Women have had few opportunities to play heroic roles in a continual sense, as warriors and leaders have. And certain specialist niches in society which they have made their own tend to be overlooked as theaters of heroism. One such is party giving. I see the eyebrows shoot up: what is heroic about being a hostess? I quote the answer given by one of them; try it and see.
The idea of a woman being the convenor of a symposium, or any other gathering, for the purpose of discussion or even mere conversation and entertainment would have been unthinkable in antiquity. Indeed, women were rarely present, except as dancers or handmaidens—or prostitutes. For a woman to be prominent at a feast was an ill omen. The entertainments which Cleopatra staged for Antony in 33–32 BC were an aspect of the decadence which led to his downfall, and the presence of Herodias and her daughter Salome at the feast of Herod Antipas in AD 29 led to the disgraceful murder of St. John the Baptist. In medieval times, kings and lords gave feasts, and it is not until the seventeenth century, beginning in France, that we hear of salons conducted by women, the prototype being the one held in her Paris home, 1618–1650, by Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. There, Malherbe and de La Rochefoucauld, Bossuet and Corneille laid down the law on manners and spelling, promoted periphrasis and préciosité and waged war against Boileau, Racine and Molière. There followed in due course the famous salons of Marie du Deffand, and her breakaway rival Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, competition being of the essence of salonières in their heyday. Bourgeois salons, inaugurated by Anne-Marie Cornuel, competed with the aristocratic ones. Madame Roland used hers to create a political party, the Girondins, and Madame de Staël ran an anti-regime salon against Bonaparte.
Party-political salons were still standard in Paris up to the Second World War. Madame de Portes, who ran one tinged with the Far Right, became the mistress of Paul Reynaud, prime minister of France at the time of the military collapse in 1940. She fought for Reynaud’s soul on behalf of the Nazis, Winston Churchill tugging the other way. The tortured man resigned, then fled with her from the advancing German armies in a car piled with luggage. There was an accident, and an enormous, heavy suitcase shot forward from the backseat and neatly took off her head.
A decade later, in the early 1950s when I lived in Paris, I used to see Reynaud swimming, almost daily, in the Piscine Déligny, which was in the Seine, conveniently near the Assemblée Nationale, in which he still sat. He always wore a woman’s bathing cap, which had belonged to the decapitated lady. By that time party salons had ceased to exist, though there was a political one run by an American millionaire who had inherited a mining fortune. Of those I attended, one was run by Marie-Louise Bousquet, for smart society people (she was connected to the fashion industry) and one was run for literature and the arts by Natalie Barney, another American expatriate. This was long established, and had been attended by Proust. Such salons were held regularly during the season, on a special day each week, and once you had been properly introduced, you could come when you liked. The company was all, for the fare was unappetizing: sticky biscuits, sweet vermouth, perhaps a glass of champagne.
The French salon system never took root in London. In Dr. Johnson’s day, Mrs. Montague set one up, giving rise to his enigmatic remark: “One would prefer to drop Mrs. Montague, than to be dropped by her.” But the English never quite liked the regularity of the salon. Charles Lamb had his “Wednesdays” but found it irksome, and spaced them out to once a month. Hostesses preferred each event to be sui generis, especially country-house parties, the preferred English form of entertainment, which by their nature could not be regular.
