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 Cooler but far from chilly for mid-November
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| New York alley off Park Avenue between 75th and 76th Street. 3:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
November 12, 2009. Fair weather in New York, cooler but far from chilly for mid-November.
Last night I went down to Doubles where the National Hypertension Association was having their annual fundraising dinner.
The NHA was founded thirty-two years ago by Dr. William Manger, a New York internist, to combat high blood pressure in the United States through research, education, detection and prevention.
Seven years ago, in 2002, the NHA developed a prevention/intervention program that teaches healthy nutrition choices and appropriate physical activities to young schoolchildren (age 4 – 8). The connection between obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure is very great. It is obvious to anyone anywhere in America these days that it is an epidemic and it is not only unhealthy, it can often be fatal. We are what we eat.
Dr. Manger has written and coauthored five medical books and more than 220 scientific publications, mostly on high blood pressure. Some of his more recent research is directed at determining how potassium prevents stroke. He recently founded the VITAL (Values Initiative Teaching About Lifestyle) program to combat in children.
About a quarter of all Americans have hypertension. A third of them don’t even know they have it. It’s chronic and it’s a major contributor to cardio-vascular disease – stroke, heart attack, heart and kidney failure and hardening of the arties. It kills and even if it doesn’t, it’s costly. About 60% of hypertensives are salt sensitive – that is excess salt increases their blood pressure. Sixty-six percent of all Americans are overweight (66%) and 31% are obese. We have the fattest population in the world. Obesity is such a problem that it may bankrupt the health system.
I first learned about the NHA a couple of years ago when I was asked to attend their annual dinner to introduce their guest speaker who was Tina Brown who was there to talk about her book on Princess Diana.
Last night’s guest speaker was Frances Osborne who has also written a book about a controversial Edwardian Englishwoman named Lady Idina Sackville. The book is called “The Bolter” and the main character, Ms. Osborne discovered when she was a 13-year-old, was her maternal great-grandmother.
“The Bolter,” which came out at the beginning of the summer is a runaway best-seller here and in England. Several people I know who have read it have all said the same thing about it: they didn’t want it to end.
The subject was born the daughter of the 8th Earl De La Warr (pronounced “Delaware” like the state which was named for an earlier earl), who married five times, bore three children by two marriages, and lived most of her adult life on a farm she started in Kenya.
In Edwardian England, the upperclasses often married for money and position. A woman was expected to produce an heir, and preferably two (“an heir and a spare”). After that she was free to do as she pleased as long as she was discreet.
Idina Sackville’s first husband was a rich Scotsman named Euan Wallace. After she’d produced her two sons for him, he, like so many of his peers, had numerous infidelities. His wife accepted them to a point and did the same. In time, however, it became impossible for her to live with this arrangement and she asked for a divorce.
Divorce in those days and in that social climate was frowned upon. In fact the adulterer was always the woman, no matter the circumstances. The word came from the word adulterate – a term used to describe a pregnancy that was not caused by the husband. A woman who left because of adultery, leaving her children behind, was called “a bolter.” |
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| Euan Wallace, Lady Idina's first husband and father of her two sons. |
Euan Wallace with her sons after her departure, Gee and David, ages three and five. |
Wallace punished his wife by insisting that he have custody of her sons – three and five. She did and never saw either one again until they were young men.
Not long after, the adulterer took up with another man, whom she married, and moved to Kenya where she started a farm. There she became part of the Happy Valley Group immortalized in the book “White Mischief” which centered around the fast times of the British residents and the murder of one of them, Idina’s third husband (who was eight years her junior) Joss Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll. Hay left Idina for another woman and was murdered mysteriously (never solved) shortly thereafter.
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| Tatler cover with Lady Idina and her third husband, Joss, Earl of Erroll. |
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| Lady Idina with her fifth (and last husband) Victor Soltau. |
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The Daily Mail called the book “an enthralling account of a dazzling, troubled life.” It occurred to me, as I pointed out last night in introducing Ms. Osborne to the guests, that it was also a life that had many parallels to that of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose two sons also lost their mother at a very young age, although under far different circumstances.
