The non-intellectual Tarka, now based in London, was certainly wringing the best out of life. He was now a captain of the Queen’s Life Guard, based at Hyde Park Barracks and in charge of training thirty-two black horses to take part in parades. On her son’s first day of duty, Anita wrote to him: ‘It’s really so romantic and UNmodern to trot past your mother’s balcony so she can peep over in a nightdress and see you! such a gorgeous uniform you never saw … and when I think of that little boy in Oranmore village!’ Later, when Anita was back in Oranmore, Tarka rang her to say that he had ridden in the Queen’s procession at the Opening of Parliament ‘and done all his sword salutes right’. In a rare diary entry, she wrote: ‘I miss the clatter of his troop in their early morning exercise around Cleveland Square.’
The latest project at Glaslough, following on the failed plans for a hotel and golf course, was for Helen to set up an equestrian centre and a cross-country course of forty kilometres (twenty-five miles) of different rides containing 200 varied fences. Anita predicted another failure. To Tarka: ‘I gave Peter Desmond’s last letter which he said was too crazy for comment – All about these ‘rides’ and so airy-fairy.’ But, although violence in the North was worsening and Glaslough, with a wall which formed part of the border, was not ideally placed to attract visitors, the equestrian centre was a success. Desmond, chronically short of money, sold the centre in 1984 but his daughter Sammy managed to buy it back in 2004.
By the end of 1974 Anita had received a £2500 advance from Hutchinson for a biography of her cousin Clare Sheridan and had begun her lawsuit against Thames Television. Her children were thriving; Tarka in the army and Leonie, now twenty-three, about to complete her three-year graphic art design course and emerge with a ba degree. In her diary, Anita wrote: ‘Nothing in my own life seems to matter except the production of these two so different – immensely dear and interesting children.’
23
Deaths and Entrances
At the beginning of 1975 Anita’s lawyers, Rubinstein, Nash & Co, wrote to emi’s legal department, seeking compensation for the ‘passing off’ of the Thames tv tie-in book, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, an action that dragged on for another two years. Meanwhile, both Bill and Anita had new books to publicize, Adventures in Depth (Bill) and Francis Chichester (Anita), and appeared together on The Late Late Show, one of Ireland’s most popular television programmes.
In April Peter Wilson died of lung cancer at Oranmore. Anita to Belsan: ‘Only one day in bed and one hour of desperate illness. 40 years of pipe smoking did it.’ Since Peter had wanted to be cremated, which was almost impossible in the Republic of Ireland, his body was flown to Belfast in a private plane. A week later there was a memorial service at the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas in Galway, attended by two hundred countrymen and women, many of whom had never before seen the inside of a Protestant church. Tarka read the lesson. Soon afterwards Prim, Peter’s widow, sold Rocklands at a very profitable £35,000 and left Ireland. Anita was preparing herself for another death. To Betsan: ‘Rose is dying slowly in Paris … what a waste of beauty and gifts.’ Rose lingered on until 1981, by which time Anita thought she had been dead for years.
Francis Chichester was published in the summer. The blurb read:
Anita Leslie is the perfect choice as a biographer of Sir Francis Chichester. She knew him, is a close friend of his widow, and has first-hand acquaintance with the sailing background, as she is married to Commander Bill King, the well-known solo sailor.
Sir Francis was a national hero, being the first person to have sailed around the world single-handed, from west to east; a feat achieved in late middle age and when he was in poor health. Anita’s writing was never at its best when she strayed too far from the Glaslough attics with their tiaras and parasols, and the Leslie family history revealed in letters from lovers and royal patrons. Her two favourite words, ‘amusing’ and ‘delicious’, could not be applied to Sir Francis, whose life, until his sea voyages made him heroic, had been grim. Jonathan Raban in an essay on Sir Francis (in Driving Home: An American Journey, Pantheon 2011) considered that he was bonkers, not a word that Anita would have used. It was while she was writing the book that Bill lost contact while at sea, which made describing the perils of solo sailing painful.
