Louche Lord who unleashed Lolita
Four wives – and a mistress who wriggled naked through his kitchen hatch. The very colourful life of Lord Weidenfeld, who fled the Nazis to be Britain’s most daring publisher
THE party at the Ritz in the winter of 1959 was the talk of London, for it was to mark the publication of the most controversial novel of the age. There were genuine fears that George Weidenfeld, the publisher of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, with its notorious theme of a predatory man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl, might be prosecuted.
Weidenfeld played up to those fears with a chutzpah typical of his brilliance. As the great and the good filed into the party, he gave them all to understand that, for fear of the book being impounded by the police, he had printed just one copy. His guests passed this solitary book displayed in the hotel, awestruck by his boldness.
In fact, he had heard that morning from the Director of Public Prosecutions that there would be no prosecution. Yet the stunt meant all of Britain was soon gossiping about the book, and agog to read what was, as well as being an unsavoury tale, a great literary masterpiece.
The presses rolled and the cash tills at Weidenfeld & Nicolson — the publishing company he founded with Tory MP Nigel Nicolson — rang like church bells.
Weidenfeld, who died yesterday aged 96, was a giant on Britain’s publishing and cultural scene for over 60 years, after arriving here as a young Jewish refugee.
A charming and ruthless networker who befriended a pope, presidents, prime ministers and countless celebrities — as well as any number of beautiful women — it was said he could persuade anyone to write for him.
One of his first titles, New Deal For Coal, was by a little-known civil servant called J. Harold Wilson. Wilson was paid a £50 advance, and the book became a surprise success, gaining him notoriety which kick-started his political career.
The book created a bond between Wilson and Weidenfeld that gave the latter access to the highest reaches of Labour governments, eventually leading to his peerage.
He was included in Wilson’s resignation honours list in 1976, having been knighted seven years earlier.
Weidenfeld went on to publish the memoirs of U.S. president L.B. Johnson, Henry Kissinger and French leader Charles de Gaulle. He managed to secure a book from Pope John Paul II — he was obsessed by the papacy, and did as much as anyone in the mid-20th century to build bridges between Judaism and Catholicism, often staying at Castel Gandolfo, the Italian summer residence of the popes.
However, he was not just interested in celebrities. The works he published — fiction and non-fiction — reflected his intelligence and bookishness. It was his intellect and curiosity — as well as his love of women — that drove him.
Weidenfeld’s stupendous flat overlooking the Thames on the Chelsea Embankment was the scene of many a great dinner party.
Here, you would find yourself eating canapes and drinking champagne — he did not himself drink alcohol, but smoked cigars like cigarettes — with an astounding variety of people.
They would range from the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, to prisons campaigner Lord Longford and opera’s Placido Domingo; from the Papal Nuncio to pianist Alfred Brendel and Bianca Jagger.
The flat was adorned with pictures of naked women by Gustav Klimt — who came from Weidenfeld’s native Vienna — and portraits of popes. On one wall brooded perhaps the most magnificent of all Francis Bacon’s paintings of a pope, now worth many millions.
It was typical of George Weidenfeld that although everyone supposed the picture belonged to him, it in fact belonged to one of his many female admirers who, from time to time, tried in vain to get it back from him. He was an honest man, but he was also flashy and an unashamed womaniser who married four times.
In his own memoir, Remembering Old Friends, one typical introduction to a flirtation reads: ‘I always had a romantic predilection for beautiful ambassadresses, especially when they combined elegance with a political bent.’
In later years, he said he preferred the company of women, ‘without any necessarily erotic overtones. I like the way they think and behave.’
But he certainly enjoyed their sexuality when he was younger. Among his many conquests was the elegant writer and socialite Barbara Amiel, now married to the disgraced press baron Conrad Black.
It is said that while entertaining her in his bedroom, she wriggled naked at his request through the kitchen hatch to fetch him some biscuits. Weidenfeld was on an enforced diet and on doctor’s orders the kitchen door had been locked to keep him out of the fridge.
George Weidenfeld was born in Vienna in 1919, an only child. His boyhood was spent in the company of adults, reciting Ovid every evening and listening to Wagner. His father Max, an insurance agent, yearned to be a classics don.
At a student, as part of the university’s ‘duelling corps’ he took part in one of Europe’s last duels — a sword fight — with a Nazi student, emerging with cuts and bruises. ‘It was a draw,’ he remembered later. ‘I was small but he was much taller. But I was left-handed, so it was very awkward for him.’
He escaped Austria for Britain after the Nazis annexed his country in 1938 and was taken in by a family of Quakers close to Parliament Hill, North London: ‘They were not wealthy, but they were nice and they treated me like a child.’
When war broke out, the BBC advertised for foreign linguists and he applied. Then, thanks to a financial guarantee from his host family, he was able to secure visas for his mother and father, ‘so they saved my own life and my parents’ lives’, he said.
Initially, his father worked in London giving tutorials in Latin to boys who would otherwise have been too stupid to get into Eton or other private schools.
George used, rather mischievously, to enjoy remembering the identity of these gangling spotty youths who had come to the Weidenfelds’ modest flat to be crammed for the Common Entrance — some of whom would later be his esteemed colleagues in the London publishing scene or Cabinet ministers.
