The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
The clever, half-educated favourite daughter of F. E. Smith believed her sex barred her from politics, so for more than thirty years she ran politics as a dinner party instead. From a small house in the Division Bell area she drew in prime ministers, writers and young journalists, made them talk, and fought feuds as fiercely as she kept friendships. She paid for it with a reputation for spite, a run of public attacks, and sons she drove "in on themselves".
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
From Ruin to the Telegraph Marriage (1930-1936)
She used the allowance to have a London "season" and made herself known. In 1931 she went to Paris to learn French. By that winter she was "quite the most interesting girl who has been going about in London lately", and by spring she had published her opinions in the Queen, posed as Récamier, and modelled in Chanel's salon.
- 2
Building the Salon (1945-1950s)
She set out to make entertaining "a vicarious way of engaging in public life" and pursued it "with voracious enthusiasm, what became highly professional skill and overwhelming success."
- 3
The Fashion Campaign (1954-1957)
In March 1954 she became President of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers and staged a series of shows in places no fashion show had used. First came No. 11 Downing Street, borrowed from Butler in July 1954 for a party for overseas buyers, with the Duchess of Kent as guest of honour.
- 4
Against Eden: The Smack of Firm Government (1955-1956)
Her act here was talk, not instruction. At a Cowley Street lunch in November 1955 she complained to the Deputy Editor, Donald McLachlan, that a Telegraph sketch had presented Eden's speech on Burgess and Maclean as a triumph. When he defended it, she "seemed piqued and dropped the subject".
- 5
Crossing the Floor Socially: Wilson's Labour (1964-1968)
She moved to the centre. "She took up with terrible people like Balogh and Kaldor, simply because they were in office," one friend complained; "You should have seen her kissing Marcia Williams!" She "took on a wager that she would one day lure him to a party in Cowley Street", and the Berrys dined with Wilson at Chequers.
- 6
The British Museum Society and the Last Campaign (c. 1975-1982)
"In the mid-seventies, Lady Hartwell found a new outlet for her energies when she became Chairman of the British Museum Society." She turned its bulletin from "a sort of school mag done in his spare time by any young man who had a minute" into "a glossy, good-looking publication packed with paid advertising and articles wrung out of the museum staff", and…
Maxims
Do it for its own sake, or don't do it
"You have to do this thing for its own sake and because you like it. There's no other recompense." Johnson heard her say it several times, and he sent her flowers after one election night because "the others always take it for granted."
Guide the talk so no one feels guided
"I am the Invisible Hand. I do the guiding, but nobody sees." The best conversation is "a controlled explosion" or "a series of controlled explosions, leading to the Big One."
Never seat more than you can control
Twelve at lunch, "never more", in small rooms where nothing "distracted from or impinged upon the talk."
Give the young the chance to argue with the great
"Oh, Perry, do tell Walter ..." Under her wing one reached altitudes "usually reached only after years of toadying and social-climbing", and with Acheson and later Lippmann she made the young journalist the one to open the fight (Story: "Oh, Perry, Do Tell…
Cast someone to be the grit in the oyster
Worsthorne knew his part: "to be the reactionary grit in the oyster", because "Ideas bored her, except in so far as they could provoke quarrels." Both gained: "A good row enlivened her party as much as it did my column."
Part IThe Story
Oh, Perry, Do Tell Walter
It was the height of the Suez crisis, and the lunch at Cowley Street was in honour of Walter Lippmann, the veteran American pundit, who had attacked the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden. Among the guests was Peregrine Worsthorne, a young leader-writer who had joined The Daily Telegraph in 1953. When the meal was over, the hostess did not wait for the conversation to find its own way. She started it by shouting down the table: "Oh, Perry, do tell Walter why you think his attack on Anthony was so fatuous."
Worsthorne was a junior man on a newspaper; Lippmann was a world figure. But "such was Pamela's personality that Mr Lippman had no choice but to pay attention to someone else's views on a basis of equality." Worsthorne remembered the lift it gave him: "When under Pamela's wing, one was carried effortlessly and instantly into the stratosphere of high society and high politics: into altitudes which are usually reached only after years of toadying and social-climbing."
