Caravans and Wedding Bands by Eva Petulengro

Author:Eva Petulengro [Petulengro, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447213017
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

TWENTY

The Two Duchesses

Our house in Ship Street Gardens took on an air of regal glamour when the Duke and Duchess of Leinster moved in next door to us. The duchess was opening up a dress shop, and she’d often pop into my waiting room for a chat and a gossip when I wasn’t busy. She was a very entertaining lady. One day she popped in to say, ‘Eva, dear, are you doing anything tomorrow?’

‘Why?’ I enquired.

‘I’m having a grand opening,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’d like you and a friend to come.’

I accepted and the next day I dressed carefully, choosing a fitted black cocktail dress and my highest pair of black patent heels. When I got to her shop, I found myself at a very swish affair, with waiters walking around with champagne and trays of canapés. Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright were there, as was the actress Dora Bryan and many other familiar faces. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and didn’t turn down the champagne, knowing I only had to stagger next door to get home!

The duchess popped in the next day and said, ‘Eva, I’ve got some lovely dress lengths. One in particular made me think of you. It’s pink and grey tweed, and I want to make you a coat dress out of it.’

She had a tailoress on the premises and I had to have three fittings. It was the most beautiful outfit, designed and made especially for me. When it was finally ready, I was very happy indeed. However, when I asked for the bill, the duchess insisted it was a gift. I don’t like taking liberties and refused any further offers to make outfits for me, although I loved the coat dress and wore it at every opportunity!

The duchess told me she was having her autobiography written by Michael Thornton, whom I had met at her opening, and he became a frequent visitor to her shop. I got to know him during his visits, and on one of them he told me he had a friend in London who had heard about me and that she needed some urgent advice. I explained to him that I didn’t usually do home visits.

‘But she’ll pay all expenses and any fee you’d care to name,’ he argued. He confided to me that his friend was, in fact, the Duchess of Argyll, a society beauty with a notorious reputation.

In 1963 scandal had raged around the duchess’s divorce from the Duke of Argyll, after Polaroid snaps emerged of her frolicking naked with a man whose head had not been captured by the camera. Speculation was rife over the identity of the so-called ‘headless man’, who was rumoured to be a senior figure in the government, cabinet minister Duncan Sandys. At the time of the Argyll divorce, other pictures were discovered in the duchess’s boudoir, of a second mystery man. Many years later, it was claimed that he was the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Reluctantly, I agreed to go and see her at her home.

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