She’s a party girl, with a string of ex-lovers and posed for a very racy photo. No, not Prince Harry’s new blonde – her mum!
By Paul Scott
AT THIS time of year, the female ranks of London’s jeunesse
dorée are imbued with an added frisson of excitement as Prince Harry makes his way once again into their gilded orbit.
The helicopter pilot Prince is on leave and on the lookout for the sort of impeccably wellbred, clear- skinned blondes to which he is almost exclusively partial.
And in the ritzier nightclubs of West London, there is no shortage of this very type. Step forward, for example, Cressida Bonas — a 23-year-old model and would-be actress with an unimpeachably noble lineage.
Harry was seen kissing and cuddling the willowy girl-about-town in the early hours at Mayfair club Le Salon last week after they had spent the earlier part of the evening noisily chatting their way through the premiere of the new Batman film.
Stowe-educated Miss Bonas, who is herself the daughter of renowned Sixties It girl Lady MaryGaye Curzon, is presumably just the sort of highborn singleton that Harry had in mind when he asked his sister-in-law Kate to hook him up with a likely female earlier this year.
In this particular case, however, it is unlikely that Kate will be rushing to give her approval to Harry’s prospective match with the otherwise perfect girlfriend material, Miss Bonas.
The lovely Cressida is, after all, the half-sister of the even more beautiful actress Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe — a name that is even now capable of sending a shiver of anxiety down the spine of the Duchess of Cambridge.
Prince William had a massive — if unrequited — crush on Bella, as she is known to friends, to such an extent that when he spent a rapt evening hanging on her every word at a black-tie party in 2005, Kate stormed out in a huff. Today Bella is engaged to Richard Branson’s son Sam.
That said, Cressida — who was actually fixed up with Harry by his cousin Princess Eugenie — certainly fits the profile of the leggy identikit blondes to which Harry is drawn.
She also comes from a family with more than their fair share of the sort of scandals, affairs, multiple marriages, messy court cases and, of course, profligate spending that is seen as a badge of honour in the aristocratic circles in which both she and 27-year-old Harry move.
Her former model mother Lady Mary-Gaye, a scion of the vastly rich Curzon banking family, has five children by three of her four husbands, all of whom she divorced.
MEANWHILE, Cressida’s father, Old Harrovian Jeffrey Bonas, was once accused of being ‘unreliable’ by a judge in a court case over the £1.2 million he paid his first wife in the divorce brought on by his adulterous affair with Cressida’s mother.
Even so, 68-year-old former Oxford boxing blue Bonas is, like most of the rest of Cressida’s extended clan, utterly charming, personable and congenitally unruffled.
This weekend, for example, he was not getting over- excited by his daughter’s nascent relationship with the Prince, which he only found out about from reading the papers.
‘Us fathers are, of course, always the last to know,’ he sighed good-naturedly to me before getting back to watching The Open golf on television at his imposing Norfolk home.
Likewise, those who know her well are united in proclaiming Cressida as a thoroughly good egg.
Like Harry’s ex Chelsy Davy, she went to study at Leeds University after boarding at £30,000-ayear Stowe School in Buckingham. While at university she garnered rave reviews for her role as Desdemona in Othello which, her father proudly father tells me, later transferred to the Edinburgh Festival.
And there is something vaguely Shakespearean about the highly complicated romantic machinations of Cressida’s parents who have six marriages between them.
She is the only child of their five-year union which ended in divorce in 1994. Prior to that Lady Mary-Gaye, who is known simply as MG in her social circle, was married twice before.
Her first marriage, in 1971, was to the late Esmond Cooper-Key, son of the then Tory MP for Hastings. They had a daughter, Pandora, now 38.
Less than a year after their divorce in 1976, she wed wealthy property magnate John AnstrutherGough-Calthorpe, with whom she had three children: Georgiana, now 33, Isabella, 32, and polo-playing son Jacobi, 29, who is a close friend of Prince William.
She then began an affair with Cressida’s entrepreneur father while he was still married to first wife Elspeth. During the subsequent costly divorce, Bonas became embroiled in a legal battle with his solicitors over a £350,000 loan he took to help pay Elspeth off.
But in the 2003 court case that followed, the
judge questioned his integrity and accused Bonas of hiding his wealth in offshore Isle of Man accounts.
Following her own divorce from Bonas, Lady MG, who is the daughter of the late motor-racing aristocrat Earl Howe, then took up with financier Christopher Shaw, moving in with him while still officially married to Cressida’s father.
Cressida, like the rest of MaryGaye’s children has had to become used to their mother’s bohemian love life that has, on occasion, involved just the sort of louche behaviour that would be frowned upon in any social grouping other than that of the seriously rich and well-bred.
