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She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art.
Some say she was the Bolter of Nancy Mitfords novel The Pursuit of Love. She played Iris Storm in Michael Arlens celebrated novel about fashionable Londons lost generation, The Green Hat, and Greta Garbo played her in A Woman of Affairs, the movie made from Arlens book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; she was the model for Molyneauxs slinky wraparound dresses that became the look fo the agethe Jazz Age.
Though not conventionally beautiful (she had a shot-away chin), Idina Sackville dazzled men and women alike, and made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in lovefive husbands in all and lovers without number.
Hers was the age of bolters, and Idina was the most celebrated of them all.
Her father was the eighth Earl De La Warr. In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, hers was as old as a British family could be (eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy and been given enough land to live on forever . . . another ancestor, Lord De La Warr, rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, became governor of Virginia, and gave his name to the state of Delaware). Her mothers money came from trade; Idinas maternal grandfather had employed more men (85,000) than the British army and built one third of the worlds railroads.
Idinas first husband was a dazzling cavalry officer, one of the youngest, richest, and best-looking of the available bachelors, with two million in cash. They had a seven-story pied--terre on Connaught Place overlooking Marble Arch and Hyde Park, as well as three estates in Scotland. Idina had everything in place for a magnificent life, until the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the newlyweds worldthe world theyd assumed would last foreverto collapse in less than a year.
Like Mitfords Bolter, young Idina Sackville left her husband and children. But in truth it was her husband who wrecked their marriage, making Idina more a boltee than a bolter. Soon she found a lover of her ownthe first of manyand plunged into a Jazz Age haze of morphine. She became a full-blown flapper, driving about London in her Hispano-Suiza, and pusing the boundaries of behavior to the breaking point. British society amy have adored eccentrics whose differences celebrated the values they cherished, but it did not embrace those who upset the order of things. And in 1918, just after the Armistice was signed, Idina Sackville bolted from her life in England and, setting out with her second husband, headed for Mombasa, in search of new adventure.
Frances Osborne deftly tells the tale of her great-grandmother using Idinas never-before-seen letters; the diaries of Idinas first husband, Euan Wallace; and stories from family members. Osborne follows Idina from the champagne breakfasts and th dansants of lost-generation England to the foothills of Kenyas Aberdare moutnains and the wild abandon of her role in Kenyas disintegration postwar upper-class life. A parade of lovers, a murdered husband, chaos everywhereas her madcap world of excess darkened and crumbled around her.