Strength in numbers
Philip Ziegler
MY THREE FATHERS by Bill Patten Public Affairs, £16.99, pp. 352, ISBN 9780571216932 The mother to m a t c h Bill Patten’s t h r e e fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady dowdily provincial. When Susan Mary took up with Bill Patten senior it was felt that she was marrying, not beneath her socially, since Patten was connected with all the right people, but beneath what should have been her aspirations. Patten, affable, intelligent, a victim of asthma and almost entirely without ambition, could not provide either the glamour or the stature which a Jay might legitimately expect.
Through family connections Patten found himself attached to the American Foreign Service and, in 1945, posted to Paris. The second father now entered the scene. Duff Cooper was British ambassador at the time; his wife, Lady Diana, took up the attractive and amusing Susan Mary; Duff soon concluded that his wife’s new protégée should be added to the formidable roll-call of his mistresses. The relationship was conducted with admirable discretion: Diana must have known about it but, as with most of Duff’s affairs, preferred not to do so. Duff wrote in his diary that Susan Mary was sick with passion for him, ‘but it would be dishonest to pretend that I am madly in love with her’. Susan Mary’s son believes that, if she was sick with passion, it was not for Duff’s body but for the excitement, consequence and fun which a liaison with him involved. On one of the first occasions that they made love, Bill Patten was conceived.
Duff died, Patten died, enter the third father. Joe Alsop was one of the best known and most influential of American journalists, a cousin of President Roosevelt, old friend of Patten and godfather to his son. He almost at once laid siege to the newly widowed Susan Mary. He offered her security, an entry into Washington’s most elevated circles and, since he was avowedly (though not publicly) homosexual, an assurance that there would be no boring physical complications. She provided him with a new range of social connections and the skills of an accomplished hostess. For a time it suited both of them; even when the marriage broke up, they continued to get on well and go about with each other. Alsop was a good and supportive stepfather, in some ways playing the parental role more successfully than either of the fathers who had gone before him.
This might be no more than a somewhat sordid story of misbehaviour in high places. It is not because, in their own ways, all the protagonists were first-rate. Susan Mary was exceptional in her charm and vivacity and proved herself, in relatively old age, a hard-working and more than competent writer. Patten was brave, honourable, generous, loyal and loving. Duff’s outstanding courage and skills as an author ensured that he shone brilliantly in the murky world of politics; it is a measure of his ability as an ambassador that Ernest Bevin kept him in place when everyone assumed that he would be immediately replaced by someone more obviously reflecting the values of the new Labour government. Diana Cooper was one of the wonders of the age; the cliché ‘life-enhancing’ might have been invented to describe her. Joe Alsop had views that some found unpalatably right-wing, but his impor tance in America’s public life was great and no one ever questioned his integrity or the fearlessness with which he propounded what he thought was right.
It would be nice to say that this book was as distinguished as its dramatis personae. It is not. The production is deplorable — the photographs so smudged as to be barely worth inclusion. The author’s pen crawls across the page like a malformed tortoise. ‘White House records,’ he writes, ‘show that Joe and my mother socialised with the Kennedys with a degree of frequency that today would be seen for someone in the media as creating an unhealthy conflict of interest.’ Duff Cooper certainly failed to pass on to this son an atom of his literary ability. The text is riddled with blunders: we have Belvoire for Belvoir, Lord Swynnerton for Lord Thomas, Cranborn for Cranborne, Riley for Reilly, innumerable misused titles; there was no ‘Oxford Oath’ for British students to sign; Curzon was not Kitchener’s ‘close friend’. Individually these are trivial, cumulatively they grate: a little tender loving care from an even moderately well-informed subeditor would have saved the reader much irritation. More seriously, Patten refers to Lady Diana Cooper as being the ‘Lady Di of the interwar years’. If this is intended to draw a parallel between Lady Diana and Diana, Princess of Wales, it betrays an alarming ignorance of both parties. If a story of this kind is to work it must be told with wit, style and accuracy. Alas, these qualities are conspicuously absent. ❑
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