‘The Lord who wanted me as a lover... but it was like clutching death
Torn between a cheating husband she adored and a lustful but unattractive peer, Barbara Amiel faced a perplexing sexual dilemma. And, as she reveals in a second extract from her shockingly candid new memoir, it cost her dear...
ON SATURDAY, in the first exclusive extract from her blistering new memoir, Barbara Amiel, wife of media tycoon Conrad Black, recalled how the pair — once the toast of London and New York society — became social outcasts after Black was jailed by a U.S. court for fraud and obstruction of justice. Today, she recounts how her reluctant dalliance with a besotted peer destroyed an earlier marriage — and why she later spurned a very generous multi-billionaire.
MY THIRD marriage ended in tears (mine), scenes (mine) and despair (mine as well). I was heartbroken, although I had contributed my share to the dissolution.
The immediate cause was my relationship with book publisher George Weidenfeld. Of course, this is only one side of the story — mine. But the entire episode was a bad novel.
Weidenfeld, member of the House of Lords, hugely successful, and 21 years older than me, was exceptionally clever, with an extraordinary sense of humour embellished by a wonderful ability to mimic anyone.
Unfortunately, he was also very short, plump and with eyes that could protrude rather alarmingly, especially when upset. And he became alarmingly obsessed with me . . .
I HAD met the man who would become my third husband at a party in Toronto, where I was living. He reeked of eligibility: cosmopolitan manner, late-40s, well over 6 ft tall, thick silver-ginger hair, very funny, a successful businessman, never married. Too good to be true. And it was. He had just arrived from the UK, where he resided. Nine months later, in 1984, we married — and the next day, he flew back to London while I headed back to my job as editor of a Canadian newspaper.
‘Will you be seeing Margaret?’ I asked before he left, referring to the very attractive divorcee who had been his constant date for some time. ‘She’s in Italy for the week,’ he said. I was in my office in Toronto some days later when the telephone rang and his brother informed me that David had been in a terrible car accident — as he drove back from Italy.
My reactions were, I think, those of an average new bride, which is to say a mixture of terrible panic and blank rage.
This was not a resounding start to our marriage, but I swallowed and took it in my stride. A handsome man that can make you laugh endlessly and make love to you endlessly is rare enough. And I was madly in love.
The plus was that I returned to the UK, where I had spent the first 12 years of my life. There, I shared hospital visits with a number of other girlfriends, none of whom knew David was married, it being secret to protect his non-resident Canadian tax status. This made visiting times slightly treacherous for me, if not farcical.
David umpired the harem around his bed with his usual charm and dexterity, in spite of having one of his wounded legs hoisted by some sort of contraption in the air. I watched the play of intimate little signals between them, and considered putting strychnine in the wine they were all sharing.
Having left my job in Toronto, I looked for work and eventually landed a column on The Times. This took me up to five days a week to write, sitting at my Tandy computer and looking out at never-ending drizzle.
My husband was away 90 per cent of the time, and I grew increasingly despondent in a city where I knew virtually no one.
It took me about two months to realise that the fulsome ‘Longing to see you again, we must meet’ from people encountered at the very occasional dinner or run-in was actually their polite way of saying goodbye.
I knew I looked too ‘new’, too shiny, my clothes screaming ‘American’ or foreigner.
But after two years, two or three like-minded people introduced me around a bit.
Among my new friends was Miriam Gross, former arts editor of The Observer, who invited me to dinner.
‘Just a couple of people,’ she said. ‘George Weidenfeld and one or two others. Why don’t you and your husband come?’
Weidenfeld was the best-known party-giver in London for circles that included top politicians, intellectuals, authors, society figures, aristocracy — well, everyone. David accepted.
The night of the dinner, he announced: ‘I’m not going. You’ll do a much better job alone attracting Weidenfeld’s attention and then we can go to his parties. Just tell them I’m unwell.’
It was horribly rude. I went alone. Weidenfeld invited me to the opera for the following weekend. David approved and left town. My new friendship was launched.
In conversation George was funny, informed and fascinating. That, together with the circles in which he moved, made him irresistible: being with him, I thought rather calculatingly, gave me access and some status.
Meanwhile, he acted as if my husband didn’t exist, a typically European approach to another’s love life.
Gradually, or not so gradually, I could see George was becoming attracted to me. He began inviting me to the country homes of his friends when David was away, a world I had never known.
Though I loved every minute with George, I not only had no sexual interest in him — I had a positive revulsion. This was not his fault, but I was still in love with my tall, considerably younger and more physically vital husband.
As the situation escalated, David’s own dalliances were scarcely concealed. At one point, I arrived in New York, where he/we had an apartment, to find our bed still containing spent condoms.
On telephoning my car in Toronto, the woman who answered said she was driving and asked me to hold a moment. I later identified her as a gorgeous Jamaican girl. Jealousy overwhelmed me, and I made dreadful scenes.
