The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff

Author:Sofka Zinovieff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062338969
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

WINNIE, PRINCESSE DE POLIGNAC READING THE PAPER ON THE PORCH AT FARINGDON NOT LONG BEFORE HER DEATH IN 1943

Among the permanent occupants of ‘the Dorch’ were the two great hostesses Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax, who abandoned their fine London houses and established themselves on different floors. The rival salonniéres continued to gather what they could of the great and the glamorous, war or no war. Naturally, some old friends were now on active service, others evacuated and others too busy to be doing with Emerald Cunard’s teas or Sibyl Colefax’s ‘ordinaries’ – lunches at the Dorchester, after which guests would be presented with a bill for 10s 6d. But many of the old faithful did turn up, including those who continued to visit Faringdon, such as Harold Nicolson, Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connolly. Rumour had it that when the sirens announced a raid, Lady Cunard would crouch beneath the dining table amidst the gilt and ormolu in her seventh-floor suite and read Proust or Shakespeare to calm her guests.

Clarissa took up quarters on the Dorchester’s (understandably unpopular) top floor along with her old school friend Pamela Digby, now Churchill, having recently married Churchill’s son, Randolph, and famous for her astonishing success with rich and famous men. ‘At one time or another, there were friends and acquaintances on every floor,’ wrote Clarissa, who nonchalantly eschewed the bomb shelter for the foyer when the sirens went off. Cecil Beaton became a very close, lifelong friend, sending over boxes of flowers from Ashcombe and writing letters when abroad.333 He had turned away from the fripperies of fashion and royal portraits (claiming ‘I was sick to death of posing people round apple blossom’334), to snap bomb-wrecked streets, wounded babies and brave airmen setting off on missions. The Ministry of Information sent him all over the world on photographic assignments and he became the official photographer for the RAF.

In 1942, Doris Castlerosse, Cecil’s unlikely girlfriend of the 1930s, came back to London from the US and also moved into the Dorchester. Lady Castlerosse had left behind her American lover, Eleonor Flick Hoffman (of the Venetian palazzo), and was rumoured to have become bitter and ‘an acid misanthrope’.335 During a trip to Washington, Winston Churchill had invited her to dinner and strongly encouraged her return to England. It appears he was worried that his portraits of this notorious, if titled, courtesan might fall into the hands of an American magazine and affect his gravitas as Britain’s leader. Not long after seeing Churchill, Doris managed to obtain a highly elusive priority air ticket to London. Despite their bitter divorce dealings, Lord Castlerosse met his ex-wife at Waterloo Station and they dined together at the Dorchester before he left her there and returned home. (He would die the following year from a heart attack, allegedly after one of his habitually indulgent dinners.)

Doris then had a dreadful few days, sitting in her rooms, terrified at the bombs falling all around and the blasts from the huge anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, the three Churchill portraits still wrapped in brown paper.

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