A blunt hatchet job

Nicholas Henderson

NO REGRETS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARIETTA TREE Commenting on Caroline Seebohm's first biography, The Life and Times of Conde Nast, Marietta Tree described her as `a marvellous biographer'. Were she alive today and able to read this biography of herself by the same author she would sure- ly not have been so flattering.

Its central theme is the conflict between Marietta's love of high, social life and her commitment to public affairs, always on the side of underdogs. This seems to fascinate and baffle the author. She likens it to 'two radio stations tuned too close together'. She describes how, after one dinner-dance, Marietta stepped into her Rolls-Royce, told the chauffeur to turn aside the rearview mirror and wriggled out of her designer ballgown and into a modest black dress. A few moments later she stepped out of the car to attend a political meeting. The author suggests that the charge that Marietta was a 'limousine liberal' is vindicated. In the same vein she writes about Marietta's time at the house in Barbados of her second husband, Ronnie Tree, and how she was working hard for civil rights while giving orders to black servants. 'How', the author asks indignant- ly, 'was she to reconcile that seeming contradiction?'

Another main theme is Marietta's reaction to her puritanical parents. It is easy to see how she had to break the Peabody family fetters and how this pro- duced a certain sense of guilt. It required courage and independence of spirit such as she may have inherited from her maternal grandmother, the unconventional and defi- ant Mary Frances Parkman. The tension with her mother may have affected her relations with her own daughters which are described as 'elusive as quicksilver'. She is said to have neglected her daughters when young and then competed with them for the attention of young men.

Caroline Seebohm's undoubted talent for metaphor is unfortunately matched by a no less evident weakness for hyperbole. Thus in a passage about Marietta's passion- ate affair with John Huston, she is said, after three years of resistance, to have finally 'entered the forbidden portals'. She `was now ripe for the plucking'. This is explained as follows:

None of her well-born New England liaisons had prepared her for this stronghold of testosterone. The range of emotions pitched by the men in her life, including her husband (she was first married to Desmond Fitz- Gerald), seemed like matchsticks compared to the lofty struts of John Huston's exotic exuberance.

Yet shortly afterwards she is recorded as having fallen in love in Barbados with Ronnie Tree who, apparently, 'awakened her sexually for the first time in her life' which doesn't say much for John Huston's testosterone. According to Caroline Seebohm, she was 'bewitched by her island Prospero', even if, as is implied later, she always suspected his homosexual tenden- cies.

After giving details of Marietta's particu- lar style in clothes — lace, sequins and rainbow-coloured caftans — the author depicts her 'signature black-patterned tights that had made men breathe faster for 50 years'. Ouida could hardly have put it better.

Not surprisingly, given the variety of her friendships and experiences, Marietta has some good stories to tell. At a dinner in New York just before the 1945 British general election, she sat next to the Duke of Windsor who told her that 'if Attlee and the Socialists win that is the end of democracy in Britain'.

At Ditchley, as Ronnie Tree's second wife, she was made to feel like the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca. The first Mrs Tree, Nancy, egged on by her aunt, Lady Astor, conducted a hate campaign against her, calling her 'Nigger lover' and tele- phoning and calling at the house when she was there. Ronnie's Tory friends thought her too earnest and an ideological bore. She did not understand their irony or cynicism.

At some dinner party, Winston Churchill was attacking the continuation of rationing So long after the end of the war. Marietta defended it on egalitarian grounds. None of the other guests supported her and, according to her own account, she `subsided in a rush of blushes, staring remorselessly at her plate for the rest of the meal'.

Incidentally, Caroline Seebohm is relent- less in her references to Marietta's tenden- cy to blush and to her 'continuing vulnerability in later life to the hives which caused her face and neck to flush like a teenager'. No doubt her persistence in por- traying warts and all is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether she had to focus quite so often on the troubles her subject had with her complexion.

Adlai Stevenson, who replaced all others in Marietta's life as the ideal and who became her lover, is not spared the author's hatchet. She was by no means his only attachment and, on the last evening of his life, Marietta is said to have accused him of having Pamela Berry's face-powder on his jacket. As for her relationship with her last lover, Richard Llewellyn-Davies, this is not portrayed as serene. Caroline Seebohm says that he did not understand her because then, as always, she made her- self out to be different from what she really was.

The book brings out the worst in most of the characters mentioned, almost as if the author were trying thereby to secure for herself some sort of hatchet-job-security for life.

Whatever the contradictions of Mariet- ta's life, there can be no doubt, as this biog- raphy grants, about her fundamental constancy of character shown at the end. She knew she was about to die from her terminal cancer but she was determined to avoid being a burden on her friends whose lives she continued to enhance right to the last, and to stick to a heavy social and polit- ical schedule, including one final visit to England, a country she had come to embrace as a home.

My favourite is Baby Spice. Which Spice Girl would you like to push under a bus?'