A Prince Among Stones (6 page)

The education I was meant to be undertaking was a three-year course. In my last term I did become somewhat more interested in studying and asked the historian Karl Leyser, who was the person in charge of me, whether I could stay on for an extra postgraduate year. He said no. I mentioned this to another historian, Raymond Carr, whom I knew and who was at New College and he said, ‘Well, you can come to New College', which was very generous of him, and which I have never forgotten. I was very grateful to him, but although my parents would have been very pleased if I had become an academic – although I think my mother might have expected me to become an unsuccessful literary critic – I very much wanted to earn money, to avoid the fragile financial uncertainty of my parents, and by that time I had already had a job interview.

I went to the Oxford University Appointments Board to look for a job one May afternoon before my Finals. There I was seen by a Mr Escrit, who asked me, ‘What do you want to do?' ‘I don't know,' I replied, ‘but I want to make money. Where can I make money?'

Mr Escrit rummaged through a selection of leaflets and picked out two or three for me to look at. One was for the Metal Box Company in the Midlands: the job paid £600–£700 pounds a year. They were based in Perry Wood, not far from Birmingham. It sounded a long way away from the life I was used to.

The second job offered some similar salary, but was up in Leeds, ever further flung as far as I was concerned. And the third was for a company called Bache & Co., New York stockbrokers, but they only paid £400 a year. ‘Where's their office?' I asked. ‘Well, it would be in London.' That did it! My mind was made up. And the fickleness of fate had determined my future.

In my first year with Bache my salary was indeed £400 with two weeks' holiday and work every other Saturday morning. I learnt how to deliver securities and transfer deeds in the Square Mile. And I also learnt how to work in an office with a simple calculating machine, which in those days was nothing more than a glorified abacus. One day I was asked to work out the amounts payable to each of our registered names, computing the gross amount of dividends payable and the various deductions and withholding taxes. I got them all wrong.

The manager took me out for a cup of coffee at the Lyons Corner House below our office. In a certain amount of pain, he asked me whether I had learnt any form of book-keeping at college. I regretfully answered, ‘No', but told him that, having studied medieval history, I could give him detailed information on the regnal dates of the Byzantine emperors between 867 and 1204. Therefore I suggested it might be safer for my arithmetical work to be checked by someone else in the office.

Within three years of starting work in London with Bache, I found myself getting married. I was living at Boodle's in those days and had been invited to a dinner party. The host had been a good friend of mine when I was studying at Cambridge but was a little dull. I thought to myself, ‘Well, I'll go there if nothing better turns up.'

Nothing better did turn up and so I attended this dinner for six or eight of us. My date, as it were, was a very glamorous blonde who had arrived driving a beautiful grey Bentley convertible. We got on very well, and after the dinner she gave me a lift back to Boodle's in the Bentley.

The following week I was giving a cocktail party for my cousin Johannes Thurn und Taxis and thought to myself that this glamorous blonde, Josephine, would be a perfect person to invite. She came – and we got engaged two months later. Needless to say, it transpired she had also decided to go to the original dinner only if nothing better was on offer.

It turned out that our paths had crossed before that dinner party. Josephine thought that she had seen me once across the room at a fancy dress party in Chelsea, and that she had been invited along to a party I threw with Desmond Guinness in my rooms at Oxford, but we had only been briefly introduced and so had not had a chance to make any significant impression on each other.

She had also noticed my father, and his second wife, Diana, when she lived near him in Earls Court. Not knowing who he was, she and her mother had often speculated on the identity of the tall, distinguished, well-dressed gentleman and his pretty wife they saw in the restaurants on the King's Road.

Josephine was two years older than I was, and had gone to the ballet school at Sadler's Wells (run by the formidable Ninette de Valois), the precursor of the Royal Ballet School. But she was too tall to continue studying ballet past her teens and so to her great sorrow had to give that up. Instead she went to Rome where she studied singing for three years and had a wonderful time in the Rome of the early 1950s. But she had grown bored with Rome and had returned to London, where she had been working for the Social Services department in the East End while she thought about what she was going to do next. Although at the age of twenty-six she was, by the mores of those days, deemed very old to be unmarried, she had not felt under any especial pressure to find a husband.

After getting engaged, we went through a difficult phase, as I was earning relatively little money. Josephine's parents were initially very set against the idea of us getting married. It was understandable. Her father had fought in the war and been badly wounded; her grandfather had been a general commanding a battalion of Grenadier Guards in the First World War. The family were less than pleased about their only daughter wanting to marry a young German who was apparently penniless but also a Catholic: Josephine's family, the Lowry-Corrys, were staunch Ulster Protestants.

When we were married, at the Brompton Oratory in July 1957, it was a mixed wedding and we could have organ music but no singing and no nuptial mass, only a blessing. What was quite entertaining about our wedding was that – as, unusually then, we were both only children and both our sets of parents were divorced – although all four parents were there they stood at least two yards apart from each other in the receiving line, which was hilarious. They were there, they were affable, but they certainly were not going to speak to each other.

3

 

 

‘Experience is what you get while looking for something else'

 

Federico Fellini

 

 

 

Despite my first, unsuccessful, stab at computing dividends during my early days with Bache & Co. in London, I had discovered that I was in fact fairly numerate. I could, for instance, read and create balance sheets and so did possess the necessary semi-technical skills, and I had a good memory. Most importantly, if I became a deal-maker I realised what could be ceded. Essentially I had an instinctive sense of money, one which I had certainly not acquired from either of my parents, and I had found a métier where I could gainfully employ those instincts.

