DLA099-0041  Transcription 

‘Lady Astor Rules a World as Hostess’, The New York Times Magazine, 1 April 1928

To Her London House in St. James’s Square Come Visitors From Every Land and With Every interest

[Losses] and of the state of Virginia. As she remarked, she represents Plymouth and Plymouth is apparently satisfied. Although the British political parties have had many ups and downs in the past decade, Lady Astor has not once been seriously challenged since she was first elected in 1919. The seats of many important members have been in the balance on several occasions, but in each election this daughter of the “Mother of Presidents” has been returned to the “Mother of Parliaments.”

If in the House of Commons Lady Astor represents Plymouth, in her own house she represents neither Plymouth, nor England nor America, nor any other place under the sun. The house itself is one of those gloomy London dwellings that in spite of their homelike interior exude a certain forbidding formality. Tucked in a corner of St. James’s Square, and enlarged by the addition of a building in the rear it is a labyrinthian maze to a visitor. Through its rambling halls one expects to meet the ghosts of the dead members of the Reform Club, which is but a few steps sway, and one wonders as he steps into the tessellated marble-floored entrance hall whose feet in years gone by trod its hard surface.

In a sense, surrounded by this atmosphere, Nancy Langhorne Astor is rather incongruous; her voice is louder than the reserved whisperings to which these old walls are accustomed; her manner is less formal and her gestures more natural than those that the gold framed mirrors had been wont to reflect before her coming.

The dead owners of this old house might stir uneasily in their graves if they could see this lithe, active woman dressed in a smock, with her hair fluttering carelessly about her temples, rush out on the balcony of her boudoir, and hear her, call across the courtyard filled with stately old trees: “Is the Viscount In?” That is a kind of humor to which they are not accustomed.

Or again; their sensibilities would be shocked at the sight of Lady Astor sitting on the floor of that same room with the diagram of her dining table before her, trying to arrange the seating of her guests at a large dinner. Her language, could they but hear it, would seem almost like a foreign tongue. Imagine one of those dead dowagers saying to her secretary: “Go call up Lord Blank, tell him that some one has disappointed me for tonight's dinner, that he has to come and if he won’t, he need not expect that I'll ever ask him again. Tell him that I am not waiting for an answer, that his name is down, that’s all.”

Strange as these things may seem in such a formal setting; nevertheless they are the very things that give a feeling of hospitality. They, as much as the flowers that are in evidence in every room, dispel the austerity of the house.

In a typically American manner her interests extend from teeming India to the slums of London.

In her home you may meet an old lady of the Victorian age, white-capped and white-haired, with a soft voice and a kindly outlook upon all folk. You may turn from her to greet a Parsee girl from Bombay, clad as she would be if she were wandering slowly to the beach at sunset to breathe the stimulating sea air from Malabar Hill. Again you turn to greet an Ambassador or a member of Parliament or some man connected with the League of Nations. Who is that unusual-looking person chatting with J. L. Garvin? Some one engaged in the suppression of opium traffic or a Mohammedan who knows the secrets of the All-Moslem conclave held at Mecca. All the world, it seems, is welcome at the house, and much of the world takes advantage of that welcome.

A woman is speaking softly near you. The voice does not seem either English or American. It is a Virginian—perhaps a girlhood friend of Nancy Astor’s. Your conjecture is almost immediately proved to be correct.

“Come here and meet a Virginian,” exclaims Lady Astor, as if she divined your thoughts and would set at rest your doubts. And before you have finished greeting the Virginian, Lady Astor is off again to make some one else feel at home.

“Being the house guest of Nancy Astor is like being tied to the tail of a comet,” says Miss Virginia. “I have never supposed such continuous activity possible in a human being. She is with you one moment and the next she is slipping into her coat and off for Parliament to vote on some measure, Then, before you realize that she has had time to motor to Parliament and return, she comes into the room and exclaims: “We are going ice skating, and the rink is not nearly so crowded at this hour as later,” and you are whisked off. She can put in more hours of work and still have more hours to play than any one I have ever known. But that is because she is never idle.

