2 Reprinted in Counting My Chickens, p. 58.
3 An oak wood on the Swinbrook estate.
1 The Duchess of Windsor’s funeral service was being held that day at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
1 Georges and Ofélia Sanègre; the Duchess of Windsor’s French butler and his wife.
2 Hubert de Givenchy (1927–). Couturier to the Duchess of Windsor.
3 Laura Charteris (1915–90). Married the 10th Duke of Marlborough in 1972, a few weeks before he died; he was her fourth husband and she his second wife.
4 Nicholas Henderson (1919–). Deborah had become friends with the ex-diplomat when they were both on the board of Tarmac. Ambassador to Washington 1979–82. Married Mary Cawadias in 1951.
1 Sophia was convalescing in hospital after an operation.
2 Tony Richardson (1928–91). The film director’s partner during the last twenty years of his life was Grizelda Grimond (1942–), daughter of the former Liberal Party leader, Jo Grimond.
1 Grover E. Mouton III; director of the Urban Design Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
2 Sir Humphry Wakefield (1936–). Founder of the Stately Homes Collection of Antique Furniture and Objects of Art.
3 Bertrand Goldberg (1913–97). American architect, trained at the Bauhaus, who designed the ‘corncob’ towers at Marina City, Chicago. Married to Nancy Florsheim.
4 Mildred Root (1908–2000). Renowned collector and producer of fine porcelain reproductions. Married Rafi Mottahedeh in 1929.
5 Herbert Kohler Jr (1939–). CEO of the Kohler Company.
1 Derek Hart (1925–86). Broadcaster, film-maker and founder member of the Tonight programme, transmitted on weekday evenings 1957–65.
1 Harold Macmillan had died on 29 December, aged ninety-two.
1 Deborah had started a ‘Duchess of Devonshire’ line of groceries to be sold in the Chatsworth shops and other outlets.
1 A Royal Doulton ‘Grace Darling’ figurine.
1 Diana had been interviewed for Russell Harty’s Grand Tour.
2 Thyra de Zayas d’Harcourt; married François, due d’Harcourt in 1961.
1 A review by John Carey of Bevis Hillier’s Young Betjeman (1988).
2 John Betjeman’s parents-in-law.
1 Martin Bernal (1937–). The British-born Sinologist’s controversial book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization was published in 1987.
2 The word game.
1 Diana had been invited to appear on Desert Island Discs, interviewed by Sue Lawley.
2 Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister on 22 November 1990.
1 A ball given for twenty-first birthday of Deborah’s grandson, Lord Burlington.
2 Joseph Paxton (1801–65). The architect of the Crystal Palace was head gardener to the 6th Duke of Devonshire and designed the rock garden at Chatsworth.
3 Jerry Hall (1956–). Actress, fashion model and ex-wife of Mick Jagger.
1 Diana and Deborah were reading the manuscript of Nancy’s collected letters. In 1932, in a letter to Hamish Erskine, Nancy had written that Lord Redesdale and Diana’s father-in-law had been to see Mosley to ask him to give up Diana and found him ‘dead white & armed with knuckle dusters’ (Love from Nancy, p. 53).
2 Treasures of Chatsworth, A Private View (1991).
1 Margaret Oulpé (1918–). A friend of the Mosleys who long after Diana’s incarceration became chairman of Holloway Prison. Married James Hudson in 1946.
1 The paragraph in which Nancy suggested that Diana was jealous of Unity was cut from Love from Nancy, the only excision that Diana requested be made from the letters.
2 Edith Cresson (1934–). France’s newly appointed Prime Minister resigned in April the following year.
1 Celia Knight (1949–). The daughter of Deborah’s friends Guy and Heck Knight was a registered nurse. Married 3rd Baron Vestey in 1981.
1 Robert Treuhaft had been operated on for a knée replacement.
2 Pronounced ‘lawst and gorn’ by Deborah.
1 Lady Redesdale’s dachshund.
* Her dau. wrote to me to make the plan – secret.
1 Giuditta Tommasi, Pamela’s long-time companion, had died.
2 Pele de Lappe Murdock (1916–2007). American artist, member of the San Francisco Graphic Arts Workshop and a close friend of Jessica.
3 ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, from Jaques’ soliloquy in As You Like It.
