Tears Before Bedtime

Obituaries are usually kind but this is the best The Independent could muster when Barbara Skelton died in 1996: “selfish, sulky, socially unmanageable, agreeable only when she was in the mood – the victim of the incurable boredom which fostered her promiscuity and her notorious rudeness”.

But men found her irresistible; many, many men.

“Pamela Flitton, a heartless beauty who drives men crazy with desire, is so clearly modelled on Barbara Skelton (or Helter-Skelter, as she was sometimes known)—a moody and temperamental wife of both Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, as well as the girlfriend of Egypt’s King Farouk, among many others—that Skelton immediately recognized herself, and jokingly threatened to sue.” (Charles McGrath, reviewing A Dance to the Music of Time in The New Yorker)

Tears Before Bedtime, the first volume of her autobiography, is a chance for her to present the case for the defence. It is remarkably candid but gives no clue to her feelings leading me to suppose she had none – at least for the men who courted her. She is dispassionate in her emotionless account of her extraordinary life. Her love of food and cooking is a major theme, leading me to suppose she preferred Dublin Bay prawns to sex. She may have a point. In the 1950s she lives with Cyril Connolly in a four room cottage near Ashford in Kent and somehow creates rather delicious meals, though there is no electricity. Inadvertently she was an early adopter of going off-grid. When they visit rich friends with staff she is usually critical of the cooking. Connolly on being given foie gras, notices too: “for only an extra ten shillings we could have had caviare”.

I cannot say that TBB made me like Skelton but I did enjoy her account of a rackety life and have ordered the next volume.