Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (4 page)

“‘I’m afraid that is out of the question,’ Lady Baillie said.

“Somehow she managed to get through on the telephone to her close friend, and, of course, your cousin, Whitney Straight, the vice chairman of BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation] who immediately arranged for the front seats of the tourist section of the aircraft to be removed so we could fly home in the greatest comfort with our prized new purchases arrayed on the floor in front of us.

“Arriving, finally, at Lowndes House [Granny B’s sumptuous London home], I naturally thought it must be time to catch the train back to Kent. But your grandmother had other ideas: ‘It’s been such a marvellous day, John,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out and have dinner and see a film.’

“I didn’t get to bed until the early hours of the morning, but I must say, seldom did I have as much fun as I did that day.”

That was the grandmother I knew from afar. Strong willed, always in command, and able to get people to do the most extraordinary things for her as if they were absolutely normal—which often they were categorically not.

*   *   *

Although no one was expected to swear allegiance or provide fighting men—as in the days of William the Conqueror—to protect the castle and surrounding countryside should some desperate need arise, everyone was obliged to pay close attention to the castle way regulations and follow them with great dedication. In return Granny B provided luxury on a grand scale for family and friends, and a very comfortable living for her employees.

It was the most extraordinary, bizarre kind of merry-go-round. So many sophisticated adults, children, grandchildren, estate workers, financial advisers, personal secretaries, even airline staff and casino managers, ready and willing to do their honourable best to accommodate the wishes of one singularly rich, shy, sometimes charming, always fiercely determined woman.

3.

S
ON OF
S
PONGE

In contrast to Granny B (Lady Baillie), my mother’s mother—whose American fortune made it possible for her to buy Leeds Castle and other grand properties, and to live a life of magnificent opulence—Granny A (Lady Ampthill), my father’s mother, was dealt a different hand of cards, which she played throughout her life with a force and intelligence uniquely her own. Her son, my father, the 4th Baron Ampthill, a tall, unconventionally handsome (prominent nose, jutting chin), soft-spoken, funny man with dark, brooding eyes, a keen intelligence, and a mild temper, was born Geoffrey Dennis Erskine Russell in London in 1921 to parents of uncertain compatibility whose unwritten prenup (her insistence) declared there would be no sexual relations in the marriage. His father, John Hugo Russell, known as “Stilts” because of his great height (six foot six inches), himself heir to the Ampthill title at the time, had married the wild and free-spirited Christabel Hulme Hart, daughter of Lt. Col. John Hart and Blanche Anstruther Erskine, anyway. What then happened was a pregnancy neither could explain. She was technically still a virgin, her hymen having only been partly perforated, and he said they had never had sex in the conventionally understood way. The result was a notorious divorce case—“the Case of the Virgin Birth”—which scandalized the nation and kept His/Her Majesty’s Law Courts busy from 1922 until 1976. It was a battle over legitimacy, honour, and a title that came with no land, no country house, and no money. Crumpets! Nonetheless, it was a title with historical associations of note.

*   *   *

Lord Odo Russell, my father’s great-grandfather, was the third son of Maj. Gen. Lord George William Russell (the Duke of Wellington’s aide-de-camp both before and after the Battle of Waterloo) who was the second son of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford. George’s brother, Lord John Russell, was twice prime minister of Great Britain, and John, who was created 1st Earl Russell, was the grandfather of Bertrand Russell, the renowned twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher.

Odo, whose eldest brother, Francis, became the 9th Duke of Bedford, was born in Florence in 1829 and educated at home by his mother, Elizabeth, niece of the Marquess of Hastings, governor-general of India (1813–23). His career in diplomacy included senior postings in Vienna, Paris, and Constantinople before he became England’s unofficial representative at the Vatican for twelve years. His being on good terms with the Iron Chancellor of the new German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, resulted in his appointment in 1871 as ambassador to Berlin, where he and Bismarck developed a remarkable friendship. For his efforts and consummate skill at maintaining honest relations with the hard-nosed, increasingly militaristic Germany—the reach of the British Empire was then approaching one-quarter of the earth’s surface, provoking considerable hostility in some quarters—Odo was offered a peerage by Disraeli’s Conservative administration in 1878, which he wanted to accept but was persuaded not to because of his family’s powerful Whig associations. He therefore waited until Gladstone and his own party’s return to office before being elevated to the title of Baron Ampthill in 1881. Acquiring a fortune, however, was never a motivating factor in Lord Odo’s life, and in order to maintain a suitably lavish household while representing his country abroad, he was obliged to rely, from time to time, upon the largesse of his brother the duke.

