Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  On 25 January 1929 when Anita was fifteen, she wrote to Margaret, ‘my dear I think I’ve only just noticed it but I’ve lost all my looks, it’s quite extraordinary. I used to be so pretty and fresh.’ She then gives out about the recently established Irish Free State, ‘which forbids untenanted land being held by anyone’. This could prove a problem for the Leslies, who owned 35,000 acres of heather-covered hills and moors. She is furious when Margaret hasn’t written for a while: ‘You’re spoilt, Margaret, disgustingly spoilt, you do just what you like.’ But, although they are miles apart, the cousins founded a Hell Fire Club in June 1928. It had a proper uk-style cabinet, except with a President – A. Leslie. M. Sheridan is Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and for India and for Air. Anita makes Westonbirt sound like an early version of St Trinian’s, telling Margaret that one of the girls ‘had some interesting experiences around India Dock Road etc. She bought a lovely little dagger for 1/6d.’

  Sometimes, during Clare’s long absences, Margaret stayed at Glaslough but she didn’t share Anita’s love of the place. Her letters to Clare belittle Leonie and Marjorie, who annoyed each other by moving ornaments about. For all her sophistication Leonie was very conventional and thought that the best choice for Margaret was to marry well, which meant wealthily. In Morning Glory Margaret wrote: ‘Great-aunt Leonie offered to present me at Court but Mama would not hear of it … It might be thought, with her Red reputation, that she was not being received!’ It was typical of Clare to cause a scandal by going to Russia as a guest of the Soviets and then express concern that this might count against her in English aristocratic circles.

  1929 was the year in which Marjorie and Anita went to Bab-El-M’Cid, near Bisra, to stay with Clare and Margaret, a trip that had been happily anticipated by Anita. The visit was a disaster. Predictably, Marjorie and Clare didn’t get on. Marjorie was, at heart, a conventional matron. She travelled with her personal maid and complained that sitting cross-legged on the ground at mealtimes, in Clare’s white house built among date gardens, laddered her silk stockings. Clare had given up maids – and probably silk stockings – years before although, Anita noticed, she was not self-sufficient, since everyone in her orbit became her willing slave, so that Clare herself never had to boil an egg or make a cup of tea. Worse than the friction between the two grown-ups was that Margaret had become intensely Arabized, fasting during Ramadan, wearing Arab robes and being eyed up by the local tribal leader, who would gladly have added her to his collection of wives. She had left Anita far behind; the latter’s companion during this tense holiday was Margaret’s younger brother Dick, with whom she rode and climbed sand dunes.

  On their return, Marjorie sent Anita to yet another educational establishment. For the next year and a half, for three days a week, she would go to Miss Wolfe’s school, just across the park from Westbourne Terrace, to study history, literature and French. Miss Wolfe was a former governess and her pupil-centred teaching methods were very advanced, with the focus on interesting books. ‘We learned a lot because all our studies interested her personally,’ Anita wrote approvingly. Jack fared less well: he was sent to Downside, the Benedictine monastery school, whose head was the terrifying and sadistic Father de Trafford.

  Marjorie and Shane were settling down, although Shane’s biographer, Otto Rauchbauer, wrote frostily: ‘From the 1920s onward he [Shane] allowed himself sexual liberties in a society that was becoming ever more permissive.’ But there was no more talk of divorce from Marjorie, who seemed happy enough to travel extensively with her sister Anne and buy dresses in Paris. Her children, as they got older, got used to her frequent absences; Anita didn’t mind Marjorie spending Christmas in New York as long as she herself could spend it at Glaslough.

  Anita, in her memoirs, describes herself and Jack as wild children, fighting until they drew blood and prone to dangerous japes such as creeping along the gutter, heedless of the forty-foot drop below, to pour jugfuls of water down the chimneys of the house next door. But at Glaslough they were well behaved. They loved and were loved by their grandparents, liked by the gamekeepers, foresters and dairymaids, and too engrossed in trawling for pike to get up to mischief, although Anita’s habit of climbing to the top of a sixty-foot Douglas fir caused an anguished Marjorie to wail: ‘Why have I such a daughter?’