For a time, the young Cressida was given the run of Hinton Ampner, the National Trust-owned stately home in Hampshire of which her mother was chatelaine following her fourth marriage in 1996 to multi-millionaire Shaw, who owned the lease on the sprawling country pile with views over the South Downs.
It was a decidedly mismatched union, however, the gracefully beautiful Lady Mary-Gaye and the bespectacled Shaw, an aging Old Etonian and former Grenadier Guards officer, who bore an uncanny likeness to Dad’s Army actor Arthur Lowe.
While Cressida, who was only five when her parents separated, was left in the care of nannies, the high-living Lady Mary-Gaye and Shaw would think nothing of jetting to South Africa for a day to attend the wedding of a friend. Or Cressida would be expected to tag along to parties at their favourite haunt, Claridge’s, where, in the late Nineties, Shaw threw a lavish Venetian-themed party for MG featuring men on stilts, a performing dwarf and a guest list of 350 that included the Earl of Lichfield.
That marriage broke down, too, in 2000 when the gallivanting Shaw traded Cressida’s mother in for 40- year- old Eliza Dugdale, the daughter of a former aide-de-camp of the Duke of Windsor.
SUCH marital hiccups did not, however, dampen MG’s joie de vivre. Friends say the young Cressida spent summers in St Tropez where her headturning mother would regularly be found with a gaggle of her children lunching at the exclusive Club 55.
Elsewhere in the social calendar, she would never let Royal Ascot pass without having her staff pitch a marquee-size tent on Number One car park of the racecourse, fitted with a mobile kitchen from where her cook and butler would serve lunch to guests on tables laid with silver cutlery and decorated with fresh peonies.
In her day Mary- Gaye, 65, so bedazzled London that a bluecoloured cocktail — to match her blue-blooded credentials — called The Curzon was invented at Claridge’s in her honour. At the height of the Swinging Sixties, she appeared seminaked and covered in engine oil — a nod to her father’s er’s motor racing past — in the bestselling, if appallingly-titled, coffee table book Birds Of Britain, which also featured ured the likes of Sarah Miles, Julie Christie and Lulu.
To borrow from the same ame rather outmoded parlance ce of the day, it seems the endlessly leggy MG was what might have been described at the time as a bit of a ‘goer’.
‘She was absolutely great fun and loved a party,’ Sixties fashion photographer John D Green told me this weekend from a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean.
‘I mean, there aren’t many girls who would let you smother them in used engine oil, but she was very up for it,’ he added. ‘We shot the pictures in my studio in London and made it look like she was topless and holding her hands up to her face.
‘Mary-Gaye was a celebrity model of the time and an It girl. She was terrific and great to work with, a complete natural.’
For her part, Cressida is, like her mother before her, said by friends to be extraordinarily nice, if a little bit on the wild side.
This weekend she was due to head off partying to a music festival, though she has found time, according to pals, to stay in flirty contact with Harry on her mobile while publicly playing it cool over their budding romance.
As part of Harry’s wider set, she is more than aware that he has a wandering eye when it comes to posh party-girls of her ilk.
He has recently been seen in the company of another high society blonde Lady Melissa ‘Missy’ Percy whom he was photographed chatting up on the stairwell of a West London nightclub a couple of months ago.
He has also been on dates with socialite Astrid Harbord and last summer had a fling with another Old Stoic, Florence Brudenell-Bruce, yet another interchangeable, fresh-faced blonde with an aristocratic heritage.
They are all members of the socalled BBB Crew — Blue-Bloods And Blonde — that includes actress Gabriella Anstruther- GoughCalthorpe, known as Bumpy, who is Cressida’s best friend and a member of her extended family. Harry also carries a candle for Bumpy.
But friends of the Prince say all his recent flirtations have been ‘ rebound’ flings because he has still not got over his one longterm te relationship with 26-year- 26-year-old old Miss Davy who ended their tops topsy- turvy attachment apparently once and for all last year when she got cold feet about being a royal bride after attending William and Kate’s wedding.
Indeed, Harry was talking specifically about Zimbabweanborn Chelsy when he moaned in an American television interview earlier this year that he was keen to settle down, but girls were put off by his title.
In the meantime, Chelsy has recently been seen in deep conversation with the amiable, if balding, nightclub owner Carlo Carello who has a taste for wearing bright red trousers.
No doubt, by being seen out on the town with the likes of Miss Bonas, Harry — who is taking a break from pre- deployment training as an Apache helicopter pilot and gunner and is hoping to be posted to Afghanistan later this year — will be hoping to catch Chelsy’s eye.
In the meantime, he is clearly up for a good time with the lovely, if predictably blonde, Cressida.