THE DOOMED DYNASTY
JFK. Eric Clapton. Karl Lagerfeld. All fell under the spell of the Harlechs – a family of hedonistic aristocrats dogged by self-destruction and catastrophe. Now the curse has struck again
THEY are two of the most charismatic and distinctive figures of their generation — a brother and sister who shine out even in the decadently glittering demi-monde in which they move.
Model, actress, stylist and It- girl Tallulah Harlech first appeared on a Chanel catwalk at the age of 12, holding the hand of designer Karl Lagerfeld. Her summers were spent at Lagerfeld’s villa in Biarritz, thanks to her mother Amanda being his ‘muse’.
Today, you’re likely to spot ravenhaired Tallulah, 27, posing at parties with fellow models Cara Delevingne and Suki Waterhouse.
Her brother, 29-year- old Jasset, is equally socially blessed through his work as a film-maker, shooting videos for musicians and companies including Lagerfeld’s Fendi label.
Beneath the sheen, though, lies the tale of a family so stalked by tragedy that it is said they must bear a curse.
Indeed, last week there was no glitz or gloss as the Harlechs gathered at St Mary’s in Selattyn, a small church on the Welsh border, for the funeral of Tallulah and Jasset’s father, Francis ormsby-Gore, known as Frank, the 6th Baron Harlech.
Francis was only 61 when he died at his home in Wales earlier this month.
The last funeral of a Lord Harlech, Francis’s media mogul father David, saw Jackie Kennedy in attendance, but Francis was laid to rest in a low-key affair attended only by close family.
A small, Mad-Hatterish-looking man with mutton chop sideburns, Harlech had moved to Wales and what remained of his family’s land when he was forced to sell the Shropshire family estate and their stately home, Brogyntyn Hall, because of lack of funds.
It was a sad end for a man whose life had started so promisingly, glitteringly even. He was born to David ormsbyGore, Conservative politician and British Ambassador to Washington in the Sixties, and his wife Sylvia ‘Sissie’ Lloyd Thomas.
Francis’s father had even been a transatlantic childhood playmate of JFK — a relationship that remained strong in adulthood.
John and Jackie were close to his sociable parents, with JFK calling David ‘ the wisest man I ever knew’, and leaning on him for support during the Cuban missile crisis.
But Francis’s mother was always wary of Jackie. He recalled her saying to him, ominously: ‘You should be aware that this charming American woman carries around with her an aura of tragedy.
‘Her ill luck, or whatever it is, will haunt not only her but anyone deeply involved with her.’
So STRoNG was the Kennedy curse, it was said to be catching. Later, it is said, the onassis family apparently caught it, too. It is tempting to see the Kennedy curse as having passed to the Harlechs, too — but in truth any ill luck in this Welsh Camelot went further back than that.
Indeed, Francis’s father became heir to the title under benighted circumstances, when his elder brother died in a car crash at the age of 19.
Painfully, it was the first of many untimely deaths.
When Francis was only 13, his mother, Sissie, died in a car crash. His father — who had become deputy Conservative leader in the Lords and set up HTV, the Welsh TV station — later pursued the widowed Jackie Kennedy.
He proposed to her as the sun set behind Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where they were holidaying together. Despite the romance of his proposal, she chose Aristotle onassis because of the tycoon’s greater means.
on her deathbed, she told a friend she deeply regretted that choice.
Glamour has never been far from the Harlech clan. Francis was one of five children and between them they became the nexus of the fashionable Sixties ‘hippieocracy’, a bohemian set where artistocracy mingled with emerging rock royalty.
His elder sister, Jane, was a friend of the Rolling Stones and dated Mick Jagger. The hit song Lady Jane was written for her.
The Harlech siblings signed up to a modelling agency called English Boy, founded by hereditary baronet Sir Mark Palmer, who eventually took off in a gypsy caravan in search of the Holy Grail, leaving the Harlech children looking for a purpose. They found one, of sorts. The ancestral seat — which was made up of 8,000 acres of land and two estates in Shropshire and Gwynedd — had been made over to eldest son and heir, Julian, to avoid death duties.
The siblings, who by then were sometimes referred to in society columns as the ‘Harlech hippies’, promptly tried to turn it into a commune, describing it as a ‘peace circus to bridge the gap between children who are rich and children who have nothing’.
High intentions, indeed, but they dissipated amid the hedonistic set they had fallen in with.
Julian, who suffered from depression, dabbled with drink and heroin. In 1974, he shot himself with a Smith & Wesson.
His younger sister, Alice, found the body. Francis, then 20, had to formally identify his brother. As the next son, he became the heir to the Harlech title.
Drink, drugs and sex continued to haunt the family. At just 17, Alice, the youngest sister, became engaged to Eric Clapton, who was then 25.
The couple met, according to Clapton’s autobiography, through David Mlinaric, an interior designer who was part of the same set of aristocratic hippies as the Harlechs.
All too quickly, the betrothed couple’s shared recreation was heroin, as well as long, boozy pub crawls with Francis.
As Alice slid into oblivion, their father was killed in Shropshire in 1986 — in a car crash, like his father before him, after he swerved to avoid a sheepdog.
