Life Worth Living (27 page)

In December 1977, President Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel resulted in the Camp David Accord, which now pitted Gaddafi
against the very Western governments with whom he had so recently been cultivating good relations and a good image. ‘Georgia,’ the Ambassador said to me on 28 December, ‘I didn’t want to ruin your Christmas with this, but Tripoli now has different political needs from when we employed you, and the Foreign Ministry are asking if you would be gracious enough to resign. Everyone appreciates all you’ve done, and of course we’ll still continue to support the many worthy charities you foster.’

‘I fully understand the predicament,’ I said. ‘You will have my resignation as soon as I can type it up.’

‘You don’t have to be so quick, Georgia,’ he laughed. ‘No one is throwing you out. Take your time, as much time as you want.’

When they gave me my pay cheque, I was delighted that they had been kind enough to pay me till the spring. After a month’s rest I began searching for a new job.

Four Lloyd’s underwriters were advertising for someone to run their office, in those days adjoining the Wigmore Hall, one of London’s premier concert venues. The job started at 10 a.m. (crucial for someone who was seldom in bed before two) and finished at 4 p.m. (most convenient for drinks parties and charity committee meetings). I turned up for my interview on a blisteringly cold February morning in a black diamond mink coat with matching muff.

‘It’s the muff that got you the job,’ says David Hornsby, nephew of the Marquis of Reading, who has remained a close friend. Although I earned less than I had at the embassy, I was far happier. I had far more in common with three of the four men for whom I worked. David, John Avedon, John Cregan and I shared a wicked sense of humour and had similar views on life and I felt a part of a whole instead of like a prized object on a pedestal. Nor was the work too arduous. There were whole days when there was nothing to do except read newspapers and organise my social life. When there was work to be done, I did it, of course, but even then, the three men, being gentlemen, understood that few things in Britain took second place to one’s social life. If I were on the committee for an impending ball or concert, they happily let me jam the switchboard and shunt their work to one side until the big day had passed.

It was not all one-way traffic: I got them on to the List for Royal Ascot, and always made myself available to help impress clients at lunch in the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s or for dinner in town with prospective American ‘names’. Peter Green, the chairman, was a good friend of John Cregan; John Avedon had a secret route through to Ian Posgate, the miracle-worker whose syndicates always made fortunes for those lucky enough to gain admission. Peter Cameron-Webb was another bigwig with whom we had a connection – his wife Ann was a close friend of mine through KIDS, the Marquis of Northampton’s charity for handicapped children, whose fund-raising committee she chaired and I sat upon.

Looking back on the shambles that Lloyd’s has become, it is hard to reconcile those heady days of ultra-respectability with the outright incompetence and thievery which recent developments revealed to be rife. They were nevertheless halcyon days for me. For three and a half years I enjoyed a security and companionship above and unusual in any job, which was largely based on the friendships I built up with my three bosses. Did I want to go to the south of France during summer? Borrow John Cregan’s house at Gassin? Join David and John Avedon for smoked salmon and strawberries and cream in some little garden tucked away in the middle of nowhere? The pace was so leisurely that there was always time for laughter.

Like my Libyan employers, my Lloyd’s bosses were protective when publicity reared its head, which it often did, now that my libel actions were settled. Nigel Dempster, the
Daily Mail
’s gossip columnist, had a particular obsession with me which exceeded even the snideness for which Richard Compton Miller, the slick curly-haired number from the
Daily Express
, was justly renowned. Handbags at dawn might have been their aim, but in my book men don’t beat women up – not with words; not with innuendo; not even with column inches or handbags. Their poison prompted David Hornsby to volunteer to accompany me to one of my court appearances. The police were prosecuting Grania, Lady Duff Gordon for making menacing telephone calls to me in a case that was typical of the trigger a life such as mine can have upon the fantasies of others.

Grania Duff Gordon had once been a great beauty. A model for Balmain and the first wife of Sir Andrew Duff Gordon, she drove herself out of a good marriage. Our paths only crossed once or twice and she seemed perfectly civilised. Then she conceived the bizarre idea that a small group of aristocrats, including one of the Fitzalan-Howards and me, was intent on selling Britain down the drain to the communists. Thereafter, she hounded us with telephone calls at all hours of the day and night.

