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.