Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  You’re Mussolini,

  You’re Mrs. Sweeny,

  You’re Camembert.

  Perhaps the bracketing with Mussolini was unfortunate. By 1963 she was in appalling trouble, castigated by Lord Wheatley, the judge in the divorce case, as a promiscuous woman whose attitude to marriage was ‘wholly immoral’. He dwelt with particular disgust on a set of photographs showing sexual acts in progress between the duchess and an unknown man or men.

  Two of the photographs are proved to be photographs of the defender taken during the marriage and they not only establish that the defender was carrying on an adulterous association with those other men or man but revealed that the defender was a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in what I can only describe as disgusting sexual activities to gratify a basic sexual appetite.

  While the woman in the photographs could be seen to be the duchess the naming of the man was very much more difficult since the pictures showed the body of a nude male but not his head. The identity of the so-called Headless Man was a subject of obsessive speculation, which I well remember since I was working in the Guardian office at the time. He has turned out to be not the portly Tory politician Duncan Sandys – for some time the front-runner – but the swashbuckling film star Douglas Fairbanks Junior. The reviling of the duchess in such salacious detail by a judge intent on showing us a monster of depravity could not but affect the old harmless-if-silly image of the debutante as it destroyed respect for duchesses in general. In her memoirs Forget Not, the Duchess of Argyll tells a striking story of how, on the day after the court case went against her, she returned home to her house in Upper Grosvenor Street:

  I went straight upstairs to my bedroom, where my loyal and devoted maid, Isabel Bennett – then almost eighty – was waiting. She had looked after me for many years, and I saw at once from her face that she had read the judge’s words. ‘Oh, Your Grace,’ she began falteringly, but got no further.

  By the early 1960s the scales were falling from loyal and devoted servants’ eyes.

  We were a jeering generation. The sixties satire boom had its origins in Oxford. It began in a small and esoteric way with Parson’s Pleasure, a High Tory weekly founded by Adrian Berry, whose father the Hon. Michael Berry, later Lord Hartwell, was proprietor and editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph. Parson’s Pleasure first appeared in autumn 1958, the term in which I arrived at Lady Margaret Hall, a college whose name itself seemed infinitely risible, like that of another idiotic, braying debutante, in that world of obscure and secret jokes. I knew these infant satirists who far from being the bearded left-wing incendiarists now enshrined in legend were amiable young men in British warms and cavalry twill trousers, all of whom had been at public school. Parson’s Pleasure was inherited from the Old Etonian Berry by the Old Salopians Richard Ingrams and Paul Foot, nephew of Michael and son of Sir Hugh Foot, recently appointed Governor of Cyprus. Another central figure in the little core of contributors and editors who gathered in the Town and Gown, an insalubrious cafe off the High Street, was Andrew Osmond, an immensely handsome and sweet-natured Old Harrovian and ex-Gurkha officer, yearned over by the girls at LMH. Parson’s Pleasure was absorbed into another short-lived satiric Oxford magazine Mesopotamia, familiarly known as ‘Messpot’. One early issue had a hessian cover attached to which was the packet of mustard and cress seeds you could grow on it. Out of these rather puerile beginnings emerged Private Eye, the satiric magazine which flourished in London in the early 1960s and, with its relentlessly joshing tone and its great resources of insider information, gradually became seriously destructive of establishment self-confidence.

  A second cell of satirists was simultaneously emerging in Cambridge in the sixties, centred on the Cambridge Footlights. Peter Cook was Footlights President in 1960, Nick Luard Treasurer, David Frost the Registrar. When Cambridge Footlights took the revue Beyond the Fringe to the Edinburgh Festival in the autumn of that year the four performers were Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. The revue was a send-up of England and the English, an attack on the outdated attitudes and mores of a fuddy-duddy nation that was perhaps more lethal than even the performers knew. In May 1961 Cook and Luard founded the satirical Soho nightclub, the Establishment, leasing an old stripclub in Green Street with the aim of continuing the political-anarchic spirit of Beyond the Fringe after the revue’s unexpectedly popular run in the West End. Many of the Oxford–Cambridge satirists were involved as the writers and performers of the Saturday night television satire programme That Was the Week that Was. An important element in the success of sixties satire was the closeness of the satirists to their establishment targets: the old buffers, the smooth talkers, the claptrap politicians, the Tory government, the monarchy, the Church of England. Bishops, as I remember, were given an especially rough ride. The minority of satirists who had not been to public schools were from the aspirational grammar schools. The girlfriends and wives of the satirists were from the edges of the deb world if not former debs themselves. Peter Cook was to marry Judy Huxtable, who came out in 1960 with my sister. David Frost married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s second daughter, becoming Sir David and a genial upper-class party-giving parody of the people he had ridiculed as a young man.

