Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  Almost until the outbreak of the Second World War, most British people regarded communism as a greater threat than fascism. In 1934 an early Gallup poll found that of its interviewees 70 per cent of those under thirty preferred fascism to communism, perhaps because living standards were improving in fascist Germany and Italy. It was estimated that the buf had 30,000 non-active members and supporters. The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, which had brought the Nazi party to power the following month, had not inspired as much fear as the news from the Soviet Union: the Stalinist collectivization policies, which led to the famines of 1930–33 and the intentional starving to death of three million Soviet Ukrainians, an event known as the Holodomor – ‘murder by hunger’. The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, edited by Otto Katz (1895–1952), the mysterious and dashing Czech-born spy said to be the model for the heroic Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca, and published by John Lane in 1933, listed the new German anti-Semitic laws but was widely thought to be communist inspired.

  In her early twenties Anita shared the dreary, casual anti-Semitism of her insecure and arrogant class but probably didn’t give the political situation much thought; young girls of her background seldom did. Nancy Mitford even said of her younger sister Unity, who is now regarded as having been a rabid fascist: ‘With her the whole Nazi thing seemed to be a joke. She was great fun … Unity was absolutely unpolitical. No one knew less about politics than she did.’

  Later Anita described herself as having been ‘an idiotic London debutante’ and, in her 1981 memoir, describes a highly suspect scene which, supposedly, took place at Glaslough at the beginning of the 1930s. Leonie, seated at her dressing table, holds up a clipping from a German newspaper that showed ‘an unhappy-looking man walking along a street in his underpants with a large star pinned to his vest’. This so distressed Leonie that ‘her trembling hands kept dropping her silver brushes’. This doesn’t quite square with a letter that Anita wrote to her friend Rose Burgh, née Vincent, on 13 October 1938. In it, Anita complains that Ireland ‘was swamped with Jews’ and quotes a conversation between her grandmother and a customs official: ‘“What will you do about them?” Gran asked the Customs man to divert his attention. “Argh sure we’ll send for Hitler to chase ’em.”’ No mention of trembling hands.

  Shane, a devout Catholic as well as a world-class philanderer, felt more threatened by Russian communists than German Nazis. In 1922 Lenin had executed 4500 priests and monks and 3500 nuns, while fascists were notable only for silly uniforms and successful economic policies. Shane had a dubious acquaintance in Charles Maurras, the French royalist and founder of the extremely right-wing Action Française who, after the Second World War, was found guilty of collaboration. At this verdict, he shouted: ‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus!’

  The Leslies, like many of their friends, didn’t take the rise of Nazism very seriously, unlike their cousin Winston Churchill. In September 1933 after she had lunched with Winston, Clare wrote to Shane, ‘what impressed me most about Winston is his vibrant hatred of Hitler … He says Europe must unite to keep Hitler down – that he’s the most dangerous thing that ever happened.’ But the world was largely indifferent to the threat of Nazi domination, and the Anglo-Irish particularly so. The news from elsewhere hardly penetrated their days of hunting and picnics. In March 1932 in the Irish Free State, Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party had been elected on a platform pledged to deliver ‘social justice’, with policies designed to show the Protestant ascendancy that it was no longer, in the words of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, ‘part of the national consciousness’. This diminished status wasn’t felt at Glaslough, situated at the edge of the country. There, Sir John Leslie, Protestant landlord, lived on with his lively wife, cared for by devoted Catholic servants, who made sure that the flowers picked from the garden that day matched the dress that Leonie changed into for dinner.

  Leonie was more concerned, as Anita’s dismal London Season drew to a close, with what her granddaughter should do next. The granddaughter herself was delighted to return to Ireland and the country pursuits she loved. Hunting with the Ward Union, a prestigious stag hunt founded in 1854, she wrote to Shane: ‘I have never had such fun, it’s the grandest life and the one I’m made for. Sociaty [sic], clothes and complex intellectualism can all go to blages [sic] while there’s this.’ But perhaps bearing in mind the fate of the Belmore sisters, she seems to have realized that she couldn’t stay on the family estate forever. On 28 September 1932 she wrote to Shane that she was about to start ‘my Daily Express job’. This came to nothing, so Leonie, as she so often did, took things in hand. She wrote to her friend Noël Coward, with the result that Anita, who had been taking lessons in Spanish dancing, was auditioned by the impresario C.B. Cochran to be a dancing showgirl in his new musical Nymph Errant. Coward had turned down Cochran’s offer to write the score and Cole Porter took over. He considered this show one of his best because of its worldliness and sophistication.

