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==Background==
==Background==
Skelton was born at The Croft, Ellington Road, [[Taplow]], [[Buckinghamshire]], elder daughter of Eric George Skelton, who had been a Major in the West India regiment before being invalided out at a young age, and Ada Eveline (née Williams), a theatre [[Gaiety Girls|Gaiety Girl]]. Eric Skelton was a descendant of playwright [[Richard Brinsley Sheridan]].<ref>https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-58311;jsessionid=AFB228A7B66D2800F0B77E00FD928A20</ref> Her younger sister, Brenda, was born in 1922.<ref>https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-barbara-skelton-1316869.html</ref> Skelton spent some of her early years in India; a difficult child, she once charged at her mother with a carving knife and was later expelled from a convent school.<ref>{{cite web
Skelton was born at The Croft, Ellington Road, [[Taplow]], [[Buckinghamshire]], elder daughter of Eric George Skelton, who had been a Major in the West India regiment before being invalided out at a young age, and Ada Eveline (née Williams), a theatre [[Gaiety Girls|Gaiety Girl]]. Eric Skelton was a descendant of playwright [[Richard Brinsley Sheridan]]; his brother was the Army officer and writer [[Dudley Skelton]].<ref>https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-58311;jsessionid=AFB228A7B66D2800F0B77E00FD928A20</ref><ref>Tears Before Bedtime, Barbara Skelton, Hamish Hamilton, 1987, pp. 1, 7, 14-18, 72</ref> Her younger sister, Brenda, was born in 1922.<ref>https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-barbara-skelton-1316869.html</ref> Skelton spent some of her early years in India; a difficult child, she once charged at her mother with a carving knife and was later expelled from a convent school.<ref>{{cite web
|last = Fisher
|last = Fisher
|first = Clive
|first = Clive

Revision as of 15:01, 7 September 2020

Barbara Olive Skelton (26 June 1916 – 27 January 1996) was an English memoirist, novelist and socialite.

Background

Skelton was born at The Croft, Ellington Road, Taplow, Buckinghamshire, elder daughter of Eric George Skelton, who had been a Major in the West India regiment before being invalided out at a young age, and Ada Eveline (née Williams), a theatre Gaiety Girl. Eric Skelton was a descendant of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan; his brother was the Army officer and writer Dudley Skelton.[1][2] Her younger sister, Brenda, was born in 1922.[3] Skelton spent some of her early years in India; a difficult child, she once charged at her mother with a carving knife and was later expelled from a convent school.[4] As a teenager, she had an affair with a friend of her father's, which led to her first abortion.[5] Her good looks allowed her to work as a model for several years.[6]

King Farouk mistress

In World War II, she was recruited into the Foreign Office as a cipher clerk by Donald Maclean, a famous diplomat who unknown to her was a Soviet spy.[7] In 1942, she was assigned to the British embassy in Cairo, where at the Auberge des Pyramides night club, she first met King Farouk, who was throwing bread balls at the patrons.[7] The sexually aggressive Farouk was attracted to Skelton, and invited her to join him on a duck hunt in Fayoum, saying she could ride in the Continental Clipper, Farouk's luxury super-trailer that was 50 feet long that weighted 8 tons.[7] The Continental Clipper broke down in the desert, but Farouk succeeded in seducing Skelton nonetheless.[7] Skelton was impressed with the Abdeen Palace, which had been built by Farouk's famously free-spending grandfather, Ismail the Magnificent, who wanted the most beautiful palace in the world. Skelton wrote in her memoir Tears Before Bedtime: "Sometimes we'd dine in the Abdine [Abdeen] Palace and afterwards watched movies or swim in the vast Palace swimming palaces. Farouk always drove me back to the Villa Moskatelle and, as we passed through the Palace gates, I had to duck so as not to be seen by the dozing nightwatchmen. In spite of the rather dull sycophantic people surrounding the King, I must confess I was never bored. I was always treated with great courtesy".[8] She described Farouk as fond of swimming in the nude and of having sex in the Abdeen Palace's pool.[8] In April 1943, Skelton replaced Irene Guinle as Farouk's "official mistress".[7]

