While inspecting a flat at 10 Westbourne Terrace, Anita had a strange psychic experience. The old lady showing her round burst into tears before a photograph of her son who had killed himself two days before Christmas after a quarrel with his wife. Anita wrote in her diary: ‘I felt him begging me to say he was sorry and not to cry and that the death anniversary must be a day of joy not grief.’ Anita conveyed this experience to the young man’s mother who had, it seemed, been longing for some stranger to come with a message. Anita wrote to the grieving woman from Ina’s flat in South Lodge, the same block where Marjorie had once owned a flat and where, coincidentally, the young man had spent his childhood:
I feel he was hanging around trying to send them a message and literally made the greedy little Jewish agent [to Anita, unpleasantly anti-Semitic even after the war, Jews were either ‘greedy’ or ‘clever’, by which she meant too clever by half] see this advert in The Times and send me hoping he could get me to write from South Lodge and give them a clue.
Anita, perhaps on account of these disturbing portents, didn’t buy the Westbourne Grove flat. Soon afterwards she learned that her cousin Diana Churchill, at the age of fifty-four and after several nervous breakdowns, had killed herself on 10 October. Diana had been divorced from her second husband, Duncan Sandys in 1960 and changed her name back to Churchill. Anita’s diary: ‘Am so flattened by these emotional shocks on top of emotional Glaslough decisions I feel like seeing nobody.’ But Christmas at Oranmore, hunting with two enthusiastic children, both ‘going like bombs’, restored her spirits although, on 18 January 1964, ‘children back to school worn out – ditto ponies – ditto me’. That winter she bought a flat at 10 Cleveland Square, near Hyde Park, which she chose because of the leafy street and traffic-free air. As for the rest of the city: ‘The noise and smell of London horrify me – and the people.’
To avoid having to pay uk income tax, Anita put the flat in Xandra Frewen’s name. By now, the Frewen marriage was skidding towards divorce. Xandra had fallen in love with another man but was still hanging about Brede Place, the Frewens’ marital home, which caused Roger great bitterness. Anita felt that if the Frewens couldn’t be reunited, Xandra should marry her lover ‘and make him give you a proper home elsewhere. Or if you are sick of him why not marry someone else?’ When Xandra pointed out that lack of money was at the root of her morally dubious position, Anita told her: ‘but my love all morality is based on economics!! The reason such a fuss is made about feminine chastity is because men do not want to bring up other men’s children.’
Xandra was beautiful; the head waiter at the Ritz mistook her for the French film star Anouk Aimée, and her adventuresome nature was a worry to Bill and Anita, who took on a parental role towards this reckless young woman. Anita advised Xandra, the mother of four small children, against sailing the Atlantic:
It just would be so awful if you got drowned my dear – you’re so precious to so many. Other people’s lives would be terribly spoiled without you … One can’t have EVERYTHING – not love and affection and freedom from love and affection … It may be a BORE to be precious but it’s not for ever!
There were sitting tenants in the Cleveland Square flat and they wanted to stay in it until November. A new friend of Anita’s solved the problem by giving the tenants £2000 to leave. This was Roy Miles, a successful London businessman, who had first met Anita at a party at Lough Cutra Castle in Galway, in 1961, the year that he had been featured in a bbc Radio programme, New Names Making News, in which ‘young people making their names in the literary, theatrical and business worlds talk about themselves and their work’. Roy had begun his business career by taking over the famous hair salon, Antoine, and its associated beauty products. But his real passion was art, and before long he sold the salon and opened his first art gallery in St James, Piccadilly. He became well known as much for his parties as for his paintings; The Daily Telegraph diarist called him ‘One of the country’s top fifteen self-publicists.’ Roy was captivated by Anita. In an interview in 2008, he told me:
I’ve never met anybody else in my life who could fascinate you with her conversation – who could thrill you. Anita educated me in the ways of high society. She had a way of saying, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ She was the greatest mentor of my life.
Anita invited Roy to dinner parties attended by duchesses, where dreadful food was served. Roy took Anita and Bill to dinner at the Connaught, where the food was much better.
