The Duchess and I

The Duchess of Devonshire and I go way back. That would be the 11th Duchess, Deborah, or "Debo" as she's known to intimates. I discovered her in 1985, when Chatsworth, the Devonshires' ancestral home, located in Derbyshire, England, was featured in Architectural Digest. There she was in the Blue Drawing Room dressed in high-necked white blouse, knitted vest, skirt, pearls, shiny black oxfords, AND BLACK KNEE SOCKS. That's what caught my eye. She looked poised as all get-out in this slightly preposterous get-up. She's now 90, and she thinks what she thinks.

I just finished her memoir, "Wait for Me!", published last year and which I could not resist buying, and I think she and I may have reached the end of the road. Yes, she's one of the six Mitford sisters, including Nancy the novelist and Jessica who crusaded against the American way of death. Yes, she calls the Queen Mum "Sugar" and Prince Charles "Friend." She knew everyone, danced with JFK in the thirties and attended both his inauguration and funeral. She's been painted by Lucien Freud, and she had tea with Hitler before the war due to her sister Unity's status as a fascist groupie.

She and her husband revived Chatsworth against all odds and a 97% estate tax; you can now pay $26.50 to visit it and its gardens and farm shop and Orangerie. Not to make fun of this: they saved a monument.

In her world, everyone has a nickname--her parents were Muv and Farve--and everyone is thrifty, not counting tiaras in the bank vault and a Victor Steibel wedding dress made of 80 yards of white tulle. She's voted Conservative her entire life, and she thinks people make too much of grief. "Grief is a part of life. The disaster of someone dying was talked about for a bit and the person was mourned, but you didn't go on about it and take pills and have to be counselled." We parted company here very quickly.

She also commented that she rarely watches television: "I can't look at anything sad or violent or anything with heaving sheets...so that rules out most of telly." I have days like that.

She's privileged and frank and, to my mind, blind to life as it is lived by most people. Still, I have to pass on a story she tells, which is hilarious and rings true. She comments on the perils of aging, how she now lacks the stamina to run uphill and needs a hearing aid, and then adds, "Other things go wrong. Paddy Leigh Fermor [her friend] came to stay, got into the bath, looked down at the tap end and to his dismay saw that both feet had turned black. 'Oh, God,' he thought, 'teeth, ears, and eyes are wonky and now my feet. ' He need not have worried. He had got into the bath with his socks on."

She has a sense of humor, anyway.