A Prince Among Stones

To my wife

Contents

Introduction

1 ‘Only children know what they are looking for’

2 ‘There is a good deal to be said for frivolity...’

3 ‘Experience is what you get while looking for something else’

4 ‘Only sick music makes money today’

5 ‘I know how men in exile feed on dreams’

6 ‘Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.’

7 ‘Corruption never has been compulsory’

8 ‘They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself’

9 ‘A lion is at liberty who can follow the laws of his own nature’

10 ‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend’

11 ‘I must put my foot in a bit of truth, and then I can fly free’

12 ‘When you can spend your life doing something you love, you are living a very fine life’

Epilogue

Appendix: The ancestry of Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg by Guy Sainty

Acknowledgements

Image Section 1

Image Section 2

Lineage Trees

A Note on the Author

Introduction

On 2 July 1969, a Wednesday evening, my wife and I gave a ball in the garden of our house in Holland Park. We had never thrown such a large party before: 500 guests, two live bands, one very large marquee. My wife was keen to have a theme for the night, and we decided that white should be the leitmotiv.

The décor for what we had dubbed the White Ball was conceived by David Mlinaric: splendid white floral displays, swathes of pure white drapery. Guests were expected – though not obliged – to arrive dressed all in white. My own outfit was a white suit, shirt and black bow tie, and white patent leather shoes, with, for flourish, a pair of gold buckles. My wife was ‘glamorously understated’ in a lace trouser suit. Only one guest bucked the trend. Marianne Faithfull arrived with Mick Jagger wearing a black gipsy dress and headscarf, and not only got away with it but drew all eyes. Mick was wearing what I can only describe as a rustic smock – which, to give him his due,
was
white. He looked like a cross between a milkmaid and one of the Evzones, the soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Athens.

The guest list was, now I look back at it, extremely varied. At the time most balls were held in great English houses in London or the country, or perhaps Claridge’s or the Hyde Park Hotel. The hosts would invite other suitable English families and maybe a handful of friends from abroad. At our White Ball, nearly a third of the friends we had invited were from overseas, a polyglot mélange of European grandees mingled with local British society, young and old. Lady Cochrane, née Sursock (a prominent family in the Lebanon), had asked us to invite her son and newly wed daughter-in-law with an inspired sales pitch. ‘They’re very small and they don’t drink,’ she told us. We took them; both facts were true.

The black-and-white photographs that we still have in a white leather-bound album are a snapshot in time of a group of people whose lives afterwards took many unexpected turns. Arnaud de Rosnay, deep in conversation with the model and actress Marisa Berenson, was an aristocratic French playboy, who later married Isabel Goldsmith; he became a pioneer of windsurfing and disappeared in 1984 attempting to cross the Straits of Formosa. The interior designer Diana Phipps, née Sternberg, was an emigrée Czech aristocrat, who helped the future President Václav Havel while he was in prison and later returned to Bohemia to restore one of the family castles which the Havel government had handed back to her. And at a table with John Betjeman’s daughter, Candida, Lord Milford Haven and Diane Halfin (who married Prince Egon von Fürstenberg a fortnight later) is Sunny von Bülow, whom we had introduced to her husband Claus two or three years earlier.

Actors and film producers mingled with the old upper class, writers and photographers with businessmen. The photographs show Cecil Beaton and the Duchess of Devonshire, Princess Margaret and Graham Mattison, an American lawyer, stockbroker and business adviser to Barbara Hutton, a man who, as I recall, was
infallibly
wrong in all his market suggestions. The film producer Sam Spiegel was there, and Peter Sellers, in a long wig and sporting a CND symbol, with Miranda Quarry, the Australian model who became his second wife the following year and is now Lady Stockton.

I had first met Mick Jagger towards the end of 1968, through an introduction by the art dealer Christopher Gibbs. Christopher, who knew the Rolling Stones well and had had them to stay at a house he was renting in Morocco, approached me to see if I would consider taking care of the finances of Mick and the rest of the Rolling Stones. The name of the group meant virtually nothing to me at the time, but I asked my wife to tell me about them. She gave me a briefing and my curiosity was tickled, and so Mick and I had seen each other frequently during the early part of 1969 before the White Ball that July.

We were very lucky that evening. There was no rain, nor was it too hot. Through Mick’s connections we had music from the Skatalites and Yes, who were just about to release their first album. The ball lasted well into the early morning, continuing after Josephine and I had gone to bed. My daughter Dora’s nanny later told us that the final guests had headed out on to Holland Villas Road at six o’clock. ‘Who were they?’ we asked. ‘They were wearing white,’ she reported confidently.

