C6| Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
And then
you
suddenly
find
yourself
all
excited
for the
9:30 a.m.
Google
Hangout.LIFE IS DIFFERENT NOW.We
all know this. Amid the corona-
virus, many of us are locking
down, staying in, working from
home and making significant
adjustments. I support this; it’s
what the experts recommend
and it’s for a greater good.
But the other morning, I felt
a strange sensation, one I
couldn’t really understand or
explain, and it frightened me.
I was looking forward to a
meeting.
I know: It’s alarming. If
you’re like me, you haven’t
looked forward to a meeting in
decades. Yes, I know there are
smart people out there who
run good meetings, productive
meetings and even meetings
with delicious snacks, but mostW
hen the British
baroness Anne
Glenconner was a
child, her parents
left their children
for three years while her father
served in World War II in Egypt. At
one point, she was placed under the
care of a nanny who tied her to the
bed every night. The nanny was later
fired not because she was inhumane
but because another staff member
discovered that she was Roman Cath-
olic.
This is just one of the vignettes
that Ms. Glenconner offers about the
haughty, aloof culture into which she
was born. After a life in the wings as
a lady in waiting to Princess Marga-
ret, Ms. Glenconner has, at 87, writ-
ten a memoir describing the wild ups
and downs of her years as the twice-
disinherited daughter of an English
earl and the wife of Colin Tennant,
the eccentric founder of Mustique, an
exclusive island in the Caribbean.
Her book, “Lady in Waiting: My
Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of
the Crown,” to be published March
24, is a window into both the glam-
orous side of the British aristocracy
and its unpleasant underbelly. She
describes a life full of jet-setting ad-
venture—such as flying around the
world from Hong Kong to Australia
with Princess Margaret—and greattragedy, including the deaths of her
two eldest sons.
Ms. Glenconner was born in 1932
at her family’s sprawling Norfolk es-
tate. Her parents—often distant, both
literally and figuratively—lived some
10 miles from Sandringham, the roy-
als’ country home, and Ms. Glencon-
ner used to play as a child with the
future Queen Elizabeth II and Prin-
cess Margaret. Her family’s estate
went to a male cousin after her fa-
ther’s death, and her mother served
as a high-ranking lady in waiting to
the Queen Mother. When Ms. Glen-
conner was 21, she walked in Queen
Elizabeth II’s coronation procession
in 1953 as one of six maids of honor,
a group of unmarried daughters of
nobility who were friends of the
royal family—a moment she de-
scribes in her book with breathless
pride.
Ms. Glenconner thinks the monar-chy still rightly plays a pivotal role in
British life. Recent scandals, such as
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s
decision to step back from royal du-
ties, only affected the monarchy “up
to a point,” she says. Ms. Markle, she
guesses, didn’t know what she was
getting into. “It’s not all riding about
in a coach wearing a tiara,” says Ms.
Glenconner. Such roles require hard
work, such as spending long days go-
ing to factories and hospitals and ap-
pearing at public events. “I’m sure
she didn’t realize what it entailed....
That’s in a way why people used to
marry people from other royal fami-
lies,” she says.
In 1956, Ms. Glenconner married a
fellow aristocrat. She was almost en-
tirely unprepared for her wedding
night. As Ms. Glenconner recounts it,
her mother pointed to her dog Biscuit
and explained that, just as her fa-
ther’s Labrador occasionally mountedBiscuit, so too would a man try to do
so with her one day, but likely on a
bed. That was the extent of Ms. Glen-
conner’s sex education.
Her husband was Mr. Tennant, the
third Baron Glenconner, an eccentric,
temperamental and flamboyant so-
cialite who went on to buy the island
of Mustique for 45,000 U.K. pounds
(about $1.2 million today). He used to
wear scuba gear flying to and from
Mustique lest he need to swim for it
if the plane crashed. She describes
how he once lay down screaming in
the aisle of a British Airways flight
when he couldn’t sit with Ms. Glen-
conner and Princess Margaret, who
were in first class, for which the air-
line permanently banned him. He also
complained to her about the behavior
of his mistresses and surprised her
with a love child.
Meanwhile, one of their three sons
died of hepatitis C after years of her-WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL|ALEXANDRA WOLFE
Anne Glenconner
AladyinwaitingtoPrincessMargarettakesafranklookattheuppercrust
oin addiction, and another died after
contracting HIV/AIDS. Her third son
went into a monthslong coma after a
motorcycle crash at 19 and still suf-
fers from tunnel vision and balance
problems.
Ms. Glenconner found solace in
her role as lady in waiting to Prin-
cess Margaret, accompanying the
princess to events, giving hosts and
organizers advance notice of her de-
sires, and being a travel companion
and confidante. She says the some-
times controversialprincess stood by
her through her most difficult times,
and she decided to write the book, in
part, “to set the record straight.... So
many people had written about her
in a not so very nice way who didn’t
know her at all.” Critical books such
as Craig Brown’s “Ninety-Nine
Glimpses of Princess Margaret”
(2018) had painted her as difficult
and moody. “I never found her like
that,” Ms. Glenconner says. Princess
Margaret was one of the few peoplewho would spend time with her son
after he was diagnosed with HIV.
