by Gully Wells
It can’t have been terribly difficult for her to conceal the extent of her passion from Freddie, because he was never the most perceptive man when it came to other people’s feelings. How else could he possibly have thought that Jocelyn wasn’t jealous? Did he actually believe that his current maîtresse en titre was just looking out for his best interests when she told him that he and this American adventuress were not “suited to one another”? So it is probably safe to say that my mother didn’t need a degree from the Yale School of Drama to convince Freddie that all they were having was a delightful affair. She surrounded him with interesting people—not too hard since he seemed to know everybody in London—and she was able to throw in a few disreputable Americans just to liven up the mix. Then she made it her business to provide him with a cozy setup at her house. A place to write and regular meals with all his favorite food: Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade (coarse cut) on his toast at breakfast, Gentleman’s Relish at teatime, and a rosy pink leg of lamb for dinner, with a good bottle of claret, and Stilton and “digestive biscuits” to follow. Forget dessert, vegetables, or salad: Freddie didn’t do sweet or green. She was always a bit of a Jewish mother when it came to fattening people up, and I remember that years later, when one of my boyfriends said he was hungry, she had to remind me that men liked two things, and one of them was food.
Her formula must have worked, because slowly they became more of an established couple. I grew accustomed to seeing him sitting in his armchair with our fat old dachshund, Monster, on his lap when I came home from school, and accepted him as part of our family. He never replaced my real father, and why should he? My father lived in Germany, took me skiing in the winter, and to Italy in the summer in his snappy white Mercedes convertible with the red leather seats that smelled like new shoes. Freddie lived in London, took me to French restaurants, fed me my first snail, and didn’t know how to drive. They could not have been less alike, and I loved them both. From as far back as I can remember I’ve had this insane idea—which can only have originated with my two fathers—that men were created to amuse me, comfort me, love me, tell me interesting things, and generally give me pleasure. I’ll admit that over the years my faith has been tested just a little by one or two men, and mocked by many more women, but mostly—and luckily—this deeply unfashionable belief has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
DIFFERENT AS THEY WERE, Freddie and my father did have one trait in common: They were not assertive, demanding, or difficult and would do just about anything to avoid confrontation. I have always assumed that this was one of the things that attracted my mother to both of them. Her primal need to be the one in charge prevented her, quite wisely, from being attracted to, or choosing, men too similar to herself. She was the sharpest, funniest, and most generous person on earth; she delighted in her talent to shock and amuse people, but the flip side to this captivating spirit was darker. She had grown up as a self-described “crafty, quick witted savage,” and it was her toughness and absolute refusal to be defeated that had helped her get where she wanted to go. Sometimes it was simply boredom that brought on the compulsion to stir things up, and she once cheerfully admitted to me that her patent cure for tedium was to start an argument. Worked every time. And so what if it escalated into a fight, with a bit of shouting and collateral damage? Many years after they were married I would sometimes hear Freddie muttering under his breath, as he paced around his study, “That dreadful woman, that dreadful woman.” But when they first met, she was just “quick witted.” The “crafty savage” was for later.
My mother must have felt she was making a bit of headway when, in June 1957, Freddie invited her to see his son, Julian, play cricket at Eton. We took a train, and I remember pointing out to Freddie the “water buffalo” (as cows were called in Burma) dotted about in the fields as we sped by. We finally arrived at a big green lawn, with a tent set up on one side, full of ladies in silly hats and men clutching umbrellas, just in case it rained. I was given strawberries and cream; while the grown-ups sipped Pimm’s and fed me the slices of cucumber and stalks of mint—infused with the strange taste of alcohol and Angostura bitters—floating in their dimpled beer mugs. In the distance tiny figures, dressed all in white, were scattered about on the grass. Occasionally one of them would summon up the energy to thwack the ball, and then walk laconically toward the stump to graze it with his bat, while the spectators would clap even more laconically and murmur, “Well played.”