  Anita in her memoir gives a false account of this episode: ‘So I became a Cochran Young Lady. Granny Leonie was disgusted, Mama could not believe that I, who loved horses and country, should be ready to miss a summer in Ireland.’ The truth was that Leonie had brought about the introduction to Cochran, Marjorie had encouraged the dancing lessons and even Shane was enthusiastic. He sent his daughter orchids on the opening night at the Opera House theatre, Manchester, and wrote to her: ‘You looked so well and wiry and brilliant that I was overwhelmed with pride when I saw you again.’ The vagabond, theatrical life suited Anita: living in digs, cadging baths from friends, greasy spoon suppers. She wrote to Shane in 1933: ‘I feel that I have opened the doors of an entirely new world.’ She admired the show’s star, Gertrude Lawrence, for her hard work but not for her diva-ish behaviour: ‘Anyone else who sings better than she gets turned out or their song cut which is not good for business.’

  While Anita was hoofing in the provinces, her friends were, more traditionally, getting married. Betsan Horlick, a member of the malted milk dynasty, who had sat next to Anita in Miss Wolfe’s classes, married John Coats, a deceptively unconventional stockbroker. Soon after the wedding, the couple went to India as vegetarian lecturers for the Theosophical Society. In 1933 Anita became the godmother of their son, Christopher. Winifred Paget married Guy Carleton, ‘a horsy young man with a quick wit’ as described by Anita in print, but less favourably in her letters. The most spectacular of the weddings was that of eighteen-year-old Rose Vincent to Alexander Leigh Henry Leith, the 6th Lord Burgh, known as ‘Alkie’, on 6 June 1934. According to Rose’s future daughter-in-law, the novelist Anita Burgh, Alkie’s brother Jock was the man whom Rose really loved but Alkie’s mother pushed her into marriage with the older brother. Alkie was on the verge of bankruptcy and Rose had been left a fortune by her American mother, whose grandfather had developed a Californian goldmine. Rose’s childhood had been spent at Muckross in Killarney, an estate of 11,000 acres which, in 1933, was donated to the state by Rose’s father, Senator Arthur Vincent, and became Ireland’s first national park. Money as much as convention motivated these early marriages. Brides could get hold of their inheritance as soon as they married, instead of having to wait until they were twenty-one. Husbands were the key to the safe, although sometimes discarded a few years later, with scandalous divorces and custody battles. ‘Matrimony represented their [the brides’] only mode of escape,’ Anita wrote. The alternative to it was the restrictive gilded cage of the parental home.

  Shane and Marjorie knew the Vincents and had stayed at Muckross at the same time as W.B. Yeats, that frequent and demanding guest of big-house owners. Anita and Rose became friends after their debutante Season and, for three decades, Rose remained the most important person in Anita’s life, the soulmate to whom secrets were divulged in long, sometimes daily, letters, while lives and husbands changed. Unlike Rose, Anita was under no pressure to marry – there would have been no great fortune to inherit if she had – an
d she was now determined to become a writer. Shane showed her the way. During the 1930s he published prolifically: books on the Oxford Movement, Poems and Ballads and a book of brief biographies, Studies in Sublime Failure, whose subjects included his late uncle-by-marriage, the rascally Moreton Frewen. In authorship, as in life, Shane was overshadowed by his cousin Winston, whose wilderness years, outside of government, from 1929 to 1939, saw the publication of his magnificent, four-volume biography of his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough.