That is the story as Duff Hart-Davis quotes it from Worsthorne. In Worsthorne's own memoir, Tricks of Memory, it has moved. His first visit is a lunch for Dean Acheson after the Bay of Pigs, and the Lippmann scene comes "years later, during the Vietnam War," when she called on him "to tell the great man why I thought L.B.J. should drop an atom bomb on Hanoi. It was pure mischief." In both versions she picks the quarrel and the journalist to start it. His verdict is cool: "Pamela had not meant to do my dirty work, or to be helpful to me professionally. She was merely doing what came naturally."
The woman doing the shouting was Lady Pamela Berry, later Lady Hartwell: the favourite daughter of F. E. Smith, the wife of the man who ran the Telegraph, and for more than thirty years the most formidable hostess in London. She believed her sex barred her from politics, and her father had kept her out of school, so she ran politics as a dinner party instead. From a small house a few minutes from the House of Commons she drew in prime ministers, writers and young journalists, made them talk, and fought feuds as fiercely as she kept friendships. She paid for it with a reputation for spite, a run of public attacks, and sons she drove "in on themselves."
She is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and an unusual one. There is no biography of her and no edition of her letters. Her words survive only as remarks quoted by others. Almost everything we know comes from three books that do not agree about her: Duff Hart-Davis's history of the Telegraph, The House the Berrys Built, which sees her through journalists who worked for her husband, several of whom disliked her; and Paul Johnson's Heroes, written by a friend of twenty-six years, which gives her a chapter called "The Heroism of the Hostess"; and Peregrine Worsthorne's memoir Tricks of Memory, by the protégé she cast as "the reactionary grit in the oyster." Where they disagree, both versions are worth hearing, because the disagreement is the portrait.
By the Numbers
The Hostess of Cowley Street
1914–1982Her life, from F. E. Smith's youngest child to Lady Hartwell
£325Yearly allowance Beaverbrook gave each of F. E. Smith's children after his death
12Guests at lunch, never more: the most interesting people she could control
30+ yearsHow long, in Johnson's verdict, she held the field as London's leading hostess
1913The last private party in Lancaster House's state rooms before her fashion show
£30,000Extracted by her own efforts from City institutions for the British Museum Society
The Wildest of F. E.'s Children
Pamela was the youngest of F. E. Smith's children, and Johnson calls her "the wildest, the cleverest, the most imaginative, the fiercest and the naughtiest." When she was eight, on a family holiday at Algeciras, Lloyd George wrote: "His youngest kiddie — 'the Lady Pam' — is a terror — utterly spoilt." Her father "adored Pam" and "let her do anything she wanted — except go to proper schools."
The exception mattered more than the indulgence. F. E., "so old-fashioned" in his views on women, insisted that girls be educated at home. She told Johnson she "had a good brain but had never been trained to use it," and she "resented her lack of knowledge bitterly": "As a result I am almost totally uneducated, and unfit for any job."
What she did have was a talent for being looked at. Hart-Davis notes "a tendency towards exhibitionism." In her early teens she played the Peter Pan statue in a Hyde Park pageant. At seventeen she represented Madame Récamier, "whose salon attracted the intellectuals of France," in a matinee of living pictures. At the same age she gave the Queen her view of the opposite sex: "The modern man? What I have seen of him so far makes me think that he is conceited, bad-mannered and uninteresting."
Her father died suddenly in October 1930. Hart-Davis has her at sixteen; Johnson says seventeen. F. E. left "a dreadful financial reckoning." The London house, yacht, cars and horses "had to be sold, servants dismissed," and her mother kept the Oxfordshire house "only through the generosity of friends." Beaverbrook, who had called F. E. "the cleverest man in the kingdom," gave each child an allowance of £325 a year.
She spent hers on making herself known. She had a London season, went to Paris in 1931 to learn French, and by that winter was "quite the most interesting girl who has been going about in London lately." She published her opinions, posed as Récamier, and modelled in Chanel's salon. In September 1935, at twenty-one, she became engaged to Michael Berry, younger son of Lord Camrose, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph. (Her brother Freddie had married Camrose's daughter Sheila months before.) She told Beaverbrook his allowance should stop, "but he would not hear of it."
