Confessions OF A hopeless romantic
Last week he told how Boris said he could bring up his secret daughter. Today WILLIAM CASH says that was just the start of his amorous adventures!
IDECIDED to get married for the first time in 1999 after I nearly killed myself falling into an empty swimming pool in Los Angeles. I’d been at a dinner party at t he house of John Irvin, the film director who was behind the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. was out cold for around eight minutes and afterwards I wrote to my longstanding girlfriend, the actress Louise King, and said: ‘You’re right, I have been living here too long… I love you with all my heart.’
The other reason for returning to England was to move into the Gatehouse at Upton Cressett, my family home in Shropshire, and write a biography of Graham Greene.
I proposed to Louise on a cold and misty evening in the garden of a Benedictine abbey in the middle of France after we had attended vespers. It stood next door to a little three-star hotel with a good restaurant where we had stopped en route to England from a holiday.
The beauty of the moment in the abbey gardens in the chilly dusk as the monks’ i ncense burned in t he candlelight prompted a spontaneous proposal.
Louise said ‘yes’, and we had a happy dinner looking forward to our future together. But then God reversed the charges. The next morning at breakfast, before I had even had a chance to call her father, Louise asked if she could ‘think about it’ before any announcement. I waited for a few weeks. Then, as the weeks turned into months, and I was still waiting for an answer, I thought my luck had changed: I met Ilaria Bulgari in a cafe in South Kensington.
A MEMBER of the famous Italian jewellery family, Ilaria was quite unlike any girl I’d ever met before. Whenever I stayed with her in Italy, she was accompanied by bodyguards. The Bulgaris had good reason to be security-conscious: Ilaria’s uncle had been kidnapped by masked men in Rome in 1975 before a reported $2 million ransom was paid.
After a whirlwind two-month courtship, I proposed, reciting from a Graham Greene love poem:
‘I can only believe in love that strikes suddenly Out of a clear sky; I do not believe in the slow germination of friendship
Or one that asks why?’
The idea of falling hopelessly, headover-heels in love would turn out to be something of a theme. Ilaria accepted immediately and dissolved into tears as she slipped on a vintage ring, which I had hidden in an old sock. I’d only recently bought it at Sotheby’s after a chastening experience when Ilaria pulled me in to her family’s Bond Street shop and asked to see some rings in the private room.
‘That would be £450,000, sir… and this very fine and suitable diamond and sapphire would be £650,000,’ said the manager, setting the rings on a table.
As I heard these figures, a small river of sweat flowed down my back. By the time we left the store, my suit was soaked and I was panicking.
Fortunately, I was tipped off about a 1970s Bulgari diamond ring coming up for sale at auction – a ring I could actually afford – and I jumped at the chance.
The wedding date was set for October 13, 2002, in London and I hurriedly booked a walking tour of the Bavarian Alps for our honeymoon. When the big trip arrived, however, the person sitting across the log fire nursing a tumbler was not my new wife but my best man, racing driver Charles Dean. The hotel management were convinced we were a gay couple.
I’d been forced to ramble round Bavaria with my best man because the wedding had been postponed when the Bulgari lawyers intervened with a prenuptial agreement. The priests due to marry us took a dim view, saying such a document was against the spirit of a Catholic marriage.
After legal amendments, Ilaria and I were finally married on Saturday, February 8, 2003, at Farm Street Church in London and, at the age of 37, I thought my wheel of fortune had finally turned.
I printed the Graham Greene poem on books of matches for the guests at our wedding lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. ‘I should let you know, sir, that we have a minimum order of 1,500 match-books,’ the manufacturer told me. ‘That’s fine,’ I replied. ‘Enough to last a lifetime.’ Or so I’d hoped – actually the marriage went up in flames in less than three years.
When Ilaria’s elegant Italian mother Anna had come to our flat to watch the wedding DVD, there had been an unfortunate incident. I pressed the button on the DVD player when, to my horror, up flashed a writhing group sex scene in a grand four-poster bed and the credits rolled for a triple-X-rated film called To The Manor Porn.
‘Oh, my God!’ I said, as I stopped the DVD. My new mother-in-law looked at me in disbelief. I’d forgotten that I had been commissioned to write a profile on the Honourable Jasper Duncombe, Britain’s most unlikely porn baron.
After I explained that the DVD was ‘research’, we all had a good laugh and watched the real wedding DVD, but it set the tone of the farce that was to follow.
The night of my 40th birthday party remains welded in the memory bank as the night Ilaria did a runner.
