Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (6 page)

My father, who met my mother when he was invited by Granny B to a Leeds Castle weekend after the war, rose to be a Captain in the Irish Guards during World War II, was then General Manager of Fortnum & Mason for four years, Chairman of the New Providence Hotel in the Bahamas, a West End theatre impresario, a director of United Newspapers, Chairman of London’s Emergency Helicopter Service, and for over thirty years a distinguished member of the House of Lords, becoming Chairman of Committees in 1992. None of the above produced an accumulation of wealth beyond what Jock Whitney might have paid his staff over the course of three or four years.

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From the late nineteenth century on, the members of America’s “aristocracy,” the East Coast establishment, were businessmen and industrialists first and men of property second. In contrast, their British counterparts, with lands and often titles going back as far as a thousand years, rarely got the hang of the industrialist side of things, having grown accustomed to running their country from the comfortable perch of large country estates, imposing London mansions, and inherited seats in the House of Lords. When the wealth moved from the country to the city during the mid-nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, the landed upper classes, squeezed by higher and higher taxes following radical political change, had to adapt to making money in the newfangled way (work), and found themselves (to begin with) not very good at it.

William C. Whitney’s sons grew the family fortune and wed appropriately. Harry Payne Whitney married Gertrude Vanderbilt, the great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the second-richest man (after John D. Rockefeller) in U.S. history; she was a sculptor, an art patron, and the founder of the Whitney Museum. Their son, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, continued the family tradition of inheriting vast sums of money and then making even more. He founded the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co. Ltd. in Canada, and with his cousin Jock helped finance the film classic
Gone with the Wind
as well as backing the Technicolor Corporation. William Payne Whitney married Helen Hay, daughter of the U.S. secretary of state and former ambassador to Great Britain, John Hay. Payne inherited $63,000,000 (over a hundred billion in today’s money) from his uncle, Oliver Hazard Payne, a Standard Oil magnate (today’s equivalent might be an original Microsoft investor) who commissioned Stanford White to build his daughter and nephew a comfortable New York residence at 972 Fifth Avenue for their wedding present. Payne’s sister, Pauline, my great-grandmother, inherited her millions from her uncle and her father—less than the boys, but she wasn’t one to grumble.

Great-grandmother Pauline married Almeric, the son of Lord Alfred Paget and the grandson of Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who commanded the British cavalry at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The story goes that the earl, after one of the last cannonballs had been fired on that gory day, exclaimed to the Duke of Wellington, “By God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg!” to which the Iron Duke had apparently replied, “Good God, Sir, so you have!” When the surgeon was later sawing off what remained of the shattered limb in the nearby house of M. Hyacinthe Joseph-Marie Paris, Uxbridge is said to have commented with great stoicism, “The knives appear somewhat blunt!”

For his selfless contributions to the final victory over Napoleon, the Prince Regent created Henry Paget the 1st Marquess of Anglesey. Although it was offered, he refused a pension for the loss of his leg, which Monsieur Paris duly had buried in his garden, thereby establishing a shrine for visiting dignitaries and gawkers of a historical bent.

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Almeric had emigrated to the United States in 1881 to seek his fortune. His first venture was a cattle ranch at Le Mars, Iowa, where he became acquainted with Teddy Roosevelt. Moving to New York, he met Pauline and worked with her uncle and father setting up the Dominion Coal Company and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company at Sydney, Nova Scotia. Their wedding was at Saint Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, with President Grover Cleveland in attendance. Granny B was born Olive Cecilia Paget in the United States in 1899.

Soon after, the family moved to England. Pauline Paget, who had always suffered from frail health, died after a brief illness in 1916, leaving my grandmother Olive, at seventeen, a rich woman in her own right. A year later she became the Honourable Olive, when her father was created 1st Baron Queenborough for having sponsored a battalion of volunteers during the war and establishing the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps with clinics to treat wounded soldiers in hospitals throughout the United Kingdom.

