He was a photographer and his death and his part in the Chelsea Set was very well covered in the press.It was Mary who was extraordinary and what she started at Bazaar. The one big scandal was the suicide of Tony Beauchamp who'd been married to Churchill's daughter, Sarah. Titles and aristocratic families seemed to matter more back then. I do remember everyone getting very excited one night because there was a rumour that the Duke of Kent was coming to the party we were at. And of course Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who later married Princess Margaret, was around.I don't remember it being extraordinary or scandalous, though. So Sharmani was "the Sinhalese model", Suna Portman "the niece of Lord Portman", Mark Sykes "her fiance", Antonia Fraser "the daughter of Lord Pakenham" (as her father, later Lord Longford, was known then) and Lady Jane Vane-Tempest-Stewart, "a maid-of-honour at the Coronation".There was undoubtedly an element of snobbery about it all.
I'd already been married at 16, had a child and divorced by 18.Michael was at the heart of the Chelsea Set in more than one way. He had a secret deal with Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard. He got a £500 retainer for supplying gossip from the parties that would appear in the "London Last Night" column which vied with William Hickey in the Express to detail our every move - and plenty of imagined ones. It was disgraceful now when I think about it.The same old names would appear in all those reports and they always had a way of describing people.
He was a writer - the nephew of Earl Alexander of Tunis is how the papers described him, though in truth he was only a distant relative He was very glamorous He'd been in Colditz and was 41 I was just 19 and potty about him. For most of us it was just great to break out of our backgrounds and have a good time.I used to spend whatever I had earned modelling on food for Michael and his friends These were the days before women's lib We lived in a flat in Harrington Gardens. And anyway I believe that it was the wartime generation who had changed the old moral standards I don't think our behaviour was terribly rebellious. We may have seemed terribly promiscuous to the papers, but our liberation paled into insignificance in comparison to what came along in the 1960s. There was a lot of hanging about and going to parties, looking for someone to pick up if you hadn't gone there with someone. You didn't take a bottle, although I do remember that on one occasion Sonia and the publisher George Weidenfeld had a party where we were all told to bring either champagne or brandy.We were younger and although a few people did have titles we were a much more ramshackle bunch of free spirits Some didn't have to work They had private incomes.