I had seen her arranging the lilies and the table settings at 6.30pm but by the time I had put on a dark suit for dinner, she had vanished.
She did reappear the following day and I tried to persuade her that our marriage was working and that I loved her. Shortly after we returned to London, however, two spotty youths in badly fitting suits approached me in an alleyway by my office. When I saw they were handing me divorce papers, I felt as if my world had collapsed and I fled across Hyde Park
She pulled me into her family’s shop to look at rings... that cost £650,000
practically in tears. We’d been staying at the Lanesborough Hotel as our flat was being decorated. But I when got back, all Ilaria’s clothes, make-up and suitcase had been removed. Her mobile number was disconnected. No voicemail – just dead. My stage exit appeared to have been ruthlessly planned. This was excommunication.
I heard it rumoured that her family might have wanted me out of the way before they sold the family business (to LVMH) and now Ilaria was installed in Claridge’s with a security guard outside her room. I was still deeply in love with her and thought this was entirely over the top. Our marriage had been far from perfect but it was not beyond rescue as we loved each other.
For weeks afterwards, I was followed around the clock by two goons, presumably looking for evidence of infidelity. Wherever I went – on the Tube, in restaurants, in banks, nightclubs and investor meetings – I was watched.
I had no idea where Ilaria was for at least a month.
When I finally saw her again, she told me: ‘I can’t go into what happened, but let me just say that my heart was torn in two and breaking more and more each day. But now seeing you in front of me, smiling back at me, fills my heart with such love. Will you forgive me for all the pain I have caused you?’
‘I feel the same,’ I replied. ‘The lawyers should never have been allowed to get between us. The important thing is that we think of today as a new dawn.’
But Ilaria’s father and the family lawyers had other ideas and continued to send what I regarded as petty and aggressive letters on an almost daily basis.
Their legal crucifixion machinery would eventually cut me into pieces financially, emotionally and physically.
Divorce was something I had never wanted and I tried to fight it to the end, which often makes for the most painful type of separation – the legal equivalent of being garrotted while the heart is still alive. FALLING in love with Vanessa Neumann was like discovering an exotic new drug that would cure all my ailments. That she was a beautiful, New York-based philosopher and writer with a PhD from Columbia University no doubt added to her allure.
With her aqua- green eyes and husky, mid-Atlantic drawl, she was known in the diary pages as the ‘ Cracker from Caracas’ for her Venezuelan heritage and because she had been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. But she was ‘Dr V’ to her close friends, while I was ‘Bunny’. The Cracker nickname was a source of amusement to Vanessa, who claimed to find it ‘flattering’ and partly ‘insulting’. She was a regular on the international conference circuit, specialising in South American politics and counterterrorism, invariably arriving in a vintage Hermes poncho and kneehigh leather boots. ‘ Could you imagine getting married again?’ she asked the night we met at Annabel’s nightclub in September 2007. I looked at her. Pause. ‘ I could see myself marrying somebody like you,’ I replied.
It wasn’t long before we were driving up the M1 to the Lake District in my old BMW for our first romantic weekend. I called my car insurance company to have Vanessa’s name added to my policy. We were on
The Cracker from Caracas would arrive in vintage Hermes poncho and knee-high boots
speaker-phone in the car. ‘Would that be additional temporary or permanent insurance cover?’ asked a female voice from a Newcastle call centre.
‘Permanent,’ I said, without any hesitation. Then Vanessa winked at me. ‘Your certainty came like a bolt from the blue,’ she later said. ‘I knew I had my man.’
I proposed on New Year’s Day 2008, in Mustique, where Vanessa had spent much of her childhood.
I produced the ring from another old sock, this time hidden inside the glove box of the electric golf buggy we were driving.
I was encouraged that Vanessa said ‘yes’ before she’d looked inside the box to see the cocktail ring I’d bought as a temporary stand-in for the real thing.
I might have read the signs better. A trip to St Moritz in February to celebrate her birthday and to present Vanessa with her actual engagement ring ( a yellow sapphire with the interwoven initials ‘ VW’ in diamonds on each side) ended up with us returning to London with the ring cut into pieces.
It turned out to be a size too small and was cutting off the circulation to her finger, which was turning a nasty blue-black. So bad did the situation become that the ring had to be sawn off by a Swiss surgeon in the town’s clinic.
We laughed about it but it wasn’t the best omen.
I tied the knot with Vanessa that June at Chelsea Register Office. By our first Christmas, however, the marriage was in trouble.
