<\/a> Only a couple of weeks ago, 86-year-old Nicky Haslam, the legendary interior designer, writer, social arbiter, partygoer, magazine editor, cabaret singer, art director, and indefatigable man-about-town announced in a newspaper interview that on Christmas he would be \u201cAlone. Asleep. Doing Nothing. Wonderful\u201d\u2014all of which seemed rather unlikely. When I caught up with him for a phone conversation on New Year\u2019s Eve, he had reassuringly returned to form. \u201cI had a very merry Christmas actually,\u201d he said. \u201cI was all over the place: Rebekah Brooks [chief executive of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s News UK], the Bamfords [billionaire industrialist Baron Bamford and his wife, Baroness Bamford, who own the Daylesford estate in the Cotswolds where Nicky lives in a charming gatehouse], and then I went to somebody else. I had a wow of a time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe best-connected man in Britain\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Nicholas Ponsonby Haslam has managed to be famous for seven decades, and to be known as the \u201cbest-connected man in Britain.\u201d He and I met in June 1991, when I interviewed him for <\/span>Reflected Glory<\/a><\/em>, my biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the fabled British courtesan. His first words about her grabbed my imagination and launched our friendship:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI went to Eton with Little Winston <\/em>[Pamela\u2019s son with Randolph Churchill and grandson of Sir Winston Churchill]<\/span>. \u2018Do you want to have tea with my mother?\u2019 he said. We waited in the rain at New School\u2019s yard. Slowly a burnished cabriolet Rolls-Royce with lights on inside turned into the gate. Pam was in back, wearing a blond rough tweed suit, blond fur coat, and very restrained country jewelry. The door opened, and out on the running board was a perfectly shod crocodile foot and an arm with a perfect crocodile bag. It was my first knowledge of living a glamorous life, absolutely imprinted on my memory.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Share<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Over the following years, Nicky has generously and repeatedly helped me in my research for books on Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He has offered introductions and shared his knowledge and insights over lunches and dinners, giving me an invaluable inside track. He has taken me on his evening peregrinations (typically four or five parties), a memorable dinner with Lucian Freud and Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon at the Wolseley in London, a dinner party at Lady Avon\u2019s flat, and a lunch with Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of Queen Elizabeth II\u2019s bridesmaids. When Nicky did his cabaret act at Bellamy\u2019s in Mayfair, I sat in the audience and applauded his crooning renditions of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, and Noel Coward. For the past seven years, he has shot to even greater prominence with his annual irreverent tea towels (he calls them \u201cdrying-up cloths\u201d) listing the \u201cThings Nicky Haslam Finds Common.\u201d They\u2019re priced at \u00a350 or \u00a370 if signed by Nicky. They\u2019re so popular, Nicky told me, that \u201csome people buy ten at a time for Christmas presents.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/a> I have watched with a mixture of bemusement and admiration at Nicky\u2019s series of makeovers, from Savile Row suits to biker leather, nose rings, earrings, and dyed black hair to his current country gentleman incarnation of heathery sweaters and corduroy trousers. He makes no secret of his 1999 facelift and neck-lift three years later (\u201cto get rid of the wattles\u201d). He was diagnosed early with colon cancer in 2010, and was cured after radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy. He has always been emphatically gay, and in his 2009 memoir he revealed that he had a brief fling with Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1959, a year before the society portrait photographer married Princess Margaret and became Lord Snowdon. Nicky also had a \u201crelationship\u201d with Roddy Llewellyn, who later became the princess\u2019s lover. For reasons I\u2019ll explain below, Nicky and I have called each other \u201cHubs\u201d and \u201cWifey\u201d since 2008.<\/p>\n <\/a> Nicky is the son of Diamond Louise Constance Ponsonby, a goddaughter of Queen Victoria and a granddaughter of the 7<\/span>th<\/sup> Earl of Bessborough. His father was William Heywood Haslam, a diplomat whose family made a fortune from cotton mills in Lancashire. During Nicky\u2019s childhood in a seventeenth-century manor house in Buckinghamshire, he was bedridden for three years with polio. After Eton, he bounced from New York to Arizona to Los Angeles before returning to London and establishing himself as an interior designer with clients ranging from Russian oligarchs to Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry, and Mark Shand, the brother of future Queen Camilla. There is, quite simply, no one of significance he doesn\u2019t know, including members of the royal family. The walls of the \u201clavvy\u201d on the first floor of his country house are filled with framed letters from an assortment of royals. Princess Diana was a distant cousin through the Ponsonby line.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!a-MO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5413dcc-17c3-47c7-bea2-e92deb244376_1180x786.webp\")
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