In 1951, the Mosleys bought the Temple de la Gloire at Orsay, twenty miles from the centre of Paris. Built in 1801 as a folly, it was a small, classical building of faultless proportions, the perfect background for Diana. A lofty drawing room on the first floor opened on to a balcony, which was supported by two generous flights of stone stairs that led to the garden. The balcony overlooked a pond (referred to as a ‘lake’, but not exactly Windermere). I first went to the Temple on a misty evening; a travelling circus was encamped outside the gates and a camel was tethered to the railings, which added to the surreal atmosphere.
When the Mosleys bought the house it was surrounded by strawberry fields, but as time went by villas grew up around it. Every new house seemed to have dogs that barked, yapped and bayed in unison at certain times of the day. It was an unholy din, not unlike a pack of foxhounds that has suddenly picked up the scent of a fox. As a young man Sir O loved hunting and had the best of it with the Quorn at Melton Mowbray. He knew reams of sporting verse by heart and when the dogs set up their racket, I would say to him. ‘Listen! They’ve found!’ This provoked a torrent of word-perfect recitations of ‘The Dream of an Old Meltonian’ and ‘The Good Grey Mare’, which made me cry every time I heard them. Diana’s laughter at his recital alternated with my tears. I loved my visits to the Temple: not only did I often have Diana to myself, but the atmosphere she created wherever she lived was the perfect antidote to any worries.
I met all sorts of people while staying with the Mosleys (some of them could not speak English, which served me right for preferring hunting to learning French when I was sixteen). When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor moved to an old mill at Gif-sur-Yvette, they became the Mosleys’ neighbours. Andrew and I had first met them years before in the South of France when staying with our friends Loel and Isabel Guinness in Cannes. The Windsors lived at nearby Château de la Croë and when they invited the Guinnesses to dinner, they included us in the invitation. The Duke was very attractive, with his shining blond hair and irresistible touch of pathos. He wore a kilt at dinner with all its extras, including laced-up pumps and a dirk in his stocking. A piper went round the dinner table playing his deafening music – more suited to the misty glens than the Côte d’Azur in the heat of July.
‘Are you the Duchess of Devonsheer?’ the Duke asked me. I said I was. ‘Aw, I didn’t like her. She used to tell on me and it got back to my mother.’ (Granny Evie passed on information, probably got from her son Charlie Cavendish, to Queen Mary about the Duke’s visits to nightclubs when he was a young man.) I asked him if Granny Evie had been nasty when he met her face to face. ‘Nasty? Smarmy as be damned,’ he said. We got over this poor start and dinner was extremely enjoyable, the Duke speaking with nostalgia of England and the English, whom he called ‘the British’.
The Windsors had a pack of pugs that had superseded their Cairn Terriers. ‘Aren’t they beguiling?’ said the Duchess, using an adjective I had never before heard attached to any member of the canine race, let alone a pug. I could not like her, she seemed so brittle, her face bony, angular and painted, her body so dangerously thin she might snap in half. It was difficult to understand why the Duke adored her, but he certainly did and was in love with her until the day he died. He never took his eyes off her during dinner and shouted down the table, ‘Wallis, Wallis, did you hear that?’ when there was something he thought she might have missed.
I saw the Windsors again in August 1963, on a visit to the Mosleys, and wrote to Mrs Ham:
I’m in the plane going back from Paris to Manchester and the old homestead having had two days on the other side of the medal with the Mosleys. We dined with some Bismarcks and there were the Windsors. He was in a hilarious mood and made Diana and me laugh so hopelessly that we were nearly out of control. He said when Grandfather Redesdale used to go to Sandring-ham to advise on trees and gardens, ‘us bunch of kids’ used to get very excited as he always gave a pound to each. He told me he (the Duke) stopped quite often with Queen Mary at Marlborough House and that, although she was much more forthcoming when she was old, ‘that woman was as hard as nails’.
