The Errant Æsthete

The long awaited and repeatedly delayed memoir that has tongues wagging and aesthetes yearning across all continents has finally hit the shelves, dear readers, and this breathless read on party monster extraordinaire, social raconteur, designer, author of the maddeningly coveted Sheer Opulence, and master of the well-dropped name, Nicholas Ponsonby Haslam’s Redeeming Features is rumored to be witty, shocking, incisive, and gloriously indiscreet. Who woud have expected otherwise?

Claims of a dalliance with Anthony Armstrong-Jones (before the latter’s marriage to Princess Margaret) have already prompted denials. Conquests – Haslam’s youthful good looks were legendary – have included dancer Larry Kert, actor Helmut Berger, architect Philip Johnson, choreographer Jerome Robbins, fashion designer Bill Blass and the actress Tuesday Weld.

Dumbstruck? Lovestruck? Who knows? No buttery madeleine, he. There’s so much to savor, a mere sampling culled from a variety of sources should satiate your appetite or addiction until your copy hits your doorstep.

BACKGROUND

On his father’s side he’s descended from a Lancashire family grown rich from cotton spinning and the invention of Aertex. On his mother’s side he is a Ponsonby. His great uncle was the eighth Earl of Bessborough, and other notable relations include Caroline Lamb and Princess Diana. Queen Victoria was his mother’s godmother.

Once described as “a living link not only with what he calls ‘post-war faggotry’ but also pre-First World War grandeur”, Haslam, born just weeks after England declared war on Germany, in 1939, has always been more than the sum of his bloodlines. Best known as a socialite and interior designer to the impossibly wealthy, he has a special talent for friendship, flair, and ceaseless reinvention.

SOCIAL LIFE

As a legendary creature of the night and burner of midnight oil for nearly half a century, he has led a life of extraordinary variety and cultural, social, even sexual, complexity. Predominantly gay, he has enough heterosexuality in him to seduce any woman he wants, friends say. It’s also been conjectured that although he may “look like a yob, underneath, he’s patrician enough to out-snoot the snootiest doormen in town.”

Beloved gadfly and internationally renowned designer, he is as famous for his love of parties as for his passion for Pantone charts. He says eight stiffy invitations land on the doormat of his home in South Kensington (one of many he inhabits) every morning — and, judging by the party pages in Tatler, he has yet to refuse one. One imagines a little R&R would be in order, but Mr. Haslam has definite opinions on rest and relaxation. “How disgusting,” he is reported to have said. “I’ve always thought relaxing was very common. What does it even mean?”

WHAT TO EXPECT:
Haslam’s fans want to know what he knows, and have been impatiently awaiting his autobiography. From all I’ve read, Redeeming Features proves that good things do come to those who wait.

As one reviewer noted:

“Nicky Haslam has known everyone from Greta Garbo to Cole Porter to the Royal Family, with many unforgettable eccentrics in between. But this is not a catalogue of celebrities. It is a truly felt, beautifully crafted, wise consideration of a full life, which paints an unforgettable picture of a vanished England and America. Masterpiece is an overused word, but this Proustian evocation is indeed a masterpiece.”

Another said:

It teems with dropped names and juicy gossip. How many memoirs contain lines such as: “As I walked up Duncannon Street, named after my mother’s family …”? In the main, it’s an intelligent, substantial chronicle of what it’s like living at the epicentre of high society and high culture (with a bit of the lower sort thrown in for good measure).

Then, there’s this:

“…every paragraph in his book holds enough plot lines to power a dozen novels. For instance (and this is abridged): “… At Longleat, lanky Henry Bath, still extremely handsome despite a deep attachment to the bottle, had recently handed over the running of the estate … to his heir, the almost more handsome but even then somewhat wacky Alexander Weymouth …”

And finally, Madame Arcati weighs in with this:

“…when I say that Nicky Haslam’s memoir Redeeming Features is the most brilliantly trivial book I have ever read (since the Andy Warhol Diaries) you may need to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, you have my permission not to work for the rest of the day. By all means have sex. At least buy a good champagne.”

 

ON DECORATING AND CLIENTS

I’m basically quite a get-up-and-do-it sort of person,” he says. “I’m sort of fearless. Not brave, you understand — fearless. Diana Cooper always said to me, ‘Never say no to anything. Do it, do it, do it!’ ” But interiors only became “big business” when “the hedge-fund wives came over from America in the 1990s”.