John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, was a close adviser to Henry VII and Henry VIII (as was William Paget, 1st Baron Paget, my mother’s ancestor). His descendants later became Dukes of Bedford, large-scale landowners—more than 86,000 acres, including Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and swaths of London around Covent Garden and the British Library now known as Bloomsbury—and one of England’s leading Whig political dynasties. When the Whigs were known as the Country Party, one of their founders, Lord William Russell, was implicated in the Rye House Plot of 1683 to overthrow King Charles II. He was found guilty and executed the same year but he was later exonerated and his father, the 5th Earl of Bedford, became a privy councillor under William and Mary and, by way of recompense, was created 1st Duke of Bedford and Marquess of Tavistock in 1694.

It would have been no small thing to have been denied one’s birthright with ancestors such as these.

*   *   *

“Injudicious use of a sponge” was the way Granny A became pregnant—allegedly—and I remained completely in the dark about this enterprising theory until Fred Hughes, Andy Warhol’s charming and charismatic business manager, drunkenly roared “Sponge!” in my face one evening in 1976 while dining in New York with him and Andy at Elaine’s. And I had to pretend I knew what he meant.

Three years before, in June 1973, David and I had been staying the weekend with my godmother Lady Buckhurst at Buckhurst Park, East Sussex (whose one-hundred-acre wood achieved legendary status in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books) when, at teatime, a call came through from our father, who was in London. He spoke with William (my godmother’s son, the future Earl De La Warr and a close friend of David’s) but apparently expressed no need to communicate directly with either of his sons. We were standing closer to the telephone than a matador to a bull’s horns, but that, to my consternation, had no bearing on the matter. After a brief conversation William replaced the receiver and said, “Your father wishes to inform you that you have suffered a mild elevation!” What he meant by this announcement was that Stilts had died, and we were now the sons of the 4th Lord Ampthill and were therefore entitled to be addressed as “the Honourable David” or “the Honourable Anthony Russell.”

A courtesy title—such as “the Honourable” if your father was a baron or viscount or “Lord” if your father was a marquess or duke—still possessed a modicum of pizzazz in 1960s and 1970s England. It adorned your chequebook and sometimes caused a flutter in a shopgirl’s eyes or achieved a better table in a smart restaurant. For most Americans such recognition of titles was hard to take seriously. But “class” in Great Britain and “class” in America have always been two separate entities. In the former it bears no relation to money but rests squarely on the shoulders of your family tree. In the latter it is applied to wealth, and (aside from “classy” behaviour, often referring to exceptional manners) wealth alone. I enjoyed my “elevation,” as I knew others were doing in similar circumstances. I brandished my chequebook adoringly about for a spell and remained blissfully unconcerned about the future status of my adornment.

But no sooner had the weighty news been properly digested than we found out that our father’s much younger half brother, John, an accountant in the City, had himself laid claim to the Ampthill title as well. This, obviously, was the height of impertinence, since the whole question of my father’s legitimacy had, as David once told me, been settled in the House of Lords forty-nine years before. Apparently not. John now claimed that the declaration of legitimacy my father and his mother had won when the “Virgin Birth” case was settled in their favour in the House of Lords in 1924 was not binding on the House of Lords in a peerage claim (someone claiming their title), and that it had been obtained by fraud and collusion.
Sacrebleu!
Whatever my father’s faults, or Granny A’s, fraud and collusion, I knew, were not among them.

