Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  These details were sprung on the world in 1985, in a book that accompanied the launch of a new perfume, “Beautiful”. For the promotion in Paris, Mrs Lauder had bought up all the pinks in the city to match both the perfume boxes and the book’s cover. This sensory extravaganza was designed to eclipse an unauthorised “inside story” of her life. Under covers of cream and blue (so tastelessly passé!) her rival revealed that Mrs Lauder’s parents, Hungarian Jews, had run a seed and hardware store in Queens, a run-down borough of New York. The young Estée had probably not finished her studies at Newtown High School. Her first jars of face cream had been cooked up not just in a kitchen over a gas stove, but also in a makeshift lab in a stable, and by an uncle whose chemical experiments stretched not only to “Viennese Cream” but to lice-killer and embalming fluid.

  These revelations, about a woman who now counted among her friends Princess Diana, Nancy Reagan, the Gorbachevs and the Begum Aga Khan, were somewhat irritating. Yet it was scarcely a tale to be ashamed of. Young Josephine Esther Mentzer, as she began, was convinced from childhood that women should be beautiful. She also hoped to make a fortune by persuading them that, if they bought her creams, their beauty would last for ever. It is a story, after all, that women tend to need to believe.

  With tireless energy, she devoted her life to both causes. She began in the 1930s in the beauty salons of Queens, finding an audience held captive under hairdryers and dabbing their hot cheeks with her uncle’s inventions. In 1948, Saks Fifth Avenue took a consignment; it sold out in two days. Steadily, Mrs Lauder acquired shiny counters in more and more department stores. With the help of a friend she branched out in 1953 from creams into Youth-Dew, a bestselling bath oil and perfume combined, and became the doyenne of all beauty.

  Tactility was her byword. She loved to plunge her fingers in her own gently simmering creations, palpating and inhaling them. Her creams came in heavy jars, her lipsticks in cool metal sheaths, to advertise their quality. Whenever she could she smoothed them on customers herself, achieving a “gentle glow” that was immediate and miraculous. For a time, Fifth Avenue was not safe from her. Sales staff at Estée Lauder counters were trained by her to get similarly intimate with customers. Free gifts, then an innovation, were handed out with every purchase, and free samples were sent to aristocrats in Europe. The distinctive Estée Lauder blue-green was devised to harmonise with most rich people’s bathrooms. By 2000, more than half of all cosmetics sold in America were hers.

  Whether women actually became more beautiful by applying Body PerformanceAnti-Cellulite Visible Contouring Serum, or whether they would have done as well with a quick douse in cold water, is impossible to say. Clearly, many felt better for it. The very names of these products, energetic and pseudo-scientific, implied that the limits of knowledge had been searched. Mrs Lauder could have cut prices, but refused. Her Crème de la Mer, developed by a NASA scientist, cost $110 for an ounce of vitamins pulped with seaweed. But cheapness, she said, would shake her customers’ faith.

  Over the decades she became very rich. By this year, her personal fortune stood at $233m and the worth of her company at $5.4 billion, with annual sales of $5 billion in 130 countries. Mrs Lauder was asked to be ambassador to Luxembourg, but declined when her husband said he did not want to carry her bags. Fabulous dinners were arranged, with gifts of Cartier silverware and with the candles set low on the tables to cast a flattering upward light on the assistance. The New York gossip columns trailed her obsessively, and still could not find out how old she was.

  Time, however, also trailed her, with his ghastly wrinkled face and his sallow hue that co-ordinated with no bathrooms. In 1988 she asked her elder son Leonard, then CEO of the company, to start dyeing his hair, as he was making her look old. That year the company brought in bleached wood and etched glass for its counters, a new blue for its packaging and more androgynous models who glowed with energy and health. Long before the death of the matriarch, Estée Lauder Companies Inc had been gently, but necessarily, moving out of her ageing shadow.

  Frank Launder

  Frank Launder, master of British humour, died on February 23rd 1997, aged 89

  As a footnote to the Ten Command- ments, Hilaire Belloc suggested: “Candidates should not attempt more than six of these.” If this sounds funny, it may be that you appreciate that quirky thing called British humour. If not, best not to bother. Belloc took more than 30 years to become British, overcoming the handicap of being born in France. The British Council teaches “British humour” to foreigners, but some believe this is itself an example of British humour.