Now he keeps an office crammed with staff behind Sloane Square and has 15-18 projects a year, travelling to Moscow, Brazil or North Africa. “I never work with someone I don’t react to well the first time, so I’ve only fallen out with two of them. One of the wives thought she knew better than I did,” he says, incredulous.

The British cash has dried up, “but there are a lot of Russians who have made a lot of money in the last six months”. And the Middle East? “Won’t work for them.” Because of bad experiences? “No, I just don’t like that you can’t use the human form. Won’t work for Nigerians, Indians, Chinese. They have these awful hard-and-fast rules. Or that awful thing, feng shui.”

He pulls a face. “The Russians don’t mind. They’ll have anything. Nigerians have the worst taste.” None of this comes off as politically incorrect. He assesses people with the same humour and detachment he might the centrepiece in a dining room. “I went to Rio the other day. Hideous dwarfs. They all looked like Princess Margaret in fright wigs. The men were like Maltese landlords. Stocky little things.”

ON HIS BELOVED HUNTING LODGE ODIHAM HAMPSHIRE

“The house is so welcoming,” he swoons. “It just loves people. Cecil Beaton and that world have been, and I’ve had some parties. The big hunting party for my 40th birthday was quite fun. It had rained for a week, but June 16 dawned and it was boiling. I had Cole Porter being played, jazz music, dancing, a tent, silver and mauve fireworks. Red and yellow are common, don’t you think?”

ON WALLIS SIMPSON, DUCHESS OF WINDSOR

Wallis Windsor was a Vogue icon. Only a few weeks before I had laid out a spread on the Windsors in their Paris house. The photographs, by Horst, might have been taken, some wag said unkindly, through concrete, so wrinkle-free were the features of both duke and duchess. Her hard, lacquered head, the scarecrow body in its exquisite clothes—part Ming empress, part bang-up-to-date modern—totally dominated the beautiful rooms, the witty 18th-century furniture, the Meissen, the dogs, the duke, with a kind of sexual artificiality that was undeniably intriguing.

I knew all the drama and anger of the abdication, of course, but by the ’60s the royal family was so safely established that that particular can of worms had somewhat lost its shelf life; the king-and-Mrs. Simpson business was simply seen as a romantic love story for him or an understandable career move for her.

But many East Coast grandees were proud of their American royal, worshiped her drop-dead chic, her sassy wit, her exaggerated jewels, her perfectionism. To others, she was a hardheaded go-getter, a haughty social cipher, cadging her way off two continents. Which?

Wallis Simpson and her rumored paramour, Jimmy Donahue

The Colony, Thursday, 1 p.m. Margaret Case, with Kitty Miller and Cordelia Biddle Robinson, is already seated when I arrive. Our table is the best banquette, in the farthest corner, affording the longest walk to it, and the best view from it, in the room. These ladies are the duchess’s “set.” If she’s not natural with them… I think.

The commissionaires swing open the doors. There’s a sudden silence: Eyes swivel, forks fall onto asparagus (“Without butter, Gene, please”). Across the restaurant—cheek-kissing, air-kissing, winking, waving—comes this minute figure, the flat Cubist head made higher and wider by black bouffant hair parted centrally from the brow to the black grosgrain bow at the nape, dressed in an impossibly wideweave pink angora tweed Chanel suit, concertinaed white gloves, black crocodile bag and shoes. As she approaches, not stopping, not stopping smiling, her eyes greet her friends. Then, “Hi, I’m Wallis,” to me, and, “I’ll have the chicken à la king, Gene, thank you,” to the hovering maître d.

ON PRINCESS DI

Suddenly this enchantingly awkward girl, with her shy, downward-lashed smile, badly cut hair, and hopelessly unchic clothes was thrust into a limelight glare stronger than anyone before her had had to endure. Sometimes reveling in her Georgiana Devonshire-like position, sometimes rabbit scared in the headlights, she made her virgin way to royal status with no one to guide her, no one to ask, only a set of contemporaries who treated her new position with either unmasked envy or mild derision. A few, perhaps necessarily aristocratic, older women were wise to the danger looming. …

Diana Cooper, perhaps remembering attempted matchmaking with a former Prince of Wales, and slightly put out that “Lady Diana” no longer signified exclusively her, was rather appalled by the determination of her friends Queen Elizabeth and Diana’s hard-bitten grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, to force the marriage. She was, however, entranced by her namesake’s poignant allure; when that one breast peeped innocently from Diana’s silken décolletage, she observed to me, “Well, wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king?”

Redeeming Features: a memoir by Nicholas Haslam is published by Jonathan Cape. Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam will be broadcast in November on the BBC.