Barbara Cartland Read online

  Barbara Cartland

  Crusader in Pink

  Henry Cloud

  To Barbara

  with love and amazement

  Contents

  1 The ‘Factory’

  2 Polly’s World

  3 The Wisest Virgin

  4 The Wrong Man

  5 The Undaunted Divorcee

  6 ‘My Other Self’

  7 ‘Men Matter Most’

  8 Married Again

  9 Barbara’s War

  10 Public Figures

  11 The Queen of Health

  12 A Star is Made

  Chapter One

  The ‘Factory’

  Since 1950 the centre of Barbara Cartland’s world has been a country house called Camfield Place lying in four hundred enviable acres of park and woodland just off the A1 motorway from London to the North.

  The countryside around is not immediately romantic or impressive. It is so close to London here that the suburbs are steadily encroaching : former country lanes are dotted now with filling stations, transport cafés, newly-built housing estates.

  But first appearances can be deceptive. Less than five miles away is Hatfield House, one of the most splendid great Elizabethan houses in the country. Since the middle ages, Kings and Queens had hunted here, and one of Barbara’s favourite gifts is a perspex paperweight containing a gilded oak-leaf picked from a tree behind her house. The following brief legend is printed on the back:

  A leaf from the pages of history. This leaf has been picked from the OAK planted by Queen Elizabeth the First of England on the spot where she killed her first stag circa 1550 in the beautiful grounds of Camfield Place, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, the home of the famous authoress, Barbara Cartland. Preserved for ever in 22-carat gold.

  Camfield Place itself appears a sort of enclave from the past, preserved and embellished, like the leaf, with a touch of Barbara Cartland. The railings and the cottage on the estate are painted Nile Blue (one of Barbara’s favourite colours), there are handsome Park Gates (also gilded), and although the house itself—built by Beatrix Potter’s grandfather—is stolidly Victorian, once past the front door you are in a world that could provide the setting for one of her own romantic novels.

  The imposing downstairs rooms are banked with flowers, and the pictures are distinguished : a fine eighteenth-century hunting scene by Webb and various other portraits of her late husband’s Granville ancestors. For many years Barbara collected gilt rococo tables and four-poster beds, and the effect is happily flamboyant, making the interior appear an impromptu treasure-house, larger than life, distinctly glamorous, the natural background it would seem for the world’s most successful romantic lady novelist.

  But Camfield Place is really two houses in one, and nobody can be here long without becoming rapidly aware of it. From the entrance hall the second door on the left leads off to the secretarys’ office, and here every inch of space is crammed with typing desks and filing cabinets and stacks of the latest Barbara Cartlands hot from the publishers. The walls are lined from floor to ceiling with framed originals of Francis Marshall’s paintings for the jackets of the books, and four permanent secretaries work here five days a week. There is the sharp electric spark of business in the air. This is the part of Camfield Place that someone dubbed the ‘Factory’.

  Barbara’s life inevitably divides between these two aspects of the house. Weekends are for her family and friends, and in particular for her two sons Ian and Glen who are the two most important people in her life. Ian, aged forty, a bonhomous, deceptively easygoing man, is married, with two young daughters and acts as his mother’s business manager, directing her affairs with breezy acumen through a partnership called Cartland Promotions. He is an efficient businessman and has made a lot of money for, ‘my wonderful mother’. Barbara herself is very vague about her earnings and always says, ‘Oh you must ask Ian that’, in answer to any questions on finance.

  Glen is aged thirty-eight, unmarried and a London stockbroker. He is a shyer, more romantic character than his brother, and advises his mother on her books, which he is the first to read in manuscript. Barbara’s eldest child, her daughter Raine, now Countess Spencer, inevitably leads a separate life as mistress of Althorp, one of the stateliest of England’s stately homes, and wife of one of the richest landowners in the country. But Ian and Glen, although they live in London, are usually at Camfield Place for the weekend. They shoot there during the pheasant season, help their mother entertain her guests and give her what she most enjoys in life—the feeling that her family are actively involved in everything she does.

