Page 6 - Shalom Toronto Centre Passover 2024

This is a small excerpt from Barbara Amiel’s newest ‘tell-all’ book.
Book Cover : Top right of this page
Excerpted from FRIENDS AND ENEMIES by Barbara Amiel. Copyright © 2020 Barbara Amiel. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Photo Credits : Ted Belton
Like a creeping mould, my houses, particularly the London home, began to need “staff.” This is one area where you either have natural talent or not, and it has little to do with upbringing. (My sister is brilliant at this.) Conrad preferred to do business lunches in the small dining room that seated six to eight people comfortably— although once again in his enthusiasm, when we were having a lunch that included Gianni Agnelli, he couldn’t resist inviting extras, and my chair was wedged up the chimney. Now that I was in the enter- tainment business, I needed to employ butlers as well as the laundress and cleaning ladies. The cartel of domestic employment agencies kicked in, and the résumés and interviews began.
Staff who had Buckingham Palace on their résumé really im- pressed me, until I discovered that this was a false lead. The Queen having so large a staff, each member does one thing, and they are lost if multi-tasking. They all seemed to know one another or have slept with each other and no one had a good thing to say about another ex-staffer. The romantic politics were as tricky as the household ones. Then there were the graduates of the butling schools, most notably the academy of Ivor Spencer. In the mid- nineties when I was hunting for butlers, this was still a relatively small field. London was not yet the top choice for the thick wallets of foreign grandees looking for a friendly tax shelter, especially the newly made Russian billionaires. The best butlers moved round and round among familiar homes—the Lloyd Webbers’ to the Schwarzenbachs’ to the Gert Rudolf Flicks’—where knowledgeable chatelaines whipped them into shape. The very best of course stayed with their English employers in their London and country homes and had no desire to work for “new people,” let alone Canadians. The newcomers—one hoped to find some unmined diamond—arrived with résumé in hand and desperate eagerness. “What is your strength?” I asked one Ivor Spencer graduate. He was ecstatic at the question. “I can,” he explained, “fold a napkin a different way for every day of the year.”
Senior staff appeared to have an imperative need to one-up you, and in the beginning—well, actually to the end of this phase of my life—they could more or less succeed. “Yes, I have the same set in my South of France place,” said one member of our domestic staff to me, almost pityingly and very off-handed, as he looked at the pride of place my Blue John garniture occupied. Another looked know- ingly, with slightly pursed lips, after an antique three-foot carved ivory pagoda that I loved arrived from auction. “Mmm,” he said, “I remember that from Mrs. Wrightsman’s house. It was sent to her as a gift and she didn’t know what to do with it.” And then came the slightly horrid smile
at the notion that her bottom- drawer gifts were my prize pieces. Then there were the coy notes: “In an effort to be completely honest,” wrote one recently hired head butler in London, “I have been approached and received a ‘muted’ offer to put forward my candidacy for a position within a prestigious foreign household. My feeling is that this is nothing more than a well-planned hoax!” A.k.a., salary hike or out I go.
Conrad received none of this. He had grown up with staff and behaved in a manner that commanded respect and affection. One of our butlers, a tall, broad man, showed this affection in an unusual manner. On a Sunday night after returning from a trip abroad, we heard an envelope being pushed under our Kensington front door. e envelope was addressed to Conrad Black. On opening, we discovered a five-pound note inside and a letter enthusiastically thanking Conrad for the wonderful evening spent together the previous Saturday (while we had been in Manhattan). e money, explained the letter, was for payment of the club fees “which I know you never thought I’d pay back.” e evening must have been an amazing success with the faux Conrad. “How did you feel on Sunday morning?” asked the letter-writer. “I was teaching at 10 a.m., so I had to get up at 8, when I was feeling ‘tender.’”
Tender? Conrad called the man who’d signed the letter (and thoughtfully included his telephone number) to discover that he was genuinely under the impression that our butler, with whom he had spent the glorious evening in a gay bar and then back at our house, was in fact Conrad Black. His disappointment was manifest, but he did ask Conrad out anyway.
Sometimes staff communications simply baffled me. A Paris hotel delivered a fax to me from London full of vile remarks about my “demands.” I had no idea what was going on and thought it best to just ignore the matter till I got back. On arrival in London I found another fax in my machine.
Madam: Where to begin?
I must say that I regret sending you that defensive and despicable fax in Paris. Above all I would never wish to upset you as I hope you know I am very fond of you and have the greatest respect for you. I totally misunderstood the request from Rosemary [Conrad’s assistant].
I am an ungrateful, servile moron who does not deserve anyone to be good to him.
For what it is worth I have been quite tired for the past two weeks.
6 SHALOM TORONTO Central edition PASSOVER 2024