He got me and Diana and Sir O together and said ‘Now we are us four Britishers’. He told of romances at Melton 1,000 years ago. Altogether the charm, the pathos and the Cockney American accent finished me. She (the Duchess) kept pointing at me and Diana, saying ‘Look at those brilliant Mitford brains. I’m not going to let them go on talking to the Dook unless I can hear what they’re saying.’ So she came over to listen to the pearls.
Years later I discovered a curious quirk of the Duchess. Our Chatsworth housekeeper, Dorothy Dean, who had been housemaid to the Windsors at Château de la Croë, was discreet and never gossiped about her old employers. But one day she did open up a little and told me that the Duchess would only employ blondes in the house: the footmen, the housemaids and even the people in the kitchen were all fair-haired. Why, I do not know. She herself was dark.
In February 1952 Decca invited me to stay in California. I had not set eyes on her for thirteen years, and then only briefly because of Esmond’s hostility, but we had kept in touch by letter. In the intervening years she had married her second husband, Bob Treuhaft, and had had two sons, Nicky and Benjy. Dinky, her daughter with Esmond, was now eleven years old. I was nervous as to what I should find after so long. The flight to California was punctuated by many stops for refuelling and seemed endless, and when we eventually touched down at San Francisco, I felt weary and bemused. And there was Decca. A new person, trousered, American in appearance and accent – someone I did not recognize. It was the oddest sensation and filled me with a feeling of intense loneliness. What was I doing, thousands of miles from home, meeting a stranger who had once meant more to me than anyone in the world?
My engagement book for the week in California reads: ‘Tuesday 12 February: dinner with Communists.’ ‘Wednesday 13 February: dinner with more Communists.’ King George VI had died a week earlier and the left-wing extremists of California did not let this pass. The sarcasm that spewed from Decca’s dinner guests was relentless and difficult to bear; none of them had ever been to England yet they launched into bitter criticism of everything I knew. Whatever I tried to say in defence of the King and our way of life was laughed out of court or greeted with a ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you’ sort of look. One evening, the conversation turned to how to do away with the royal family. Manners were not their priority.
Decca and Bob were generous hosts and took me to Carmel, where we stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights. There I met ‘brunch’ for the first time and thought it perfect: all my favourite foods laid out. As we were leaving, I noticed that Decca had packed the towels. I asked her if she had done it by mistake. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘they are lovely and white and ours are horribly grey.’ When I said, ‘Hen, that’s stealing’, she replied, ‘Oh, it’s all right, hotels are insured for that sort of thing.’ So my reputation for being the ‘Conservative policeman’ rose, as did my surprise at her thieving ways.
The visit was dispiriting. I knew Decca had tried hard to make me enjoy myself, introducing me to her friends and political colleagues, but it fell on stony ground because of their hostility and lack of understanding of any view but their own. I thought afterwards that she may also have felt nervous about seeing me after so long and had mustered her friends to bolster her confidence. If I had been alone with her for a week it would have been different. We did have some talks about the old days when glimmers of the Decca of the past came through. The bright spot was Dinky. She was – is – beautiful and practical, taking charge of Decca and looking after the boys far better than she herself had been looked after by Decca. It was no wonder that she chose nursing as her profession when she left home. Her patients were the lucky ones.
When Decca came to England in 1955, her first visit since the war, she must have been stunned by the changes she found. In California she had talked of her relations and English friends as if they were just as she had
left them in 1939. In spite of the loss of her beloved Esmond it was impossible for her to understand what the vast upheaval of six years of war had meant to the people and places she had once known.
My next visit to the Americas was very different. In 1955 I went to Brazil for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro as a guest of Aly Khan. I had first met him at a party in London and often saw him on the racecourse. We had become friends and he was the easiest of company. His wife, Rita Hayworth, was one of the four most beautiful women I have ever seen (the others were Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal, Madame Martinez de Hoz, wife of a South American diplomat, and my sister Diana). Her features were perfect, her mass of truly auburn hair sprang straight from her forehead and cascaded down to her shoulders, and she moved like the dancer she was.