Needless to say, I found the game totally incomprehensible and extremely dull: All I wanted was to see Julian. I knew he was Freddie’s son and sensed that for my mother, meeting him was important. Determined to be on my best behavior, I politely shook his hand when he was introduced to me and as soon as his back was turned, tugged at my mother’s skirt and pointed out, quite truthfully, in the dangerous way that children can, “Mummy, Julian doesn’t look a bit like Freddie. He doesn’t look like him at all.” She ignored me. So I said it again, and, still getting no response, I repeated it a little louder. Finally she bent down, put her face very close to mine, and said, “Shut up.” I don’t recall being offended, but I did shut up, and probably wandered off in search of some more strawberries.
It was only many years later that she told me why the tall, dark, and pointlessly good-looking Julian bore no resemblance whatsoever to his father. While married to Freddie, Renée had had an affair with Stuart Hampshire, another philosopher, and Julian was Stuart’s son. But nobody had ever bothered to tell him. Or, at least, plenty of malicious gossips had hinted over the years that they knew, but his three parents apparently took a rather more casual view of the situation. For my mother bushes were not something you beat about. And so, when she finally met Renée, she got straight to the point and asked her when she was going to tell Julian about his origins. Renée replied, “It’s not up to me. Freddie and Stuart are his parents.” Yet more evidence that the English were completely out of their minds.
Julian’s housemaster at Eton had even written to Renée urging her to come clean with her son: “I am certain that to learn the truth from anyone other than you and Freddie would be a mistake, perhaps even a danger, for him.” But neither of them was brave enough to tell poor Julian the truth, and he discovered it only from a girlfriend when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Isaiah Berlin remembered that Julian came to him in a state of extreme distress, wanting to change his name. I don’t know what Isaiah’s advice was, but he always had a prissy, puritanical attitude toward Freddie’s romantic arrangements and disapproved of the louche nature of his marriage. When Stuart Hampshire had confessed to Freddie, in 1937, that he and Renée had fallen in love, Freddie seems to have taken the news quite calmly and, amazingly, even agreed to spend Christmas in Paris with them. Yet more evidence, for my mother, of his near-autism when it came to emotion.
Intellectually Freddie was a child of the Enlightenment and worshipped at the altar—designed in severe neoclassical style by Jacques-Louis David—of reason and tolerance. This was the foundation of his approach to philosophy and may have served him well in his politics, his assault on religion, and even in his sex life, but love and logic have never been happy bedmates. So, not too surprisingly, the festive ménage à trois in Paris ended in tears, and Freddie, feeling a bit sorry for himself, returned to London alone. But his mood didn’t last long. He soon took up with a pretty young undergraduate at Somerville College in Oxford, who, in the incestuous nature of life, turned out to be a friend of Isaiah’s. One of Freddie’s closest friends, Philip Toynbee, wrote in his diary that Berlin, not for the first or last time, had tried to interpose himself between Freddie and a girlfriend: “Isaiah has been rushing from one to the other, urging them not to go to bed with one another. What an old fool he is.”
Over martinis at their club, Freddie told Philip all about the debacle in Paris and his new girlfriend, and they “agreed that seduction was enormous fun” and that they “shared a genuinely adventurous attitude.” That silly old fool Isaiah ha
d no idea what he was missing.
Meanwhile life at Holland Park Avenue trundled peacefully along, or at least that’s how it felt to Freddie and me, but for my mother, who was engaged in the amorous equivalent of a Napoleonic military campaign, the situation was far from calm. Here’s how she described her progress to Sue Boothby:
The Prof. and I are still having the battle of the brains and you can just guess who is winning. He is a nimble one he is, but I have never lived far away from the abattoir and learned early that there’s more than one way to skin cats even cats on hot tin roofs like him. Sometimes I feel more encouraged than others … my latest hurdles have been fairly important ones: I’ve been taken to Eton twice (unprecedented that) to see the beautiful son. Once we took him to lunch at that chi-chi joint in Bray, and the other time we went to watch him play soccer against Westminster and then drove on to Oxford where Freddie had to give a talk. The son likes me (gleaned from the daughter who was there for lunch). Then, I’ve met the misty all-powerful wife and (absolutely unprecedented this Freddie claims) she isn’t hostile. My sister has made friends with the daughter and has even been included in cosy family dinners in Hampstead with Renée and Lord Listowell [sic], the man she got after Stuart Hampshire.