In an interview in 1990, Skelton described Farouk: "He was my type, though, totally my type. Farouk had a very regal bearing, totally sure of himself, but part of that was that he expected a woman to do everything for him. He was something of a hermaphrodite, really more woman than man. He wasn't a good lover at all, though he did kiss rather nicely. The sex was quick. He got a very quick erection. He lay on his back and I got on top of him. It gave me no pleasure whatsoever."[8] In common with Farouk's other mistresses, Skelton described Farouk as having an abnormally small penis, saying: "It was tiny, but it did get hard, and he adored having it sucked. You know, he made jokes about absolutely everything, about his starting to get fat and losing his hair, about the British treating him so shabbily, but he never, ever joked about the size of his penis. Never".[8] But Skelton did enjoy being spanked by Farouk, saying she was "very passive" and enjoyed being dominated sexually by powerful men.[9] Skelton later published a novel entitled A Young Girl's Touch about a prim and proper Englishwoman named Melinda who has an affair with a grotesquely obese Middle Eastern monarch named King Yoyo who introduces her to spanking and sadomasochistic sex, which she enjoys.[10] Skelton admitted that A Young Girl's Touch was a roman à clef with Melinda being a stand-in for herself and King Yoyo a stand-in for King Farouk, with many of the passages in the novel taken straight from her diaries.[9] Skelton's only complaint about being spanked by the king was that he used his cord of his dressing gown to flog her, leading her to write "I would have preferred a splayed cane."[11]

Skelton called Farouk "a complete philistine", but also funny and amusing.[9] She stated about Farouk: "He was very adolescent. He didn't the stuff to be a great king, he was too childish. But he never lost his temper, he was incredibly sweet, with a good sense of humor. He wasn't a grand passion, but I was bored to death with all the British officers I knew in Cairo. Life in the palace with Farouk was not boring".[9] In 1945, the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, decided that Skelton was a security risk, believing that she was leaking information to Farouk, and she was reassigned to the embassy in Athens.[12] Of these allegations, Skelton stated: "After all, I was in a sensitive position, and they were convinced that Farouk was settling me up just to get information from me. What they could never understand was that Farouk couldn't have cared less. The only communications to England that mattered to him were his telexes ordering silk neckties from Hawes and Curtis. There was absolutely nothing political about him then".[12] Farouk encouraged Skelton to run up a large bill with dressmakers, promising her he would pay for it all, which he did not when she was informed him that she was being reassigned to Athens, leading her to say he was "staggering cheap".[12]

Later years found her in Yugoslavia, Egypt, the US, Cuba and back in England. She lived for many years in France before returning to England where she died in 1996.

Writings

Her works include a volume of short stories, 1966's Born Losers, two volumes of memoirs, 1987's Tears Before Bedtime and 1989's Weep No More, as well as two novels, a Young Girl's Touch (1956) and A Love Match (1969).

Personal life

She wed prominent critic Cyril Connolly in 1950, a marriage which ended in 1956. At the time of her engagement to Connolly in 1950, King Farouk took his much publicised "bachelor party" in Europe, and invited Skelton to join his entourage as he traveled across Europe.[13] Connolly encouraged his fiancée to go with the king as she recalled: "He thought I could get money from Farouk for pay for our honeymoon. He had no idea how tight this king was"..[13] At La Baule in France, Skelton met up with Farouk who was surrounded by an entourage of Albanian bodyguards, Sudanese food tasters, Egyptian civil servants, French doctors and a vast number of hangers-on of various nationalities.[13] Skelton recalled: "Farouk was fatter than I could have ever imagined like a stuffed animal. And now he had this passion for gambling, which I never really noticed in Egypt. He called me 'my mascot'. I don't think I was there for sex as much as for being a good luck charm. I did sleep with him...We'd have sex, maybe once a day, if that. We didn't have a pool to get him excited. He'd have me get on top and that was it, and I can't remember a thing about it...As I said, the sex wasn't the thing. It was the gambling. I'd sit beside him as his mascot and he'd give me a pile of chips to play roulette with. I stored as many of them away as I could, as I always lost. He'd play sometimes until dawn and the casino would always stay stay open for him, and whenever we came in or went out there was always a big crowd of people yelling "Vive le roi! Vive le roi!". You know how the French love royalty".[13]