When I arrived at the airport in Rio after the long flight via Dakar, I was held up at immigration; the trouble was the rigmarole on my passport: ‘Her Grace Deborah Vivian Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire’. ‘Yes, that’s me,’ I said. The official looked again. ‘Where are all the others?’ he asked. He took a bit of convincing that I was the one and only, but eventually allowed me to enter. While Aly travelled the country looking at thoroughbred stud farms, I stayed with polo-playing friends of his and went racing with them. In their drawing room where in England there would have been a fireplace with chairs and a sofa, there was a pool instead. But there was no writing table, no writing paper and no way of buying stamps. My hosts could not understand why I wanted these things – necessities for me that seemed positively eccentric to them. Muv began to panic when she heard nothing from me. I explained to her later that they would say things like, ‘We’ll go to São Paolo tomorrow and buy some’, but tomorrow came and we never went.
When Carnival in Rio began we did go and it was everything it is cracked up to be: a stream of beating drums, music that stayed in the head long after it was over, wildly extravagant costumes, nearly naked dancing girls with fruit, flowers and feathers piled on their heads and the male equivalent dressed (or not dressed) in anything they fancied. This uninhibited crowd paraded the streets all night. It was good-natured and happy, with a few hours of semi-quiet after dawn while the revellers gathered strength for a repeat performance. The heat was as extreme as the enjoyment.
We were having dinner at a restaurant one evening when in stumbled a South American polo team dressed as English governesses. Wobbling on court shoes with heels they could not manage, these athletic and gloriously good-looking young men wore demure navy-blue crêpe de Chine dresses with elbow-length sleeves and white cuffs, flat straw hats plonked on their heads, a string of decorous beads, black lace gloves stretched over their huge hands and square, white handbags dangling from their hairy arms. They had all grown up with English governesses so knew exactly how to dress. The tallness and masculinity of these young men made their get-up supremely comical, the best fancy dress ever.
On my last day we flew to a remote stud farm where we rode on cowboy ponies over mountains and ravines where you would not dream of taking an English horse. There were bridges made of two planks, and paths so steep I had to cling to the horse’s mane so as not to slide off. We rode for four hours, the last in the tropical dark that falls so suddenly, with fireflies, jungle noises and the delicious smells of flowering trees all around us. We galloped home behind our guide. I asked him afterwards why there had been such a hurry. ‘Because of the vampires,’ he said.
I also stayed at Aly’s house in Neuilly, a mile or so from the centre of Paris. We went to marvellous nightclubs and restaurants, including Maxim’s, and turned night into day, sometimes with friends of his, sometimes on our own. Aly took for granted the glamour of this round of pleasure and I was fascinated to see the Continental version of what I already knew in London. But he also had duties, which he took seriously, and there was a group of Ismailis sitting patiently in the hall of his house at all hours waiting for an audience.
You never knew who you were going to meet at Château de l’Horizon, Aly’s house on the sea near Cannes, where fellow guests ranged from beautiful women friends to international racing people, with a sprinkling of showbiz thrown in. Ray Stark, the film producer, was there one year with his wife, Fran, a daughter of Fanny Brice, the original ‘Funny Girl’. Ray and I were fellow sufferers in not being able to speak a word of French. He was trying hard to learn and was delighted with his progress. ‘I know that glace is not “glass” and that chocolat is “chocolate”. Today I discovered that eau isn’t “oh!” it’s water. But I can’t imagine why the shops have notices saying soldes when a sale is going on. No point in going in if everything is sold.’ He was to leave a book in my room. ‘Which is your room? I know, the one with the star on the door.’ I was stunned by such flattery and missed the Starks and the daily bulletin on his linguistic progress when they left.
One day Aly arranged for me to dine with his father, the old Aga Khan, and his stately Begum, who lived in the hills behind Cannes. As I drove to the house through what seemed to be acres of bedded-out begonias I wondered what I was going to find. I was lucky: the old Aga (whom Nancy referred to as ‘Father Divine’) made me feel as if I had known him all my life. As I left, he gave me a book and told me very definitely to read it. A far cry from the Ismaili tract I had expected, it was a novel called In Love. At 2 a.m. the telephone by my bed rang. It was the Aga: ‘How are you getting on with that book?’ he asked.
