Bill and Anita decided, after all, to take over Glaslough. In January 1954 Anita wrote to Shane: ‘Bill is trying to work out a method whereby he can run this farm [Oranmore] and at the same time spend May 1 to September 1 at Glaslough – the important farming months.’ She and Bill wanted to set up a syndicate to organize pheasant raising and shooting, to plant Scots pines and Sitkas and to reduce ‘the immense estate loss [that] exists despite the fact that Reynolds [the farm manager] has reduced the farm loss by £1000. I think it lies in the actual layout of the desmesne – roads, walls, rates.’ The usual problems relating to badly managed estates in the mid twentieth century.
Anita’s life of Leonard Jerome was going to be published, with Winston’s approval, in both the uk and the usa. The ructions surrounding Shane’s earlier attempt – ‘that ill-fated life of Leonard Jerome which you induced me to take out of print’, as Shane accused Winston in a letter on 14 March 1954, marked ‘Very confidential’ – went on. Winston seemed to think that Shane had sold some papers relating to the enterprise but not belonging to him to a dealer called Jimmy Dunn. Shane had form in spiriting away other people’s books and papers. From 1928 until 1952, he had worked as an agent for A.S.W Rosenbach (1876–1952), the famous Philadelphia book dealer. During that time the owners of at least one Big House kept an eye on Shane whenever he visited, aware that he might make off with a book or two. Shane admitted to his cousin that he had sold some manuscripts to Jimmy Dunn for £500 because the Leonard Jerome project had left him in debt, but offered to give Winston everything at Glaslough that related to Winston’s mother, Jennie – ‘my only wish is that these papers should reach your archives.’
However, when Winston’s son Randolph came to Glaslough to retrieve his grandmother’s papers, they weren’t there. Shane wrote to Winston: ‘I remember now that most of the papers are in banks and perfectly safe’ but didn’t say which banks. To prove his integrity, he continued:
I might add that I returned to the late King [George vi] three tin boxes of my mother’s letters from the late Duke of Connaught which the Princesses believed contained intimate secrets of the Royal Family. H M asked for them and Seymour took them to Buckingham Palace and gave them to the King.
These thousand or so letters, written by the Duke over four decades, are held in the Royal Archives at Windsor and, although they were supposed to remain under seal only until 1993, access to them is denied. Leonie’s letters to ‘Pat’, as she called the Duke, were destroyed after his death.
Anita had resigned herself to an uneventful and frustrating life spent in two icy castles but in 1954 everything changed. ‘My life has become so interesting that I simply must recommence a diary.’ She finished writing The Fabulous Leonard Jerome on 29 April and flew immediately to Geneva to join Betsan on a motoring trip through Yugoslavia – a voyage she described in a travel diary. On 1 June she met Bill in Athens and they joined Bobby Somerset’s yacht for a four-week cruise of the Greek islands. After three nights in Rome with Jack, she spent a rainy July and August with the children at Glaslough and then flew to New York for the launch of her new book. The diary that she began that year was a sketchy, spasmodic affair and no substitute for the letters to Rose, begun in their debutante days and revealing Anita’s life in detailed instalments but which had now come to an end. Anita’s worries about Rose were well-founded; her friend had disappeared. In 1953 Winston had appointed Dan Ranfurly as Governor of the Bahamas and Peter Gardner went out to join him as his adc, taking Fleur with him. Rose was supposed to follow a month later, when her clothes would be ready. She never arrived and Fleur didn’t see her mother again until, in Rose’s old age, Fleur became her guardian. Rose had become a drug addict, something that Anita mentioned briefly in a diary entry in 1958. Apart from this, nothing. What was probably Anita’s most intense relationship ended almost without comment.
