Cara's VERY naughty aunty! Miss Delevingne may try to shock but she'll never match her great-aunt who slept her way through high-society/ July 19, 2013
She had a house in Mayfair, a chauffered Rolls-Royce and household staff on tap. She bought her shoes in their hundreds from Paris or Rome — ‘I can never wear a shoe more than two or three times’ — and to pay for them eyed up every man with a title or a bank-balance.
The polite called her a ‘poule de luxe’ — literally a luxury hen — which means a woman who is a plaything for rich men. What she was called by others, who were less admiring, does not bear printing in a family newspaper.
‘You may think it fun to make love,’ she declared. ‘But if you had to make love to dirty old men as I do, you would think again.’ Yet her amorous undertakings certainly paid the bills.
Cara Delevingne's great-aunt, Doris Viscountess Castleross, pictured in her sun suit posing for Sir John Lavery at Palm Springs in California, made her way from Beckenham to Mayfair via many society beds.
Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, was the most notorious mistress in London Society. ‘I don’t know what you call it exactly,’ she once said vaguely, ‘but it would be fair to say I have reached the height of my profession.’
Indeed, by the mid-1930s, Doris had. Tall, blonde, sexy, and motor-mouthed, she clearly passed on some of her magnetic qualities to her great-neice, the supermodel Cara Delevingne, dubbed the new Kate Moss.
But no matter how hard Cara tries — being caught dropping a packet of mysterious white powder, acquiring a new tattoo to flaunt in front of royalty — she could never shock like her naughty auntie Doris.
Doris was nothing short of outrageous. With fabulously beautiful legs and a small-boned, voluptuous body, she looked her best in a bathing-suit or in shorts and wore these garments whenever she could.
She had exquisite taste in clothes and soon decided that her legs were worthy of a new pair of silk stockings each day — they came from Paris, darling, and cost a guinea a pair.
Oh my: Cara Delevingne may make jaws drop with her antics, but her great-aunt Doris beats her in the scandals game
Oh my: Cara Delevingne may make jaws drop with her antics, but her great-aunt Doris beats her in the scandals game
When she entered a restaurant, all heads turned — with her sparkling good looks, she might have stepped out of one of those velvet-lined jewel-cases from Cartier which were so regularly delivered to her home.
‘You should write a book and call it Around The World In 80 Beds,’ snorted one of her jealous rivals on the society circuit. She should have — it would have been the raciest read of the century, and an unrivalled account of social mountaineering.
From modest suburban beginnings, Doris came to rule the Mayfair set between the wars. Anxious wives and mothers were soon warning their husbands and grown-up sons to avoid ‘accidentally’ passing her door.
Doris took life by the scruff of the neck. She reasoned her surname, Delevingne, might be too difficult for rich men to spell on a cheque, so she simplified it to Delavigne. (The rest of the family — Cara included — have kept their original name.)
Once she’d mastered the social conventions of her new upper-class set, this sexy, sassy, rude and utterly beguiling piece of work set off in pursuit of her fortune.
How did she carry it off? ‘She is the most arrogant, temperamental, foul-mouthed and ecstatically beautiful woman in London,’ raved one of her admirers. ‘She had only to raise an eyebrow — it was easy.’
Doris contemplated her triumphs differently. ‘An Englishwoman’s bed is her castle,’ she said forthrightly — making no secret from whence her fortune had come.
Doris spent her formative years in the dusty London suburb of Beckenham in a small terrace house which her father left early each morning in pursuit of his business as a butter importer.
But he was determined to improve himself. With his fancy surname, he let it be known he came from an obscure but noble Belgian family. If so, it must have been a very distant ancestral connection. The truth is that as far back as his great-grandfather, John Delevingne, an engraver from Liverpool, the family was as English as roast beef.
With no particular role-model to emulate but with a burning desire to get ahead — whatever it took — daughter Doris one day met the actress Gertrude Lawrence, soon to be celebrated as Noel Coward’s most famous leading lady.
Two years older than Doris, Gertie also came from the London suburbs and was herself very determinedly on her way up. With an early failed marriage, she’d become the mistress of a Household Cavalry officer who installed her in a West End flat and taught her how to dress and behave in high society.
When Doris joined this upwardly-mobile young woman as her flatmate, her ambitions suddenly became clear — and after Gertie proclaimed ‘I am going to be the most celebrated actress in London,’ Doris responded, ‘And I am going to marry a Lord!’
An early step in that direction was the Honourable Tom Mitford, heir to the second Lord Redesdale and brother to the famous Mitford girls — the novelist Nancy; she-devil Diana, Lady Mosley; sweetheart Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire; and fascist-loving Unity.
Tom, himself a bit of a fascist, wasn’t really Doris’s cup of tea however — apart from his questionable politics he was no great lover, and there simply wasn’t enough money sloshing around to hold her interest for long.
More here: dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2370612/Cara-Delevingnes-great-aunt-Doris-slept-way-high-society.html