Life Worth Living (13 page)

I enjoyed charity work, but it was merely a stop-gap until I could embark upon my real vocation: being a wife. Unfortunately, I was about to be derailed by yet another handsome and unsuitable man. Two weeks before Andrée’s concert, in Epiphany, the most fashionable discotheque in Jamaica, where I’d been with Michael Silvera and his wife, Suzanne Rees, a tall, strapping stranger had come up to me and asked me to dance. As we had not been properly introduced, I was taken aback by his forwardness, but his physical appeal swept aside such considerations. Nevertheless, while we were dancing, I had misgivings about this handsome stranger, who identified himself as Ron from Wales. Even when he asked me to a party the following day, I still couldn’t decide whether I was attracted to him. It was only when we got to the party, where I didn’t know a soul – it was all new people and British expatriates – and we started to talk that I realised how highly intelligent Ron was. I’ve always been a sucker for a good mind in tandem with a good body, and our romance was underway.

To say that Ron and I were ill suited would be an understatement. An accountant by profession, and thoroughly British in his attitudes and perspective, he had recently come to Jamaica to work for Peat Marwick, a firm whose senior partner was the father of my friend Joanna Thwaites. Ron was my introduction to the extreme destructive preoccupation most British people have with class. Traits that anyone else would marked down to a personal failing or even as the fault of the cat were invariably attributed to class. For instance, Ron could not
understand why he could not address my mother by her Christian name. When I explained that she expected my friends to maintain a respectful distance and either call her Aunt Gloria or Mrs Ziadie (depending on the relationship with their parents), he decided that my family thought they were better than everyone else. Thereafter, he gained her undying antipathy by addressing her in an overfamiliar manner as ‘my dear’, beginning a set piece which incensed both of them but which I found funny. ‘How are you, my dear?’ he would ask every time he saw her. ‘Very well thank you
without you
,’ she would reply, pointedly turning her head away from him.

Daddy did not feel so strongly about Ron, but, knowing that Mummy did, he asked me on several occasions to stop seeing him. I refused, because I genuinely liked him (he was a decent guy, for all his nonsense), and because he was good company, when we weren’t rowing about class. Moreover, I enjoyed his friends. The men were all rugby-players, and their girlfriends mostly representative of the new Jamaica, with the exception of Lorraine Drew, who was from a similar background to mine. Lorraine, Opal Groves and I used to spend many a Saturday afternoon huddled in deep gossip while the men were knocking the daylights out of one another on the rugby field. Afterwards, we cooed in all the right places while they relived a game we hadn’t even bothered to watch – those were the days when girls played the feminine role to the hilt.

I would be a liar if I claimed that I did not enjoy playing the little woman to Ron’s big, strong man, and he undoubtedly expanded my horizons. But this obsession with class, above all, made me aware that there could be no future with Ron, even if my parents could be talked round to grudging acceptance, so I was keeping my eyes fully open for a husband while he kept my bed warm. Then, on Christmas Day, Ron did something that precipitated the end. After dinner, we dropped in, as is the Jamaican custom, on my relations, ending up at the house of my father’s cousin Joe-Joe and his family. Joe-Joe and his wife Dorothy had been wonderfully supportive to me, and his youngest sister, Toni, was one of my closest friends. Ron knew this, but it didn’t stop him leaving us chatting in the drawing room while he went into the kitchen to tell the cook, who had been with the family for nearly thirty years, that the Ziadies were exploiters of labour and she was being taken advantage of. She was so incensed by what she saw as Ron’s abuse of Joe-Joe’s hospitality that she recounted the conversation to Joe-Joe as soon as we left.

Joe-Joe, who was the kindest and most benign of men, telephoned my father in an apoplectic rage and left a message for me: I was always welcome, but that troublemaking boyfriend of mine was never to cross his threshold again. The relationship might have survived had Ron been able to see how misguided his behaviour had been. However, when he was still trying to justify himself weeks later, while I became increasingly vituperative about what I now described as his disloyalty, we admitted that we had come to the parting of the ways. We did remain friends – and I even had a fling with him the following Christmas – but as far as anything else was concerned, there was no way back. But the path towards marriage was in sight, had I but known it.

