reviews_and_ramblings | Barbara Cartland (July 9, 1901

Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland (9 July 1901 – 21 May 2000) was one of the most successful writers of romance novels of all time, specialising in historical love themes. She also became one of the United Kingdom's most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues.

Born at 31 Augustus Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, she was the only daughter and eldest child of a British army officer, Major Bertram Cartland, and his wife, Mary Polly Hamilton Scobell. Though she was born into an enviable degree of middle-class comfort, the family's security was severely shaken after the suicide of her paternal grandfather, James Cartland, a financier, who shot himself in the wake of bankruptcy.

This was followed soon after by her father's death on a Flanders battlefield in World War I. However, her enterprising mother opened a London dress shop to make ends meet — "Poor I may be," Polly Cartland once remarked, "but common I am not" — and to raise Cartland and her two brothers, Anthony and Ronald, both of whom were eventually killed in battle, one day apart, in 1940.

After attending The Alice Ottley School, Malvern Girls' College and Abbey House, an educational institution in Hampshire, Cartland soon became successful as a society reporter and writer of romantic fiction. Cartland admitted she was inspired in her early work by the novels of Edwardian author Elinor Glyn, whom she idolised and eventually befriended.

After a year as a gossip columnist for the Daily Express, Cartland published her first novel, Jigsaw (1923), a slightly naughty society thriller that became a bestseller. She also began writing and producing somewhat racy plays, one of which, Blood Money (1926), was banned by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. In the 1920s and '30s Cartland was one of the leading young hostesses in London society, noted for her beauty, energetic charm and daring parties. Her fashion sense also had a part in launching her fame. She was in fact one of the first clients of designer Sir Norman Hartnell, who was later appointed dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II.

Some pass her books by; some can't get enough of them. But it's impossible to be neutral about Barbara Cartland, the standard bearer of true romance and perhaps the most prolific romance author.

There is something undeniably cheerful in an octogenarian who favored Norman Hartnell pink gowns and white Rolls-Royces, and who had a pamphlet printed to inform the curious press of her life's achievements, not the least of which is herself. Close up, she looked a little like a sugarplum fairy. Her hair was platinum, her eyeshadow delicious turquoise, and her mouth the proverbial rosy lips most living legends favor. Her visual flamboyance was very appealing as though she had stopped the clock at an hour that suited her person admirably. Her more than fifty old daughter, Raine, called her, "Mummy," and it was through Raine - a divorcee, she married Lady Di's divorced daddy and became Countess Spencer - that the doyenne of romantic novelists had become a seep-grandmother of the Royal Family.

If Princess Diana of Wales did not exist, Barbara could had easily invented her, a lady of unsullied reputation, an archetype. All Cartland heroines are virgins, nineteen, and ready to open up like flowers, but only on the wedding night in the last chapter. And then, of course, a discreet veil is drawn over the actual act, which takes place, doubtless, under piles of snowy sheets, and lacy nightgowns.

As she said, "You can't get more naked than naked. These days people.are quite worn out with pornography, poor darlings. They're terrified that they're abnormal it they don't have intercourse upside down swinging from a chandelier."

Miss Cartland said, too, she felt very sorry for young girls because, "If a man buy a girl a good dinner he expects her to bounce into bed with him. She's supposed to give her all for an evening out - in my day we expected a bit more than that."

She insisted vehemently that women's liberation won't admit that men can enjoy sex like a good meal and forget it, whereas women get emotionally involved and miserable.

"That's why I'm selling millions of paperbacks to women who are on Valium because they're having such a rotten time in real life. They don't want to read about the kitchen sink, they can look at that any time they're peeling potatoes. I'm their escape. I give them glamor, beautiful clothes, and the marvelous attentive men they are starving for."

Though Barbara wrote primarily for female readers and rarely hesitated to speak for all womankind, she was no friend of feminists. "I don't like most women." she admitted without hesitation. "I can't bear ugly women who sit about doing nothing but waiting to play bridge. All my life I have thought men were something very special. It is a treat to be alone with them. I prefer a dumb man to an intelligent woman."

