My friend Annabel Goldsmith had an electric aura that captivated royals and rock stars

I was sitting next to my old friend Annabel Goldsmith last month at Hum Fleming and Zac Goldsmith’s wedding. I was suddenly very close to her, and I realised an extraordinary thing (when you’re near to somebody, you see something in them that you don’t see from a distance). Annabel looked like a painting, both in her colours and the shape of her features; from the line of her eyes, to her nose and her cheeks. It was a look not of beauty but of exquisiteness. There was something in her that radiated.

After the wedding, I wrote to her about it and she said, “Thank you so much”. Then I found a passage of Tennyson about how people who are close up have a much more interesting effect on one, which I told her about. She replied to me: “He’s my favourite author, I read him every night in bed”. And so her last words to me, after nearly seven decades of conversations about less lofty matters, were about Tennyson.

I first met Annabel just after I’d left Eton in 1957, when I was seventeen. I went to a party in Pimlico for Nicolette Harrison, who was marrying Annabel’s brother, Alistair Londonderry. Annabel was sitting on a sofa with a group of other girls, howling with laughter. We were strangers at the time, but she swept me into the fold, saying, “you’re one of the family”. When she married Mark Birley in 1954, one of my brother’s best friends, I saw her even more.

I was there on the opening night of Annabel’s night club in 1963. I was there with American Vogue, who was photographing the opening, and then I went on to become a member for £5 a year. It was such a new conglomeration of people. Annabel was the nucleus of the original Chelsea set who gave London a great boost after the war in the late Forties and Fifties. At the time, nobody had any idea that the club would be the success it was; it was in a basement which was considered awful. But because of Annabel and Mark’s personalities, it became a lynch pin of a group of friends who then became known as “society”.

There was the famous Mabel, who looked after incredibly valuable fur coats at the door of the club. She was wonderful, a real mother figure. If someone had torn the hem of your dress, Mabel would sew it up in the cloakroom. Annabel loved Mabel, and knew how to choose the best people to be around her; none of her staff ever wanted to leave because they all adored her.

I think we realised pretty quickly that Annabel’s was an extraordinary meeting place for a certain group of friends. It was beautifully done, Mark had wonderful taste, and there was delicious food. It also had a tiny dance floor, and Mark used to get all the latest pop songs, with singers like Frankie Avalon and that world of crooners. Every celebrity in the room was crammed onto this dance floor – and they’d smooch too.

At the centre of it all was Annabel, who had this electric aura that raised her above other people, though one didn’t necessarily notice it – she didn’t deliberately turn it on. At her own parties at Ormeley Lodge, following her marriage to Jimmy Goldsmith, she’d often go upstairs and everyone would say “where’s Annabel gone?” and the reply would be “she’s gone upstairs to rest”. I suppose she had a certain shyness underneath it all too.

Nonetheless, she knew how to convene a smattering of royals, politicians and movie stars. Princess Alexandra of Kent was a neighbour who lived next door, Mick Jagger was there often. They just gravitated naturally towards her aura.

In the summer of 1979, I went on holiday to St Tropez with her family. I’d been given the job of driving a little launcher boat between house and beach. I remember the whole family, Goldsmiths and Birleys, piling into the boat with much hilarity.

They were all jumping up and down in excitement, when I noticed that the little boat was rapidly sinking beneath the waves, and water was flooding over the sides. “Sit down, we’re all going to drown”, I remember shouting in panic. “Oh do behave”, Annabel said at the time, and then later screamed with laughter. In years to come, we’d often laugh at the thought of us all drowning in the bay of St Tropez. That was her; she saw the funny side of everything and everyone.

I remember she used to run these ridiculous dog shows at her house in Richmond with the local neighbours. I had a Pekingese at the time, and she had huge, great bawling whippets.

Annabel could also read people completely. She often did it to me when I was feeling low. Almost without knowing, she would ring up and make some date or say something that would bring happiness. She instinctively knew when people were going through a bad time.

As a mother figure, she was never cloying, but was interested in making one better. Some might have found a matriarchal figure like her overpowering, but all her children and grandchildren adored her from the moment they could first talk. Given the strength of feeling towards her within the family, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is inherited by future great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, who won’t even have met her.

The loss of her son Rupert in 1986 had been a terrible blow for her, so she knew what it was like to have pain and suffering. I wrote her a letter about him after his death and she kept it in her bag for the rest of her life.

When Annabel married Jimmy in 1978, she became notorious in the press. It was pretty wild to run off with Jimmy Goldsmith, and we were all surprised because he lived in France, but we adored Jimmy so were also pleased. When the papers got onto it, and she became a kind of celebrity figure, it didn’t change her at all. Most people pretend they hate publicity but, in fact, Annabel didn’t mind the publicity. It was such a compliment to herself in a way; she had no pretence or hypocrisy about her. With her death, British society is losing someone with immense originality. There are not many people left who are like that.

As told to Natasha Leake

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