Graham Lord reviewed the book unfavourably in the Sunday Express: ‘Her [Anita’s] stodgy style – interrupted by curiously girlish exclamations – suggests that she was as much at sea in writing about her subject as was Sir Francis in his succession of Gypsy Moth boats.’ In the Guardian, William Golding praised Sir Francis, while scarcely mentioning the book, except to ask whether, since he was a superb self-publicist, ‘there is any point in the publication of a biography’. But there was: soon after publication, Francis Chichester reached number two in the uk bestseller list. The English like stories about plucky underdogs who succeed against the odds. Anita gave a winsome interview to The Liverpool Post, which described her as slim and elegant with pale, ice-blue eyes and, approvingly, as ‘not being at all adventurous herself’; the newspaper’s research had obviously not included reading Train to Nowhere, with its tales of front-line war service.
In October Anita was back on the American lecture circuit. Wherever she went on the ten-week tour, interviewers quizzed her on Ralph Martin’s speculations: ‘Winston’s conception, John’s father and when Lord R caught syphilis.’ She wrote to Clodagh Roden: ‘In Texas the Sunday paper had just had a quiz “Were both Lady Randolph Churchill’s children illegitimate” (on the basis I suppose of were they legally so if Martin’s insinuations were correct).’ When interviewed, Anita offered her usual refutations: the intense chaperonage of unmarried girls, the unlikelihood of Jennie taking as a lover the much older John Strange Jocelyn and her happy marriage.
The violence in the North had spread to the Republic of Ireland. On 12 February 1976, Frank Stagg, a member of the ira, after enduring a sixty-two-day hunger strike, died in Wakefield prison in West Yorkshire and was repatriated to his native Mayo for burial. The Irish government directed the flight carrying Stagg’s remains to Shannon, then he was buried in his family plot at Ballina. To stop the ira disinterring the body and reburying it in a republican plot, the grave was covered with concrete. Anita to Jack:
The soldiers had a rough time on Sunday controlling mob of 7000 at Frank Stagg’s funeral – 6 gardai in hospital and … if they had not dispersed the Londonderry Derry [sic] IRA who are the real gangsters – with gas and rubber bullets early on they might have had to open fire – such a nightmare and infinitely worse each year – The whole generation which was 7 to 14 when the troubles started now 14 – 21 – armed hooligans.
The Gardaí kept watch on the concreted grave for six months. It became a focal point for violence. When protesters mobbed the Land Rover containing the guards’ lunchtime sandwiches and threw the food on the ground, shouting ‘Free State bastards’, they were severely treated. Anita to Jack: ‘You can imagine how furious soldiers [sic] are when deprived of their grub!! … The country seems delighted with the strong stand made by the Govt. The ira is illegal and they just won’t allow political – demonstration – funerals.’ In November republicans tunnelled under the concrete and removed and reburied the body. The violence was getting even closer to home. Mollie Cusack Smith, hunting at Westport, County Mayo, ‘cancelled the meet so as not to get involved’.
On the hottest day of that very hot summer, 3 July, Tarka married Jane Forbes, the daughter of a baronet. The bride’s wedding dress had belonged to Tarka’s great-grandmother, Leonie; her veil was Marjorie’s and her tiara the one which had been Mrs Fitzherbert’s. Jack, brought to the church in Roy Miles’ air-conditioned Rolls Royce, remarked that ‘it was a lovely cool day for a wedding’. Roy himself was rather put out. Anita had asked him not to wear a morning coat since Bill didn’t own one and Roy, always superbly dressed, regretted not being properly attired. The honeymoon was spent in Italy, after which Tarka retired from his regiment and began an estate
management course at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester.
On the last day of that drought-ridden July, Comtesse Mary Margaret Motley de Reneville, formerly Margaret Sheridan, died in Biarritz. She had become horribly racist, telling Seymour the year before she died that London had become a ‘nigger ridden paradise’ and that she never wished to set foot there again. Margaret had led an unhappy life, unable to marry the man she loved because her husband wouldn’t give her a divorce, and was inclined to drink too much. Anita was now writing a biography of Margaret’s mother, Clare, while, at the same time, buying a larger flat at number 20 Cleveland Square, which was put in Tarka’s name. A visit to Glaslough in August was an escape from the London heat. To Xandra: ‘Strange to arrive in the silence and peace here for dinner. Ireland is green – there’s never been more grass for cattle – and much cooler.’ She was astounded by the security measures for the Belfast flight,
everything taken off one and put into plastic bags – so it was 1 hour getting on – 55 min flight – and 1 hour getting off – queueing for plastic bags etc. Desmond was waiting for me behind barricades and soldiers with tommy guns covered one’s descent from plane – and went in with the cleaner-gang after! Road blocks – barbed wire entanglements etc must make it the most ‘secure’ port in Europe.
