TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011590/0115520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13KB | 258 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 66

Not Quite Your Usual Historian


Champion of imprisoned writers, chronicler of monarchs, LADY
ANTONIA FRASER stirs controversy without even trying

By BONNIE ANGELO


    She is the kind of woman Maureen O'Hara used to play in
big-budget costume movies: Lady Antonia Fraser, beautiful,
hot-blooded, titled daughter of a noble line, turreted castles
in her background and the whiff of scandal in her past. But the
portrait of a romance-novel heroine slips out of focus with a
closer look, for that same Lady Antonia is an internationally
established historian, the author of best-selling biographies
and a social activist. She is mother of six, protective wife
of renowned playwright Harold Pinter, and also dashes off
detective stories, wafts along the British TV celeb circuit,
and displays an admirable tennis serve.

    But forget Goody Two-Shoes. This paragon wades into
controversy with brio. She has publicly criticized Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies and rallied British
writers to think more politically. She marches for Soviet
Jewry. She organizes petitions and badgers officials to help
free dissident writers in jails across Europe and Africa. One
of these has made history: playwright Vaclav Havel, the new
Czech President. For years, from his prison cell, he exchanged
letters with Pinter. The couple will visit Havel to share his
triumph in February.

    She speaks her mind. And Fleet Street's columnists speak
theirs, making the high-profile Lady Antonia a high-priority
target. A succinct explanation for this targeting is offered
by the London Daily Mail's senior feature writer, Geoffrey
Levy: "She's an aristocrat. She's beautiful. She's a celebrity.
And she is a successful writer. She is an irresistible target."
Her father, the seventh Earl of Longford, sums up Fleet
Street's anti-Antoniasm in a word: "Jealousy!"

    At home in London's fashionable Kensington, Antonia Pakenham
Fraser Pinter is a composition by Gainsborough. Her English
skin would make peaches weep in their cream. Blue eyes seem to
savor a secret, shared but not revealed. She is tall, not
willowy but womanly, and at 57 she is, by any standard,
beautiful.

    Harold Pinter looks in for a bit of householdish chat on his
way to his studio in an adjacent mews house. Such an easy,
conventional moment, but achieved, some ten years ago, at such
a personal price.

    Lady Antonia -- "the title has cachet," notes her agent
Michael Shaw -- is dismissive of the personal attacks. "My
father brought me up not to mind criticism or ridicule," she
says. Lord Longford, a former Labour Cabinet minister, has
endured both in his crusades against pornography and for
prisoners' rights. The disparagement, in his family's view,
stems from the fact that he, a nobleman who turned socialist,
violated Britain's class order.

    Antonia much admires this man with the courage of his
convictions, the progenitor of Britain's fabled Literary
Longfords, a family unmatched -- possibly in history -- for its
eight esteemed writers in three generations publishing
contemporaneously. They are prizewinning and prodigious: at
last count their output topped 80 volumes, most of them digging
deep into British and Irish history. Scholarly research is the
family hallmark.

    The brightest star in the family firmament is Antonia. Her
mother recalls that this precocious firstborn "always wrote,
even before she could write -- poems, little stories. She could
read before she had any idea of the meaning of the words. Frank
and I called her the wonder child." Which is not to say she was
candy-coated. Young Antonia was fiercely competitive, on the
tennis courts with her brother Thomas and on the football team
at a boys school that admitted a handful of girls on equal
footing. The genesis, perhaps, of her view of woman-as-equal.

    As a student at Oxford, Antonia Pakenham (the family name)
was the centerpiece of an oh, so uppah-crusty circle. "She was
already a bit of a star at Oxford," says her father. But even
as swains queued eagerly for her attention, "all of the time
there was a more profound, intellectual side."

    At 22 she published her first book, on the mythical King
Arthur. Her typewriter never cooled down, even after she
married Hugh Fraser, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and
produced three sons and three daughters. The result: 23
volumes.

    All the while she was ubiquitous on the TV-radio "chat show"
circuit, bright and quippy for Call My Bluff, articulate and
opinionated on the weighty Question Time. Last month Americans
tuned to a highbrow quiz program on National Public Radio could
hear Lady Antonia deftly identify an arcane quotation: "It's
Milton -- Lycidas."

    She gained her place as a major historian and writer in 1969
with her definitive biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, a best
seller in eight languages. Then came Puritan ruler Oliver
Cromwell and Charles II, the Restoration King.

    Each famous subject, perhaps not coincidentally, had a
personal tie to her family. Cromwell granted her Anglo-Irish
forebears land in West Meath in the heart of Ireland. (The
Longfords, originally Protestant, converted to Catholicism one
by one in the 1940s, in individual decisions.) The family is
directly descended from Charles II. "Most people in England
are," she chuckles, "and I'm no exception." All, of course,
from "the wrong side of the blanket." She likes the fact that
her line stems from the classy Duchess of Cleveland rather than
the King's more ordinary mistress, actress Nell Gwyn.

    Some of the royal genes crop out now and then. Author
Michael Holroyd, clearly a partisan, portrays Antonia entering
a crowded room: "There's a stateliness about her. It's almost
like a member of the royal family; people feel they should make
a little bow. Some people are dazzled, some feel overawed. She
can intimidate some and charm others. It's chemistry -- and
possibly height. But as soon as she laughs, the formality is
completely dissolved." Adds playwright Arthur Miller, a
frequent guest of the Pinters: "She has great elegance as a
writer and as a person." Marigold Johnson, a devoted friend
since Oxford days who is married to the sharply conservative
writer and historian Paul Johnson, muses, "Men like her better
than women."

