He is 33 and very nice and suits her artistic temperament … of the great Finn clan from west coast … Has a music group which tours and sells records of Irish traditional not POP … His very artistic nature-loving temperament suits her and she is happy with him. What else matters!
Alec’s ‘music group’ was the internationally renowned De Dannan, which had been formed in 1973 in Hughes’ pub in Spiddal, near Galway and would go on to perform at both the Royal Albert Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York. Alec, a founder member, played the bouzouki. On 2 July at Oranmore, the first Leonie’s wedding dress and the Fitzherbert tiara got another airing. Anita was due an advance on her next book and David Roberts, Hutchinson’s managing director, told the accounts department: ‘Could you please rush the cheque off to Anita Leslie. It is to pay for her daughter’s wedding.’
A letter from Anita to Kathleen Abercorn on 3 September ends ominously: ‘I shall just concentrate on Tarka and getting him to Mollie’s meets.’ Tarka had completed the estate management course and, during the summer, had moved into Dawson’s Lodge at Glaslough, but not for very long, once he discovered its closeness to the village sewerage plant. Jane stayed in England, where she studied at art college in Bristol and Tarka started to convert the old stables at Glaslough into a flat, where he and Jane might live one day. But, for the present, Jane was in England and Anita began to plan a new career for her son: huntsman for Mollie Cusack Smith, with whom he had hunted since he was six years old. Anita to Kath, from Oranmore: ‘Tarka is practising his horn in the kitchen – although not musical he is catching Mollie’s notes – He fell in a ditch and lost the hounds first day – Mollie follows by car berating him – a little daunting for a new huntsman.’ Although Tarka loved hunting as much as Anita did, he managed to resist the temptation to move back to Oranmore.
Trying to be constantly in control was getting too much for Anita. She wrote to Jack: ‘I suddenly feel so old and tired – all I want is one warm light room in which to write my books, in silence. Let the young ones get excited over new doors and windows – it’s their turn now to plan and struggle.’ As if she would ever be able to stop planning and struggling.
24
No Chance of a Warm Light Room
Madame Tussaud Waxworker Extraordinary was the only book that Anita wrote just to make money and she probably wouldn’t have agreed to write it if Tarka hadn’t needed a new car. The book was sponsored by Madame Tussaud’s Limited and, under that organization’s agreement with Hutchinson, Anita was given a £4000 advance plus £500 for every thousand copies sold, as well as 25 per cent of the revenues from subsidiary rights. The downside of this deal was that the book was to be co-authored with Lady Pauline Chapman, archivist and researcher at Madame Tussaud’s, who had spent twelve years researching the life of Marie Tussaud, née Grosholz (1761–1850), referred to by Anita as ‘the odious subject’.
For a biographer who could always find redeeming features in her subjects, however lecherous (Leonard Jerome), financially idiotic (Moreton Frewen), or promiscuous (Jennie Churchill), Marie presented a challenge. Anita wrote furiously to Harold Harris:
I must ask if a TRUTHFUL biographical representation is desired. (If I were writing for Hutchinson I’d lash out!) or just a nice readable story for school children. Is one permitted to say anything not-all-that-endearing about Mme. T? For instance when the lovely Princesse de Lamballe whom she had known was cut to pieces in prison and her head brought to Marie to model do I tell the TRUTH – that her genitals were mounted on a pike and also paraded through the streets? And even less savoury episodes? You realise she actually did a death mask of the King’s severed head (he had been a kindly friend to her for 8 years). And there is not a word to explain her callousness – TERROR? Pressure from her uncle who sounds to me an absolute bastard? The cold objectivity of an artist trained only to ‘see’ the physical features of people? This is a GUIDE BOOK. I don’t leave out what offends. But tell me!
The sickening episode of the paraded genitals made it into print along with other horrors of the French Revolution. But it wasn’t Anita’s style to present anyone as completely black-hearted, so we have: ‘What could she [Marie] have felt as she tinted the hair and painted the wax to exact colourings of the face she had known so well?’ This soft approach was all Anita’s doing. Pauline Chapman rather admired ‘the odious subject’ for not letting sentiment stand in her way. Anguished letters from Oranmore were sent to Hutchinson. From Anita to David Roberts, 14 January 1978:
She [Lady Chapman] is certain that Marie was NOT scared of handling the guillotined heads of people she knew well!! I feel that any human being must have been cut to the quick – quite different to handling bits of body of strangers! … Lady Chapman thinks of her [Marie] as ‘the first career woman’ but aren’t we all rather tired of the avalanche of career women.