1965 started with a royal visit to Oranmore Castle. The Countess of Rosse, Lord Snowdon’s mother, brought her son and his wife, Princess Margaret, to the castle, where they spent an hour clambering on the roof: ‘And I never thought hrh would admire the Red Turret (rather dripping!)’, Anita recorded. There was whiskey and gossip and an oyster feast and singing at nearby Clarenbridge. A few days later, an observer ‘watching Tony in his odd beatnik shooting outfit pulling out a fabulous cigarette case, said, “He’s not a gentleman of course but he will flaunt it.”’ Anita approved of the unusual royal consort,
such an alive attractive person – most congenial and such fun for her to be married to – one sees her face in repose is so soft and happy and a gleam in her eyes – after the taut miserable-looking little princess of a few years ago – Obviously he is a good lover and takes trouble with a highstrung temperamental attractive wife – who can’t carry on any old how with the press spying and being beastly.
On 10 January Anita recorded, ‘Bill left for Kenya – coughing.’ She wasn’t particularly worried, unlike Bill’s old friend Ruckers, who wrote to her that
the continual coughing and the night sweats (the latter are a bad sign) may well mean his lungs are affected … I am almost in entire agreement with his contempt for doctors and his faith in nature cures etc but there are occasions when doctors are essential and one is to be screened in case there is the least sign of T.B.
Ruckers intended to give Bill this advice ‘but please also add your weight to mine’. It is unlikely that Anita did this, or that Bill would have taken any advice offered; both the Leslie-Kings swore by ‘nature cures etc’.
Winston died on 24 January. ‘One can think of nothing else but the end of an epoch. All the war revives and runs through one’s veins.’ Shane was a chief mourner and Tarka, home from school, queued in the cold to witness the Lying in State. Anita wrote: ‘He will never forget the Great Hall and Marines on guard with tears pouring down their faces.’ Anita attended the funeral in St Paul’s and then, from the banks of the Thames, watched ‘the little flag-covered coffin leaving us for ever – One was seared by the day.’ Inevitably, at Glaslough, there were spooky goings-on. Seymour wrote to Anita: ‘Crashes and bangs in the loft overhead and all that week mysterious footsteps in West Wing staircase and Leonie’s famous finger-tip drumming, sounded like a typewriter tapping next door!’ When Jennie Churchill’s grave at Bladon, near Blenheim, was shown on television, ‘an awful big bang in our loft! And it’s upset Timmie [Seymour’s wife]. Twice we’ve heard together Leonie’s drumming fingertips … I predicted it would be so.’ Seymour’s letter concluded: ‘Des has flag (Eire) ½ mast! Top of castle. Floodlit. The only ½ mast flag!’
There was another significant death on Good Friday, 15 April, that of Paul Rodzianko. After a funeral officiated by his nephew, Father Rodzianko, and attended by representatives of several regiments and the Italian Cavalry School, he was cremated and his ashes spread over the garden of Brayfield Lodge in Buckinghamshire, the house he had shared with his wife Joan and where they had run a school for horsemanship. For Anita, all Paul’s sins were forgotten – his bullying, his refusal to give her a divorce. Instead:
What a character he was. I am glad I could write his book and give him some happiness – tho very little for our penniless garret life was such a strain. It was like being married to a bear – or to the North Wind! Such vitality courage and talent – Farewell Paul. May your best horses await you in the clouds.
It was as though she had momentar
ily forgotten that she’d spent much of her married life with Paul plotting to run away from him, or pleading for a divorce. By the 1980s she’d returned to a more truthful frame of mind, telling Harold Harris that she could not bear to write about Paul in her forthcoming memoir because of the unhappiness he had caused her. Among Paul’s glowing obituaries, one mentioned his marriage to Anita and a schoolfriend of Tarka’s brought it to his attention. Tarka was so surprised by this aspect of his mother’s past that he was given permission to ring home. Anita assured him that she was going to tell him about Paul ‘one day’. Leonie, aged fourteen, staying with Bill Cunningham and his family, heard about the obituary and was deeply shocked that her mother, who had brought up her children as Catholics, was a divorcée.