If Barbara Cartland is dated - "some sort of marvelous British heirloom" by her own description - her value in the market-place is still soaring. Her books had been sold to TV and the movies, her name appeared on a romantic line of perfume, fabric, and home decorating items, and her home and the Spencer estate were part of a special tour.

What was it like to be Barbara Cartland? To live at Canfield Place, the fourteen-room mansion in Hertfordshire, England, the former playground of Beatrix Potter? Here was a typical day in the life of this successful author of romantic fiction.

"I wake up at 8:00 A.M., when the gardener buzzes me so he can take Duke, the black Labrador, out. He is one of the Queen's Sandringham strain and always stays in my room at night. The Pekinese, Twi-Twi, sleeps at the end of my four-poster."

"My old maid, PurceII, who has been with me for thirty-three years and is now in her eighties, comes in about 8:45 A.M. with breakfast which Reeves, the butler, has carried upstairs for her."

"I get up, do my hair and put on makeup simply because I like looking nice and I believe in self-discipline. I complete my face in a much more complicated way after my bath at 10:45 A.M. I don't mind admitting I wear false eyelashes."

"I eat the same thing for breakfast every day: an egg, my bran - I'm a great believer in bran - a tablespoonful of honey, and ginseng tea. I take all my vitamin pills - usually seventy or eighty. I read six newspapers."

"I answer all my letters when Mrs. Waller, my chief private secretary, arrives at 9:00 A.M. - there's no question of me staying in bed because so much has to be done and everyone depends on me to keep things working. We deal with telephone calls and my urgent things. Today it was doing the week's-menus with the chef, Nigel Gordon. Then I see the other secretaries, and Mrs. Elliott takes the 8,000 or so words I dictated to her the previous afternoon to be xeroxed. We have to photostat everything at least seven times."

"Really, the mornings here are like a bad Noel Coward play. Telephones, secretaries, and dogs ail demanding attention."

"My maid organizes what I wear and my hairdresser comes in several limes a week. I wear a lot of what Sir Norman Hartnell calls 'Cartland Pink.' It is a warm, happy color when you get old. I hate beiges, they make a woman look like a baked potato."

"After my bath I use ice on my face. It's so much better than a facelift. Not on the cheeks (it breaks the veins because it is too strong) but on the eyes and under the chin."

"I use what I call a working girl's makeup, which lasts all day, and I don't necessarily have to touch up in the evenings, I have a sun-proof cream as a foundation from Elizabeth Arden and special powder from Cyclax - who are the Queen's suppliers - because my skin is so pale."

"At night I always use a vitamin FF cream, which is the only thing I know that takes away the crepiness on the eyelids."

"I take the dogs out for a walk before lunch, and do my yoga breathing to freshen my mind. I lunch alone; today it was cold cuts, mixed salad, and Brie washed down with water."

"At 12:45 I shut myself away with Mrs. Eliiott to whom I dictate whatever chapter I am doing. I dictate or write between 6,000 and 9,000 words by 3:30 P.M., lying on the sofa, swaddled in a white coverlet. I then think about what I want to write and ask my subconscious for a plot - and one is provided. I always find the first chapter the most difficult to write. Toward the end ot a chapter I will ask Mrs. Eliiott, 'How many words?' The Labrador (a gift from a longtime friend, the late Lord Mountbatten) and Peke recognize the sentence arid almost immediately jump up, and we go for a walk through the kitchen garden where Peter Rabbit lived. The hole in the wall is still there exactly as it was in Beatrix Potter's day when her grandfather owned the house."

"We have tea at 4:00 P.M. - usually a biscuit and some cake. Then I work through until 7:00 P.M. researching. I have a hot bath - two hot water bottles put in my bed - and I retire after putting on my FF cream and putting in my Lady Jane flat curlers. I go to sleep about 10:30."