And to Harold Harris:
I can’t do more with it. As I rewrite – Antoinette and the king become more and more interesting and tragic and Marie Grosholtz a more dismal little bore obsessed with waxworks! … Being a successful determined businesswoman does not make Marie Tussaud interesting!!
Anita objected to Pauline Chapman’s preferred title, ‘Madame Tussaud – History Maker’. Waxworker Extraordinary was substituted but in nearly every other way Lady Chapman’s view prevailed: that Marie was an out-and-out professional, concerned only in doing a great job of work, even when her studio was awash with aristocratic blood. The jacket flap sets the tone: ‘Shrewd and independent, she [Marie] ranks among the first great career women of modern times, for she built up her business unaided in a man’s world.’ The book admiringly mentions that Marie seems to have taken no holidays and that ‘She deserved her fortune. She had worked every yard of the way.’ She was also everything that Anita most despised – a solemn, ambitious workhorse, unlike the feckless aristocrats who lived for pleasure and whom Anita loved for their gaiety, extravagance and wit. But hard-working career women, shouldering their way into a man’s world, were currently fascinating: in 1975 Margaret Thatcher had become the first woman to be elected as leader of the opposition and was soon dubbed ‘The Iron Lady’ by the Russians. The book was an unhappy collaboration, which was perhaps why the authors’ correction bill came to £222. One error survived: Marie settled in Baker Street, ‘surely next door to Sherlock Holmes’.
The name of Madame Tussaud was internationally famous, so the book was reviewed everywhere, not always kindly, from The Times Literary Supplement to Tit-Bits. Some reviewers retold the Tussaud story, hardly mentioning the book, while others hurled brickbats. In British Book News, 1 January 1979, Carole Angier wrote: ‘ … alas, the story is in the “must have been” genre of biography … it is marred by careless writing and psychological speculation’. This upset Lady Chapman but Geoffrey Chester of Hutchinson reassured her: ‘Carole Angier’s reservations are at once understandable and “unfair”. Sophisticated reviewers may well find the speculations and asides irritating, but they bring the heroine alive for the general reader, which is precisely what was intended.’ Other reviewers were as dismissive as Carole Angier. Brian Cleeve in the Irish Sunday Press, 1 November 1978: ‘They tell us that she “shuddered” or that she was “fairly shaken” and so on. But how do they know?’ In Books & Bookmen, November 1978, Maurice Richardson predicted snootily, ‘It ought to sell like a shilling barrel of oysters.’ Although the book didn’t find an American publisher, when Anita accepted an invitation in 1980 to speak to a women’s club in Chicago, that ‘dismal little bore’ Marie Tussaud was what her audience most wanted to hear about.
The lawsuit against Thames Television was settled in Anita’s favour on 11 January 1978. She was awarded £1100 but, over the five-year dispute, had accrued solicitors’ fees of £1800. ‘So I won nothing – lost a little – but moral victory!’ Anita wrote to Jack and she gave Seymour £100 out of her non-existent winnings. This wasn’t the whole story. I am indebted to Julian Mitchell, who wrote the book linked to th
e television series and found himself involved with a litigious Anita. He allowed me to see his diary entries relating to the lawsuit and in 2013 told me, ‘I can still feel very angry at the trouble she [Anita] caused me.’ While Julian was writing his book, Anita promised to let him see some family letters if she could use a photograph of Lee Remick on the cover of the newly reissued paperback of her own Jennie – an impossible request to grant and one that would have caused confusion between the two titles, which was the very situation that Anita claimed she was trying to avoid. Before writs started to fly, Anita was friendly enough. Julian’s diary entry for 24 May 1974: ‘Tues: dinner at Anita’s … usual raw meat to eat. Anita is so thin, I can’t see how she manages to live at all, she looks so brittle.’ But by the end of the year, they were no longer on speaking terms, since Anita had resorted to the law, seeking compensation for the ‘passing-off’ of the tie-in book. A furious diary entry from Julian on 4 January 1975:
I had to go through all the letters again – Anita’s claiming she made it a condition of letting us use the letters that the book was to be called A Portrait with Letters, which is simply untrue … I have two letters and a postcard from her commenting on the book, and two letters from old Seymour, neither mentioning the title – it’s all so mean and stupid, when her book has benefited hugely from the series.
