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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The death of an intellectual bon vivant draws fans, friends and Tony Blair, who is unafraid to mingle or pick up a lady's purse.
Jan 16, 2003 | Roy Jenkins' death at the age of 82 took me to Oxfordshire last week for his funeral. In London, he had been a friend of my husband, Harold Evans, for 30 years. When Harry was president of Random House in New York he was delighted to publish Roy in America and we used to see him whenever he hit town, which was often. I became immensely fond of him myself.
Roy was the last of a species, the great statesman, who was also the urbane man of letters and bon vivant. He was altogether a civilizing force. As home secretary, he ended the "ghastly apparatus of the gallows," removed flogging as a criminal penalty, abolished the absurdity of official censorship of the live theater, decriminalized homosexual conduct and humanized the laws on abortion. On top of that he wrote 18 excellent books of biography and history. The day he suddenly died his last book, "Churchill," was No. 1 on the paperback list in England.
Roy adored New York. It revved up his prodigious social energy. He always stayed at the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue, where he considered the bacon superior to anything in England. He swam like a shiny, bespectacled porpoise through the New York social scene. In a world of teleprompters and speechwriters, his brand of lapidary wit -- aided only by a few tiny scrawls on the back of the menu card -- is a vanished art form. He blew everyone away at John Kenneth Galbraith's 80th birthday party in 1988, an occasion not short on eloquence from his American peers. His closest New York buddy was the Camelot historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whom he had known for 50 years. Whenever they were round the same table it was a dazzling tour d'horizon of presidential and prime-ministerial foibles. He and his wife, Jennifer, would race between dinners at the Schlesinger's (last time with Bill and Hillary Clinton), lunches with Irwin Ross (whose book on Truman Roy deemed with his usual scrupulousness "far better than my own"), parties hosted for him by the Grande Dame Jane Wrightsman, or at one of the Tree-houses, as he liked to call the residences of saloniste Marietta Tree (until her death in 1993). Alluring, public, spirited Democrats like Marietta and that other creamy vintage rose Leslie Bonham Carter (the daughter no less of Condé Nast and aunt of Helena), were very much Roy's "type."
The last time I saw him was in May in his official capacity as chancellor of Oxford University. We both were due to speak at the 50th-anniversary celebrations at my old college, St Anne's. The day before the dinner I joined one of the Jenkins' regular weekend lunch parties at their East Hendred cottage.
This was always Roy's best setting, with no whiff of lord chancellor grandeur. It was like turning up for a tutorial at a professor's house and finding in the small garden a convivial little band of living legends, mixed with younger critics, historians and novelists he collected, and the invariable visiting American enjoying a pre-lunch martini.
On this occasion the conversation veered between genial geopolitics with Robert McNamara to deliciously vinegary gossip with Winston Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames. At lunch, Lady Soames recounted how some grand mutual friend had behaved at the British Embassy in Paris in the '70s when the waiter emptied a gravy boat down her back. "She really, really took it well," said Mary. "She just withdrew and changed into another splendid dress."
"Spilt gravy is always an excellent character test," said Roy, rubbing his hands and looking around the table with that richly amused gleam. "I am glad to hear she came shining through."