  When the older Leslies were away and Shane and Marjorie were in charge of Glaslough, exciting visitors arrived: W.B. Yeats, who walked around the lake declaiming his poetry, and a peer of the realm with his mistress who wore gold lamé trouser suits and drank cocktails. When Leonie was in charge, cocktails, mistresses and evening trousers were out of the question. Shane was now working for A.S.W. Rosenbach, the American bookseller known as ‘the Napoleon of the book trade’. Shane’s familiarity with Big House libraries and owners who were willing to sell them was an invaluable asset but helped to deplete the stock of rare books on this side of the Atlantic. He still wrote prolifically – novels, poetry, literary criticism – and continued his involvement with the Catholic Church and Irish politics.

  Clare Sheridan, contentedly living near Bisra, at least for the moment, was not scandalizing her family as much as previously. Her 1920 visit to Moscow to sculpt the heads of the Soviet leaders had greatly embarrassed her cousin Winston Churchill, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies, and had caused a temporary rift between him and Shane, who had known about Clare’s plans. But Winston’s cousins were soon forgiven, although mi5 remained convinced for some years that Clare was a Russian agent. Since she was scattily indiscreet, this seems unlikely.

  Shane, hardly a family man, made this unfounded criticism of his mother and aunts: ‘The Misses Jerome never entered into British family life.’ It was Shane himself who didn’t pass through that particular door. Anita wrote: ‘I think we [Shane’s children] realised fairly early that our own father did not exactly dislike us – he would merely have preferred us not to have been born.’ To convey his boredom during rare family mealtimes, he developed a trick of closing both the upper and lower lids over his eyes, like a weary tortoise, causing an enraged Marjorie to leave the table. Anita’s two paternal uncles, Shane’s younger brothers, were more amenable. Seymour, born in 1889, had spent ten years of his childhood bedridden with a tubercular hip and emerged from that decade in the sickroom as ‘the best-read member of a hard-reading family’. He wrote books and a series of gossipy articles for Vogue, called ‘Our Lives from Day to Day’. He abandoned his literary career to become a successful fundraiser for Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. His younger brother, Lionel, only fourteen years older than Anita, had inherited from his mother the robust Jerome constitution. Having served as an officer in India at the end of the First World War, he decided to walk home, crossing the Himalayas en route. He then became an explorer in Labrador and wrote a book, Wilderness Trails in Three Continents, for which Winston Churchill supplied an introduction.

  As well as these entertaining uncles, Anita was blessed with the kindest of great-aunts, Olive Guthrie, née Leslie, the owner of Torosay Castle in the Isle of Mull, where Anita and Jack were invited to stay when Marjorie was on her travels. The Leslies were well born and wealthy but their domestic arrangements, whereby they looked after each other’s children and never doubted that blood was thicker than water, were not unlike those of traditional working-class families as depicted in Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s superb study, Family and Kinship in East London (1954). Her unsatisfactory parents aside, Anita was taken up by her large extended family and, like her grandmother Leonie, kept them close throughout her life. The Leslies’ attitude to their relations was one of staunch tolerance, so that the nationalist Shane could live under the same roof as his unionist father and indiscreetly promiscuous Clare was constantly forgiven, although she once noticed her aunt, Jennie Churchill, looking at her ‘in a kind of overhauling way’.

  Anita still did what she was told, and what was now prescribed was a period in Paris, the city where, it was hoped, poise and polish cou
ld be acquired by gauche aristocratic English girls. As important as these Parisian attributes was allure, although not so overtly on the ‘finishing school’ agenda. Anita was aware of her shortcomings in this department: ‘An odd streak in me remained resentful of any attempt to cultivate the art of alluring the opposite sex. This was what all mothers hoped of their daughters – maximum sex appeal with the minimum of sex experience.’ There had been previous attempts to make her prettier: ‘Asthma and recurring pneumonia had rendered me thin and unattractive.’ Her aunt Anne had taken her to Switzerland for animal gland injections. The result was that she grew two inches in a month and, inclined to sallowness, now had a sea-green complexion.

