About the Author
Frances Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. She is the author of Lilla’s Feast. Her articles have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband, a Member of Parliament, and their two children.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Carolyn See "The Bolter" is a biography of Lady Idina Sackville, cousin of the novelist Vita Sackville-West, written by Idina's great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. The idea was given to the author by Errol Trzebinski (author of a biography of Joss Hay, the 22nd earl of Errol, Idina's third husband), who persuaded Osborne "that not only was there a book in Idina, but it was one that ought to be written." Certainly Osborne follows in the tradition of her class. One can't help but notice that these people were (and are) assiduous about writing biographies and appreciations of one another, painting one another's portraits, leaving behind sloughs of snapshots of one another laughing at picnics. They were aware, at every turn, of the obligation to make their own history -- even if, at times, there wasn't anything particularly historic about them. Idina Sackville is memorable for having been married and divorced five times, beginning in 1913. Thus her nickname, "the bolter." But she was reviled -- it's hard to say how widely -- for leaving Euan Wallace, her astonishingly rich and handsome husband, and for deserting her two young sons, David and Gee, leaving them to the care of a chilly stepmother and a flock of indifferent caretakers. They wouldn't see her again for over two decades. In those days, that kind of behavior wasn't "on" (well, it still isn't). The English upper classes had condoned extramarital affairs for years, as long as marriages and property were kept safe. (The author includes a charming reason for the favored "cinq à sept" -- 5 to 7 p.m. -- hours for adultery: "It took some considerable time for a lady to unbutton and unlace her layers of corsets, chemises, and underskirts, let alone button and lace them up again. Lovers therefore visited just after tea, when ladies were undressing in order to exchange their afternoon clothes for their evening ones.") So it wasn't adultery alone that sent Idina down an unfortunate path. It was probably the stress of the Great War, coupled with the callow character of Wallace, who seems, from his diary entries at least, to have been an upper-class twit. The couple had married in 1913. Idina immediately got pregnant. The next year Euan was off to the war. He was wounded, came home for a while and got Idina pregnant again. When he next returned -- for two months -- Idina was seriously ill with a lung affliction. Euan wasn't up for that inconvenience and went for weeks without seeing her, preferring instead the company of her younger sister, Avie, and the predatory husband-hunter Barbie Lutyens, daughter of a famous architect. These young girls annexed Euan and, together with some others, whiled away their time playing tennis, riding horses and dancing to the gramophone. Idina lay sick at home, seething. She left no diary, but the author suggests that because her own mother had been deserted by her father, Idina determined that if anyone were to do the leaving in this marriage, it would be her. Euan seems to have been entirely surprised that anyone would want to leave him -- him! -- and insisted upon sole custody of their boys. He then dived directly into the arms of Barbie Lutyens. Idina went off to Kenya with the man who became Husband No. 2. The section dealing with World War I, held together by entries from Euan's diary, is the weakest part of the book. Gramophone, gramophone. Tennis, tennis. Rides, glorious rides. The thought occurs: Why, again, am I reading this book? Just what remarkable things are these people supposed to have done? It's slow going and disagreeably thin. After that first divorce, though, things pick up. English expatriates in Kenya were a raucous bunch, and society in Nairobi featured some names we're familiar with today, such as Baroness Blixen (a.k.a. the writer Isak Dinesen) and her lover, Denys Finch Hatton. We've been conditioned to think of their lives as glamorous, and maybe they were. The adventuring English upper class believed seriously in the consolations of adultery, alcohol, drugs and building fabulous houses. Idina built a charming one, but then that marriage blew up. Her third husband, Joss Hay, 10 years younger than she, was unfaithful from the start, but since it was mostly with Idina's best friend, she didn't seem to mind. She and Joss built a lovely house called Slains. They gave wild parties with wife-swapping. They went on safari. Idina had a daughter. Then Joss met an older woman with an even nicer house, and left. And so on, through Husbands Nos. 4 and 5. With No. 4, Idina built a really gorgeous place, Clouds, but she couldn't stop her bad habit of adultery, and her husband took potshots at all those he suspected. In any event, she vowed she would stay in the house after they separated, and she did. The author presents theories about all this: Idina craved true love; she was deeply insecure; she lacked self-confidence. But there's no real proof of any of this to be found in the text. She left no diaries, and her few letters are unexceptional. She had a very bad reputation and seemed to have been very glamorous. Is that enough to carry a whole book? For some, apparently it is. "The Bolter" got wonderful reviews in England. But nobody in this book seems to wonder what they're supposed to be doing in this life. They spend their time getting married and divorced, getting sloshed and doing drugs. I'm all for that stuff in principle. But in this case, these characters make those activities as momentous as mowing the lawn.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Thirty years after her death, Idina entered my life like a bolt of electricity. Spread across the top half of the front page of the Review section of the Sunday Times was a photograph of a woman standing encircled by a pair of elephant tusks, the tips almost touching above her head. She was wearing a drop-waisted silk dress, high-heeled shoes, and a felt hat with a large silk flower perching on its wide, undulating brim. Her head was almost imperceptibly tilted, chin forward, and although the top half of her face was shaded it felt as if she was looking straight at me. I wanted to join her on the hot, dry African dust, still stainingly rich red in this black-and-white photograph.