In July 1919 Olive married the Hon. Charles Winn, second son of Lord St Oswald, who lived at Nostell Priory. They had two children, my aunt Pauline (born 1920) and my mother, Susan (born 1923), and lived in a large house on Hill Street, off Grosvenor Square in London, until they divorced in 1925. Because he later went to live in America with his third wife, Theo, I saw my grandfather fewer than a dozen times when I was growing up, but I am sure that my mother’s warm personality, kindness, and sunny outlook on life came from him. I loved his expressive bushy eyebrows, handsome pinstriped suits, half-closed left eye (never explained beyond “from the war”), which frequently twitched involuntarily, and full-bore raspy chuckle. He would sit in my father’s chair by the window in our London house, a glass of whisky in his hand, and talk with feeling and humour about our lives and what I took to be other vital matters. And then he would be gone, not to reappear for two or three years. I once spent half a day with him when he came to take me out from St Aubyns. Just he and I, going for a walk up in the rolling green hills known as the South Downs; having tea in a quaint old seventeenth-century teashop; shopping for sweets—enough sweets to fill half my locker when I got back to school! He had an easy generosity of spirit. I was always sorry to have to say good-bye to him.

Granny B married Arthur Wilson Filmer in 1926. He was a big-game hunter and a collector of fine antique furniture and tapestries. He also was the owner of East Sutton Park, near Maidstone, Kent, and he took my grandmother to see Leeds Castle, which had been vacant for two years, soon after their marriage. She straightaway spotted the potential in the somewhat derelict building, which had not seen repairs for almost a century. Not so William Randolph Hearst, who decided to look elsewhere for his
“de rigueur”
English castle—a weakness of American millionaires at the time—after his agent informed him that there were twenty bedrooms, one bathroom, and a crumbling ancient shell.

Granny B and her husband were thus able to buy Leeds in 1926 for the then-gigantic sum of $874,000. The Wilson Filmers parted company soon after the purchase was completed, and in 1931 my grandmother (retaining ownership of the castle) married Sir Adrian Baillie, 5th Baronet of Polkemmet, a Scottish businessman, sportsman, and member of Parliament. Her full name therefore became the Honourable Olive, Lady Baillie, but it was simply as Lady Baillie that she became known. Granny B was the last private owner of Leeds Castle, the eleven-hundred-year-old former stronghold of Saxon kings and Norman knights, which she lovingly restored, lavishly decorated, and exquisitely maintained, transforming it into a unique and magnificent twentieth-century country home.

I was lucky with lineage. Money, and lots of it, appeared to grow on trees, especially those which adorned the Leeds Castle parkland. Ancestors with glowing titles and extraordinary accomplishments filled the history books, but there would be consequences for being handed everything of a material nature on a plate, with no clear indication of what one might be expected to do with such good fortune.

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The castle’s three long drives led to the gatehouse, which for eight hundred years had guarded the entrance to the two small islands upon which sat the castle and the Maiden’s Tower. Inside the gatehouse were a squash court, golf clubs, bicycles, and two go-carts. There was a large storage area for the estate workers’ tools and gardening equipment facing a small house where the gatekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin, lived. And there was a gun room where shotguns and cartridges were kept locked up and made ready by the gamekeepers, George Riggel and his son, Peter, for pheasant-shooting Saturdays. The circular croquet lawn, lying reverently before the statuesque castle facade, and the swimming pool, tucked away behind a tall neatly trimmed hedge, adjacent to the Maiden’s Tower, rounded out the array of outdoor activities and visual majesty.

In the milieu of aesthetics, taste, and the international beau monde, Granny B’s undertakings at Leeds Castle became renowned and a byword for matchless taste. On a lesser-known and smaller scale, her homes in London and Nassau enjoyed similar degrees of recognition. For more than thirty years, she worked closely with Stéphane Boudin, who became a close friend and went on to be hailed, by many, as the finest decorator of his time. James Archer Abbott, curator of the Evergreen Museum & Library at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in his impressive history of the Jansen firm: “As a result of her [Lady Baillie’s] association with Jansen, she became the iconic tastemaker of pre–World War II England.” Granny B might have huffed and puffed a bit at such an accolade, perhaps out of false modesty, but I suspect it would have pleased her greatly.