Several of Anita’s friends and associates died during the year: Dr Gillespie, the family doctor at Glaslough, who had delivered Leonie in Marjorie’s bed; Montague Porch, Jennie Churchill’s third husband, at the age of ninety-nine; Anita’s favourite teacher, Miss Lambert, ‘the only sensitive teacher of my miserable childhood’, and the amateur sailor Bobby Somerset, a close friend. ‘I am over 50 so from now on I suppose everyone who has been in my past will drop by the wayside,’ Anita recorded gloomily. At a party in July, she met the American former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson for the first time. He told her that, at his very last meeting with Winston, he’d asked the old man on whom he had modelled his oratorical style and Winston had said that he had learnt all he knew, when he was nineteen, from another American politician: Bourke Cockran. Anita wrote in her diary:
Only I in all England – except Pa – knew that Jennie had a love affair with Bourke and gave Winston his introduction – Then Bourke married my mother’s sister! And left us all his money – And told his wife my aunt the tale! 24 hours after pouring this out for me Stevenson dropped dead in Grosvenor Street.
This was on 14 July; the following weekend, Anita wrote down the entire exchange and brought this record to Randolph Churchill at his house, Stour, in East Bergholt, Sussex, where Randolph was writing his father’s life. When the first volume was published in 1966, Anita ‘was horrified to find my own ill-written, hasty letter about Bourke inserted verbatim in this most eminent of biographies!’ There were more deaths in the second half of 1965: Barney Baruch, Aziz al-Masri, the Egyptian general whom she had known during the war, and Joe Dudgeon of the Irish Riding School. But Anita could write: ‘The year ends in great happiness for me personally with both children enjoying their schools and able at 16 and 14 to get the most out of hunting.’
She had been writing another book, once again recycling her father’s work. In 1932 Shane had published Studies in Sublime Failures, one of the failures being Moreton Frewen, his uncle by marriage and husband of the eldest Jerome sister, Clara. Moreton had had a varied career: cattle dealer in Wyoming, land speculator, financial advisor to the Nizam of Hyderabad, investor in strange products such as a noxious-smelling disinfectant called Electrozone and, briefly, from 1910 to 1911, an Irish Nationalist mp. None of his schemes brought him anything except financial loss, for which he acquired the nickname ‘Mortal Ruin’.
Anita’s biography of this chancer was published in 1966 and called Mr Frewen of England. A Victorian Adventurer. Anita treated her subject sympathetically, writing: ‘It has been said of Moreton that he had a first-class mind untroubled by second thoughts.’ Rudyard Kipling was harsher: ‘He [Moreton] lived in every sense, except what is called common sense, very richly and widely, to his extreme content.’
But not to his family’s content. Moreton bamboozled Clara and their children out of every inheritance, which he then lost, to the point where Clara’s household goods had to be auctioned. Her two sisters, Leonie and Jennie, who were hardly rich themselves, bought her favourite pieces and returned them to her. With his daughter Clare, Moreton went further: he not only forced her to hand over her inheritance but demanded that she seduce rich men on his behalf, which the strong-willed Clare refused to do. Moreton wrote to her disapprovingly: ‘You are a beautiful woman with a mental equipment which, rightly employed, might have helped me infinitely.’ He was incorrigible as he launched scheme after disastrous scheme: ‘I have got the ball at my feet once more, and this time I’ll keep it – you will see.’ A philanderer as well as a duplicitous crook, he boasted in his journal: ‘Every woman I have ever enjoyed has been completely paralysed by the vigour of my performance.’ An outcome which not every lover would relish.
Anita doesn’t mention that in spite of Moreton’s vigour, Clara’s admirer, King Milan of Serbia, may have been Clare’s father. Clare herself believed this to be the case. In a letter to Anita on 20 December 1954, Clare wrote: ‘Margaret [Clare’s daughter] looks so like him and we both so dislike Frewens.’ Although the exiled King Milan was devoted to both Clara and Clare and showered them with gifts, Anita was reluctant, as always, to reveal amorous goings-on within her family, a stance not easy to maintain since so many of its members were world-class adulterers. She sprinkled stardust over Moreton as she would do with later biographical subjects, Jennie Churchill and Winston’s son Randolph. Ralph Martin, a rival biographer, who will later reappear as Anita’s nemesis, preferred another biography of Mortal Ruin: ‘The prime source book on Moreton Frewen is The Splendid Pauper by Allen Andrews (1968). It is excellent. Anita Leslie has also written a biography of him … but as a member of the family she is not as objective.’ Anita found rascals irresistible, which is perhaps why she was so fond of the Edwardian age, with its randy and rapacious scoundrels and their sultry, adulterous mistresses. To have depicted Moreton as a monstrous cad might have unsettled her readers, who responded to her talent to amuse. Unpleasant aspects of her subjects’ lives were kept shadowy. Of her biography of Randolph Churchill, she told Harold Harris: ‘That book is full of things i don’t say.’ As for Moreton, she told Betsan Coats: ‘I didn’t harp on how dreadful Moreton was to his offspring.’
