The solitude and loneliness I go through when he is making these long voyages can be hell but I wouldn’t dream of asking him to stop … My nerves aren’t in the best of shape after this one but frankly I wouldn’t dream of trying to dissuade him – even if going round the world again was what he wanted.
Luckily, for the sake of Anita’s nerves, Bill, at the age of sixty-two, had decided against another round-the-world trip.
22
The Low-Down on the High-Ups
Anita understood how difficult it was for Tarka to be both a British soldier and an Irish farmer. Rather than give up the idea of Tarka farming at Glaslough, she tried to influence government policy on Northern Ireland. She wrote to Winston’s grandson, Winston S. Churchill, the Conservative mp for Stretford, near Manchester, who disagreed with her anti-internment views and was equally unmoved by her conviction that violence in the province was caused by inequalities in housing and jobs. She approached David James, the Conservative mp for North Dorset, with the idea that the British government should pay increased subsidies to Northern Ireland, to iron out these inequalities of provision. His answer was: ‘I would far sooner end it [the violence] by assisting the Republic to bring their level of social services up to the standard of our own, as that is the single biggest impediment to a United Ireland.’ Anita’s friend Aidan Crawley, who had served as first a Labour and then a Conservative mp, had become the influential chairman of London Weekend Television but neither he nor Sir John Foster, the Conservative mp for Norwich, a lawyer who had devoted his career to the advocacy of human rights, seemed to care much about Northern Ireland. Anita received ‘an interesting letter back from Michael Foot’, but it has yet to turn up in Mr Foot’s archive. What unlikely correspondents: the scatty, witty Anglo-Irish woman and the brilliant, intellectual socialist.
Seymour Leslie’s views were more radical than Anita’s: ‘I want the political sf [Sinn Féin] party to be allowed to stand in the Ulster elections,’ he wrote in an undated letter to Anita. This was a very bold opinion in the early 1970s. It wasn’t until 1983 that Gerry Adams became the first Sinn Féin mp for West Belfast, although he refused to take his seat at Westminster. On 30 January 1972 the event known as Bloody Sunday flared in the Bogside area of Derry, leading to the introduction of direct rule by the British government. Even so, few people in England and even in the Republic of Ireland were overly concerned, at least, not until the start of the ira bombing campaigns on the mainland.
Anita’s new book, published in 1974 and called Edwardians in Love, was a nostalgic inspection of a different world, a romantic age that may never have existed in the elegant and passionate manner Anita described. There is nothing rancid or devilish about her Edwardians. When Harold Harris read the manuscript, he thought that she was too enraptured by Edward vii and his circle, which is something of an understatement.
The dedication is: ‘For Leonie My Grandmother, died at Castle Leslie 1943 and Leonie My Daughter, born at Castle Leslie 1951’. Grandmother Leonie takes her place among the loved and loving in a chapter called ‘Arthur of Connaught and “Beloved Leo”’. Anita would have liked to have written more about this lengthy romance between Leonie and the Duke of Connaught, a relationship described by Anita as merely a loving friendship: her grandmother, ‘the amie adorée’. But Arthur’s daughter Lady Patricia Ramsay – ‘that gaga old Patricia Ramsay’ – refused permission to quote from the few letters which had escaped incarceration in the Royal Archives. One wonders, if the relationship was platonic, why the letters between the two are still kept under lock and key. The book was to have been called ‘Amorous Edwardians’ but Anita wrote to Harold:
My uncle Seymour aged 84 writes ‘The word amorous is odious, vulgar-genteel, snide and coy!’ Dirty old men paying nubile teenagers are ‘amorous’. Granny Leo wasn’t amorous … My grandmother said English girls were taught in the schoolroom never to lift their voices or allow excitement to creep in.
