Everybody has black sheep in the family, but Frances Osborne's great-grandmother was so scandalous she went through five husbands and inspired a Greta Garbo movie, writes Louise East.
IT'S 1982, AND Frances Osborne is 13. The monotony of Sunday morning is broken by the Sunday papers and a wonderfully salacious story of adultery and murder in 1930s Kenya. Frances decides she's old enough to read it, but her sister, a baby of 12, is not. Parents are called in to mediate.
"My mother blushed and my father grinned. He said, 'You have to tell them.'" The woman in the photographs was Osborne's great-grandmother, Idina Sackville, the woman at the heart of the deeply murky Happy Valley set. Five times married, five times divorced, Sackville cut a swathe through London society, going nowhere without a black pekinese called Satan tucked under her arm. She bedded anything with a pulse, started a trend for bathing in neat champagne and invited her husband's mistresses to stay.
"When I asked mum why she never told us about her, she said 'Because we didn't want you to think her a role model. It sounds so glamorous and it wasn't.'" Sitting in her publisher's office with a huge leather-bound photograph album propped in her lap, Frances Osborne appears to have ignored the warning.
Skipping through the pages, she points out key players from her great-grandmother's set, rather as though she's flicking through the latest copy of Heat magazine.
At 39, with big round eyes and the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl, Osbourne does not look old enough to be a mother of two and wife to Britain's shadow-chancellor, George Osborne. Long before publishing her first book, Lilla's Feast, in 2004 ("Embarrassingly, the story of another great-grandmother") she trained as a barrister, worked in the city and dabbled in financial journalism.
"I thought, well, I've tried everything else under the sun and still all I want to do is write books." Idina Sackville's story is an absolute cracker - just when you think it can't get any better, Tallulah Bankhead comes to stay or a sister marries the inspiration for James Bond's secret service agent, M.
Born in 1893 to a fabulously wealthy mother who was "trade" and an impoverished earl, who was most definitely not, Sackville was introduced to the perils of divorce early when her own parents shocked society by legally separating. Raised eyebrows ascended further still when Sackville's mother started to campaign for workers' rights and women's suffrage, all the while espousing the cause of the Theosophists, with their racy suggestion that a woman might enjoy good sexual relations within marriage.
Despite this unconventional upbringing, Sackville bagged a highly eligible match in the shape of cavalry officer, Euan Wallace, who was both handsome and rich, with three large estates and a million pounds to his name. On their marriage in 1913, the pair razed one of Wallace's country piles and drew up plans for a house with five wings and more than 65 rooms.
As it turned out, Sackville would never set eyes on the place. After a few heady months of partying, the first World War broke out, and Wallace was sent to France. Four years later, on the day peace was declared, Sackville wrote to her husband asking for a divorce.
It was a fateful decision. In the years to come, Sackville married and divorced four times more, scattering children as she went. With every match, she pushed herself further from polite society; even decades later, Frances's mother would be whisperingly described as "the Bolter's granddaughter" .
"It's funny. We look at Idina's life and assume that what she did wrong was have affairs, but back then, having the affairs wasn't wrong, it was the getting divorced and remarried. It was considered strangely unnecessary."
In truth, Sackville did not seem to care too much about what society thought, while society appeared deeply fascinated by Sackville. Despite not being a conventional beauty, she was painted by William Orpen, photographed by Cecil Beaton, and designers Lanvin and Molyneux sent her the best of their collections from Paris. When a novel based on her life was turned into a film, A Woman of Affairs, Greta Garbo took the leading role.
Husband number two took her to Kenya, and she lived there on and off for the next 30 years, eventually building a very beautiful thatched house called Clouds with husband number three, Joss Hay, Earl of Errol. It was Joss's murder, allegedly at the hand of a jealous husband, which formed the basis of the 1982 book, White Mischief, later a film starring Greta Scaachi and a lot of white linen.
In Africa, hedonism reigned. Sackville designed a house with a secret staircase leading from her bedroom to the smoking room downstairs. Guests turning up to a house party at Clouds were issued with a pair of pyjamas and a bottle of whiskey. Who they would be sleeping with that night was decided by Sackville, obeying the whims of a white feather blown across a bed sheet.
When her great-granddaughter returned to the Happy Valley to research her life, more than 60 years later, Sackville's exploits were still considered so incendiary and debauched that several white Kenyan's refused to talk to Osborne, or would only do so anonymously. "The 1920s and 1930s was the age of bolters, but she was the worst and wickedest of the lot." Osborne admits that when she started her research, she too was shocked by Sackville's behaviour.
"If your great-grandmother has reportedly done something terrible, you want to know. I suppose I did partly think, well if she has done something shocking, might I be capable of doing it too?" Fuelling her appalled curiosity was not Sackville's racy reputation but the fact that when she left her first marriage, she also left her two sons, aged four and three. David Wallace, Osborne's grandfather, would not see his mother again until he was 19 years old when she invited him to meet her in Claridge's Hotel. He had to ask a family friend what her name was.
"My mother always thought of her as a bad person. She ran off. She left her children, whereas Euan Wallace was saintly and perfect in every way. But when I read his diaries closely, it became clear that things weren't like that."
These diaries, which Osborne's mother kept sequestered in a tin box in the attic, have never been published, yet they go a long way towards explaining why Sackville felt she had no choice but to bolt. In staccato, emotionless notes, Euan Wallace details how, newly married and home on leave from the trenches, he chose to skip from party to party in the company of Sackville's younger sister's friend, Barbie Lutyens, beautiful daughter of renowned architect Edwin Lutyens.
"The key thing is, Euan wasn't just having affairs on the side, which was perfectly acceptable in Edwardian society. He was openly careering around town with Barbie. I spent two decades thinking Idina was the bad woman, whereas in fact she went to the seaside with the children for a month and waited in vain for him to join them. It was such an extraordinary reversal of the family legend."
It was, however, Sackville's decision to leave the marriage. By 1918, she had already started an affair with husband number two, who had promised to take the eternally restless Sackville to Africa. That meant leaving her children.
"Do I think she was bad? No, but I think she was foolish, and I think she was headstrong. If you're 25 and you're in love and you feel humiliated, you go stalking off to reclaim your pride," says Osborne, pointing out that her great-grandmother died, of cancer at the age of 62, with a photograph of Euan Wallace by her bed.
"I haven't had five husbands, but I've had five careers. When I was 25, I finished my pupillage as my barrister and didn't get taken on. I walked straight into a head hunter and ended up as a corporate financier by the end of the week. That was my Idina bolt. You do think at the age of 25 that you can completely reinvent your life and start again." What started out as an intriguing project has become, for Osborne and her family, something much more.
"Twenty-five years ago, the family wouldn't have been happy about me writing this book. Now, they're thrilled. My mother said it was like having her life pieced back together from the scraps she'd been handed. " For Osborne herself, researching and writing the book has clearly been something of a rite of passage.
"Part of growing older is realising that there isn't bad and good, it's all shades of grey. In the last four years, I've gone from mid-30s to 39. I've grown up. I started off feeling shocked and in the end I wasn't shocked at all. I think I understood." She shakes her head and pats the photo of Sackville on the cover of her book fondly.
"Idina is tantalising to us because she had so many things we long to have and so many things we dread. She was photographed and painted by the most important people of the time, she was famously elegant, she could attract any partner she wanted, for the night if not for a lifetime, and she was daring and exciting. Yet at the same time, she paid a heavy price. She lost her children and was ostracised from society. It's that combination of glamour and tragedy, of glitter and darkness that is so intriguing."
The Bolter by Frances Osborne is published by Virago priced £18.99