The wedding, in Gray's Inn chapel on 7 January 1936, was "hailed as the first important society wedding of the year," and the Telegraph printed more than a column of presents, among them diamond earrings from Beaverbrook and glass from the Churchills. Chips Channon found the couple "gay, dark, vivacious and charming." In the long run the marriage gave her what her sex and missing schooling had denied her: a platform. Michael Berry became editor in chief of the Telegraph group, "and it was as his wife that Pam set up shop as a London hostess."
Setting Up Shop in the Division Bell Area
They were opposites. Michael was shy, partly deaf in one ear, and had "no small talk": "I don't like standing about in clumps. I'd much rather get my knees under a table." Hart-Davis sums up the marriage as "she going out of her way to attract attention, he doing everything he could to avoid it."
She felt, Johnson says, "(rightly or wrongly) barred from politics by her sex," and "thought her lack of education disqualified her from any other career." The great hostesses between the wars, Colefax and Cunard, had been finished by the war and by the peace that brought the "labour occupation." After 1945 she set out to make entertaining "a vicarious way of engaging in public life," and pursued it "with voracious enthusiasm, what became highly professional skill and overwhelming success."
Her eighteenth-century house in Cowley Street was "almost within shouting distance of the House of Commons," chosen "because it was in the Division Bell area, convenient for ministers in Whitehall to pop over for lunch or MPs to have dinner during a busy evening's voting." The rooms were small. The food was "the best that money could buy," and the service came "imperceptibly and with infinite skill, at exactly the right temperature." Weekends at Kidmore End, and later at Oving, carried the salon into the country. Evelyn Waugh reported in 1947 that at her house he "was never so sumptuously fed or delicately flattered."
By the end of the 1940s she was "one of the two most celebrated hostesses in the capital," in "none-too-good-natured rivalry" with Ann Fleming. Johnson goes further: "for more than thirty years she held the field. None of her rivals even approached her," and "when she died there was no one to take her place."
It helped her husband, too. He "needed to meet politicians, even if he did not much enjoy it; and certainly, without her efforts, he would have been even more cut off than he was." Alan Brien called her "a kind of exotic pilot fish, swimming ahead, fending off bores, steering in talent, exploring new territory, testing the water. She is his radar."
The Invisible Hand
Johnson's central claim is that her art was invisible. "I am at my best when nobody feels I am there," she told him. "I do the guiding, but nobody sees. Nobody wants to feel the conversation is being 'directed.'" At her lunches, he says, she "hardly said a word," but "set hares running," "occasionally pricked conceit," and stood "always ready to come to the rescue of a fragile guest who was being bullied or ragged." Her ideal was the unrehearsed: "Can't bear people who prepare Good Things in advance, or hostesses who prod, prod, prod all the time. A good conversation is what that American general-person, what's his name, yes, Haig, called 'a controlled explosion.'"
Hart-Davis's witnesses saw a heavier hand. "She herself would drive the conversation on relentlessly, wrenching it away from idle chatter and forcing it back to matters of political contention." The Lippmann lunch fits his version better than Johnson's: she set the hare herself, loudly, and chose the quarrel. "The coruscation," Hart-Davis writes, "was often as hard as the glitter of diamonds."
What held the salon together, in Johnson's view, was friendship, "the guiding principle of her life": "she saw her guests as possible, potential, actual friends." She "banked her treasure in her friends' hearts, and expected them in return to bank their treasure in hers." "As a friend," Hart-Davis agrees, "she was absolutely loyal and tenacious." Muggeridge's verdict was the most exact: "not witty, but immensely droll; not clever, but shrewd and tough."
She was her father's daughter in more than looks. F. E. had chosen the motto Faber fortuna mea, "maker of my own fortune." She "cheerfully attributed her dark good looks to the gipsy Smiths in her ancestry," and when a Sardinian port authority demanded the names of father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Elizabeth Cavendish wrote "Tenth Duke of Devonshire, Ninth Duke of Devonshire, Eighth Duke of Devonshire," and Pamela wrote "Tenth Gipsy Smith, Ninth Gipsy Smith, Eighth Gipsy Smith." Hating the idle rich, "she liked creative, hard-working, self-made people best." Waugh put the contrast with her rival plainly: "Mrs Fleming is aristocratic and corrupt, Lady Pamela is neither."
