By Philip Eade
AUTHOR OF EVELYN WAUGH: A LIFE REVISITED
LAST WEEK we revealed how Brideshead Revisited, one of Britain’s best-loved novels and most famous TV adaptations, was inspired by the riotous real life of author Evelyn Waugh – including a homosexual romance with a fellow Oxford student.
Today, on the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death, our second and final extract from this definitive new biography lifts the lid on the atrociously behaved, sex-soaked world of ‘bright young things’ at the heart of many of his novels – including his doomed, yet hilarious obsession with a glamorous young woman called Baby...
IT WAS soon after Evelyn Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn Gardner, left him for another man in 1929, a little over a year after they had married, that he began to fall for one of the great loves of his life. Known as ‘Baby’, Teresa Jungman was the younger daughter of prominent London hostess Beatrix Guinness, who was referred to as ‘Gloomy’ – not so much for her curious habit of closing the curtains during lunch parties as for her deep voice and doom-laden conversation. She was once overheard demanding of a startled milliner’s assistant: ‘I want a hat for a middle-aged woman whose husband hates her.’ Her house at 19 Great Cumberland Place was a hub of fashionable society, where politicians mixed with writers and artists such as Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton.
Baby and her elder sister Zita were from Gloomy’s first marriage to Nico Jungman, an impoverished Dutch-born artist whom she abandoned while he was interned for four years in a German PoW camp. She then fell in love with the far wealthier Dick Guinness, scion of the banking branch of that family.
The sisters’ striking beauty and spirited attitude to life soon rendered them among the most dazzling of the ‘Bright Young People’, the well-connected partygoers satirised by Evelyn in Vile Bodies.
With their equally high-spirited friends Eleanor Smith and Enid Raphael (who once quipped ‘I don’t know why they call them private parts – mine aren’t private’), they initiated the nocturnal treasure hunts and masquerades that came to define high society in the late 1920s.
Beside her pale beauty, Baby was renowned for her pranks, one of which was to borrow her mother’s Rolls-Royce and mink coat and go about pretending to be a widowed Russian émigrée who had been forced to sell her jewels to educate her ‘poor leedle boy’.
In the same guise, she attended a party and approached an old general gushing about how she would never forget the night they had spent together in Paris during the war. The general, who was with his wife, coldly replied that he had only spent one night in Paris during the war. ‘Zat was zee night,’ said Baby, before melting away into the crowd.
Exactly how or when Evelyn first met Baby is unclear, although when he died his prayer book was found to contain a pressed orchid and fern next to which he had written ‘19 January 1930’ – thought by some to be the date in question. Baby would have been 22, and Evelyn 26.
The first mention of Baby in his diary is on May 26, 1930, when they dined at The Savoy with Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford.
The following week she accepted an invitation to a lunch party Evelyn was giving but at the last minute told him via a friend that she would not be able to come after all.
THIS provoked a rant by Evelyn in the Daily Mail the following week – headlined ‘Such Bad Manners!’ – against ‘incompetent young women who just do not know how to organise their affairs’.
Gloomy later told Evelyn that Baby was in tears after their ‘tiff’, and when he went to lunch at their house in July, he ‘sat at a side table with Baby who was sweet’.
Subsequent encounters were rarely more encouraging than this but they seemed to do nothing to diminish Evelyn’s ardour.
A consummate if perhaps unintentional heartbreaker, for the next few years Baby neither surrendered to his advances nor discouraged him from making them. She told him she enjoyed his being in love with her ‘too much not to encourage it as much as I can in a subconscious way’ and that ‘if you weren’t married you see it would be different because I might or I might not want to marry you…’
For Evelyn, who referred to Baby as ‘the Dutch girl’, the word ‘Dutch’ came to denote anyone or anything problematic or unco-operative.
He was presumably aware that Frank Pakenham had been as besotted as he was with Baby. Consequently, self-interest might have been a factor when, after dinner one evening at Frank’s family home, Evelyn took it upon himself to whisper to a beautiful girl his friend had invited to stay: ‘Go after Frank. Go up with him. Follow him. Go on.’
Elizabeth Harman obediently followed Frank up into his bedroom, where, as she recalled, ‘we conducted an ardent but chaste and anxious conversation about ourselves far into the night’. Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘Frank and Harman slept together on Frank’s last evening but did not f***.’
Evelyn’s passion for Baby did not prevent him from pursuing other diversions. In the summer of 1931, he took a 33-year-old divorcee called Pixie Marix to the French Riviera. Pixie was reputed to enjoy ‘brinking’ – leading men on but stopping short of sleeping with them.
Evelyn grew frustrated with this and complained to a friend: ‘That girl has made a fool of me and taken all my money… I could drown her with pleasure.’
Eventually, Pixie realised that unless she gave him what he wanted she would have to make her own way home, so she decided to let him have ‘so much of it he would wish he had not brought the matter up’.
At night she kept him busy until two or three in the morning, and at dawn she would ‘bound into his room, eager and voracious’.
Baby was far less accommodating. In a 1931 letter, Evelyn suggested she saw him ‘simply as a pair of trousers for your mother’s parties’.
In February 1932, he told her that he had ‘thought of you this morning and yesterday and in fact every day since I left London’ and that he was ‘sorry that I am so consistently tiresome with you’.
Travel seemed to offer Evelyn the best means of distraction from his lovesickness, and after pondering a variety of far-flung destinations – Moscow, Borneo, Peking – he finally settled on the Amazon jungle.
When he sent Baby a copy of Black Mischief in late September ‘simply to show you that I was still thinking of you’, he breezily added that he was ‘off to British Guiana [now Guyana] quite soon’.
He took Baby out for dinner at Quaglino’s (caviar, cold partridge, marrow on toast) the night before his trip to the Amazon, and the next morning attended Mass followed by breakfast over which she presented him with a medal of St Christopher,