This party, oddly enough, marked the beginning of a new chapter in my working life. At the time, had I been asked I would have imagined that in my role as the managing director of the merchant bank Leopold Joseph my immediate future would have entailed increasing the value of the bank and providing a platform from which we could, eventually, sell it. Life is, perhaps happily, never so predictable.

The same night as the party Brian Jones was found dead at his house in Sussex. Three days later the Rolling Stones performed a most impressive memorial concert in his honour in Hyde Park, in front of nearly a quarter of a million people. Mick wore his milkmaid’s dress again, and read some moving verses from Shelley’s
Adonaïs
. The effect was almost like the Nuremberg Rallies.

The crowds, I thought, could definitely have started pulling down the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane if they had felt moved to do so. I sat on the main stand and chatted to Mick before they played, not about his and the band’s finances, which I was about to start reviewing, but of general matters. I asked him whether he thought that he could move the crowd into action by his voice in the way that Hitler had done. He thought carefully and replied, ‘Yes. To get the crowd to pull something down would probably take twenty minutes, but to get them to build something could be done but would take much longer, say an hour.’

Things were changing, and not just in the fortunes of the Rolling Stones. The course of my own life was certainly never the same again.

1

 

 

‘Only children know what they are looking for'

 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Le Petit Prince

 

 

 

When I was fourteen, at boarding school shortly after the end of the Second World War, one of my classmates came across a comment in the social column of a paper talking about my parents getting a divorce. This was complete news to me. I had no inkling whatsoever that they were planning to do something quite so irreversible – and when I heard I was much disturbed. I went straight down to the school office and asked if I could place a reverse-charge telephone call to my mother.

I got through, and asked her, ‘What's happened?' ‘Darling,' she replied, ‘I wasn't going to tell you, because it doesn't count.' It was her own odd interpretation of what it meant in the eyes of the Church: in her mind she had married my father and that was that. For her this divorce was purely a civil arrangement that in no way altered the fact of her marriage.

What was strange was that I had not realised that my parents had split up long before, when I was very young, maybe four or five. They lived in separate places, and indeed separate countries, my father principally in England, my mother mainly in France, but periodically they were together, and whenever I was with them both they seemed to get on very well. They certainly never spoke critically of each other.

On one occasion, puzzled by our living arrangements, I had gone so far as to question my mother, with whom I lived, on the reason all three of us did not live in the same house. ‘Well, it's very easy to understand,' she said, explaining, quite plausibly, that ‘Papa likes to get up early. And I like lying in bed and getting up in time for lunch. So it's really much more convenient this way.'

And so it was. I would see my father on and off (more off than on). From time to time I would go and have lunch or dinner with him where he lived just off the King's Road in Chelsea, or occasionally stay for a night or two. Whenever I saw him, there was always some nice young woman there, too, but I have few memories of any of them as they were usually never there again the next time I visited.

But I do remember staying with him when I was ten or twelve and he was living with the actress Googie Withers. Born in Karachi to a Dutch-German mother and a father who was a Royal Navy officer, she had been given the nickname Googie by her ayah: it meant ‘little pigeon'. I much enjoyed meeting her, because I was fascinated by her being a film star and having seen a number of her films: she had become famous during the previous few years, appearing in
The Lady Vanishes
and
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
. She was charming, pretty and also particularly kind to me.

There was one Easter holiday a couple of years later when my mother was in New York and my father told me he couldn't have me to stay, because, he said, it was complicated for breakfast. That I really thought was carrying things too far, although I didn't much mind. I made great friends with him in my teens, and we got on very well. Although he was distant, he was extremely witty and perceptive.

On the rare occasions I found myself alone with my father, he would talk to me about our background and our family tree, which interested me very much. I think it was the only thing my father ever talked about. From an early age he made me aware that I came from a certain sort of distinguished background.

He was Prince Leopold zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, from a family that can trace itself back to Luitpold Markgrave of Carinthia and later Duke of Bavaria (who died repelling the Huns in 907).

My family is a branch of the Bavarian royal house, which started its own independent history at the end of the fifteenth century as a result of the morganatic marriage of Frederick I the Victorious, Elector Palatine, and Klara Tott, a pretty lady-in-waiting at the Palatine court. Their son, Ludwig of Bavaria, was created Sovereign Count of Loewenstein-Scharffeneck by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1494. His descendants made some good marriages and were then created counts of further territories.