— Lady Pamela Berry, to Paul JohnsonYou have to do this thing for its own sake and because you like it. There's no other recompense.
Paris Couldn't Have Done It Better
It was "in the field of fashion," Hart-Davis says, "that Lady Pamela cut ice in her own right." London couture lived in the shadow of Paris, and she knew why: "the idiotic reaction of the English to the word Paris. It means brothels and excitement ... anything Parisian must be better than anything British."
In March 1954 she became President of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers and began staging shows where no fashion show had been. She "twisted the arm" of the Chancellor, R. A. Butler, into lending No. 11 Downing Street in July 1954 for a party for overseas buyers. The Guardian said, "Paris couldn't have done it better." Then came the Mansion House, with the City gold plate on show. Then Lancaster House, whose state rooms "had not been used for a private party since 1913," and to which she "lured an astonishing collection of important people, including the Lord Mayor of London, half the Cabinet and four ambassadors." The Fishmongers' Hall and Hamilton House followed, with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret as guests.
Among the guests at Lancaster House, "unfortunately for her, was Randolph Churchill," godfather to her son Adrian, who called the show in Truth "an entertainment of inconceivable silliness" and said that "the whole performance made a mockery of the British fashion industry." Nothing, Hart-Davis says, "could have been more wounding than that last sentence," because that industry was her cause. She struck back at his "malice unredeemed by wit" and his "pyramid of abuse," and ended: "Fashion ... like art, is a matter of taste, and that is evidently not a quality with which Mr Churchill is conversant." When the Daily Express reported him "reinstated" at her table, he wrote to deny it: she was "still, of her own volition ... not on speaking terms with me."
She pressed on, "anything but downhearted," and added work for the English-Speaking Union and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The sources give no measure of what the campaign did for London fashion sales. What they record is the method: she borrowed the grandest rooms in the country, and with them a prestige that a proprietor's wife did not have of her own.
The Smack of Firm Government
Eden became Prime Minister in April 1955. By late that year she was openly hostile, and it was "widely said that she had been disparaging Eden at her parties," and that the Edens had cut the Berrys in consequence.
At a Cowley Street lunch in November 1955 she complained to Donald McLachlan, the Deputy Editor, that a Telegraph sketch had presented an Eden speech as a triumph. When he defended it, she "seemed piqued and dropped the subject." The idea for an article assessing Eden's first six months came from Michael. McLachlan wrote it, though he told Kenneth Rose he "had been disturbed by the Berrys' petty malice towards Eden, manifest at their own lunch party." On 3 January 1956 it appeared, ending: "Most Conservatives . . . are waiting to feel the smack of firm Government."
The article, in the paper's political correspondent's judgement, "began Eden's 'overt downfall in the Conservative Party's esteem, and the country's'." She took the blame. One of Eden's private secretaries called it "a typical piece of Lady Pamela's spite," and the Sunday Express attacked her "attempt at petticoat government." Hart-Davis is clear that "it was certainly not true that she ordered or even suggested the piece," but adds: "Such was the price she paid — however undeservedly in this instance — for constantly promoting gossip and intrigue." Worsthorne, who was on the paper at the time, goes further: "she had nothing to do with it," though she was pleased to be credited with it. She could shape the mood of the people who wrote the paper. She could not decide what it printed.
A night in Paris showed the same line from the other side. During one of the Algerian crises she rang Ronnie Payne of the paper's Paris office, hoping he would cover her opening of British Fashion Week: "It's going to be such fun." The French Prime Minister had just warned that rebel paratroops might drop on the city that night. Payne could not leave his desk. "Oh well — if you're going to take that attitude . . ." she said, and rang off. A complaint reached London. Next day Michael rang Payne to say his coverage was "far superior to that of any other paper" and that he was arranging a bonus. Payne was left "with the clear impression that he, and not his wife, was Editor-in-Chief." She "had little direct influence on the content of the paper," Hart-Davis concludes, "for if ever she did suggest something to him, it was most likely that, out of sheer obstinacy, he would do the opposite."
That did not stop her treating the staff as a private service. She made "a habit of dragooning members of the staff to smuggle packages back to London on her behalf: usually expensive underwear, but once at least a whole ham."
