AN Outrageous Affair Read online




  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  No Angel

  Something Dangerous

  Into Temptation

  Almost a Crime

  The Dilemma

  Sheer Abandon

  Windfall

  Forbidden Places

  An Outrageous Affair

  Penny Vincenzi

  THE OVERLOOK PRESS

  New York, NY

  This edition first published in the United States in 2008 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1993 by Penny Vincenzi

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 9781590207901

  For Polly, Sophie, Emily and Claudia, who are all so outrageously good to me

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments are a bit like Oscar speeches; corny, predictable but from the heart.

  From my heart then, may I offer some predictable corn to the people who have helped me with An Outrageous Affair.

  I could not have begun to write the chapters set in Hollywood without the help of my good friend in Los Angeles, Anita Alberts, who worked tirelessly to find me people to talk to about Tinseltown in the fifties: and wonderful Gabrielle Donnelly who did the same and took me to endless legendary eateries. It was all the best fun.

  In New York, Nancy Alloggiamento gave up hours of her high-powered time to tell me about Madison Avenue and its attendant excitements, past and present; and so did Gregg Boekeloo who was wonderfully funny and informative on the same subject.

  I would also like to thank Sally O’Sullivan, brilliant editor and friend, who has dispatched me over the years to interview countless actors, thereby providing me with a great deal of background and colour; and a special thak you to Angela Fox, who has not only given me lots of wonderful stories and gossip to weave into my story, but has advised me on such crucial points of detail as theatrical superstition and folk lore.

  I would also like to thank my mother-in-law for the very valuable groundwork she put in for me into my research into wartime Suffolk, and all the people in Framlingham and Woodbridge (none of whom will remember me) who raked their memroies for G.I. stories for me, as I wandered through one dark January day two years ago.

  I would like to thank Sue Stapely, legal whizz person, upon whose encyclopaediac knowledge of just about everything I increasingly rely and several other members of the legal profession who wish to remain anonymous but who have guided me through the quagmire of libel law and writs and the whole damn thing; to Caroleen Conquest, Morag Lyall and Katie Pope who have seemingly magical powers in transforming manuscripts into books; and to Carol Osborne without whom I would never finish any book because she sees to all the things that I should be doing at home. And, as always, a special thank you to Rosie Cheetham, without whose skill, inspiration and awe-inspiring patience as an editor I should be entirely lost; and to Desmond Elliott who, apart from his more conventional duties as my agent, makes me laugh and boosts my morale exactly when I need it most.

  The Main Characters

  ENGLAND

  Caroline, Lady Hunterton, née Miller

  Sir William Hunterton, her husband

  Chloe, their daughter, later Mrs/Lady Piers Windsor

  Toby and Jolyon, their sons

  Jack Bamforth, Caroline’s groom

  Joe Payton, arts journalist, later Caroline’s partner

  Piers (later Sir Piers) Windsor, Chloe’s husband

  Flavia, his mother

  Guinevere Davies, his first wife

  Pandora, Edmund and Kitty, children of Piers and Chloe

  Rosemary, their nanny

  Jean Potts, Piers’s secretary

  Ludovic Ingram, lawyer, friend of the Windsors

  Magnus Phillips, journalist and biographer

  NEW YORK

  Brendan FitzPatrick, screen name Byron Patrick

  Kathleen, his mother

  Edna, Kate and Maureen, his sisters

  Kevin Clint, a theatrical agent

  Hilton Berelman, talent scout for Twentieth Century Fox

  Fleur FitzPatrick, daughter of Brendan and Caroline Hunterton

  Poppy Blake, a colleague of Fleur

  Reuben Blake, her brother

  HOLLYWOOD

  Yolande duGrath, drama coach

  Rose Sharon, friend of Brendan

  Naomi MacNeice, studio executive

  Perry Browne, Publicist

  1972

  From the Daily Mail, 10 July 1972

  Final curtain comes down on Sir Piers Windsor

  Sir Piers Windsor, who was knighted by the Queen yesterday, and has played all the great tragic heroes, was centre-stage in a dreadful real-life tragedy yesterday, when he was found dead by his secretary in the stables of his country home in Berkshire. Foul play is not suspected.

  Sir Piers, who was 51, was at the peak of his profession. Only yesterday he was knighted by the Queen for services to the British theatre, and he had been earning huge critical acclaim for his production of Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company in which he was playing Othello and Iago on alternate nights. His celebrated film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream won three Oscars two years ago, and he was about to take a Shakespeare repertory company to New York. His innovatory musical version of The Lady of Shalott ran for five years in both London and New York and set entirely new standards for the genre.

  An additional and dreadful irony was that he held a large party last night to celebrate both his investiture and the sixth anniversary of his idyllically happy marriage. Tributes have been pouring in all day from both the theatrical profession and the public. Lady Windsor, who is deeply distressed, is still at Stebbings Hall today with her three small children. She is expected to return to her London home shortly.