But all this lateral infiltration will never poison the well so long as the mainspring is untouched you may claim—we don’t ignore that for one moment let me tell you, but there’s no good mauling that unless the host of protective friends and family on the side are fixed too. They’re important to him, and I don’t think that one blackball excludes or I’d have been out months ago, but I think some votes are 20 times more important than others. The Maori (Jocelyn Rickards) has been in Rome for a while now trying to trap an Italian, but he wriggled out and I hear she’s heading this way. I don’t think she’s much to worry about except that she’s out-and-out hostile and is an Influence. Even so, I see a couple of huge jumps left and then the homestretch is in sight. It is the most nerve wracking thing I’ve ever been in—and it seems to go on and on for years although I see by the calendar it’s only 9 months.
Still and all, I think it’s worth the struggle—my only fear is that I won’t pull it off and will then find I’ve used up all my elasticity and sanity in the big effort and will just be a gibbering blob for the rest of my life. Which would be brief for, naturally, I would plaster damning notes all over London and then jump off Big Ben. It really does give pause for reflection though on the ultimate wisdom of not putting all the eggs in one basket. Though, if you don’t, you can never hatch the number of chickens you want. I guess that most people just learn to settle for fewer chickens.
But just as soon as my mother felt she was within sight of victory, yet another dragon would rear its ugly head. The next one was called Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal. And she was far from ugly. In fact she was one of the most beautiful women in London. The daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey, she was married to a wonderful man named Raimund, the son of the Viennese poet and librettist of Der Rosenkavalier, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (At the very end of his life Freddie confessed to me that he had been in love only three times: with Renée, with Liz, and with his third wife, Vanessa.) It wasn’t as though Liz was about to abandon her family (she and Freddie had known each other for twenty years, and when the affair had started or ended was all a bit hazy), but she was an Influence, and her vote counted. Again my mother confided to Sue:
Wish somebody would poison that f—ing Lady L.Von H. She is the biggest fly in anyone’s ointment and I think fills F’s head with stories of how ruthless and uncivilized I am and will make him miserable. She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.
AND VERY FETCHING she must have looked swathed in chiffon and swansdown, sipping tea in her lit à la polonaise with its pale pink chintz curtains, held back by silken ribbons and tassels. Birch logs glowed in the fireplace, and above its marble mantelpiece hung a portrait of Liz’s equally beautiful mother, who had the same creamy, magnolia skin, blue eyes, and almost-black hair as her daughter. The dressing table stood in front of the bay windows, festooned in a flouncy white petticoat, and on her bedside table, beside a flowering jasmine plant, was the all important telephone: the electronic conduit for pouring venom into Freddie’s ear.
How, you may be wondering at this point, is it that I am so familiar with the decor of Lady Elizabeth’s boudoir? Well, years later, when my mother and Liz had become friends, and I was old enough to go to grown-up dinner parties, I would be invited quite often to the Hofmannsthals, since I was roughly the same age as their son Octavian. Looking back, it does seem a little incredible, but in some houses, in those dim and distant days, the ladies actually followed their hostess out of the dining room after the dessert, leaving the men alone so they could have their brandy and cigars unencumbered by feminine company. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me, because at that point in the evening you were always longing to pee, and also needed to brush your hair and spackle on more makeup. And the bonus was that you got the chance to poke around in your hostess’s bathroom, examine the contents of her medicine cabinet, see what interesting pills she might be taking, and douse yourself in her perfume. Having done all that, you’d then lounge about in her bedroom for a while—sometimes a bit too long—and, if you were lucky, exchange delicious little petits fours of gossip.
