Debutante DOOMED BY DESIRE
A cousin of Churchill, but a Nazi sympathiser. A showgirl, . but a war heroine. A femme fatale, but sick of falling in love. No woman can have led as many lives as Co. Monaghan’s Anita Leslie, the...
By any standards, it was an unconventional wedding. The bride, Anglo-Irish beauty Anita Leslie, was a cousin of Winston Churchill and neither he, nor the guests who watched her walk down the aisle, radiating loveliness, knew she was glowing not only with happiness, but with early pregnancy.
More scandalous still, the groom waiting at the altar, war hero Bill King, was not the baby’s father, and he knew it. Astonishingly, Anita, whose wedding dress had been let out to accommodate her burgeoning bump, was pregnant by her lover, Peter Wilson, and, following the wedding in 1949, both men proceeded to live with her in a complicated form of marital timeshare in her dilapidated Irish pile, Castle Leslie in Co. Monaghan.
Her unconventional, chaotic life was the result of her desire, as she candidly put it, to ‘have several cakes and eat them too’. Anita Leslie was a mass of contradictions: a bashful debutante who was fearless under fire; a fan of Hitler who came to despise the Germans; a beauty racked by insecurity; an inadvertent femme fatale who broke her own and others’ hearts.
Now, an intriguing new biography, Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie, by Penny Perrick, reveals the truth about this brave Irish woman who insisted that life was ‘delightful and amusing’ even when beset by disaster.
Anita’s tempestuous life began in 1914. Her Anglo-Irish father, Sir Shane Leslie, was Winston Churchill’s first cousin – his mother Leonie, Anita’s grandmother, was Churchill’s favourite aunt. Anita’s wealthy American mother, Marjorie, was more interested in buying gowns than in bringing up Anita and her two brothers.
One of those brothers was the sprightly, electronic dance musicloving John, affectionately known as Captain Jack. Even into his 80s, war hero Jack was a familiar sight on the dance floors of Clones, and travelled to Ibiza to celebrate his 85th birthday at Privilege, then the world’s biggest nightclub.
He became an international news sensation in 2002 as the castle hosted Paul McCartney’s wedding to Heather Mills. With the media gathered at the gates of the estate, he announced the nuptials were taking place there but that it was ‘a secret’.
But back to Sir Shane. He was a poet, author, philanderer and distant parent. ‘Our own father did not exactly dislike us – he would merely have preferred us not to have been born,’ wrote Anita.
She was educated at seven different schools, some of which bordered on barbaric. At one convent books were banned. At another, she complained to her mother: ‘The food is foul and gives even me violent indigestion.’
Anita was happiest at Castle Leslie, where she could climb trees, ride and fish. But when she left school, she was propelled onto the London social scene as a reluctant debutante. She found the dances dull and failed to attract a marriage proposal.
The London Season over, she began dancing lessons and even had a brief stint as a showgirl. In her early 20s, she met a charismatic Russian aristocrat, Paul Rodzianko. He was penniless, three decades older than Anita, but a brilliant horseman, who sliced off champagne corks with his sword and walked on his hands while singing Russian songs. ‘
She knew that he was trouble and decided to travel around the world to escape him. In April 1937, mainly to annoy her mother, Anita married Paul. She realised her mistake even as she made her vows: ‘My heart turned to lead at the word wife,’ she wrote to her best friend, Rose Burgh.
Sure enough, Paul began bullying her. ‘I am so bored, and caged and unhappy,’ she confided in Rose. When she sought refuge in an affair, he was violently jealous: ‘He wanted to strangle me with a belt… he clouted me and then broke down in hysterical weeping.’ She later claimed their marriage was never consummated and may have been bigamous as Paul had two other wives.
Paul infected Anita with his anti-Semitism and support of the Nazis. Like many aristocrats, she became an admirer of Hitler, dismissing her cousin Winston warnings about the Nazis.
