[9] Her mother had asked the British ambassador, Sir George Clerk, to keep a watchful eye on her, an unintended consequence of this being that she was taken under the wing of an embassy press secretary who, with his wife, introduced her to a round of café society parties.

[11][page needed] Among other artistic treasures, she saw the fifteenth-century frescoes by Piero della Francesca at Arezzo, one of which, The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood (c. 1452), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting—"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".

Around this time, she displayed her individualism by acquiring a specially tailored trouser suit along the lines of those associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich[11][page needed] after the latter's appearance in the film Morocco (1930).

For a time, the future Lady Avon lived in a rooftop room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing[11][page needed] (although the building was a modern, steel-framed structure with extensive underground accommodation that was considered relatively safe during air raids).

[27][e] After the war Spencer-Churchill worked at London Films for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened",[29] and as a reviewer for the fashion magazine Vogue.

Historian Andrew Roberts described it as "the last great British autobiography of the pre-war and wartime era",[41] while art critic John McEwen remarked on its "witty and elegant restraint".

[42] She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay, briefly a diplomat and later a painter, who was the stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.

[43] Wyatt quoted Lady Avon as having told him that she had resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime information minister and the British ambassador in Paris (1944–1947), who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother:[44][page needed][g] "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from".

[54] Gerald, Lord Berners, used her as the basis of a character in his novel Far From the Madding War (1941), while photographer Cecil Beaton, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo.

As an illustration of her occasional proximity to the centre of power, between meetings of the War Cabinet on 30 May 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was at its height, Spencer-Churchill was present when Churchill lunched with her parents and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.

Attempting to defuse an argument between Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook about their respective motivation during the abdication crisis of 1936, Spencer-Churchill, just turned 21, proclaimed with patent improbability that she had three favourites, Edward VIII, Leopold III of Belgium and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.

This event drew large crowds, on a level with those earlier in the year for the wedding of film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding,[38] prompting Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' [Eden] still has and how popular he is".

[73] However, the marriage also drew the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh,[75] a convert to Roman Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Spencer-Churchill himself[76] and who, a few years earlier, had repeatedly criticised the poet John Betjeman for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs.

[88][page needed] Historian Hugh Thomas noted that, though "non-political", Lady Avon was interested in foreign affairs, having written a Berlin diary for the literary magazine Horizon.

They drank vodka and ice, and Beaton recorded Lady Eden's observation that her husband was kept awake by the sound of motor scooters,[90][page needed] which were growing in popularity among young people in the 1950s.

[92] Her stepson, Nicholas, Eden's surviving son from his first marriage, who succeeded him as 2nd Earl of Avon, served as Under-Secretary of State for Energy in Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS in 1985.

Colville noted that, at a dinner attended by the Queen to mark Churchill's retirement, the Duchess of Westminster had put her foot through Lady Eden's train, causing the monarch's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, to remark, "that's torn it, in more than one sense".

Over dinner (when, according to his hostess, he ate nothing[11][page needed] despite his reputation for eating and drinking greedily[108][t]), he responded rather bluntly to her question about the range of Soviet missiles that "they could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther".

[113][page needed] In the humiliating aftermath of the crisis in 1956, Lady Eden's most famous public remark to a group of Conservative women that, "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room", was widely reported.

For example, Isaiah Berlin assured "dearest Clarissa" that Eden had acted with "great moral splendour", describing his stance as "very brave", "very patriotic" and "absolutely just",[136][page needed] while opining to another acquaintance that his policy had been "childish folly".

[140]The damage caused by the Suez Crisis to the Prime Minister's already frail health persuaded the Edens to seek a month's rest cure at "Goldeneye", Ian Fleming's "plain, low-roofed" bungalow[141] on the north coast of Jamaica.

[147][z] Installed in Jamaica after a good deal of secrecy and close liaison between Downing Street and Ian Fleming's secretary, Una Trueblood,[150][full citation needed][aa] the Edens were temporary neighbours of Noël Coward who thought Goldeneye "perfectly ghastly"[152][ab] and presented them—"poor dears"—with a basket of caviare, pâté de foie gras and champagne.

[159] The publicity that the Edens' sojourn attracted is credited by some with boosting Fleming's literary career, including sales of his early novels about James Bond, the first of which, Casino Royale, he had written at Goldeneye in 1952.

[ad] The future Lady Avon later recalled her "astonishment" (and Ann Fleming's "rueful embarrassment") at the success of the Bond books,[163] which continued after From Russia, with Love entered the best-seller lists in 1957.

[178][page needed] Half a century later Prescott recalled that, while kneeling to clean the ship's brass, he had occasion to admire a pair of legs that turned out to be Lady Eden's—"You naturally look, don't you"—after which Anthony Eden tapped him on the head.

"[182] When Eden was taken mortally ill with liver cancer, he and Lady Avon had just spent their final Christmas together at Hobe Sound, Florida, as guests of former New York governor W. Averell Harriman, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party, and his English-born wife Pamela.

The Avons were flown back to Britain in a Royal Air Force VC-10 that was diverted to Miami after Prime Minister James Callaghan had been alerted to his health situation by Pamela Harriman's son, Winston.

"—at the funeral of her husband, the former king Edward VIII,[187][ak] while thirty years later, Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair Campbell noted that at a dinner at 10 Downing Street in 2002 to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee, attended by five prime ministers and several relatives of deceased prime ministers:Prince Philip was deep in conversation with T[ony] B[lair], the Countess of Avon, Macmillan's and Douglas-Home's families, and there was lots of reminiscing about life in Number 10.

In 2013 she attended a memorial service for Sir Guy Millard (1917–2013), one of Eden's long-serving private secretaries and probably his last surviving close associate, having been with him and Churchill at wartime meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin and in Downing Street during the Suez Crisis.

[118] In April 2008 she and Haste appeared at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival,[194][verification needed] the literature for this event observing that, although Avon was perhaps best known for her lament about "the Suez Canal flowing through [her] drawing room", "she was far more than a drawing-room consort".