I don’t want to give the impression that the Siege of Freddie occupied all my mother’s time or formidable brain, because she actually loved her work and was just as determined to succeed in journalism as she was to become Mrs. A. J. Ayer. Having started out writing about fashion and London life for the New York Times, she quite soon moved on to reviewing movies, and then became the lead book reviewer for the Sunday Express. Her highly opinionated pieces began to create a stir and caught the attention of the Express’s proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook. The Beaver, as he was known, was Canadian, and incredibly right wing, and I think my mother enjoyed winding him up, and he, being the consummate newspaperman that he was, undoubtedly enjoyed the controversy that she attracted. In 1959 my mother wrote a scathing review of a book called Beloved Infidel, by Sheilah Graham. It may not have interested the Beaver particularly, but it was all too relevant to Freddie’s byzantine private life.
The title was taken from a poem that Scott Fitzgerald had written about Sheilah, and the subject of the book was their love affair. They had met at a party to celebrate her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, given by Robert Benchley in July 1937, at his Garden of Allah bungalow in Hollywood. Fitzgerald was writing scripts to pay for his daughter’s education and his wife’s catastrophic medical bills, drinking way too much, and trying to finish The Last Tycoon. Sheilah was a syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist. The marquess was unemployed, as marquesses generally are, and returned to his estate in Ireland, without his fiancée, the day after the party. In Beloved Infidel she describes, in touching detail, her life with Fitzgerald, who was to die in her arms on December 21, 1940. Sheilah had grown up dirt poor in the slums of London, with no education, but had parlayed her dazzling looks, charm, and street smarts into a career, first as a chorus girl and later, when she moved to New York and Hollywood, as a journalist. But it was Fitzgerald who made up for all the schools she never went to, when he became the private tutor in her “college of one,” and drew up the long list of books that she would read and they would discuss together. The book that Sheilah subsequently published almost twenty years later was good enough for Edmund Wilson to review in The New Yorker, calling it “the best portrait of Fitzgerald that has yet been put into print.” But my mother thought otherwise, and dismissed it in the Sunday Express, concluding “And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to this ex–East End orphan, once named Lily Sheil. Just what to hand her, I’d be hard put to say. But I do know it’s nothing I’d touch with a ten-foot pole. With gloves on.”
Whatev
er the merits of Beloved Infidel, the main issue, from her point of view, was that Sheilah and Freddie had been lovers in New York during the war. It’s not as if she posed any threat, but my mother just could not resist sticking the knife in and twisting it around, especially with an audience of five million readers. The situation was made even more complicated by the fact that Sheilah had given birth to Freddie’s daughter, Wendy, in September 1942. There had been no question of marriage (he was still, conveniently, attached to Renée), so she had rather nimbly turned around and married the hapless Trevor Westbrook, after a “whirlwind romance,” and had presumably convinced him that the baby born “prematurely,” but curiously large, was his. (Interestingly, her next child, Robert, born in Hollywood, was rumored to be Robert Taylor’s son. One sperm bank for brains and one for beauty.)
Sheilah kept in touch with Freddie over the years, and used to bring Wendy to London to see him, without ever telling her the truth about who her real father was. At one of these cozy lunches, in 1959, it emerged that Freddie had actually seen the review before it went to press but had done nothing to prevent its publication. As if poor Freddie, who loathed all confrontation, would ever have dreamed of doing any such thing. All he could come up with in his defense was to tell her that he had said to my mother, “Don’t you think that’s a bit strong?” As if my mother, who loved all confrontation, could ever have been persuaded to tone it down. Sheilah stormed out of the restaurant, leaving Freddie and Wendy to poke around at the remains of their lamb chops in embarrassed silence.