did not star, but had a chance to sing and to play her violin. The following year, she was in another George Edwardes play at the Gaiety Theatre, the highly successful Our Miss Gibbs, although she only had a supporting role in it. The extent of Denise Orme’s further acting and singing career, if any, does not seem to be very well chronicled.
John Yarde-Buller’s father died in 1910 and he succeeded to his title, becoming the 3rd Baron Churston — with Denise now Lady or Baroness Churston. Denise was busy as a mother. The Churstons had six children in all, the last being born in 1918.
In the late 1920s Denise had an affair with Theodore, “Tito,” Wessel (1889-1948), a Danish businessman and diplomat, and, as a result, Baron Churston divorced her in 1928. On October 31, 1928 Denise married Wessel in London. She became the mother of three step-children, but also had a son with Wessel in 1930 when Denise was 46 or so. It was her last child. In 1934 they dissolved their marriage.
A short time after the end of her second marriage, Denise had an affair with the 9th Earl of Darnley, Esmé Ivo Bligh (1886-1955), a major in the Air Force. Bligh was born in Australia, but had inherited an Irish title. He had been twice divorced, the last time being in 1936. Presumably, the affair with Denise ended when he married for a third time in 1940.
During the 1940s Denise Orme owned and managed the Beech Hill Hotel in Rushlake Green, an old, but small village in East Sussex, southern England. In 1946, though, she married for the third time, an old friend, Edward Fitzgerald, the Duke of Leinster, Ireland’s Premier Peer of the Realm (1892-1976). She was 62, he, 54, both having been married twice before.
The Fitzgerald family has an interesting history. Edward’s grandfather, the 4th Duke of Leinster had 15 children by a single wife. Edward’s father, the 5th Duke, was noted as voracious stamp collector. Edward’s older brother Maurice, the 6th Duke, never married and lived in a mental institution, dying there at the age of 35. Edward assumed the title in 1922 when he was 30. Before succeeding to the title, Edward, a notorious gambling addict, profligate, and ne’er-do-well, had already signed away most of his inheritance to one Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley, a some time member of parliament. Fitzgerald declared bankruptcy in 1936. His first wife was a chorus girl whom he married in 1913. She provided him with an heir, his only legitimate offspring, but they separated in 1922 and divorced in 1930. She later committed suicide. The second wife, whom he wed in 1932, was an American socialite. They divorced in 1946.
Denise Orme, then a duchess, died in London in October 20, 1960 at the age of 76. She was found having passed away in her bath. Her widower, the Duke of Leinster, would marry a waitress in 1965. Living in poverty, he committed suicide in 1976 by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
Denise Orme had six children by her first husband, John Yarde-Buller, 2nd Baron Churston. Joan Barbara (1908-1997), the eldest child, was one of the much chronicled Bright Young Things, the wild-living socialites of 1920s England. She was firstly married to Thomas Loel Guinness, from 1927 to 1936. Guinness, descended from a brother of the famous Irish brewer, was a conservative Member of Parliament, as well as businessman, aviator, and philanthropist, and, in the 1950s, he would be the secret owner of the research vessel Calypso, which he leased (for a token franc a year) to oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. When Loel Guinness sued Joan for divorce, he named Aly Khan as co-respondent. The divorce was uncontested.
In 1936, just after her divorce from Guinness, Joan did marry Prince Aly Khan (1911-1960), a Pakistani diplomat and officer in the French Foreign Legion, but better known as an adventurer, playboy, and owner of race horses. During the marriage, Joan Barbara converted to Islam and assumed the name Taj-ud-dawlah. They had two sons together. In 1957 the eldest, Prince Karim, age 20, succeeded his grandfather Aga Khan III as the Imam of Nazri Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam, and became known as Aga Khan IV.
Joan Barbara divorced Aly Khan in 1949 due to his extramarital affairs, particularly one with Pamela Churchill (later Harriman), the wife of Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son. Shortly after the dissolution of their marriage, Aly Khan would wed legendary American film star Rita Hayworth. The marriage was short-lived, though. Even before their divorce, Aly Khan became engaged to, but, in the end, did not marry film star Gene Tierney.
Joan Barbara would have a long friendship with the unmarried Seymour Berry, Baron and Viscount Camrose (1909-1995), military officer, Member of Parliament, and newspaper magnate. They would eventually marry in 1886 when they were both well into their 70s. Joan, then the Dowager Viscountess Camrose, died in 1997 at the age of 89, surviving her husband by 2 years.
Denise Orme’s eldest son, Richard (1910-1991) succeeded to his father’s title and became the 4th Baron Churston in 1930. He served during World War II in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and achieved the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. Among his three wives was Sandra Needham, whom he wed in 1949. She, as actress Sandra Storme, had, in the 1930s, appeared in several British films, including one (Q-Planes) with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. Two years after her death in 1979 he married, as his third and last wife, an illegitimate daughter of the 2nd Baron Rothschild.
The second son, John (1915-1962) was a soldier and married to the daughter of a minister. The second daughter and fourth child, Denise, (1916-2005) was the second wife of Robert Grosvenor, 5th Baron Ebury, Lord-in-waiting, military officer, and racing car driver who died at the age of 43 in a racing accident.
The fifth child, daughter Lydia (1917-2006), was married twice. Her second husband, 1947-1960, was John Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford (1917-2002), who was notorious for flouting conventions and outraging his fellow peers. He worked as a newspaper reporter and as a farmer in South Africa. To satisfy the $14 million dollars in death duties incurred when his father died, he opened the family home, Woburn Abbey, to the public and later put a safari park on the grounds. He was the author of several books and appeared on television. After he and Lydia divorced in 1960, the Duke married Nicole Milinaire (1920-2012), a heroine of the French Resistance during World War II and, during the 50s, a TV producer in France. (She was the associate producer of the 1954 British TV series Sherlock Holmes which starred Ronald Howard and Howard Marion-Crawford).
The sixth and last child Denise had with Yarde-Buller was Primrose (1918-1970), who married William Cadogan, 7th Earl Cadogan (1914-1997), a military officer and Freemason Grand Master. Their son, Charles Cadogan (born 1937), is considered one of the wealthiest men in England through his family estates and ownership of valuable properties in Chelsea, London.
With her second husband Theodor Wessell (1889-1948), Denise had one son, Hugo (1930-2012). A businessman, in the 1950s he was married briefly to Danish aristocrat Nina Møller (1932- ). After their divorce she and Frederik Floris, Baron van Pallandt (1934-1994), son of the Dutch ambassador to Denmark and a Danish countess, formed the successful musical group Nina and Frederik, a singing duo performing calypso, folk, and popular music. Nina van Pallandt also had an acting career, starring, notably, in Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye.
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