Nostalgia for upper-class ladies of the Art Deco generation
PAUL JOHNSON
Oh, those prewar, upper-class ladies, with their malicious wit and hearts of gold, or at least platinum! How I miss them! Three in particular — two as friends, one as enemy. Nancy Mitford is back on the box again, triumphant, but I can't bear to watch it. If alive today, she would be 96. She was kind to me when I lived in Paris in the early Fifties. She occupied the ground floor of an old hotel particulier in the rue Monsieur, right in the heart of what had once been the aristocratic quartier. A bonne a tout faire, called Marie, looked after her. There were little supper parties, after which you played charades. She had hit the jackpot in 1945 with The Pursuit of Love, which sold a million copies, and, after Christian Dior brought back haute couture in January 1947 with the 'New Look', she was able to indulge her passion for smart clothes. She was tall and slim, and Dior's style suited her perfectly, though she liked Givenchy too. She could make you roar with her talk and she herself, avid for laughter, thought any day lost in which she had not 'shrieked'. But she knew sadness, increasingly so as time went by. Her husband, Peter Rodd, had been no good. The man she adored, Gaston Palewsky, could not reciprocate her passion, though he hung around endlessly until his master, de Gaulle, returned to power and he went on to higher things — the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and marriage to a duchess. Loving the old Bourbon kings, Nancy went to live in Versailles and there contracted a strange malady which the doctors could not treat and which caused her intense pain. She told me that the only thing that eased the agony was letters from friends, and I was in the middle of one to her when I heard on the wireless that she had died. That she, who gave so much fun to the world, should have met such an end seems wrong. But God knows best.
Pamela Berry I knew much better, and had tremendous fun with, including dramatic rows. Her father was the famous, or notorious, F.E. Smith, whom Beaverbrook called 'the cleverest man in the kingdom' and whom Lloyd George made an earl. Pam inherited his brains and wit, but as he would not let her go to school she considered herself uneducated and almost illiterate. I begged her to write her memoirs and offered to help, but she said she would not be so 'presumptuous'. She was much more of a bohemian than Nancy, who did not like to be called by her Christian name until you knew her well: she was Mrs Rodd. While
Nancy loved the upper classes and le gratin, as they are called in Paris, Pam thought of herself as an outsider and detested the Establishment. She gave the best lunch parties I have ever attended, and the stars were more likely to be people such as R.H.S. Crossman and Tommy Balogh than Tory grandees. Oddly enough, the one Tory she really liked was Ted Heath, and she sometimes went around the country with him. After Thatcher ousted Heath, I regularly got a phone call from Pam at nine a.m., beginning, 'Well, what do you think of your leader now?' Pam was a power in the British fashion industry, but her own taste was lurid. She was dark and believed that she had gypsy blood, so she dressed in a spangly way with lots of gold chunks. However, there was nothing of the gypsy about her food, which was of a quality rarely found in London private houses, then or now. I loved her dearly and few days go by when I do not think of her, a naughty candle in a dim world.
Annie Fleming was 'the enemy', 'the witch'. She took against me after I published an article denouncing the work of her third husband, Ian Fleming. It was called 'Sex, snobbery and sadism', and had quite a vogue, though to read it now would make one laugh, for the Bond novels seem as tame as The Wind in the Willows. Mrs Fleming thought me cheeky and, if I was ever put next to her at dinner, she would either have the seating changed — noisily — or during the meal I would get a painful rap over the knuckles with a piece of heavy silver cutlery. She should have been a man, and a general. If there was any parade going, she wanted to lead it. Fleming told her, 'You have the heart of a drum majorette.' Her parties — she gave two dinners and one lunch, or two lunches and one dinner, every week in the season — were not on the same level as Pam's, but they provided an agreeable haven for idle dons, socialist leaders anxious to get away from their party rabble or wives, and country intellectuals needing a fix of London gossip.
All these ladies were on the bossy side, at any rate to young men like me (young women, unless family, they ignored or froze out). It was characteristic of the ladies I called the Art Deco generation that, while reserving the right to break the rules themselves, they enforced them on others, when it suited their whim, rather like royalty. Nancy Mitford would correct my French — not grammatically, of course, but socially. Pam often read me sharp lectures on such topics as loyalty, patriotism, confidence-keeping and the mores of the press. I am glad that she is not alive now to see what has happened to all the things she held dear. Annie Fleming was a stickler for rules, which she often made up on the spot. It was not she but another of her generation (still alive, just) who once turned to me at dinner and said, 'I hope you don't mind my saying this, Paul, but are you aware you are using the wrong fork?' I paused, looked at the array of utensils, then at her, and said, 'No, darling, you are using the wrong fork.' A few minutes later I heard her say exactly the same thing to the young man on her right, who is now famous but was then new on the scene, and who was so upset that he left the table and ran off into the night, much to the consternation of our hostess. Can't imagine that happening today, can you?
All these ladies wrote a lot of letters. Nancy's were good; sometimes funny, always interesting. I have got some, tucked away in relevant books — a maddening habit of mine. Pam's were the best. Indeed, I think she was probably the best letter-writer in English of the mid-20th century, better even than Evelyn Waugh. I keep her letters to me grandly in the old red Cabinet box I was given for serving as a royal commissioner. One day, no doubt, they will all be published and that will be a rare treat for posterity. Meanwhile, we have Nancy's and, of course, Mrs Fleming's. They are too deliberately malicious for my taste. Thus poor Katharine Hepburn is dismissed as 'an immense length of bone and old skin knitted together by vast purple varicose veins'. At one of Pam's lunches Annie grumbled at having to sit 'in uncomfortable proximity to Anthony Powell'. She said he 'complained that only politics were ever discussed these days, and seldom or never the arts. It transpired that he knows naught of music and, I would surmise, has never glanced at a painting. I suppose he reads books?' To amuse her correspondents, Mrs Fleming invented anecdotes. When her letters were about to be published, the editor submitted to me a passage describing disgraceful behaviour by me at a house-party in Ireland. It was almost entirely fiction, and I asked him to tone it down. The exact truth will be told when, if ever, I write my memoirs. Oh, those prewar girls! Good or bad, they were the spice of life, and no one now seasons so sharply the stodgy stew of existence.
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