1 Britain was debating ratification of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union and Euro-scepticism was at a peak.
1 Jessica was reading a proof copy of Love from Nancy.
1 Deborah’s daughter Sophia, who married Alastair Morrison in 1988, had named her son Declan James.
1 Max Hastings (1945–). Editor of the Daily Telegraph 1986–96.
1 Nancy’s letter to Jessica of 15 November 1968, in which she had said that Tom Mitford had hated Mosley (see p. 521).
2 The launch party for Love from Nancy.
1 The ‘Stork’ was a grey Morris Minor with red painted wheels, hence the name.
1 Katherine Tennant (1903–94). A great-aunt of Deborah’s son-in-law Toby Tennant. In 1958 she was one of the first women to be created a life peeress. Married the politician Walter Elliot in 1934.
2 Deborah’s great-granddaughter Rosa Tennant.
3 Admiral Sir Richard Thomas held the parliamentary position of Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod 1992–5.
4 Approximately 350 miles.
1 Deborah had sent Diana an article about Sir Abe Bailey (1864–1940), the South African mining magnate and financier.
1 Reprinted in Counting My Chickens, p. 50.
1 Twenty-six-year-old James Forman had finished law school and was clerking for a Supreme Court Justice before joining the Public Defender Service in Washington.
1 Pamela had died that morning, aged eighty-five.
2 Margaret Cross (1917–). A friend of Pamela whose husband, George Budd, was in Squadron 604 RAF with Derek Jackson during the war.
1 Sally Belfrage (1936–94). Human rights activist, journalist and friend of Jessica’s whose last book, Un-American Activities, A Memoir of the Fifties, was published posthumously in 1994.
1 The Mitfords’ uncle, Bertram, had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War.
2 Neighbours of the Mitfords.
1 Keith Mellors was houseman at Chatsworth; his wife, Stella, was housekeeper of the private side of the house.
1 Pamela’s dachshunds.
1 Emma Tennant’s obituary of Pamela concluded, ‘In old age [she] radiated serenity and goodness. Her huge blue eyes were as innocent as a child’s. Indeed, innocence along with courage, honesty and cheerfulness was one of her remarkable qualities.’ Independent, 16 April 1994.
1 David Plante (1940–). Novelist and author of Difficult Women, A Memoir of Three (1983), portraits of Jean Rhys, Germaine Greer and Sonia Orwell.
2 A review of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell, in the New York Review of Books, 30 January 1969.
3 Jacqueline Onassis had died of cancer on 19 May 1994.
1 Toby Tennant had read from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, at Pamela’s funeral.
NINE
1995–2003
Letter from Deborah to Diana
As she approached her nineties, Diana found the upkeep of the Temple de la Gloire too much to manage and at the end of 1998 moved to a flat in Paris where it was easier for her friends and many descendants to visit her. Except for her almost complete deafness, she was in good health and had the upright carriage of a young woman. She still read omnivorously, contributed the occasional article to the English newspapers and took a keen and opinionated interest in politics. But increasingly, she found life a burden and longed, as she put it, to ‘fall asleep and never wake up’.
Jessica was the only one among the sisters who had smoked and she drank heavily for much of her life, habits she had taken up duri
ng her marriage to Esmond. She suffered a stroke in 1984 and when she broke her ankle in a fall at the end of 1994, she decided to give up alcohol completely. She wrote to Deborah that it was the realization of the trouble that her alcoholism was causing her family, rather than the damage it was doing to her health, that had made her give up. At nearly eighty, she was still asked to give lectures including, to her astonishment, at a funeral service seminar – which she compared to Ralph Nader, the crusading attorney and terror of the auto industry, being invited to speak by General Motors. When Jessica died in 1996, Deborah could not turn to Diana to express her grief – the estranged sisters had been distanced for too long for Diana to feel any great emotion – and, unlike the outpouring of sorrow that followed Pamela’s death, the interchange was perforce brief and unemotional.
At seventy-five, Deborah had the energy of someone half her age. Chatsworth was now one of the most visited houses in Britain and the commercial activities that she had started and built up over forty years led to her being voted ‘2000 Rural Businessperson of the Year’. Her letters recount her gruelling schedule of writing, travelling, lecturing, entertaining and overseeing the hundreds of staff working on the Chatsworth estate. She wrote especially to Diana, the sister to whom she had grown closest in old age and who was now too deaf to hear on the telephone. They exchanged letters or faxes almost every day of the week.