I was not alone. For she was, the newspaper told me, irresistible. Five foot three, slight, girlish, yet always dressed for the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she dazzled men and women alike. Not conventionally beautiful, on account of a “shotaway chin,” she could nonetheless “whistle a chap off a branch.” After sunset, she usually did.
The Sunday Times was running the serialization of a book, White Mischief, about the murder of a British aristocrat, the Earl of Erroll, in Kenya during the Second World War. He was only thirty-nine when he was killed. He had been only twenty-two, with seemingly his whole life ahead of him, when he met this woman. He was a golden boy, the heir to a historic earldom and one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. She was a twice-divorced thirty-year-old, who, when writing to his parents, called him “the child.” One of them proposed in Venice. They married in 1924, after a two-week engagement.
Idina had then taken him to live in Kenya, where their lives dissolved into a round of house parties, drinking, and nocturnal wandering. She had welcomed her guests as she lay in a green onyx bath, then dressed in front of them. She made couples swap partners according to who blew a feather across a sheet at whom, and other games. At the end of the weekend she stood in front of the house to bid them farewell as they bundled into their cars. Clutching a dog and waving, she called out a husky, “Good-bye, my darlings, come again soon,” as though they had been to no more than a children’s tea party.
Idina’s bed, however, was known as “the battleground.” She was, said James Fox, the author of White Mischief, the “high priestess” of the miscreant group of settlers infamously known as the Happy Valley crowd. And she married and divorced a total of five times.
IT WAS NOVEMBER 1982. I was thirteen years old and transfixed. Was this the secret to being irresistible to men, to behave as this woman did, while “walking barefoot at every available opportunity” as well
as being “intelligent, well-read, enlivening company”? My younger sister’s infinitely curly hair brushed my ear. She wanted to read the article too. Prudishly, I resisted. Kate persisted, and within a minute we were at the dining room table, the offending article in Kate’s hand. My father looked at my mother, a grin spreading across his face, a twinkle in his eye.
“You have to tell them,” he said.
My mother flushed.
“You really do,” he nudged her on.
Mum swallowed, and then spoke. As the words tumbled out of her mouth, the certainties of my childhood vanished into the adult world of family falsehoods and omissions. Five minutes earlier I had been reading a newspaper, awestruck at a stranger’s exploits. Now I could already feel my great-grandmother’s long, manicured fingernails resting on my forearm as I wondered which of her impulses might surface in me.
“Why did you keep her a secret?” I asked.
“Because”—my mother paused—“I didn’t want you to think her a role model. Her life sounds glamorous but it was not. You can’t just run off and . . .”
“And?”
“And, if she is still talked about, people will think you might. You don’t want to be known as ‘the Bolter’s’ granddaughter.”
MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT to be cautious: Idina and her blackened reputation glistened before me. In an age of wicked women she had pushed the boundaries of behavior to extremes. Rather than simply mirror the exploits of her generation, Idina had magnified them. While her fellow Edwardian debutantes in their crisp white dresses merely contemplated daring acts, Idina went everywhere with a jet- black Pekinese called Satan. In that heady prewar era rebounding with dashing young millionaires—scions of industrial dynasties—Idina had married just about the youngest, handsomest, richest one. “Brownie,” she called him, calling herself “Little One” to him: “Little One extracted a large pearl ring—by everything as only she knows how,” she wrote in his diary.