That left Francis, by then in his 30s, with the estates and the title — but he soon discovered that
the gracious Palladian facade of Brogyntyn came with debt and death taxes. While he’d inherited £2.6 million, it turned out he had to pay £1.6 million in death duties, as well as selling art worth £5 million to pay a capital gains tax bill.
On a personal level, though, he had found love with the fashion editor Amanda Grieve. They married in 1986, had two children, Jasset and Tallulah, and lived on the family estate in Shropshire.
BuT the marriage was explosive. Amanda, a winsome Oxford graduate who today lives between her suite at the Paris Ritz and a farmhouse in Shropshire, was deeply embedded in the fast world of fashion, as ‘ muse’ and partner- in- crime to the emerging British designer John Galliano.
Heated rows fuelled by their painful lack of money saw Amanda spend weeks away in Paris for work.
Francis did not struggle for company in her absence. At the age of eight, Tallulah asked her mother why another woman slept in her bed when she was away.
Then, just as Galliano was hired to be the designer at Christian Dior, Amanda abandoned him for a more lucrative role with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel. If it looked mercenary at the time, she has defended herself since: she needed the money.
For cash was much needed by the Harlechs. In the struggle to keep going, Francis did much of the graft on the estate, rising at 5am to run the estate, as well as running a small haulage company.
Francis had also taken up his seat as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords — a role he loved. He would drive to London in one of his lorries and table questions about the beef industry.
But while his wife’s career thrived in Paris, where she became the muse of Chanel, Francis’s life descended into drink and drugs and desperation. When the children were sent to Eton and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Amanda was the one who paid the fees.
Things became yet more pitiful when, in 1994, police caught Lord Harlech with two loaded firearms in his car. He was two-and-a-half times over the legal alcohol limit. He was banned from driving for 22 months and fined £1,400.
Amanda moved out. Divorce would follow in 1998.
But if anything, worse was to come: Alice Ormsby-Gore, Francis’s sister, died in a grimy Bournemouth bedsit, having overdosed on heroin. The 44-year-old was found with the syringe still in her arm. Again, it fell to Francis to identify the body.
When Clapton heard about her death, he somewhat tactlessly said he felt lucky to have escaped the same fate.
As his biography makes clear, he treated her appallingly. While she was besotted with him, he described Alice as like his ‘slave’.
Having introduced Alice to heroin as a teenager, he abandoned her, getting clean himself while she was dragged down like a stone by her addiction.
For Francis, yet another blow was to come when he lost his seat in the Lords thanks to Tony Blair’s decision to get rid of the majority of the hereditary peers. Given that the Harlech name had been built on politics for generations, it can only be imagined how traumatic this was.
His fall continued. In 1999, he was fined £1,000 for careless driving and failure to stop after an accident. Two months later, he was fined £300 after being arrested at Crewe station with a wrap of heroin he said he had found on the train.
By 2001, things had crumbled to the extent that he had to put the family seat of two centuries standing on the market. He sold it for less than £5 million.
A family friend said at the time: ‘Frank has been through more hell than it’s possible to believe. He had to identify the bodies of his father, brother and sister. Can you imagine what that does to a person?
‘Then he had an unbelievably unpleasant divorce, with a settlement that can’t have helped his finances. This latest trauma must be dreadful. He has been trying to hold on to the house for years, but it’s a final admission of defeat.’
His battle with alcohol continued. He spent a year on probation after driving at four times the legal limit. Struggling with mental illness, he was even sectioned for a time.
His relationship with his children floundered. Tallulah, who had gone to New York to pursue an acting career, made a rare visit to see him in 2011. It was a disaster: he became ‘agitated and aggressive’ when he couldn’t open the back window of his Mercedes while she was driving.
She swerved into a car, that car hit a lamp-post and he convinced her to drive off.
When the law caught up with her, she admitted careless driving and failing to stop after an accident, and was fined £325. It was an incident that rather neatly summed up the chaos of their family life.
Poignantly, as recently as 2014, Francis tried, twice, to get back into the Lords.
ONE letter to his fellow peers saw him pitch for re- entry saying: ‘ I, Francis David Baron Harlech, am a farmer, forester, land manager, heavy haulage and plant contractor for some 47 years.
‘ Since 1975 I have conducted across the globe RR & D — rural reconstruction and development. Mostly war zones: water, crops, machinery, homes.
‘As an experienced mechanic who works from dock to warehouse, factory and office, I do unashamedly and quite literally work at the coalface of mankind’.
It didn’t work. He died without his beloved position in the upper House to console him.
Harlech never remarried. Amanda still flourishes at Chanel.
Her children certainly continue the tradition of family glamour in spades. Tallulah, according to one in her circle, ‘is incredibly sweet and incredibly cool, very unassuming actually’ — though her social media Instagram feed is so ‘edgy’ it borders on the pornographic.
Jasset, who is now the 7th Lord Harlech, is, according to one acquaintance, ‘ very good-looking, though he always wears tracksuits and sportswear. He looks more like a builder than a Lord. Very cool, though.’
One can only hope these bright young Harlechs can triumph over all those decades of adversity and disprove any talk of a family curse.