The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  Lady Evelyn was on our side, but said she could not write to Muv and Farve. ‘I shouldn’t dare,’ she whispered. While Parliament was in recess Bryan’s father was away on his yacht—far away. He did not go to the Mediterranean, but to distant, savage lands.

  In September he was expected back. Lady Evelyn and the children left the Huts and went to Heath House, Hampstead. ‘I wish we could stay on at Bailiffscourt,’ she said. ‘Such beautiful weather. But I must go at once because of Christmas.’

  ‘Christmas, Lady Evelyn?’ I cried. ‘But that’s three months off!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Bryan, ‘but it takes Mummy a good three months to do her Christmas. In fact she’s really at it the whole year.’

  This astonished me so much that I asked Rosalie and Pink McDonnell about it one day. ‘Aunt Evelyn’s Christmas is terrific,’ said Rosalie. ‘In fact Uncle Walter can’t stand it. He always leaves England the moment Parliament rises because of the Grosvenor Place Christmas.’

  Colonel Guinness, who turned up eventually, had a long talk with Bryan. I was invited to stay at Heath House; Bryan met me at Paddington and drove me to Hampstead. When we arrived his mother was gardening. She was walking along a path with a watering can, watering it here and there, if that is the word, with milk. ‘Mummy’s encouraging the moss’, explained Bryan.

  The garden was quite big by Hampstead standards; it looked rather sad. Ugly tufts of murky, untended grass and weeds sprouted everywhere, there were over-grown hedges with holes and gaps in them, and not a flower was to be seen except the odd dandelion and thistle. ‘Mummy can’t bear garden flowers,’ Bryan told me. ‘She only likes wild ones, and of course they don’t do very well in London.’

  Lady Evelyn pointed vaguely here and there. ‘You can’t imagine what a perfectly ghastly pergola there used to be,’ she said, adding in a horrified whisper, ‘And there were hideous roses—in beds.’

  Inside, Heath House had also been transformed to Lady Evelyn’s taste, and one saw what Bailiffscourt would eventually become.

  Colonel Guinness seemed not to notice either the garden or the house. He talked about politics, people and health.

  ‘What! No vitamins?’ he said when I refused some raw carrot. The food was excellent; we ate it off a worm-eaten refectory table. I felt very shy of Bryan’s father. He was kind but distant to me; but he had promised Bryan to write to Farve.

  Every evening we dined early and went to a play. In the mornings Lady Evelyn did her Christmas shopping, and in the afternoon she scattered milk over the grim garden.

  Farve gave in and we were officially engaged. I spent my time between Swinbrook and Grosvenor Place, where the Guinnesses returned in October. Lady Evelyn shopped all day now, as there were only about seventy shopping days till Christmas.

  Grosvenor Place was like Heath House only much, much more so. When you approached the great, ugly Victorian imitation of a French château and walked up the steps the door opened at once. This was the work of George, the door man, who sat all day watching the entrance from a little window in the porch. He was by way of being clumsy. ‘Did George knock you down?’ was Lady Evelyn’s first question when one arrived. George led the way across a dark hall with stripped pine panelling to the lift, which looked like a tiny medieval closet. The lift whizzed up several floors and was opened by a nursery-maid. Tea, and in fact most of life, was spent in Grania’s nursery. Lady Evelyn herself slept in one of the night nurseries. The day nursery was a large cheerful white room with a bright fire, plenty of toys and books, and sofas covered in chintz. While the rest of the house was almost pitch dark, lights blazed in the nursery. Lady growled and made little dashes, but she only bit men guests; Raymond and Edward Greene, great friends of Lady Evelyn, always came to Grosvenor Place wearing riding boots because of the collie.

  If one arrived for luncheon or dinner George handed one over to the head parlourmaid and the full oddity of Grosvenor Place was unfolded. The downstairs rooms were lined—panelled is not the word—with rough, blackened wood. The fires were encouraged to smoke and smoulder, because the effect Lady Evelyn wished to create was that of a house so ‘early’ that chimneys had not been invented. The furniture, besides refectory tables black with age—or with simulated age—one did not always quite believe in the Grosvenor Place furniture—consisted of dozens of Spanish chairs, of various sizes but similar design, a strip of dark, hard leather for the back, another for the seat, with many a rusty nail to catch a stocking here and there in the crumbling wooden frame. The lamps were made of bent pieces of iron holding sham yellow candles with yellow bulbs of about five watts shaded in thick old parchment—tallow, not wax, was the note.

