![]() ![]() Lastly, there is William’s father, William Waldorf Astor II, known as Bill, a prominent Conservative Party politician who saw his reputation ruined in the 1963 Profumo-affair sex scandal (much of it centered at Cliveden), which brought down Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government. The first woman to sit in Parliament and the greatest hostess of her day, Nancy Astor turned Cliveden into a hub of cultural and political intrigue, entertaining everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Edith Wharton to Winston Churchill and Joseph Kennedy at her weekend house parties. His daughter-in-law-and William’s grandmother-Virginia-born Nancy Langhorne Astor is represented by a pair of charcoal studies by John Singer Sargent. Astor, queen of New York society-he decamped in 1891 to England, where he bought two very grand houses, Cliveden and Hever Castle, and donated so many millions to war-relief charities that he was made the first Viscount Astor in 1917. ![]() Tired of feuding with his aunt Caroline- the Mrs. Next up is his great-grandson-and William’s great-grandfather-William Waldorf Astor, said to be the richest American of his generation. A butcher’s son from Walldorf, Germany, John Jacob became the first multi-millionaire in the United States by monopolizing the North American fur trade and investing in booming Manhattan real estate. John Jacob Astor, the founder of the family fortune, looms largest, painted in 1794 by Gilbert Stuart, the official portraitist of George Washington. William’s Astor ancestors greet guests in the front hall. As a child I used to spend hours in his studio playing with his granddaughter Annie Freud, the daughter of Lucian.” (Gaudier-Brzeska was a young French artist killed in the First World War.) “The bronze cast of the original is by Jacob Epstein, the famous sculptor who lived opposite us in Hyde Park Gate. “The bust is of my grandmother Enid Bagnold by her friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,” says Annabel, pointing to a wood sculpture of a determined-looking woman on a nearby table. She has not changed out of the indigo cotton shirt, dark-blue jeans, and knee-high boots she wore for her daily morning horseback ride with William along the Ridgeway, the ancient pre-Roman highway that crosses the grassy hills above their 40-acre property. At 67, she looks a decade younger, her light-brown hair worn loose with bangs, her sea-green eyes sparkling with curiosity, her wide, ready smile “the most welcoming in all of England,” as one acquaintance puts it. Viscountess Astor, to use her formal title, laughs uproariously. It makes me think of my grandmother having the time of her life.” What she was doing on this sofa God only knows! That’s why I never get rid of it. It was pure pink silk from the 1920s with my grandmother’s initials embroidered. When they were digging down and recovering the inside they found this most beautiful brassiere. “And then I went and had it reupholstered. “When my grandmother died, I took a few things,” she continues to explain about the faded chintz sofa. (The dining room alone holds 11 equestrian pictures, most notably Winner of the Oaks 1929, by Sir Alfred Munnings.) In most other English aristocratic houses this room would be referred to as the drawing room, but Annabel says, “We think that sounds too grand.” She is telling me her life story in bits and pieces, her memories stoked by the family heirlooms surrounding her, including one of England’s most important collections of paintings of horses and dogs. We are talking in the vast but cozy pale-yellow library of Ginge Manor, the 17th-century Oxfordshire country house she shares with her husband, William Waldorf Astor III, the fourth Viscount Astor and chairman of Silvergate Media Ltd., an intellectual-property company. ‘This sofa we’re sitting on-the springs are all gone-is my grandmother Lady Clifford’s sofa,” says Annabel Astor, the high-born, well-connected co-founder and executive vice-chairman of OKA Direct, the British home-furnishings retailer. ![]()
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