It was a circuitous route, and had I not met Kari Lai the previous year in the Jockey Club Enclosure (her husband Eddie owned the racetrack), I would never have encountered Colin Campbell. Kari and I had become great friends, and through her, I had met the present Duke of Marlborough’s sister, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill. Sarah had a beautiful house, Content, in Montego Bay, and was almost a resident, spending half the year on the island. She filled her time organising the most entertaining house parties, and virtually every evening she and Montego Bay’s other noted British semi-resident, Dolly Burns (only child of the famous art dealer Lord Duveen), threw dinner parties. Sometimes the two grande dames attended one another’s events, but essentially they were rivals for the crown of premier hostess, and the Montego Bay social set effectively divided into Sarah people and Dolly people. Sarah had a great personality and a wide and varied circle of friends, but Dolly was nothing but a committed socialite who rushed around from party to party booking everyone up two weeks in advance. With the intolerance of youth, I looked down upon her as having ‘false’ values, and invariably declined her invitations.

Two weeks after breaking up with Ron, I drove down to Content for a long weekend, where Sarah and I were joined by Kari, Eddie and Ian Hamilton. Ian, who was not handsome, but personable and great fun, pulled out all the stops to flirt with me, and gradually I became drawn to him. I did not hop into bed with him, the way I had with Bill Madden; instead, I let him work. Think of yourself as Everest and the man as a mountaineer. Let him hack away with his pickaxe until he reaches the peak. That was my attitude, and I stuck to it until we reached Kingston and were safely ensconced in my brother’s pied à terre, where we consummated our romance. By my parents’ criteria, Ian was suitable. Although not rich, he was comfortable. He owned a stud farm in Newbury, England, while his elder brother farmed Caymanas Estate, one of Jamaica’s larger sugar estates and the site of the racetrack. The Hamiltons were as racing mad as the Ziadies, so to that extent there was a common interest, although I must say that our greatest bond was horizontal.

When the time came for Ian to return to England, he asked if I would come and see him? I thought I might be able to arrange it. By this time, Daddy had finally learned that nagging was not the best way of getting me to do something. He therefore sensibly kept out of my hair, though he showed his approval of my relationship with Ian by promising me a plane ticket to Greece to cruise on Sarah’s and the Onassis yacht in June, stopping off for two weeks on the way to see Ian. In the intervening couple of months, I spent a great deal of time with Kari and Sarah at Content.
Papillon,
the movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, was being filmed near Montego Bay, and we became friendly with the cast and crew, especially with Tony Masters, the art director who had won Oscars for
Nicholas and Alexandra
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Evening after evening, Sarah established her ascendency over Dolly Burns by having Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Dustin and Anne Hoffman and other visiting actors and actresses for dinner, although her
coup de grâce
was when she was asked to entertain the Shah of Iran’s second wife, Princess Soraya. Her fiancé had just been killed in a plane crash, so she was not
exactly full of beans, but she was sweet and very, very beautiful.

Steve McQueen was my all-time favourite because he was so straightforward. The first time he came to dinner, he confessed to me as we chatted on the sofa that he had nearly backed out.

‘I’ve never met blue-bloods before. I don’t know how to act.’

‘You’re joking,’ I said, thinking he was.

‘No, no, no, I really haven’t. What do I do?’

I laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you. If you prick the veins of everyone here, you’ll find the blood flows red each and every time. Just be yourself. The one thing no one can stand is pretentiousness.’

We separated for dinner, which was served under the stars on the patio. The conversation bubbled along as everyone tucked into a delicious fish soup made by Melvia, the cook. Suddenly, Steve threw back his chair, jumped up, and said as naturally as I had advised him to do,

‘Sarah, where’s the nearest john? I need to take a piss.’

All the other soup spoons were suspended in shock. I quickly looked to check Ali MacGraw’s reaction. She was coolly drinking her soup as if nothing untoward had occurred.

After Mr McGrath, as Sarah’s sister Lady Caroline Waterhouse kept on calling him, had left, we all decided we liked them both. At the time, they were about the most glamorous couple on earth. Ali was certainly beautiful, dressed all in white with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and not a scrap of make-up, but still so elegant. When they left, we chewed over what she could have meant when she told Mary-Anne Innes Ker that they were a ‘different’ couple.