Tarka was now a married man but Anita went on micromanaging his life and that of his new wife. She suggested that Jane wear a tie-belt on her black pyjamas and questioned Tarka about his finances: ‘On Monday I checked all our accounts and you had an overdraft of £465 … how come you did not know? Don’t they send you a monthly account?’ She instructed him on buying carpets and, when he told her that he was going to the Royal Ballet, reminded him: ‘Don’t forget how I opened your eyes to its delights as a little boy, taking you to see Margot Fonteyn.’
Towards the end of the year Anita was invited by the Countess of Rosse, Lord Snowden’s mother, to lunch at her London house in Stafford Terrace, Kensington. The other guests were the Queen Mother and the writer Harold Acton. Anita described the occasion to Xandra:
Q.M in huge mauve picture hat ostrich-plume bedecked (She doesn’t mind others being drab – happily as all my clothes dumped in plastic bags and unprocurable). Conversation about Italian sculpture and ‘beautiful things’ rather than mugging and transvestites! And charming remark from Her Majesty about ‘my splendid son-in-law Tony who fights so hard to preserve lovely old buildings’. I wondered for an instant who ‘the splendid s-in-law’ was!!
It was charming of Her Majesty to praise her hostess’s son while he was in the process of getting divorced from her own daughter. Earlier in the year, Anita had marked the end of the Snowden marriage in her diary: ‘Queen and Qu Mum upset and Margaret, according to her mother-in-law, “a pathetic child clamouring for love”, having terrible nerve fits and worrying her sister to death.’
Cousin Clare: The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan, dedicated ‘To Margaret in memory of the golden years’, was published in November. Reviewing it in The Financial Times, Francis King wrote: ‘It is true that in real life people often talk as though they were characters in second-rate fiction; but when so many conversations are given verbatim one would like to know their derivation.’ Anita was never averse to inventing scenes and conversations but in the case of Cousin Clare, she may have been relying on her excellent memory to record what her outlandish cousin had told her over all the years of their close friendship: details of her affair with Charlie Chaplin and a quarrelsome tête-à-tête with an awestruck Mussolini. As newspaper columnists say, ‘You couldn’t make it up.’ As usual, Anita saw her biographical subject through rose-tinted spectacles. Just as Jennie Churchill, a magnificent poule de luxe, was presented as a winsome ingenue and the calculating and crafty Maria Fitzherbert as stoically pious, the steely, ambitious sculptor Clare Sheridan was given a ditzy, romantic makeover. Anita’s Wilfred Sheridan, tragically killed in the Great War, is adored by his wife, whereas Clare’s own view of her short marriage, as expressed in her published diary, Mayfair to Moscow (1921), is more acerbic: ‘When it dawned on me that dead clay could be brought to life – a husband who was rather clairvoyant, and doubtless had visions of a neglected home, said “no” – and the flame was suppressed into a rather sullen domesticity.’ Anita doesn’t quote Clare’s stated beliefs that ‘Work alone brings happiness and the desire to achieve or to attain is the only satisfaction,’ and that ‘There are many disappointments in life but the greatest of all are one’s children.’
In her autobiography, Morning Glory, Clare’s daughter Margaret Sheridan has Clare admit that ‘she was descended on the one hand from Red Indians, on the other from the Obrenovitches through King Milan of Serbia’. Anita ignored this admission of Clare’s paternity; the exiled Balkan king is merely Clara Frewen’s ‘beau, or in the parlance of the time a cavalier attendant’, a sender of daily gardenias and sigher of sighs. Clara accepted him and his lavish gifts because, Anita wrote, ‘She had a touch of her mother’s snobbism and liked having a Majesty in tow.’ Cousin Clare and Bill’s Adventure in Depth were launched as part of Irish Book Week at the new Galway City Museum, which had once been Clare’s house and studio. ‘People who had known her came in tears of emotion,’ Anita wrote to Xandra. The launch, hosted by O’Gormans bookshop, helped the sales of both books. Desmond and Helen visited Oranmore around this time and Anita told Jack, rather triumphantly, that she’d put them in two small, separate rooms.
By the time Anita was able to move into the new London flat in January 1976, she had lost track of several of her possessions, which Tarka was sent out to retrieve:
Sheila [Chichester] urgently wants you to take away as soon as possible the electric cooker or whatever you left in the cupboard downstairs. Can you remember what you left? … If you see Patsy [Jellicoe] rescue my red dressing gown and the cherub heads – I think that’s all I left with her if you took the pictures and the RED WINE and 2 bottles of champagne!
