From Call Girl Princess to Murderer | Marguerite Alibert

Marguerite Allibert's story is one of gritty survival, followed by a lucrative life of sex work. Allibert was a formidable woman who pulled herself up from a world of poverty to mingle among France's elite, accomplishing her goal of turning affairs into large sums of money in the process. Today, we're looking at the weird life of Marguerite Allibert. Marguerite saw love not from a romantic's point of view, but as a way to survive and thrive. She's even one of Prince Edward VIII's mistresses and went on to marry an Egyptian royal. However, that monumental event is where her story takes a murderous turn. In the end, Marguerite went down in infamy as the princess who got away with murder. The daughter of a taxi coach driver and a maid, Marguerite Allibert was born into France's middle class, read, not quite dire poverty, in the winter of 1890. Her mother and father were, not to put too fine a point on it, total failures as parents. When her younger four-year-old brother got run over by a lorry and, rather than going after the driver or at least carrying Junior down to the cemetery, the parents sent their naughty, brother-losing daughter to the Sisters of Mary for psychological torture. The nuns taught young Marguerite that if not for her sins, her four-year-old brother would still be alive, regardless of the lorry. With more help from the Sisters of Mary, Marguerite spent the rest of her guilt-ridden childhood cleaning someone else's house, only to lose both the childhood and the house to an unplanned pregnancy at 16. This was surely just a bump in the road in the beginning of a wholesome life filled with possibility. Uh, just kidding. They threw her out of the house to starve in the streets. While Marguerite's don't-ask-baby went on to live on a farm, as they did in those days, Marguerite herself became a sex worker and was scouted by one Madame Denard, keeper of courtesans. The Madame trained Marguerite to use her natural charm and beauty to make money instead of babies, which suited Marguerite just fine. Madame Denard boasted that Marguerite was The mistress of nearly all my best clients. gentlemen of wealth and position in France, England, America, and other countries. It was me that made a sort of lady of hair. She was cheeky that way. Marguerite had already learned from the Sisters of Mary that she could only count on herself if she was to survive and flourish in any way. She had also learned to sing there. Mezzo-soprano, a handy skill in any quality courtesan's garter belt. It seems she'd found a fulfilling career in which to put everything she'd gotten from her parents to good use. Marguerite had a number of aliases, including Maggie Mellor, taken from her first almost-husband, a wealthy 40-year-old stable owner, Andre Mellor, himself a married man. As we'll see soon, she was nuts for horses, money, and the name Mellor. Andre had it all in the bag. Or not. While Maggie was never actually married to Mellor, what with the laws of man and God and all, the 17-year-old liked the name and the money enough to take them for herself. We must admit Maggie Mellor does have a ring to it. And it would soon become apparent to her that that ring was the only kind of ring she'd get from this fellow. Ironically, Andre, still married six years later, hung up his sugar daddy shingle because Maggie couldn't or wouldn't stay faithful to him. Freed from the clutches of abject poverty and in possession of about 200,000 British pounds, courtesy of Mr. Mellor, Maggie got Raymond, her don't ask baby, back from the farm and would later send her to school in London. It was the only really decent thing she's known to have done. Prince Edward VIII, having recently borrowed a hooker from a friend to take care of his virginity problem, was just one of Maggie's many moneyed men. But he was also the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne. And so here, our story takes a fun turn. Maggie was in her late 20s and an experienced Parisian courtesan at the time. Prince Eddie was a baby in comparison. 23, royal, freshly deflowered, and out on leave during his very first world war. It was the good queen mother's worst nightmare. Edward fell head over heels for Marguerite for about a year before he got bored, just long enough to write what he would go on to call, Oh, those bloody letters. in a lament to advisor Joey Legg. Those bloody letters contained every idiot thing a young man might say to his lady love. All the delicate fancies that come straight from the heart, bypassing the brain. Things like, I found a sex fork. Ha ha ha. Or, Dad's actually a bit of a wanker. Or, This war is dumb, and no one will let me drive the bloody ship. But while the average parents might be embarrassed to be confronted with the blatherings of their firstborn in the spring of his first love, this ---- could have ruined the royal family. Spoiler alert, that's going to be important here in a minute. It may come as a shock, but Maggie actually did settle down. Well, she got married anyway. In 1919, after a year of sending a regular stinker to Prince Edward VIII, reminding him that she still had all those bloody letters, Maggie Mellor married Charles Laurent. He was handsome and boring, and he saved Prince Edward a lot of trouble. People, this is why boring exists. They divorced six months later, netting Maggie a nice settlement to call her own. An apartment, 10-horse stables, cars, heaps of servants, and of course, a new name to use, should the mood take her. Maggie's new, ahem, Bey was actually a Bey, or lord, not a prince. But that didn't stop people in certain circles from