  On the tables were pewter pots containing bunches of grasses and wild flowers, and there were polished pewter plates and dishes to eat off. The forks had two prongs. The pewter things were made by Day, the head chauffeur, in a garage. He had given up driving and spent his whole time making more and more pewter plates, because Colonel Guinness liked to have dinner parties of over a hundred people. Lady Evelyn thought entertaining a tiresome bore, but she did it for his sake, only insisting that there must be enough pewter for everybody. To have had to fall back on silver or china would have been too humiliating.

  On the day of a dinner party the cars went out of London at dawn, crowded with maids; when they got to the country they filled baskets with cow parsley, grasses and buttercups and then hurried back to London and changed into their medieval gowns made of stuff with a pattern of wild flowers on it, to be ready by the time the guests began to arrive.

  The guests behaved rather badly; they all pretended to get hay-fever from the floral decorations. I sat next to Philip Sassoon at one of these dinners; he was quite furious because Lady Evelyn could just as well have had orchids everywhere instead of cow parsley and moon daisies, and gold rather than pewter. He loudly disapproved of her eccentricity.

  Grosvenor Place had two of everything because it was numbers 10 and 11 knocked into one house. One of the big staircases was entirely taken up by Murtogh’s slide. After a visit to a fair he had said to his mother: ‘Why can’t we have a slide from the top of the house to the bottom?’ and immediately a beautiful, polished wooden slide was built and fitted on the staircase. Everybody, not only Murtogh, played on the slide. It was a marvellous idea perfectly executed.

  Lady Evelyn’s father was still alive. His only son, Uncle Ronny, was a bachelor of about fifty. He was charming and rather eccentric; he believed in the Hidden Hand and the Jewish World Plot. Colonel Guinness had no patience with Uncle Ronny’s pet theories, but as he was a member of the government Uncle Ronny deluged him with literature about them which went straight into the waste-paper basket.

  As soon as our engagement appeared in The Times, wedding presents began to pour in. When the presents were all arranged Lady Evelyn looked at them reflectively.

  ‘The glass will be the easiest,’ she said. ‘It only needs a good kick.’ She said silver was much more of a problem. ‘Walter and I had such luck, all ours was stolen while we were on our honeymoon.’

  All I remember of the marriage service is that Tom had got hold of a wonderful trumpeter who filled the church with triumphant sound when the choir sang Handel’s ‘Let the bright seraphim in burning row’, and that the clergyman pressed his hand on my head so hard that the rickety wreath and veil arrangement almost fell over my eyes.

  Lady Evelyn was a vision in cream velvet trimmed with sables. Just as we were going away Bryan rushed over to where she was standing and threw his arms round her. ‘Good gracious, Bryan!’ she said, in the little voice usually reserved for Lady.

  From A Life of Contrasts, Mosley, D. (1977, 2002)

  Blenheim’s Eccentric Duchess

  Gladys Deacon, whose classic face is carved in stone on a sphinx at Blenheim, was an American child living with her parents and sisters in Europe when an appalling drama struck the family. Mr Deacon had long been jealous of his wife’s friendship with a certain Emile Abeill
e, and convinced that the two of them were locked-in together in her room at the Splendide Hotel at Cannes, he got the hotel secretary as witness and they broke open the door. Mrs Deacon, despite a bed which had clearly had two people in it, pretended she was alone; but Mr Deacon, candle in one hand and revolver in the other, saw a shadow in the adjoining sitting room and shot through a little canapé, mortally wounding the unfortunate Abeille, who was crouched behind it. The trial was at Nice, and Deacon was sentenced to one year in prison, of which he served a month. It was one of the most sensational crimes passionnels of the nineteenth century.

  Mr Deacon went back to America and Mrs Deacon reverted to her maiden name of Baldwin, but everyone knew who she was, and the little girls could never appear without somebody whispering the dreadful tale. They grew up with it. Gladys was eleven in 1892 when her father shot her mother’s lover.

