My last summer in London was spent in the top bedroom of a shoebox flat on Ebury Street with moldy walls and a small, south facing window that ensured the air was piping hot most of the time. I didn't care. I was living less than 50 yards away from what was formerly London's most prestigious address, Eaton Square. One evening I went to the local bar, and, with the tactlessness of the truly broke, asked the woman in front of me what she did for a living. When she muttered something back, clearly embarrassed, I asked again only louder, "Philanthro-what? I've never even heard of it!" Thankfully, her friend stepped in: "Darling, it means she's rich. Look at the rock on her finger—it's so heavy she's got arthritis."
The problem with any fashionable address or club or destination is that somewhere along the line the plebs—the striving middle classers so desperate to feel rich by association—start to find their way in. The fact that a 22-year-old me was spitting distance from Eaton Square for $990 a month, crammed in a house with five other writers trying to make it, is evidence of this. The square built its name on socialites and aristocrats having affairs and plotting duels, on Mitford sisters and Neville Chamberlain; now it boasts empty flats bought up by Russian oligarchs hiding money and nouveau riche philanthropists feeling the shame of having any. Nothing has really changed except the year, then. Which is more or less the whole argument of Alexander Larman's latest book, The Secrets of Eaton Square: Sex, Scandal, and Infamy on the Road to Buckingham Palace.
Larman is well placed to make it, having spent a large part of his career reporting on the grandest and grubbiest corners of the House of Windsor, whose headquarters is just down the road—there is no vault of sordid gossip Larman can't crank open. The Secrets of Eaton Square moves house by house, rather than by decade, as it examines the illustrious street. You can see, after reading it, that this is the only honest way to write about the square. Its inhabitants, unlike other pockets of London, like the Primrose Hill set or the Sloane Rangers, were never a set or community. There was no camaraderie or physical closeness one gets with their neighbors. So Larman treats each dwelling as its own crime scene taped up for examination.
Take 19th century American banker-turned-philanthropist George Peabody in number 80, who loved his adopted city of London so much that he invested around half of his fortune in housing its poor. In number 37 lived Joachim von Ribbentrop—a former champagne salesman turned Nazi ambassador to Britain, and, according to Larman, "arrogant buffoon," and lover of Wallis Simpson. Larman believes he deserves his own book, and so do I. He was renting the house from none other than future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Diana Mitford, Mitford sister, writer, and fascist, resided in number 2, which she moved into with a "small staff" upon her divorce from Bryan Guinness, in order to be closer to her married lover, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, whom she later married after the death of his wife, Cimmie.
With each chapter we get the good stuff; like the nosy neighbor who's been invited in for tea and refuses to leave. There is Vivien Leigh, who moved into number 54 with Laurence Olivier in 1957 and, during her time spent there, proceeded to fall apart in full view of Belgravia. Her mental health collapsed, leading to the end of her marriage, and then, seven years later, would die in Eaton Square from tuberculosis, prompting her now-famous complaint: Why couldn't she have a nice, respectable illness like cancer? Larman renders her days there in a "relatively civilized regime de vivre," with her mornings spent chain-smoking in a replica of her Gone with the Wind bed while her secretary handled her fan mail and prepared her lunches of smoked salmon and gin and tonics.
No street this famous escapes its own murder mystery, and Eaton Square's creepy campfire story involves the 7th Earl of Lucan, who had, by his 30s, traded a banking career for professional gambling, married, had three children, and lost custody of all of them after a bitter separation that cost him some £20,000 in legal fees he didn't have. On the night of November 7, 1974, his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was bludgeoned to death in the basement of the family home in Belgravia; his estranged wife, badly injured herself, escaped and told police her husband had done it. Lucan drove to a friend's house in Sussex that night and wrote a letter claiming that he had simply interrupted an intruder attacking his wife, and vanished. His car turned up abandoned near the coast with a bloodied length of lead pipe in the boot. He was never seen again. An inquest jury named him Rivett's killer, and he was declared legally dead in 2016, 42 years after he vanished.
In that same year, Larman notes in the epilogue of the book, Eaton Square was named the most expensive street in Britain to buy on, with an average house price of £17 million. By then, so much Russian money had poured in since the Soviet collapse that locals started calling it Red Square. Also, Margaret Thatcher had moved in and out, and Andrew Lloyd Webber had a house on it that he swears was haunted by a poltergeist. "It is a place where literal royalty has mixed with showbiz royalty, where playboys have lived next door to dowagers, and where the ability to spend money ostentatiously marks its inhabitants out from virtually everyone else," Larman writes.
The book ends on a question of what kind of man will inhabit it next. Larman imagines Prince Harry, the ultimate social climber, drawn to a place like Eaton Square, "bored with his life among the chickens and jamjars of Montecito"—a joke that became funnier two months after this book had been published, when Harry actually did announce he was moving back to Britain. Although he settled his family in the Cotswolds, he could still use a nice flat in London.
The Secrets of Eaton Square: Sex, Scandal, and Infamy on the Road to Buckingham Palace
by Alexander Larman
St. Martin's Press, 320 pp., $31
Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
