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CHAPTER SIX

In 1934 Ian’s sister (and Dardy’s namesake) Rosemary von Urach arrived from Europe. She was hoping to make it an extended stay. According to her sister, Frederika (Erica), Rosemary wanted to get into the movies.

Lili was taken by the blonde and glamorous woman with the “expressive purple eyes.”⁶² Rosemary was witty and clever, wore a fur coat, and traveled with enormous trunks, her manners gracious and elegant. She was a beautiful, enchanting woman, a genuine princess, and, as yet undiagnosed, schizophrenic.

ROSEMARY BLACKADDER VON URACH HAD BEEN BORN THE MIDDLE child of Anne Wilson and John Blackadder in Scotland. She was high-strung and extremely intelligent. She had studied at Girton, “degrading” for a couple terms, meaning one had permission to have the term disregarded, in Rosemary’s case, due to health reasons.⁶³ She studied English and modern and medieval language Tripos.⁶⁴

What remains of Rosemary’s school records is a slim file that notes she toured “over Europe with a puppet show” after leaving Girton and then became a journalist writing “middle” articles for the Saturday Review and Evening Standard.⁶⁵ For the Daily Express she was hired to interview famous people for the Manchester edition. She often illustrated her own articles.

Conversant in a multitude of languages, Rosemary was well-traveled, studied art and Italian in Florence. In Paris she studied painting and roomed with composer Gustav’s daughter Anna Mahler.

Close with her mother throughout her life, Rosemary relied heavily on Anna, often writing for money. She was accused by her sister Erica of being frivolous and manipulative, the same charges later leveled at Lili by others.

At a party at the German embassy in Paris, Rosemary met her prince—a real live prince—whom she fell in love with. They married in Oslo, Norway, in 1931. The two-years-younger German Prince Albrecht von Urach came from an impressive—albeit impoverished—background.

Lili’s step-aunt Rosemary

Born in 1903, the sixth of nine children, young Albrecht spent his days at the family’s fabled Lichtenstein castle outside of Stuttgart.

Albrecht was handsome, tall, and light-haired. He was an expressionist painter, photographer, war correspondent, and diplomat. His princess mother was aunt to Prince Albert I of Monaco, for whom he was named (and at one time stood next in the line of succession). Albrecht joined the Nazi party in 1934. Interrogated for war crimes at the end of the war, he would suffer no ill repercussions for his Nazi association and began a successful career with Mercedes-Benz.

Rosemary and Albrecht’s marriage might have lacked money but there was no shortage of adventure. Albrecht continued painting, though they sold poorly.

In 1932 Rosemary gave birth to daughter Marie-Gabrielle “Mariga,” who would one day marry Hon. Desmond Guinness, son of the gorgeous and glamorous Diana Mitford, one of the famous Mitford sisters.

Having a child did little to settle the relentlessly traveling couple. They lived in Germany but left for Venice and Mahler’s apartment in 1934 where they both continued as freelance journalists.

According to her sister, Rosemary had an idea to get into the movies and thus planned a trip to California to stay with brother Ian. When nothing panned out she lay around on Ian’s and Idella’s sofa shooing her curious nieces (Barbara and Dardy) away. “Go away, little girls. Go away.”⁶⁶ She wasn’t interested in her own child, let alone someone else’s.

Lili thought this fragile, eccentric, glamorously made-up woman was wonderful. She envied the princess’s title, travels, and clothes. Though Rosemary had obligations of husband and daughter they didn’t hamper the ethereal young woman collapsed in languor on Idella’s couch. One can only imagine what Idella thought. And though they weren’t related by blood Lili was greatly influenced and infatuated by Rosemary, the most exotic creature to cross her path. Here was a woman, practically a relative, who had managed to escape her provincial family to lead an adventurous life trotting around the globe, draped in chic clothing. Rosemary was the epitome of the independence—and glamour—Lili dreamed of.

Rosemary was soon gone, continuing her travels with her big trunks to the Far East and then Berlin where her husband and daughter waited.

In 1934 the von Urach family set up home in Japan, where Albrecht worked in the German press office as a journalist. He was sent to China to cover the Chinese-Japanese war. For unhappy Rosemary, being left behind was lonely and increasingly difficult. Daughter Mariga weathered her mother’s mercurial manners and “impulsive behavior.” The isolated child would write her father a letter saying she was “terrified” of Rosemary’s “wild unreasonable temper.” To her father the girl noted he was “sane” as opposed to Rosemary, but admitted she still adored her charismatic mother.⁶⁷

In Japan Rosemary suffered a concussion (her third) after falling from her horse.

One day an agitated Rosemary took her young daughter by her five-year-old hand and managed to make her way into the Royal Palace, intent on warning the Japanese emperor that his generals were plotting against him. Erica claimed Rosemary attempted to drown the crown prince along with daughter Mariga. The emperor’s guards seized and arrested Rosemary. After being given enough morphine to knock her out, Rosemary was entrusted to the care of two nurses who transferred her to a ship bound for Europe. Albrecht was deeply embarrassed by his wife’s erratic and criminal behavior that put him in an awkward and dangerous position with the Japanese. There must have been other episodes to cause Rosemary’s drastic banishment. Mariga stayed in Japan with her father.

In Hong Kong Rosemary ditched the nurses. Again according to Erica, Rosemary went from London to Berlin intent on meeting Hitler. While staying at the swank Hotel Adlon she slit her wrists. She supposedly lost part of her nose due to jumping out of a glass window. Rosemary was put into an asylum back in Scotland where she had made her way to be with her mother, Anna.

At Morningside Mental Home she was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1941 the troubled young woman was given one of the early experimental procedures to cure an assortment of mental disorders. Into her confused brain doctors bore holes in either the top or side of the skull and a sharp instrument was then inserted. The instrument was then jiggled back and forth cutting the nerves and the offensive behavior. The two- to five-minute procedure was widely popular, with thousands being performed. The British neurosurgeon Sir Wylie McKissock was said to be responsible for three thousand operations during his days of practice, roughly the same time Rosemary underwent hers.⁶⁸ McKissock admitted that very often the lobotomies killed the patient or left them, in his words, in a “harmless vegetable state.”⁶⁹

Ian’s sister was left nearly catatonic and “incarcerated” in Craig House, a sixteenth-century house turned into a psychiatric hospital for “paying” customers. The memory of “bolts and bars” traumatized daughter Mariga when she visited as an adult.⁷⁰ Rosemary denied having an adult daughter; she insisted her daughter was five. Rosemary would remain at the home for the next twenty-seven years until she died in 1975 at age seventy-four.

Though not related by blood, Lili and her exotic step-aunt would share eerie similarities: Both loved traipsing from one exciting locale to another. They expected—demanded—life to be fascinating and adventurous. Lili was impressed by Rosemary’s courtship and marriage to a real prince, regardless of the character of the man himself. For Lili a man’s good looks—a cleft chin and dark chest hair—would be more important than the substance underneath.

What no one saw coming was that Rosemary’s outgoing, eccentric, and prone-to-depression personality would increasingly echo in her niece, Barbara. That tragedy was many years in the future.⁷¹