When I started work, the enormous shifts in the British class system were still ten or more years away, and I had no real inkling that there would be any significant change, even after the Suez Crisis of 1956, which in retrospect marked the first cracks in the foundations of the existing Establishment. When I left Oxford all the good jobs in the City were by and large still being taken by public schoolboys, as were those at the Bar and in most professions and avocations.

In the 1950s nobody I knew who went into the City or insurance or law had a starting salary of more than £300 or £400 a year, on which in a strange way one was able to live – if you had a roof over your head and a friendly bank manager.

At the time we married, Josephine had a little money, with £6,000 of which she had bought 4 St Leonard's Terrace – the street ran parallel to the King's Road in Chelsea, just opposite Wren's Royal Hospital. It was a charming house in a charming street, very tall and thin, somewhat like a vertical flat, with five rooms one on top of the other. Later, when I had made some money, we moved and bought a house in Holland Villas Road, which had, as I remember it, ten bedrooms and a large garden, for £35,000.

I was still extremely committed to reaching a position where I could avoid the financial insecurity that my parents had always lived with. Josephine remembers my ‘dogged determination'; she, too, came from a family which had lost the bulk of its estates and money. At one point they had owned a large portion of the ground rents of Belfast and large estates in Shropshire. By the time I met her it had nearly all been lost in a couple of generations, through the selling of land and ground rents at the wrong time, and although Josephine, who would otherwise have been a significant heiress, accepted the situation fatalistically, she was saddened by seeing the family let it slip through their fingers. As in so many similar cases, they knew how to run an estate but had little commercial experience in terms of maximising its value.

The increase in my earnings had initially come about when I became a commissioned rather than salaried man for Bache. Since the only European office Bache had apart from London at that stage was one in Paris – where the director was Hans Czernin, whom I and my parents knew – the company thought that they could capitalise on my connections by sending me to help open a number of other continental offices for them and attracting new clients.

This required a substantial amount of entertaining, which was never an issue for me. I was then very gregarious and I enjoyed any lighted candle. I think we were known as a ‘merry' couple. Even when we had little money we would find a way to have people round for dinner every few days with a larger dinner party every fortnight or so.

Josephine was not and is not gregarious in the way that I was, so all the entertaining was a strain for her, especially at the beginning. She found it particularly nerve-racking because of the pressure on all the women to wear immaculate
haute couture
outfits. Josephine improvised by finding a Cypriot dressmaker round the corner who helped run up her clothes from good materials.

Of course the entertaining did take up quite a lot of time, but being a stockbroker did not require me to be hard at work on a consistent basis. The hours were tiresome because of the time differences between stock exchange opening periods but apart from that my colleagues and I were often sitting at our desks twiddling our thumbs, or in my case gossiping with my friends.

I had started my worldly life in my late teens. Both at Cambridge and at Oxford I had met and made friends with people who were by and large a minimum of two or three years older than myself because they had been through National Service, from which I had been exempted because of my asthma. I attended their parties and went to stay for weekends.

Compared to others of my age, I was well travelled. At the age of fourteen I had travelled to New York on my own. My mother had remarried. Her new husband, Peter Rosoff, was an American publisher, and I was duly dispatched to join them in their Manhattan flat for my summer holidays, crossing the Atlantic on the liner RMS
Queen Elizabeth
(and back on the
Queen Mary
). I travelled out in cabin class and in my cabin got to know a history professor at Pennsylvania University who specialised in American warfare. With a shared interest in history we got on very well, and I got on equally well with his very attractive daughter who was also on board.

My mother was much in France and Italy where on visits I met her always intriguing circle of friends. Consequently, by the time I was married I already had a busy social life in Rome, Paris, London and Munich, and my employers rather shrewdly realised that I might be a good person to seek business from these people – the head of their ‘foreign' department was a socially mobile Roman who was very keen on landing gilded and generous fish.

The next few years were something of a
dolce vita
period as, courtesy of Bache, I enjoyed a very jolly international time, spending three months of each year in Rome, the heartland of that very
vita
, and Milan, and a further two to three months over the winter in St Moritz. I was also in Germany for shorter periods, perhaps one month twice a year overseeing the opening of the Bache office in Frankfurt. Here the emphasis was on administrative details added to chatting to potential clients. In Germany wealthy people were looked after by local banks, while in Italy much of their wealth was abroad.

Wherever I was in Europe, I felt quite at home, and thanks to my parents' facility with languages, which they passed on to me, was quite happy chattering away in French, Italian and German. My mother was completely fluent in all three, as well as English, my father also, although his Italian was never as good as my mother's. When he spoke, he had the mildest of German overtones. You might equally have thought he was Swedish, and my mother Italian. Theirs was the accent of European cosmopolites.

Even though there was work to be done, the predominant mood was cheerful and the greatest possible fun. How could it not be? Here I was at the turn of the decade from the 1950s to the 1960s, newly married, staying in glamorous hotels with my glamorous wife, and getting to know swathes of the people who were then known as café society. My cousin Johannes Thurn und Taxis never quite got that appellation right. He called it ‘coffee society', which in a way was the same but different.

Whenever I was in St Moritz, not being much of a skier I spent much of each morning chattering on the telephone to other equally less sporting people. Marella Agnelli, from a princely Neapolitan family, wife of the Fiat chairman Gianni, rang me very early one morning saying that she had to go to Rome in her private plane to look after her niece, who was dying of cancer and was alone, and therefore would I tell our friend in common Marie-Hélène Rothschild that as a consequence she would not be able to go to the dinner party that Marie-Hélène was giving that evening.