It had been Winston’s idea to have his cousin Shane write a biography of Leonard Jerome during the Second World War, in the hope that by stressing Winston’s American connections it would persuade the usa of the need for a special relationship between Britain and America. In Winston’s first speech to Congress, on 26 December 1941, three weeks after the usa entered the war, he spoke of being able to trace unbroken descent on his mother’s side through five generations, from a lieutenant who served in George Washington’s army, so ‘it was possible to feel a blood-right to speak to the representatives of the great Republic in our common cause’. Towards the end of the war, in a speech given on 16 February 1944, he said that it was his ‘deepest conviction that unless Britain and the United States are joined in a special relationship, another destructive war will come to pass.’ Leonard Jerome, his American grandfather, whose three daughters married Englishmen, was an ideal figure to promote this idea of kinship.
Shane, half-American like Winston, looked like the perfect biographer but, having worked on the book for two years, he wrote ominously to his cousin: ‘I have finished a life of Leonard Jerome which will startle you.’ It certainly did. Instead of a portrait of a captivating sportsman, financier and opera-lover, Shane had ‘given our grandfather a creditable if pathetic setting. Otherwise he would be dismissed as a total failure.’ Winston was outraged; Shane was mortified. ‘I have been so unhappy over upsetting you that if it were not for my publisher I would suppress it totally.’ He didn’t have to do this because Winston did. Although ‘The Life of Leonard Jerome of New York’ had already been set up in galley proofs by MacDonalds, it ended up among Shane’s papers in Georgetown University in Washington. A small tag attached to the proofs reads: ‘This book was stopped publication by wsc.’ When her own book on Leonard Jerome was published, Anita thanks her father in the acknowledgments for his notebooks, scrap albums and anecdotes about Leonard but does not mention Shane’s suppressed book. With hindsight, Shane should not have been employed to write a hagiography. His style, although witty and pertinent, was sourly rancorous and he found it hard to resist squelching put-downs of his subject. Winston paid some of MacDonalds’ printing costs but Shane was left with debts and Winston’s great displeasure.
In a letter to Nancy Mitford in 1984, Evelyn Waugh wrote: ‘It cannot be said too often that all Art is the art of pleasing.’ If that is true, Anita was a true artist, writing biographies that are the literary equivalent of sitting in sunshine. Her version of her great-grandfather’s life was subtitled: ‘A delightful and amusing Biography of sir winston churchill’s american grandfather.’ This Leonard Jerome is dashing, uxorious and a proud and loving father. True enough but far from the whole truth. He was also a chancy speculator who in spite of – or perhaps because of – his lavish and showy spending, failed to gain membership of the ‘Four Hundred’, a list of the most esteemed New Yorkers of the day. He was also promiscuous. The opera singer Minnie Hauk was undoubtedly Leonard’s illegitimate daughter but, in Anita’s biography, Minnie was only ‘rumoured to be Leonard’s daughter through an early romance’. In fact, she was born in 1851, the same year as Leonard’s eldest and legitimate daughter, Clara. In private, Anita was more honest. In a letter to Xandra Frewen she wrote: ‘Roger [Xandra’s husband] must see “La Sonnambula” for Minnie Hauk was Leonard’s illeg daughter (and therefore Roger’s illeg gt aunt!) and looked so like Jennie C. [Churchill] Made her debut in it aged 16.’
Leonard’s flighty, over-indulged daughters also met with disapproval in conservative New York society, one of the reasons, although Anita doesn’t spell it out, for the Jeromes moving to a less decorous Europe, where the Jerome girls proved to be catnip to various rackety aristocrats. In England Lord Randolph Churchill wished to marry Jennie Jerome, with whom he had fallen in love at first sight. Anita notes that his father, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was against the match but doesn’t quote directly from the Duke’s letters to his impetuous younger son, after he has made enquires about Leonard and discovered that he was ‘a well-known man with a fast reputation’. According to the Duke, as the daughter of this rascal, Jennie suffered from a reputation, which ‘no man in his senses could think respectable.’