  The satire boom had an almost tragic impact on its victims, needling these derided people into ever more self-destructive outbursts of buffoonishness. It was a culture in which almost no one survived to be taken seriously any more. I addressed this whole dilemma in a Guardian column. I called it ‘In Fear of the Fringe’ and singled out for blame the young and fashionable humourists – Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn – for creating such a climate of general ridicule and scorn:

  Who can one own as one’s friends when everyone around appears to be a boutique keeper or an artist in a cottage or a modern clergyman or a Foreign Office Wykehamist or Old Etonian banker or a literary agent or something humorous? And who is one to marry? The satirists between them have made the choice of partner more or less impossible. With everybody funny, the sacred vows of marriage seem – to say the least – a little inappropriate.

  A typically 1960s cri de coeur.

  On That Was the Week that Was Fenella Fielding impersonated Jennifer. In what had become a national frenzy of debunking, the Season could no longer be taken absolutely straight even by the magazines that recorded and promoted it. In 1959 the Tatler ran a feature by Andrew Sinclair, billed as the irreverent young author of ‘a best-seller that mocks the Season’. Sinclair’s cult novel The Breaking of Bumbo was about to be staged by Wolf Mankowitz as a West End musical. His disdainful article about what he claimed to be the now redundant Season compared it to ‘the skeleton of a dinosaur in the desert’. Queen, Tatler’s chief rival as a magazine which traditionally drew its circulation from the landed and moneyed classes, made similar attempts to have it all ways, teasing its readership without alienating it. The proprietor of Queen in the sixties was Jocelyn Stevens, a young energetic hot tempered and some ways brilliantly iconoclastic man, nephew of Edward Hulton, famous publisher of Picture Post. He bought Queen as a 25th birthday present for himself and appointed a Cambridge friend, Mark Boxer, as art editor. Boxer was a formidably observant cartoonist, inventor of the Stringalongs, the archetypically trendy sixties couple who lived in NW1. Another of Stevens’s early hirings had been Jennifer, tempted away from the Tatler in 1959. But this was in effect a token hiring. In what Stevens assessed as a new climate, social comment was a matter of asperity and irony and jokes, not simply lists of names and velvet smooth responses that flattered the hostesses and buttered up the debs. Jennifer complains in her memoirs that her diary was given very little space. The doings of the debutantes were now considered of only marginal interest to Queen readers and – horror of horrors – the cruel lens of Henri Cartier-Bresson was brought in to photograph Queen Charlotte’s Ball.

  In 1963 a book was published that altered
fundamentally the public perception of the Season. It was a short novel, not an especially well written or profound one, but there was something about the tenor and the timing that made it influential. Debs’ escorts in particular, derided as foolish, unattractive chinless wonders, could not be the same again. Coronet Among the Weeds was the work of the twenty-year-old Charlotte Bingham or, to give her her full name, the Hon. Charlotte Mary Thérèse Bingham, daughter of the 7th Baron Clanmorris. She had gone to a very unacademic convent school, The Priory, Haywards Heath, and had been ‘finished’ in Paris, living with an impoverished aristocratic family and going to lectures at the Sorbonne. She had then returned to London for the Season. Coronet Among the Weeds, undisguised autobiography, shows coming out to be unremitting awfulness.

  There had been attempts before to satirise the Season. A sharp-eyed deb of my own year, Dominie Riley-Smith, had written a novel, Curtains for Curtseys, about a fat, vague mother bringing out her own smart daughter and a bumbling cousin from the country. Curtains had been accepted by a publisher, Secker & Warburg, who in the end had failed to bring it out. Charlotte Bingham’s Coronet Among the Weeds was the first public send-up of the Season from the point of view of a disgruntled debutante. The tea parties:

  Tea parties went on for practically ever. Everyone went on and on giving them. If they liked you they didn’t only ask you to one, they asked you to half a dozen. And if there was some corny bit in the newspapers about you they’d all swoon.