I'm Going to Make Them Kiss
The same Paris office saw her at her most effective. Nancy Mitford had put the journalist Sam White into a novel as Amyas Mockbar, and White, "upset by this, and by nasty remarks about Mockbar's Jewishness," had retaliated in print. Lady Pamela decided to end it. She summoned Payne to the bar of the Hotel Crillon. "Be sure you're there, because I'm going to make them kiss." She had him order champagne and bring White over the moment he came in. White growled, "I certainly won't kiss that bloody Mitford woman" — "but kiss her he did, such was the strength of Pamela's personality."
She could undo a peace as easily. Seeing Kenneth Rose and John Sparrow reconciled at a party, she cried, "You two talking to each other?" and "immediately the shadow fell again."
Kissing Marcia Williams
The Telegraph was "rigorously Tory, harshly anti-Labour." But she "courted politicians of all parties" while she "despised them as a breed," and when Harold Wilson won in October 1964 she moved to the centre. "She took up with terrible people like Balogh and Kaldor, simply because they were in office," one friend complained. "You should have seen her kissing Marcia Williams!" She took a wager that she would lure Wilson to Cowley Street, and the Berrys dined with him at Chequers. When she learned he meant to make Michael a peer, "she was delighted, and urged her husband to accept it." She became Lady Hartwell.
Wilson came to Cowley Street only once. In 1966 he "even pursued Pam Berry out of the room to attack her for the biased reporting of the conference." Crossman found her "hard to understand": "what interested her was Harold and Marcia. She has an obsession about that." Hart-Davis offers three readings: she wanted "the gratification of being near the centre of power," she was doing what the paper's news pages did anyway, or "she preferred them anyway."
The Hanging Judge Face
"She had hot blood," Johnson writes. "She loved passionately, ruthlessly and, at times, recklessly. She was also a superlative hater." Her "obstinacy was monumental and granitic, her chilliness marmoreal," and when he tried to argue her out of an antipathy he would say, "Pam, you have got your Hanging Judge Face on." He tried "hard and repeatedly" with one friend she had misjudged, and failed: "she rarely revised a guilty verdict."
Her wit was "mischievous — some would say malicious." When Colin Welch wrote a leader she disliked, she cried out at a party, "A DREADFUL leader — quite dreadful!" and "gave him a dressing-down in front of the assembled company." After Worsthorne, the young man she had launched at Lippmann, swore on television, she sent him "a ferocious letter," and Hart-Davis says that "from that moment she turned against him." Worsthorne's memoir prints the letter but says nothing of a lasting break. Private Eye called her "Screaming Lady Pamela, or worse."
The heaviest cost fell at home. Friends noticed "how powerfully their mother dominated" her sons. In front of their friends she would ask, "Why can't Adrian swim like David? Is there something wrong with him?" He could swim perfectly well. The effect was "to drive the children in on themselves." Nicholas "appeared troubled by the fact that his mother had very little time for him," and colleagues thought the antipathy's effect "profound, if incalculable: some reckoned that in the end it cost the family their business." Hart-Davis reports this as speculation, but it is the gravest charge in the record. Johnson's portrait leaves it out, and presents the hating as "the other side of her deep and glorious passion for friendship."
The Obituary Before the Death
In the mid-seventies she became Chairman of the British Museum Society. She turned its bulletin from "a sort of school mag" into "a glossy, good-looking publication packed with paid advertising," and "by her own efforts extorted some £30,000 from City institutions." "Colleagues found her bossiness tiresome, but agreed that she was admirable at getting things done." In 1979 she moved the Telegraph's election-night party from the Savoy to Cowley Street. When the Thatchers did not invite Michael to No. 10, she complained until Bill Deedes had a word with Downing Street, and got a lunch at Chequers at which, by her account, Margaret Thatcher's only words to them were "Would you care to wash your hands before lunch?"
In April 1980 Sir James Goldsmith's magazine Now! published an attack on her by Antony Lambton, a former minister disgraced in a call-girl scandal. It was "cast in the form of an obituary, as if the subject were dead," and asked whether she had been "the Madame de Maintenon of Fleet Street." Her husband, "terribly hurt," spent "three hours and about 40 cigarettes" on a reply: "So, back to the oldest and dirtiest trick of all — befoul the wife." Nobody in Fleet Street knew how cruel the form was: "Lady Pamela had already been stricken by cancer." She "fought the disease with characteristic courage, telling nobody — not even close friends — that she was ill."