  If Shane resented living in Winston’s shadow, he didn’t show it. He praised Winston’s books. Of the first volume of Marlborough, ‘It is certainly the most remarkable perusal of history made in our time.’ He kept his cousin up to date with family news: ‘Dicky Sheridan [Clare’s son] has signed on a wind jammer of Finnish extraction on which he sails for the Cape – Australia and the Horn – a very manly proceeding.’ Shane asked for, and received from Winston, money for Hugh Frewen, Clare’s brother who, like his father, had a talent for launching ruinous business ventures. And he made shameless use of his cousinage to seek introductions for his cronies, such as an American, Mrs Eustis, who wanted Winston to write an article for Today magazine, which Shane offered to write for him. Shane also solicited invitations for Winston to give lectures: ‘Would you care to lecture to the admirals and captains at Greenwich? … If you go I would like to go with you.’

  In May 1934 Anita was back in Paris, being entertained by Lionel and the gold-painted dancer and getting on with her book on Rodin, which she went back to Glaslough to finish. On 25 February 1935 she sent the manuscript to Shane, who was in New York: ‘I do do do hope you think it good enough – if it isn’t I shall just die of rage, exhaustion and humiliation and never take up a pen again …’ She says that she has too many ‘alternative satisfactions’ in her life to be good at any one thing – writing, acting, riding: ‘The result is I never get anywhere or will I get everywhere in time.’ She was twenty-five. At Glaslough she rode and stayed with friends with whom she hunted. She borrowed ‘Paul’s saddle’ and it is clear from her letter that Shane knew who Paul was. Then she went back to Paris, discovering, as all biographers do, that just when you think that you’ve exhausted every line of enquiry, more information comes your way. She wrote to Marjorie: ‘Now I have pages to insert in my nice clean typescript.’ Marjorie helpfully tried to interest the publisher M.M. Short in her daughter’s book.

  Paris was no longer the frolicksome city that Anita had loved: ‘The French are all very gloomy … take war with Germany for granted.’ Her family encouraged her to travel; widowed Aunt Anne took her to St Moritz, which Anita found ‘too civilised’, although she enjoyed excursions in the ‘super Rolls Royce’ belonging to the Granville Barkers. But it was dull for her: ‘Lady Ashley and Douglas Fairbanks are the only hotel excitement. They are generally to be found in the bar.’

  The following month there was a more enlightening trip: to the estate of Count Larvich, an old friend of Leonie’s, at Solza, Karviná, in Poland. Anita, an admirer of people whom the writer Edward Upward labelled ‘poshocrats’, sent Marjorie the guest list, which included the Duke of Alba and the Austrian Count Kinsky, cousin of the Count Charles Kinsky who had been Jennie Churchill’s great love. It was a lavish house party: ‘We had a sumptuous picnic lunch in the woods – wooden table, bonfire and butler included! In Poland!’ But the mood was sombre: ‘[P]olitical feeling is very strong here. One cannot discuss Hitler openly even in a private drawing room.’ Her host was examining his cellar in case of future air raids. The Poles didn’t seem to be panicking like the French but were taking ‘calm, mechanical precautions as the cloud of disturbance and war looms nearer and gloomier’. Anita didn’t mention this visit in any of her published writings. In this atmosphere of unrest, Margaret Sheridan married a much older man, Comte Guy de Renéville, at the time an admirer of Hitler and later described by General de Lattre de Tassigny as ‘the most likeable lunatic in the French army’. The marriage was not a success.

  Quite suddenly, in 1936, Anita’s own marriage prospects became a subject of interest to her family, for reasons which would later become clear. In February Marjorie took her daughter to New York, ‘where she and aunt Anne wished me to marry a rather nice American of their choosing’. Anita and the said young man, Ben, got on well but neither wished to marry someone who had been shoved at them ‘with the tact of a sledgehammer hitting you on the head’. While staying at her aunt’s Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, Anita had one of her frequent changes of career-plan and took acting lessons at a drama school run by émigré Russians from the Moscow Arts Theatre: ‘I have decided I want to try to get into the Old Vic when I return,’ she wrote to Shane. After New York she stayed with the Baruchs at their South Carolina plantation. Barney gave her a useful lesson: ‘There’s only one thing worth studying – human nature.’