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About Granny A I had mixed feelings. Her domineering personality could one day whisk me along on a magic carpet ride, but on another give me a drastic case of the heebie-jeebies. I seldom saw her because she was always travelling or foxhunting or both, but when she did enter my life she blew in like a hurricane, engulfing the household for however long she was around in a blitzkrieg of nonstop activity. Walks, games, come here, go there, do this, do that. It took everyone at least a week to recover after she left—even Nanny, who would have her job explained to her in the minutest detail, daily. Granny A was a terror but she loved us, and this was her way of expressing it. “After all, my darlings,” she would say. “You don’t get to see me that often.”

In keeping with her whirlwind character, Granny A was always a dashing dresser, and the day she took me, aged six, to my very first film at a cinema on Oxford Street, was no exception. She wore a hat, veil, scarf, jacket, flowing skirt, and high boots, all flung together with a superlative eye for cut and colour. Everything she did seemed to be done at breakneck speed; her thinking, riding, talking, driving, cooking, arranging—all were conducted so crisply and rapidly that anyone within striking distance had to concentrate ferociously on keeping up or be prepared to be left trailing in her formidable wake.

The film was called
Tonka (
aka
A Horse Named Comanche)
and, to my initial delight, she insisted on taking the bus (“Much more economical and so much more fun”), another first for me. Of course she also insisted on sitting up top, at the front, so she could energetically tell me—and the entire upstairs section of the bus—all about everything we were witnessing from our vantage point, including the personal faults in half the population’s general appearance, the unsatisfactory skills of our bus driver (“Much too jerky, he should know better!”), and how filthy all the buildings looked (“Something really
must
be done”). Every time I found myself looking the other way when she was speaking, she would grab my leg and vigorously shake it: “Pay attention when I’m talking to you.” After being instructed “Sit up straight,” “Don’t touch the handrails, they’re full of germs,” “Straighten your tie, it’s unbecoming on a young man to appear slovenly,” I was feeling a little the worse for wear by the time we arrived at Oxford Street, and I noticed some fellow passengers giving Granny A peculiar looks as we made our way off the bus.

I have no idea why this particular film was selected for my introduction to the joys of big-screen entertainment. Perhaps the equestrian subject matter seemed appropriate for a small boy, but it may have been due to Granny A’s obsession with horses and hunting. Once comfortably ensconced in our seats, however, I found myself sitting through a one-hour buildup to the Battle of the Little Big Horn (I, of course, possessed little knowledge or understanding beyond Indians bad, U.S. cavalry good). After that I was obliged to endure the nightmarish sight of countless horses being slaughtered by streams of arrows. To make matters worse, the doomed soldiers then used the wounded animals as cover before being annihilated themselves. I emerged from the spectacle sobbing like a lunatic and had to be comforted by Granny A over tea and buns around the corner.

“There, my darling, try not to get yourself all wound up. It’s only the cinema.”

“But it looks awfully real. Did it actually happen?”

“Well, historically speaking, yes.…”

This was almost too much to bear, but on the bus ride home she was sympathetic to my feelings and calmed me down by insisting that the horses were not hurt in the making of the film. Even though she was generally more restrained than on our outward-bound journey, I still wondered how anyone could have such supreme self-confidence and jaw-dropping disregard for what others might be thinking about her.

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Granny B, by way of contrast, conducted herself and her affairs with great deliberation and thoroughness. If she needed to talk to someone during castle weekends, including a member of the family, an “audience” would be set up by Borrett with precise timings as to when it would begin, and end. “Audiences” were almost always held in Granny’s boudoir, her private sitting room, adjacent to her bedroom.

All her finances were scrupulously attended to, from the largest sums down to the smallest. If a guest at one of her houses expected to get away with surreptitious and extravagant use of the telephone provided in each bedroom, Borrett would discreetly place an itemized bill there before their departure. Anything so rash as nonpayment curtailed future invitations. Once, the immensely sophisticated Johnny Galliher, a New Yorker with a wicked sense of humour and, so the story goes, a frighteningly large cock, failed to pay. Only because he was such a good friend and prized cardplaying member of the court was this isolated incident allowed to be swept under the rug—though not forgotten.