  Mrs Baldwin was soon installed at Caprarola, a palace near Rome, by her lover Prince Doria; but neither Roman nor Parisian society would receive her. As they grew up the girls were so beautiful and clever that they proved irresistible. Their mother longed for them to make ‘good’ marriages. Gladys in particular was brilliant, and Marcel Proust said of her: ‘I never saw a girl with such beauty.’ Her friends were writers and artists and intelligent people, many of whom were more intrigued than shocked by the old scandal.

  When she was 40, after his marriage with Consuelo Vanderbilt had been annulled in Rome, Gladys married her lover of many years, Sunny, ninth Duke of Marlborough. What did she see in him? He was unprepossessing. The answer must be ‘a duke’. Thenceforward a slow, steady decline began for Gladys. She had a disastrous face-lift; it left her with mouth awry and a chin which looked like a collapsed balloon. She was extraordinarily brave about this, in fact she behaved as if she had never looked in the mirror. She never referred to it, even obliquely.

  In her first years at Blenheim she continued to see Paris friends as well as English friends. Daphne Fielding has used pages from the Blenheim visitors’ book as end papers; in 1921 Sunny and Gladys’ guests were Etienne de Beaumont, Princesse Winnie de Polignac, Mrs Keppel, Professor Lindemann, Lord Berners, the Duke’s first cousin Winston Churchill, Princess Marina and her parents, and many more. Yet inexorably the sky darkened. Was Gladys a little mad when she gave her clergymen’s luncheon, to which all the incumbents of the Duke’s livings were tactlessly invited together? It was the talk of the neighbourhood. Gladys was not well looked upon, nor was the annulment of the Duke’s first marriage.

  Gladys had a French accent and she rolled her R’s. ‘Have you rrread Thrrree Weeks?’ she asked my father. ‘I haven’t read a book for three years,’ he replied in Uncle Matthew vein. Lady Ottoline Morrell, not far off at Garsington, declared that Gladys was ‘the most interesting character in Oxfordshire’.

  As time went on she showed signs of becoming more eccentric, and the Duke began a series of friendships with ladies young and old; he loved dancing, which exasperated her. She indulged her passion for Blenheim spaniels in such a way as to wreck carpets and floors in the palace. She and the Duke parted company in bitter anger, not long before he died. Gladys retired to a farm in the Midlands; she called herself Mrs Spencer. Journalists who sought her there got a douche of cold water poured over them from an upper window.

  A long night began for Gladys. She preferred not to see friends. Soon after the war the local police, worried by the strange old hermit she had become, made her relations come from abroad to visit her. She was certified insane. Daphne Fielding, a friend from former days, visited her many times in the hospital. She gives a touching account of Gladys; the ravaged chin and mouth had become normal, so that once again she had ‘the face on the sphinx’. A beauty, whose unusual intelligence changed to madness, she lived on into extreme old age; pathos personified.

  When she died last year aged 96 her possessions were sold for more than seven hundred thousand pounds; there were pictures by Toulouse Lautrec and Degas, her portrait by Boldini, beautiful jewelry, all relics of her youth and now immensely valuable. Knowing her as I did, I do not think she would have been either surprised nor particularly pleased by this financial tribute to her taste. She knew she was ‘wonderful’, and cared nothing for the world’s opinion. But she would like Daphne Fielding’s book, which ensures she will not be forgotten, and tells so well the story of her mother’s drama, a drama that marked Gladys’s life.

  The book is splendidly illustrated; the photograph of the tenth Duke in his coronation robes is alone worth a fiver. He looks like a giant Dutch doll with a cigar in its mouth and a coronet on its head.

  The Face on the Sphinx, Fielding, D. Books and Bookmen (1979)

  And the Rich Filed in Two by Two

  Edith Chaplin always thought of herself as a child of the Highlands, says Anne de Courcy. Perhaps she did, but this fey side of her nature was under control, and everyone else thought her the epitome of worldliness. She was the very image of aristocratic magnificence as she stood, with her somewhat Dutch doll-type solid good looks, smothered in jewels from head to foot, to receive the Tory faithful at the top of the stairs at Londonderry House. A nabob ancestor had brought enormous diamonds from India, ‘given’ by a maharaja.

  The Londonderrys were both 21 when they married; the extremely attractive husband was the love of her life; the best thing about her was her absolute loyalty to him, despite his innumerable infidelities.