Lady Idina Sackville’s biographer- great-granddaughter withholds all judgment of the life whose memory was theretofore scandalous to her descendants. Idina was in many ways a thoroughly modern woman, although as an aristocrat with money to smooth the way a good part of the time, she was often willful and foolish. Her reputation which soon preceded her was that of a “nymphmaniac” for whom one man was never enough. She was a woman “who lived entirely in the present,” one friend recalled. Which may be why so many readers finished reading her life story wishing it would never end.
Some readers are familiar with a cousin of Idina Sackville, Vita Sackville-West, author and wife of Sir Harold Nicholson, as well as lover of Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis (the daughter of Mrs. Keppel – great-grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall). When Idina Sackville died at age 61 on November 5, 1955, Vita published an obituary in the Times of London:
“No more succinct or better epitaph could be given to Idina Sackville than the following lines from the Chinese poet Wu-ti 157-87 BC, translated by Arthur Waley:
The sound of her silk shirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?”
The story of Lady Idina Sackville reminded me of an obituary published sixteen years ago in the Daily Telegraph of London, written by biographer Hugo Vickers about Loelia, Lady Lindsay, also one of that generation of Edwardians, notably one of the Bright Young Things, who became famous as the second wife of Bendor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster (England’s richest landowner who is now also remembered as a lover of Coco Chanel). Loelia was immortalized in popular fiction as Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond series by Ian Fleming, also an admirer. Again, it was a life of party and song, champagne and no regrets while it lasted.
An Edwardian by birth, Loelia Ponsonby became a leading 'Bright Young Thing' in the 1920s and went on to marry the 2nd Duke of Westminster - the legendary sybarite 'Bendor', whose yacht features in Noel Coward's play Private Lives.
Coward also wrote the foreword to the Duchess's well-received memoirs. He did so, he said, 'cowed by the steely inflexibility of her tone and a look in her eye that I suspect caused the late Duke of Westminster some uneasy moments'. Another friend, Ian Fleming, used her as the model for Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond books.
Loelia Mary Ponsonby was born on Feb 6 1902, the only daughter of the courtier Sir Frederick Ponsonby, later 1st Lord Sysonby. 'Fritz' Ponsonby was assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V, and wrote Recollections of Three Reigns.
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| Loelia Ponsonby on her way to marry Bendor, Duke of Westminster. |
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Young Loelia once occupied the lap of Edward VII and amused His Majesty by seizing his beard and demanding: “But King, where's your crown?” Her childhood - spent variously at St James's Palace, Park House at Sandringham and Birkhall - was, as she recalled, made irksome by a succession of fierce foreign governesses. She escaped from the stiffness of her parents' world into the hedonism of “the Bright Young People”.
Their pranks included treasure hunts and impersonating reporters to obtain interviews from famous people. The older generation were duly shocked, although in her own old age Loelia Lindsay insisted that it was 'just light-hearted fun'.
Her own contribution was to invent the 'bottle-party' in 1926, when, for economic reasons, guests were bidden to bring their own drink. The first guest was the author Michael Arlen, bearing a dozen bottles of pink champagne.
Towards the end of the 1920s Loelia met Bendor Westminster, a selfish, spoilt, twice-divorced playboy, though a generous landlord and gallant officer. The diarist 'Chips' Channon summed him up as 'a mixture of Henry VIII and Lorenzo Il Magnifico'.
The Duke courted Miss Ponsonby in style, showering her with diamonds. A typical incident occurred one night in her sleeper en route for Venice when she woke with an uncomfortable lump digging into her: it was an emerald and diamond brooch.
They married in 1930 in a blaze of publicity, with Winston Churchill as best man. The new Duchess became chatelaine of the Gothic palace of Eaton in Cheshire, as well as houses in Scotland, Wales and France, to say nothing of the steam yacht and a sailing ship.
But the marriage was not a success. The Duchess found Bendor a man of changing moods - charming and generous one moment, furious and cruel the next. Their choice of friends differed considerably. James Lees-Milne described the Duchess's married life as 'a definition of unadulterated hell'.
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| The newly married couple emerging from the marriage ceremony. |
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The marriage was dissolved in 1947. By this time the Duchess had established a new life for herself, in considerably reduced circumstances, at Send Grove in Surrey, where she was a skilful hostess with impeccable taste.