Anita now had a high-powered American agent, a New Yorker, Fanny Holtzmann, ‘a leading theatrical and copyright lawyer and friend of the Churchill family’. When Fanny procured a $75,000 advance from Doubleday, Anita nearly fainted and probably forgave her agent for ending her letters ‘With my fondest thoughts’. The hefty contract may not have been entirely straightforward since Harold Harris had to unravel problems regarding the us rights. He wrote to Burroughs Mitchell of Charles Scribner: ‘Please do not quote me as saying so, but Miss Leslie does get herself into the most fearful muddles.’ Nothing more was heard about Miss Holtzmann.
The advance from Hutchinson was £1000 for the hardback edition, plus £300 for the Arrow Books paperback, with a first printing of 30,000 copies. A three-part serialization was sold to The Sunday Telegraph while, in America, the book was chosen for the Alternate Selection of the us Literary Guild, and was the Homes and Gardens in association with the National Book League Christmas Book Choice. Perhaps the sweetest financial reward of all: Ralph Martin had to pay Anita £500 plus her costs for copyright infringement. When Anita expressed her gratitude to Harold Harris, he wrote back:
I should like to thank you particularly for your most generous letter about what little help I was able to give you in preparing Edwardians in Love for publication. Indeed, it always seems to me that the greatest service I rendered was in helping you to find the right order for the pages when you dropped the manuscript from the taxi.
When, in 1954, Anita visited her American relatives, the Ides, she had regretted that her mother had left the rectitude and simplicity of Vermont to marry Shane and become part of louche English society. But it was the rollicking, larky and sexually adventurous to whom Anita was drawn, at least in most of her books. Edwardians in Love was a success because scandalous goings-on among the upper classes had, and have, universal appeal, as can be seen in television series such as Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey. The tone of Edwardians in Love is one of fond indulgence towards the cast of adulterers, betrayers, high-class cocottes, racketeers and drunks who were the cream of Edwardian society, people like those disapproved of by St Augustine for living in ‘a hissing cauldron of lust’. Characters met previously in her other books make another appearance: the kind-hearted, affection-seeking, amoral Prince of Wales and his acolytes, members of the Marlborough House set, who called their country-house bedroom hopping ‘roguey-poguey’ and considered other men’s wives fair game. ‘At luncheon and at tea wives received whom they pleased – it was not husband-time.’
Few of these philanderers were brainy but Anita was suspicious of cleverness; there was something nine-to-five in city offices about it. She admired ‘these … rulers who remained rustic amidst their magnificence and their power, and who did not mix with the professional classes depicted in Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga.’ In Edwardians in Love, she is more truthful about her great-aunt Jennie Churchill, an honesty which may have been forced on her by Ralph Martin’s revelations about Randolph’s supposed homosexuality and his syphilis. But she didn’t come clean about ‘Star’ Falmouth. She wrote only: ‘although Jennie was a tremendous flirt and always had admirers in tow, there is no shred of evidence to lead one to suppose that she preferred “Star” Falmouth or any other man to her attractive young husband during the years in Ireland.’ Some of these badly-behaved aristocrats are sympathetic figures. Lady Aylesford makes the heart-melting remark ‘I cannot live uncared for’, while her husband, forced to leave the royal party in India to deal with domestic dramas, discovers that ‘There is nothing more melancholy, majestic and uncompromising than the hind view of an elephant.’
Macaulay considered ‘that the best histories are … those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed’. This was certainly Anita’s style. She heightened the glamour, swept the tawdriness under the costly carpets. And she recounted conversations that may not have existed. ‘Se non è vero, è ben trovato’, as the Italians say – ‘If it’s not true, it’s still a good story.’ Anita dismissed
certain books as being ‘Un peu pour les concierges’, a charge that could be levelled at Edwardians in Love. One reviewer wrote pithily: ‘It is not an edifying theme or spectacle that Miss Leslie presents, but there is always an eager audience for the low-down on the high-ups and she gives us full measure.’
