The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (23 page)

OT LONG AFTER Jennifer’s catalytic trip, she fell in love again – this time with a young man her father had met on his way to a conference in Canada.

He was a regular soldier, an Olympic athlete and very handsome. I tossed and turned in my bed, fantasising, but he was too correct and my father seemed to disapprove of my schwerm as it was called in Vienna. Innocently one day, as I was sitting on my mother’s bed, I said, ‘Why is father so irritable and disapproving when I look at John or speak about him?’ She turned her immense blue eyes on me, slightly twisted her star sapphire ring and said, ‘Men sometimes love each other.’

Jennifer was also discovering more about Alathea’s secrets.

My mother’s only pleasure in life was visits from the doctor, new clothes and jewellery and occasional escapades of which I was made aware by servants’ gossip and glances in the other direction when I came into the room. Dim young men came and went … Once a very attractive young man with red hair came to stay. He was a nephew of a Cambridge friend of my father’s, and this was the excuse, as he had no money or room. He had a brief romance with my mother – Her Last Attachment she called it, and they went to New York together. I hope she was happy. He told me years later he had been in love with me.

Pixie had sustained Jennifer through her childhood and continued to give her the affection and stability her parents were unable to offer, but her natural innocence prevented Jennifer confiding in her about what were increasingly daring adventures. Pixie still acted as chaperone, and Jennifer continued to run circles around her adoring governess. Fortunately she found the perfect friend in Violet Wyndham. Violet was old enough to be Jennifer’s mother, but understood all about problematic families, and offered a perfect haven of fun, sympathy and intelligence to Jennifer at Parliament Piece, her home not far from Oare. Violet’s mother was the novelist and literary hostess Ada Leverson, famous for being a supporter and friend – ‘The Sphinx’ – to Oscar Wilde before and after his disgrace. Though sought after in her salon, the Sphinx was less of a success as a mother, which doubtless gave Violet insight into Jennifer’s problems at home.

Photographs from the time show Violet tall and willowy in chic outfits, draped with fox furs and accompanied by dachshunds. Nobody quite knew her age; like Jennifer when she got older, Violet forged the date of birth on her passports. She was, according to her son, Francis Wyndham, ‘social but not snobbish’. Married to a much older man who ‘only wanted to play bridge’, she provided dinners and weekend house parties for a range of interesting, attractive and often younger people. Her house was the only place in the vicinity that Jennifer’s parents approved of her visiting, and the teenager started to spend a great deal of time there. More significant for Jennifer than the social gatherings was the fact that Violet was a wise older woman – almost a substitute mother – who was a sympathetic, dependable and crucially non-judgemental confidante. If she gave advice, it was likely to be: ‘You should always go to a party, even if you don’t feel like it.’ And Jennifer tried to follow that. As a Jew living among a class of English people who were easily anti-Semitic (even her friend Diana Cooper called her ‘Auntie Nose’ behind her back), Violet probably also knew what it was to feel different – an outsider within an elite. Gradually, as Jennifer came to trust Violet, she arranged to meet her boyfriends at her house, and started to invite along her own friends.

If her Aunt Evelyn had been the perfect 1920s party girl, Jennifer’s more voluptuous figure, feminine dresses and flirtatious ways made her the ideal version for the 1930s. With her penchant for sunbathing and easily tanned skin, she followed the fashion for sun worship that marked the decade: sun baths for their ‘health-giving rays’ and the use of new-fangled suntan oils were all the rage. One of her favourite songs was Cole Porter’s ‘Experiment’, its promotion of curiosity and personal rebellion perfect for this stage of her life. Some saw Jennifer as giddy and superficial: ‘She had a throw-away manner. Passing herself off as frivolous was her way of managing her life. But it was deceptive, and covered somebody much more thoughtful,’ said one friend who knew her for decades.256

In 1934, Alathea managed to get out of bed to ensure that her daughter went through the traditional rite of passage for girls of her background and had a London season. Like Jessica Mitford, who described it as ‘the specific, upper-class version of a puberty rite’, Jennifer was not excited by the idea of being a deb. Her coming of age was closely allied with creating a distance between her parents and herself, but she went along with the convention of ‘coming out’. There were interminable balls, dinners and race meetings, and in May, the eighteen-year-old was presented at Buckingham Palace. Along with a crowd of other young women in long white dresses and evening gloves, virginal in their lack of jewellery, she queued up to make the deep curtsey to the sovereign that they had all been practising. In July, The Times reported ‘Lady Fry’s small dance’ for her daughter, where the ‘decorations consisted of roses, sweet peas, carnations, delphiniums and clarkia’. Jack Harris’s band played the latest fashionable dance tunes, like the slow foxtrot ‘You Forgot Your Gloves’: ‘You forgot your gloves
When you kissed me and said goodnight,
So I’ve brought them, you see, / But don’t thank me, it’s quite all right.’

