world was discovering quite what advertising could really do. Right through the 1950s, there had been a sense in many quarters that it was enough to say ‘Use this! It’s Good!’ And that would do the trick, launching the product on a grateful public, until the moment, and it was in my teens, that the world of marketing would change forever and begin its remorseless campaign to take over civilisation. Jeff Vitkov spotted this coming era sooner than most. He was a simple, unpretentious soul, brilliant in his way but not, or so we thought, complicated in his wishes or his needs, the last man on earth to wish to climb the social ladder. Even after the move to New York he continued to regard Cincinnati as his home and he would possibly have left the family based there, flying back on the weekends, enjoying vacations in some modest but comfortable resort hotel, if his wife, Verena, had not made the unwelcome discovery that even the vertiginous improvement in their finances had not brought the social recognition she craved and, reasonably enough, felt entitled to. There is a fantasy one often hears voiced in England that America is classless, which, as any traveller will know, is arrant nonsense and never more so than in the provincial towns, whose social arrangements can be impressively resistant to the ambitious newcomer. Someone remarked, not all that long ago, that it would be easier to gain entree to the King’s chamber at Versailles than to break into the inner gang of Charleston, and much the same could be said in all the cities of the true, US Gratin.
This was always so. One of the main reasons for the great invasion by American heiresses in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called Buccaneers, was that many of the daughters of those newly rich papas grew tired of having doors shut in their faces back home in Cleveland or St Louis or Detroit, and preferred instead to enjoy the deep and genuine warmth with which the well-born English have always welcomed money. It is hard to deny that the careers of girls like Virginia Bonynge, Viscountess Deerhurst, who began life as the daughter of a convicted murderer from the Middle West, would seem to confirm that things were much easier this side of the pond. Needless to say, this would often lead to sweet revenge, as the mothers of the Duchess of Manchester or the Countess of Rosslyn or Lady Randolph Churchill, or many, many others would sweep home in triumph to the place where they’d been snubbed, to rub their sisters’ noses in it. I suspected at the time that this thinking, or something like it, was behind the plan, forming in Verena Vitkov’s mind towards the end of 1967, to put her daughter through a London Season.
There were options open to mothers, in those days, to defray some of the expense if necessary. Things were already less abundant than they had been before the war, when there were three or four balls in London every night. Until the end of presentation there were half a dozen each week; by my time there were two or three; and fifteen years later it was down to less than ten in the whole Season. Even in ’68, some girls gave only cocktail parties and no dance, others would throw both but share the ball, and there was no shame in this. Serena Gresham shared her coming-out ball with her cousin, Candida Finch, although this was of course because Lady Claremont was funding them both. But from the start, Terry Vitkov was anxious to cover every base and I have no doubt she was more than encouraged in this by her mother, the unsinkable Verena. In the event the drinks party, held early in the proceedings before they’d quite found their feet, was a standard affair at the Goring, but for the ball they were determined to make the evening memorable. This they undoubtedly achieved if not quite in the way they had intended, but that comes later and, to be fair, it was an original location. Mrs Jeffrey Vitkov, so ran the invitation, would be At Home, ‘for Terry,’ on such and such a night at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks in the Euston Road.
I do not know if you can still hire the waxworks for a private party. Not just a room, or a special chamber set aside for ‘entertaining,’ but the whole edifice and all it holds. I doubt it, or if you can, I imagine the price would be prohibitive to all save the super-rich, but forty years ago you could. There was less danger in it for them, of course, than there would be today. Apart from any other reason we were a more law-abiding lot. We took more care. Crime, as it might touch the middle and upper classes, was rare. People may groan when they hear that houses in the country were not locked, but they weren’t. Not if one had just gone shopping. In central London we walked home alone at night without a qualm. Shoplifting was not considered cool by anyone. It was just stealing. I don’t think mugging was sufficiently common even to qualify for a special name. And again, as I said, we were much less drunk. This did not mean, of course, that every party went without mishap.