  The cocktail parties:

  Cocktail parties are worse than tea parties. They’re worse than dances too, come to think of it. In fact they’re the worst thing you could possibly do. Except shorthand. It’s all the weeds you have to talk to. They’re much worse than the girls. Millions of times worse. If you find the girls chilling you wait and see what you’ll find the men. You really get fond of the girls after you’ve met the men. I thought I knew how weedy a weed could get. But I didn’t. I didn’t know even half how weedy a weed could get.

  With her endearing frankness and her faux naif approach Charlotte Bingham gave a true insider’s view of a girl’s Season, analysing the worst of a deb’s social dilemmas:

  You can’t tell some po old hostess you don’t want to go with someone because he’s a sex maniac, and being raped by a weed would be no joke. I’m not exaggerating: some of those weeds there was nothing they wouldn’t stop at. Mostly because they’re so stupid. No intelligence at all.

  For the early 1960s this was a new tone: anti-romantic, painfully realistic, rudely discontented with the debs’ delights on offer, like an early, posher version of Bridget Jones.

  The Season had been based on ideas of the inheritance of elegance, the debutante looking like as well as emulating the behaviour of her mother. By the early sixties this was no longer so. Once Mary Quant had introduced the miniskirt the concept of dressing in a style that reflected your position in society was fatally undermined. Following the youth cult of the period debs turned into dolly birds, parading down King’s Road in little gymslips, keyhole dresses, skinny rib sweaters, paper knickers (or no knickers), op art earrings and enormous floppy hats. The debutante pink lips had given way to splurged white lipstick. Thick black eyeliner made the girls look rather waifish under their Vidal Sassoon geometric haircuts. There was the craze for hot pants and I still have a picture of myself standing in a white cave like boutique wearing the pair of white Courrèges boots I’d bought in Paris and a long shiny white mac.

  The girls of this generation were abandoning the labels still popular in the 1950s: Jean Allen and Frank Usher now looked frumpy. They took up the young designers who had begun producing clothes for an emphatically young market: Mary Quant, Kiki Byrne, Jean Muir, Marian Foale and Sally Tuffin, Gerald McCann, Emmanuelle Khahn, inventors of the lean and classless ‘London Look’. All aspects of the Season were affected by the youth cult. The once staid Berkeley Debutante Dress Show reinvented itself. No more Monsieur Cardin. The girls now modelled clothes from Young Jaegar and from Annacat, the ultra fashionable South Kensington boutique set up by two ex-debs Maggie Keswick and Janet Lyle. A deb of my own year, Annette Bradshaw, another of the girls involved in running Annacat, remembers the excitement and the chaos of the scene in a shop that epitomised the swinging sixties: everyone shopped at Annacat, from Christine Keeler to Mrs David Bruce, wife of the American Ambassador to London. The sixties was a period of social fluidity in which fashion models had more kudos than the daughters of the upper classes and ex-debs (not always too convincingly) attempted to look and behave like fashion models. I remember being stopped by a film crew in Woollands 21 shop, the ‘young designer’ section in a once completely middle-aged Knightsbridge department store, and asked if I dreamed of looking like Jean Shrimpton, the sixties’ most iconic face. I denied this indignantly, refusing to be interviewed. But I was not being truthful. Anyone of my generation longed to be Jean Shrimpton, whether or not they had curtseyed to the Queen.

