Basil Zaharoff - Personal Life

Personal Life

Zaharoff was a friend of both the actress Sarah Bernhardt and her Greek husband Jacques Damala (who was once described as the handsomest man in Europe). When Damala's mistress (who injected him with heroin between acts of plays he was appearing in) had an illegitimate daughter by him in 1889, she left the baby in a basket (with a note) on Sarah Bernhardt's doorstep. The baby (who was baptised Teresa) was given into the care of Zaharoff, who found a family to raise her in eastern Thrace (in Adrianopole). In 1920 she posed for Picasso, and she had affairs with the American novelist Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel D'Annunzio (an early Italian Fascist). The story of her life is told in the historical novel Terese by Fredy Germanos (1997).

Zaharoff was fascinated by aviation, and gave money and other support to pioneers in Great Britain, France and Russia. He encouraged Hiram Maxim in his attempt to build a flying machine, and later claimed that he and Maxim were the first men to be lifted off the earth, when Maxim tested his first "flying machine" at Bexley in 1894.

In September 1924 Zaharoff, almost 75 years old, remarried. (He had been married to an English woman much earlier in life—primarily, it was believed as of mid-February 2011, to obtain a British passport.) He met María del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocinio Simona de Muguiro y Beruete some three decades earlier on business travel in Spain, when she was married to her new husband (the unbalanced Prince Francisco de Bourbon, Duke de Villafranca de los Caballeros). She was unable to divorce her husband (despite his documented insanity) because of his relationship to the Spanish royal family, and the duchess and Zaharoff had to wait until the Duke's natural death. Some eighteen months after their marriage, Lady Zaharoff died of an infection.

Afterwards, Zaharoff began a liquidation of his business assets and undertook to compose his memoirs. When the memoirs were completed they were stolen by a valet who had, perhaps, hoped to make his fortune by revealing embarrassing secrets about the greats of Europe. The police found the memoirs and returned them. On payment of a cheque to the policemen Zaharoff re-acquired the manuscript, which he then consigned to the fireplace.

He was interested in promoting aviation and study; he funded chairs of aviation at the universities of the Sorbonne, Petrograd and Imperial College, and a chair of French literature at Oxford University.