Having fought for Franco during the Spanish civil war, Vilallonga was himself obliged to go into exile after writing a series of anti-Franco novels in the s. Having fled Spain, he was sentenced in absentia to imprisonment for sedition — and every three months thereafter was retried and had his sentence increased. By the time he returned to Spain his sentence was said to have amounted to more than years.
A self-proclaimed seducer and cad, the tall and elegant Vilallonga flaunted conquests ranging from Magda Gabor, the sister of Zsa Zsa, to the wife of a British admiral. In his vainglorious and — in the opinion of some — highly unreliable memoirs, he described himself as "a hardened alcoholic who, without ever taking precautions of any kind, has slept with more whores than a porcupine has quills". He claimed that when his first wife had fallen asleep on their wedding night, he had slipped out to spend the rest of the night in a brothel with French prostitutes.
His unfortunate first wife was Priscilla Scott-Ellis, a daughter of the 8th Lord Howard de Walden, one of Britain's richest peers; she and Vilallonga had met early in A former debutante, and always known as "Pip", she had joined Franco's forces as a field nurse during the Spanish civil war, one of only two British women volunteers to serve with the Nationalists. Described by Pip's biographer, the historian Paul Preston, as "handsome and dissolute", Vilallonga seemed to Pip's parents to be a most unpromising match; such were their misgivings that they did not attend their daughter's wedding in Cadiz in September Nor was Vilallonga's own father too pleased, fulminating how he had heard that during the civil war his son's bride had slept with half the Spanish Army, if not the entire Nationalist forces — suggestions that prompted Lord Howard de Walden to challenge him without success to a duel.
Cut off without a penny, Vilallonga looked to his young wife and her family as a potential source of funds, and so was dismayed to learn that most of the Howard de Walden fortune deriving from family ownership of a large patch of London would pass to Pip's brother. When the couple arrived in England in the spring of , Lord Howard de Walden — scenting Vilallonga's predatory motives — changed his will in what proved to be a fruitless effort to protect his daughter's financial interests.
While Vilallonga continued to accept large sums of money from his wife, he treated her abominably, confessing in his memoirs to having humiliated her and made her miserable. By the time Lord Howard de Walden died in November , Vilallonga and his wife were living in Argentina, allegedly for the sake of Pip's health. Returning alone to London, Vilallonga moved into a property in Cadogan Lane that Lord Howard de Walden had bequeathed to Pip — and proceeded to sell off the contents, including a valuable collection of modern art, to finance a spending spree.