  The Britishness of Frank Launder’s humour was the main reason why most of his films never travelled well. In the 1950s British audiences from Newcastle to Newport were in fits over the goings on in an unruly girls’ school called St Trinian’s, but in New York, let alone Little Rock, these scenes were received with bafflement. American family values at the time owed much to 15 years of sentimental Andy Hardy films, in which Mickey Rooney’s adolescence had been phenomenally extended. In Mr Launder’s films, by contrast, there were wild schoolgirls showing a shameful amount of leg in their black stockings and gymslips, and, most oddly, their school was in the charge of a man dressed as a woman.

  The New Yorker and other classy magazines praised Mr Launder’s films. Comics who wore women’s clothes, they explained, were continuing a tradition of the dame in English pantomime. They deplored the prudishness of American censors who had got Mr Launder to reshoot a scene in another film of his, “The Rake’s Progress”, in which Rex Harrison climbs an Oxford steeple to crown it with a potty. In the American version of the film, renamed “Notorious Gentleman”, a top hat is used. But Mr Launder’s American friends were addressing a relatively tiny audience. His productions were dismissed by Hollywood as cult films, the polite term for turkeys.

  In Britain Frank Launder’s films are still regarded as very watchable, to the extent that they are given good slots on television. More important, perhaps, they are seen as a link in a long chain of British humour. In the beginning, inevitably, was Lewis Carroll. Innumerable references to “Alice” turn up all the time in speeches and journalism. A smattering of scholarship underpins much of British humour. ITMA, the most famous of the British radio comedies in the second world war, and the brilliantly awful “Carry On” films have occasional literary jokes, as do Mr Launder’s films. “The Goons”, on the radio, and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, on television, which later gave a new thrust to British humour, are loaded with artful literary references. Often the references are missed, but get a laugh anyway.

  Frank Launder’s literary scholarship seems to have been picked up as he went along. He had, he said, little education, but was a compulsive reader. When he started in films in 1928 they were still silent. He wrote the captions, and was paid £4 a week (about $16 in those days).

  In 1936 he gained attention and some more pay when he wrote the script of “The Lady Vanishes” in collaboration with Sidney Gilliat (his partner in many subsequent films).

  “The Lady Vanishes”, directed by

  Alfred Hitchcock, has something of the endurance of “Casablanca”. Both are daft stories, quickly and cheaply made, but have the fascination of antiques that mirror an era. “The Lady Vanishes” is a melodrama, but for it Mr Launder invented two comic characters, Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne). Although Mr Launder said his films were solely to entertain, part of the entertainment was to show the British class system in its more absurd forms. Charters and Caldicott are upper-class buffoons, more interested in cricket scores than the imminent war. Class is an inviting battleground for satirists. The “idiotic and splendidly senseless” St Trinian’s girls, as an admiring critic called them, were obviously from privileged homes. The staff at the terrible school were played by Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell,issuing their pointless orders in stately accents.

  During the war Mr Launder made “Millions Like Us”, about women factory worker
s. It is warm rather than funny. Mr Launder never made political statements, but it seems likely that his sympathies were with what is now called the disadvantaged. His film that he liked best was “Geordie”, about a poor boy who has success as an athlete. The director he most admired was René Clair, who like Mr Launder had a talent for fantastic satire, but also, as in “Sous les Toits de Paris”, saw value in ordinary people.

  Frank Launder’s good fortune was to be a film-maker when the industry was presided over by a rich and generous patron. This was Arthur Rank, who had made millions as a miller, producing the flour for much of Britain’s rather awful bread, and then became infatuated with the glamour of films. “We would go to Mr Rank,” Mr Launder recalled, “and tell him we have a story. He says, ‘How much?’ We tell him. He hands it over and that’s that. We then go about our business.” The miller’s tale. Quite amusing really, in a British sort of way.

