WHATEVER NEXT?

A nonagenarian member of the minor British nobility delivers a sometimes–self-satisfied, sometimes-moving memoir.

The takeaway from Glenconner’s memoir is that in many respects, it is quite smashing to be rich and entitled‚ the latter in both the sense of holding privilege and bearing a royal title. In the author’s case, the title comes from having married a man named Colin Tennant, bestowed with the sobriquet “Lord Glenconner,” who bought a Caribbean island and turned it into “a luxurious retreat, famous for its privacy, its glamorous visitors and its parties. Among those visitors were Mick Jagger and David Bowie, of whose work she remarks, “I know the transformative effect of great music and a thumping tune.” Calling herself “an unofficial agony aunt as well as a gay icon,” Glenconner raises a matter that, she suggests, is of burning interest to a large audience—namely, “if Colin was gay or bisexual.” Granted, she notes, Colin did leave his entire estate to his male valet, but while she has no direct evidence, “I was painfully aware of the multiple affairs that he had with women.” Named lady-in-waiting to her friend Princess Margaret, Glenconner enumerates some of the “lovely perks” that come with the job, including free passes to Wimbledon and Royal Ascot and gaining access to doctors devoted to the royal household. “I don’t have to go often as fortunately I am quite healthy,” she writes, “but it certainly makes getting one’s flu jab more of an occasion.” Less superciliously, Glenconner recounts the difficult fates of several of her children. While one son is the current Lord Glenconner, another died of AIDS and still another of hepatitis C, “a result of his struggles with heroin addiction.” Though her book is often glancing, the author has clearly made much of life, even if the world today is “very different…from the one in which I was brought up.”

Will appeal to royal watchers and those who delight in tales of the idle rich.