MICHAEL KARLIN
Helen of Troy’s face, it is
said, launched a thousand ships. Memories of my mother, MIRIAM STAHL
KARLIN HENDERSON, could launch a thousand adjectives, a thousand
pictures, a thousand stories.
Let me launch some adjectives
and pictures and stories about her and see if this is the person we knew
and loved.
Tall, beautiful, striking,
matchstick legs.
Long dark hair, huge dark sunglasses.
Stunning, overwhelmingly glamorous, a commanding presence, powerful, a
little intimidating.
Insightful, wise, multilingual, wobbly at navigation and dodgy at
arithmetic; fond of a joke and occasional teller of salty stories.
Opinionated, a little arbitrary.
Steely, poised, a fighter, especially when the chips were down, a
capacity to rise to the occasion.
A hostess with a superb sense of
style and occasion; a genius at entertaining whether the glittering
perfection of Paris or New York dinner parties, or glorious family
weddings or quintessential weekends in the English countryside.
An acquaintance of prime
ministers and royalty and business tycoons in many lands, she was
gracious without pretense and without flattery.
Sometimes intolerant but in much
more important ways open and accepting and loving.
Proud of her children and grandchildren and fiercely loyal to all her
family.
Fulfilled in very different ways in her two marriages and the deaths of
Eli and John were both blows that irreversibly saddened her.
A thousand pictures:
Saint Laurent and Dior,
Balenciaga, Cole Hahn shoes, exquisite jewellery.
Y-C-C-I-A-T-A-A “You can change it at Turnbull & Asser” – not that
anyone ever did.
Joan Sutherland in La Traviata, Kiri te Kanawa singing Ave Maria, As
Time Goes By
Bloody Mary’s, Krug, Vodka Martinis with an olive, Pimms made with
champagne instead of lemonade
Avid reader of biographies,
especially of Jackie Kennedy.
Speaker of English and Hebrew, French and Portuguese, German and
Yiddish, spoken in that very distinctive voice and written in that
distinctive hand.
A thousand stories – here are a
few Did You Knows?
Did you know that though she was
5 foot 11, at school she hated basketball?
That in her 30s she learned to water ski and drive a ski boat? That in
her 40s she learned to cross-country ski?
That she returned from a visit to West Africa with corn rows in her
hair?
That in the 1960s, she was constantly mistaken for Anouk Aimée, the
French film star she closely resembled, and the actress Miriam Karlin,
star of The Rag Trade, whom she resembled not a bit?
That she tapped her own phone to catch a French MP who was stealing from
my father’s company and then confronted him with the tape?
That she was a fast and skilled driver, who once drove a Mustang from
Lisbon to Paris and en route talked her way out of a visit to a Spanish
jail; and just 5 years ago, ignoring the apprehensions of her children,
she drove her BMW from Montpellier to London, announcing in response to
anxious phone calls from her children that she had stayed the night at
the Crillon in Paris and dined on lobster and champagne.
She faced many medical trials
and tribulations over her life and bore her last illness with dignity,
comforted and enlivened by visits from her family and friends. But I
hope you will remember her now not as she died but as she lived,
beautiful, loving and, in the words of so many people whom I have heard
from, remarkable, extraordinary and a true original.
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