We were living between my London flat and the Coach House at Upton Cressett. I’d decided to renovate the main Elizabethan manor house, but this was now gutted and building work was yet to start. Then, on Valentine’s Day, Vanessa had a riding accident and after taking her to A&E, we had a bad row. Vanessa packed up her stuff and flew to New York.
We had been married for just six months and were already separated. Three months later, she was back in England saying she wanted to try to make the marriage work, but I soon found myself confronting my marital past in a way that proved fatal.
I’d discovered that Ilaria was selling almost the entire contents of our Bayswater home through the Lots Road auctioneers, including our marital bed with a royal-blue velvet headboard and our Vispring mattress from Harrods.
Why couldn’t I let go? I had moved on with my life. I’d had no contact with Ilaria since her lawyer had t old me t o communicate only through his office, but I didn’t like the idea of a stranger in our bed or our curtains lying crumpled in the corner of a saleroom. So I spent thousands buying back my past.
Vanessa couldn’t understand it and by t he end of t he month she had left for New York again, this time for good. I MET Lady Laura Cathcart in October 2009, when I found myself sitting next to her at a restaurant in Belgravia, Central London. The first thing I noticed was that she had such classical features – the pale cream complexion and slightly rouged English beauty of a Gainsborough portrait.
She was just 26 and an interior designer. After just one meeting, I was smitten.
By November, I’d taken her to the theatre, Annabel’s nightclub and even the Elton John Winter Ball, but one Saturday the following January, as we drank cocktails, she got directly to the point.
‘I am not sure I’m what you’re looking for right now, William,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m not ready to settle down with anybody. Everything is going too fast. I’ve had a lovely time with you, but I can’t give you what you want right now.’
This was a knife to the heart. Another ex, another broken dream. At 43, past my prime and with two failed marriages behind me, I was no closer to finding a chatelaine for Upton Cressett. Would I ever have a family of my own?
I decided the only way to mend my broken self was to throw all my energies – and remaining money – into restoring Upton Cressett to its former glory.
So I commissioned prize-winning artist Adam Dant to paint the walls and ceilings with ‘ Elizabethan’ murals. My exes were to feature and I asked Adam to portray ‘the chatelaines who got away’ – i ncluding my t wo ex- wives. Vanessa was pictured writing on a notepad under a tree. Ilaria was some way off in the distance, reading Graham Greene poems. Laura was also there, waving happily at me, sitting on a brick wall on the Gatehouse lawn.
Later, Adam would include a cartouche panel on the upper landing of the main stair featuring a Venus pouring water from a jug. The goddess – symbolising love, sex and beauty – was a figurative likeness of Helen Macintyre, the beautiful art dealer whose baby, fathered by Boris Johnson, I had offered to raise, but who had left me heartbroken. THERE were more ill-fated relationships to follow – with Kym, an estate agent turned actress; Anna, a City tax adviser and expert equestrian; and Caroline, a super-bright free spirit and poet.
But I had rarely stopped thinking about Laura, who was by now working as a milliner with a small studio near Sloane Square, Chelsea.
She had seen a Country Life article about the murals at Upton Cressett and, to my delight, she wrote saying she would like to be in touch, signing her letter ‘Love L xx’.
Just two little crosses can bring an eternity of hope. We met for dinner in the weeks following and then – the breakthrough – we spent a long weekend in Venice. I knew it felt right to be with her. ‘When I was 26 I wasn’t ready to get married,’ she told me later. ‘But three years can change everything.’
I proposed at a summer concert in Upton Cressett’s 12th Century church on the bank holiday weekend of August 2013. That afternoon, I had lined the Norman stone font with a bed of thistles, Laura’s favourite flower, having hidden a pink sapphire engagement ring in a box at the bottom of the leaded font. As we stepped inside the little Norman church, I said: ‘The font is lined with flowers. Somebody must have dressed it for tonight’s concert.’
Laura looked more closely. ‘How pretty – Scottish thistles,’ she said. ‘My favourite!’
It didn’t take her long to find the black jewellery box and within a few moments Laura was wearing her ring and smiling radiantly.
We were married one fine February morning at the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in Chelsea. I was 48 when our daughter Cosima arrived and our son Rex followed when I was 50.
At my 50th birthday party, I had asked my old jazz singer friend, Christopher Silvester, to sing a few numbers, including the song Laura from the Otto Preminger film of the same name. ‘That was Laura but she’s only a dream,’ went the lyrics.
Except Laura was no longer only a dream – she was living in the Elizabethan brick house that was now our family home.
Abridged extract from Restoration Heart: A Memoir, by William Cash, published by Constable at £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until September 30. Call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk.