Daughter of Narcissus by Lady Colin Campbell

Daughter of Narcissus by Lady Colin Campbell

Author:Lady Colin Campbell [Lady Colin Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780955350733
Publisher: Dynasty Press
Published: 2015-09-15T05:00:00+00:00


Chapter Eighteen

In New York, I stayed with Jeanie Campbell, daughter of the eleventh Duke of Argyll and granddaughter of the Canadian newspaper magnate, the first Lord Beaverbrook. She was something of a character, which is typified by an anecdote she used to relate about her marriage to Norman Mailer. Norman, unconvinced that she really loved him, dared her to allow him to dangle her by the feet from the eleventh floor of her New York apartment building. Accepting the dare, Jeanie gave no thought to Norman being short and slight, while she was hefty and large-boned. Nor did she feel a moment’s fear as Norman held her by the ankles, though she did feel triumphant, after he pulled her back inside the apartment, for she had provided him with indisputable proof of love. The fact that he might well have dropped her simply didn’t enter into Jeanie’s reckoning. Love was all.

Love or no, the marriage did not last; but Norman remained a part of Jeanie’s life, because he was a devoted father and they had a daughter together, an adorable girl named Kate.

Jeanie was a genuinely kind and decent person who was always offering a bed to people like me or Prince Alexander of Russia, to name but two. We slept on Napoleon I’s (surprisingly comfortable) camp bed, with the famous sketch Graham Sutherland had done of her Beaverbrook grandfather looking over our shoulders. A devout convert to Roman Catholicism, she tried to make her everyday life a cathedral to her beliefs, especially after she gave up drinking and acknowledged how destructive her family’s alcoholic tendencies had been.

I would learn, once I had married her brother, that Jeanie was haunted by her family’s heritage. ‘There is something very dark about my family,’ she used to say, using the polite word for evil. In particular, she alluded to past atrocities such as infanticide, murder, incest and the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe, when her ancestor the Earl of Argyll had orchestrated the slaughter of the rival clan, the MacDonalds, murdering in their beds the men, women and children who had given them refuge in keeping with Highland traditions of hospitality. To this day, there are people in Scotland who will have nothing to do with the ducal family of Argyll, whom they regard as the forerunners of the Himmlers and Goerings of a later age.

Jeanie was also haunted with guilt about the infamous divorce of her father and stepmother and the part she had played in destroying Margaret’s life. She had helped Big Ian to break into Margaret’s townhouse and steal her appointment books. He then used a series of innocuous entries about lunches and dinners with male socialites, mostly gay, to ‘prove’ that Margaret had not only kept a written record of her lovers but had also rated their performances numerically. As homosexuality was then illegal, and the men named would have gone to jail if Margaret had exposed them, honour gave her no choice but to endure in silence the persecution she suffered in the Divorce Court as she was ‘unmasked’ as a rampant harlot.



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