Evelyn Waugh gossiped about her, Anthony Powell put her in his novels and Lord Weidenfeld, briefly, married her. She was a writer, a bohemian, a femme fatale – but, on her centenary, DJ Taylor asks who was the real Barbara Skelton?
Barbara Skelton’s trail runs through a certain type of 20th century literary life like a vein of quartz. Here is Evelyn Waugh, writing to Nancy Mitford early in 1950 with a bumper selection of the latest Grub Street scuttlebutt: “G Orwell is dead, and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow. Will Cyril [Connolly] marry her? He is said to be consorting with Miss Skelton.” Nearly four decades later their mutual friend Anthony Powell was still filling his diaries with news of the journalists who had telephoned to inquire if Barbara was the model for A Dance to the Music of Time’s farouche, man-eating Pamela Flitton (“I replied with guarded affirmation”). The death of Lord Weidenfeld earlier this year brought another little flurry of publicity for the woman once described as looking like “the youthful concubine of a legendary Mongol chieftain” along with lurid accounts of their brief yet tempestuous mid-1950s marriage.
But who was Barbara Skelton, and why should Waugh have gossiped about her, Powell finessed her into his novels and Weidenfeld schemed so craftily to displace her first husband, the literary critic-cum-editor Connolly, from the marital bed? Most of the answers can be found in her highly autobiographical first novel, A Young Girl’s Touch, published in 1956 at the height of the Weidenfeld/Connolly standoff, which tracks her erratic progress through the second world war. Skelton, who was born 100 years ago, features as “Melinda Paleface”, who is thought “far too young and pretty to live in London alone”. She is first seen working at the offices of a continental government in exile, where she devotes her mornings to “doing her face or making dates by telephone with all her friends and admirers” and her evenings to being entertained by them at a variety of expensive restaurants and back-street nightclubs.
An unabashed freeloader (“Someone was always there to take Melinda out to dinner”), equally in her element lunching at the Berkeley Hotel or attending blue movie screenings in Chelsea, her fatal attraction is ascribed to a trick of cupping her chin in her hands and staring abstractedly into the distance to create “an air of elusiveness that men found irresistible”. At the same time the deep wells of private unhappiness into which her boyfriends so regularly tumble make her captious and spiteful. Plus, as she frankly concedes, she has a habit of falling for men as unreliable as herself. Despatched to “Jubaland” (a thinly disguised Egypt) as a cipherine, she is taken up by the local potentate, King Yoyo (an even less thinly disguised King Farouk), who delights in thrashing her with a dressing-gown cord. “Nothing was ever as black as it seemed,” Melinda gamely reflects at the close of her tragi-comic picaresque. “The entire course of our life can change completely at a moment’s notice.”
At 17, bored by the routines expected of the rich man’s mistress, she took to modellingIf A Young Girl’s Touch falls into the category of ingenue confession – one of those engaging books in which a stream of hair-raising events is recounted with a comparatively straight face – then by the time of its appearance Skelton had spent nearly two decades up to the neck in the kind of life it so carelessly describes. Her father was a regular army officer who had married an Edwardian chorus girl. There was Danish blood – the source of Barbara’s corn-haired good looks – a family connection to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a germ of temperamental excess that led her at four to attempt to run her mother through with a carving knife and in her early teens to be expelled from her convent boarding school for forging a sheaf of love letters to herself signed “Fred”. At 17 a millionaire friend of her father set her up in a West End flat. Bored by the routines expected of the rich man’s mistress she took to modelling for Schiaparelli and Hartnell, pining for the bohemian life while acknowledging that whatever society she fell into would always fall short of her expectations of it. Like Melinda, “for years she had longed to get away and escape into the unreal world of London. Now that she had done so, happiness still seemed far out of reach.”
All this raises the question of milieu, the kind of world that Skelton inhabited in her twentysomething heyday. On one level, naturally, it is the sort of existence sketched out in the famous chapter in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair entitled “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year” in which a suit of finery or a three course dinner is all the more enticing for being subsidised by somebody else. It was also a world of stratospherically differentiated removes, in which the Ritz hotel and the rat-haunted bedsit, the flyblown country cottage and the out-of-season continental resort all play their part, and the next significant other is as likely to be a half-starved painter as a chequebook-wielding millionaire. What kept her from being a poule de luxe pure and simple, Powell thought, was an odd streak of seriousness, a half-buried intellectual twist that allowed her to combine a relish for causing trouble for its own sake with a genuine shyness, uncertainty and eagerness to learn.