  Laurie Lee

  Laurie Lee, explorer of a lost rural England, died on May 13th 1997, aged 82

  The England that Laurie Lee wrote about so evocatively no longer exists. Perhaps it never existed, except in his imagination. In “Cider with Rosie”, his best-known book, there is, for example, a certain scrumpy haziness about this temptress of the haystacks, who “baptised me with her cidrous kisses”. The Rosie of the book shyly identified herself after it became a bestseller. They were marvellous days, Rosie recalled, but she dismissed the idea that she and Laurie had been “sweethearts or anything”. Neither had she drunk cider with him, or anyone else. “I suppose all writers exaggerate,” she said. Still, admirers of Laurie Lee’s writing have never been put off by mere realities. He thought of himself primarily as a poet. Facts should not get in the way of the words.

  In his next memoir, “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning”, Mr Lee is off to Spain. As in England, the roads are “innocent of oil and petrol” but, even better, there is an abundance of generous Rosies. Mr Lee started out with no Spanish other than the words for “May I have a glass of water, please?” But this, together with scraping a tune on his violin, seemingly provided for his needs. Merrie old England and funny foreigners: a reader was blissfully comfortable with Laurie Lee.

  Artfully, though, he wove into his memoirs the exemplar of the lad from a humble background who made good. The Anglo-Saxon virtues of “hard work and necessary patience” saw him through. His father had two wives who between them produced 12 children, eight of whom survived. Lee senior abandoned the crowded Cotswold cottage and ran away to London where he became a civil servant, sending home £1 a week. Laurie left school at 14 and took a number of undemanding jobs. Then he, too, left “the honeyed squalor of home” in the village where “everyone minded everybody else’s business”, and did not see it again for 20 years.

  Fame did not come quickly, and almost did not come at all. During the second world war Mr Lee wrote government pamphlets and helped to make propaganda films, and published several books of poems, which were well regarded at the time. Cyril Connolly, the most influential literary critic of his day, encouraged him. Mr Lee considered his poems his best work, but this view is not now widely shared. Nothing of his was thought by Philip Larkin to be worth including in his “Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse”.

  The publisher of “Cider with Rosie” in 1959 was at first reluctant to take it on, doubting that it would sell well, despite the blurb Mr Lee wrote for its dustjacket: “Should become a classic”. Even the critics who gave it good reviews could not have predicted that it would sell more than 6m copies around the world (in America, rather less invitingly, as “The Edge of Day: A Boyhood in the West of England”).

  Here on offer was a lost rural world, but one that seemingly could still be reached by using the most primitive of transport, your legs. When Laurie Lee had left his village he had walked to London. He walked through Spain and a dozen other countries. Every born-again walker owes something to Mr Lee. Not

  surprisingly, the rosie hue of his writing has been welcomed by the tourist industry, which thrives on nostalgia. “Cider with Rosie” made Slad, Laurie Lee’s Cotswold village, world-famous. Mr Lee is among those, such as Hardy, Hemingway and the Brontës, who have established literary landmarks. After visiting Slad and popping into the Woolpack inn for a Rosie special, a Lee pilgrim might nip over to Almuñecar, a fishing village and the scene of an episode in his Spanish book, to look at the statue put up in his honour.

  This remarkable achievement came from a modest oeuvre: mainly three bits of biography (the third was “A Moment of War”, about his experiences in the Spanish civil war, when he fought briefly against the Franco forces) and his poems. Laurie Lee was not contrite about writing slowly (with a 4B pencil). Barbara Cartland and Compton Mackenzie had written hundreds of books which had been forgotten, he said. His few were remembered. Nevertheless, he took his success without fuss. The main gain, he said, was that he could now afford whisky.

  After becoming famous, Mr Leereturned to Slad and bought the cottage of his childhood. But he kept a flat in London. It was hard to write in the country, he said. If it was a nice day you would lie in the long grass or some friends would arrive and you would go to the pub for a chat. “And that’s the day gone.” But although an urbanite by adoption, Mr Lee liked to have reassurance that the country, his country, awaited him when he needed it. He joined with other villagers of Slad to oppose, successfully, a proposal to build a housing development on a meadow near the village. In such places, he said, the young decayed, “imprisoned by videos and computer games”. They did not have the feeling of community he had known. No, he did not think Rosie would have cared to curl up in front of the telly.

