Strength in numbers

My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten

The mother to match Bill Patten’s three fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady dowdily provincial. When Susan Mary took up with Bill Patten senior it was felt that she was marrying, not beneath her socially, since Patten was connected with all the right people, but beneath what should have been her aspirations. Patten, affable, intelligent, a victim of asthma and almost entirely without ambition, could not provide either the glamour or the stature which a Jay might legitimately expect.

Through family connections Patten found himself attached to the American Foreign Service and, in 1945, posted to Paris. The second father now entered the scene. Duff Cooper was British ambassador at the time; his wife, Lady Diana, took up the attractive and amusing Susan Mary; Duff soon concluded that his wife’s new protégée should be added to the formidable roll-call of his mistresses. The relationship was conducted with admirable discretion: Diana must have known about it but, as with most of Duff’s affairs, preferred not to do so. Duff wrote in his diary that Susan Mary was sick with passion for him, ‘but it would be dishonest to pretend that I am madly in love with her’. Susan Mary’s son believes that, if she was sick with passion, it was not for Duff’s body but for the excitement, consequence and fun which a liaison with him involved. On one of the first occasions that they made love, Bill Patten was conceived.

Duff died, Patten died, enter the third father.