When Anita gave press interviews, she presented herself as a lady dabbler: a farmer and pony breeder who just happened to scribble a bit – no more than three hours a day, usually on the floor with cushions. ‘I try to keep [writing] a pleasure’, she told The Scotsman in October 1972, ‘like embroidering or painting. If I had to write more intensively, like a man might to support his family, I wouldn’t be able to do that and I’d hate it.’ The truth was that Anita did support her family. Bill had only a small pension, Tarka hardly any income and Leonie was still a student. Anita’s writing paid for the upkeep of horses, central heating and carpets, a London flat and Glaslough farmland, but to admit it would be to sound like a professional writer, grim and pleasureless.
Sometimes, reluctantly, she had to stand under the literary spotlight. In December she wrote to Xandra that her publisher
got me to Harrogate for a literary lunch at which I had to spout for 15 minutes – this after a soporific 2 hour luncheon – 400 magnates and wives in feathered hats had all paid £3 each – One woman fainted and another was sick – otherwise a great success.
Far more enjoyable was the premiere of the film Young Winston, which Anita attended wearing the tiara that had once belonged to Mrs Fitzherbert. Since Bill was at sea, Leonie accepted the Alec Rose trophy for ‘the best individual sailing achievement’ on his behalf. Desmond could always be relied upon to cast a shadow. At the end of 1972 he advised his nephew to have a very serious talk with Anita about resigning his commission:
The name of the British Army in Ireland now stinks to high Heaven … you must seriously consider the family tradition of nationalism, anti unionism and putting Ireland first above everything. I am sure you will come to the right decision and be very glad that you have done so.
Desmond then described taking part in a bit of ‘subversive skulduggery against British helicopter crews.’ He would have been superhuman not to have relished the crushing of Anita’s dream of Tarka peaceably and profitably farming at Glaslough.
The problems at the estate were endless. Anita to Betsan: ‘Things getting for ever worse in the North and Desmond glooming and threatening to sell out if Jack does not support him! I have procured the farm and 300 acres for Tarka – price of bad Irish land has risen from £30 an acre to £500 in ten years!’
Anita had begun a new book: a biography of the round-the-world yachtsman Francis Chichester, who had died in 1972, for which she demanded an immediate contract ‘because’, she wrote to Harold Harris, ‘I’ve seen a beautiful 3 year old … and the price is £600 – more than I’ve ever paid for a horse ¾ bred – and her name is to be Daisy Warwick.’ Rather fitting to name a beautiful horse after a king’s high-stepping mistress. Doubleday, Anita’s American publisher, changed the title ‘Edwardians in Love’ to ‘The Marlborough House Set’. In a press release, they claimed: ‘Anita Leslie is a delightfully racy old girl who got many of her boudoir anecdotes from her great-aunts and uncles.’ In the spring, the delightfully racy old girl hurried back from her American promotional tour for Bill’s long-delayed home-coming. She collected Leonie in London and then they waited in Plymouth for five foggy days – Anita with a temperature of 102 – for Bill’s eventual emergence through the mist. ‘What a moment though when he did arrive.’
During his last perilous voyage, sea water had affected Bill’s circulation, making the skin on his hands peel off. He decided to sell his boat and Galway Blazer ll was displayed at the Boat Show in London and sold to Peter Crowther, the landlord of a pub in Devon. During the show an ira bomb demolished the £18,000 cruiser on the adjoining stand but missed Bill and his boat. ‘Really,’ Anita wrote to Betsan, ‘the last straw to be wrecked at Earl’s Court after rounding the horn!!’ Bill invested the money from the sale in buying cattle and started to write Capsize, about his 1968 round-the-world attempt. He and Anita were becoming well-known as a bookish couple and, in January 1974, appeared on RTÉ television, discussing their works in progress. Literary pairings were fashionable: the married novelists Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis appeared in advertisements for Sanderson wallpaper.
Anita Burgh, Rose Gardner’s former daughter-in-law, wrote to Anita (Leslie) that Rose had collapsed after some kind of overdose, either drink or drugs. The older Anita wrote back to the younger one regretfully:
I am so sorry that she turned against me when, thoughtlessly I now see – I told her to go back to Peter and Fleur and Bahamas – she resented any advice – it broke the wonderful link between us … I wonder if I had acted differently, might she have been different now.
