Lady Annabel Goldsmith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lady Annabel Goldsmith (born 11 June 1934) is an English socialite, eponym for the London nightclub Annabel's, and the best-selling author of Annabel: An Unconventional Life.^[1]

Contents 1 Early Life 2 Family 2.1 Notoriety 3 Writings 4 References 5 External links 6 Further Reading

[edit] Early Life

Lady Annabel was born in London as Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart to the 8th Marquess of Londonderry and his wife Romaine Combe, who was the daughter of Major Boyce Combe from a middle-class family in Surrey. The second daughter in her family, she was named after her mother's favourite song, "Miss Annabel Lee," and was brought up as a country child. She was educated at Southover Manor School in Lewes, Sussex and later at Cuffy's Tutorial College in Oxford. In her youth, she was an avid reader, practical joker and equestrian.^[2]

Her father's aristocratic family, the Marquesses of Londonderry, owned several enormous houses and estates. As a result, Lady Annabel grew up dividing her time between Mount Stewart, a vast lakeside palace in the shadows of the mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, the historic Wynyard Park in County Durham, England, and the Londonderry House, an aristocratic townhouse in London's Mayfair district.^[3]

When she was 17, her mother died of cancer in 1951, but the illness was kept a secret from Lady Annabel and much of the London society, where the family held a prominent place. About her mother's demise, she later said, "I remember firing furious questions - 'Why didn't somebody tell us? We could have done nice things for her.' But cancer was such a taboo then - Mummy didn't even tell her sisters."^[4] Her father, unable to bear the loss and live without his wife, became a chronic alcoholic, created a tumultuous environment at home and eventually died from liver failure on 17 October 1955, at the age of 52.

[edit] Family

In her memoirs, Lady Annabel stated, "I was an incredible mother, rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife."^[2] Her primary vocation has been as a mother, having raised two sets of children, whom she has often differentiated as the "Birley children" and the "Goldsmith bunch." In 2003, she remarked on her children's varied marital patterns by observing that, "All my children with James marry young and breed, and my children with Mark do the opposite."^[5]

Birley Marriage

On 10 March 1954, at the age of 19, Lady Annabel married businessman Mark Birley at the Caxton Hall register office in London. Her husband famously paid tribute to her by founding and naming in her honour his legendary Mayfair nightclub, Annabel's, which opened on 4 June 1963.

The first of the Birleys' three children, Rupert, was born on 20 August 1955. He attended Eton and read History and Russian at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1986, at the age of 30, Rupert Birley disappeared off the coast of West Africa and was presumed drowned.^[6] "There really is nothing worse than losing a child - and there is something special about your first-born," Lady Annabel later said, adding that, "Because I was so young when Rupert was born, he was already in his 20s when I got into my 40s - so we were more like good friends than mother and son."^[4]

Born on 19 February 1958, the couple's second son, Robin Birley, grew up to be a businessman and co-managed Annabel's for a few years while it was still owned by his father. He was, as recounted with detail in his mother's autobiography, mauled by a tigress at John Aspinall's zoo, an incident that left his face visibly disfigured at a young age. Having let the boy near the pregnant tigress, Lady Annabel claimed that she never quit feeling guilty about this tragedy.^[4] "It was my own fault. I was, am, angry with myself," she said. The family was completed by the birth of Lady Annabel's first daughter, India Jane, on 14 January 1961; the granddaughter of society portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, she became an artist.

[edit] Notoriety

During the 1960s, Lady Annabel visited Annabel's, owned and run by her first husband for more than forty years since its inauguration, every night and entertained various guests ranging from Ted and Robert F. Kennedy to Frank Sinatra, Prince Charles, Richard Nixon, and Muhammad Ali. She later recalled, "I used to be there every night, even when I had three small children to take to school the next day. It was like a second home to me."^[7] The nightclub is known as the grandest and most celebrated London nightclub of the late 20th century, and came to symbolise the hedonistic swirl and dazzle of the sixties and seventies, before eventually losing its luster in the nineties.^[8] The Daily Telegraph described Lady Annabel's reputation and influence during those years as such:

What brought the punters in as much as Mark's attention to detail was Annabel - her fabulous frontage cleaving the smoky subterranean air, her breathy voice loaded with wonder and flirtatious nuance. An unconfident girl and reluctant debutante, she discovered, during those late nights at Annabel's, the power to break hearts.^[3]

In 1964, Lady Annabel fell in love with one of her husband's friends, the entrepreneur Sir James Goldsmith, and soon embarked on an extramarital affair with him. This arrangement was made public when she became pregnant by Sir James and gained notoriety in London's society columns as a modern British mistress. Both believed the affair would be a passing fling. Lady Annabel, who was attracted to Sir James' flashiness and his jet set lifestyle, claimed, she was "Mad about Jimmy. Loved Mark desperately."^[9]

She professed an opposition to raising another family with Sir James because, "I didn't want to hurt Mark any more than I had." Yet, she was Birley's wife and Goldsmith's mistress when her second daughter, Jemima Goldsmith, was born on 30 January 1974. Sir James, known for maintaining polyamorous relationships throughout his life, was married to his second wife, Ginette Lery, at the time. He was famed for saying, "If you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy." When he proceeded to have more lovers after his relationship with Lady Annabel, she revealed, "I did feel jealous. I used to scream at him."^[9]