Despite encouraging his fiancée to go with Farouk, Connolly became consumed with jealously and started staking the royal party as Skelton remembered: "Cyril turned out to be more jealous than I first thought. He got an assignment from the Daily Mail to do a piece on Farouk and came over to La Baule but Farouk wouldn't give him an interview. Farouk hated journalists. Hated them. I tried to explain that Cyril was a real writer and not one of those journalists. Farouk wouldn't hear it. Cyril got his own black beret and followed us anyhow. I rode in Farouk's big car, a Cadillac convertible, I think, and a bus followed the fleet of cars, carrying all the luggage. Farouk always drove. He loved to drive. He was an excellent driver."[14] Despite the fact that he was worth $140,000,000 million US dollars (a sum equivalent to a billion dollars today), Farouk stole rings belonging to Skelton as she remembered: "One night he asked to see these lovely eternity rings I had for years and years. I never got them back. I'm sure he took them and had them woven into Narriman's famous bejewelled wedding dress".[15] Skelton recalled: "After Biarritz Farouk and his group kept on to Cannes and Cyril and I went to the Dordogne. I was glad to get way, especially from the press. I had become the 'mystery woman'. Back in London Farouk had sent Cyril a box of Egyptian mangoes, maybe as a consolation prize for not giving him an interview. I stayed in touch with Farouk".[15]

She married George Weidenfeld, a publisher, in 1956; that marriage ended in 1961. She met Weidenfeld when he agreed to publish A Young Girl's Touch.[16] In her 1989 memoir Weep No More, she described Weidenfeld as having a very hirsute body and wrote "There was hardly any pleasure in his company except for the instinctive animal desire to be with one's mate."[17] As divorce was very difficult to obtain in Britain until 1967, it was necessary to prove adultery conclusively to the courts to be granted a divorce. In 1956, her marriage to Connolly was ended when evidence of her adultery with Weidenfeld was presented to the court and in 1961 her marriage to Weidenfeld was ended when evidence of her adultery with Connolly was presented to the court.[18]

Her final marriage in 1966 to Derek Jackson, a physicist, was brief. She wrote that it was "not for love that I married Professor Jackson".[19] The alimony she obtained from Jackson allowed her to live in Paris in a relative comfort.[20] She had affairs with, among others, Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Charles Addams, Bernard Frank, John Sutro and Alan Ross. Anthony Powell used her as the basis for Pamela Flitton, a character in his novel sequence a Dance to the Music of Time.[21] Powell also wrote a critical essay on Skelton, included in the collection Miscellaneous Verdicts.

Death

She died in Worcestershire from brain cancer, aged 79.

References

  1. ^ https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-58311;jsessionid=AFB228A7B66D2800F0B77E00FD928A20
  2. ^ Tears Before Bedtime, Barbara Skelton, Hamish Hamilton, 1987, pp. 1, 7, 14-18, 72
  3. ^ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-barbara-skelton-1316869.html
  4. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  5. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "OBITUARY : Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  6. ^ Stadiem 1991, pp. 71–72.
  7. ^ a b c d e Stadiem 1991, p. 74.
  8. ^ a b c d Stadiem 1991, p. 75.
  9. ^ a b c d Stadiem 1991, p. 76.
  10. ^ Stadiem 1991, pp. 70–71.
  11. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  12. ^ a b c Stadiem 1991, p. 79.
  13. ^ a b c d Stadiem 1991, p. 80.
  14. ^ Stadiem 1991, pp. 80–81.
  15. ^ a b Stadiem 1991, p. 81.
  16. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  17. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  18. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  19. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  20. ^ Fisher, Clive (2 February 1996). "Obituary: Barbara Skelton". The Independent. Retrieved 2019-02-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  21. ^ https://www.maxhastings.com/2018/yesterdays-parties-max-reviews-anthony-powell-dancing-to-the-music-of-time-by-hilary-spurling/

Sources

  • Powell, Anthony. Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989. University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-67710-9
  • Skelton, Barbara. Tears Before Bedtime London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987
  • Skelton, Barbara. Weep No More London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989
  • Lewis, Jeremy Cyril Connolly London; Jonathan Cape, 1997
  • Lewis, Jeremy Grub Street Irregular London: Harper Press, 2008
  • Stadiem, William Too Rich The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991.
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