Lesley Blanch, age three © Lesley Blanch Archive
Lesley Blanch was born in London in 1904. At heart a nomad, her lifelong passion has been for Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East. She has spent the greater part of her life travelling about those remote areas her books record so vividly. She states: "I have always had a strong appetite for life and for loving."
Her father was cultivated and idle, and spent his time in museums and galleries, while her mother longed to travel, but never did. Blanch says, "I was brought up to read a great deal. My parents were always broke, but had beautiful old things, and I used to make up stories about them." She continues, “My father used to recite a poem to me that I specially loved, I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby and Tales of Far Kashmir. My mother used to read The Koran for breakfast in bed which she found very stimulating. My father would read Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year because he said the descriptions were so ghastly it made daily life seem so much more agreeable. I would be in my room getting ready for school and reading Carlyle's History of the French Revolution; I had a thing about tumbrils and all that. It was not exactly a conventional household. Of course school (St Paul's) was a letdown."
1942 London. Lesley Blanch by Cecil Beaton © The Condé Nast Publications Inc
From about the age of four, a mysterious family friend whom Lesley Blanch only ever refers to as 'The Traveller' occasionally blew into her nursery, muffled in heavy furs and bearing gifts of Fabergé eggs and icons. Full of the fairytales of Russia, "He looked like Nureyev with slanting eyes." She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her in the grips of a lifelong obsession. Blanch describes her search for her great love, and the Russia he had planted within her, in her memoir Journey into the Mind's Eye. Later, she was among the very few who adventured across Stalin's Soviet Union, tracing history and literature rather than politics — "I went to Moscow and Leningrad because of my interest in Pushkin."
Blanch studied painting at the Slade; Oliver Messel and Rex Whistler were among her contemporaries. She went on to do private commissions, portraits and book jackets for T.S. Eliot at Faber, "A very grave, quiet, polite man," for whom she also edited and wrote an introduction to a book of illustrated verse by John Dryden. However, she soon turned to journalism, “It turned out that I express myself better in writing. And I had to earn my living, you know. I have always had to earn my living.” Articles like her profile of Pushkin for Time and Tide, and 'Anti-Beige, A plea for the Scarlet Woman' for Harper's Bazaar were remarked. From 1937-44 Lesley Blanch was features editor of British Vogue, "Writing on everything but fashion — theatre, films, books, people". She covered various aspects of Britain at war for the Ministry of Information, and documented the lives of women in the forces with her friend the photographer Lee Miller. She worked also as a film critic for a year. "When I lived in London during the Blitz, three flats were shattered from under me — by the end of it I wanted a change."
1948 Bulgaria. Lesley Blanch and Romain Gary © Lesley Blanch Archive
Then she met Romain Kacew (later changed to Romain Gary), a Russian-born French navigator with the Lorraine Squadron of General de Gaulle's Free French Forces. The couple married in 1945 and left to live in Bulgaria where Gary was sent en poste — Blanch was never to return to England other than as a visitor. Gary spent every available hour working on his novel. Lesley says, "He was always going to be a great writer. His mother had decided that."
Life in the French Diplomatic Service took them from the Balkans to Paris, Berne, New York and Los Angeles. From these home bases they extended their travels further — to Turkey, North Africa, Mexico, Central America ... When not travelling or socializing, the couple would sit snug in dressing gowns, writing their books in long-hand as neither one had learned to type. "We understood each other perfectly about work and had the same sense of humour, and we both loved animals, all kinds. He used to say, 'Lesley doesn't mind my infidelities, she is very eighteenth-century'."
1957 Hollywood. Christmas card drawn by Lesley Blanch of herself and Romain Gary writing "snug in dressing gowns" © Lesley Blanch Archive
Lesley Blanch's first, bestselling book, The Wilder Shores of Love, was published in 1954. She writes, "There are two sorts of romantic: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving". Her book pioneered a new kind of group biography which focused on women escaping the boredom of convention. "When I wrote The Wilder Shores of Love, over fifty years ago now, my title coined a phrase which I still hear people use, or sometimes see in the press — 'the wilder shores of Westminster' in a piece on stormy politics, or 'the wilder shores of romanticism' on a new fashion."
1956 Hollywood. Lesley Blanch on the terrace © Lesley Blanch Archive
Romain Gary's last posting was as French consul general in Hollywood. In 1956 he won the most prestigious literary award in France, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Les racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven). And it was during this time that Lesley Blanch wrote what she considers to be her best book, The Sabres Of Paradise, which was published in 1960.
As bestselling authors, the couple were invited everywhere. Blanch says: "We both loved it. And we knew everybody: Aldous and Maria Huxley, Igor Stravinsky and his wife Vera, George Cukor, who became a great friend, Gary Cooper, Charles Boyer — everyone interesting. James Mason, Sopia Loren, David Selznick ... Grand Hollywood parties? Oh no, there was never enough money for us to do that. But we had a Russian cook, and it was sometimes very amusing to give a dinner for, oh, Cecil Beaton and Laurence Olivier and Peter Ustinov and Leslie Caron —- who was one of the few intriguing women there at that time." When the ambitious, young actress Jean Seberg came with her husband to one of the Gary's star-studded suppers, it marked the beginning of the end of two marriages. In 1962, Romain Gary and Lesley Blanch divorced.
1960 Hollywood. Christmas dinner with Aldous Huxley and his scientist brother, Julian. Lesley Blanch says: "This photograph was taken a few months before Aldous' house burned to the ground and all his papers lost. No fire trucks could reach him in time as the hill roads were blocked with sightseers enjoying the specatacle" © Lesley Blanch Archive