When, after some rather distasteful haggling between the two families over the marriage settlement, Jennie and Randolph married on 15 April 1874, his parents didn’t attend their rather muted wedding at the British Embassy in Paris. In Anita’s version: ‘The Duke could not leave England but he sent a blessing, and the Duchess rejoiced that her favourite son had chosen her birthday for his wedding.’ Elizabeth Kehoe, writing about the same event in Fortune’s Daughters (2004), a biography of the Jerome sisters, considers the absence of the ducal couple a slight, ‘a recognition that, although Jennie was accepted by the Marlborough family, this was not a splendid marriage to be celebrated in pomp, merely one that had to be accommodated’, and quotes from the Duke’s letter to his son, which hoped for his future happiness but pointed out that his bride was ‘one whom you have chosen with rather less than usual deliberation’.
Winston was delighted with Anita’s book, perhaps because it suggested that Leonard’s greatest achievement was to have been Winston’s grandfather. The biography ends with the dying Leonard contemplating his grandson, then a schoolboy at Harrow: ‘Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. What would he come to? Where would his road lead?’
At the time of the book’s publication, Winston, prime minister once again, had regained his wartime reputation as an internationally recognized Great Man. Anita, promoting the biography in New York, wrote to him: ‘The dustman has just swept in (evidently he’d discussed the book with the door porter) and announced “You got just two characters over there that appeal to us Americans – Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill – Mr Attlee does not interest us at all.” And off he went clanging garbage bins!’ Either he was a very politically savvy dustman or Anita invented his conversation in gratitude for Winston’s congratulatory cable. Her letter to him ends: ‘Your personal opinion means more than anything to me. Thank you.’
From New York, on 1 October 1954, she wrote to Shane about the book’s ‘unimagined’ success. The first us printing of 8000 had sold out in a week and, by October, the second edition was fast selling out too. Shane was mouldering in Glaslough, befuddled by the new managerial arrangements, so may not have been altogether delighted that his daughter was conquering America, ‘interviews, television etc and radio every day, lunch with reporters, tea with friends and then theatres which I adore … Felicitations from everyone including Winston whose thoughtfulness was most touching – Herewith his cable – isn’t it splendid.’ Then, almost as an afterthought – ‘And I could never have pulled it off without your enormous help – so thanks for your endeavours.’ After this offhand tribute, she was off again. ‘O how restful it is to feel one’s hard work rewarded – I am thrilled and letters pour in by every post.’ She had lunched with her beloved Barney Baruch – ‘he was fascinating on atom bombs and Russians’, dined with publishers, given an address at Rochester university – ‘I may go to Princetown also.’ What a tactless account to send to Shane, whose hard work on Leonard Jerome had not been rewarded at all. Ten days later Anita seemed to regret her boastfulness and told Shane: ‘Everyone – every reporter, interviewer etc seems to know you. You certainly made a deep impression over here – But the Jerome book needed to be written by a woman.’ She then ruined her earlier flattery by scolding him for his financial ineptitude at Glaslough. ‘I would be delighted if you would like to attend meetings and learn the layout of the whole financial side but unless you are prepared to grasp the layout of the new investment plan please do not write me inaccuracies … ’ She seemed to be getting back at Shane for his offhand parenting, when he had made no secret of the fact that he ‘would have preferred us not to have been born’, had demanded of his awkward daughter why she didn’t ‘get married and go away’, and showed how much his family bored him by closing his heavy-lidded eyes.