  Tremendously rich, beneath his land were vast coal mines. The great coal owners in England were the Arabs of the nineteenth century, with the same love of display, and of horses and racing.

  Lady Londonderry was an organiser of outstanding ability, getting cohorts of women to do war work in both wars. She was a noted gardener at Mount Stewart in Ireland, and she hunted several days a week in the shires. Lord Londonderry loved hunting and shooting, but he loved politics more. What with women, sport and Parliament, she saw little of him, and her biographer has a mass of letters to draw upon. It was Ramsay MacDonald, her great friend, who gave Lord Londonderry office in the National Government, Tory in all but name. For MacDonald, Lady Londonderry was glamour personified and he adored her. She was quite fond of him, for all his whining self-pity and embarrassing compliments, until the day he ceased to be prime minister, when the boredom became too much for her and the gorse at Lossiemouth lost its charm.

  To his great credit, Lord Londonderry was one of the few who realised an airforce might be vital to Britain’s survival. At the same time he did all he could to foster Anglo-German friendship, visiting Germany and inviting Goering to stay at Londonderry House for the coronation in 1937. Goering refused.

  The Londonderrys had one son and four daughters. There were fusses over weddings, two of the girls marrying in register offices: one bridegroom was divorced and the other of Jewish faith. Lady Londonderry wanted a church, preferably Westminster Abbey.

  Her clever son Robin had enormous sympathy with the miners, who had been treated abominably by the government in 1926 after the strike, and who provided the family’s bottomless purse. He married a lovely girl who died tragically of cancer not long after the Second World War. Robin also died, several years before Lady Londonderry.

  These deaths are not mentioned in the book, a strange oversight, since they must have touched the mother.

  What about Circe? Lady Londonderry had an ‘ark’ of celebrities, given silly names, invited to Londonderry House for childish games and champagne. She should have been Mrs Noah, but Circe was preferred. A mystery for she turned none of her guests into swine. Anne de Courcy has written a very interesting book about how things were for the very rich in the first half of the century, including a clear if rather biased précis of the politics of those days.

  Circe: The Life of Edith Marchioness of Londonderry, de Courcy, A. Evening Standard (1992)

  Catty Musings of a Living Doll

  Gift shops sell little dolls dressed in crinolines, covered in white lace with a rosebud here and there; they have wh
ite silk hair, rosy cheeks, ruby lips and black eyelashes. They are bought by misguided people to hide their telephones. Cynthia Gladwyn was one of these dolls to the life, with plenty of crinolines in her wardrobe. Her hair was silvery white while she was still quite young; she was very pretty in her doll-like way.

  I suppose I must declare an interest. She says in her diary that I am evil. Is this libellous? Is it true? There is a saying: the greater the truth, the greater the libel, which is rather tempting, because it takes the wind out of the sails of the defence, were I to sue.

  Cynthia herself was as good as gold and far from stupid, despite her insipid appearance.

  For years her husband, Gladwyn Jebb, was our ambassador in Paris, and Cynthia really loved the splendid embassy and appreciated her enjoyable life there. She wrote a book about the house and strangely enough asked me to review it in Books and Bookmen; it was very well done.

  She is endlessly gushing in her diaries: ‘Quite the most exquisite… quite the loveliest… quite the kindest… quite the cleverest….’ On the other hand she can, on occasion, be fairly catty. My sister, Nancy Mitford, loved clothes; she is described as wearing a dress not only too expensive, but also as coming to pieces, an unfortunate combination.

  There are some interesting pages about the 1956 Suez fiasco because Anthony Eden and Selwyn Lloyd, when Prime Minster and Foreign Secretary, stayed with the Jebbs in order to cook up with their French counterparts their bright idea: that the Israelis should invade Egypt, and then the peace-loving English and French should separate the antagonists, while Nasser fell from power. Jebb was not invited to these mad plottings, as he should have been. He could have introduced common sense and have warned that essential secrecy would never have been possible with Fourth Republic French politicians. Needless to say, all was ‘leaked’. Described by Cynthia Jebb from the sidelines, the whole affair, including Eden’s and Lloyd’s lies to the House of Commons, is described in all its pristine oddity. These were bad times for England; and for Europe, with Hungary bashed by the Russians.