SHE WANTED TO MURDER MANDY
Andrew Gimson remembers his encounters
with Elisabeth Furse, whose remarkable and flamboyant life ended this week
ELISABETH FURSE, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of the most amazing hostesses London has known. One could not say she had a 'salon', for the word carries connotations of politeness and selfrestraint which were entirely foreign to her. When I first descended the fire-escape-style steps to her basement flat in Belgravia in the mid-Eighties, she had already been inducting shy young Englishmen into the charms and horrors of bohemian Central European life for half a century. Her flat felt like a Berlin flea market It was dominated by a long table at which 20 or more people could sit down to dinner, squashed together on rickety chairs. One saw enough in the candlelight to tell that the room was very dirty and disorderly, decorated with extravagant bits of kitsch, filled with old things that might be priceless or might be junk, amber necklaces and once-raffish clothes, books and newspapers in many languages, presents crudely wrapped and waiting to be distributed to friends and the children of friends.
Mrs Furse's portable typewriter, at which she poured out her thoughts to her friends in long, passionate and almost illegible letters, stood somewhere amid the chaos, loaded with a piece of paper removed from one of the grandest hotels in Venice. Until an advanced age, and despite being virtually crippled, she travelled by train at very frequent intervals to Paris, where she had a daughter, and to Berlin, where she had a flat, sometimes getting the German equivalent of the Salvation Army to let her sleep in their hostels at railway stations. She had about five doctors in Berlin, all of them leading specialists in their fields, paid for by the German taxpayer under some system of wartime reparations, for which she was duly grateful, though she could be as acerbic about the Germans as about anyone.
If you arrived at her basement in London before the other guests, you would generally find the large television set booming away, showing whatever news or politics was on. Mrs Furse was passionate about politics. It was one of the many fields in which she mounted a one-woman assault on the decorous English desire to avoid getting emotional about anything. If you were bold enough to suggest to her that British politics were quite dull, she would answer in a fury, 'To be uninterested in politics is to be uninterested in your survival.' Politics, she said, made the difference between living or dying, eating or starving. Politics to me is sacred,' she added, then remarked with no sense of contradiction, 'Politics is a science — at least to me.'
She had great loves and hates, and unlike the English she took immense pleasure in expressing them. She could not remain outside her friends' lives; as she
said in a letter, 'It is very un-English to walk into other souls, hearts and minds — it is called -meddling" or even bad manners. But we are different. and I do not intend to change in any way.'
Her table was a mix of the illustrious and the obscure, with the former expected to help launch the careers of the latter, which were always predicted to he brilliant. Not that she was a lion-hunter: she often insulted lions, and various people who had not been great worldly successes found refuge at her table, though she had an abiding interest in the upper classes. 'Dukes in England are the sons of their mothers, and their mothers are usually chorus girls,' she would remark. 'That's why the dukes in England are a very weak lot.'
Gales of hilarity, and the occasional pained silence, were set off at her table by her pungent and often correct observations about the virtues and defects of her guests. It was amusing to see the ill-concealed horror of any fastidious guest at the appearance of the food, which looked as if she had prepared it in the most unhygienic conditions, though since it had also quite often been severely burned, and tasted (in my opinion) surprisingly good, their fears were exaggerated. Mrs Furse would perceive their anxiety and ladle out extra-large portions of goulash to them, remarking the while, 'I don't believe in infection,' but this did nothing to comfort the faint-hearted. 'I'm just amazed I never got botulism,' one of her most regular guests remarked when I rang him with the news of her death.
She had a tremendous capacity for falling out with people and often took violently against the women with whom her young men fell in love. This meant that there was a continuous turnover of people at her table, but the gaps were always filled with new recruits, or by old faces with whom there had been a reconciliation. She loved David Owen, who first came to her bistro in Bourne Street as a young medical student looking for a cheap meal, and she was body and soul in the setting-up of the Social Democratic party, which she said was 'the best of England', one of her highest forms of praise. Robert Skidelsky saw much of her, as did the chess player Nigel Short, and she seemed to know the whole of the British Foreign Office and a fair proportion of the British and Polish aristocracies. Sometimes a whole Oxford generation would arrive, including the editor of this magazine. She spoke with great affection of old friends now dead, such as the journalist Peter Jenkins. She was devoted to several long-lasting women friends, but on the whole she preferred men. She was, I fear, very lonely.
Towards the end of her life she said that her last mission was to murder Peter Mandeison. In the context of her own biography, this did not seem such a fantastic notion. She was born Louise Ruth Wolpert in KOnigsberg, then a German city, in 1910, to rich, Baltic Jewish parents who moved to Berlin after the Russian Revolution. As a young woman in Berlin she renounced her family and joined the Communist party: 'Why did I become a Communist? Not because I was hungry. Because I had too much to eat.' Her first boyfriend was summoned from Berlin to Moscow and murdered. She remembered going ski-ing with Walter Ulbricht, who after the war became East German leader; one of the innumerable surreal touches that lent humour and implausibility to her reminiscences. It was impossible, by questioning her, to establish the exact facts of any given episode, and poor Ann Barr, who wrote her life, was driven to distraction by the attempt to do so. The book was published under the title Dream Weaver.
The second world war found Elisabeth (a name that she had early chosen for herself) in France. She was married by then to Peter Haden-Guest, who got a job in Washington, and had given birth in 1937 to their son, Anthony Haden-Guest, in later life to become a celebrated New York journalist. She caused the Haden-Guests a great deal of alarm and vexation by refusing to leave France before the Germans got there and keeping Anthony with her. When the Germans arrived, she was at the seaside villa in Brittany that belonged to the Forbes family. She told the Germans, erroneously, that Churchill had often stayed there on holiday, with the result that they interned her and, when they left, burned down the house. In 1993, when Alastair Forbes reviewed the Ann Barr book for The Spectator, he made it clear that the house-burning episode still rankled —as well it might.
Mrs Furse escaped the Germans, had a spell in Marseilles helping Allied servicemen get out of France, and was incarcerated for a time in a French prison, before eventually reaching London with Anthony. She was unable, to her intense regret, to persuade anyone to send her back to France as a secret agent, a line of work for which her courage, love of adventure and unscrupulousness all fitted her, but where her lack of discretion and her confidence in her own judgment would have maddened her superiors.
She later married Pat Furse, artist and son of an ancient Devon family, had four more children and remained Mrs Furse despite her divorce.
She liked to call herself 'self-made poor', and her Three-Musketeers, all-for-one, one-for-all idea of friendship owed much to her romantic notion of a poverty in which people desperately need each others' help and give it with unstinting generosity. Few people lived up to this ideal, but many remain grateful for the ferocious tenderness with which she cared for them.
Previous page