  James Lees-Milne

  James Lees-Milne, who saved the country house, died on December 28th 1997, aged 89

  The old houses of England, James Lees-Milne once wrote, meant for him “far more than human lives”. In the 1930s, when Mr Lees-Milne began his mission of mercy to save what he could of “the England that mattered”, the old houses were falling like a property Passchendaele. The owners could no longer afford to run their vast estates, many of which had been designed for feudal economies. Some owners seemed themselves in a state of decay. Mr Lees-Milne recalled going to a party at a stately home where the owner entertained his guests by slashing at paintings with a whip and shooting the heads off statues in the garden. He was appalled. It brought home to him how he cared for “the continuity of history”. It was, he said, a turning point.

  Mr Lees-Milne’s task was to persuade the owners of great homes deemed worthy of preservation to give them to the National Trust, a body that had been set up in 1895 by Victorians anxious about the spread of industrialisation. Up to 1936, when Mr Lees-Milne joined the trust, it had mainly acquired endangered land. Now it was after property as well.

  It was difficult to persuade an owner of a property that had been in his family since Elizabethan times to hand it over, for nothing. Assurances that the nation would be grateful did not carry much weight with a lord of all he surveyed. Mr Lees-Milne’s main carrot in his negotiations was the promise that, when the owner died, his heirs would not have to pay the huge death duties that had crippled many families. The heirs could, in some cases, stay in residence in part of the property. A series of acts of Parliament made the scheme law.

  This redistribution of property was seen by some as secret socialism, although not by the conservative-minded trust, and certainly not by Mr Lees-Milne. The trust is independent of government and is supported mainly by members’ fees and legacies. All the same, the 11.7m people who in 1996 happily tramped around the trust’s 263 houses, castles and other once-forbidden premises must have included a fair number of Mr Lees-Milne’s despised “lower classes”.

  James Lees-Milne’s parents were Worcestershire “gentry”, which made them, in class terms, just below nobility. He paints a picture of a slightly dotty household, with a father deeply suspicious of young James’s interest in art. Calling anyone “artistic” denoted �
��decadence, disloyalty to the Crown and unnatural vice”, he noted in his memoirs. Mr Lees-Milne was notoriously disloyal in his gossipy memoirs. The stories he tells of the then famous are amusing in a schoolboyish sort of way. Of Ivy Compton-Burnett, he noted that the writer “ate half a pot of raspberry jam, and I was shocked to see her surreptitiously wipe her sticky fingers upon the cover of my sofa”. He favoured the exotic. He had stories of Robert Byron, another writer, swimming in the Bay of Naples while being fed with chocolates from a boat and of Rosamond Lehmann, yet another, at a seance, apparently talking with the dead.

  Although he had a wide circle of acquaintances and admirers, Mr Lees-Milne regarded himself as an

  outsider. He was not sure whether to be a Roman Catholic or an Anglican, and tried both creeds. Politically, he was as right as you could get: he supported the Franco cause in the Spanish civil war. As well as his memoirs, he wrote a lot about architecture, published three novels and wrote some poetry, which he showed to friends but was otherwise unpublished. Probably he would have liked to be remembered chiefly as a writer. But the fashionable enthusiasm for conservation has provided him with his pedestal: during 30 years with the National Trust, as an official and later an adviser; he did as much as anyone to save the country house. Others took up the cause, but Mr Lees-Milne, single-minded in this at least,pushed it forward.

  He had his critics. A book on the trust by an American, Paula Weisdeger, criticised the amateurism of Mr Lees-Milne. Some critics agreed with her. But, as she put it, “several of the old boys took to spitting at me, in print. How dare I, an American, etc?” America’s National Trust for Historic Preservation tends to look forward as much as back, perhaps because there is not all that much back to look at. It has just waged a campaign against “sprawl development” in Vermont, an echo of the anxieties felt by the Victorian founders of the British trust. France’s Demeures Historiques, old houses where the family stays on but allows visitors (usually reluctantly) to look around, are closer to the British idea envisaged by Mr Lees-Milne.