According The Sunday Mirror magazine, Lady Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, was the society catch in Park Avenue circles during her current visit to New York. Park Avenue grande dames swooned over titles. Although estranged from her philandering husband for 14 years, the Duchess was in no hurry to grant him a divorce since she enjoyed a sizable annual income from the marriage as well as the prospect of a huge inheritance if the nearly 70-year old Duke should kick the bucket. Or so the article claimed. (They were divorced the following year).
For his part, the Duke of Westminster was an example of the British aristocracy at its degenerate depths. His huge fortune was derived not from his exalted title but from an ancestor who had the foresight to marry the only daughter of a prosperous farmer who owned the land where the prime real estate neighborhoods of London, Westminster, home to the famed Cathedral and Parliament, and fashionable Mayfair, later spring up. In fact it was the Grosvenor family's status as the wealthiest people in England that led to its exaltation to a dukedom. Although not mentioned in the article, this Duke was a notorious anti-Semite who also had his brother-in-law banished from court for being gay. What the article does detail is his many marriages, infidelities and bestial treatment of his former wives when he tired of them. Lady Loelia was wife number three.
After the war broke out in Europe, the Duke continued to enjoy life at his Normandy estate with his 400 hounds, 50 thoroughbred houses and his latest mistress, the daughter of a French fish merchant, even after the Nazis occupied France. In the spring of 1942 as the war intensified with the entrance of the US into the the conflict, the Duke finally decided it was time to move on and staged a personal commando raid in his yacht to his coastal estate to evacuate his consort, the fair Bettina as well as a boatload of his favorite dogs.