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  The Birleys were two of only twenty-four guests, excluding the hosts and the guests of honor, to attend a dinner for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth given by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his wife, Anne, on March 29, 1942. Eight years before, Oswald had gone out to Windsor with his easel for sittings with the king’s father, one of the many times he painted him, and mother. Queen Mary recorded her opinion of the finished portraits in her diary after viewing them in the artist’s St. John’s Wood studio: “good.” Hers hung in the King’s Writing Room at the castle, his in the Queen’s Vestibule. Oswald was nearly commanded to wear breeches to the Chamberlains’ dinner—until Mrs. Chamberlain asked the king’s preference and the palace reminded her that breeches are permitted only when the host wears the Garter: the prime minister did not. Following protocol, a proposed list of guests was submitted to the king’s private secretary. Everyone was approved, including Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marquess of Londonderry, and his wife, Edith; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire; Lord Halifax, former viceroy of India; and Lord Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s brother. As the Birleys sipped their consommé, they couldn’t have known that in 1954 their son, Mark, would marry the Londonderry’s granddaughter Annabel.

  ANNE DE COURCY 1939: THE LAST SEASON It was only the third time in the century that the Sovereign had dined at 10 Downing Street … The royal couple arrived punctually at 8.25 p.m. … guests stood waiting in a half-circle … presentations were made … Those invited included friends at the highest political level, known to be greatly liked by the King and Queen … The Londonderrys … combined politics and social grandeur … Edith was the most famous political hostess of her day… The brilliant entertainments at Londonderry House were a noted feature of the Season … Representing the arts was the portrait painter Oswald Birley, for whom Mrs. Chamberlain had just sat … Birley’s well-cut clothes, neat military mustache and genial manner gave him more the air of a solider than of the artist and music lover that he was. He and his dark Irish wife … shared an interest in Indian philosophy and had visited India several times already. For him, the invitation to dinner held an additional bonus: he was able to study the King, the subject of his next portrait, at close quarters. Although the order of precedence of the various distinguished guests was unequivocal, the seating plan had not been achieved without a certain amount of anguished consideration … the list of precedence … was sent along with the table plan to the Palace … Food, drink, the chairs the guests were to sit on … all had to be settled in advance … There were four services of waiters … In deference to royal tastes, the meal was comparatively simple: … filets de sole Bercy, selle d’agneau bouquetière with pommes Parisienne were followed by Poussin à la Polonaise, salade de laitue, asperges vertes, Parfait comtesse Marie aux fraises Grand Marnier with crème Chantilly … The names of those brought up to talk to Their Majesties had been carefully arranged …

  (“The Queen suggests starting to talk with Moucher Devonshire and Lady Londonderry, followed by as many of the others as there is time for.”) … The royal couple stayed until 11.40 p.m.

  ALISTAIR LAIRD Though Birley had none of Sargent’s psychological insight, Sargent made Birley’s career possible. There was so much money in Europe at the turn of the century, everyone wanted his portrait painted. Sargent did all the well-to-do. Birley was a product of that explosion.

  HUGO VICKERS His bread and butter were captains of industry—bankers, railroad magnates, sausage-factory owners. Lord mayors. Grumpy men with waistcoat chains.

  INDIA JANE BIRLEY My grandfather was the last of the great bravura portrait painters. Of his time, there’s only him and László. Oswald went to Spain as a young man to look at Velázquez. He idolized him. My grandfather’s studio at Charleston is where I paint now. He had a reputation for perhaps repeating himself—too many military men with their hands clasped. But there’s no one I’d rather have been painted by, and I’ve been painted by Lucian Freud. I went with Prince Charles to record his trip to Bangladesh in the nineties and lived in Bombay. I found portraits by Oswald from the twenties, “improved” by local artists.

  NICKY HASLAM A fairly hopeless painter, wouldn’t you say? Sub-Sargent fashionable. Subsubsubsubsub.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Oswald was a perfectly adequate performer, but he looks awfully second-rate now. Rhoda was to my mind the figure, a good friend of Brooke Astor, showy, narcissistic, highly affected, not as grand as she thought she was. Maxime was always talking about how she was a great gardener and a great cook and how she combined these two interests, feeding the roses with bouillabaisse.

  LADY RHODA BIRLEY After a time, the claws surface. Winston Churchill did a beautiful painting of one of the lobsters we had in the South of France called After Luncheon at Cappon, Cap d’Ail. Roses enjoy all sorts of things we enjoy ourselves.