Of the famous hostesses, six stand out. First comes Lady Holland, who entertained at Holland House, the remnants of which (the house as a whole was destroyed by Nazi bombers) is now in a fragment of park in built-up Kensington but was then open country with a large farm attached. She invited you to dinner and to “bring a nightcap” if you wished, since there were dozens of bedrooms, and getting back to central London late at night could be tiresome. Apart from herself, the dinners were men only, for she was a divorced woman: ladies in polite society would not receive her, as a rule, or enter her house. But men, especially Whigs, radicals and writers, were delighted to come, for she kept a fine table and was clever at getting people to talk. The Tories often expressed regret that they had no comparable gathering place on their side. William Pitt had no wife, having turned down (or rather fled) Madame de Staël. Lady Peel, who was beautiful and delightful, and had a suitably rich husband with a fine house (and art collection) in Westminster, on the bend of the river, could have emulated Lady Holland but was too shy. Lady Palmerston was certainly not shy, and entertained often at their big, sprawling house at the bottom of Piccadilly (later the Naval and Military Club and known as the Inn & Out). These “drums,” as they were called, took place several times during each sitting of Parliament, and a young man could get in without an invitation if he was handsome, well dressed and had the nerve to present himself. These Palmerstonian drums were described by Thackeray, Trollope and Bulwer-Lytton, though not by Dickens, who would not go, or Wilkie Collins, ditto, because he was not allowed to bring either of his two regular mistresses. Big political receptions of this type were held regularly by Lady Londonderry in the between-the-wars period, at Londonderry House in Park Lane. She liked to receive the guests at the top of the first flight of the main staircase, with the prime minister of the day at her side—first Stanley Baldwin, then Ramsay MacDonald, then Baldwin again. But when Baldwin was succeeded by the moth-eaten Chamberlain, she lost heart and stopped giving her drums (called, by then, “bashes”). Londonderry House, the last aristocratic mansion, on Park Lane, on which Evelyn Waugh modeled Marchmain House in Brideshead Revisited, was hired out for wedding receptions and the like in the postwar years, and then ignominiously pulled down.
Lady Londonderry, however, did not give regular parties throughout the two seasons (May to mid-July and October to mid-December). That was the self-allotted job of Lady Colefax and Lady Cunard. Both specialized in lunch parties for ten or a dozen people, but they gave dinner parties and theater supper parties too. Sybil Colefax reckoned to give two lunches and one dinner a week; Emerald Cunard sometimes as many as three lunches and two dinners. Their guests were available royalty, headed by the Prince of Wales; dukes such as “Bendor” Westminster; the more sortable cabinet ministers; visiting celebrities; newspaper proprietors like Beaverbrook, Rothermere, Luce and Hulton; and occasional exotics like Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson and the singer-pianist “Hutch.” After T. S. Eliot achieved fame with The Waste Land in 1923, he was “taken up” by both these competitive hostesses, as was Evelyn Waugh when Vile Bodies became a best seller in 1930, and W. H. Auden in the mid-1930s briefly, until his disgusting personal habits caused him to be “dropped.” It was as easy to be dropped as to be taken up. Lady Cunard, who had been pro-Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, was punished by the new queen, who let it be known that those who attended her parties would not be welcome in royal circles. Thereafter Cunard slowly fizzled out. Of course both women were hit by the war. Colefax became poorer, and had to change for what she called her “ordinaires,” now held at the Dorchester, which possessed the safest basement bomb shelter in the West End. The peace, which brought the “labour occupation” and an intensification of rationing, was the end of their era.
It had already ended for the most important hostess of that generation, Lady Ottoline Morrell, who died in 1938. At the age of seven, she was granted the precedence of a duke’s daughter when her half-brother became Duke of Portland (1880), and, after her husband Philip Morrell became a liberal MP in 1906, she began to entertain in London. From 1913 to 1924, the Morrells lived at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, and there she held the most famous literary and artistic house parties in English history. Among her guests were Bertrand Russell (for a time also her lover until she found his chronic bad breath insupportable), Augustus John, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Henry Lamb, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. The house was beautiful but also cozy, the food delicious, the garden delightful with many intimate nooks and crannies, and the conversation at a high level but also (at times) thrilling and alarming. Lady Ottoline had a notable gift for spotting and encouraging talent, and promoting it publicly. Lawrence and Huxley in particular owed a great deal to her. The atmosphere at Garsington was unique and entirely her creation, and she herself, as Lord David Cecil wrote, central to it: “Her own personality was, in its way, a considerable work of art, expressing alike in her conversation, her dress, and the decoration of her houses, a fantastic individual and creative imagination.”