At first I tried to be nice, and when that failed, understanding. In the end I contacted the police, who charged her. She pleaded guilty, was fined and banned from communicating with me, a ban with which she complied until a year or so later. Then her obsessions took a sexual turn, focusing on some inelegant fantasies concerning me and her former boyfriend, Count Artur Tarnowski. This time I insisted that the police put a stop to her ravings without recourse to a trial. The last time, the press had been out in force for each of the three hearings, turning the whole thing into a circus. The mischief they would create with sexual stories could easily be imagined. Whether the police succeeded, or whether it was my friend Patricia Baldwin, who knew Grania’s brother, I shall never know, but someone got Grania to get her claws out of me.

Not all of the fantasies for which I was the catalyst were so disturbed. Out of the blue, an eminent financier I knew approached me on behalf of a friend of his. ‘He’s the monarch of a Middle Eastern state. He wants a Western-style Queen. She has to be from a good family. She has to be good-looking. She must be good with people, for he wants her primarily for the
public role she’ll play. She’s got to be intelligent, and she also has to have a good character, because she can’t mess around on him once they’re married. Do you know anyone who’d fit the bill?’

I compiled a list of possibilities with notes beside each name. The problem was, hardly any of the candidates had the looks, the charm and the character, and of the few who did have all three, not one was the type to go for such an arrangement. Feeling an utter failure, I met with my friend to convey the bad news. With only the most perfunctory of looks at the list over which I had slaved, he said, ‘Do you want the role?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where have you been living? Don’t you read newspapers?’ I asked irritably.

‘So does what the papers say rule you out of the running?’

I gave no more than a slight nod of the head.

‘In fact, Georgie, it’s you he wants. He’s seen you on television; he knows Lebanon well, and the Ziadie family. He’s heard good reports about you.’

‘I can’t believe he wouldn’t mind about my medical history.’

‘Middle Easterners take a more compassionate view of birth defects than Westerners. He’s also a pragmatist. No one will ever write a word against you in any Middle Eastern publication, at least not while you’re Queen. Those rulers stick together and look out for each other’s interests. Even the English papers will lay off once the British government has a quiet word with the newspaper owners. Which they will – you can depend upon it.’

I was so taken aback I didn’t know what to say. ‘Why are you negotiating on his behalf?’ I finally managed.

‘I’m not negotiating. That will come later, when his representatives hammer out a marriage contract with your father’s representatives. This is his way of showing you that he’s not old fashioned and that he’s thoughtful.’

Otherwise, I suppose he’d simply have approached Daddy, cutting me and my wishes out of the picture.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t be so negative. At least give it some thought. You’ll have your own airline. And he is good-looking. He looks Pakistani more than Arab.’

‘What an intriguing definition of beauty you have,’ I observed drily.

‘Georgie,’ he said impatiently, ‘stop being flippant. This is no joke. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will never be offered to more than a handful of girls all over the world. Think of the odds. Maybe five out of the billions of human beings on the face of this earth. Think. You can be a Queen. You’ll have
palaces and ladies-in waiting and servants galore. Money will never be a problem again, no matter how long you live.’

‘Will I have to sleep with him?’

‘Of course you will. But he has three other wives and all those Arabs have countless concubines.’

‘But I won’t be in love with him.’

‘No, that you won’t,’ my friend, who knew how romantic I was, agreed.

‘It’s really prostitution on the most glorious scale, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t go all soppy on me, please. This is a great honour and you know from your own family that that’s how many marriages are arranged.’

‘And if the marriage doesn’t work?’

‘He’ll divorce you. You’ll have the title of princess, your own house wherever you wish, and an income suitable to your rank. You could do worse.’

‘What about religion?’ I asked, certain no Muslim would want a Christian wife.

‘You’ll have to become a Muslim. And even if the marriage doesn’t work out, you’ll have to remain one. Recanting is a capital offence for Mohammedans.’

