Exclusive: The Secret Life of Tommy Lascelles * Part IV: The Secret Romance
The previously untold story of the clandestine May-December romance between the most influential royal courtier of the 20th century and the official biographer of Queen Mary
In Part III: The Hidden Hand, I described the role behind the scenes of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles in shaping the official biographies of King George V and King George VI. As he neared the end of his twenty-seven years serving the royal family as an influential senior adviser, he made it his mission to seal the legacies of the two kings. Viewers of The Crown will recognize his memorable portrayal by Pip Torrens—a level of celebrity that would have dismayed him. Tommy was a man of many secrets, the biggest of which was his bisexual life that included intimate relationships with two of the three royal biographers, James Pope-Hennessy and Harold Nicolson. His involvement with Pope-Hennessy and his official biography of Queen Mary happened unexpectedly after Tommy’s retirement from royal service in 1953. In Part IV of this series for my Royals Extra subscribers, I will draw from correspondence I discovered at an archive in Los Angeles to illuminate an often-fraught relationship between Tommy and James that nearly went off the rails in the summer of 1958 when Pope-Hennessy most needed Lascelles’ support to finish the book.
ICYMI: Part I: Setting the Stage
ICYMI: Part II: The Making of a Courtier
“I love yr fireside”
Tommy Lascelles was sixty-nine and James Pope-Hennessy had just turned forty when Tommy became infatuated with what he later described as James’s “peculiar and inexplicable, Dionysiac charm.” They had initially met in February 1957, and the first hint of intimacy in the correspondence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles that I reviewed came in a letter from Tommy to James on February 4, 1958, when he asked if they could get together at the Beefsteak Club in London for dinner on Friday the 14th, St. Valentine’s Day. “I love yr fireside,” he said, and wondered if they might “sit beside” it again. James lived on Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill, a chic neighborhood today, but bohemian and rundown in the 1950s. Still, Harold Nicolson was moved to tell James in a letter in 1952 that his flat was “elegant” and a “pleasure” to visit.
By early 1958, James had completed nearly all the interviews for his Queen Mary biography, and in March he traveled to the lakeside village of Hagnau in Wurttemberg, Germany to buckle down and write the book—the beginning of a five-month stay. He likened his lodgings there to “an overheated birds-nest.” As soon as he produced a chapter, he would send a copy to Tommy for comment. Toward the end of March, he wrote a long letter on “cochineal paper”, with Tommy’s name in the salutation carefully cut out of the copy James retained. He thanked Tommy for his “wonderful letter…I do think you are a perfect letter-writer…I do enjoy writing to you more than I can say.” He teased him about his approaching seventy-first birthday: “You are presumably one of those birthdays The Daily Telegraph likes to collect and publish.”
“A sort of opiate, one wants more and more and newer”
James attributed his “over-excitable” nature to his “mélange of Irish and Malayan blood” and a mother—Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, a noted biographer— “whose supreme self-control and austerity used to drive me into unthought-of excesses.” After drinking too much, his “lid of safety gets dislodged and I sometimes do something loony like going to find some Trooper acquaintance. They are mostly brutes.” He recognized that his dangerous liaisons had become “a sort of opiate, one wants more and more and newer…almost like a mental disease and comes from my excess of imagination—the bad side of it, you see, the good side being writing. My brain never seems to stop imagining things and might one day blow up with a small pop.” Still, he promised to stop “letting these midnight figures in to Ladbroke Grove.”
He also confessed that he had been upset by the “slow death” from cancer of an acquaintance. “But cancer in the young is something you know more bitterly about than I do.” Tommy and his wife Joan’s only son, John, had suffered from cancer and died in September 1951 at age twenty-nine—a shattering loss for them both. As Tommy wrote to Joan several months after John’s death, “There are no dark shadows between us. Insofar as there is a shadow & there always will be, it falls on us both & makes for unity rather than a drift apart.”
“How splendid to be so excitable at the age of 70”
James was sending chapters of Queen Mary to the official biographer of King George V, Harold Nicolson— his friend and former lover. After reading a portion of the biography, Nicolson wrote in his diary that it was a “really remarkable book, dexterously combining factual narrative with imagination, humour, and sympathy.” James also sought advice from Harold on how to manage Tommy’s infatuation. In a lengthy letter to James on April 10, 1958, Harold noted in passing that he had read his “private and confidential” letter “with sympathy but not with distress.” He explained that “our friend was always, even in adolescence, a romantic person and such people enjoy even belated romance. You know you can rely on my discretion; even if the matter is mentioned by the sufferer, I shall manifest no previous knowledge or suspicion. But you have nothing to reproach yourself with and it will die down like a magnificent sunset. But how splendid to be so excitable at the age of 70!...I know you will behave well about our common friend, who is in fact so very uncommon.”
James’s older brother John, an eminent art historian, was likewise a frequent correspondent and deeply interested reader of the Queen Mary work-in-progress. James wrote to his brother in detail about how he was organizing the book and what he thought of the various characters. In April 1958 he reported to John. “I think I can get away with murder if everything is presented as making Grannie [Queen Mary] grander and stronger & more utterly marvelous—coming up fighting after each fresh trial, don’t you see?”
John was also gay, but unlike James, he led a more stable life. James could count on him to be non-judgmental when he wrote—often with initials or nicknames—of the “dear boys” with whom he was having flings. Among them were “Franz, in a most sexy blue uniform with an SS-type cap,” and a “dreary sailor in Copenhagen, with a mouth like Donald Duck.” James similarly confided to John about his relationship with Tommy. Writing from Hagnau in March 1958, he revealed that Tommy “is coming here for 3 days in late June, but don’t say so to him or anybody shd he not mention it to you.”
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