LITMIR.BIZ

      Nearly thirty years later, Pat’s mother Evelyn – known as Evie – sent her and her brother across that same ocean – itself a dangerous journey during wartime; in June 1940 the ship they sailed on, SS Washington, had been stopped by a German submarine on an earlier voyage taking back Americans who had been warned to return to the US without delay or stay in Britain at their own risk. (As a Jew, Evie would have been concerned at what might happen if the Germans invaded. Ten years later, the same ship would sail from Southampton to New York, carrying survivors of the Holocaust.) The liner’s deluxe interior – its staterooms, ballroom and library – was filled with families. Archive film shows the deck piled high with trunks and suitcases, and children being led off the ship on arrival in New York with teddy bears in their hands or in prams and pushchairs. Their evacuation was done for their safety, but Pat came to believe that both her mother and her father wanted to conduct their various affairs unencumbered by their offspring. It had not been a happy marriage. Her parents had divorced in 1936, leaving Evie to conduct an affair with Ralph Murnham (later the queen’s surgeon) before marrying her second husband, Sebastian de Meir, son of a Mexican diplomat, in 1939; he enlisted in the RAF and died when his bomber plane was shot down over the Netherlands in 1942. Evie, who had taken up nursing in London during the war, moved back to New York in 1943.

      Pat had always felt abandoned. ‘I was a refugee,’ she says. As a girl, growing up in St John’s Wood in London, she had hidden in the park, imagining herself as an animal; one of the first books she remembers reading, in the nineteen-thirties, was about a boy who was shipwrecked and stranded on an island where he was brought up by wolves. She wanted to be that boy. Her parents did not care about animals; nor did her nanny, whom Pat remembered wearing a sealskin coat. Pat’s mother must have been beautiful and chic. She gave Pat a beaver collar, but Pat refused to wear it, and wouldn’t even touch her mother when she wore her fur coats. Pat remembers when Evie showed her a rug made of cat fur. ‘She knew I loved cats. She hated them.’

      A faded photograph in Pat’s bedroom shows ‘Captain E.W.A. Richardson, February 1944’, now serving in the Queen’s Regiment, dressed for the Canadian winter in a white wool duffelcoat as thick as snow. His face is broad and handsome and British. He glows.

      Evie’s life was as unstable as the times. In 1945 she married Martin Arostegui, a Cuban publisher whose previous wife, Cathleen Vanderbilt, an alcoholic heiress, had died the year before. Within a year they had separated, and Evie married George Backer, an influential Democrat, writer and publisher of the New York Post. Like his friend Nathan Straus, Backer had worked to save his fellow Jews: in 1933 he had travelled to Poland and Germany to help Jewish refugees flee the growing Nazi menace, and he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 1937 for his efforts. ‘It is horrible to think,’ he would later recall, ‘how responsible we were for all that happened. The ships were there and the people were not saved.’

      But Evie’s world was Manhattan, a world of money and powerful people. Her husband’s friends included William Paley, the head of CBS, and Pat recalls that another friend, Averell Harriman, US ambassador to Britain and heir to the largest fortune in America, had also attempted to seduce her mother. Described by the New York Times as ‘a small, fast-moving woman … amusing, gay and sharp-tongued’, Evie drew on her sense of style and her impeccable contacts to become an interior decorator; her clients included Kitty Carlisle Hart, Swifty Lazar and Truman Capote. The pictures in her apartment on the Upper East Side, at 32 East 64th Street, were hung low and small-scale furnishings were chosen to reflect Evie’s five-foot-four stature; she moulded her environment to her requirements, just as her daughter would do. Capote named her ‘Tiny Malice’ for her quick wit. She created a lavish, almost visceral apartment for the writer on the UN Plaza, painting the drawing room blood-red and installing a Victorian carved rosewood sofa, a $500 Tiffany lamp, and a zoo of mimetic and dead animals, from a bronze giraffe and china cats to jaguar-skin pillows and a leopardskin rug. I can hear Pat’s horror. Cecil Beaton called it ‘expensive without looking more than ordinary’. But Capote approved, and asked Evie to design his Black and White Ball, the most famous, or notorious, party of the twentieth century, notable for the fact that, despite Evie’s recommendation, Capote declined to send an invitation to the President.

      She and Capote were snapped arriving at Manhattan’s fashionable Colony restaurant. Truman wears a bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles. He greets the paparazzi, his notorious guest list in his hand; how the magazine editors longed to see that roster. Evie is by his side, thin and chic, conspiratorial in dark glasses. They’re both diminutive, yet the centre of all attention. They retreat to one of the coveted back tables – the Cushing sisters on one side, James Stewart on the other – to plot the party. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll is added to the list – Evie says it never hurts to invite a few duchesses. Later, Capote crosses her off too.

      The venue was the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, celebrated in the twenties by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The event exceeded any of Gatsby’s parties. Evie ordered red tablecloths and gold candelabra entwined with ‘miles of smilax’, a green vine. The guests wore masks, barely disguising their celebrity: Lauren Bacall and Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer and Cecil Beaton, Henry Fonda and Tallulah Bankhead. There were Guinnesses, Kennedys, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and it was a marvellous party; its ghosts might still be dancing now.

      Evie was never more in her element; her daughter couldn’t have cared less. High society was far from how Pat wanted to live; now she looks at those photographs, those thin society queens, with disdain. She was, and still is, a teenage rebel, a dropout, and had been ever since she first came to Provincetown, at the age of sixteen. In 1946, her mother had rented John Dos Passos’s house in Provincetown’s East End for a year, having been alerted to the Cape’s allure by Dorothy Paley, wife of William Paley and friend of Dos Passos. It was a heady introduction. It changed the course of Pat’s life.

      I find it almost impossible – but not quite – to imagine what this place was like then. Its lanes seemed part of the country; many still do. Fishing and whaling had left the remote town open to other influences; a wilderness which allowed the wildness of its inhabitants. Pat worked in the bookshop, but was fired because all she did was read. Then she worked as a waitress in the Flag Ship, where the bar was a boat, and where the owners didn’t feed her. Her mother complained that Pat was losing weight – less attractive to the rich Jewish boys with whom she tried to pair off her daughter. Pat would rather go out on Charlie Mayo’s boat and sit on the fly bridge, watching the whales and birds. Charlie lived across the street. He was a champion fisherman; his family, part Portuguese, had been on the Cape since 1650. His father had hunted whales, as did Charlie; he only stopped when he harpooned a female pilot whale and heard the cries of her calf beneath his boat. Pat saw Charlie as her surrogate father. They talked and fished. Her mother disapproved; she thought Mayo was a communist. Pat didn’t care. She cared about the sea.

      Evie had sent her to Austria, in the way that young women of wealthy families were sent to finishing school. Vienna in 1948 wasn’t a good choice for a girl like her; there were no zithers playing, and a former Nazi officer tried to rape her when he discovered she was Jewish. Pat came back to college at Pembroke, outside Boston. She loved riding and skiing. But her mother took her away, and her stepfather

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