In spite of her vivacity and her spontaneity, mention to Lady Astor one of the subjects in which she is interested and it is her wholehearted sincerity that impresses one. Housing plans for the poor, the improvement of labor conditions, the advisability of prohibition in England-these are matters in which she is deeply interested, and, unlike many other American-born British subjects, she has never hesitated to hold up the actions of the land of her birth when she has felt that they could serve as a model for England. As a British subject she has never hidden her Americanism, and, while she has forsworn allegiance to the United States, she still retains her love for it, and Virginia, not St. James’s Square, is Home, Sweet Home.

Lady Astor is a born actress, or perhaps it is better to say she is an excellent mimic. In her lighter moments she can imitate any one and keep a roomful of people laughing.

With her slender figure it might be supposed that imitating a fat German would be hopelessly beyond her. Not so. You can almost see her expand into the dimensions required, while her voice ìs that of a Teuton speaking broken English.

Her unconscious acting, however, is what interests the many visitors who pass through her doors. She is always the moving figure. Her luncheon guests will be assembled in a drawing room, lackadaisically, whiling away the time waiting for her, asking polite and very discreet questions and growing more and more bored, when suddenly, something will seem to have happened in the hall outside. The butler opening the front door, one will imagine, has been half bowled over by an avalanche of questions and directions; the guests In the drawing room will begin to bob into life. Then the whole scene will become bustling and active, as the slim little hostess bolts into the room.

Or, if it be an evening reception, and well started, she will leave it to run of its own momentum and have a private conversation. Once, when she was holding a reception for some American students; and the Lord Bishop of London and his Lady were, among the guests, it began to occur to a person here and there that nothing had been seen for some time of the vivacious hostess. She was over in a corner of the big room where the Bishop and his wife were seated. Lady Astor was squatted on the floor facing them, oblivious of the rest of the company.

Doing the unexpected seems a part of Lady Astor. One must look for the unexpected in her unless one wishes to be continually surprised. An instance was when the Filipino Mayor of Manila and his young son were at dinner at her house a few months ago. It so chanced that it was the twentieth birthday of the Mayor's son, and durtág dinner a guest spoke of it. Lady Astor excused herself for a moment and returned with six pairs of silk socks, which she handed the young Filipino in honor of the day. Whether she had purloined six pairs of Lord Aston's new socks or whether she keeps an assortment of presents on hand for such occasions was not disclosed.

The young Filipino was quite equal to the occasion. He gallantly informed his hostess that he was going to frame one pair and keep them always. He was convinced, however, that when he returned home to the Philippines and showed his new finery, his friends would consider him something of a Baron Munchausen.

Lady Astor ignores the useless trimmings of conversation and goes straight to the point. Questions follow one another. She shows a distinct antipathy to verbal parsley and thyme when the meat is there and may be had. She turns to the Mayor of Manila and asks bluntly: “Are you for the continuance of Wood’s policy In your country? Are your people qualified for self-government? Will your people and the Morns ever live amicably together?” The surprising thing about Lady Astor, when she asks questions is not their number, but their pertinency, and she leaves you wondering what secret well of information she has tapped.

Lady Astor is a paradox. She is a leader of the new woman movement, and she is a reactionary when it comes to many of the changes that woman’s emergence have fostered. No bobbed or shingled hair for her. She is unacquainted with face lotions and lipsticks. A bachelor girl—one of the type who would decry marriage and the rearing of children—would be anathema to her. When a member of Parliament excuses his bachelorhood by making the pretty speech that in his youth he was not so fortunate as to know Lady Astor, she shouted, “shame” at him and gave him to understand that it was a man’s business to marry and raise a family.

She is at once, conventional and unconventional. In many ways she is the most modern of women. In others she is very old-fashioned. In the large rooms of her house, where hang pictures by Romney and Turner and the more recent ones by Sargent and De Laszlo [possibly 2608], she seems a part of what many think is a prettier age. Her own portrait by Sargent is charming and dignified, yet not more so than is the original today. She is so distinctly of the present out of the past and looking into the future that it is difficult to appraise her in terms of a woman of today.

The elements are so mixed in Nancy Astor that she is a distinct type-a type not to be found else where. She seems not to care a rap what people say of her. Those that know her and love her find her sympathetic with all the world, and especially that part of the world that needs help to lighten its burdens and raise its standards.

Lady Astor’s adopted country has no stancher patriot or harder worker. And it is fair to say that the country of her birth has never sent an emissary to another land who has done more lasting good for the friendship of two peoples than has this Virginia woman.

MD

26/07/2009