Harold pinter and antonia fraser: beauty and the beast

Harold Pinter with his wife Lady Antonia, who reveals her love for the playwright in her new book “Must you go?” Their extraordinary love affair began that night. It lasted until his death

33 years later on Christmas Eve 2008, aged 78. But in the mid-Seventies, when it all started, it proved a media sensation.“We were never shocked again in the same way,” says one seasoned

media commentator. “It had huge gossip potential. There had been nothing else like it and there hasn’t been since.” What made it so remarkable was the fact that Pinter and Fraser were

extremely well known public figures who both dazzled in their very different worlds. She was a leading historical biographer and beautiful society hostess; he was the brilliant but brutal

playwright, author of The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. The fact that they came from such different worlds – she was the eldest child of the Earl of Longford; he the only son of a Jewish

East End tailor – only added to the intrigue. “They were as incongruous as Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller and equally as glamorous,” says the commentator. “And it shows you just what

different worlds they inhabited, that they had never before met despite both being so accomplished.” Antonia was born in London in 1932, the first of eight children of Frank Pakenham, later

Lord Longford, and Elizabeth Harman. “She dazzled us all the moment she could speak,” her mother said of Antonia whose childhood home in Oxford, where her father taught politics at Christ

Church and where she studied, was always “full of dons” and such friends as Isaiah Berlin and John Betjeman. Pinter, meanwhile, grew up in working-class Hackney, East London, where he

attended the local grammar school before training as an actor at which he earned very little – “six shillings a week as an actor and tuppence halfpenny as a poet”, he once explained. Before

Pinter found success he and his first wife, actress Vivien Merchant, shared two rooms in Chiswick. She was the main breadwinner at the beginning: Pinter would take their infant son Daniel to

the theatre so she could breastfeed him before performances. A few months before Pinter’s death, Lady Antonia, 77, reflected on what it was that had made their relationship so long and

happy. “I find Harold a very interesting person which is not surprising. And I suspect he finds me interesting. I can’t think of two more different things than the plays of Harold Pinter and

the historical biographies of Antonia Fraser. So there is absolutely no competition. It didn’t matter where we came from, it mattered where we were going.” The fallout of their affair was

magnified by the fame of their respective spouses. Hugh Fraser, to whom Antonia had been married for 19 years was a Tory MP and a descendant of Scottish aristocracy. Pinter’s wife Vivien was

a respected actress who never recovered from her devastation at losing her much-loved husband with whom she had suffered years of financial struggle before he found success. When Pinter

left her, Vivien made public her hatred for Antonia and, in the era before the no- fault divorce, cited her as the other woman in her divorce petition. Hugh Fraser visited her twice to try

to discourage her from doing so. When he failed, there was a tabloid dissection of Fraser’s sexual history. “I look back on it in amazement,” Antonia once said. “We were two writers in our

40s who decided to live together. But it was so intense that it probably did scar me and these things inevitably have terrible spin-offs on your family.” The fact that Antonia had six

children only added to the scale of the scandal. Vivien never recovered from Pinter’s’ rejection and died of alcohol poisoning seven years later. As far as anyone knows, the last time Pinter

and his devastated son Daniel met was at Vivien’s funeral. The loss of his son’s love affected the playwright to the end. Sir Hugh, as he later became, appears to have been much more

sanguine about the whole thing. After Pinter proposed, Antonia invited him to her marital home where – as well as talking over this delicate matter – Pinter drank whisky and Sir Hugh brandy

while they discussed Proust and cricket. Their coup de foudre had proved no mere dalliance. Pinter began recording their romance in his poetry – “the quality of his love is in the poems he’s

written to me,” Antonia once said – and friends were still commenting on their remarkable and touching rapport after 30 years of marriage. They were often seen lunching à deux in Le Caprice

or dining near their Holland Park home, sometimes arguing, always listening. For, as well as a deep romantic attachment between this real-life beauty and beast – Pinter was no oil painting

– they were also intellectual equals who each understood the other’s creativity. “Well, of course Antonia has a brilliant mind,” Pinter explained in an interview four years before his death.

“We have a lot of really energetic but also clinical, even pedantic, debates about language. And we enjoy that. She’s no pushover intellectually.” Until now, however, Antonia has chosen to

reveal very little about the circumstances surrounding their chance meeting, their years together, and the pain of watching her husband succumb to a fi nal illness just over a year ago. But

next week the biographer’s latest book will be published, partly based on her diaries and it promises to shed new light on their lives together. “In essence,” Fraser writes, “it is a love

story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between.” The couple were fi rst seen

publicly together in April 1975 at the opening night of his new play, No Man’s Land. Antonia, then 42, was described as a “profound admirer of his literary works” who saw the fi rst-night

performance from a seat in the stalls bought by its author. Vivien was at home recuperating from pneumonia and, four months later – three weeks after the breakdown of her marriage was

revealed – gave an interview in which she said that this was the fi rst time she began to have suspicions her husband was unfaithful (between 1962 and 1969 he also had an affair with the

broadcaster Joan Bakewell of which Vivien was never aware). “A few days later I picked up the paper and there was a picture of my husband and old ‘Flipping Irons’, saying they had been

together at the first night.’ Old Flipping Irons? ‘Yes, you know. Big feet. HER. It’s a Lancashire phrase – it means someone you don’t much care for. It’s always the wife who’s the last to

know, isn’t it? “He is possessed by Lady Antonia – she has cast a spell over him. How she can do it with six children to look after I don’t know.” Her spirited comments led the legendary

Daily Express columnist Jean Rook to declare in her column: “Mrs Pinter’s bubbling, spitting, cauldron-hot fury – real-life stuff she puts across as strongly as she’s ever played Shakespeare

– is compulsive listening.” Meanwhile, her husband and Mrs Fraser were planning their future. In October 1975, the Daily Express reported: “The irresistible forces which drew [them]

together have resulted in what most knew was inevitable: they have set up house together.” And, it seems, rarely left each other’s company after that.