by Gully Wells
ON OUR LAST NIGHT Stephanie and I cooked ratatouille in the one-armed pot; we served grilled sardines and fennel on the crooked red platter that Sylvia had made with some mad potter in Ollioulles; and drank our wine from the glasses Francette had found at her favorite antiquaire in Toulon. At the center of the table sat the thirsty wasps’ old drinking bowl, now filled with fresh figs. I reached up and unhooked a basket hanging from one of the beams, filled it with bread, and passed it around with the Reblochon that was already escaping over the edges of the marble slab we used as a cheese plate. More candles were lit—the bloody electrics—and after dinner, with Sinatra crooning away on the rackety cassette player, Nick produced a bottle of Madame Tricon’s vin d’orange, while Alexander played chess with his sister on the same board that Freddie and Martin had fought to the death on almost forty years before. Outside the wind was starting up—maybe it was that ill-tempered Monsieur Mistral up to his odd-numbered tricks—and Nick and Peter had launched themselves onto the always choppy waters of the French Resistance. After a while I slipped off to bed and fell asleep listening to their voices drifting up the stairs—just as I had as a child. “Aaron Bank was the real hero … parachuted into the Var with the Jedburghs … the maquis rose up … the beaches between Le Lavandou and Saint-Raphaël … did you know that Le Beausset was liberated by Moors from Algeria?” La vie continue.
But the house will always be hers.
Acknowledgments
First I must thank the two infinitely understanding people—my husband, Peter, and my son, Alexander—who had to live with me while I was writing this book. Their wife/mother went AWOL for almost three years, but they never complained and now she’s back. My daughter, Rebecca, was lucky enough to be living in England at the time. I am also deeply and forever indebted to my dear friend and agent, Irene Skolnick, who had faith in my idea from the day I first described it to her. Irene led me to Knopf where I was fortunate enough to find myself in the company of Sonny Mehta and Shelley Wanger. Need I say more? Well, just a bit. Shelley snipped and trimmed and restrained me from including some of the more exuberant and embarrassing moments in my life, and Sonny liked it enough to publish it. Peter, Rebecca, my brother, Nick, and his girlfriend, Stephanie, my aunt Beegoonie, and my old friend Hylan Booker all read the manuscript and put me right where I’d gone wrong. My godmother, Sue Boothby, Hylan, and Claus von Bülow were all kind enough to lend me letters from my mother and allowed me to quote from them for which I am truly grateful. I would also like to thank my publisher in London, Alexandra Pringle, and my agent, Clare Alexander, for their many helpful suggestions. I promise that I have made nothing up, but I have changed one or two names for reasons you are free to imagine.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gully Wells is a features editor at Condé Nast Traveler. Married, with two children, she lives in Brooklyn.
Ambassador David Bruce giving my mother away at her wedding to my father in Paris on September 24, 1949
My father and mother at their civil marriage ceremony in Paris
My mother—surrounded by men, as usual—at a party in Rangoon in 1953, when my father was first secretary at the American Embassy
Pleased as can be, I am standing in front of my father’s Triumph sports car in Vienna
In the summer of 1955 my father and I took a trip to Italy, where this sizzling temptress was staying at our hotel. I did my best to get rid of her by dumping her off the pedalo at sea, but amazingly she reappeared at dinner.
With my parents in Connecticut in the early ’50s, after their divorce. I remember setting up this picture in a pathetic attempt to portray us as a “normal,” happy family.
On a trip to Venice my father and I decided to dress in stylish matching lederhosen for a visit to Piazza San Marco
At home in London with my mother and Freddie in our house on Conway Street, shortly after they married in 1960
Freddie, left, and Bertrand Russell, right, at Woburn Abbey in 1962, with their host, the Duke of Bedford, standing behind them
My brother, Nick, with Freddie and our mother at the house in France in 1964
What was I thinking? An embarrassing and ill-advised photograph that appeared with an item about me in Cherwell, the Oxford students’ newspaper, in 1971. My tutors at Saint Hilda’s were not amused.
A photo of Martin and me that appeared in The Daily Express gossip column, 1970
Freddie and I gave a garden party together in the cloisters at New College, Oxford, in 1971. Iris Murdoch is on the right and Martin is standing behind her.
Vanessa Lawson, who would become Freddie’s third wife in 1982, with her newborn daughter, Horatia, in London in 1967
My lovely stepmother, Melissa, and my father in London in the 1970s. He’s in the driver’s seat of his old London taxi cab wearing the fur hat that was for some reason part of his chauffeur’s uniform.
Our neighbor Francette Drin, whose large and malodorous dogs always accompanied her to dinner at La Migoua
With Tom Burns, my favorite Spanish “tutor,” in London in the early 1970s
A view of the front of La Migoua, taken from the vineyards below the house
After our wedding in London in June 1978, my kind and generous father-in-law took everybody to lunch at the Waterside Inn in Bray, overlooking the Thames. Here I am with Peter, my brand-new husband, and our bridesmaid, Sarah Haycraft.
The night of our wedding we had a huge party at a restaurant in Chelsea called Eleven Park Walk. Hylan Booker, my mother’s lover; Antonia Fraser; and Marigold Johnson were among the hundreds of guests.
Christopher Hitchens and Anna Wintour at the party after our wedding
Four of the cooler, younger guests—Oliver Haycraft; Selima Guirey; my brother, Nick; and William Miller—loitering on the sidewalk outside Eleven Park Walk
My husband, Peter, in the Virgin Islands just after we moved to New York in 1979
My mother flanked by our neighbors Francette Drin and Nicole Padula in the kitchen at La Migoua, circa 1990
In the summer of 1995 I took my son, Alexander, to La Migoua for the first time. Here we are on the terrace with Nick and his then girlfriend, Jemima.
Alexander with his sister, Rebecca, in the main place in Le Beausset in the summer of 1996
With our houseguest Christopher Hitchens in the dining room of our apartment on Bank Street