Darling Debo
Phillip Whitehead1 is doing a 3-part Churchill for telly: Lord Randolph, Winston & Randolph. I’m to be filmed next week. I objected my nose2 but he makes 0 of it. My value is my vast age, very few left who remember the first years of Chartwell. He says Mrs Harriman3 has been v. nice about Randolph. Also they’ve seen Lord Randolph’s medical reports & he was told (poor man) he was sure to die of G.P.I.4 which explains much, the wild hurry for example.
Phillip says the spite of the Press against Brussels is unbelievable, of course really against Europe. He is an MEP. He says England cannot now stop the advance & can’t afford to opt out. How I wish some voice could be raised to say that the making of Europe is the ONLY way to stop another war, this time finally destructive of all that makes life worth living, including all our grandsons & all your marvels. I can feel the hate building up in England just like last time. But old Winston has made us so weak that perhaps there’s not much we can do this time in the way of harm. A dead nettle. How wretched to have to hope for that. Phillip thinks the Tories will ditch Major5 before the next election, & that it will be very close. He used to be on the Left, I wonder now; was Pres: of the Oxford Union, a friend of Max’s.
Love darling, Honks
Dearest Hen,
Enclosed: a killing article by Xopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair,1 at least I loved it. Did you catch the telly programme about Mother Teresa? I always thought she was just a boring old saint, hadn’t realized she’s a disgusting old fascist. Xopher is v. good value – will be a high point of our Washington trip (we are off there on 21 April, mainly to see Oy #12 at his work, thence to NY to stay with Dink & Co. for a few days).
Also on the lit. front, have you read Selina Hastings’s book about E. Waugh? To my annoyance I note that it’s had marvellous reviews, just when I was thinking what a hopeless idea – yet another book on well-worn subject.
Well Hen not much news here – we’re going to Los Angeles for a few days, but you don’t know the people there so what’s the use.
So, as you can see, I’m v much up & about. Nary a drop to drink & so it goes. Re giving up: a year or two ago I decided to try, method being to taper off, starting with a ration of 3 of those wee aeroplane bottles of vodka a day. But once I had them I craved more, so the tapering didn’t work at all. Oddly, the total giving up is actually working OK. I suppose everyone is different in that line?
Much love, Henderson
Dearest Hen
I forgot the best bit of the Hattersley1–Rich People lunch.
Andrew has had ghoulish dentistry of late involving (as the wireless says with emphasis on the O) 6 or 7 new top front teeth sort of hooked on to some remaining back ones, you know the kind of thing they do. It cost A FORTUNE & he spent many an unpleasant hour in the chair. All done, they said, for years – or probably forever, seeing as how old he is. Alright then. In the middle of lunch the whole lot slowly descended, very slowly but very surely. He couldn’t talk because he wasn’t sure what was happening. He couldn’t eat for obvious reasons.
Desperate, he somehow got my attention from t’other end of the table & I saw he had turned into a wolf, those frightful teeth sort of took over the whole face & yet they didn’t come out entirely, still just fixed to the real ones but hanging. Oh Hen please picture. Of course it was incredibly funny but the complete strangers in our midst were discomforted to say the least.
So that was the entertainment provided by mistake.
Much love, Yr Hen
Dearest Hen
Daphne Fielding, 92 & often as odd as odd, sometimes hits the nail on the head. Jim [Lees-Milne] was talking to her last week.
Jim: Isn’t Paddy [Leigh Fermor] the best octogenarian any of us knows by far?
Daph: Yes he ought to be squashed up & made into pills for the rest of us.
Too true. HASTE.
Much love, Yr Hen
Darling Debo:
Did you find hundreds of little mistakes (typing) in EW/NM?1 When you were here I thought I noted you scribbling away. I ask, because I found very few, which may be rather worrying & the beginning of senile dementia, I used to be rather good at proof reading.