I dined very well on the night of Terry’s ball because my hosts for the dinner beforehand, had forgotten all about it. I turned up at the door of a rather smart house in Montpelier Square, joined on the step as I waited for the occupants to respond to my ring of the bell by Lucy Dalton and a man I hardly knew, who later became the head of Schroder’s, or some such spangled operation, although you couldn’t have told his future held such promise then. The three of us stood, shifting our weight from foot to foot, until the door was at last opened by Mrs Northbrook (for that was her name), who stood there in jeans and a jersey, with a gin and tonic in her other hand. At the sight of us the blood drained from her face and we were greeted with the telling words, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s not tonight!’ The result of this was that Mr Northbrook was summoned with a scream and had to book a table for ten at an excellent place just across from Harrods, in that funny little triangle which I think used to have a grass bit in front of it, or have I made that up? As we waited, we all sat in their pretty, untidy and unready drawing room, swilling down some rather good Pouilly Fume, which Laura Northbrook (we had moved on since the doorstep moment) had providentially found in the fridge before she joined her husband upstairs to struggle into their clothes. After such a welcome they could hardly stint with these frightful strangers wished upon them and the result was one of the best dinners I had eaten all year.
Our group was therefore in a jolly and convivial mood when we arrived at the famous entrance at about eleven that night. I suppose there must have been bouncers or someone similar to admit us, but, as I’ve already said, I have no solid memory of cards to be taken, or lists to be ticked off. The main party space had been arranged in what was then, and maybe is now, known as the Hall of Kings. The wax images of England’s Royalty had been moved back into a circle round the dance floor, cleared at the centre, but the figures were still sufficiently spaced apart for us to be able to stroll among them and photographs would later appear in the press – though not in the Tatler, which had originally been the plan – of debs and their escorts apparently standing next to Henry VIII or Queen Caroline of Anspach. I was myself snapped with a girl I knew from my Hampshire years after my father’s retirement from the diplomatic. It never, mercifully, appeared in print, but for some reason now forgotten I still have a copy of the picture. We look as if we’re talking to a startled and offended Princess Margaret.
As we know, every waxwork ever made appears to be either under sedation, or recently arrested for criminal assault and in this respect almost uniquely, the last four decades have seen little change. Except perhaps in their subject matter. We certainly all knew far more history then, that is the whole nation did, not just the privileged, the educational establishment having not yet broken the link between teaching and the imparting of knowledge; so figures like Wellington and Disraeli and Gordon of Khartoum still had a resonance that spread far beyond the elite, the only group today who might have heard of them. Nor, when it came to waxworks, was there the modern, pusillanimous terror of causing offence and I can bear witness that the Chamber of Horrors in those days was really horrible. That night it had been set aside for a discotheque, and when Lucy and I went downstairs to explore it was quite clear the authorities were a long way from worrying about whether or not someone might get hit by a falling basket of nasturtiums or a stray conker.
There were stone pillars dividing the space and at the top of each, on a little ledge, was a severed head, disfigured with some hideous atrocity. Eyes hung out of sockets, flaps of skin revealed whitened bone, one even had an iron bar thrust right through it, causing the face to look very surprised, as well it might. A long glass case held miniature examples of every torture known to man, some quite new to me, and we walked slowly down it, wondering at human cruelty. Then there were the serial killers, although I don’t believe that term was yet in use, but we certainly had them, if by some other title. George Smith, who drowned several unfortunate brides, presided over a bathtub which, we were told, was the actual one in which he had perpetrated his crimes, Dr Hawley Crippen was there and John Haig, who had met his chief victim in the Onslow Court Hotel, which I knew well since it was just down the street from where my grandmother used to live. Haig selected Mrs Durand-Deacon from among the diners in the restaurant and worked his way into her affections before he took her off to the country somewhere and plunged her into a vat of acid. Lucy and I stood, silenced by the sight of these drab and ordinary men who had caused such untold misery. Today these displays tend to have a comic, even camp, element to them which