  Another factor in the death of the debutante was Biba, which had started in a small way as a mail order catalogue, then enlarging into retail. The Polish designer Barbara Hulanicki and her entrepreneur husband Stephen Fitz-Simon opened the first Biba shop in a converted Victorian chemist’s shop in Abingdon Road in 1964. Two years later, such was Biba’s success, they took a larger shop in Kensington Church Street before expanding yet again into the beautiful Biba designed by Julie Hodgess on the site in Kensington High Street which was formerly a Cyril Lord carpet showroom. With its decor of giant potted ferns, dark wood panelling and stained glass (retrieved from neighbouring St Paul’s School, about to be demolished) that Biba store lives on in many people’s minds as one of the dream experiences of the sixties, a fantasy of opulence and sexiness. In a recent interview in the Observer the singer Jane Birkin made the comment that ‘People know exactly where they were, or who they were in bed with, when they first heard “Je T’aime (Moi Non Plus)”’, the 1969 hit song she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg and which was banned as indecent by the BBC. I know I was in Biba’s, ascending the grand staircase, and that astonishingly arousing song had had an extra magic in that Jane Birkin, a war-hero’s wayward daughter, was a former pupil at my own old school, Miss Ironside’s. Stylistically Biba was unlike Bazaar, in some ways its antithesis. Where Bazaar promoted a pert teenage look of stripes and spots and daisies Biba was marketing a notion of sinfulness. This was fashion for young vamps: body-clinging satin dresses, feather boas, shoes with high-stack heels, suede boots with long long zips. The colours were those of the fashionable brothel: black, purple, dusky pink. The point about Biba style was that it was pastiche High Society, replicating the etiolated glamour of debs of the year in c.1930. Biba clothes were not expensive. Teenagers from the suburbs raided Biba every Saturday, returning home with carrier bags bulging with their spoils. Once the style of the elite was taken over by the people once regarded as an underclass the mystique of the debutante was undermined.

  Annette Fletcher modelling Young Jaeger beachwear at the Berkeley Debutante Dress Show in 1966

  Sarah Harman modelling Annacat palazzo pyjamas at the Berkeley Dress Show in 1967

  The traditional deb escort was hit hard by the fashion revolution. Henry Blofeld, in his memoirs, recalls the purchase of his city gentleman’s wardrobe in 1959: the impeccably tailored three-piece dark-grey suit, the bowler hat from Lock’s, St James’s, the rolled umbrella. These clothes would have made him look a cartoon character a few years further on. The catalyst for change was John Stephen, a design entrepreneur who introduced into men’s fashion a new mood of flamboyance, an element of camp, using often lurid colours, shiny textures, patterned fabrics, pleated pockets. These were clothes my Tattersall-shirted Uncle Justin would have certainly denounced as pansy stuff. But they suited the mood of the time, the urge for performance, the shock tactics of the pop scene. John Stephen’s first shop, His Clothes, opened in Beak Street in Soho. He soon moved into Carnaby Street with Lord John, Mod Male, Male West One, virtual
ly taking over the street with his chain of consciously subversive menswear shops. Gradually the debs’ delights adapted, even if they never totally abandoned the uniform announcing them as officers and gentlemen. The fashionable Mayfair tailors, Blades, opened in 1963 by Rupert Lycett Green, grandson of a baronet and Candida Betjeman’s husband-to-be, sold the Carnaby Street look in a much better cut and more expensive version. In 1960s London the aristocracy were followers rather than setters of the trend.

  ‘I can’t bear chinless people talking about sex. I think chinless people should be eunuchs.’ Charlotte Bingham’s onslaught on the chinless wonders in Coronet Among the Weeds is a reminder of a time in which the smoothness and effeteness of traditional debs’ delights, murmuring their innuendos and reeking of Old Spice, was being challenged by the unkempt glamour of the working-class professionals: designers, actors, photographers with East End accents. If ex-debs were dreaming of looking like Jean Shrimpton, some at least of the escorts must have felt a twinge of envy at the swaggering and blatantly unshaven David Bailey, as I remember him in Vogue House Studios, shouting at the models: ‘Stick your tits out.’ The romantic ideal of working-class authenticity caused the London Season to lose much of its appeal.

  The old predictable social patterns were dissolving. Fewer people were assembling for drinks at 6.30 when there were all-day parties. The merging of the deb world with a more rackety, ostensibly less-snobbish subsection of society had started in the fifties with the so-called ‘Chelsea Set’, a throwback to the louche and flamboyant arty Chelsea personified by Augustus John. The attractions of that scene are well explained in Andrew Sinclair’s The Breaking of Bumbo in which the young Guards officer, desperately bored with the conventional deb parties, looks for an alternative in the espresso bars and pubs of Chelsea amongst the arty drunks and models, old painters, heavy blondes. The Chelsea Set was a small world of fashionable drifters which revolved around the ever-crowded Markham Arms, the pub beside Bazaar, the Pheasantry, the Chelsea Potter, the Picasso Café. No debs’ mums’ address books. Entrée to the Chelsea Set was more a matter of style than family credentials. No embossed invitation cards. You sniffed out the best party and brought along a bottle of undistinguished vino. As yet not many drugs.