JENNIFER, 1930S PARTY GIRL. SHE WAS VERY LIBERATED AND ENLIGHTENED ON SEX AND WAS ATTRACTED TO MEN WHO WERE ‘QUEER’

As she changed from girl to woman, Jennifer remained close to Prim, her childhood friend, but also fell in with a crowd of young people who were more decadent – beautiful and mostly upper-class, they had been to good schools and had their photographs in Tatler. She was particularly attracted to men who were ‘queer’, as she put it – not necessarily the ‘roaring pansies’, but those who could play it either way, using ambiguity to their advantage. She was often attracted to the same men as those that caught the eye of her gay friends. Good looks were important to her and smooth-skinned, limber youth was preferable to the macho style of the alpha male. Jennifer’s notebooks from when she was undergoing psychoanalysis in her sixties describe her sexual development at this time. In one passage, she turns from the first person to a note-form in the third person to depict how she deliberately encouraged an admirer to make love with her, ‘and has first real violent orgasm. Has never known of the clitoris or that form of pleasure, but from then on uses it to full advantage, alone, with girls, but not with great success with men though enjoys love making and thinks herself in love with one or another.’

PRIM AND JENNIFER ON A SHIP HEADED FOR HOLIDAYS

If Robert had occasional flings with women but was basically gay, Jennifer had occasional flings with women but was basically heterosexual. Jennifer ‘had a gay sensibility’, said one friend, ‘and on the whole, she liked beautiful boys. She could be quite explicit and quite camp.’257 Another friend recalled that ‘She was very liberated and enlightened on sex – rather as people are now. She would have casual sex as well as love affairs. She might go down to the docks in the East End after a party – sometimes her men friends would use her as bait. She liked to peep into that world, and sometimes she’d pick someone up too. She liked the idea of “rough trade”, even if it wasn’t something she did very much. She wasn’t sordid.’258

Treading a delicate line between sexual ambiguity and getting involved with men who were never going to end up with a woman, Jennifer fell in love with Hamish St Clair Erskine. A dark-haired, finely built dandy and the son of the Earl of Rosslyn, he was described by Harold Acton as ‘an elegant and amiable young social butterfly’.259 Hamish preferred boys but was happy to string girls along. He had already made Nancy Mitford miserable for years, with their engagement that everyone except Nancy seemed to realise was hopeless. Despite Nancy’s perspicacity, she entertained the common but often erroneous belief that Hamish’s dalliances with men were youthful peccadilloes, and as in many similar cases, they would surely be replaced in the long term by marriage, children and family life. Whether or not Jennifer had the same illusions is unknown, but she was certainly involved with him.

One of the aesthetes who had been at Oxford in the 1920s with Nancy’s brother Tom, Hamish had been sent down for his behaviour. Foppish, frivolous and dedicated to drink, he was pinned to the page as Albert Gates in Nancy’s first novel, Highland Fling, where he is depicted as wearing crêpe de Chine shirts, taffeta wraps and tartan trousers, while trailing wafts of gardenia perfume. He calls his friends ‘Darling’, quaffs sidecars at the Ritz and is enamoured of the Victorian era in the fashionably semi-ironic manner of the times. ‘Albert disliked women, his views on the sex coinciding with those of Weininger – he regarded them as stupid and unprincipled; but certain ones that he had met in Paris made up for this by a sort of worldly wisdom which amused him, and a talent for clothes, food and maquillage which commanded his real and ungrudging admiration.’

Hamish was friends with Gerald and Robert, and he introduced Jennifer to many people who were racy, clever and determined to keep things fun. ‘Hamish was a little king in that world depicted by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh,’ remembered Francis Wyndham.260 Their language and expressions defined them almost as much as the invitations to their parties: ‘Darling, how divine’ and ‘I could-dern’t care less.’261 And they liked to use the word ‘Miss’ in a camp or ridiculous way: ‘Where’s Miss Taxi? She’s late.’ Or ‘I just can’t get on with Miss Proust.’262 Never mind if it was all a bit light-hearted and giddy – anything to be amused. Hamish may have found Jennifer amusing in certain similar ways to Nancy. Both had an intelligent wit and dressed with elegance. Yet their astuteness apparently deserted them when it came to getting involved with Hamish. Nancy once admitted, ‘Hamish said to me in tones of the deepest satisfaction “You haven’t known a single happy moment since we met, have you.”’ She even made light of an attempt to kill herself: ‘I tried to commit suicide by gas, it is a lovely sensation just like taking anaesthetic so I shan’t be sorry any more for schoolmistresses who are found dead in that way.’263 And ultimately, Jennifer would probably have agreed with Nancy’s comments in a letter to her brother, Tom. ‘How is one to find the perfect young man, either they seem to be half-witted, or half-baked, or absolute sinks of vice or else actively dirty … All very difficult.’264