She was an expert needlewoman, with a knack of incorporating beads into flowers and leaves. The actor Ernest Thesiger gave her his collection of beautiful multi-coloured beads and she once threaded 20 shades of mauve into a dusky rose.
A talented horticulturist, she transformed a muddy rubbish dump at Send into a magnificent garden. She would bind roses high up a tree-trunk and then allow them to tumble over, giving the impression of a floral waterfall.
In the 1950s Loelia Westminster worked as a feature editor for House and Garden, and covered Grace Kelly's wedding in Monte Carlo. Besides her memoirs she published an evocative album of photographs, Cocktails and Laughter (1983), edited by Hugo Vickers.
She found much happiness in her second marriage, in 1969, to Sir Martin Lindsay of Dowhill, 1st Bt, Arctic explorer, Gordon Highlander, Conservative MP and historian of the Baronetage. He died in 1981.
Hugo Vickers writes: Some years ago I was discussing the new style of obituary with Loelia and she fixed me with a steely eye, and announced: 'Now I'm counting on you for a good spread when the time comes.' I rise to the challenge.
Loelia's life was almost a classic 20th century Cinderella story. It was, she readily admitted, one of rare privilege.
Yet the contrasts were too extreme for comfort: a stern childhood, the seemingly fairy-tale marriage, the sorrow that followed - including incidents that would make some of today's court cases look tame. She told me she had consigned to paper the story of a night when the Duke of Westminster, in one of his rages, tried to strangle her.
Loelia was a mixture of two souls. On the one hand she was insecure, an inheritance from childhood. 'I was most unhappy,' she recalled. 'I never learned a thing. And I was out of everything for a very long time because I was too shy to speak.'
Her parents were so strict that they often put her in the wrong unfairly. In later life, as a defence mechanism, she sometimes wrongfooted her friends. |
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| Eaton Hall, the Chesire pile of the Westminsters built originally in the early 18th century on land that had been in the Grosvenor family since the 15th century. The house shown here was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a somewhat smaller French chateau style mansion. |
On the other hand, she had infinite patience and imagination, and made needlework designs of great finery, even picking out the clouds in a sky with strands of her own hair. Her house at Send was full of painstaking work -a wonderful hand-woven carpet, a mirror adorned with shells hand-picked by her in Australia. Her beautiful collection has been bequeathed to the National Trust.
As a hostess she had the skill of a conductor, imperceptibly bringing the silent to life, so that everyone had their say. Nor was she lacking in confidence; I once saw an American guest reach for the decanter of wine, whereupon her restraining hand descended with some alacrity. She lived in a world in which feuds consumed considerable energy, 'cutting dead' was part of the vocabulary and the morning telephone buzzed with enjoyable gossip in her rich, melodic voice. She was celebrated, too, for such aphorisms as 'Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life'.
By her own choice Loelia spent her last years in nursing homes, first in Surrey and latterly in Pimlico, where the matron gave an annual Christmas party at which delicious champagne flowed and the atmosphere was about as far from a geriatric establishment as you could hope to find.
Though Loelia always claimed rather to dislike Margaret Argyll, another resident, they were thrown together in their last days.
Matron told me she had taken them out to tea: 'The Duchess of Argyll wanted to go to the Ritz and Lady Lindsay to Claridge's, but I took them both to the Carlton Towers and they had a wonderful time.'
In her rooms Loelia recreated the atmosphere of Send in miniature, with her favourite furniture, pictures and needlework. 'To think,' she would say, 'that at one time I used to own half London, with 50 valets, and now I am reduced to one room.'
She retained a youthful enjoyment of life, regularly visited by old friends 'that I've known since I came out of the egg'.
Some of her reminiscences were broadcast on BBC Radio 4, such as the occasion at a ball at Balmoral when all her party, as a joke, decided to kiss Queen Mary's hand on presentation. When Loelia's turn came, she found, to her lasting horror, that she had left the perfect impress of red lipstick on the white-gloved royal hand.
Looking back on her life on her 90th birthday, Loelia reflected on the contrasts of her life: 'Rich as Croesus, then not a penny … That was all very exciting, I must say. It ended badly, but things like that do end badly. I never could have done any better. I was out of my depth the whole time. It had moments, there's no question about it. I can see how lucky I've been compared to other people.'
-- Hugo Vickers |
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