‘I don’t suppose you know it,’ I said, ‘but one of the Ziadies is the Archbishop of Beirut. I can see why your ruler doesn’t mind my past: he has something much more significant as leverage. A member of one of the Middle East’s best-known Christian families becoming a Muslim. God, wouldn’t all the Muslims love that!’

I wish I could say the offer tempted me, but it did not. Giving up my religion was unthinkable. Moreover, the idea of being marooned in a strange land, surrounded by strange people, with a man I didn’t love seemed too high a price to pay. My own airline I did not need, though it has always amused me that it was used as an inducement.

I still hankered after emotional fulfilment, and this yearning, of course, was not purely a matter of current emotional need. All my life I had felt that my father did not love me. While I would later come to see that he did, this belief was not totally unfounded. His rejection of me far exceeded the aloofness he displayed with his other children, none of whom felt spurned the way I did, because they had not been. What I needed as an adult in a man was therefore more than just a sexual partner. I needed a new daddy, one who would wash away all the pain that my father’s rejection had caused. Until that happened, I would always be saddled with this sense of loss.

In the meantime, there was no shortage of really nice, eligible men to wine and dine me. Some, such as Shane, Earl
Alexander of Tunis, did not get further than the dinner table; with others, among them Oliver, Lord Henley, I formed rather closer associations. Oliver went on to become a conservative minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. I first met him before he succeeded to his father’s title. We ran into each other again in April 1978, at Bennett, the Battersea nightclub which Liz Brewer, the society PR woman, launched to huge acclaim. It became the most fashionable club in Europe for all of about six months.

At the time, I thought of Oliver as nothing more than a friend. I often went out to dinner and parties with masculine innocents, and entertained them at the weekly dinner parties I had. But I would have had to have been blind not to notice how attractive he was. He was well over six feet tall and very handsome (the Edens are an exceptionally good-looking family – even his cousin, Sir Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon and prime minister during the Suez Crisis, was better known for his looks than for his political ability). But I did not view him as a potential lover any more than I did my other chums, who included Roddy Llewellyn (then Princess Margaret’s boyfriend) and Ned Ryan (her greatest male friend) until one evening after a party, when, as we were sitting having a cup of coffee, Oliver changed gears. One thing led to another and we ended up in bed. He was a wonderfully tender lover, and I woke up feeling more relaxed than I had felt for a long time.

Shortly afterwards, Oliver and I were sitting in Bennett having dinner when he suddenly said, ‘You’d make a lovely Lady Henley. How about it?’

‘Is this a proposal, Oliver?’

‘If you want it to be,’ said Oliver, who was a barrister, in true advocate’s style. I thought very quickly. Fond as I was of Oliver, I was not in love with him, nor would I ever be. Tender as he was, the chemical fireworks were simply not there. And I didn’t believe that he was in love with me, either. I had to be careful how I conveyed my refusal, because I wanted our friendship to emerge unscathed. I decided that making light of the whole thing would be the best way of dealing with it. ‘Oliver, you’re not in love with me. You simply want a glamorous Lady Henley. Why don’t you wait a bit till you find someone who’s glamorous and whom you’re in love with? Now, how about ordering me another glass of Cointreau?’

Having acknowledged that I did not want our relationship to progress beyond its present limits, I now felt I had to call a halt to the physical side. Having spent so many years living in limbo, I did not want to muddy the waters as far as other men were concerned, and I didn’t want him falling in love with me when I liked him so much and wanted what was best for him. Besides, there was little point in continuing with a relationship that I knew could never lead anywhere. Fortunately, Oliver found his glamorous and charming wife within a few years, and I went to his wedding to see him safely married off.

While I was having my fling with Oliver, I was also seeing Eli Wallitt, the multimillionaire American businessman who was Bernie Cornfeld’s partner in IOS. But Eli was only ever a friend
because I simply wasn’t physically attracted to him. Nothing he did could alter that.

‘I’ll get you to change your mind,’ he said the second time we went out to dinner. ‘I’m used to motivating people. I was responsible for motivating thousands. It might take time, but I’ll find the way through to you.’