He never forgot his debt to the Quakers who rescued him and his parents. It was entirely typical of him that he spent so much time during his final years raising money for the persecuted Christians of Syria.
Yet he was also a fervent Zionist, and almost the only thing which would cause his permanent air of benign sociability to turn into cold anger was any whiff of hostility to the Jewish state.
Shortly after setting up his publishing firm with Nicolson, he took a year’s leave to work in Jerusalem for Israel’s first president Weizmann. He told me he had been very much tempted to stay, and make his life in Israel, but returned here to his publishing company.
His business sense enabled him to see the commercial possibilities of publishing material which non-Jewish publishers would have found untouchable.
One of the first great successes of his firm was the publication of the memoirs of Admiral Doenitz, the man who took over as Fuhrer when Hitler committed suicide. A stream of successes followed, including the Goebbels diaries as well as lesser Nazi best-sellers.
The qualities which made him so successful a businessman and publisher were immediately obvious to any who met him. His owlish face and bright brown eyes were alive with intelligence, and appeared to be taking in everything he saw.
His delight in a huge variety of human company was perfectly genuine.
Early on in London, he became friends with a group of English writers who were serial womanisers. For a while he shared a flat with the writer Peter Quennell and the greatest literary journalist in English history, Cyril Connolly.
One evening, Weidenfeld came into the flat and found his two friends sitting over a bottle of champagne before going out to meet their grand friends.
‘George,’ remarked Quennell, ‘did you notice anything as you came into the flat?’
‘There was a basket on the coconut matting,’ George replied.
‘Did you see what was in it?’ asked Cyril Connolly. ‘It was a baby,’ said Weidenfeld, a little tensely.
All three young men sat gloomily wondering who among them would be accused of wholly unwanted paternity. It was George who eventually brought the basket into the flat and they began going through the names of girls who might be the mother.
Luckily, only a few hours later, the real mother — who lived upstairs in another flat — came to reclaim the baby. It had not, in fact, been the child of
‘The moment the waiter left, our love affair began’ He fought in one of Europe’s last sword duels
Weidenfeld, Connolly, or Quennell; she had left it there, in a moment of despair, thinking they all seemed nice young men who would surely take pity on the child.
True — but she could scarcely have chosen three less domesticated human beings. Weidenfeld was incapable of boiling an egg or even of turning on a television without assistance (preferably female assistance).
His Jewishness and his success with women undoubtedly won him enemies. Once when he was staying in Tuscany, swimming in a friend’s pool, a neighbour — the wickedly mischievous Lord Lambton — telephoned the police to say that an ape had escaped from the local zoo. They came, equipped with nets and stun-guns, to find the hairy publisher rubbing himself dry with a towel.
All his wives were beautiful. The first, Jane Sieff, was a Marks & Spencer heiress, and they had a daughter, Laura. Jane left him in 1954, saying George’s work had come between them and that she couldn’t stand ‘another breakfast with Trevor-Roper’, a reference to the acclaimed historian who George published.
The second wife, who had previously been married to his chum Cyril Connolly, was the legendarily beautiful and famously vampish Barbara Skelton.
Weidenfeld published her first novel A Young Girl’s Touch and shortly thereafter her husband, Connolly, divorced her, citing Weidenfeld as the co-respondent. (The flavour of the marriage was well-conveyed in her memoir when she recalled asking Connolly, ‘What’s that on your face?’ ‘Hate,’ was the reply.)
Skelton wrote in her diary that she was obsessed with him sexually, especially with his fleshy, hirsute body. Weidenfeld recalls how, soon after they met, she invited him to breakfast at a hotel. He found her wearing a fur-lined jacket over pyjamas. She ordered tea and it was brought. ‘The moment the waiter left the room our love affair began,’ he wrote.
Yet the love — and marriage — did not last. Not long afterwards, she sloped back to Connolly, and Weidenfeld cited him as a co-respondent.
In her memoirs, Skelton was scathing about Weidenfeld, describing him as a magnetic but trivial man who had a chilling obsession with work and networking. ‘Gush, gush,’ she claimed he would whisper as she sulked at the head of a star-studded dining table. ‘You simply must be more gushing.’
Five years after their split in 1961, he married his third wife, Sandra Meyer, a divorcee and niece of the U.S. publishing tycoon ‘Jock’ Whitney. They were together for a decade.
But if wife number one represented the solid commerce of a nation of shop-keepers, wife number two upper-class bohemia at its most exotic, and wife number three the tying of two publishing empires, for wife number four in 1992 Weidenfeld chose the sometime mistress of Artur Rubinstein, one of the greatest concert pianists in history. Yet this final marriage, to Annabelle Whitestone, was perhaps a calmer experience, and based on a deep mutual affection. The days when he cavorted with naked mistresses had been replaced by quiet supper parties among friends — though the friends were likely to be of the grandest.
The union also revealed that other side to George’s nature, his unashamed love of opera, theatre and the other arts, and his sponsorship and encouragement of them whenever and wherever he was able.
Weidenfeld was working in his publishing company to the very end.
‘Age is like sexism,’ he said, ‘I never think about it.’
The world is a much duller place now that he is dead. He was not only an individual of enormous vitality and interest: he was a slice of European history.