They moved to a cottage on the Kentish heights, attended by a vengeful coatimundi, and fought ‘like kangaroos’All these qualities contributed something to the most heartfelt relationship of her postwar life, her five-year marriage to Connolly. They were also responsible for most of its tensions. By this time, at any rate in the upper bohemian quadrant in which she moved, Skelton was famous, or perhaps only notorious, part of the tiny yet legendary demographic defined by the essayist Peter Quennell (with whom she had pursued a wartime affair) as “lost girls” – “adventurous young women who flitted about London, alighting briefly here and there and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend”. Their ranks included Orwell’s second wife Sonia Brownell, Janetta Parlade (then married to the journalist Robert Kee) and Connolly’s former girlfriend Lys Lubbock, and the associative net flung out to gather them in was usually a connection with Connolly’s 40s literary magazine, Horizon. Skelton herself had first come across Connolly while sharing a flat with Quennell upstairs from the Horizon offices.
Married at Elham registry office in October 1950, with a local policeman as the solitary witness, the Connollys moved to a cottage on the Kentish heights, attended by some guinea fowl, several geese and a vengeful coatimundi named Kupy, and fought, in Connolly’s words, “like kangaroos”. Friends offered horrified testimony to the adversarial depths they were capable of plumbing – Frances Partridge’s diary for January 1954 carries a bracing resume of a weekend house party in Wiltshire where Skelton sulked in her room, refused to come down to meals, asked to be called at seven on the Monday morning and then knocked herself out with sleeping tablets to the fury of her hosts. Skelton’s accounts of life at Oak Cottage, meanwhile, contain epic descriptions of her slothful and self-pitying husband lying for hours in the bath murmuring the words “Poor Cyril” to himself or telling her that he wishes she were dead.
Punctuated by outsize doses of husbandly melancholia and periodic crises in the pets department (“His Animal has been sacked from the zoo” Waugh reported to Nancy Mitford, “and sent home to Oak Cottage in disgrace”) the marriage limped on until early 1955, when Connolly became aware of his wife’s infidelity with Weidenfeld – apparently by walking on a whim through the front door of the latter’s house in Chester Square and finding them in flagrante. Matters were further complicated by the fact that Weidenfeld was at this point both his Skelton’s and her outraged husband’s publisher. Though represented as something very near to farce – a friend remembered the affair as a case of “people literally hiding in cupboards in hotels” – the swerve to Weidenfeld is a classic instance of Skelton’s fatalism, her tendency to take the worst possible option when every natural instinct counselled otherwise. Connolly, she acknowledged, was the love of her life; her marriage to Weidenfeld was in trouble from the honeymoon onwards, when her ex-husband was discovered to be lurking on the same Greek island; in the second set of divorce proceedings, Connolly was named as co-respondent.
There was faint hope of a rapprochement, but by this stage Connolly was courting his last wife, Deirdre Craven, whom he married in 1959. Skelton took flight to New York, where she worked in a bookshop and as a dental assistant, had affairs with (among others) the dramatic critic Kenneth Tynan and the cartoonist Charles Addams and sent back a series of autobiographical short stories for Alan Ross – another of her ex-lovers – to publish in the London Magazine and eventually in book form as Born Losers (1965). A second novel perished before the lawyers, as did a third marriage, to the millionaire physicist, Derek Jackson. A final relationship with the French writer Bernard Frank was marked by bouts of plate-throwing. In her mid-70s, with many of her friends dead and most of the remainder alienated by her two scarifying volumes of memoirs, Tears Before Bedtime (1987) and Weep No More (1989), she came back to England – the transit is vividly rendered in Jeremy Lewis’s memoir Battling with Barbara – and very soon after succumbed to an inoperable brain tumour.
Twenty years after her death, what remains of “Skeltie”? Literary friends occasionally complained that her books were marred by laziness, that age-old amateur reluctance to do justice to promising material. On the other hand it could be argued that this tendency to throw the words down any old how is what gives her fiction its kick, the breezy impressionism of the style made all the more compelling by the hint of darker things beneath. And for sustained, score-settling bitchiness the memoirs are in a class of their own, not least for their portrait of the sheet‑chewing Connolly, at one stage pictured lying in recumbent misery with the bedclothes seeming to spew out of his mouth like ectoplasm. Or there is her account of a grand party at which Skelton, furious that Connolly has been invited to sit next to Princess Margaret, cruises the room looking for people to insult (“we are interrupted by Orson Welles, so I try to be offensive to him but he doesn’t notice”).
If there is something rather impressive about Skelton’s complete disregard for what people might think of her – one of her most mystifying tricks as a memoirist is to spin out stories that unwittingly present her in a bad light – then there is no getting away from the deep-rooted vulnerability, the sense common to nearly every account of her that here is someone who not only makes life harder for herself, but who knows it as well. And while the merits of her books can be overplayed, she remains a classic example of the woman writer inhibited by the company she keeps – a genuine stylist who deserves to be taken out of the context of the world in which she was compelled to operate and given something never allowed her by the teeming horde of male associates – a life of her own.
A Young Girl’s Touch, Tears Before Bedtime and Weep No More all by Barbara Skelton are available from Faber Finds.
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