*Athena (née Livanos, 1929–74) married Onassis in 1946 and they had two children, Alexander and Christina. She divorced Onassis in 1960. Her third husband, after her divorce from Sunny Marlborough in 1971, was Stavros Niarchos, her sister Eugenia’s widower. When her twenty-four-year-old son died in a plane crash she never recovered from the shock and died soon afterwards, aged forty-four, of a drug overdose.
*Villa Nova subsequently became a luxury hotel and more recently a conference centre.
†The Maudsley Hospital in South London provides mental health care and help for substance-abuse cases.
‡Henry Tuchet-Jesson, 23rd Baron Audley of Heleigh (1913–63), had succeeded to the title from a cousin in 1942.
*The condition of ‘love at first sight’ has been known throughout recorded history. Plato suggested that primitive men and women were matched double creatures (as in ‘soulmates’), and that their modern counterparts spent their lives searching for their ‘missing half’. When lovers are fortunate enough to find that part of themselves, he stated ‘they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant’.
*Margaret Campbell, third wife of the 11th Duke of Argyll. The divorce case made headlines when the prosecuting counsel introduced as evidence several Polaroid images of the Duchess, naked but wearing her pearls. In one photo she was performing a sex act on a man whose head had been cut off by the camera angle. He was known as ‘the headless man’ and it was widely suspected that it was Duncan Sandys, Minister of Defence – who had access to the only Polaroid camera in the country at the time. Subsequently it was proved that there were two men in the photographs; the other was Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who was identified by his handwriting on the reverse of the photos.
*Among Leland Hayward’s (1902–71) successes were The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Spirit of St Louis, The Old Man and the Sea and Gypsy. His clients included stars such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn.
*It is common for coma patients to live to a special, much looked-forward-to date such as Christmas, the birth of a child or a family marriage, and then die quietly immediately afterwards.
†This great office of state dates back to the twelfth century and has been held on a hereditary basis by the Norfolk family since 1672.
*Under the order of precedence, the sovereign is the most important person present at any occasion.
*Father of Sarah Ferguson, former wife of Prince Andrew.
†Arthur Ronald Lambert Field Tree (1897–1976) was MP for Harborough in Leicestershire, a journalist and an inventor. He had a British father and his mother was the American heiress of Marshall Field’s department store. One of Winston’s political allies, Tree owned Ditchley Park, an eighteenth-century stately home in Oxfordshire; during the Second World War, in clear weather whenever bombing raids were expected, he made Ditchley available to Winston and Clementine (Chequers was considered to be an easy target). Marietta, his second wife, was known for her famous lovers, who included Adlai Stevenson and John Huston.
*He subsequently took over from Randolph as Churchill’s official biographer, producing a further six volumes, plus companion books (see the Bibliography).
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