Lady Anne was the widow of Sir Roderick Percival, who was killed during a test flight of a Hurricane in 1939, and the daughter of Earl Selden, the world’s leading armor theoretician. There is some question whether the earl had ever been inside a tank, but his 1934 work Armored Warfare was a seminal study on its use. Generals Guderian, Rommel, and Brauchitsch admitted reading it, and it is still a standard work at the United States Army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth.
The earl was in his seventies in 1942 and may have supposed his life’s work was behind him. Then the American general came calling. Clay’s first meeting with Earl Selden began simply enough. In a significant breech of decorum, Clay and I appeared without warning at his country home, Haldon House, in Surrey, southwest of London. After we were shown into his study and announced by his butler, Clay said only, “Earl Selden, I am an artilleryman. I need your help.”
The earl had a reputation for being curt and ill-natured. Yet he rose like a young man, beckoning us in. He remains the only man I’ve ever met who did not look ridiculous in an ascot and a smoking jacket. He had a raft of white hair, parted in the middle, and an ivory mustache sculpted with wax, the tips sharp enough to chip ice.
The room looked as if it had not changed since the age of Queen Victoria. Ponderous red swags hung on the windows. Much of the furniture was covered in tufted silk damask. A Bosendorfer piano, the dimensions of an automobile, was in a corner. Dried flowers were in an arrangement on the mantle, as if they had been there all that time. A dozen family photographs in silver frames sat atop the piano. The earl was a noted collector of Wellington and Peninsular War memorabilia, and three mahogany display cases were near a wall.
The session lasted three hours, with Clay and the earl hovering over a contour map I had brought along, using pins and tags. I had never before seen the general take instruction so passively. He had finally met someone who knew more about fighting a war than he did.
At eleven o’clock that evening a woman entered the study. It seemed that a stage light picked her up, illuminating her arresting features and creating an aureola around her hair and shoulders. Music might have swelled and applause rolled down from the seats. I have no other way of describing her entrance. She was followed by a small dog, a white and tan pekinese with a pug nose and bushy tail that swished side to side.
The general and I stood quickly. The woman’s hair was raven black, and she wore it bobbed and tucked in at her neck. Her skin was the color of frost. Her lips were burgundy and full, with a upward lilt, as if she found us Americans amusing. She was wearing an iridescent silk blouse that cast off numberless hues, making her seem illusive and transient. Her eyes shone with knowledge and wit as she drifted across the carpet to the earl.
She bussed her father’s cheek and bid him good night. Her voice was both mature and breathless, a mix of challenge and invitation. Yet all she was doing was saying good night to her father. The earl did not introduce her. Maybe he knew better. Even he could not take his eyes off her. The old man glowed with pride and, it seemed, wonderment. She began toward the door.
General Clay abruptly asked, “Earl Selden, may I borrow some brandy?”
“Why, of course. Rude of me not to have offered.”
Clay turned to her. “Will you have a refreshment with me, ma’am? Some brandy, perhaps?”
The earl almost coughed out his bridgework.
She replied, “I would enjoy that, Major.”
“It’s general, ma’am. General Clay.”
“Yes, undoubtedly.” She smiled. Her teeth must have had some sort of electrical work that made them glow from within. “Have Smalley call me when you and father have finished for the evening.”
“I wouldn’t want to tire your father,” Clay said quickly. “We’re done.”
The earl glowered at Clay in such a manner that I feared for the alliance. He harumphed in the proper British manner, then levered himself out of his chair.
As he passed us, he said, “Good luck, General.” There was a curious tone to his voice. Looking back, I think he was about to add, “You’ll need it,” but declined, perhaps thinking the general deserved whatever came his way.
Anne Percival was born in the home in which we sat, but had spent most of her youth in the East Africa Protectorate, later called the Kenya Colony. Earl Selden owned a cotton and coffee plantation christened New Surrey, so named because it was about the size of the English county. Lady Anne’s upbringing was supervised by her mother and two nannies, one a Welsh woman and the other a Kikuyu. The earl visited infrequently, preferring the study of armor to farming.
A number of young women from Africa entered Wycombe Abbey, the girls’ school, in 1915, most of them tomboys, admired and snubbed for their worldliness, their equestrian ability, and their smattering of native phrases. But Anne Percival also brought a sparkling intellect and relentless spirit and soon developed a scarcely concealed sensuality and provocative candor. A few of the teachers at the school still roll their eyes at her name. She was a confidante to many, a ringleader for all, a girl who broke up cliques and reformed them at will, and a prankster who laughed longest if the joke was on her. She organized a strike against the school’s kitchen over the porridge, and it is believed she organized the throng of girls who tied their Latin teacher to a chair and left her in a room all of one night, to be found by a janitor the next morning. The school sighed with relief when she left, but she was widely and fondly remembered by her classmates.
Lady Anne was married four times. General Stedman once said she “used up her husbands and tossed them aside.” Her first was Edwin Wooleridge, son of the Fleet Street press magnate, whom she left after three years, “having taught him everything and learned nothing,” as she put it, according to Stedman. Her second husband was Baron Fairchild, who thought life on his estate in the Cotswolds might domesticate his new bride. Instead, she wore him down to nothing over the next several years, then returned to the family apartment in London, some say in triumph. Next she married into the Grimaldi family, to a nobleman who had more money than stamina. She lived in Monaco for six years, but left him a juiceless husk. I remember reading about the controversy over the unprecedented annulment in Newsweek.
Her self-prescribed station in life was at the elevated center of everything, whether it was a small conversation, a dinner party, or a gala ball. She demanded, and received as her due, the attention of anyone near her. One might think ill of anyone else for such a requirement, but she wore this mantle with grace and amusement. She had a way with the self-deprecating comment, disarming and endearing.
I have heard that Lady Anne’s father was in a way relieved that she had been widowed, rather than divorced of her last husband, because the usual storm of controversy that followed her would not whip up this time. I don’t know how she took the death of Sir Roderick, but it did not long slow her travels or deter her from her social rounds.
It is popularly believed that Lady Anne devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, stealing in and out of the bedrooms of the powerful and wealthy throughout England and the Continent. I have it on good authority that this was untrue, mostly. But she did nothing to quell these whispers. She enjoyed the notoriety, and everywhere she went she caused an uproar, much as the oars of a skiff leave expanding rings in the water as the boat moves along.