It was the story of Ottoline Morrell which first made me see the hostess as a potentially heroic figure. She and her husband were not rich: more than half their income went on entertaining. She was a hard worker and devoted immense amounts of energy, both physical and nervous, to presenting Garsington as a place where writers and artists could be at their creative best. The tiniest details were important to her in making her guests feel loved: timing and serving of meals (especially breakfast); masses of comfortable furniture and well-chosen books in the bedrooms, and perfect bedside lighting; the selection of fellow guests to make a creative mixture; and the wide choice of activities and expeditions to keep them occupied when not writing or talking. This success as a hostess of difficult artistic people, testified to by all, was due to her willingness to take infinite pains and never to relax. But it was due chiefly to her warm sympathy for often unhappy or depressed people, her ability to enter into their troubles and give wise counsel and her capacity to encourage. She was a good woman, and one hopes she got her reward in heaven, for it was certainly not forthcoming on earth. The literati, not least those who enjoyed her (unreciprocated) hospitality most often, gossiped spitefully behind her back. Russell was disloyal, Lytton Strachey his customary self—critical, mean minded and inaccurate—Lawrence lampooned her in Sons and Lovers, and Huxley presented a parody of Garsington in CromeYellow. Lady Ottoline and her careful, anxious entertaining were used as a pretext for working off grudges against the upper classes, the rich, the pretentious, by the clever, grubby intellectuals she fed, housed and befriended. Nothing new in this, of course: Rousseau had done exactly the same in the eighteenth century, and Wagner in the nineteenth. But she took it hard, being sensitive and in many ways vulnerable—it was indeed her sensitivity and consciousness of how easy it was to be wounded that made her so effective in her chosen role.
Ingratitude is something all society hostesses receive and become habituated to. “You have to do this thing for its own sake and because you like it. There’s no other recompense.” The speaker was Lady Pamela Berry (later Lady Hartwell), and she said something like this to me several times during our friendship, which began in 1956 and lasted till her death in 1982. She is often described as “the last of the political hostesses,” and the title is just. But it has to be understood that she was a hostess as a pis aller. She really wanted to be a politician, but felt debarred by her sex. Not that she disliked being a woman. On the contrary, she delighted in femininity, in clothes, makeup, fashion, hairstyles, on being inconsequential, illogical, impetuous, passionate, changeable, perverse, on being able to say, “Oh, but I can’t be expected to know anything about that,” on being outrageously womanly and disgracefully, irresponsibly feminine, on being girlish. She carried around with her a personal space in which the scents of a Salome and the guile of a Cleopatra mingled with the restless provocation of Récamier.
Nevertheless, Pamela gave an overwhelming impression of missing the opportunities of a man. Her life was, in one sense, dominated by the memory of her father, F. E. Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead. Now he was a hero for all seasons, though not for all people. He was a self-made man, and exulted in the fact. When awarded his coat of arms, he chose as his motto Faber fortuna mea—maker of my own fortune. He came from Birkenhead, a characterless town on the other side of the Mersey from Liverpool. Smith liked to exaggerate the lowliness of his origins and tell stories, especially later in his life and in his cups, of childhood hardship. In fact, his father was a solid middle-class citizen of the town, who rose to be its mayor, and Smith got a good education at Birkenhead School before going to Oxford, where he took first-class honors in jurisprudence. His college, Wadham, then small and obscure, was just on the eve of its period of greatness. Among Smith’s contemporaries were John Simon, another future lord chancellor, and C. B. Fry, the famous cricketer. The last left a portrait of the young F. E.: “A long, lean brown face and an impudent nose. Very remarkable eyes. They were the colour of a peat pool on Dartmoor, full of light and fringed by luxuriant silky eyelashes.” He was enormously good looking, tall and athletic, a tremendous competitor in any contest going, from boxing to rugby and, as soon as he could afford it, a first-class golfer, horseman and rider to hounds. But, “the lips were slightly ajar, as if about to close on a cigar, and shaped to violence or disdain.” He was hair-raisingly articulate, scintillating and reckless in what he said and, to quote the Tory leader Bonar Law, “It would be easier for him to keep a live coal in his mouth than a witty saying.”