calling her Princess Fahmy when she married the hilariously wealthy Ali Kamal Fahmy Bey and settled down with him in Cairo. The Egyptian, not a prince, received his title of Bey from Egypt, And Egypt is an Islam-oriented nation. The strictly upright life of a Bey's wife was not exactly appealing to thoroughly established hedonist and probable dominatrix Maggie Mellor. But she agreed to it on two conditions. The first was that she be allowed to wear Western clothing. Fair enough. She's quite a negotiator. The second, that she be allowed to divorce him. Ooh. Prince Fahmy wasn't so into that. But he was willing to pretend it if it meant Maggie would convert. Just before the wedding, the clever Bey slid the divorce clause off the table and replaced it with an edict that he'd be allowed to get himself more wives. Maybe they were true soulmates after all. Why the Bey thought this devilishly sexy, twice-divorced Parisian prostitute he met while she was escorting a different rich man around an exotic country a year ago would ever become a proper Islamic wife, we have no idea. But apparently he did, bless his heart. Gotta give it up to the Bey for trying. Bey Fahmy and his princess fought more or less constantly, sometimes even carrying on with a row in broad daylight in front of other people. He complained that her independence, insatiable sexuality, and general personality were utterly humiliating. This was, in fact, exactly what the Bey had signed up for. But he seems to not ever have really figured that out. As we will soon see, he didn't have much time. Bey Fahmy had a certain reputation around Egypt as a closeted homosexual. Whether to perpetuate that rumor or to use it to her advantage, Maggie claimed to have been torn during unnatural intercourse. Considering her line of work, this coy false claim to innocence is pretty foul, no matter what she meant it to do for her. Those who knew her well enough suspected that she was working on getting another fat divorce settlement because this claim was one of many in a growing list of abuses she was collecting so soon after the marriage. But wait, what about that last minute no divorce, more wives clause? Well, we'll never know how that battle might have gone. Probably not great because, dun, dun, dun, it's perhaps a bit too perfect that the couple should have returned from a showing of The Merry Widow to have a violent fight in their hotel room that would make a Merry Widow of Maggie Mellor. But that's exactly what happened the night of July 9, 1923. After a lot of shouting and such upon their return from the theater, the Bey left. He returned a few hours later and would never leave again under his own power. Around 2 that morning, three shots were heard. Princess Fahmy was arrested, and an hour later, the Bey was dead, shot by his wife in the back of the head with a .38 she'd been keeping under her pillow. It was rather neatly packaged as far as homicides go. There was no mystery. The murder weapon, the perpetrator, and the victim were all accounted for. There were no extra threads to untangle. Witnesses present before and after the shooting rounded the case out nicely, or so everyone thought. Ah, the power of blackmail. 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 pound or nothing type, Though I'm disappointed and didn't think she turned nasty, of the whole trouble is my letters and she's not burnt one. Prince Edward VIII, who, all things considered, got out of this lightly compared to Joey Legg. We think there are about 20 letters, which are wildly indiscreet. He said things about the conduct of war that might have been misinterpreted. He's made rude remarks about his father, and there's a commonly sexual content to them as well. They're not the kind of letters you would have wanted the world to know about. Put all that together, and you have the keys to a royal get-out-of-jail-free card. Maggie's mother's nuns didn't raise no fool. Her regular stinker of a threat letter to Prince Edward VIII about his letters was a refrain the former choir girl turned call girl was happy to sing again, only this time there was a lot more than 100,000 pounds on the line. Strings were pulled to protect the prince and his family's reputation. Maggie's life as a lady of the night was never admitted into evidence and therefore couldn't be examined, thus taking care of those pesky letters and making sure no one would think less of Maggie for her work or Eddie for ever having been 23. This, combined with some classic racism of the roaring 20s, ensured the defense could paint the picture they needed, the late Bey as the wife-beating, baby-swapping subhuman, Marguerite as the hapless white woman trapped in his savage brown clutches. Guess how that turned out? Yeah. Every decade has its trial of the century. This was one of them. People lined up around the building to see the action or sent their servants to buy and or save seats for them. Aside from the vicious slander of the victim, though, there wasn't much actual, well, action. In September 1923, Bey Fahmy was convicted in the public mind of being an evil, depraved, racially inferior, perverted little monster man. Marguerite Allabert was acquitted of all charges. Maggie returned to her native Paris to live a long, comfortable life of luxury. She continued her exciting lifestyle, but eventually withdrew from the limelight, supported by at least five different ex-husbands until her death at age 80 in 1971. Prince Edward's mistake is a cautionary tale to us all in the age of the internet. As for Maggie, we learned that a little extortion, a little imagination, and a lot of blackmail can make a very merry widow indeed.