Another friend from that period was Ann Fleming – whose shining life was so sadly cut short by cancer. Many friendships were made in her sunny house on a corner of Victoria Square in Westminster. Ann could seat only eight in her small dining room (we did not know her in her palmy days when she was married to Lord Rothermere and lived at Warwick House), so there was no room for passengers. I sometimes heard her say, ‘I would love to ask so-and-so, but I can’t sink his boring wife at my table.’ She was a dab hand at getting her chosen ones to talk, prodding them into an argument, or anyway a spirited discussion, on every subject under the sun. Andrew loved the arguments and stayed till the early hours.
Lunch or dinner with Ann never failed to be entertaining: politicians, writers, painters, poets, lawyers, Oxford dons and actors, a Who’s Who of their professions, were all bundled together with no holds barred. More arrived after dinner and the talk got louder. The politicians were mostly Labour: Hugh Gaitskell (who was in love with our hostess), Richard Crossman, Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins were all regulars. I never shared Ann’s admiration for Arnold Goodman, Harold Wilson’s solicitor and adviser, who adored her and on whom she came to rely.
The historian Robert Kee and Lucian Freud were often at Victoria Square, and Francis Bacon too if you were lucky. He did not speak much but commanded attention just by being himself. His face, sad in repose, lit up when he gave his one-sided, wholly captivating smile. One person I often saw but never got to know was Ann’s husband, Ian Fleming. He let himself into the house after dining elsewhere. We heard the front door shut and a second later he would put his head round the dining-room door and scan the table. Not liking what he saw, he shook his head and went upstairs to bed.
13
Lismore
T
HE FIRST SIGHT of Lismore Castle as you come over the Knockmealdown Mountains in County Waterford makes your jaw drop. A place of mystery and romance, the huge grey castle – half giant, half fairy – rises from the rocks above the banks of the River Blackwater. ‘Built by King John, lived in by Sir Walter Raleigh and plumbed by Adele Astaire, it looks like a castle out of Le Morte d’Arthur,’ wrote Paddy Leigh Fermor, a frequent visitor. Steeped in history, it has been the colourful background to tragedies and rejoicing, from civil wars to fantastic festivities, for over eight hundred years. Andrew’s uncle, Charles Cavendish, was given Lismore Castle with its surrounding estate and superb salmon fishing in 1932 as a wedding present by his father, the Ninth Duke. (It had been the Devonshires’ Irish home since 1753.) Charlie died in the castle twelve years later, aged thirty-eight, a h
opeless alcoholic – the generally accepted reason for his early death. Charming, good-looking and shy, he was loved by all who knew him. After Cambridge, where too much drink and a succession of bad falls in point-to-point races weakened his health, his parents thought a spell in America would do him good and sent him to New York to work in a financial firm. His time there coincided with Prohibition and his health, far from improving, was made worse by the illegal hooch.
Charlie came back to England and fell in love with Adele Astaire, the dancer and entertainer who, partnered by her brother Fred, had taken London by storm in Lady Be Good, The Band Wagon and Funny Face. Adele retired from the stage at the height of her fame to marry Charlie and, as time went by, having once been the more famous of the two siblings, she referred to herself as Fred’s sister. Charlie and Adele made their home at Lismore, travelling a great deal and leading a whizzing social life, but always in the shadow of his addiction.
Adele was a fascinating creature of irrepressible vitality but she was also capricious and used a torrent of bad language. ‘Oh Dellie, oh Dellie, oh Dellie,’ her mother, Ann Astaire, used gently to reprimand her from the other end of the dining-room table, but it did not stop Lady Charles Cavendish’s all too vivid descriptions of friends and foes. By the time war broke out Charlie was unfit to join up and remained at Lismore, leading the half-life of an alcoholic, assisted by his wickedly complicit butler who gave him whisky camouflaged in a mug. Ann Astaire, a wonderful woman who is still fondly remembered at Lismore, stayed at the castle and did what she could for the ailing Charlie, while Adele went to London and delighted the GIs at the American Red Cross centre.
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