If Jennifer felt doomed to be a misfit and a failure in the eyes of Sir Geoffrey and Lady Fry, she threw herself even deeper into the hedonistic circles of her new friends that she knew would not please them. In addition to Hamish, there was another unsuitable man called Peter, whose surname remains unknown.

I had made friends and was also attracted to an amusing young man, also homosexual, who wanted to marry me for my expectations. My father disapproved and feared that Peter knew they shared the same inclinations. He tried to break up our friendship but I followed him to New York, where I received short shrift, as he had got into café society, where I felt I was a fish out of water. I stayed with a friend of my mother’s who knew little of the Harlem nights, the clubs and the wild dancing and drinking, though no harm came to me. I lied to her, and said I was going to stay with a respectable couple in Jamaica, but set off with Peter and his raffish friends and generous keeper, on a tour of the islands, then by boat to British Guyana, train to Guatemala, by car through the forests and lakelands and another train to Mexico City.

Photographs from this time show Jennifer tanned and gorgeous, beaming for the camera, arm-in-arm with her fellow travellers. She got drunk on tequila, hardly noticed an earthquake that up-ended the table in a bar, and acquired a pet squirrel that drowned in the lavatory. When a handsome Mexican serenaded her with a guitar under her window, she let him in and took off her clothes, only to find that ‘Peter opened my bedroom door and sent him packing and we moved on the next day. He was yet another governess, but more successful as I never made love with the Mexican.’ Meanwhile, Sir Geoffrey was sending telegrams to every port they visited, demanding that his errant daughter come home. Eventually she left, travelling alone by boat and returning ‘to an icy welcome’.

By the late 1930s, Jennifer was an elegant, cultivated young woman. Her hair was styled, her clothes were chic, and she had a strong sense of how to create beauty around her. Like many of her aesthete friends, she had picked up on the kitsch appeal of Victoriana, and dug around in antique shops for what were still the unfashionable relics of her grandparents’ generation: decorated boxes, vases in the shape of hands, and dainty bracelets and rings studded with seed pearls and turquoise. But she was also something of a dandy – a category that might primarily apply to men, but that included a few women such as Nancy Mitford, Edith Sitwell or Nancy Cunard. Jennifer’s interests went further than a narcissistic dedication to style, but she was developing something of a reputation: ‘Where would it get her, all of this running around with queers?’ Certainly not the right sort of husband, murmured the older, more experienced society types.265

Life was not unpleasant; there were certainly thrills, even if they were within the tightly drawn boundaries of Jennifer’s particular world. While she still lived with her parents in Sloane House and at Oare, she was increasingly independent, if necessarily reliant on her father for financial support. Her parents may have sensed that their daughter understood about their more shameful secrets and they were unable to exert much pressure on her to conform. There were parties, weekends away, and trips to the South of France or Majorca, where she sported a daring two-piece swimming suit. She continued to read voraciously and to attend the ballet whenever she could – she was a great fan of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Many years after the first generation of Bright Young Things, Jennifer was taking on their mantle, drinking late into the night at the Cavendish, where Gerald had entertained the original Russian Ballet and where Cyril Connolly was still gossiping with the irrepressible owner, Rosa Lewis, just as he had when he came down from Oxford in the 1920s. By 1937, Jennifer was included on one of Cyril Connolly’s many and frequently changing lists of significant friends, which also included the Betjemans, ‘Wiz’ (W. H. Auden), ‘Pierre’ (Peter Watson, who would fund Horizon magazine) and the writer Peter Quennell. Although many of the names left the lists over the years, Jennifer’s remained: Cyril adored her for the rest of his life, and their amitié amoureuse sustained them both. Thirteen years older than Jennifer, Cyril was already a successful literary critic – a romantic cynic, a melancholic wit and a chubby, snub-nosed dandy who almost made a profession of depicting himself as a failure. It is easy to understand his attraction to Jennifer on physical grounds; years later he wrote to her recalling ‘the brown-gold evening dress you had in the War and those lovely hands and tiny feet’.266 Continuing the colour scheme that he adored, he also eulogised her voice, that some found ‘actress-y’ or affected; Cyril said it was ‘like a brown sunny stream with a smell of pine needles as one finds in the Lande’.