  The meeting of Sir Piers and the Honourable Chloe Hunterton, as she then was, when she was only 18, has passed into theatrical folklore: after doing a course at Winkfield Place, Lady Windsor was working as a cook, and Sir Piers asked her to do a luncheon at his office. It was love at first sight, and they were married a few months later.

  The writer and journalist Magnus Phillips, who has been working on a highly publicized book about Sir Piers, said last night, ‘The theatre has lost a great talent and to his wife, family and friends his loss is immeasurable.’

  The phone rang on Magnus Phillips’s desk as he sat reading his own words. It was Chloe.

  ‘I suppose you realize that you drove Piers to this,’ she said. ‘You and that vile book.’

  ‘Oh Chloe,’ said Magnus, ‘there were any number of reasons your husband might have decided to kill himself. As you very well know. Anyway, it will be a while before it comes out now. I have to write the epilogue.’

  The Tinsel Underneath

  A Story of Hollywood

  By Mag
nus Phillips

  Published by Beaumans, 1972

  The Tinsel Underneath is an extraordinary true story: of love and loyalty, good and evil, hope and despair – and above all of fierce, relentless ambition. It is a story that could perhaps have only taken place amidst the aristocracy of the acting world. The heart of the story lies in Hollywood, with all its glamour and promise – and attendant corruption and temptations; and yet it all began in the peace and beauty of the Suffolk countryside over twenty years ago.

  Following on the success of his unique documentary-style bestsellers Dancers and The House, Magnus Phillips has written an enthralling study of the theatrical and film world. It is moving, scandalous, amusing: it reads at times like a thriller, at others like a love story. It is compulsive entertainment.

  Dedication to The Tinsel Underneath.

  For Fleur, in the hope she will forgive me.

  ‘I’d like to tear down all this false tinsel to show the real tinsel underneath’.

  Sam Goldwyn

  Foreword to The Tinsel Underneath

  There is a poem by Don Blanding (recited by Leo Carillo in the movie Star Night at the Coconut Grove) which describes Hollywood far better than I can.

  Drama – a city-full,

  Tragic and pitiful,

  Bunk, junk and genius

  Amazingly blended.

  It goes on. It doesn’t really need to; you get the idea.

  The story told in this book is both tragic and pitiful; it contains a great deal of bunk, junk and genius; and (in another line from the poem) is both vicious and glamorous.

  What is astonishing is the seemingly irresistible draw of Hollywood. It attracts the tacky, certainly; it also draws the talented, like lemmings to the cliff edge, lambs to the slaughter.

  The two men in this book, equally ill equipped to cope with the city full of drama, for different reasons, both found their downfall within it. For one of them, the end came swiftly, for the other slowly, as tragedy pursued him down the years. But the roots were there for both of them, in the celluloid Babylon, put down in hope, torn up in despair; and not only for them. Other lives were sacrificed, other loves destroyed. All in the cause of greed, ambition, hope – and fear. And where the reality ends and the fantasy begins is something that perhaps only the next generation can tell.

  1942

  Caroline wasn’t sure who was doing a better job at wrecking her life, her mother or Winston Churchill: her mother, she supposed, being clearly hell-bent on her personal downfall, on the destruction of her youth, although Winston was doing a pretty good job backing her up, removing any man under the age of forty-five from her orbit, enveloping the country in a funereal shroud of blackness and telling them all they had to look forward to was blood, sweat and tears. Of course such thoughts were near heresy, and she was frightened almost to express them herself, Mr Churchill being invested (probably quite justly) with Messiah-like qualities, worshipped and revered by the whole country; indeed when they all gathered round the wireless in the kitchen at the Moat House and listened to the majestic poetry of his voice, even Caroline stopped begrudging all that she was asked to give and give up. That was the whole trouble of course; it was all giving up, all negative. She would have rushed out tomorrow to join one of the forces, would have given her life gladly working in the Ops Room as a Wren, or as a mechanic in the ATS, would have personally toiled in the rubble of the bombed cities along with the fire services; would even have run a soup kitchen with the Red Cross, or trained as a nurse and volunteered for the most dangerous overseas postings. That was what she understood by the blood, sweat and tears Winston offered them, that was how she saw defending her island, whatever the cost might be, but her mother would have none of it, would not countenance her doing anything constructive, certainly not joining the services. ‘Yes indeed,’ she had said icily, when Caroline went and begged her permission to join the Wrens, proffering the famous poster: ‘Free a Man to Serve the Fleet’, ‘and I think we can all imagine how you would be freeing men, Caroline. You can stay here and help at home, just as important to my mind, with Janey leaving us and going to work in the munitions factory, wretched girl, and Bob gone as well from the garden, and I can keep an eye on you.’