In London, where he entered the bar, Smith quickly acquired the mannerisms, accent, self-confidence and arrogance of the Tory aristocrats. He was also a sensationally hard (as well as a quick) worker and made rapid progress at the bar, soon earning over £6,000 a year. He performed particular services for the Liverpool shipping magnates and the great local soap tycoon William Lever (afterward Lord Leverhulme), who was made the target of the Northcliffe press. Lever wanted to sue but a well-known K.C. told him his case was not strong enough. Dissatisfied, Lever asked F. E. for his opinion. F. E. hurried to London, to the Savoy Hotel, where he found a stack of papers four feet high waiting for him, and a note saying his opinion was required by nine AM the next morning. He ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of champagne and sat up all night reading. Promptly at nine AM he gave his opinion, one of the shortest on record: “There is no answer to this action for libel, and the damages must be enormous.” They were: £50,000.
This notoriously laconic opinion was given in 1906, the same year Smith, aged thirty-four, entered Parliament for Walton, Liverpool. The famous 1906 election was among the most disastrous in Conservative history. From having a majority of 134, they found themselves with barely 150 seats, while the liberal majority was 356. But this nadir of Tory fortunes gave Smith a matchless opportunity to make his name at a stroke by restoring Tory morale in his maiden speech, delivered at ten PM on March 11. Traditionally, a maiden speaker “craved the indulgence” of the House in hearing him, and repaid it by keeping his material uncontroversial. Disraeli ignored this tradition and was howled down. Smith likewise craved no indulgences and made his speech as offensive to the government benches as he possibly could. He prepared it with great care, spiced it with witticisms and superb jokes, learned it by heart and delivered it with stunning confidence, keeping a straight face throughout. When F. E. first stood up, the Tory benches, meagerly attended, were a picture of misery and dejection. When he sat down, fifty minutes later, the House was packed, for word had gotten around that a great event was taking place, and the Tory benches were a shouting, foot-stamping mass of jubilation and excitement. It was, without question, the most famous maiden speech in history, quite unprecedented and never equaled since. F. E., who had to take the midnight train north, woke up in Chester, like Byron a century before, “to find himself famous.”
Thereafter he flourished, a leading buccaneer in the last great age of British political privateering, on the high seas of the Commons. His comrades in adventure were nominally his opponents, Lloyd George and Churchill, united with Smith in their oratorical brilliance and boundless ambition. Smith became attorney-general in the wartime coalition, and when Lloyd George remade his government after the landslide coalition victory of 1918, he raised F. E. to the woolsack as lord chancellor and, in due course, gave him an earldom. “LG,” Birkenhead and Churchill were the three titans of the postwar coalition, riding high over the mediocrities who, in their view, constituted the rest of the House of Commons, and then coming crashing down, in the autumn of 1922, when the mediocrities rose in revolt against LG’s high-handed ways and threw his government out. LG never held office again, Churchill was forced to go cap in hand and rejoin the Tory Party, which he had left in disgust twenty years before, and Birkenhead became a spent force, drinking heavily and getting himself into debt.
Nevertheless, the earl had a shot or two left in his arsenal. Two days after the fall of the coalition, he had been elected lord rector of Glasgow University by the students, the losers being his old rival John Simon and H. G. Wells. On November 7, 1923, he gave his rectorial address on the subject of “Idealism in International Politics.” The speech was, in its own way, as sensational as his maiden, and required the same kind of courage. At that time, the League of Nations was regarded by all, or almost all, as the ultimate solution to all international problems, and young people were expected to pay it unqualified obeisance. The era of power politics, they were told, was over for good, and perpetual peace had taken its place. The young must prepare themselves for a lifetime of idealism and dogooding, and expect a halo in due course. All this, said Birkenhead, was absolute nonsense. The world would continue to be a rough place, with force the ultimate arbiter and war always just around the corner. He conceded that there might be “a modest area within which the League of Nations may make useful contributions to the harmony of the world [but] the larger claims made on its behalf always seemed to me to be frankly fantastic. Its framers forgot human nature as absurdly as they neglected history.” As for youth, it would do well to note the facts of life. “The motive of self-interest not only is, but must be, and ought to be, the mainspring of human conduct.” Only “the desire of self-advancement” was an adequate incentive “to the labour required to push the world forward.” Fortunately, he concluded, “The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.”