    For a change of pace and a piece of change, the prolific
Antonia takes breaks between works of history, which eat up
three to four years, to write mystery stories featuring female
detective Jemima Shore, who has made the leap to TV. But when
she first joined the Crime Writers' Association, she was
snubbed. "This glittering butterfly was too much for them,"
says an observer. Eventually, her seriousness won them over and
-- what else? -- she became chairman.

    Beguiled by power, she writes of kings and queens. "And,"
she interjects, "the other side of the picture, the powerless.
The powerful have such an extraordinary effect on the lives of
people around them." This led to the work she found most
demanding, The Weaker Vessel, her prize-winning tapestry of the
harsh lot dealt to 17th century women. Her current project is
the suggestion of old friend Robert Gottlieb, editor of the New
Yorker: the six wives of Henry VIII, combining her three
specialties, royalty, power and women.

    Her fascination with women of power resulted in The Warrior
Queens, her last book, an analysis of women rulers who led
their people into battle, from British Queen Boadicea in 60
A.D. to Israel's Golda Meir, India's Indira Gandhi and Prime
Minister Thatcher, triumphant in the Falklands. Fraser
identified history's typecasting of women leaders: the
appendages, those who gain power by virtue of being wives,
widows or daughters of a male ruler; the honorary male who
rejects her femininity; and the female chieftain who is either
"supernaturally chaste or preternaturally lustful." Fraser
observes that when a woman holds power, "her sexuality is
always relevant. That fascinates me."

    Assessing Thatcher, Fraser compares her to Queen Elizabeth
I. "She's like a 16th century queen -- not a modern one,
powerless, gracious, noncontentious. Her handling of her
femininity is astonishingly similar to that of Elizabeth I. She
says, `I'm feminine, don't you forget it. I'll dress as a
woman, but at the same time, I'm as good as a man.' She's like
Elizabeth: `I've got the heart and stomach of a king!' She's
old style, with courtiers and endless speculation about her
favorites. Look at that photograph of her with her Cabinet --
it says it all: she is the queen, among her dinner-jacketed
knights. I think the fact that she has no woman in the Cabinet
is extremely significant. Another woman would spoil the
picture!"

    As a strong feminist, she voted for Thatcher in her first
election, but now is deeply troubled about the Prime Minister
and "the socially divisive effects of her policies that make
it increasingly difficult for the really poor, who are very
often hopeless." When Fraser expressed these concerns, she
sparked charges that she was a "chateau-bottled socialist" who
has prospered under the Thatcherism she deplores. In rebuttal,
championing the independence of writers, Antonia snaps, "In
France they would have given me a medal." She readily
acknowledges that personal attacks sting. "Yes. Absolutely.
Fair criticism is hurtful; unfair criticism is doubly hurtful."
But Lady Antonia is past her Perfect Woman stage. That ended
in 1975, when Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter discovered each
other. Then came the gossip, the headlines, the charges in
divorce court. Five turbulent years later they were married.
(Both former spouses have since died.)

    Through it all, her staunchly Catholic family stood by her.
Says Lady Longford: "From the word go, Antonia wanted a
literary life. Her first husband was a Conservative M.P. I
could see that wasn't really the kind of life she was meant
for. What she is doing now with Harold and on her own perfectly
fits in with everything."

    The gilded young aristocrat at Oxford and the Jewish lad
from London's East End would never have intersected. "But it
was our great good luck," Antonia says, "that by the time we
met, we were both recognized." Opposites, fully formed,
attracted.

    How do two famous talents under the same roof manage the
egos, the stresses? She replies with a laugh, "A lot of our
sentences begin, `I completely understand that you, too, are
having a rotten time, but . . . ' We read each other's things.
We talk about them." A London critic comments that "living with
Pinter has been a terrific influence for the better on her
writing."

    "He wins on some things. I win on some things, too," she
says. She wins on opera, he on cricket. But Antonia casts
herself as the junior talent. "I don't criticize Harold's work.
I influence Harold, I contribute to his work by living with
him, by talking to him." She contributes in another way
repeatedly cited by friends: Pinter's manner is as angular and
abrupt as his characters, but, observes a friend, "Antonia
smooths over the offenses before the evening is out. She is
quite good as stage manager."

    Marigold Johnson pinpoints Pinter's greatest effect on
Antonia: "She has become a lot more involved in public issues,
a much more public figure." And she is planted distinctly to
the left of her days as wife of a Tory M.P.

    Activist Antonia is deeply committed to writers imprisoned
for their written words. "I feel passionately about this," she
declares, and she leads the cause for English PEN. Holroyd,
former PEN president, sings her praises: "She knows when to
press and when not to; she can let loose the dogs on them, or
she can charm them. Pinter tends to blow his top; she's got a
great deal of common sense." Arthur Miller, longtime advocate
for imprisoned writers, concurs: "She is very effective."

    She regularly writes to the prisoners: "We may never hear
from them but we keep writing, for years." She rejoices that
now for the first time Russian writers are in PEN and Czech
writers are back in the fold. "It's a labor of Sisyphus," she
sighs. "Just as they are let out in Russia, they've increased
in Turkey and Kenya."

    The kaleidoscopic Lady Antonia, a dishy blue-blood
intellectual, seems tailor-made as the heroine of a romantic
novel. Pity that Fraser the writer shuns that pop genre -- it
would make a lively autobiography.