Perhaps because of all this shifting of household goods, Tarka’s back ached. His mother advised: ‘So send Mrs A [a very alternative practitioner] a few hairs plucked from your head and a spot of your blood on blotting paper (Jane must have a needle!!?)’ At Oranmore, windows blew out, boilers broke down: ‘I don’t think we dare let Gerry paint the kitchen while water is pouring through walls from the outside.’ At Glaslough, bars were stolen off the tractor. Tarka’s attempts to help weren’t appreciated: ‘You hung the garden gate so I could neither get in or out.’
Disagreements with Desmond now centred on rights of way and farm gates. Anita drafted a letter to her brother, supposedly written by Tarka: ‘And I would not be prepared to in any way improve the road itself or create foundations.’ It didn’t seem a very opportune time for Tarka and Jane to move to the violent province but Anita, who could never bear too much reality, urged them to take over the servants’ wing at Castle Leslie: ‘It could be a most amusing habitation – compact and heatable.’ She had become the mother-in-law from hell, writing to Jane: ‘I want you to enjoy doing up the [London] flat in your own way and only make these suggestions for economy,’ before going on to dictate every aspect of the redecoration, down to the colour of the curtains.
That winter, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit gave their last party at Russborough House, County Wicklow before gifting the house and their six-million-pound art collection to the State. The Beits had bought the Palladian house, designed by Richard Cassels and described by the historian Mark Bence Jones as the most beautiful house in Ireland, in 1952. In 1974 the ira had raided the house, stolen nineteen valuable paintings and viciously assaulted the Beits, leaving them tied up and gagged. Even after the shaken owners left Russborough, it continued to be burgled, both in 1986 and 2001. After attending the Beits’ last party with Bill, Anita wrote to Xandra:
One realises we are living through a 20 year so-far-bloodless revolution the whole pattern of life changing every year – and what matters amidst the lashing waves is to keep one’s he
alth, one’s balance and one’s own inner calm, – and that is all that has ever mattered even in times of steady security (actually there never has been such a thing – the long Victorian security ended in 2 destructive wars, because all the statesmen talked so elegantly at dinner parties they LOST THEIR eye for DANGER).
Anita’s American book tour had become an annual and profitable fixture, at five hundred dollars a lecture plus travel costs. When she returned from the 1977 tour in May, she wrote Seymour a gossipy, eight-page letter, in which she described having tea with the 95-year-old Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Theodore, ‘in the same dark Washington mansion hung with Teddy’s lion skins that I first visited aged 3!’ Mrs Longworth thought the recently elected President Jimmy Carter silly. Anita agreed; she loathed Mr Carter’s ‘false cosiness … But a silly President of the usa is quite terrifying.’ Another interesting encounter: ‘Janet Auchincloss, mother of Jackie Kennedy, came to dinner – such a beautiful woman and sweet but so dreamy one wondered if she was gaga with tranquillisers!’ It’s possible that Mrs Auchincloss was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s disease that contributed to her death in 1989. Dinner at the house of a rich bibliophile, Mrs Hyde, ‘started as always in usa with dreadful icy strong drinks … (I’ve learnt to totally abstain)’. After dinner, ‘Mrs Hyde, fluttering in chiffon, proudly announced only sanka would be served no coffee – .’ Without the boost of caffeine many of the guests dozed off during a two-hour performance of extracts from Mrs Thrale’s journal but Anita ‘adored every moment … how marvellously Americans get up things – how enthusiastically they collect and how generously they donate to colleges and suchlike’. With money from the lecture tour, Anita paid Seymour £800 for a clock that had been in the family for a long time, which she gave to Tarka.
Anita to Xandra, 12 May 1977: ‘Now our news is all Leonie!’ Leonie had, for a long time, been suffering from a chronic pain in her wrist, which doctors in London had pronounced incurable. But that Easter, the Oranmore doctor, Joe Kelly, had x-rayed the wrist from a different angle and discovered what was wrong. After a course of acupuncture and massage, a healthy, rested Leonie was able to take charge of her life again. She got a new haircut – ‘So becoming and the first time for years!’, Anita told Xandra – and decided to marry Alec Finn:
Telling Tales Page 23