When war was declared September 1939, Anita carry on hunting and partying. But August 1940, with Winston prime minister, she volunte for war work in order to es her miserable marriage. joined the Mechanised Trans Corps, which was full of up class girls. They were poste North Africa where she drove ambulance across the desert crying wounded men to hospital Her first patients were a serg with venereal disease and a dier knocked out by a cricket
On her days off, she wat polo at the Gizera Club in C lunched with General Alexan British commander in the Mi East, and went sightseeing in J salem. But wherever she w Paul followed, jealous and r ing to divorce her. When the M was disbanded, Anita found
‘The groom at the altar, war hero Bill King, was not her baby’s father’
in Syria as editor of an English newspaper for the troops. She was soon driving all over the Middle East, possibly gathering intelligence.
There was plenty of time for fun too: she went riding in the mountains of Lebanon and skiing by moonlight with off-duty officers. And there were other pleasures too, despite Paul’s clinging presence. Anita attracted many admirers, officers on leave who were undeterred by the prospect of evading a jealous husband by jumping from hotel balconies.
Her heart belonged to a dashing Australian colonel named Philip Parbury but she was also being pursued by an English colonel, Peter Wilson, who, although married, begged her to have a child with him, and by submarine commander Bill King, who dubbed himself Admirer Number Four.
He was sent to sea and did not see her again for years, although he wrote her poems. Far from delighting in her convoluted love life, she was, she wrote to Rose, ‘just sick of falling in and out of love’ and yearned to do something heroic ‘like capturing a tank’.
Instead, she gave into Peter’s demands and became pregnant but miscarried. Now desperate to leave her ‘cobweb of affection’ behind, she volunteered for the Red Cross and sailed for Italy in May 1944. Before leaving Cairo, she discovered she was pregnant by Peter and did ‘the brutal and sensible thing [an abortion]. Peter minded terribly and so did I…’
In Italy, which she described as ‘Dante’s Inferno’ as battle raged, she tended wounded British soldiers. She was still heartbroken over the abortion and still caught in her romantic ‘cobweb’ sighing: ‘I so want to marry two men and can’t decide between them.’ Soon she had attracted Admirer Number Five, a ‘rather sweet’ army officer.
Salvation, or distraction, came when she volunteered as an ambulance driver with the First French Armoured Division. Unlike the British, the French allowed female drivers on the front line.
Her yearning for heroism would be realised. Landing at Marseilles, she found herself in the thick of the fighting. It was dangerous work but her French female commander instructed: ‘Whatever happens, remember to use lipstick because it cheers the wounded.’
Just how dangerous this work was became clear when a shell nearly landed on her and she snatched up a tin basin to use as a helmet. Soon she was regularly dodging mortars and bullets but at least Paul could not pursue her to the battlefront, try as he might.
In one village, Anita came across a mother whose young son had been shot by the Germans. Two German prisoners were brought before the mother and she was given a gun and invited to take revenge. ‘She was expressionless as she shot them,’ Anita observed.
By December 1944, they were in Northern France and Anita was in the thick of battle. ‘In all directions, men advancing through the fields were suddenly blown up in a fountain of scarlet snow,’ she recalled. She ran forward to drag wounded men out of the snow, under heavy fire, gaining a reputation as ‘Une Anglaise Formidable’.
Her heroism was recognised at the end of the war when she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Anita returned to Ireland a war heroine, but felt empty and depressed. Her mother’s solution was to buy her Oranmore Castle in Co. Galway. Anita invited Peter Wilson, now divorced from his wife and hoping to marry Anita, to move in.
Peter cared for her tenderly and she became pregnant by him again. But then her submariner admirer, Bill King, arrived in Ireland. Undeterred by her pregnancy, he proposed to her. She accepted, oblivious to the anguish this caused her ‘Darling Peter’.
She planned to pass the baby off as Bill’s but when her son, Tarka, was born, both men were buckling under the strain of living under a lie. Only belatedly did she realise the pain she had caused: ‘I can see I’ve done great wrong to both Peter and Bill… I have only dealt out unhappiness.’
Eventually, Peter left Ireland and Anita and Bill had a daughter, Leonie, and remained happily married until her death, aged 70.
Her behaviour caused heartbreak but it made her a heroine. ‘Never again am I going to live a dull domesticated existence,’ she wrote to Rose when leaving for Africa in 1940. ‘I’m just going to be naughtier and naughtier!’
She certainly succeeded.
‘Salvation came when she volunteered as an ambulance driver’
Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives Of Anita Leslie, by Penny Perrick, first published by Lilliput Press, is out on Bloomsbury Caravel, €10.