Ah, the 107th anniversary of the birth of Barbara Skelton, a woman you may not have heard of, but who wrote two novels, a volume of short stories, and two magnificently indiscreet memoirs
As a child, apparently, she once threw a tantrum in the street so violent that the police had to be involved, and was beaten at the Catholic boarding school she was first sent to at the age of 4 for “precocious sexuality”.
At her next school, she played truant to visit the cinema, started wearing make-up, and was expelled when the nuns found love letters in her desk from someone called Fred. They were fake. She’d written them to herself.
In WWII, she worked for the Foreign Office in Cairo, where she met King Farouk — he was throwing bread balls at people in a nightclub at the time. She described him as “a huge sawdust teddy bear badly sewn at the joints”, and they had a seven-month affair.
In 1950, she married the love of her life, Cyril Connolly, but they fought incessantly, and she said he lay in the bath for hours on end muttering “Poor Cyril” to himself, so she took up with George Weidenfeld, who was, at the time, publisher of both of them.
Connolly discovered this when he went to said publisher’s house one day and caught them at it. It was difficult to get a divorce in 1956, but evidence of her adultery with Weidenfeld swung it. She then married Weidenfeld.
When she divorced Weidenfeld in 1961, this one went through because she provided evidence of her adultery — with Cyril Connolly. She also had affairs with Charles Addams and Kenneth Tynan, among others.
(Apparently, it was her to whom Tynan addressed the words “Sex means smack and beautiful means bottom and always will”, and who was probably thinking those exact words when this photo was taken — and, indeed, when every other photo of him in existence was taken)
Anthony Powell turned her into ‘femme fatale’ Pamela Flitton in A Dance to the Music of Time, so she wrote to him:
Dear Tony, I am suing naturally, in the meantime can you advise me a good publisher for my new novel?
Damn it, I’m going to have to buy this book, aren’t I?