There is no doubt that what Birkenhead said about the league and world peace was true, prophetically so, and was to be proved so in the next fifteen years—and the advice he gave to youth was good, as the Glasgow students themselves recognized, applauding the speech. But their elders were shocked, indeed outraged. Birkenhead was almost universally denounced as a disgraceful example of cynicism, gross materialism and worldiness. It was the time when the extreme liberalism and pacifism of Bloomsbury was taking over and Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes were setting the moral (or, some would say, the immoral) tone of society. Birkenhead went head-on against this trend, and though he was eventually proved right, at the time he was treated as a leper, especially by the bishops and other clergy and by those in society usually described as “right thinking.”
The criticism of Birkenhead was all the more fierce in that, by the mid-1920s, he was clearly out of the running for the prime ministership. Baldwin made him secretary of state for India, but he was eventually forced to resign in order to go into the City of London and make money. By this time there were ugly rumors about his drinking and his debts. His son and heir, “Freddie,” second Earl of Birkenhead, wrote in his biography of his father:
At the end of his life, when he had left politics for the City, he had his yacht, six motor cars, only three of which were normally used, three chauffeurs, eight horses with three grooms, a large London house in Grosvenor Square, and a house in Oxfordshire. He refused to attend to his income-tax returns, exercised no control over his agents and gradually acquired an enormous overdraft. This rake’s progress was prompted by the same hubris which led to the downfall, in a different way, of Oscar Wilde. When protests were made to him he bought another car or a new motor-launch, and this selfishness and indifference to the interests of his family was undoubtedly the least attractive feature of his character.
These are harsh words for a son to use about his father, and seem all the more repellent in that everything the second earl enjoyed in life, his expensive education at Eton and Oxford, his peerage, his connections and the patronage of the great, were the direct result of his father’s hard work and brilliance. He achieved very little, no doubt because he failed to inherit either his father’s brains or his judgment, perception and capacity for intense and determined industry.
By contrast, Pamela was her father’s child through and through. The youngest of the family, she was also the wildest, the cleverest, the most imaginative, the fiercest and the naughtiest. When the Lloyd Georges and the Birkenheads shared a holiday at Algeciras in January 1923, Pamela, then eight, earned this accolate from LG: “His youngest kiddie—‘the Lady Pam’—is a terror—utterly spoilt.” It was true. Birkenhead adored Pam, born just before the First World War, in May 1914, and let her do anything she wanted—except go to proper schools.
It was Pam’s great grievance that her father’s views on women were so old-fashioned that he insisted girls be educated at home. “As a result I am almost totally uneducated, and unfit for any job.” This was the only criticism I ever heard her utter of her father, whom she loved and hero-worshipped, and whose memory and reputation she defended with the ferocity of a tigress. She was seventeen when her father died, suddenly, not yet sixty, in 1930. There was a dreadful financial reckoning. The London house, yacht, motor car, horses, had to be sold, servants dismissed, and his widow was able to remain at the Oxfordshire house only through the generosity of friends. One of them, Lord Beaverbrook, who had once described F. E. as “the cleverest man in the kingdom,” came to the rescue of the children, making each an allowance of £325 a year. This enabled Pam to have a “season,” and in due course she made a splendid marriage to Michael Berry, son of Lord Camrose, who owned the Daily Telegraph. She then told Beaverbrook that the allowance should cease, but he would not hear of it.