On 6 January 1982 Hartwell rang Kenneth Rose. "Pamela's dying." He did not like the obituary in stock. "Could you do another? I leave it in your hands." There was a tiny pause. "Half a column will do." She died the next morning, forty-six years to the day after her wedding, so suddenly "that even the Telegraph was taken by surprise." Those who knew Hartwell "felt that he was never the same again." The British Museum Society renamed a room in her memory; "today the Pamela Hartwell room is used for small dinner-parties and the entertainment of VIPs." It is the only institution in the sources that bears her name, and it is a dining room.
— Peregrine Worsthorne, obituary tributeLife may be safer now that she is gone. But infinitely less dramatic.
Agency Under Constraint
Johnson expects the objection — "what is heroic about being a hostess?" — and answers that the work "needs brains," that the hostess persists against ingratitude, and that she faces the moment after the party alone: "What's the point? Are they worth it? Is it all a waste of time and money and effort, and of love?" Pam, he says, was in his Valhalla, "a valkyrie of the festive table, a Brunhilde of the fête."
The constraint was real, though partly self-imposed. Johnson says she "really wanted to be a politician, but felt debarred by her sex," and called her hostessing "a pis aller," a second best. Her obituarist Elizabeth Longford thought she "would have made a splendid Minister for the Arts 'if she had been absorbed into politics instead of by them'." In public she said the opposite: she "would loathe to be in Parliament," because "it has such a turgid effect on women," and she denied being a political hostess at all. Her account and Johnson's may both be true, as a wish and the defence against it.
What she did with the constraint was make influence out of access. Lord Weidenfeld remembered her "poring with Dr Adenauer over his collection of political cartoons," "probing Albert Speer about his complex relations with the Nazi leaders," and "eliciting from Guy Mollet some of the untold secrets of the tripartite Suez collusion." Yet the hardest finding in the sources is how little reached the newspaper she was thought to run. Her husband preferred "the solid, the reliable, the grey"; she preferred "clever, lively people with a flash of steel." The young journalists who cultivated her in hope of promotion were, every one of them, "wrong." She could make a junior man feel senior. She could not make him an editor.
Part IIThe Playbook
Lady Pamela Berry held no office, and almost nothing she wrote survives. Her career was conducted at a table for twelve and through other people's buildings, staff and newspapers. That makes her useful to anyone who works through convening rather than command, who has access without authority. Her methods were precise. So were her mistakes.
The principles
- 1.Put your table where the powerful pass by.
- 2.Cap the room at what you can control.
- 3.Cast the guests like a director.
- 4.Provoke the clash, then protect the fragile.
- 5.Borrow the grandest room you can't own.
- 6.Announce the outcome before you stage it.
- 7.Know the difference between mood and policy.
- 8.Revise your guilty verdicts, especially at home.
Principle 1
Put your table where the powerful pass by
The most important decision of her career was an address. Cowley Street let a minister "pop over for lunch" between votes. Powerful people rarely turn down good invitations because they dislike the host; they turn them down because the invitation costs time. By putting her table inside their working day, she made coming easier than declining.
Tactic: Put your convening space on the daily route of the people you want, so that attending costs less than refusing.
Principle 2
Cap the room at what you can control
Twelve was "the maximum number of interesting people she could control." The room could be doubled, "but she liked to keep things small." Everything else protected the talk: the wine appeared "as if by nature," and "nothing distracted from or impinged upon the talk." Past twelve, a conversation splits into clumps and the hostess becomes a spectator.
Tactic: Size any gathering by what you can actually steer, and strip out anything that competes with the main event.
Principle 3
Cast the guests like a director
Johnson's account of her difficult guests reads like a director's notes on a temperamental cast.
