BOOKS
Washing one's mother's linen
David Gilmour
THE VICEROY'S DAUGHTERS: THE LIVES OF THE CURZON SISTERS by Anne de Courcy Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 421 The lives of Lady Irene, Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra were connected by two powerful men. They were the daugh- ters of Lord Curzon and they were among the lovers of Sir Oswald Mosley. Without these connections, nobody could want to read — or even write — this book.
George Curzon was a great viceroy, a successful foreign secretary and a passion- ate conservationist. But he was a lamentably bad father. He wanted his daughters to be delicate and submissive like their mother, who died young; instead, they were wilful and opinionated like him. He told them there were more serious things in life than knitting and reading novels. They agreed: fox-hunting, for example, dancing, going to parties, swanning around the Riviera, having love affairs and marrying the wrong men.
Curzon died when they were in their twenties, estranged from the elder two by disputes over money and on deteriorating terms with the youngest, who was not quite old enough to escape. Their stepmother (who also had intimate physical experience of Mosley) did not help these impulsive orphans. Stupid, selfish and vain, she spent most of their father's money and managed to secure most of their mother's jewellery.
The life of Cynthia (`Ciirimie) has already been well told by her son Nicholas in a biography of his father. She made the mistake of marrying Mosley and paid for it with years of sarcasm, bullying and ostenta- tious philandering. On realising that Diana Mitford had finally captured her monstrous mate, she lost the will to live and died at the age of 34.
The lives of Irene and Alexandra (13aba') were until now unchronicled and • would have remained so had it not been for the bewildering decision of a son and a nephew to hand over their letters and diaries to a Daily Mail journalist who thrives on social gossip. Irene, whose inti- macy with Mosley was limited to a drunken tumble after hunting, is the nicest and sad- dest figure in the book. Although several people proposed to her, she yearned for a married man who refused to leave his wife. For consolation she turned to drink, chari- table work and looking after her sisters' children. In the summer holidays she took her nephews and nieces to the English sea- side while Mosley and Baba cavorted (sometimes together) in the Mediter- ranean. She received little gratitude.
Almost the only other person who comes out well from this tawdry tale is Baba's hus- band, Major Metcalfe, known as 'Fruity' to everyone except the aged Queen Alexan- dra, who thought he was called 'Juicy'. Penniless, brave, amiable and rather dim, he realised from the beginning that he was the wrong person for the beautiful, imperi- ous and much younger Baba. Intensely loyal himself, Fruity was repeatedly let down by the most important people in his life. Baba gave him three children and then neglected him for Mosley and a succession of other lovers, all of whom were richer, more intelligent and more sophisticated than her husband. His closest friend, the Duke of Windsor, callously exploited him. Despite years of service as companion and equerry, Fruity was abandoned in Paris in May 1940 when the ineffable former monarch fled to Biarritz. Like Irene, he was a kind and heavy-drinking loser. The Viceroy's Daughters is a chronicle of gossip, scandal, sisterly bickering, political nastiness and the smart social gatherings that Anne de Courcy finds so extraordinar- ily exciting. The subtitle suggests that the author has written biographies of the Cur- zon sisters. She hasn't: she has written about them in the Twenties and Thirties when they were young, rich and naughty. The last 50 years of Baba's life are virtually ignored. We are told that 'the main thrust of her life was her work for the Save the Children Fund, a commitment that lasted for more than 40 years'. But because the author doesn't find charities smart or sexy, she writes only half a page on the 'main thrust' of her main character's life.
Anne de Courcy gushes breathlessly about the social round, the 'frenetic' Sea- son, about wedding presents, menus, fancy- dress parties and after-dinner games. Much of the book is Jennifer's Diary in hardback: entire paragraphs are consumed by lists — the guest lists at Cliveden week- ends, the people dining at the Dorchester Hotel, the neighbours of the Windsors in the south of France. 'The Dorch' exercises a peculiar fascination. We learn that inside it the Duchess of Westminster played bridge, that Roger Senhouse attended a dinner, that Sir George Clerk slept in the Turkish baths during air raids. But how could we possibly care? These characters do nothing in the book except belong (with a great many others) to these interminable lists.
Evidently an authority on the fashions of the period, the author details not only the livery of the Windsors' footmen in Antibes but also their Parisian costumes of 'black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats with silver buttons, and gold- collared scarlet waistcoats for large, formal dinners'. 'Perfection reigned,' she purrs when describing that pointless couple s colour schemes for soap and towels. It is a pity she is so much more conscien- tious about clothes and jewellery than she is about geography. Las Palmas, it is now quite well known, is not in Majorca. Simla is as much in the Darjeeling Hills as Dundee is in the Spanish Pyrenees. And the author of a biography of Diana Mosley, completed though awaiting its subject's death before publication, should perhaps know that the Shaven Crown, the inn where Diana lived at the end of the war, is not near Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucester- shire but in Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire.
Famous people sometimes try to prevent biographies being written about them, invariably without success; their works and sometimes their papers have already become public property. But unfamous people who lead deliberately private lives should be protected by their families from salivating journalists and their prurient readers. No one can blame the author and the publisher for producing this book, but one is bound to wonder why Curzon's grandchildren helped them to do it.
Nicholas Mosley is a fine novelist and a somewhat tormented confessional writer. I think he was right in his biography to reveal so much about his father's sex life because it helps explain the political fail- ure: one cannot build a career or a political party on a gondola with one's mistress. But I do not see what historical or other pur- pose is served by releasing his Aunt Irene's pathetic diaries to Ms de Courcy. Still less do I understand why David Metcalfe should wish to destroy the reputation of his mother, who becomes two arch-villainess of a book that includes the more worthy can- didates, Wallis Simpson and Diana Mosley.
I knew Baba well at the end of her life when I was writing a biography of her father. She was kind, humorous, intelligent and lovable; despite an age gap of half a century, we were close friends. She told me several times that she hated the idea of anybody writing about her, and she reject- ed Jock Murray's offer to publish any memoirs she might care to write. I cannot believe Mr Metcalfe was unaware of this or that he did not anticipate the result when he gave Baba's letters and diaries to Anne de Courcy.
It would be interesting to know, there- fore, why he wants the world to learn that his mother could be unkind, negligent and many other things, or that (as the author tells us three times) she had inherited her father's 'powerful libido'. Perhaps it is a question of revenge, a mutation of the Oedipus complex with the parents reversed. Perhaps he will explain in these pages why I am wrong to feel outraged. Perhaps he will convince us that washing one's mother's linen in public is not a pecu- liarly grimy form of filial betrayal.
David Gilmour is the author of a life of Lord Curzon.
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