The princess was also perhaps the
only person who could calm Ms.
Glenconner’s volatile husband, but it
never occurred to her to leave him.
“You just got on with it,” she says.
She finds many women in the #Me-
Too era overly sensitive. “We were
used to people pinching our bot-
toms,” she says. “You just moved
away or pushed them.” She does
sympathize with rape victims and
women whose jobs depend on abu-
sive or predatory men: “That’s awful,
but with other sorts of things I think
women could really be stronger,”
says Ms. Glenconner.
She was pleased this year when
the Telegraph, a British newspaper,
gave her an award for having a stiff
upper lip. “We were brought up not
to complain,” she says. She scoffs at
the Oxford University Student
Union’s recent decision to discourage
clapping for fear of upsetting people
with anxiety and excluding the hear-
ing-impaired; the union now suggests
that audience members instead use
silent “jazz hands” to show enthusi-
asm. “I’ve never heard anything so
ridiculous in my life,” she says. The
jazz hands are “much more frighten-
ing.”
Her upper lip isn’t always stiff.
When her husband died in 2010, in-
stead of leaving his fortune to her or
their children, he gave it all to an
employee. For a change, she couldn’t
contain her emotion. “Actually, it was
a great relief to be screaming,” she
recalls. “The anger, the hurt and the
humiliation left me.” (Her daughter-
in-law later sued, leading to Ms.
Glenconner’s grandson receiving
about half of Mr. Tennant’s estate.)
For 10 years, she says, “I had
nothing.” Last fall, her new book
changed everything by becoming a
bestseller in the U.K. As she says of
her home, “I’ve now got the heat
thundering away!”
Next, she’s writing a thriller called
“Murder on Mustique.” “I’m going to
be called Lady Veronica, the new
aristocratic Miss Marple,” she says,
chuckling, alluding to Agatha Chris-
tie’s famous sleuth. “I’ve been invisi-
ble all my life until now,” she says,
“and now I’ve come out with a bang!”‘It’s not all riding
about in a coach
wearing a tiara.’JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
REVIEW
JASON
GAYI Used to Hate
Meetings.
Lockdown Made
Me Love Them.
where everyone is hunkered
down, the weird stuff on their
shelves, the clothes they’re
choosing to wear. I’m person-
ally debating whether or not I
should start wearing costumes,
or funny disguises. (I heard one
Journal editor was trying out a
porcupine puppet.) I keep try-
ing to get my cat to walk in
front of my laptop camera, but
have you ever tried to get a cat
to do anything?
Don’t get me wrong; even
these meetings still go on too
long, and I continue to derail
them by telling a thoroughly
useless 10-minute, off-topic
story. But they’re comforting,
because I can see that everyone
is hanging in, trying to make
the best of a strange and anx-
ious situation.
I’m sure when this all settles
down, I’ll go right back to de-
spising meetings and trying to
weasel out of all of them. Right
now, however, they feel like
one of the best parts of the
day. In fact, we should call a
meeting to discuss this. How
about 9:30 a.m.? I could even
do earlier, if need be. ZOHAR LAZARof the meet-
ings I’ve at-
tended in my
life have been
wandering,
overly long skull sessions
which always get derailed by
someone telling a thoroughly
useless 10-minute, off-topic
story about the time they saw
Mike Tyson at the airport. And
yes, usually it is me derailing
the meeting by telling a thor-
oughly useless 10-minute, off-
topic story about the time I
saw Mike Tyson at the airport.
I’m part of the problem, to
be sure. But to me, meetings
are a time suck, a barely neces-
sary evil, the height of work-
place inefficiency, the bane of
all existence. They are to bewhere I can’t
wait for a
meeting to
start. If author-
ities weren’t
telling us to
stay out of the
hospital, I’d be
heading
straight to the
doc to figure
out what’s
wrong with me.
I’m even
starting to en-
joy conference
calls. It’s very, very scary.
But meetings and conference
calls are fulfilling an important
need for outside connection. I
currently share my home with
my wife, two small and whiny
children, a gecko and a cat, all
of whom are bored with me.
We are barely a week into our
self-imposed stay at home, and
we know all of each others’s
tricks and secrets. It’s getting a
little routine.
So these virtual office meet-
ings, they’re a blast of fresh air.
I truly enjoy the Hollywood
Squares-y video ones, seeingavoided, especially if they hap-
pen before 9:30 a.m.
But now, suddenly, I’m get-
ting excited about meetings.
Offices that are “working from
home”—like the Journal, which
is being assembled remotely—
are relying on virtual conclaves
to plan, collaborate and com-
municate. They’re using meet-
up platforms like Zoom and
Google Hangouts, and for many
of us, it’s a welcome opportu-
nity to see and hear colleagues
we may not see and hear in
person for a while.
It’s gotten to the point