🍽
The Cowley Street Cast List
What the difficult guests required, in Paul Johnson's account.
| Guest | What they required |
|---|---|
| Richard Crossman | To be stopped from shouting people down |
| Ted Heath | Careful placement |
| Laurence Olivier | Royal dollops of imperceptible flattery |
| André Malraux | First-rate flattery in faultless French |
| Tom Driberg | Threatening, being often beastly to servants |
| Danny Kaye, Arthur Miller | Protection |
| Princess Margaret | Always a three-move problem |
The flattery was fitted to the guest. She did not have one manner; she had a reading of each person and a plan for each one's weakness before they arrived. "Her likes and dislikes were very swift," and at the table that speed was an asset.
Tactic: Before any gathering that matters, decide for each key person how you will seat, flatter, shield or restrain them.
Principle 4
Provoke the clash, then protect the fragile
Her ideal was "a controlled explosion," and the word that matters is controlled. She "set hares running" and shouted down the table to put Worsthorne against Lippmann. But she also stood ready "to come to the rescue of a fragile guest who was being bullied or ragged." A clash a young man survives lifts him "into the stratosphere." A clash that crushes someone just makes an enemy.
Tactic: Seed disagreement to make a room come alive, and step in the moment argument turns into bullying.
Principle 5
Borrow the grandest room you can't own
As President of the London designers she had a title and few resources, so she borrowed the state: No. 11 from the Chancellor, the Mansion House from the City, Lancaster House from the government. Each venue lent her cause a prestige she could not supply, and each was news in itself. The dark side of the same instinct was using the Telegraph's Paris staff to smuggle underwear and a ham. Borrowing a grand room for a cause is leverage. Using people who cannot refuse is not.
Tactic: When your cause lacks status, attach it to a venue or institution that already has it, and ask the person who controls it directly.
Principle 6
Announce the outcome before you stage it
At the Crillon she did not hope for a reconciliation. She declared it, "I'm going to make them kiss," then set the stage, ordered the champagne and posted a witness. Once a witness has been told the kiss will happen, refusing it means spoiling a scene in public, against a formidable personality. White refused. "But kiss her he did."
Tactic: When you want two people to settle, set the scene, name the outcome in front of others beforehand, and make refusal the awkward choice.
Principle 7
Know the difference between mood and policy
She did not order the Eden article, but her "petty malice" at lunch had set the mood among the men who wrote it, and "petticoat government" stuck to her. On the night of the paratroops her husband backed his reporter against her and paid him a bonus. Her power was real but specific: she could change how people felt, not what the paper decided. People who live on informal influence tend to overrate the second because they are so good at the first, and so do their enemies, which is how she was blamed for decisions she never made.
Tactic: Be honest about which kind of influence you hold, and remember that a reputation for intrigue gets you blamed even when you are innocent.
Principle 8
Revise your guilty verdicts, especially at home
Her loyalty and her vindictiveness were one trait: she judged fast and did not move. That made her a tenacious friend and a "superlative hater," and when she was wrong she stayed wrong. Randolph Churchill, her son's godfather, was cut off; Worsthorne, whom she had made, was cut off over a swear word. The same habit reached her children. "Why can't Adrian swim like David?" asked in front of their friends is the Hanging Judge Face turned on a child, and some thought the estrangement that followed cost the family their business.
Tactic: Give yourself a way to appeal your own snap judgments, and never pass sentence on your children in front of an audience.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Do it for its own sake, or don't do it. "There's no other recompense." Anyone who convenes for the thanks will be disappointed.
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Guide the talk so no one feels guided. "I am at my best when nobody feels I am there."
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Never seat more than you can control. Twelve at lunch, never more.
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Give the young the chance to argue with the great. One introduction at the right table can do what "years of toadying and social-climbing" cannot.
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Mock your own pedigree before anyone else can. "Tenth Gipsy Smith, Ninth Gipsy Smith, Eighth Gipsy Smith."
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Gossip has a price, and it falls on you. She did not order the "smack of firm Government," but her malice at lunch made her the obvious culprit.
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Charm is not command. She could make Lippmann listen to a junior man. She could not make her husband's reporter leave his desk on the night the paratroops might drop.
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Ask, but be careful what you get. She pressed until Downing Street repaired the slight, and got "Would you care to wash your hands before lunch?"
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Don't bully your children in front of their friends. The salon lasted thirty years. What it cost at home may have lasted longer.