  Barbara lives in style, as few of her Dukes would manage to these days. She is not personally extravagant but the house is expensive to maintain, and it pleases her to run it like a comfortable Edwardian country house. She has her white Rolls-Royce, which she calls ‘my trade-mark’, her butler, and her chef.

  It was typical of her to send her chef, Nigel Gordon, off to eat in several of the finest restaurants ‘to see how food should look’, and the weekend food at Camfield Place is very good indeed. Barbara herself has no pretensions as a cook—although she has written several cook books—but she believes strongly in the importance of nourishment, particularly protein, for healthy living and real happiness.

  Men, she has written, require ‘regular feeding and a diet abundant in protein to keep them in condition’. So do women, and she makes sure that at Camfield Place they get it. Nigel Gordon’s specialities include Salmon Coulibiac, game from the estate and perfect soufflés. Barbara herself eats modestly, but strongly disagrees with women who starve themselves in an attempt to keep thin. ‘It could do untold damage to their health,’ she says, ‘and anyhow, I’ve yet to meet a man who didn’t like a handful.’

  From Monday to Friday Barbara conducts her life according to a tightly disciplined routine, and it is now that the ‘Factory’ takes over. In this she is aided by her secretary, Mrs Waller, an attractive, quietly efficient woman in her early thirties who comes closer than anyone to running Barbara’s life. Not that this is always possible, for Barbara is incapable of delegating and so hyper-energetic that there is little that she does not try to do herself. ‘If only people would accept that I’m always right,’ she says, ‘everything would go like clockwork.’

  But Ruth Waller is one of the marvels of Camfield Place. For despite the fact that Barbara maintains that it is very different to work with women, her secretaries are the exception. ‘They are a marvellous team—my lifeline,’ she says. Mrs Waller has been acting as a sort of general manager for the ‘Factory’ for the last thirteen years. Barbara, half-jokingly, refers to her as ‘my Comptroller’. ‘Royalty have Comptrollers who see to the details of their lives. That’s what Ruth Waller does with mine.’

  Barbara is called at eight forty-five sharp, by a ladysmaid who has been with her for thirty-five years. Sleep is another thing that Barbara believes in. ‘Most people need eight hours a night, especially if they use their brain. My family all need a lot of sleep and I have always believed it important for them at weekends to sleep until they wake.’ She is generally in bed by nine o’clock at night and reads for an hour or so before she goes to sleep. Similarly she deals with her post, the morning papers and her breakfast in bed. With her breakfast comes a most important part of her routine—the seventy or so vitamin pills and capsules to which she ascribes her extraordinary vitality and health.

  Not for Barbara the pleasure of a casual, easy-going morning. There are thirty or forty letters to which she dictates a reply and endless telephone calls before she has her bath. Each day is treated like a grand occasion, in which Barbara always has the starring part. She always dresses glamorously—Cartland pink or brilliant blue—and insists that she does this
purely to please herself.

  By now it is eleven-thirty and Barbara descends and takes her two dogs for a walk. One is a white lion Pekingese called Twi-Twi—who featured in her recent novel, The Prince and the Pekingese — the other a black Labrador, appropriately christened Duke, who was born at Broadlands and given to Barbara by her great friend, Earl Mountbatten of Burma. The dogs have come to form a sort of symbol of the two opposed elements in Barbara’s life. Twi-Twi is cosseted, luxurious and bites strangers; Duke is down-to-earth, extrovert and wags his tail at everyone he meets.

  Lunch on a working day is simpler than at weekends, and Barbara eats the same menu as is provided for her secretaries, sitting alone at the head of her immaculately laid and polished dining-table. Then, just after one o’clock, the most important part of her day begins.

  She walks from the dining-room, followed by her dogs, across the hall and into Grandpa Potter’s big library which holds over three thousand of the books she has collected for research. There she makes herself comfortable on a big yellow-brocade sofa in front of the fire – a hot-water-bottle at her feet and over her legs a pink rug covered in white fur.

