Piers Dudgeon - The Woman of Substance - The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford

Of secrets, she writes in Everything to Gain , ‘there were so many in our family . . . I never wanted to face those secrets from my childhood. Better to forget them; better still to pretend they did not exist. But they did. My childhood was constructed on secrets layered one on top of the other.’ In Her Own Rules , Meredith Stratton quantifies the challenge of the project: ‘For years she had lived with half-truths, had hidden so much, that it was difficult to unearth it all now.’

Secrets produce rumour, which challenges the literary detective to run down the truth at the heart of the most fantastic storylines. Known facts act like an adhesive for the calcium layers of fictional storyline which make up the ‘pearl’ that is the author’s work. These secrets empower Barbara’s best fiction. They find expression in the desire for revenge, which Edith will have felt and which drives Emma Harte’s rise in A Woman of Substance . They find expression in the unnatural force of Audra Kenton’s determination in Act of Will that her daughter Christina will live a better life than she, and in the driving ambition of dispossessed Maximilian West in The Women in His Life .

My project is not, therefore, as simple as matching Barbara’s character with the woman of substance she created in the novels, but I believe it takes us a lot closer to explaining why A Woman of Substance is the eighth biggest-selling novel in the history of the world than merely observing such a match or studying the marketing plan. That is not to belittle the marketing of this novel, which set new records in the industry; nor is it to underestimate the significance of the timing of the venture; nor to underrate the talents of the author in helping fashion Eighties’ Zeitgeist .

It is just that these ‘secrets’, which come to us across a gulf of one hundred years, have exerted an impressive power in the lives of these women, and although we live in a time when the market rules, deep down we still reserve our highest regard for works not planned for the market but which come from just such an elemental drive of the author, especially when, as in the case of A Woman of Substance , that drive finds so universal a significance among its readers in the most pressing business of our times – that of rising in the world.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Party

‘The ambience in the dining room was decidedly romantic, had an almost fairytale quality . . . The flickering candlelight, the women beautiful in their elegant gowns and glittering jewels, the men handsome in their dinner jackets, the conversation brisk, sparkling, entertaining . . .’

Voice of the Heart

The Bradfords’ elegant fourteen-room apartment occupies the sixth floor of a 1930s landmark building overlooking Manhattan’s East River. The approach is via a grand ground-floor lobby, classical in style, replete with red-silk chaise longues, massive wall-recessed urns, and busy uniformed porters skating around black marbled floors.

A mahogany-lined lift delivers visitors to the front door, which, on the evening of the party, lay open, leaving arrivals naked to the all-at-once gaze of the already gathered. Fortunately I had been warned about the possibility of this and had balanced the rather outré effect of my gift – a jar of Yorkshire moorland honey (my bees, Barbara’s moor) – by cutting what I hoped would be a rather sophisticated, shadowy, Jack-the-Ripper dash with a high-collared leather coat. If I was successful, no one was impolite enough to mention it.

One is met at the door by Mohammed, aptly named spiriter away of material effects – coats, hats, even, to my chagrin, gifts. Barbara arrives and we move swiftly from reception area, which I would later see spills into a bar, to the drawing room, positioned centrally between dining room and library, and occupying the riverside frontage of an apartment which must measure all of five thousand square feet.

The immediate impression is of classical splendour – spacious rooms, picture windows, high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. These three main rooms, an enfilade and open-doored to one another that night, arise from oak-wood floors bestrewn with antique carpets, elegant ground for silk-upholstered walls hung with Venetian mirrors, and, as readers of her novels would expect, a European mix of Biedermeier and Art Deco furniture, Impressionist paintings and silk-upholstered chairs.

This is not, as it happens, the apartment that she draws on in her fiction. The Bradfords have been here for ten years only. Between 1983 and 1995 they lived a few blocks away, many storeys higher up, with views of the East River and exclusive Sutton Place from almost every room. But it was here that Allison Pearson came to interview Barbara in 1999, and, swept up in the glamour, took the tack that from this similarly privileged vantage point it is ‘easy to forget that there is a world down there, a world full of pain and ugliness’, while at the same time wanting some of it: ‘Any journalist going to see Barbara Taylor Bradford in New York,’ she wrote, ‘will find herself asking the question I asked myself as I stood in exclusive Sutton Place, craning my neck and staring up at the north face of the author’s mighty apartment building. What has this one-time cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post got that I haven’t?’ It was a good starting point, but Allison’s answer: ‘Well, about $600 million,’ kept the burden of her question at bay.

Before long the river draws my gaze, a pleasure boat all lit up, a full moon and the clear night sky, and even if Queens is not exactly the Houses of Parliament there is great breadth that the Thames cannot match, and a touch of mystery from an illuminated ruin, a hospital or sometime asylum marooned on an island directly opposite. It is indeed a privileged view.

Champagne and cocktails are available. I opt for the former and remember my daughter’s advice to drink no more than the top quarter of a glass. She, an American resident whose childhood slumbers were disturbed by rather more louche, deep-into-the-night London dinner parties, had been so afeared that I would disgrace myself that she had earlier sent me a copy of Toby Young’s How To Lose Friends & Alienate People .

I find no need for it here. People know one another and are immediately, but not at all overbearingly, welcoming. In among it all, Barbara doesn’t just Europeanise the scene, she colloquialises it. For me that night she had the timbre of home and the enduring excitement of the little girl barely out of her teens who had not only the guts but the joie de vivre to get up and discover the world when that was rarely done. She is fun. I would have thought so then, and do so now, and at once see that no one has any reason for being here except to enjoy this in her too.

It is a fluid scene. People swim in and out of view, and finding myself close to the library I slip away and find a woman alone on the far side of the room looking out across the street through a side window. Hers is the first name I will remember, though by then half a dozen have been put past me. I ask the lady what can possibly be absorbing her. I see only another apartment block, more severe, brick built, stark even. ‘I used to live there,’ she says. ‘My neighbour was Greta Garbo . . . until she died.’ This, then, was where the greatest of all screen goddesses found it possible finally to be alone, or might have done had it not been for my interlocutor.

‘Where do you live now?’ I venture.

She looks at me quizzically, as if I should know. ‘In Switzerland and the South of France. New York only for the winter months.’

Then I make the faux pas of the evening, thankful that only she and I will have heard it: ‘What on earth do you do ?’