Birley and Lady Annabel divorced in 1975 after the birth of Jemima's brother Zac, an environmental activist and aspiring politician.^[10] Despite their divorce, the two remained best friends, talking to each other everyday and even holidaying together until his death in August 2007.^[5][8] On the breakdown of their marriage, acknowledging Birley's own infidelities, Lady Annabel said, "I wasn't totally to blame. Publicly the whole blame lay with me and that's something I've just had to live with. But there were two of us in that marriage."^[5]

Goldsmith Family

In 1978, after Sir James divorced his second wife, he and Lady Annabel married for the sole purpose of legitimizing their children.^[2] Ben Goldsmith, the couple's third child together, was born on 28 October 1980. Apart from her own six sons and daughters, Lady Annabel is stepmother to five of her second husband's children, including: Isabel, Sir James' first child from his marriage to Bolivian tin magnate Antenor Patiño's daughter Maria Isabel Patiño; Alix and Manes, his offspring with second wife and former secretary Ginette Lery; and Jetho and Charlotte, the youngest of the Goldsmith brood who were born to his mistress Laure Boulay, Comtesse de la Meurthe.^[11]

Lady Annabel raised her children in Ormeley Lodge, a six-acre Georgian mansion on the edge of Richmond Park in Surrey. The half-German Jewish and half-French Catholic James Goldsmith divided his time between Ormeley Lodge, a Paris mansion, an 18,000-acre estate on the Pacific coast of Mexico, a villa in Marbella, Spain, and his 17th-century chateau in Burgundy, France.^[12][13] In 1981, Sir James moved to New York with his new mistress Laure Boulay, Comtesse de la Meurthe. Lady Annabel, however, remained legally married to him until his death in 1997.^[6]

[edit] Writings

On 29 December 2000, Lady Annabel experienced what she has called a life-defining moment, when, according to her, "the things which you might mind desperately, didn't seem to matter."^[4] She, her son Benjamin, daughter Jemima and her two sons, plus her niece Lady Cosima Somerset and her two children were traveling to Kenya to celebrate New Year's, when their British Airways jet came within seconds of disaster after a passenger stormed into the cockpit and tried to seize the controls.^[14] The flight to Nairobi, which reportedly included rock singer Bryan Ferry, became temporarily disengaged and the jumbo was knocked off course, abruptly diving and plunging 17, 000 feet below.

"Nobody on that plane thought, 'am I going to die?'" she later recalled. "They all thought, 'we are going to die'. It was horrible, horrible."^[4] This near-death incident is the event that Lady Annabel has credited with the inspiration for her literary efforts. "I had always thought that I would write a book," she claimed, "but writing my memoirs didn't really come into my head until after that flight."

Best-selling memoirs

In 2004, she published her memoirs Annabel: An Unconventional Life, which spanned the course of her life from a pre-World War II aristocratic childhood and her glamorous social circle of the 1960s to her current status as a homely grandmother of nine. In the introduction to Annabel: An Unconventional Life, she wrote:

Before the accident I would not have believed that I would come to love and value my family even more than I did already. Shortly after the accident, with an awareness of how close my children and their children came to being denied their future, an understanding of the fragility of my own hold on life and a profound appreciation for my own past, I decided to write this book.^[2]

David Chapman, reviewing the book for the Newsquest Media Group Newspapers, concluded, "This is a decidedly funny memoir that includes the scrapes and japes of nob culture."^[15] Lorne Jackson of the Sunday Mercury was totally dismissive, saying, "This could have all been explained in one page, possibly two if the type was particularly large. Instead Goldsmith witters, waffles and warbles in her pucka-posh writing style."^[16] The memoirs shot to No. 7 and then No. 4 in best-seller lists for non-fiction in England.^[17]

Pet dog's autobiography

Lady Annabel followed her successful autobiography, two years later, by ghost-writing her pet Copper's autobiography in the name of Copper: A Dog's Life. Her daughter India Jane illustrated the book. Copper was originally bought by the Goldsmiths as a reward to their daughter Jemima for passing her Common Entrance Examination, but he remained in Lady Annabel's care for most of his life and had an adventurous time in Richmond. "Amid tough competition, he was probably the greatest character I ever knew," she told The Daily Telegraph while planning the book in 2004.^[18]

The mongrel, who died in 1998, was famed for traveling by bus, chasing joggers and visiting a Richmond pub, the Dysart Arms. Upon the release of the book, Lady Annabel declared, "My late husband and Copper had a lot in common," and then elaborated that, "Jimmy was not at all a doggy person, yet he was intrigued by Copper. I think he recognised that same free spirit in him. They certainly both had an eye for the ladies!"^[6]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Many lives of Mistress Goldsmith
• Woman's Hour: Leading Women interview
• The Peerage: Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart

[edit] Further Reading

• Goldsmith, Annabel (2004). Annabel: An Unconventional Life: The Memoirs of Lady Annabel Goldsmith. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-82966-1. 
• Goldsmith, Annabel (2006). Copper: A Dog's Life, illus. India Jane Birley, London: Time Warner. ISBN 0-316-73204-4.