Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs.
Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. In conversation he was full of amusing scandal, but the transcript of his dictated reminiscences was painfully discreet. I suggested they might be ‘sexed up’ — a new, comparatively innocent but still obviously vulgar expression — and he looked puzzled. ‘The first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham,’ the transcript read, ‘who was very stupid and rather dirty, and came to a bad end.’ Bingham became Lord Lucan, so if there were more about his stupidity and dirtiness, along the lines of ‘I remember “Lucky” in Uganda, beneath a pile of oiled Nubians…’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you mean an exposé. I don’t think so.’
The 7th Earl of Lucan was a friend of Annabel Goldsmith’s, and of both her husbands. Here, complete and unexpurgated, is what she recalls of him in her latest book: ‘Rarely did I walk into the Clermont and not see Lucan sitting at a table playing back- gammon. Little did we anticipate the scandal with which he would be synonymous — to me he was simply part of the furniture.’ So no oiled Nubians.
No Invitation Required — a companion piece to Annabel: An Unconventional Life — records her sojourn at Pelham Cottage, in a garden down a lane in South Kensington, in the 1960s and 1970s. She was married to Mark Birley, who named his nightclub after her, and they had three children. At the club’s opening night she met Birley’s friend Jimmy Goldsmith, who became her lover, husband, and the father of another three children. Goldsmith acquired Ormeley Lodge, Ham, where Lady Annabel (née Vane-Tempest-Stewart, a daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry) installed the Pelham Cottage furniture in her bedroom, which is of a similar size. So she still lives there, in a way, and remembers it with warmth and charm, in sight of the drawing-room sofa which so often served ‘as a bed for those who came to lunch and stayed’.
George Weidenfeld suggested she write about her lunchers and stayers, ‘including,’ as the blurb puts it, ‘some of the most sophisticated and iconic people of the day’. Among them is Tony Lambton, whom she had a crush on as a girl when he stayed at Wynyard Hall, the Londonderry seat in Co. Durham (‘I loved the promise of the three ballrooms …’), and who had a long affair with her sister Jane. Lambton was an oiled Nubians man if ever there was one, and is duly billed as ‘the arch-lover, the Casanova of his time’. But there are no stories about the parties at Cetinale, his Tuscan villa, because he was, like nearly everyone else mentioned here, ‘an adored friend’.
It is a loyal approach, but not an especially fascinating one. Much of this book reads like a bread-and-butter note. People and things are apt to be ‘delicious’, ‘lovely’ ‘mad’, ‘fabulous’, ‘incredibly kind’ ‘marvellously inspired’ and ‘immensely grand’. Claus von Bülow — ‘Clausikins’ — sounds awfully nice, though ‘unfortunately, he often made a somewhat sinister impression’.
John Aspinall — ‘our adored friend Aspers’ — was a Thinker, and she quotes him respectfully: ‘The concept of sanctity of human life is the most damaging sophism that philosophy has ever propagated … The destruction of this idea is a prerequisite for survival.’ When her son Robin was mauled by a Siberian tigress at Howletts, Aspinall’s zoo, she was confident, given their host’s uncanny affinity with his beasts, that ‘of course he did not know that Zorra was pregnant’. It was Aspinall who persuaded her to go off with Goldsmith: ‘Addressing me rather as if I were a Siberian tigress, he said, “It’s time you mated with Jimmy and gave him the children he wants.” ’
Several of the sketches are of her family — her grandmother, the 7th Marchioness, her cousin, Patrick Plunkett, and her mother-in-law, Rhoda Birley, who fed Lobster Thermidor to her roses, which ‘would almost cry out with pleasure’. The one of her first son, Rupert, who was brilliant and beautiful and died young, is much the best thing in the book.
There is a curious one of Mark Birley, whom she adored to the end, and whom she describes entirely in terms of his dogs, in a rather barbed way, stating that he was more upset by the death of his Midge than he was by Robin’s mauling. Blitz, his Rhodesian ridgeback, used to bite people: ‘When Blitz happened to bite a woman on her ear during one of their walks, Mark refused to blame Blitz … people were frightened to come to his house.’
Birley emerges nonetheless as one of the more sympathetic figures in No Invitation Required. His tragedy seems to have been that his best friends were men in the mould of Roderick Spode, 8th Earl of Sidcup and ‘amateur Dictator’.
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