And on 20 October: ‘Apparently her claim is based entirely on letters from titled people in castles who got our book instead of hers. Why didn’t they buy it before, I want to know.’ Anita reduced her demands to complaining only about the rival book’s jacket and even apologized to Julian, who remained unmollified.
Anita claimed to want nothing more than a warm, light, quiet room in which to write but, since she gave keys to the London flat to several friends and relations and let everyone know when she was in town, Cleveland Square was never going to provide comfortable solitude. In June she wrote to her stepmother, Iris, urging her to use the flat whenever she liked: ‘I feel the important thing about the flat is availability.’ Desmond was about to stay there for one night and so was Leonie, on her way back from Germany where De Danann was touring. Agnes was a regular visitor. Her career was now thriving and she was part of a group called The Radiators, described in The New Yorker, when it broke up after thirty-three years, as ‘one of the world’s greatest bar bands’.
From Oranmore, Anita wrote often to Roy Miles. In 1978 she described the Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston, painted in 1954, commissioned by both Houses of Parliament to mark Winston’s eightieth birthday and subsequently destroyed by Clemmie because of its unflattering candour: ‘If only Clemmie had left it hidden for 50 years for some other generation to judge – but she cared only for Winston and his moods – that was why she was such a wonderful wife.’ Anita and Bill had seen the portrait before its destruction and thought it brilliant: ‘Sutherland … paints the actual psyche – and when a man is old and has lived deeply it isn’t the wrinkles and jowliness you see – it is his mind.’
She was cross that Leonie, who was teaching at art college in Galway – ‘one day a week only and it is quite enough for her’ – had been asked to become a full-time etching ‘professor’, something that sounded too much like a career woman for Anita’s tastes: ‘There is no reason why she should not work away with her press for pleasure and because she is creative.’ In her letters to Roy, Anita sounds lonely. Oranmore was always kept ready for Tarka to hunt there but, when her son could get away from farming at Glaslough, he went to England to be with his wife. Leonie was often on tour with Alec and Bill went skiing at Kitzbuhel as often as he could. ‘So,’ Anita wrote, ‘all I have to arrange is meals and walks for the dogs.’ She was dismissive of the television series on Lily Langtry: ‘The lack of formality in public renders flat the informality in private.’
In spite of her dislike of professional women, Anita admired Margaret Thatcher, although she did not think that she would ever become prime minister, since Penelope Aitken, mother of the Conservative mp Jonathan, had told her that Mrs Thatcher’s family thought her health too delicate to stand the pressures of the job. On 28 March 1979 Mrs Thatcher brought a vote of no confidence in James Callaghan’s Labour government before the House of Commons. The Government was defeated by one vote – 311 votes to 310 – in what the bbc called, ‘one of the most dramatic nights in Westminster history.’ Anita was delighted that it was Northern Ireland’s sdlp (Social Democratic and Labour Party) mp, Gerry Fitt, whose abstention brought down the unpopular government, which was held to blame for a series of strikes and petrol shortages known as ‘The Winter of Discontent’. Anita to Jack: ‘It’s just like the old days when Irish Nationalists controlled the balance.’ Two days later, Airey Neave, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, was killed when a car bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army exploded under his Vauxhall Cavalier as he was leaving the House of Commons car park. More violence was expected during the election on 3 May but the day passed peacefully enough. The Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority, making Margaret Thatcher the first British female head of government. Far from being in delicate health, she bloomed robustly and claimed to need only four hours sleep a night.
Anita read the recently published Irish Country Houses by Mark Bence-Jones, an Anglo-Irishman after her own heart of whom, on his death in 2010, an obituarist wrote: ‘His admiration for the upper classes and grand houses made him seem a man born in the wrong century.’ Of the book, Anita wrote to Jack:
WHAT a plethora of beautiful country houses covered this land but all within demesne walls with the hungry Irish outside – A cruel history unforgotten and instead of pride in the wondrous ruins hatred remains and they all think their hideous bungalows ‘lovely’.