Rose had been the one person to whom Anita could be ‘as awful as I feel like’. After they stopped writing to each other, Anita kept her miseries to herself, and her letters to other correspondents, although interesting, lack the rawness of those to her erstwhile closest friend. It appears to have been a one-sided correspondence, a circumstance that the American writer Jill Lepore describes as ‘a house without windows, a left shoe, a pair of spectacles smashed’. Of Rose’s infrequent letters to Anita, one that survived is written on both sides of flimsy paper and is indecipherable, suggesting that its writer’s heart wasn’t in it. So perhaps the loss of Rose’s letters isn’t significant.
Anita went back to the us in May 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation. She toured from coast to coast and gave sixteen lectures in Washington. In an undated letter to Tarka, she wrote: ‘They [Americans] seem to regard their president’s dishonesty as a major disaster when they ought to be thankful it has shown up the tendency and likelihood of such doings under their system!’ Back home at Oranmore, so that Bill could finish his book, she took on the job of reselling the cattle, a gloomy task since a wet winter followed by drought had depressed prices. She grumbled about Agnes, who was now living with the eminent architectural historian Maurice Craig, because Agnes, bewilderingly, called herself Mrs Craig in Dublin and Mrs Leslie at Glaslough: ‘No one knows or cares who she marries – they just wish she’d stop masquerading.’
What should have been the highlight of the year was the Independent Television production of The Lives and Loves of Jennie Churchill, seven one-hour episodes aired to coincide with the centenary of Winston’s birth. Anita’s Jennie was reprinted to take advantage of the television series and sold 25,000 copies. But at the same time, Collins and Independent Television Productions published a book called Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill: A Portrait with Letters, by Julian Mitchell, who scripted the series, and Peregrine Churchill. ‘Trying to steal my sales and pronounce itself as the story of her life,’ Anita wrote furiously to Jack. But it was her fault. She had sold the tv rights of Jennie to Thames Television for £450 without demanding an acknowledgment. She blamed her publisher: ‘Dear Harold, I think nothing of your mouse-sized advert for Jennie while Collins gives 4” x 2” to their hoax, written to accompany the TV series.’ She decided to sue the rival publisher for ‘passing off’ her book; meanwhile she advised friends and relations ‘to ask for my Jennie in bookshops and place it well in front of any other Jennie they may have been foolish enough to stock!’
She approved of most of the casting for the television series, especially Barbara Parkins as Leonie, but thought Lee Remick, in the title role, ‘a bit bouncy American rather than a smouldering panther’. In America Remick won a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Television Drama and, in the uk a bafta award, again for Best Actress. The period details in the series met Anita’s tests for accuracy, unlike some episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, where Anita spotted a dinner gong in a London house, when they were only used in the country, and debutantes shimmering with jewels instead of the only permissible adornment of a seed pearl necklace.
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In September 1974 Xandra Roche’s small son, Standish, died in an accident. Anita believed in a very specific sort of afterlife, where the dead lived in a parallel universe, ageing in the same way as they would on earth. Trying to console Xandra, she wrote:
If you keep Standish’s room and things you MUST NOT FREEZE him in your memory as a little boy – he is a person. Of course one thinks of one’s fled children in the form you were accustomed to SEE them in – but that is so PAINFUL – and they are changing all the time just as you are.
In October, a general election saw the return of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Anita wrote to Jack that her friend the Marquis of Duoro, heir to the Duke of Wellington, failed to get elected: ‘It’s no help to be a duke’s son these days – in fact it’s almost a handicap – people won’t use you because you are class-stamped.’ Then, bewilderingly: ‘I feel that Tarka being a non-intellectual is wringing the best out of what is left to enjoy.’ The Marquess’s political ambitions may have been stymied because of his class, although he later became an mep, but the seat he stood for in 1974 as the Conservative candidate was Islington North, which had returned a Labour mp in every election since 1937. Even had the Marquess not been an Old Etonian, married to a daughter of a Prussian prince, there was little chance of his being elected in that particular inner-city seat.
Telling Tales Page 22