  ELIZABETH LAMBERT On the matter of feeding the roses … she felt there was nothing better than fish, and she was very likely to donate the cod or mackerel that had been the subject of a still life and had already lingered for too many days in her painting studio. She brought ancient and unpleasant shellfish all the way back from a painting holiday in Brittany, and when a dead goldfish was discovered in the lily pond she called for a spade—not to bury it, but to feed it to the Fantin-Latour rose.

  LOULOU She’s a very exotic and daring cook, who suddenly gets hold of an idea, cooks it thousands of different ways, and then moves on to something else.

  LADY RHODA BIRLEY Once I get an idea it’s like a tidal wave—everything comes pouring in and it’s difficult to be selective. One ends up with more actors than audience because there’s hardly any room left for the audience. I also think I overestimate the public interest in the things I do. I always think they won’t be able to resist them, and I’m surprised when they do.

  KENNETH JAY LANE I loved Rhoda. Maxime did not. I gave Rhoda a show in New York once. She painted. Not very well. Realistic. Amateurish. Still Life with Mushrooms—that sort of thing. Marjorie Merriweather Post 4 came, Gloria Guinness5 … Rhoda hosted an arts festival at Charleston. In 1969, the program included a conversation gastronomique. She wore her hair in Charles II banana curls, a black pailletted skirt, a chrome yellow shirt held closed by Chanel brooches, and around her waist an embroidered Spanish piano shawl. She made pâtés to sell, a revolting mixture of salmon and sausage meat. As it was a broiling day, they bubbled and turned poisonous in the sun.

  There was lunch under a tent, then the conversation in the wonderful Elizabethan barn. On the stage were Rhoda, Osbert Lancaster, 6 Derek Hill7 and Cecil Beaton, especially lovely in a straw-colored linen suit. “Now we’re going to discuss our most favorite meal,” Rhoda announced. “Darling Cecil, why don’t you begin?” Cecil mumbled something about his Bolivian aunt.

  If the catering van with the platters for a party broke down, Rhoda thought nothing of serving the sixty-five chickens she’d prepared from a stone birdbath. Mia Farrow, who knew Rhoda through Rhoda’s protégé, the composer John Tavener, is said to have likened her to a Picasso whore. When it came time for Rhoda’s portrait bust, the sculptor of George V’s effigy for his tomb at Windsor did the honors. William Reid Dick showed Rhoda not just with her eyes downcast but closed shut, in high disdain.

  Her pull was enormous. Other Charleston festivals featured the culinary writer Elizabeth David, the literary biographer David Cecil, the Borodin string quartet, an exhibition of Rhoda’s own antique Indian coats and saris, Desmond FitzGerald on Irish gardens, Kenneth Clark on “The Questionable Concept of Good Taste” and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell—brother of Edith—on roses. Quentin Bell, son of Bloomsbury’s Vanessa and Clive Bell, held forth on the other Charleston, nearby Charleston Farmhouse. John Tavener performed sacred cantatas. Princess Margaret might be in the audience.

  JOHN TAVENER I never took drugs… No, that’s not quite true, my godmother [Lady Birley] was very wild and gypsylike, and Loulou de La Falaise—I was briefly involved with [her]… I remember going to lunch there, at the
manor … The cook came out and said, “Whatever you do Mr. John, don’t eat the vegetables.” But I had already drunk quite a lot of cider and wine with … these vegetables, which were laced with hashish, and I collapsed underneath the dovecot… I just waved [good-bye to Loulou], lying flat on the floor…

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH This is Rhoda for you, actually: Mark and I were newly married and staying at Charleston. There was a big do at the Brigh-ton Pavilion, and I’d forgotten my dress in London. Rhoda said, “Wear this one of mine.” There was only one thing wrong: The front had gone missing. I’ve never been strong on bras, and the one I was wearing was particularly hideous, a nursing thing. The bra was literally spilling out of the dress.

  “Rhoda, I can’t wear this.”

  “Darling, it’s charming. You go just like that.”

  Rhoda’s maid Jackie gave me a wink and sewed a chiffon scarf inside the bodice.

  “Oh darling, what have you done?”

  “But Rhoda, I couldn’t go out showing my underwear.”

  “Well, you’ve ruined the whole dress.”

  ARABELLA BOXER There is a mixture of Irish vagueness and practicality about Lady Birley that, together with her exotic beauty, makes her irresistible. Her secretary told me that when people rang up to ask whether they should wear jackets for the Borodin evening, Lady Birley, worried by the cool weather, said, “Blow the dinner jackets—be warm.” On another occasion, when … asked her advice about how to suggest tactfully to people that they might dress tidily for Glyndebourne,8 without actually forcing them to wear dinner jackets, she said, “Why not just say, ‘Come clean’?”