  Lodged in the Rue de Longchamp, near the Eiffel tower, at the home of the Mesdemoiselles Armoury, with her friends Winifred (Pooh) Paget and Elizabeth Darrell, Anita’s health and appearance soon began to cause concern. She had never eaten a lot, as heavy meals seemed to bring on asthma attacks, but now she and her two friends took to serious dieting: ‘We all wanted to be thin and longed to look depraved.’ Word got back to Marjorie and on 30 November 1930 Anita wrote protestingly to her mother:

  I DID NOT go three days on water in Paris … I am afraid that my bony legs must be an optical delusion [sic] as according to measurement they are exactly the same as for the last three year … I have no defence what so ever [sic] for my previous wish not to eat except that it was an interesting mental experience to see just how far my will controlled my body.

  She ended by describing a visit to the Casino de Paris: ‘I thought Josephine Baker the loveliest thing I had ever seen on stage … how could you be disgusted by that perfect brown body.’

  Anita, bony legs notwithstanding, was lovely too, tall and slender with the clear Leslie brow and slightly slanted eyes, the type of looks that would become more fashionable as the slinky fashions of the 1930s took hold. In Paris she was held responsible for the dieting craze that resulted in Pooh and Liz coming down with pneumonia and influenza and being brought back to London. Anita was moved to the home of an aristocratic Russian emigrée, Madame Lermantov, and enrolled at the Sorbonne. And then the good times began. Her youngest uncle, Lionel, was studying animal sculpture in Paris while living with a nightclub dancer whose stage costume was a covering of gold paint: ‘I had never met anyone like this. Nor for that matter have I done so since.’

  She began to study French literature and, introduced by her Russian landlady to a very old French sculptor, Alfred Boucher, once an intimate friend of Auguste Rodin, she kept a diary in which she recalled Boucher’s anecdotes. This later became the seedbed of her first biography, Rodin: Immortal Peasant (1939), a lively, if highly fanciful, book. In 1931 she was reluctantly dragged away from this exciting milieu to prepare for the following year’s debutante Season: ‘After all, it just means dull expense and lots of clothes and “amusement”, which I don’t want.’ Meanwhile, there were country house parties, which she found distasteful if, as was often the case, they involved shooting: ‘I found it repellent that the shooters’ faces always looked so red!’ But, coming from a literary family, it wasn’t all ruddy-cheeked squires and tedium. She sat next to W.B. Yeats at a Dublin dinner party. At a house party in Oban, given by her great-aunt Olive Guthrie, she looked so leggy and dashing that the local people thought that she must be a film star.

  She made some exotic new friends, among them the disreputable Tallulah Bankhead, whom she visited in Mayfair, ‘feeling tiresomely undecadent amongst ladies whose eyelids glistened with incandescent violet grease’. Another unlikely acquaintance was the American Gladys Marlborough, a ruined beauty, miserably married to the Duke. When their ghastly marriage ended in 1933, ‘I tried hard to appear sophisticated and one of my letters [to Gladys] ends, “Wishing you the best of luck in the divorce – with love – Anita”.’

  Every debutante’s account of her Season tells a story of wretchedness and dismay. Even the flamboyant Clare Sheridan had been overawed by the weighty procedure of coming out. She wrote in Nuda Veritas: ‘I stood in ballroom doorways longing to be hidden in the crowd, cursing my conspicuous height and shrinking from introductions.’ During her own Season, being carelessly parented worked to Anita’s advantage. Marjorie seldom chaperoned her because ‘it bored her to see my sulks’. And Shane ‘would only go to balls which took place in grand private houses’. Indifferently watched over, Anita could evade the dull young men in the ballroom, appalling dancers every one, and attach herself to a livelier lad, a well-born bad lot who, unknown to Anita’s family, had been wiped off the high-society listings on account of, among other misdemeanours, having a drink-driving conviction and losing his licence. Anita became his evening chauffeur. She would sneak out of the ballroom and into the driving seat of his sports car. They headed for the Ace of Spades, a racy nightspot on the Great West Road. Then Anita would sneak back for the closing moments of the debutante dance. Clare’s parties in her St John’s Wood studio, where writers and artists dined on red wine and spaghetti and there wasn’t a suitable boy in sight, provided another welcome distraction from the stuffy Season.

