The granddaughter of Circe casts her mesmerising spells
AUL jai-itstSON
Atrue aristocrat is not born but becomes one by developing a special sort of courage: the ability to accept and rise above the vicissitudes of fate, to develop a reckless relish for all the splendours and miseries of outrageous fortune, and always to live life to the full. By this criterion Annabel Goldsmith (as her memoirs show) is an aristocrat not only by birth but by experience, and her life is a morality tale worth examining.*
The Vane-Tempest-Stewarts, Marquesses of Londondeny, were once one of the grandest families in Europe, rich in land and coal mines, and their story, like the Habsburgs', is a saga of prudent marriages and shrewd administration of broad acres, conducted from their splendid citadel, Mount Stewart in Ulster. In the time of Annabel's grandparents the grandeur was still there. The 7th Marquess was a political potentate who helped to make and unmake cabinets. His wife Edith, known as Circe, was herself the daughter of an extraordinary Victorian figure, the first Viscount Chaplin, known in the Commons, where he spent most of his life, as 'The Squire', a chum of Edward VII and the 'Marlborough House Set'. Lady Londonderry's eve-of-session reception, at Londondeny House in Park Lane, was the political party of the year. Circe would stand at the top of the grand staircase, wearing the Londondeny partue and tiara, one of the weightiest sets of diamonds on earth, often with the Prime Minister of the day, be it MacDonald or Baldwin, by her side, receiving the guests with magnificent hauteur. Annabel, it must be said, has the looks, the figure, the self-confidence and sheer aplomb to do just as well, or better.
But already, even in those days, there was canker at the heart of the exotic bloom. Old Lord Chaplin got through all his money, mortgaged his estates and lost them, and ended his days as his daughter's pensioner, in a cosy garret at Londonderry House. The Londonderry fortune itself was beginning to founder, as the coal mines were nationalised, the broad acres diminished, the mansions, of which there were many, shut up and sold off. By the time I came to London the Park Lane house itself could be hired for wedding receptions. What remained were chiefly heirlooms, made difficult to sell by their legal status, colossal settings of rocks, safe in their bank vaults. Annabel's mother died when she was a teenager, and her father, the 8th Marquess, then became a hopeless drunkard, involving his children in embarrassing scenes and dying miserably in his early fifties. His two daughters survived this and also his latter-day taste for floozies younger than they were. Both married talent — Annabel's sister Jane, her rival in good looks and regality, chose Max Rayne, who made a sumptuous fortune in shoes and gave her yachts and other baubles. Annabel herself picked a tall, handsome and saturnine Etonian called Mark Birley. His father, Sir Oswald Birley, had been a successful portraitist of royalty, but Mark had quite different talents. The honeymoon, in Paris, began badly. Mark got drunk and went off gambling. Annabel had to send two hefty footmen from the Hotel Lotti to drag the reluctant groom away from the tables and frogmarch him to the hotel's bridal suite.
However, Birley redeemed himself by immortalising her. In her name, he founded Annabel's, now and for many years the most famous night-haunt in Europe. He developed an extraordinary talent, unique in our day, for creating restaurant-clubs — like Harry's Bar and Mark's Club, which combined an illustrious clientele, delicious food, superb service and all the comforts and atmosphere of a Mayfair mansion in the good old days — with his proficient financial management. (It was in Harry's Bar that the late Sir Denis Thatcher made one of his characteristic mots. Margaret: 'This food is absolutely delicious.' Sir Denis: 'So it should be. They're charging like the Light Brigade.')
The marriage produced three children and two tragedies. The older son, Rupert, was working in north-west Africa when, aged 31, he suddenly and mysteriously disappeared without trace. Prolonged investigation eventually discovered that he had formed the habit of going for a swim on that remote and dangerous coast, notorious for treacherous tides, had weather and sharks. His neatly folded clothes were found, and his distraught mother still has his watch, which she likes to look at in silent remembrance, and his last letter. An even more harrowing experience, in some ways, befell the second son, Robin, when he was a boy of eight. Visiting John Aspinall's private zoo, famous or notorious for the close contact with savage beasts cultivated there, Annabel foolishly allowed Robin to go into a tiger cage. A female tiger, later discovered to be in the early stages of pregnancy, pushed Robin down and took his entire head into her cavernous jaws. Aspinall and a keeper eventually managed to extricate the boy, who was lucky to survive at all, but not before appalling damage had been done. An emergency operation by two gifted surgeons saved Robin's life and the basic structure of his head and face. In due course he faced (I think he told me) more than 30 more operations. At Eton, where his appearance produced much teasing, he was known as Tiger Birley. He has emerged from all this, thanks in part to his heroic mother but chiefly to his own imaginative courage, as a loving and gentlemanly soul, whose countless friends, male and female, testify to his charm and good nature_ Annabel, meanwhile, had compounded her already electrifying life by divorcing Birley and taking on the enormous global job of running Jimmy Goldsmith. One day I am going to write a memoir of my own about Jimmy, whom I have known since he was 16 and ran away from Eton, having won £6,000 on an accumulator (an enormous sum, then, in 1947). He said, 'Why should I stay on in that mediaeval dump when there is the whole world to enjoy and I now have the means to enjoy it?' No answer to that one, then or now. He eventually made two billion, more or less, and it must be said of Jimmy that no rich man ever got more fun out of his money or provided more pleasure for his friends. There was always action when Jimmy was around. and Annabel relished it all, good and bad, happy and inglorious, in her superb house, Orrneley Lodge in Richmond Park — which was once bounced in by the Prince Regent and Mrs Fitzherbert — and in the palace Jimmy built in Mexico (he told me there were more people working on the site than Louis XIV employed when he was building Versailles). Of course she shared the burden of managing Jimmy with various other ladies. Alas, cancer got Jimmy quite young, 65, and his last months were agony, first at the hands of an Indian miracle worker who brought him little but pain, then on a final wretched transfer to his Spanish house, to get out of French death duties.
Annabel had a second family, three by the ebullient Jimmy, and they in turn have married and multiplied. In her maturity, she enjoys a rich and full life, surrounded by the beings she enjoys most, children and dogs, a warm and still beautiful woman whose life, despite all its tragic moments, has been a celebration of vitality, charmingly and innocently recorded in this delightful memoir, enriched by fascinating photographs.
*Annabel: An Unconventional Life, Weidenfeld, £20. Review, page 42.
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