"I don't go out much in the week except perhaps sometimes for a television interview. The weekends I reserve for my family, (two sons, one daughter, and their offspring. Son lan acted as her personal business manager). Yes, I work very hard, but what else does someone of my age do? I don't play bridge or golf, and with four permanent and six subsidiary secretaries, several dogs, a house and estate to run, I just keep working."

Like her fictional heroines, Barbara Cartland was a virgin ("Of course!") when she married wealthy Alexander McCorquodale at London's fashionable St. Margaret's, Westminster, in 1927.

"In those days we were all terribly innocent and pure," she said "Remember, there was no such thing as the Pill. The difference between the lady and the prostitute was enormous."

A certain soap opera plotline ran through her own wedding. It was at the ceremony thai the bridegroom's cousin, Hugh McCorquodale, first saw Barbara and, as she told it, fell in love with her on the spot. The marriage of Barbara and Alexander "was disastrous." When she sued for divorce five years later, he cross-petitioned, citing Hugh as corespondent. The allegation was dismissed in court. She called it a "spiteful, dirty trick." She and her second husband Hugh enjoyed a wonderful romance, and were "blissfully happy" until his untimely death twenty-seven years later.

Barbara Cartland lived up to her title, the Queen of Health, in England. Not only did she write and promote her books - on health, nutrition, menopausal replacement therapy, but she practiced what she preached. Every day she swallowed more than seventy vitamins, special calcium tablets, and her own formula for "brain pills" - vitamin E, vitamin B6, and ginseng.

The English press and television had always treasured her, but she became somewhat of a national landmark, too. She and her blonde curls were encased in a life-size, waxlick substance at Madame Tussaud's museum, although the resemblance could stand improvement.

At the unveiling, the museum director explained why they chose Barbara Cartland: "We at Tussaud's today have a difficult time trying to find suitable feminine lady figures even in these days of feminism and women's lib."

When all is said and done, this remarkable woman, a cross, some said, between the Queen Mother of England and Zsa Zsa Gabor, will probably have the last word. She admitted that in reality the kind of romance in her books might be a crashing bore in real life since it: all turns out the same.

"But," she stressed, "romance in life makes an important difference. Never, never, run away from it."

Her virgins were big business, so said Miss Cartland, who had other reasons for choosing her hisiorical settings. "It's difficult to portray virgins in modern dress," she admitted. "Furthermore, I prefer a period when men were not wearing wigs. It's unattractive to have a young man taking off his wig in bed!"

The one question on the lips of every Cartland fan was, "Has she known such men as romantic as her heroes?" The answer was "Never! I always liked the dark, handsome cynical type. But all I ever got were the fair-haired, blue-eyed stupid ones," she said.

Her physical and mental health began to fail in her mid-90s but her spirit and courage were undiminished, and she remained a favourite with the press, granting interviews to international news agencies even during the final months of her life. Two of her last interviews were with the BBC and US journalist Randy Bryan Bigham.

Her last project was to be filmed and interviewed for her life story (Directed by Steven Glen for Blue Melon Films). The documentary, titled 'Virgins and Heroes', includes unique early home cine footage and Dame Barbara launching her website with pink computers in early 2000. At that time, her publishers estimated that since her writing career began in 1923, Dame Barbara Cartland had produced a total of 723 titles. After years of wearing her trademark anti-wrinkle cream and heavy makeup, she had herself photographed repeatedly without any cosmetics before she died. She was 98 years of age at her death.

Due to her concern for the environment, she requested to be buried in a cardboard coffin. This request was honoured and she was buried at her estate in Hatfield under a tree that had been planted by Queen Elizabeth I.

Source: Love's Leading Ladies by Kathryn Falk

For Vintage Covers of Barbara Cartland, please refers to the featuring post of Francis Marshall (http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/872359.html) who was her most famous cover artist.