  Leonie, too, came to the rescue. When she was in London she took her wilting granddaughter to receptions at Londonderry House, where the guests were eminent statesmen rather than callow striplings or, if a dance was obligatory, she introduced Anita to ‘the most amusing people – never young however’. Every debutante was required to attend Royal Ascot: ‘When my turn came, she [Marjorie] had left London and Pa disappeared.’ Anita went by herself with two sandwiches in her handbag and got picked up by ‘an olive-skinned gentleman with roving – very roving – eyes’, who tempted her with several helpings of strawberries and cream. He was Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan and the kindest and most courteous of men, but a potential source of scandal. At the end of the Season, thankful that ‘one could not be a deb twice,’ Anita reflected that ‘if my ambition throughout had been to annoy Mama, I had succeeded wonderfully.’

  Marrying off their daughter to a rich suitor was important to the upper classes, since a wealthy husband’s money could alter the circumstances of an entire family. Clare Sheridan, daughter of the reckless Moreton Frewen, knew this well: ‘My father regarded me as an investment. If I married well I should have proved myself worthwhile.’ To this end, she was forbidden to see the brilliant but poor Wilfred Sheridan for years. There was less pressure on Anita to marry well, perhaps because the Leslies’ finances weren’t as dire as those of the Frewens, but parents and girls were mindful of the fate of unmarried women at a time when there were no careers to provide an alternative to matrimony. In The Gilt and the Gingerbread Anita tells the story of the six unmarried sisters of Lord Belmore of Castle Coole, Enniskillen, thirty miles from Castle Leslie:

  Each girl had been given one London season and when she found no suitor of equal rank returned to the Irish demesne for ever … Nothing ever happened. Nothing could happen. One of the six sisters drowned herself in the lake and when the butler announced the news at breakfast, her brother, Lord Belmore, reportedly said, ‘Well, don’t stand there, man. Bring in the porridge.’

  In 2008 I visited an exhibition called ‘The Last Debutantes’ at Kensington Palace. The last debutantes to be presented at Court made their debut in 1958, nearly three decades after Anita’s much-resented Season. By then a wider world than that offered by an early, wealthy marriage was on offer but you could still feel desperation in display stands of expensive frocks, walls papered with invitations, a film of girls being taught how to curtsey. Even the smiling debs photographed in their Dior and Balmain dresses seemed to be quivering from the ordeal.

  I can’t imagine Anita quivering. Although her family would have been delighted had she landed a duke, she wasn’t seen as an investment. It was probably just as well since her recalcitrant personality would not have been suited to the narrowness of English aristocratic life, impressed as she was by titles. Anyway, she soon made it clear in a letter to Shane that she never wanted to marry, ‘although I might
make quite an intelligent mistress – I don’t mind sacrificing my body but not my freedom’.

  3

  The Devil’s Decade

  Anita, despite her taste for unsuitable boys and her dislike of matrimony, was not the most outlandish debutante of the 1932 Season. That title belonged to Unity Mitford, younger sister of Diana, ‘the most flawlessly beautiful woman I have ever seen’ according to the diarist James Lees-Milne. Diana’s triumphant debut in 1928 had culminated in her engagement to Bryan Guinness, heir to a great fortune. Unity, less beautiful than her older sister but more striking, seemed unlikely to repeat Diana’s success. Nearly six feet tall, she attracted more notice by adding swirling capes and paste jewels to the regulation jeune fille wardrobe. In case attention was still lacking she took along her pet rat, Ratular, to dances, or wound her grass snake, Enid, around her neck instead of pearls. More sinister was her abiding interest in fascism: when she was fifteen she said that when she grew up she would go to Germany to meet Hitler.

  In 1932 this didn’t seem such a horrible idea as it would by the end of the decade. In Unity and Anita’s debutante year, Tatler magazine photographed Adolf Hitler, the leader of the German National Socialist Party, as a man about town – just another ambitious politician hoping to triumph in troubled economic times. On 1 October in Great Britain another charismatic politician, Sir Oswald Mosley, launched the British Union of Fascists (buf). Mosley was – this is James Lees-Milne again – ‘a man of overweening egotism … he had in him the stuff of which zealots are made’. Diana Guinness, after a long affair with Mosley, married him in secret in October 1936 in the drawing room of Joseph and Magda Goebbels’ Berlin apartment, with both Hitler and Unity in attendance.