At Sarah’s, there was almost as quick a turnover of house guests from Britain, the US and the Continent as there were of dinner guests. After her sister Caroline, one of Princess Alexandra’s ladies-in-waiting, left, her son Michael flew out with his good friend Mark Shand, who would later achieve fame as an intrepid traveller and as the brother of Camilla Parker Bowles. Naturally, I placed both Michael and Mark under my marital microscope. Michael was good-looking, with a hairy chest and dreamy eyes, while Mark was hairless of body but hairy of head, with craggy features and an endearing manner. But neither, it must be said, held much appeal for me, though we had huge fun while they were in Jamaica. We went on picnics up the Martha Brae River, swam, went nightclubbing and to dinner parties. Every now and then Mark would do something which made me wonder if he fancied me, but no sooner did I get a glimpse of interest than it would be concealed. The evening before he left, however, he spent about two hours chatting to me in the pool house long after everyone else had gone to bed. I wanted to see if I had intuited correctly. Eventually even my vanity could not prop up my eyelids any
longer, so I had to draw the encounter to a close before receiving the confirmation I sought.

Months later, when I was in London, I ran into Mark in Annabel’s on Berkeley Square. He made a beeline for me and asked me to dance. On the dancefloor I discerned that he was indeed happy to see me. ‘I’m so glad to run into you,’ he kept saying, as if he were trying to hark back to the non-starter in Jamaica. Although not the most patient of people, I was curious to see how this was going to pan out. So when Mark asked me not to go home with my friends, but to let him drop me off, I agreed.

Mark’s conduct in the flat where I was staying at 7 Bina Gardens (he bought a flat beneath it himself a few weeks afterwards), still brings a smile to my face twenty-four years later. I went into the kitchen to get us something to drink, and, when I returned, there was Mark, stark naked from the waist down, with a proud and magnificent erection.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I snapped, rather angry that he had jumped the gun in such an unmistakable way. Had I said yes yet? Had I even indicated anything so much as a possible maybe? Such presumption really was insupportable.

‘I’m shy. I like you and I didn’t know how to tell you.’

‘Well, you don’t look shy to me. Indeed, you look rather proud,’ I retorted. ‘Now, please put your trousers back on.’

Mark pulled on his trousers sheepishly, battling for a good minute or two with his steely member before it relaxed enough to be tucked away. Unsurprisingly, poor Mark never tried to get into my knickers again, although he has always been affable whenever I have seen him since.

My encounter with Mark Shand would not have taken place if my relationship with Ian had not come to an end the way it did. Two weeks of the Newbury countryside was enough to kill any interest I had in continuing an intimate relationship with him. While I enjoyed his company and that of his friends – notably Vickie Learmont (Lady Valentine Thynne), Henry, Earl Sondes and Confrey Phillips, the band-leader – and the time we spent in London at places like the Clermont Club, where the Earl of Lucan and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll’s first husband, Charlie Sweeny, were regular fixtures, I simply could not abide being buried in rural England. One morning I woke up and simply couldn’t face another barren day with Ian puttering in the garden. I reached for the telephone and rang Mary Anne Innes-Ker, a friend from Jamaica, to ask her if I could go and stay with her until I found somewhere else. Sarah was delayed in California, and God knew where Jackie and Ari were, so Greece was on hold. After a week at Mary Anne’s, I moved into the flat at Bina Gardens, sharing with two other girls. One of them, Diana Ballard, became a good friend. I was also fortunate that quite a few friends I knew from Jamaica lived in London. Most of these were well placed, so my introductions were impeccable. Bobby Alexander, for instance, owned a bloodstock agency with offices in Piccadilly where David Cecil, brother of the leading trainer, Henry, worked. His office was
staffed with girls from good English families who were my age and became friends. One of them shared a house with Georgina Blunt, who was an object of adoration to Prince Michael of Kent (handsome and unassuming then, before he married the impossibly grand German ‘socialite’ Marie-Christine von Reibnitz and grew that fluffy beard which I find repellent, but which makes people say that he looks like his grandfather, King George, and the last Czar).