There aren’t many diary entries for 1966. One of the most interesting refers to a visit Anita made to Randolph Churchill at Stour.
Found him weak and doctor said he had cirrhosis of liver. His Vol I so good – warm and well balanced but he knows I think he cannot finish the other 4 vols … I had to realise he is dying – all because he lives on whisky and plum cake. My heart was aching all the time I tried to jot down notes in the archives for ‘Jennie’.
In spite of the state of his liver and his poor diet, Randolph survived until 7 June 1978 when, according to his doctor, he had ‘worn out every organ in his body at the same time’. He rallied after Anita’s visit and on 27 October 1966 was the guest of honour at a Foyles Literary Luncheon, at the Dorchester Hotel in London, to mark the publication of Winston S. Churchill Vol. I Youth 1874–1900 (1966). At the top table were Shane, Iris, Anita and Clemmie, now Baroness Spencer-Churchill, gbe. There had been much recent literary collaboration between Churchills and Leslies: Shane and Anita had helped Randolph, and Randolph had given Anita access to his family archive to help her in the writing of her next book, a biography of Randolph’s grandmother Jennie.
At Glaslough there were problems both financial and domestic. Desmond was in Dublin for much of the time with Helen Strong and their baby daughter Sammy. Anita wrote to Betsan:
Helen maddens everyone by calling herself Mrs Desmond Leslie while Agnes storms around Glaslough, is hateful to poor old Seymour and Timmie stuck in their wing and causes as much scandal and trouble as possible. The farm we worked at for 8 years is ruined and Desmond – who never pays bills – has a huge overdraft and is about to sell the garden as a hotel! I think they are as mad as hatters. Pa spent 3 months there last summer and said they were the most unhappy of his life – with Desmond and Agnes screaming at each other.
Seymour was having a bad time. In a letter of 21 November 1966 to Anita, he referred maliciously to Agnes as ‘cette horrible juive à côté de nous’, while Desmond’s ‘other wife’ was ‘La Belle Helene’. The war of the wives went on until 1969, w
hen Desmond, despicably, contrived to banish Agnes and her children from Glaslough. Anita immediately took them in at Oranmore until Monaghan County Council found them a house close to Castle Leslie, where Helen and her two daughters had been installed. Sammy and Antonia, Agnes’s daughter, were classmates in the local school and became friends. When Antonia was invited to tea at the Castle, she found herself in the room which had once been hers, playing with her old toys. In any ordinary family this would have been regarded as a heart-breaking and scandalous episode but the Leslies had a talent for sliding a veneer of civilized behaviour over their natural ruthlessness, and cordial relations were soon restored between Desmond, past and present wives and all the children. Only Anita continued to find her brother’s conduct unforgivable.
20
Jolly Old Age I’m Having
Anita began her biography of her great-aunt Jennie Churchill in 1966. This was the first time that she had written about a member of her family whom she had actually known, although Jennie had died when Anita was only seven. She could make use of her grandmother Leonie’s reminiscences about her sister and had access to family papers. What she didn’t have was any research on the subject by Shane that she could recycle, as she had done in previous books. In Shane’s rare references to Jennie, his tone is one of snooty disdain. On Lord Randolph Churchill’s marriage: ‘He had married an American in the days when such an alliance was considered as experimental as mating with Martians’ (from The End of a Chapter); and from Long Shadows, on his aunt: ‘She could be described as unsuitable as possible for a Bishop’s wife or President of a ymca.’ Shane recognized Jennie’s dauntless spirit; writing of the Randolph Churchills’ last voyage, he wrote: ‘She [Jennie] cheerfully crossed the tropical seas, though it was necessary to include a leaden casket among the baggage.’ He compared Randolph to Lord Byron, ‘they were spendthrifts of their own minds’, and describes the former as ‘bearded and silent, a cause of trembling to all who passed.’ Having to carry out her own research may have been the reason why Anita wrote fewer letters and diary entries than usual and only managed to record the events of 1968 in her 1969 diary, which began ‘God what a year to get over.’
Telling Tales Page 19