  Mrs Audrey Elliott, her literary secretary, sits behind her, pad in hand. As an extra safeguard a tape-recorder is switched on. And for the next two-and-a-half hours, Barbara dictates a chapter of her latest novel. Apart from her very earliest novels, and her ‘serious’ books, like the lives of her mother, her brother, Ronald, and eight historical biographies, she has dictated all her books. It was Godfrey Winn who first advised her to do this: ‘The words you speak are so much more immediate and sincere than those you write,’ he explained to her – invaluable advice.

  For she has taught herself the virtuoso art of unhesitating dictation. It requires extraordinary powers of concentration, and Mrs Elliott, apart from being very accurate, has long discovered how to remain invisible and totally discreet throughout the process. Sitting directly behind Barbara, all Barbara can see of her is the faint reflection of her face in the glass of the bookcases beyond. It is an uncanny scene as Barbara – makeup still immaculate, hair perfectly in place, a string of pearls around her neck – starts to construct her latest book.

  She herself describes the process : ‘As I sit there I’m simply telling myself a story, and I am told my voice changes as I take each separate part—I see exactly what is happening as I describe it and I live through each dramatic incident. I’ve always had this unusually vivid visual imagination, and I can really see each room my characters are in.

  ‘The dining-rooms I use are versions of the dining-room from my grandfather’s Georgian house which I remember as a child, the famous ancestral houses in which I stayed or have visited and places where I’ve actually been. This is why my books are very lifelike.’

  ‘And what about your heroine?’ one asks.

  ‘Oh, she is always me, and always virginal of course. She’s something of a Cinderella, and I’ve always thought the point where a young girl falls in love just on the edge of womanhood is the most romantic moment in her life.

  ‘Whenever I’ve had a love affair myself I’ve always somehow felt I was innocent. It is a sort of mental virginity—that lovely feeling that real love has happened to me for the very first time. I think most women secretly enjoy this idealistic sensation and I try to get it into all my books.’

  ‘And your heroes?’

  ‘Of course they’re the sort of men I’ve always found attractive—tall, dark and rather challenging. They’re expert lovers, quite unlike my heroines of course, and I always particularly enjoy the part where the heroine makes it clear that she doesn’t quite know what goes on in bed, and the hero says: “Darling, that is something I will explain later,” which he does on the page when they’re safely married.’

  One of the most phenomenal things about her work is that she never seems to falter, never needs to correct herself—and never fails. She cheerfully admits she cannot spell and that her punctuation could improve, but incidentals such as these are taken care of by a retired classics master who reads each manuscript before it is finally retyped for the publisher.

  Another extraordinary thing about her work is the speed with which she can construct a book. Her theme, as she explains, is traditional. The Cinderella virgin meets and falls in love with her challenging dark hero on the first few pages. Events occur to mar or complicate the course of true love for the next six chapters. But in the seventh, love wins through, the pair are safely married, and we leave them as the joys of licit carnal bliss are just about to start.

  But after a lifetime writing just this sort of book, Barbara’s skill consists in the endless ingenuity with which she adapts this constant theme to different historic backgrounds and events. Her period extends from the 1790s, when men stopped wearing wigs—‘I never really believe a man in a wig could be an attractive lover,’ she explains—until the death-knell of Edwardian England. For locales she has scoured the world, from Haiti and South America, to Bali and St Petersburg.

  But every book is carefully authentic in its background and she reckons that she reads twenty to thirty serious history books for each novel. These are collected by her chauffeur from the London Library or Hatchard’s, or provided by the local County Librarians who take a personal interest in her requirements.

  As one might expect, she reads extremely fast. ‘You have to understand,’ she says, ‘that I have had to educate myself, so I enjoy learning about a period and then weaving myself a lovely romantic story round it all.’