  And so it was that Caroline found herself leading a life of sterile, barren misery; sometimes days would go past and the only person she would talk to was Cook, and that only to be asked if she could pull some onions or find some eggs. She felt quite literally sick with boredom much of the time; and almost frightened at the knowledge that at the age of twenty, in what she could see perfectly clearly was the prime of her life, she was leading the life of a middle-aged matron for months, years on end, with very little chance of escape. She was in effect a prisoner, and so desperate that she was seriously considering running away, locked up as she was (never mind that it was in a beautiful house) in the depths of Suffolk, miles from anywhere, too far from any of the towns to be able to make her own way there, and fraternize with the servicemen on leave. Woodbridge was an hour’s drive in the trap and more than two hours’ bike ride away and Ipswich an unimaginable journey, and while her mother could have driven her in occasionally, or even to one of the local village dances, she flatly refused.

  Her mother indeed was her enemy and jailer: delighted to have the war as her ally in removing most of the pleasures of life from her daughter, deliberately placing obstacles in the way of any that might still be stealthily making themselves available to her. Her father, who might have helped her, might have spared at least an occasional gallon of precious petrol and his elderly chauffeur (replacing the dashing young one long since called up) to drive her to the odd party, but he was unaware of her predicament, working round the clock (and frequently sleeping) at his factory, on double time producing military uniforms. Caroline was thus entirely at her mother’s mercy, living out day after day of aching, sick boredom – in the conviction that her life was more than half over, and without even any real blood and sweat to relieve it.

  The Moat House, which was currently serving as Caroline’s prison, was situated on the outskirts of Munsbrough, a tiny and charming Suffolk village halfway between Wickham Market and Framlingham; it had been in the Miller family for five generations when Caroline was born there. It was a beautiful, low, Elizabethan house, painted pink in the Suffolk manner, with heavy timbering and a small river running round three quarters of it which did duty as the moat of its name. There was a bridge over the moat which led into a small courtyard, with a high, curving wall, the same age as the house which, although small by regal standards, and having only eight bedrooms, was said to be one of the few where Queen Elizabeth had indeed actually slept. The hall of the house was flagstoned, leading on one side into a huge drawing room, and on the other an equally large dining room, and at the back the kitchen and utility rooms extended into an endless warren. There was a very fine rose garden, an orchard, and a walled vegetable garden greatly reminiscent of Mr McGregor’s in Peter Rabbit, there was the large stable block, and beyond that four hundred acres of arable land (now leased out for the most part to a local farmer) grazed by the Millers’ dozen or so horses.

  Caroline’s father, Stanley Miller, was a businessman, not a farmer, a big, burly, red-faced man, six feet three inches tall, and weighing at least seventeen stone, bullishly insensitive, good humoured and oddly patient, especially with children and animals; he had a big blanket factory just outside Ipswich which had made his father and his grandfather extremely rich and which made the shrewd Stanley even richer.

  Jacqueline Miller had been the daughter of the modestly impoverished local solicitor, beautiful, with flaming red hair and dark green eyes; boys who had enjoyed her favours in the backs of cars and in cloakrooms during hunt balls testified to her almost voracious sexuality. It was said that she could come at least four times from every sexual penetration. However, sexy and beautiful as she was, by the time s
he was twenty her reputation was appalling, and no decent boy would have considered marrying her. But Stanley Miller, ten years her senior and desperately in search of a wife, had considerable problems with women; he was, despite his bluster, almost pathologically shy, incapable of talking about anything except the fluctuating price and future of the blanket industry, his exploits on the hunting field, and the weather. He was, moreover, to his immense embarrassment, a virgin. Jacqueline, equally desperate for a husband, and seeing him as an opportunity and a challenge, put to work not only her determination and charm, but what was known locally as her ‘lobster grip’ and lured him into bed, thus winning his heart, his fortune and his undying love.

  They were married three months after their first coupling; everyone had said that Jacqueline must have been pregnant in her wild silk wedding dress, and beneath her huge bouquet of lilies, but she was not; it was over two years later, in 1922, that she finally produced Caroline and confounded local gossip. (There were those who said that Caroline was not Stanley’s child, eager to extract every possible ounce of scandal from the relationship, but they were wrong, and if she had her mother’s red hair, she had her father’s blue eyes and height to prove it.)

  But despite Stanley’s great love for Jacqueline and her genuine fondness for him, the marriage was unhappy; his insensitivity, his almost total inability to communicate with her did not improve with the years, and she had finally grown lonely and hopelessly frustrated and even depressed. She was an intense, emotionally demanding woman; marriage to Stanley, she confided to her unusually sympathetic GP, was like marriage to some alien from another country who could neither speak to her nor understand what she said.