During her American tour Anita took a train to Vermont to visit Marjorie’s birthplace, St Johnsbury. By this time her diary entries were intermittent but she was so moved by her visit there that she used her diary to write a short biography of her mother’s family for her own children to read one distant day: ‘The understanding of the other strain which is in us should be there – And it helped me to realise how queer decadent English society must have seemed to my mother Marjorie Ide.’ The Ides came from a milieu which ‘admired men for their individual achievement and where women were married for love and expected to be virtuous!!’ How different from the society into which Marjorie Ide married, ‘where inherited titles and wealth were adored, where poor men looked around for heiresses and it was “chic” to sleep with everyone on the right “snob” level.’ Anita, reflecting on the Ides’ ‘sincerity, trueness, lack of sophistication allied to love of culture and instinct for training of the intellect’, was overcome by shame and self-loathing. The diary entry is written in a tumbling rush of penitence:
Could hardworking ambitious cut and dried Henry Ide have imagined his only grandchildren – us three – Jack a dilettante Guards officer who has never earned a penny in his life and is shadowed by the most introverted sexual illusions, Desmond a fly-by-night who lives in nightclubs, makes up to every girl he meets and thinks collecting money for films that never materialise or lecturing on Flying Saucers a man’s career – and myself! Of whom the less said the better except perhaps that these New Englanders might have recognised a certain diligence which has resulted in the writing of books – but their code – none of us have had a code we have lived in such different airs and morals – on many subjects we would have been Chinese to each other.
She flew back to Ireland in the middle of October. A diary entry: ‘Tarka said: “Mummy, don’t go away again. I don’t like it” and I knew I never wanted to – not till they are grown up – 3 months away in 6 months has broken my desire ever to travel again – They are in my mind wherever I go – and they need me now – They won’t later.’ But the next month she flew to London for the uk launch of The Fabulous Leonard Jerome, now number thirteen on the American bestseller lists. She went to Winston’s eightieth birthday party at Downing Street – ‘I was lent a wonderful dress by Worth – Bill said the best there.’ She hunted in Galway throughout the winter and returned to London for Clemmie Churchill’s seventieth birthday party, the last that the Churchills would hold in Downing Street: ‘Winston sad at going – forced to by Eden and Macmillan.’
An extraordinary thing had happened at the end of 1953: Peter Wilson left Oranmore. From being embedded in the muddy, windswept farm, working too hard, unwashed and living on bread and marmalade, he first travelled the world and then settled in the Bahamas at the home of Nancy Oakes. She was the daughter of the tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, whose murder in Nassau, on 8 July 1943, remained unsolved. At the time of Sir Harry’s death Nancy was married to Count Alfred de Marigny, who was accused of the murder on the false testimony of two corrupt detectives, brought over from the usa by the then Governor of the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor. De Marigny was acquitted but because of his contemptuous attitude – he described the Duke as ‘a pimple on the arse of the Empire’ – was deported from the country. He and Nancy were divorced in 1949 and, in 1952, Nancy married Baron Ernst von Hoyningen-Huene. By the time Peter Wilson arrived in the Bahamas that marriage was shaky and another divorce followed in 1956.
Peter Wilson may have decided to go to the Bahamas because Dan Ranfurly, whom he knew, was then governor, while another acquaintance, Peter Gardner, was his adc. Dan’s term of office ended in 1956, and he and Hermione left for England the following year. Peter Gardner stayed on. He opened a restaurant, Sun And, in Lakeview Drive in Nassau and it became fashionable among the glitterati: The Beatles, Sean Connery, Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra. For part of the year Peter left the restaurant in the hands of a deputy and ran Snow And, a similar restaurant in the fashionable skiing resort of Kitzbuhl. Peter Wilson also made a life in the Bahamas, working for an unlikely employer, Harold Christie, a property developer and, during Prohibition, a bootlegger. Christie had been a friend and partner of Sir Harry Oakes and was widely believed to have murdered him. He had motive enough: he owed Sir Harry money and the latter had called in the loan because he was planning to move to Mexico. Sir Harry’s death meant that the loan needn’t be repaid. Christie subsequently became a property millionaire and was knighted in 1964. William Boyd gave a fictional account of this murder mystery in his gripping novel Any Human Heart, in which Christie is the main suspect.
