Taking tea with Barbara Cartland is a distinctly unnerving experience. She is as firm about her ideas as she is about her morals. She presided at the end of her dining table, resplendent in pale aqua blue, trimmed with the fabled Cartland pink, and told me exactly what she thought.
She terrifies people. "Eat that meringue, darling, and the chocolate cake or the chef will resign this afternoon." I ate it. She dislikes women, dislikes young people and hates the colour black. As I was the perfect combination of all three I ate yet more chocolate cake.
We talked about fashion today ("perfectly hideous"), morals today ("perfectly awful") and people today ("perfectly uninspiring"). In fact, Barbara Cartland finds today a thoroughly ugly and unprepossessing place. But despite her gloomy and uncompromising view of the present (all pop stars are illiterate, all young people are drug-crazed fiends, nobody has any manners), she is perceptive and extremely witty both about the present and her place in it.
"It can't get any uglier, it's like the obsession with pornography. Morals went so low that when Jean Rook of the Daily Express wanted to revive romance and purity she had to come to me. I was the only person left with 150 virgins lying around. In my books. She didn't want me, but she had to have me.
"Now of course everybody's copied me but at the time I was the only person who stuck to my guns and went on with my lovely stories of beauty and love. Who on earth wants to read about the cockroaches in the kitchen? People want romance and happy endings; it brings them comfort." When she is tired and upset she reads herself.
Clothes to her are like her books. "They make you feel romantic, they give you emotions and are therefore absolutely essential to women." The Cartland theory of dressing for love starts with colour. Strong people like strong colour, beige people like beige, and no Englishwoman should wear beige or brown because it makes them look like a baked potato.
"Women should surround themselves with positive colours. It's terribly important to their emotional state. Who can be happy and pretty in grey? It affects men, too, although they won't admit it. Even Englishmen, who are really very romantic deep down."
Her own favourite, "Cartland" pink, is a strong coral pink which she alternates with a deep aqua blue. She has tried wearing other colours; last year she took to mauves and purples but when the hundredth reporter described her as wearing the "usual Cartland pink," she gave up mauve and went back to pink.
When you are hailed as the queen of romance and expected to appear before an audience of 750 people all wearing the very same Cartland pink at 9.30 in the morning it can be a very trying experience. Barbara Cartland said she felt quite limp at the thought of all those pink clones dancing before her eyes.
"It can be very very difficult. I have to be vaguely dignified because I'm old and rather social, but at the same time I have to be theatrical. Danny La Rue, who is a great showman, was on television the other night wearing a dress that I thought was absolutely me. It was black velvet, embroidered all over and trimmed with yards and yards of pink feathers. It was too funny, I must ring him up and ask if I might borrow it."
She has all her clothes made up for her by top couturiers, to her own design. All her dresses are a variation of the same theme: a simple waisted shape with an A-line skirt and a sweeping train attached from the shoulders. "That thing at the back is really frightfully good when you're getting old and fat like me." Her children accuse her of extravagance, but she explains that at her age and awkward size, it would take her five days to find something off-the-peg. "And then which is the more extravagant?" Rumour has it that it costs Cartland £20,000 every time she does an interview because it wastes her precious writing time.
She hates looking at ugly people. "I'm very disagreeable to them. People aren't ugly in their features, only in what they make of themselves. People in the streets these days always remind me of Lady Hastings, who said that they were all dead but didn't know it."
She thinks fashion is going through an extremely ugly period, only equalled by the 20s, when women flattened their chests and bound their breasts. "It was against nature. That's why it was so hideous. All those loose, drab clothes today are the same. If you are a woman you shouldn't hide it, show it off." But not in trousers. "I've never seen a woman who looked good in trousers because they've got the wrong-shaped behind. If women looked at themselves behind then they wouldn't wear trousers."
She allows no excuses for not looking pretty and feminine. It's the reason men have gone off women. This new breed of sexually strident amazons, wearing ugly, ill-fitting clothes, men's hats and dinner suits have turned men to men for comfort. Her young secretary told me later that she occasionally points an accusing finger at her and booms: "It's all your fault."
As I left, I pulled on my drab-grey, loose-fitting man-size jacket, clapped a man's black hat on my head and smiled; very prettily. She told me I looked charming, kissed me warmly and waved a regal farewell.
This is an edited extract
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