But there is one constant about men that all females know: unless you catch them in flagrante
‘I had to avoid body to body contact’
‘The break-up was a stew of hysteria’
delicto, they will not admit to any infidelity, while, unlike women, they cannot absorb any hint of it in their partners.
And I was up to my eyebrows in my own double life: George was now regularly proposing marriage and begging me to get a divorce. I was trying to hang on to the social advantages he gave me without incurring the payment required sexually.
This obviously had a short lease. The minute I heard George’s suggestion, ‘Let’s spend a cosy evening,’ I went into semi-paralysis with dread.
I knew the code. The only way I could deal with it was to avoid actual body-to-body contact and pleasure him orally.
Men rarely care whether you like or dislike doing it, since they go into some world where they can live out every fantasy in their heads. I wanted nothing in return, which seemed a relief to him.
To the onlooker, I was behaving shamefully and causing George great unhappiness. A cleverer, more decent or more experienced woman could have managed this sort of game far better. George, on the other hand, was a brilliant manoeuvrer.
He would pour out his anguish to his friends, especially those women who formed a sort of praetorian guard about him: they began to look at me as a heartless Jezebel leading on this lovestruck swain as if he were a callow youth of 25. [He was 68.]
‘Speak to Gina,’ he would urge me, mentioning a very clever close friend of his. ‘Tell her your problems frankly and she will understand.’
In my desperation and naive belief that women were allies, I actually did this.
‘I think the world of George,’ I told her in between my little tearful moments, ‘but holding him is like clutching death.’
This brutal simile immediately went straight to George and all over London.
He knew exactly what the problem was and he also knew that if he cried, I would be rendered immobile. I could see him watching me behind his tears and I could hear my voice going from firm to faltering.
‘I can’t go, George,’ I would say after he proffered another invitation to the Stresa music festival or a trip to the Weimar Republic with friends. ‘This can’t continue.’
Now that I’d got up the strength to actually say I was through, George would fall back against the sofa, his head lolling on it, sobbing. ‘How can you humiliate me?’ he would ask. ‘You’ve promised to come. Everyone is expecting you.’
This accusation of humiliation always stopped me cold. Guilt seeped through me. The crying would become intense and I would see the tears roll down soft, loose cheeks.
I felt encircled by a cobra feigning helplessness, and to say no would be more lethal than going. I would lose the friendship not only of George but, as important, of the several women I really liked, especially Miriam, who were his old friends.
George had an astigmatic vision in which I was his clever Jewish columnist wife who would run his salon with brilliance. As for his intense sexual needs, that would all work out. In the meantime, ‘We’ll have a
mariage blanc,’ he would reassure me, which I knew was bunk. ‘You will live in a little apartment of your own.’
I had no illusions: he would be there at bedtime, very much part of an anticipated mariage noir.
He even purchased a small basement flat next door to him connected through a small tunnel, commissioning a mutual friend to decorate it. She must have thought I was brain-damaged as I listened numbly to plans for it, speechless with horror.
The deadlock was broken in 1988 after the New York Post gossip column mentioned that ladies across two continents were weeping because George Weidenfeld was going to marry me.
One of David’s former girlfriends drew his attention to the exchange, and I was toast. Divorce proceedings by him began immediately.
The break-up was a stew of hysteria and hideously lumpy moments involving me flying back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of my soon-to-be former husband. The details would fill a shelf of weepy books.
We did reconcile about a year after our divorce, while he was secretly in the throes of a passionate love affair with a 6ft blonde American plastic surgeon. There was a bizarre
incident in which she sent David over to my London lodgings with a condom firmly attached by surgical glue to his relevant part.
Twelve months on, David wanted us to remarry but no ring could be big enough for any more pain.
My own view is that my mental capacities never recovered from the fairly lengthy coma induced by an unoriginal cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol that I took during and after one of my beseeching transatlantic telephone calls when David suggested I kill myself, a not unreasonable suggestion given my tiresome repetitions of an inability to live without him.
From Toronto, he managed to call the police station around the corner from our Belgravia flat, and I ended up in hospital for about 48 hours. Particularly humiliating was his next morning’s request to my cleaning lady to FedEx his dinner jacket so he could attend dinner in California with [Jackie Onassis’s sister] Lee Radziwill.
Clinical depressions are fairly common: mine began slowly, during the last six months or so of my marriage to David. Perhaps friends in London might have helped me through this, but the ones I had were put off by my behaviour to George.
Beginning in 1987 and taking hold during 1988 and most of 1989 was a solid 24-hour-aday depression during which I was a menace to home and hearth. A rather attractive light fixture in a conservatory got ripped out of the ceiling after a bungled attempt to hang myself from it. There must be a trick to the noose that I hadn’t got.
I became a whiz at collecting sleeping tablets from doctors all over London, and there was a faint-hearted attempt by me in front of the Baker Street line at the Finchley Road Tube station.
But I suspect that these failed attempts were all faux, rather like the ‘insufficient number of pills’ [the novelist] Colette ascribes to one of her hysterical French courtesans with a habit of overdosing.