How Cara’s racy aunt seduced Churchill & son
AJEALOUS rival once suggested the beautiful Twenties socialite Doris Delevingne should write an autobiography entitled Around The World In Eighty Beds.
For most young women of the day, that would have been an unforgivable attack on their virtue. But Doris’s only quibble might well have been whether “eighty beds” was something of an underestimate.
Her long list of conquests included Sir Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, alongside numerous other men and several women, and she was unabashed about trading on her looks.
Today, her family name is famous because of her great-niece Cara Delevingne, 24, the supermodel known for her love of partying. This is something she has in common with her outrageous forebear, along with a fondness for baring flesh.
Cara has flashed her cleavage in revealing outfits and Doris was equally det e r mined to show off what were regarded as her best assets. “Hers were the prettiest legs that ever stepped into a punt or danced a foxtrot,” opined one close friend. Those celebrated pins are on show in a previously unseen picture snapped at the Venice Lido in 1932. Taken by her lover Cecil Beaton, it shows her lying on her front in a white swimsuit, with her le gs kicked up coquettishly behind her.
The photo features in a new book of Beaton’s work. And its publication coincides with that of The Mistress Of Mayfair, a racy new biography of Doris by Lyndsy Spence, which reveals she took every opportunity to show off those legs.
Wherever possible, she wore shorts, tailored far higher than would have been considered decent even if it had been acceptable for women to wear such garments – which it wasn’t.
Not that being acceptable mattered a jot to a woman who revelled in the impact her looks had on both sexes.
One admirer recalled how she had “hair the colour of ripe corn, a flower petal complexion and deep-set blue eyes fringed with enormously long dark lashes”.
She had a small gap between her front teeth, but she resisted any suggestion that she should have this corrected, referring to the old wives’ tale that this quirk signalled good fortune.
“Wouldn’t have them changed for anything, darling,” she would say, laughing raucously. Beyond her physical charms, she also made it her business to be a proficient lover.
“There’s no such thing as an impotent man, just an incompetent woman,” she told one paramour.
Another recalled that she had seduced him using an intimate trick, the details of which are unprintable. – Daily Mail