Lucinda O'Sullivan's Ireland

Wednesday 05 January 2011

We have all been watching with fascination the romantic happenings of life in the fictional Great House, Downton Abbey, but it would be true to say that life in the real world of Farmleigh and Wilbury Park, former homes of Miranda, Countess of Iveagh, who sadly died this week, was far more interesting and colourful altogether. Miranda Iveagh was a sensationally beautiful women with a string of lovers to her bow including a Duke, a Marquess, an Airline tycoon, a racing driver, and a well known Irish TV personality.

She was in a way a modern day Scarlet O’Hara – bright, beautiful, challenging, fun loving and spirited, and quite literally added that frisson of ‘aristocracy’ drama and colour to Dublin in the 70’s and 80’s, where titles participating in Dublin society were somewhat thin on the ground.

I knew her on a couple of fronts over the years but my first memories are of her when I was a very young girl and my mother showing me a formal photo from the English Social & Personal magazine of the beautiful debutante Miss Miranda Smiley whose engagement had just been announced to the young Benjamin Guinness, heir to the Guinness billions, and future Earldom of Iveagh. Miranda Daphne Jane Smiley may not have had a title herself but she was the great grandaughter, on her mother’s side, of the 1st Viscount Cowdray and was brought up in Castle Fraser, at Aberdeen, an enormous Z shaped castle dating back to the 15th C which was gifted by the Pearson family in 1976 to the Scottish National Trust, and indeed it was used as a backdrop in some of the scenes for the Helen Mirren movie ‘The Queen. Miranda’s mother, Lavinia Pearson, who was also a direct descendant of the novelist Jane Austen, inherited Castle Fraser from her father, married Major Michael Smiley, who was one of the British prisoners of war who escaped from Colditz Castle in Germany – perhaps it was from him that Miranda inherited her spirit and get up and go.

Miranda and Benjamin married in 1963, he was 26 and she was 23, a golden couple to all intents and purposes, with the world at their feet. The Guinness family, however, throughout their different branches, have suffered a lot of tragedies, indeed Ben Guinness’s father was killed by a V2 rocket in 1944 while on active service in Belgium when Ben was just 7 years. He inherited the title of 3rd Earl of Iveagh on the death of his grandfather in 1967. Miranda and Benjamin had four children Edward, now 4th Earl of Iveagh, the Hon Rory Guinness, Lady Emma Guinness Barnard and Lady Louisa Guinness Ulroth. Farmleigh, the family home in the Phoenix Park, which now belongs to the Irish State, was a vast country mansion in the middle of the city. I remember being in it as a family home and the first thing you noticed, once you had driven up through the lush lands, past grazing cattle, to the hall door, were the rows of wellington boots inside the door of the vast hallway. It was very much an Upstairs Downstairs world, with everything focused on the comings and goings, and life around the Earl and Countess, looked after by Pollard the Butler, Annie the cook, and Pat her secretary.

Miranda always had her luxuriant tresses coiffed by Derek Milner of Cezanne Hair Studio in Drury Street. Derek knew Miranda for some forty years first meeting her when he was a junior hairdresser in the old Brown Thomas Department Store, which was located in what is now Marks & Spencer in Grafton Street. “Miranda was as good as she was good looking.” He recalled affectionately that he used go out to Farmleigh every week to do her hair, but she used also pop into BT’s and to Cezanne. “I remember getting Miranda ready to go to various balls with Benjamin; she would be all beautifully dressed in a magnificent gown and Rory, as a little chap, would run and jump into the ballgown.” “She loved life, fashion, people. She had a fantastic business brain but people didn’t realise how very good she was to homeless men at the Iveagh Trust. If the hostel was full and there weren’t enough beds, Miranda used worry ceaselessly about this.” “I spoke to her two weeks ago on the phone, I just can’t believe she is gone, we will miss her vibrancy and love of life and people so much.”