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY I saw Rhoda every year in Palm Beach. Our’s wasn’t the Palm Beach of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Our group was artistic: Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, Alice DeLamar,9 Tanaquil Le Clercq.10 Lady Birley made belts and jewelry with shells that she sold from a friend’s boutique on Worth Avenue, standing in front with her wild gypsy hair and baroque pearls, waiting for customers, looking like she was about to read your palm.

  ————————

  KATE BERNARD I’d been invalided out of my job as features editor of Tatler and went to Provence, where Maxime was living, to help her with her never-published memoirs. We celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday, so it was 2007. Her papers were everywhere, in complete and utter confusion, files stuffed under a cushion in her bedroom.

  She was extremely deaf but refused to wear her hearing aides. Like a lot of old people, she was selectively deaf. She wanted to talk when she’d had a few drinks. She didn’t want me to take notes, which hardly suited the task.

  Oswald had painted the notoriously acquisitive Queen Mary. One day, Maxime said, the queen came by the house in London. Eying a set of chairs, and finding Maxime, who was just a girl, alone, she attempted to persuade her: “These chairs are a gift to me from your mother!” Maxime had a randy nursemaid who liked to be spanked with a Mason Pearson hairbrush, and she took ballet lessons from Lydia Sokolova11.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Maxime and Clarissa Eden12 took dancing classes together as girls. Clarissa told me Maxime was so beautiful, the other children were frightened of her.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE It is quite true that I was brought up as a beauty… Being promoted as a beauty gives you a certain self-confidence… I had no feeling as a child of anything towards my parents, except terror and laughter. There was none of this stuff the Americans cheerfully call “bondage.” I was rapped on the knuckles [by my French governess] with an ebony cane if I couldn’t remember every coal mine in France… [My parents] were like Edwardian parents. They thought that children and dogs could be taken care of by servants… My mother had a wonderful solution for teenage children at parties. I would wear the dress she had chosen until she said goodnight to me, and then I would go upstairs, change my clothes, and for the rest of the night she wouldn’t officially recognize me… She spoke fluent Russian and said she had remembered it from an earlier incarnation. She became passionately religious; she was a Christian Scientist and then a Buddhist. Instead of a nanny we had a resident yogi… We rented a villa [in France] every summer… Everything interesting my parents had to say to each other was said in French, so I picked it up very quickly… [My father] liked to meet politicians and army people and went off to Scotland to shoot all kinds of little birds. It wasn’t any more of a life for my mother than it would have been for me… She was a bitch. Not at all with her friends, but with her family. A manipulator. I think she was unhappy with my father. He was wonderful but never wanted to have any fun. She was very beautiful. As she got older she became less beautiful, ruined by her expression. If I tried to kiss her she simultaneously drew me to her and pushed me away. When I turned my back she made the sign of the cross. I felt like a witch, like I was being burned. I screamed with rage… There’s some of her character in me. It’s sort of like when you carry a bad gene.

  LOULOU I was petrified of my grandmother. There were so many rules, dos and don’ts, what was U and Non-U. She hated physical contact. When you approached her, she backed away… In England, we’re not very physical.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS The Birleys were undemonstrative and uptight, as only the Brits can be. Two of Rhoda’s grandchildren went to school near her, and she never once asked them to lunch in five years.

  JOSÉPHINE RINALDI “When I was little my mother pushed me down the stairs, and more than once,” Maxime told me. Rhoda had a passion for roses, but not her daughter.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Rhoda was totally lacking in any kind of maternal feeling whatsoever. None. Forget it. Women who have a complete antipathy to their children do exist. Mark and Maxime didn’t see much of her. Rhoda would pit them against each other. Mark was never mad about Maxime, to be honest.

  AMY FINE COLLINS John Richardson always said that Maxime raped Mark, when they were teenagers. Now that doesn’t make any sense. It must be the other way around, if anything like that happened. I don’t think it’s possible for a woman to rape a man, or is it?