*   *   *

If my asthma had featured prominently in the family archives of “things not discussed” the so-called Russell Baby Case was the absolute crown jewel of no comment. I never heard the affair being talked about in London, or at Leeds, by my parents or by anybody else when I was growing up. It seemed as if a blanket curfew had been imposed on words deemed unsuitable for public consumption, which, ironically, is exactly how King George V viewed the salacious revelations of my grandparents’ 1920s divorce trials. “The pages of the most extravagant French novel would hesitate to describe what has now been placed at the disposal of every boy or girl reader of the daily newspapers,” the king had lamented, carefully implicating only the French in the dastardly habit of writing in lewd language endless pages of love, lust, and fornication which, clearly, His Majesty had no time for.

The saga began in 1915 when Stilts, on leave from the navy, met my grandmother at a dance and fell in love. He was one of many dashing young officers who fell in love with the glamorous, fun-loving, and unstoppable Christabel Hart, who showed her fierce independence by working for the war effort at a factory lathe by day and dancing all night at parties and in nightclubs. She quickly forgot about Stilts, but he refused to give up the chase despite her prior warnings about the “proposal room” at the Savoy Hotel, where many suitors chose to vent their amorous intentions. My grandmother finally accepted Stilts’s marriage proposal in 1917: “I thought it would be nice and peaceful not to be pestered by men asking me to marry them.” After a brief hiccup in which she eloped to Gretna Green with Stilts’s best friend, Gilbert “Flick” Bradley (an unconsummated, overnight affair), they were married in 1918.

Lord and Lady Ampthill, courtiers to King George and Queen Mary, were so appalled they refused to attend the wedding. They had wanted their son and heir to marry the Princess Royal, not some “fast” young woman who shaved under her arms, had been educated and had lived on the seamier side of Paris, and appeared to have no concept as to how to behave in a normal, civilized fashion. As if to underscore her unsuitability, when her husband lost his job, after the war, at Vickers in Victoria Street, a guns and ammunition company, Christabel opened a dress shop in Mayfair in order to pay the bills. The shop became a huge success, but if there was one thing still absolutely beyond the pale in those days, it was for a family with links to the monarchy to be “in trade.” These, of course, were “their” rules, and my grandmother cared not a whit about anyone’s rules but her own—which inevitably caused the establishment to groan into their teacups with undisguised opprobrium.

Despite living as man and wife under the same roof in a small house in Chelsea, Granny A held fast to her prenup rules and insisted on separate bedrooms. Stilts went along with the arrangement (“Is this a man or a jelly?” my grandmother’s lawyer, Patrick Hastings, was later to ask in court) and even went so far as to regularly bring her breakfast in bed, at which time she would regale him with news about whom she had seen the previous evening and whom she was going dancing with that night.

After three years of marriage to a force of nature beyond his understanding or ability to keep up with, Stilts moved in with his parents at Oakley House, their seventeenth-century manor in Bedfordshire. His fondness for dressing up in women’s clothing had failed to impress upon his unimpressionable wife whatever needs he was endeavouring to impart, and it wasn’t long before Lady Ampthill was pressing for an annulment. Nonetheless, risking his mother’s anger, Stilts sent my grandmother flowers for her twenty-sixth birthday in June 1921.

Writing back to thank him, she suggested they have lunch, as she had some extraordinary news. Having first visited a clairvoyant and then a doctor for confirmation, she had discovered, she told him, that she was “five months gone.” They both racked their brains for an occasion when “something might have happened,” but the best Christabel could come up with was that a sleepwalking incident had concluded with lovemaking neither had been aware of.

In July 1922 my grandfather Ampthill’s side of the family laid siege to my father’s legitimacy and his mother’s honour in a divorce which dominated headlines, titillated the nation, and caused conniptions in the royal family for years. The problem for my grandmother was that she had rendered herself the easiest of targets through her unusually flamboyant way of living. Stilts’s lawyer, Sir John Simon, quoted from a letter Christabel had written to her friend Maud Acton, in which she claimed, “I have been so indiscreet all my life that he has enough evidence to divorce me about once a week.” But her “indiscretions,” as she would make abundantly clear during the two trials and two appeals, never included sleeping with any of the co-respondents (three were named, which surprised my grandmother, who had anticipated “rows”).