  And weave she does, six to seven thousand words an afternoon, forty-five thousand words a book—and after seven afternoons with Mrs Elliott behind her, the book is finished and only has to be typed by Mrs Clark whose manuscripts, Barbara says, are the best any publisher or editor has ever seen. ‘I expect, and get perfection,’ she adds.

  Barbara shows no sign of author’s strain throughout this period, no nerves, no hesitation. According to Mrs Waller she is more relaxed and energetic after an afternoon’s dictation than she was before. It is only when she is not involved in a book that she begins to get restless.

  For Barbara lives her books and they have now become a crucial part of her existence. She believes implicitly in what she writes, and this is the key to their success, the vital quality she shares with every really big, mass-selling author of popular fiction—sincerity. It is impossible to counterfeit and pointless to deride. Edgar Wallace had it, so did Ian Fleming, so does Barbara—the ability to turn their private dreams into the sort of myth that has a universal appeal. In Barbara’s case, this appeal is still increasing, as her books are read by countless million female—and male—readers of all ages, classes, and levels of intelligence, from Tokyo to Trinidad, San Francisco to Ceylon, Britain to Brazil.

  But what really are these dreams which have such universal feminine appeal? And where did they begin?

  Chapter Two

  Polly’s World

  Barbara is not a snob—‘Give me an interesting dustman rather than a boring Duke to talk to any day,’ she says—but as a romantic novelist she is predictably keen on noble antecedents.

  The downstairs cloakroom at Camfield Place has a large framed family tree tracing her husband’s family back, via the Granvilles, to Duke Rollo, grandfather of William the Conqueror, and she has written proudly of the way her mother’s family, the Scobells, are descended from ‘one of the oldest Saxon families in Great Britain’, the de Scoberhulls who were High Sheriffs of Devon in the years before the Norman Conquest.

  She finds such connections, like the Dukes and Marquises she writes about, ‘very romantic’; but her own immediate past lies not with the upper aristocracy. Like many writers of her period, she comes from that most fertile of imaginative seed-beds, the dispossessed Edwardian gentry.

  One of her prized possessions is an imposing marble bust of her maternal grandfather, Colonel George Scobell, which glares at visitors across the hall of Camfield Place. Even in marble he could almost be a Barbara Cart
land hero with his handsome commanding profile, perceptive, searching eyes and bold, sardonic whiskers.

  True, he was not a Duke, but a Rector’s son from Sussex, who was sent to Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, and inherited a small fortune from an unmarried naval uncle who was a Member of Parliament and invented the VC. This enabled George Scobell to travel widely, climb Mont Blanc, and make love to a lot of women of all sizes, shapes and nationalities, before marrying in the early 1870s.

  His bride, Edith Palairet, enjoyed an income of £2,000 a year and was connected with the Hamiltons of Philadelphia—and thence with the Dukes of Hamilton. She was a lively, energetic, tolerant lady—which was just as well, for Colonel Scobell’s interest in the fair sex did not cease with marriage.

  The Scobells lived in considerable style in Down House, Redmarley, a village some ten miles from Worcester. It was a graceful, many bedroomed Georgian mansion, with its own farm and small estate, and the Colonel—he served loyally for many years with the local militia—employed twelve indoor servants, four men in the gardens, three in the stables, and six on the farm. Most years he reckoned to make a profit of at least two hundred pounds from his land.

  He hunted five days a week, fathered four daughters and one son, and remained something of a fire-eater to the day he died, imposing order and obedience upon his family by the sheer strength of his extremely dominating personality. It was a religious household, and a very ordered one—with the Colonel taking family prayers at eight o’clock each morning.

  But the Colonel was a restless, frequently irascible character, always dreaming of fresh Mont Blancs to climb. And it was into this little High Victorian kingdom which he ruled so absolutely, that Barbara’s mother was born in 1877. She was the fourth daughter—and the Colonel’s reactions to her sex can be imagined. She was duly christened Mary Hamilton, but throughout her long and very energetic life, was always known as Polly.