At one impressive Irish country estate, Glaslough, the equestrian centre, in spite of its situation on the border, was becoming increasingly popular with European visitors, who enjoyed long cross-country rides, pike fishing on the lake and the superb scenery as well as the weekly drinks parties and barbecues hosted by Desmond and Helen. Guests didn’t seem to mind that the house itself was grubby and dilapidated but Jack, who now spent much of the year at Castle Leslie, did. He complained to Iris that ‘the house in general has another year’s dirt on top of last year’s and the windows are still unwashed’, but the estate was engaging enough to win, in 1979, a tourism award ‘For the best individual effort’.
There were ongoing rows with Tarka over access rights, which sometimes stymied Desmond’s plans to sell some of his holdings to developers. Under Irish law, Desmond was legally married to Agnes and Helen had no right of inheritance, which, Desmond explained to Tarka, was the reason he had to sell his assets. Anita to Jack: ‘Tarka got out his crying handerchief.’ She had poured money into Glaslough on her son’s behalf, selling all of her aunt Anne’s jewellery, except for one emerald ring, but Desmond always needed more. Anita to Jack:
If only I had not made over the estate to Desmond 19 years ago the company would own 1000 acres still – worth £2000 an acre – and we would all be millionaires! But the pressure of family feeling that Desmond and his sons ought to own the family home and Bill’s exhausted disgust at trying to deal with Desmond made me take an unwise decision. I felt it in my bones it would be the end of the place and it very nearly has been. BUT I COULD NOT PROVE IT in advance.
Towards the end of 1979 Anita wanted a month by herself in London so that she could finish the first volume of her autobiography, but there were visits from Agnes, now billed as ‘The German cabaret legend’ and her pianist, who regarded Anita’s flat as a convenient rehearsal room, and from Desmond, who, since Anita had given him a key, would arrive without warning. Anita to Iris: ‘I’m suffering from fatigue.’ She had been booked to give a lecture on Clare Sheridan to an American group staying at Renvyle in Connemara, but she lost her voice due to exhaustion. An icy winter had left Oranmore without fruit or vegetables and a substitute diet of tea, bread and marmalade was not nutritious. Anita was also helping to care
for Leonie’s first baby, Jessica, who, because of bungled birth procedures was brain-damaged. Margaret Glynn, who had looked after Anita’s own children, now looked after this special child who brought Anita nothing but joy, perhaps the greatest she had ever known.
Although she was very tired, at the end of September, Anita, with Bill and Tarka, walked the nine miles from Oranmore to Ballybrit racecourse outside Galway to see Pope John Paul II during his three-day visit to Ireland. Bishop Eamon Casey of Galway, who had organized the visit, and the popular singing priest Father Michael Cleary entertained the crowd of 280,000 until the Pope’s helicopter zoomed out of the grey sky. Anita, sitting on a wall, waved her yellow and white scarf in tribute to the white and gold papal flag, then made the long walk home past deserted farms and cottages, whose owners were all at Ballybrit. Some years later, both Bishop Casey and Father Cleary were found to have fathered children with vulnerable women and Bishop Casey admitted to stealing money from the diocese to support his illicit family.
Tarka and Jane decided to move into the old stables at Glaslough for part of the year, although, as Anita told Iris, ‘the gloom of farming in that rain is I can see getting Tarka’s spirits down’. The London flat was proving to be a financial headache. Tarka was the nominal owner but it was Anita who paid the hefty bills for heating and maintenance and negotiated with the other leaseholders for a share of the freehold. She had given keys to so many people, most of whom didn’t keep account of their phone bills, that she had to put locks on the telephone receivers. She also came to an arrangement with one of her neighbours, Joseph Corvo, a leading practitioner of a foot massage technique, Zone Therapy, and nicknamed ‘Joe the Toe’ by Bill, whereby, on Thursday mornings, he treated twenty patients in Anita’s flat, in return for giving free treatments to Anita, her family and friends. Anita might as well have tried to write her books in Piccadilly Circus. At Oranmore she came down with a bout of bronchial asthma, her first attack in years.
Telling Tales Page 24