  MARK BIRLEY My relationship with my mother … wasn’t so much a strange relationship, more the absence of any normal relationship… an absence of affection … We were rather a divided family … a pretty good mess … The fact that my father was fifty when I was born must have made for some remoteness in the relationship there. I was extremely fond of him, but he was almost like a grandfather… I never really thought of my nanny as being a kind of surrogate mother figure, but … I suppose … she was… Frankly I was glad to leave that period of my childhood behind me, although I’ve wiped my mind pretty clear of all the bad things that happened.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I think this upbringing makes one independent. One judges for oneself what one does. One has one’s own morality, which has nothing to do with religions, or with anyone else. That’s what eccentricity is. We’re like a family of orphans. It’s because my children broke with this ghastly tradition that they became such good parents… We’re more like a tribe than a family. We’re close, but we’re Bedouins. We choose our own oasis, and we have our ins and outs. …

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Rhoda and Oswald had actually met my parents in the twenties at Dunrobin, my paternal grandmother’s castle in Scotland, the seat of the Sutherlands. Oswald was there to paint the duke. Rhoda was a deeply disappointed woman. The one major affair outside her marriage, with Victor Bruntisfield, 13 hadn’t gone right. He wouldn’t leave his wife. When it was breaking up, Rhoda would walk slowly and miserably downstairs to breakfast, looking like a ghost, her face thickly covered in talcum powder. She took a strange interest in the falling apart of my own marriage to Mark and in my affair with Jimmy Goldsmith.14 If I’d let her, she’d have asked about our sex life! … [My] breakup [with Mark] was because of Mark’s infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy … [Mark] was a serial adulterer.

  ————————

  Maxime attended Owlstone Croft finishing school in Cambridge. She was seventeen in 1939 and decided to join the Women’s
Royal Naval Service. But the recruiting office was shut the day she went to enlist, so she lied about her age and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)instead, becoming, she said, a corporal in intelligence. Maxime preferred the WAAFs anyway because of the uniform.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I liked blue close to the face. I didn’t think khaki suited me.

  KATE BERNARD At some juncture, she worked in a Red Cross hospital and told me she’d had an accident, an out-of-body experience, and died, but then came back. Bletchley Park was code-breaking headquarters in England in World War II. Maxime worked there, “catching” kleptomania. Anything with a bit of shine, she took. This led to a nervous breakdown, and she was discharged. The kleptomania was “shook off like a cold.”

  There was a snob element to Bletchley: lots of debs, girls with posh names and from secretarial colleges, Old Etonians, admirals’ daughters, or those of a general’s friend who were considered “suitable.” Coming from a “good family,” as Maxime did, implied that the candidate could be trusted not to betray king and country. Qualifications were beside the point. Interviews were along the lines of, “Do you mind typing things you don’t understand?” Camilla Wallop and the future Elizabeth II had been Girl Guides together. Sarah Norton was a goddaughter of Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India.

  Not that the work at Bletchley was frivolous. By the end of the war, ten thousand people were employed within its gates. Maxime was an “Enigma girl,” operating a German cipher machine, an Enigma, that decrypted double- and triple-scrambled messages tracking U-boats. WAAFs received four weeks of training, mostly drills to improve stamina. Maxime’s French was a plus, likely earning her the classification “multilinguist.” She traveled fifty miles north of London to Bletchley, a fifty-three-acre estate whose lugubrious late-Victorian redbrick pile combined the atmospheres of a home-county country house and a detention camp, barbed wired discouraging any thoughts of escape. Inmates wore “apple-catchers,” the long, baggy black underdrawers that were standard issue for British servicewomen, and received a stiff lecture on security. Maxime signed the Official Secrets Act and would have been told that should she be tempted to talk, even to her family, she could look forward to thirty years in prison. If anyone asked, best to say, “I’m a clerk in the Foreign Office.” Addressed by their surnames—it was always “Miss Birley,” never “Maxine,” her actual given name—WAAFs were “teleprincesses,” typing out intelligence reports on convulsive telex machines, or else indexers, cross-referencing U-boat numbers and the names of German naval officers. They complained of working in “huts” that were deathly cold, mittens and overcoats worn against coke stoves that heaved smoke. Billets were the luck of the draw. You could get a sympathetic couple with a lovely Queen Anne cottage or hostile hosts who forbid you to use the bathroom. Maxime wasn’t the only one who found Bletchley unhinging, who cracked. To forget her isolation, there was the drama club and passing performances by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and the Ballet Rambert, the same Marie Rambert whose dance school Loulou would grudgingly attend in the sixties. Bletchley’s culture of indulgence was a fillip to Maxime. Angus Wilson, the novelist, could be openly gay and no one cared. The budding computer scientist Alan Turing cycled to work in a gas mask because, he said, he had allergies. On leave days, Maxime could take the milk train down to London to go dancing, catch a play, or have a decent meal. There was sex, of course, consummated under the cloud that no man would marry a girl who was “shop-soiled.” American and RAF airmen from neighboring bases were invited to social evenings in the main house’s ballroom.