Michael Berry became editor in chief and, in effect, the boss of the Telegraph group of newspapers, and it was as his wife that Pam set up shop as a London hostess. She felt herself (rightly or wrongly) barred from politics by her sex, for she despised the type of woman who in those days (I am talking about the 1940s) got into the House of Commons—they were still excluded from the Lords—and she thought her lack of education disqualified her from any other career. Entertaining the elite, and especially the political and intellectual elite, was thus for her a vicarious way of engaging in public life, and she set about the business with voracious enthusiasm, what became highly professional skill and overwhelming success. For more than thirty years she held the field. None of her rivals even approached her in her ability to gather fascinating people around her table and get them to sparkle. And when she died there was no one to take her place—nor has there been in the quarter century since.
What makes an outstanding hostess? First is intelligence. It is the essential quality because the work is supremely difficult and requires it. The idea that a woman can succeed in it simply by possessing lots of money and social position—even if you throw in charm and good looks—is nonsense. It needs brains. Pam inherited her father’s brains and his sense of adventure but she also possessed a prudence he lacked. She had to be as clever (or almost so) as the cleverest of her guests but also disciplined enough to hold her tongue and let them speak. It is a curious fact that, although Pam was talkative (none more so) on the phone or in a tête-à-tête, and sharp, spicy and delightful talk it was, she hardly said a word at her lunches. She set hares running, she occasionally pricked conceit, she might even rebuke, briefly, but her words usually served only to flick forward deftly a faltering conversation—something she rarely needed to do—and as a rule, she remained silent, watching, always ready to come to the rescue of a fragile guest who was being bullied or ragged, but for the most part just laughing, encouraging and applauding. She said to me: “I am at my best when nobody feels I am there.” Or again: “Wasn’t there someone who referred to the Invisible Hand?” “Yes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.” “Oh, goody, darling, you know everything. Well, I am the Invisible Hand. I do the guiding, but nobody sees. Nobody wants to feel the conversation is being ‘directed.’ And it isn’t, actually, is it?” “No, the best talk is entirely spontaneous and off the cuff. Can’t bear people who prepare Good Things in advance, or hostesses who prod, prod, prod all the time. A good conversation is what that American general-person, what’s his name, yes, Haig, called ‘a controlled explosion.’ Or a series of controlled explosions, leading to the Big One.”
Brains were needed to handle the extraordinary assortment of people who came to her table. Evelyn Waugh was superlative on form, but had to be coaxed out of bottomless misery at times. Dick Crossman required to be stopped from shouting people down, as had Randolph Churchill (but he was often banned). Tommy Balogh might be unwittingly provoked into an uncontrolled explosion of prewar-Budapest rage. Ted Heath, one of Pam’s unaccountable favorites, was one of the rudest men in London, not out of malice but by nature, and needed careful placement. Laurence Olivier required royal dollops of imperceptible flattery. Some visiting Americans, like Arthur Schlesinger, were up to all the latest London scandals but others—Danny Kaye, Arthur Miller, General Westmoreland, Governor Stevenson and Clare Luce—needed protection from incomprehensible in talk. Tom Driberg was often beastly to servants and required threatening. Duff Cooper, a man of brief, spasmodic outbursts of fury, known as “veiners,” might not be on speaking terms with one or more of the other guests. His wife, then his widow, Diana, was angelic but might be tipsy, reminding one of Lamb’s description of Coleridge, “an archangel slightly damaged.” Princess Margaret was always what Professor Bronowski, a grand master, called “a three-move problem.” Graham Greene might be monosyllabic or mute. Ian Fleming itched to get back to Bond or, even more likely, golf. His wife, Annie, was a rival hostess, looking for slips to be exploited. The frogs, as Pam called them, were particularly difficult: André Malraux needing first-rate flattery in faultless French, Nancy Mitford’s colonel horribly particular about the food, Louise de Vilmorin stirring up jealousies, male and female. Pam had her own list of those she termed prima donnas, marvelous to have if well-behaved but liable to sulks: Anthony Eden, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Crosland, Maurice Bowra.