When women were more sophisticated than we can even imagine now, she was, despite her small stature, famous for her seamless elegance. In the words of The New York Times, Idina was “well known in London Society, particularly for her ability to wear beautiful clothes.” It was as if looking that immaculate allowed her to behave as disreputably as she did. For, having reached the heights of wealth and glamour at an early age, Idina fell from grace. In the age of the flappers that followed the First World War, she danced, stayed out all night, and slept around more noticeably than her fellows. When the sexual scandals of Happy Valley gripped the world’s press, Idina was at the heart of them. When women were making bids for independence and divorcing to marry again, Idina did so—not just once, but several times over. As one of her many in-laws told me, “It was an age of bolters, but Idina was by far the most celebrated.”
She “lit up a room when she entered it,” wrote one admirer, “D.D.,” in the Times after her death. “She lived totally in the present,” said a girlfriend in 2004, who asked, even after all these years, to remain anonymous, for “Idina was a darling, but she was naughty.” A portrait of Idina by William Orpen shows a pair of big blue eyes looking up excitedly, a flicker of a pink-red pouting lip stretching into a sideways grin. A tousle of tawny hair frames a face that, much to the irritation of her peers, she didn’t give a damn whether she sunburnt or not. “The fabulous Idina Sackville,” wrote Idina’s lifelong friend the travel writer Rosita Forbes, was “smooth, sunburned, golden—tireless and gay—she was the best travelling companion I have ever had . . .” and bounded with “all the Brassey vitality” of her mother’s family. Deep in the Congo with Rosita, Idina, “who always imposed civilization in the most contradictory of circumstances, produced ice out of a thermos bottle, so that we could have cold drinks with our lunch in the jungle.”
There was more to Idina, however, than being “good to look at and good company.” She was a woman with a deep need to be loved and give love in return. “Apart from the difficulty of keeping up with her husbands,” continued Rosita, Idina “made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in love . . . She was a delight to her friends.”
Idina had a profound sense of friendship. Her female friendships lasted far longer than any of her marriages. She was not a husband stealer. And above all, wrote Rosita, “she was preposterously—and secretly—kind.”
As my age and wisdom grew fractionally, my fascination with Idina blossomed exponentially. She had been a cousin of the writer Vita Sackville-West, but rather than write herself, Idina appears to have been written about. Her life was uncannily reflected in the writer Nancy Mitford’s infamous character “the Bolter,” the narrator’s errant mother in The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred. The similarities were strong enough to haunt my mother and her sister, two of Idina’s granddaughters. When they were seventeen and eighteen, fresh off the Welsh farm where they had been brought up, they were dispatched to London to be debutantes in a punishing round of dances, drinks parties, and designer dresses. As the two girls made their first tentative steps into each party, their waists pinched in Bellville Sassoon ball dresses, a whisper would start up and follow them around the room that they were “the Bolter’s granddaughters,” as though they, too, might suddenly remove their clothes.
In the novels, Nancy Mitford’s much-married Bolter fled to Kenya, where she embroiled herself in “hot stuff . . . including horse- whipping and the aeroplane” and a white hunter or two as a husband, although nobody is quite sure which ones she actually married. The fictional Bolter’s daughter lives, as Idina’s real daughter did, in England with her childless aunt, spending the holidays with an eccentric uncle and his children. When the Bolter eventually appears at her brother’s house, she looks immaculate, despite having walked across half a continent. With her is her latest companion, the much younger, non-English-speaking Juan, whom she has picked up in Spain. The Bolter leaves Juan with her brother while she goes to stay at houses to which she cannot take him. “ ‘If I were the Bolter,’ ” Mitford puts into the Bolter’s brother’s mouth, “ ‘I would marry him.’ ‘Knowing the Bolter,’ said Davey, ‘she probably will.’ ”
Like the Bolter, Idina famously dressed to perfection, whatever the circumstances. After several weeks of walking and climbing in the jungle with Rosita, she sat, cross-legged, lo...