The letters end so sadly somehow. Evelyn was miserable for years & his books lost all their wonderful hilariousness. I read Love Among the Ruins & it is boring & disgusting (the heroine’s beard). Poor Naunce no more Colonel, no more hero in other words, but her books got better & better. I think after the wretched U-book1
Helleu3 was always just going to take me to see Boldini4 but never did, I think he didn’t want him to see me. I was allowed to meet Sem.5 No wonder they hated the modes of the twenties, it must have seemed such drear fashion. Like punk is to us.
I can’t see that it matters the IRA having guns as long as they don’t shoot people with them. They’ll never honestly give them up. Isn’t it rather mad to make everything depend on an impossibility?
Love darling, sorry for dullth, Honks
Darling Debo
Yette1 came down. She says you are SO beautiful, so I says yes and good and VERY CLEVER. Yes Debo.
Now we have spoken.2 I’m not sure I can write about Lytton [Strachey] & Carrington. I think I did what I could in Loved Ones. I think looking back what he loved was my extreme youth. When I met him (with Emerald) at Russian Opera we flew together like iron filings & magnet, I suppose my admiration shone out & perhaps pleased him. I was 18. He often dined at Buckingham Street. Biddesden began when I was 21 & by then I’d stayed at Ham Spray & become instant friends with the adorable Carrington who never hesitated a direct compliment, she too loved the fact I was young, by then 21. Lytton liked to teach & I was avid to learn after a sketchy education. During my two terms in Paris I had read much Racine & other favourites of Lytton’s & seen them on the stage at matinées classiques. All of us elder children went three or four times a year from Asthall to Stratford so we had seen more Shakespeare than most I suppose. Anyway he always spoke as if one knew, like a well-read grown up, though I was callow. My enthusiasm was probably what he liked. I had read all his books before I knew him. They (he & Carrington) were amused by me being rich (!) & in the two years I was at Biddesden there were Boris Anrep’s3 mosaics, gazebo by G. Kennedy,4 & the wonderful lead nude woman statue in the walled garden by Stephen Tomlin.5 I got most of the furniture in Venice & had my bed made. It was so pretty, 65 years ago but I still think it perfect. Lytton & Carrington constantly came over & I made a great fuss of them & they of me. There’s a lovely letter of Carrington’s about Muv, Bobo, you & Decca, she adored you. It seems so unbelievable that I was only 21½ when both died
.
Peter Quennell says in The Marble Foot that he was a bit in love with me, something I never dreamed of at the time.6 He used to come & chat at Cheyne Walk, & later on at Eaton Square. He was one of my little circle. Evelyn [Waugh] was Buckingham Street. I think I was very obtuse & never realized when people were a bit in love, only thinking of my own feelings. I suppose Gerald [Berners] was, in his mysterious way. I twice stayed a month in Rome with him & frequently at Faringdon, & at Eaton Square he came all the time & I went to Halkin Street. He, like Lytton, taught me almost all I know. I could never have had my Gerald life married to Bryan.
Another bosom friend when I was at Eaton Sq was Henry Yorke. I was great friends with Dig but he often took me to cinemas & dinners. He amused me with his paradoxes. After the war they came to stay at Crowood but by then he was getting rather mad. But when he was a hermit I always went when in England, mostly for Dig’s sake as he’d become disagreeable.
Another bosom friend at Eaton Square was Peter Watson (he not the least in love of course) & with him & Edward James I saw many Paris friends like Tchelichew, Dali, Sauguet, Marie-Laure [de Noailles], & Kurt Weill & Lotte Lenya7 from Berlin.
Looking back, perhaps Kit wanted me at Wootton miles away from all inties [intellectuals] of different nationalities. I loved him so much that I look back on Wootton as a dream of happiness. What luck we had. The food there was sans pareil [matchless]. Fancy remembering that, but I do, & the pretty garden which I left entirely to the two gardeners, not interfering in any way, & it was heavenly with a thrilling kitchen garden full of tiny peas & new potatoes.
You won’t have got as far as this. I could also be lyrical about Birdie & Munich & the fun & excitement we had. I was terribly sad to be deprived of you and Decca by Muv but she was so splendid later & so fond of Kit that I’ve purposely forgotten her cruelty, & you & I have made up for it since haven’t we. As to Naunce I did my best, she had her room at Eaton Sq but after that there was so much spite & disloyalty that I couldn’t really love her, though often amused.
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