A hostess is like a theater director with a tricky cast and an improvised play. Or like a zookeeper with animals in unlocked cages. Pam used to say that twelve was the right number for lunch—never more—as that was the maximum number of interesting people she could control. This was, as she intended, intimate entertaining. Her house in Westminster was made for it: chosen because it was in the Division Bell area, convenient for ministers in Whitehall to pop over for lunch or MPs to have dinner during a busy evening’s voting. The rooms were small and cozy. She could, if necessary, double the size of the dining room but she liked to keep things small. There was breathtaking attention to detail, born of long experience, excellent taste and a powerful mind. The food was perfect but never excessive or awkward to handle; one was never conscious of the wine flowing, as it appeared in your glass as if by nature; everything was served imperceptibly and with infinite skill, at exactly the right temperature. Nothing distracted from or impinged upon the talk.
Pam was not just a highly intelligent woman. She was also deeply emotional, with feelings that at times overpowered her. She had hot blood. She loved passionately, ruthlessly and, at times, recklessly. She was also a superlative hater. And her hates could be long lasting, indeed perpetual. Once she had decided firmly against a person, she was unremitting in her antagonism and reasoned arguments could not shake her. Her obstinacy was monumental and granitic, her chilliness marmoreal. Once or twice I tried hard and repeatedly to argue her out of a particular antipathy toward someone who remained a friend of mine and whom I knew she had misjudged. But she rarely revised a guilty verdict. “Pam, you have got your Hanging Judge Face on,” I would say. This was the other side of her deep and glorious passion for friendship. This too was inherited. Winston Churchill said of F. E., when he died, that their friendship had been unbroken for nearly a quarter of a century, from the day they first met properly and warmed to each other. He said that F. E. was not one of those acquisitive men who piled up estates and possessions, “piles of scrip and bonds and shares,” and tangible assets to be tucked away in vaults and strong rooms. Rather, “he banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends.” I often think of this noble phrase, and debate how far it applies to people I know. Certainly Pam banked her treasure in her friends’ hearts, and expected them in return to bank their treasure in hers. Friendship, close, intimate, firm, indestructible and perpetual friendship, was the guiding principle of her life. Along with her intelligence, it was the reason she was a hostess without rival, for she saw her guests as possible, potential, actual friends. Some turned out duds in this respect, and others even became enemies. But most, in all kinds of different, sometimes very peculiar ways, were friends, or treated as such, with tenderness, love, devotion and the affection which a guest always needs and so seldom receives. She made her guests feel special because she always tried to make them her friends too, as the dwindling band who still remember will testify.
Pam gave many large-scale parties, too, for public occasions. She always had a huge election-night party at the Savoy, down the road from the Telegraph fortress. This was the scene alternately of unbecoming exultation or gruesome despondency, guests leaving or arriving all the time into the small hours, having triumphed with obscene relish or having lost their jobs and often their seats too. Pam presided over these long nights of electoral carnage or indecent joy with extraordinary patience and almost sacramental charity. I thought of her, at these times, as a high priestess of England’s political faith, stretching out a consoling or restraining hand to vanquished and victor alike. She had the personality and the training, and the wise self-discipline, to do this with elegance and professional aplomb. And of course, as at her lunch parties, every detail was planned and supervised with immense care, so that the stricken were comforted, the exuberant calmed, the worried reassured, the mighty made to feel humble in their hearts. It was tremendously hard work, often emotionally exhausting too, for Pam felt deeply for a politician who had just seen his career tumble down in ruin. Once, after a particularly stressful night, I was up early, and had masses of flowers sent round to Pam’s house in Cowley Street. The phone rang: “Do you know, you are the only person who ever sends me flowers after a party? The others always take it for granted.” Not true, of course, but Pam sometimes was overcome by that feeling which all hostesses experience. What’s the point? Are they worth it? Is it all a waste of time and money and effort, and of love? That is why I see the hostess among the ranks of the heroes and heroines, and usually unsung too. Certainly Pam was in my Valhalla, a valkyrie of the festive table, a Brunhilde of the fête.