  The year 1936 was besmirched with shabby events as well as tragic ones. It was the year when Diana Guinness, née Mitford, secretly married Sir Oswald Mosley in Berlin. A new Public Order Act had banned buf uniforms and Sir Oswald was no longer able to appear in his menacing fascist regalia. Another notorious marriage was being discussed: that of King Edward VIII and the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Both Leonie and Marjorie knew the leading players in the abdication crisis that followed the King’s decision to marry the woman he loved. Marjorie played bridge with Wallis and admired her beautifully shaped eyebrows and quiet manners, neither of which cut any ice with Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, who suggested that Leonie, a devoted Royalist, and the Duke of Connaught visit the King at Fort Belvedere, his country house in Berkshire, to judge how serious the affair was. After the royal party had returned from a walk, Wallis ordered the King to take off her muddy shoes, which he did. Leonie knew then that all was lost. The King abdicated in December and married Wallis in 1937.

  In the spring of 1936 Italy annexed Abyssinia and Hitler’s army marched into the Rhineland. In July the Spanish Civil War began, a harbinger of the wider conflict to come. Even then, invading dictators were not taken very seriously. At the Ideal Home Exhibition in London, a fashion display posed the question: ‘If England had a dictator what would women wear?’ and Diana Vreeland, in her Harper’s Bazaar column ‘Why Don’t You?’ suggested: ‘Why don’t you wear bare knees and long white knitted socks, as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the Carlton in Munich?’ But perhaps she was joking.

  There was a death in Anita’s family. Dick Sheridan, the seafaring young man of whom Shane had written so admiringly to Winston, had turned twenty-one on 20 September of that year. This was a matter of great apprehension to his mother, Clare, because he now became the owner of Frampton Court, the Sheridan family estate in Dorset, whose lands carried a curse: ‘No first-born son had ever survived to inherit those lands from which Henry viii had evicted the monks.’ Dick sold Frampton, to Clare’s relief, but he didn’t tell her that he had retained a single acre, which contained his grandfather’s grave. Dick, reckless survivor of storms and mishaps at sea, decided that he wanted to be a playwright, like his famous ancestor and namesake, and set off with a girlfriend to drive to Bab-El-M’Cid, where he could write in peace. It didn’t seem particularly worrying when he needed an operation on his appendix and was flown to the French hospital in Constantine. Then Clare, now living in London, received a telegram: ‘Peritonitis developed, come quickly.’ She went at once to Paris, from where she could get the evening train to Marseilles, and there found another telegram telling her that her son was dead.

  Anita’s family had always known that she looked upon Glaslough as her home and that the sporting life she enjoyed there was good for her health; Leonie, suspicious of her granddaughter’s rosy cheeks, once accused her of wearing rouge. However, in 1936 she was urged to go anywhere but the place she most loved and, since she seemed disinclined to marry nice young men who were pushed towards her, her ever-changing ambitions to act, write and travel were encouraged. There was a reason for th
is: his name was Colonel Paul Rodzianko cmg and it was clear that he meant trouble.

  4

  Married to the North Wind

  In 1981 after The Gilt and the Gingerbread was published, Harold Harris, Anita’s editor at Hutchinson, asked her why Paul Rodzianko, to whom she had once been married for more than a decade, had been only sketchily mentioned in her memoir, with no reason given as to why Anita married this penniless Russian, thirty years her senior. Anita told Harold: ‘I found it very difficult to blow him up or explain why I married him. I don’t know.’

  Nobody else knew either. When he first visited Anita at Glaslough in 1935, having met her at another Irish country house where he was training steeplechasers, Leonie referred to him as ‘that nhb’, the letters standing for ‘noisy, hungry bore’. Lionel’s daughter, Leonie de Barros, told me that Lionel had thought that Paul had given Anita the idea that the Russian Revolution would one day be overturned and that he and Anita would return to the land of his birth and resume his former aristocratic, landed life, with one hundred horses in the stables, where wolves were hunted with borzoi dogs and where, for a fancy-dress court ball, Paul’s mother had all her diamonds made into a glittering breastplate. Or, perhaps, having known other émigré Russians in both Paris and New York, Anita had admired the resilient and courageous way they coped with the loss of their fortunes and estates and adapted to new, much harder lives. Annoying Marjorie, who did not see Paul as suitable husband material, also had something to do with it, as Anita admitted. During the years of maternal neglect Anita had adored her mother but when Marjorie began to take more of an interest in her, Anita resented her interference.