Peter Wilson, who had always professed a longing for simplicity and a loathing of corrupting wealth, was a strange employee for the dodgy property developer who had acquired Cat Island, south of Nassau, where, some believe, Christopher Columbus first stepped ashore in the New World. Known as an ‘out island’, sunshine and tropical lushness apart, it shared some of the features of the west of Ireland: ruins of great houses, poor, decent inhabitants and, something that would have appealed to Peter, ‘the feel of true isolation’, as described by the travel writer Benedict Thielen in Holiday magazine (December 1964). Peter, the only white resident of the island, was in charge of Christie’s land there. He planned on returning to Oranmore at some stage and, in a transaction negotiated by Anita, bought Rocklands House, near the castle.
Anita was thriving. Her children were old enough to travel and her diary entries, while short and not very informative, have a sunlit quality. The incessant rain seems to have given way to balmy summers. Tarka and Leonie, the Jellicoe children, and Desmond and Agnes’s boys enjoyed ‘Heavenly months of sunshine and laughter’ at Oranmore. In England there was ‘a delightful day with the Lysaghts in the Wye valley’, ‘a jolly night’ with Pooh in Oxford, as well as opera and dinner parties in England, stalking at Glenveagh in Ireland, ‘one stag rolling on his back in the sunshine – too sweet to shoot’. In September 1955 the Leslie family gathered at Glaslough to celebrate Shane’s seventieth birthday: ‘He took it very gloomily with closed eyes and groans’ before Anita, Bill and the children moved back to Oranmore and the centrally-heated cottage for the winter.
Tarka was six and his education had begun, with lessons at Monaghan Convent during the summer and home-schooling by Anita, using pneu teaching methods – short lessons lasting twenty minutes with the emphasis on real ideas – during the hunting season at Oranmore. She was delighted by her little son’s unselfconscious religious convictions: ‘The maturity of his vision astounds me. Everything I have ever let drop of my own religious beliefs evidently has sunk deep into his imagination.’ A letter from Tarka to Peter Wilson: ‘Dear PP [Poppa Pete] I saw two dragonflies get out of their skins – just like me when I die.’
Anita’s friends were going through harsher times. Sally Perry, who had married the severely wounded Gerald Grosvenor, heir to the Duke of Westminster, during the war, gave birth to a stillborn child and was unable to have another baby. After a visit to the Grosvenors in February 1956, Anita wrote in her diary: ‘Sally so lovely and so sad – her twin sister dying of paralysis and herself childless.’ And that romantic pair, Patsy and George Jellicoe, were coming adrift: ‘Patsy writes miserably about how awful George is – drunk and after floozies.’
In May Anita and Bill took the children skiing in the Austrian Tyrol. Then on to Rome to visit Jack and wave rosaries at the Pope in St Peter’s Square: ‘I never dreamt how impressive he would be – a radiant personality of love and pity.’ Not a universal view; this was Pope Pius xii, whose wartime papacy was, to say the least, controversial. She took the children all over southern Italy, bringing back wartime memories, before they returned to Oranmore and Tarka’s lessons. The pneu school, run by Miss Faunce and Miss Lambert – ‘teachers of genius’ – had been the only part of her education that Anita had enjoyed. It had instilled in her a love of poetry and literature and ‘the sensuous delight of words’ before Marjorie’s habit of shifting her daughter in and out of different schools had brought this bright period to a close. Anita’s next school had been the detestable Convent of the Sacred Heart, which had offered no delight, sensuous or otherwise.
In the summer of 1957 the King family sailed the Brittany coast and that winter, hunting at Oranmore, ‘Tarka got the brush.’ In March they set off again for three months, the trip beginning with skiing at Klosters in Switzerland with the film director John Huston’s children, Tony and Angelica. At the age of forty-four Anita had enough money to give up writing for a few years. Her aunt Anne had left her money to Marjorie, who, in turn, had left it to her children. The Fabulous Leonard Jerome had sold well. No longer trapped at Oranmore, Anita spent a lot of time packing suitcases, something that always filled her with pleasurable anticipation.