In the old Brown Thomas, Private Lives was a really exclusive little section up a few steps to the back of the store. Here there was also a private room for top customers of the store and Miranda Iveagh was, without any doubt, the top customer. She would be looked after by BT Director, Cecily McMenamin, and Paula Kelly. Her clothes were absolutely fantastic, and she was the perfect clothes horse, tall, slim, beautiful, with dark auburn hair, twinkling eyes, and a wonderful soft plummy voice. She indulged her passion for clothes in Private Lives, and in London, favouring designers such as Sonia Rykiel, Jean Muir, Georgio Armani, Valentino, Michelina Stacpoole, Yves St. Laurent, Bruce Oldfield, Belville Sassoon, Anouska Hempel, Thierry Mugler. Wonderful daywear would come from Rykiel, Muir and Armani, whilst fabulous ballgowns of luxuriant silks and lush velvets would be created by Lorcan Mullaney of Belville Sassoon, and by Anouska Hempel, who also went on to open the Hempel Hotel in London.

In the late 70’s Miranda and Benjamin’s marriage deteriorated, she spoke to friends about his declining health and alchoholism. This was a world that revolved around what was then the glamorous Grafton Street, Brown Thomas, West Jewellers, Louis Wine, the Buttery and Layfette Room in the Hibernian Hotel, and the Saddle Room in the Shelbourne Hotel. Miranda’s Diary in Image Magazine with its happenings of Dublin society life was inspired by her. She had an affair with dapper good looking and charming man about town and racing driver Vivien Candy, who sadly died a year or so ago. It was perhaps this liaison which prompted her to buy, in 1981, a racy red De Lorean gull wing car, of which she had many happy memories of driving her kids around, and which she held on to until earlier this year when she sold it. After her liaison with Candy, she then had an affair with a very well known Irish television personality, and she and Benjamin divorced in 1984. Although divorced, they remained close, and he spent the final months of his illness with cancer at her then home in Cottesmore Gardens, in Kensington, London, before dying aged only 55 in 1992.

Miranda, it is claimed was the love of Ryanair founder Tony Ryan’s life. He admired her not only as a fantastically beautiful woman but her amazing business brain. Perhaps it was for her he originally bought Castle Lyons Estate at Newcastle, Co. Dublin, for she certainly had a huge input into the restoration and creation of this wonderful house. Her taste was unfaltering and exquisite, and it was she who guided Ryan in the world of art and antiques, and in creating a truly classic estate. She moved to London, selling Farmleigh to the Irish Government, which she said to me “was the right thing to do”, and she bought a Georgian townhouse at Cottesmore Gardens in Kensington. She subsequently sold Cottesmore Gardens when she bought a Palladian Mansion, Wilbury Park, in Wiltshire, in the late 90’s for something of the order of £7m and spent the next few years restoring the property to its former glory, indeed so well so that it was the overall winner of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Building Conservation Award in 2006. Around 2005 she formed a relationship with the 9th Marquess of Londonderry, brother of Jemima Khan’s mother Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Londonderry himself had a rather complicated and tragic marriage background in that what was thought to be the first child and heir to the title by his first wife Nicolette turned out at 14 months old to be the son of singer Georgie Fame, whom she later married, but some twenty years later went on to take her own life. Londonderry was then married to ballet dancer Doreen Wells, but that also ended in divorce some years later.

Within the last eighteen months or so Miranda developed a tumour on her spine and despite a valiant fight against the cancer, and treatment in the U.S., she died in Wiltshire this week.

Whilst based mainly in England, she used return to Dublin for meetings, staying on occasion at The Clarence Hotel by the Liffey. For her 70th birthday she also returned to Dublin and hosted a party at the Guinness Store House, which in essence was really a farewell party for old friends. She spoke affectionately of her time in her young years here and her love for Dublin. Those who attended included the Duke and Duchess of Abercorn, James Mellon a New York Banker, Lord and Lady Ross from Birr, Derek and Joan Milner, and many others.

The legendary beauty and grace of Miranda Iveagh will be greatly missed.

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT ON 2ND JANUARY, 2010.