Though Morris wrote that her marriage was “open,” Clements keeps things strictly PG, either out of discretion or lack of dirt. Her most passionate affair may have been an imaginary affair with Lord “Jacky” Fisher of Kilverstone, an admiral of the fleet who may have been the first to use the phrase OMG, in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill. While she clearly yearned for academic credibility, an essential silliness and self-deprecation may have gotten in the way; more than once she passed herself off as a “flibbertigibbet,” one in a lexicon of favorite “ricochet” words, including “harum-scarum” and “razzle-dazzle.”
As a cub reporter, Morris had interviewed Cary Grant and Irving Berlin, and she later became a celebrity herself, going on “The Dick Cavett Show” and drawing the scorn of Nora Ephron in Esquire. Some thought her prose tended toward purple (“the best descriptive writer of our time, of the watercolor type,” Dame Rebecca West brushed aside in these pages), but her many admirers included Paul Theroux – though he once rather rudely compared her looks to Tootsie’s — and Tina Brown, who commissioned Morris to profile Boy George for Vanity Fair. Long-faded glossies with names like Holiday, Venture, and Horizon sent her to distant lands and paid her handsomely, though she spoke of money as “a constant worry.”
Like the finicky cat from the old commercial that shared her name, Morris had strong likes and dislikes, listed here with relish. Yes to: cards, marmalade, music (she also preferred the adjectives “melancholy,” “uncountable,” and “magnificent”); Elon Musk, battleships and wine. No to: complainers, Washington, DC (“perhaps the most unspeakably boring city in the world”), zoos, and—oddly enough, considering how it had helped her—science. “Even evolution was suspicious to her,” writes Clements, one of the few moments in a very full narration where I wanted to know more.
This biography is a good addition to Morris’ vast body of work, even though her complex psyche, like her physicality, may be impossible to master. Jan Morris was a woman who “had it all,” as the old Helen Gurley Brown guidebook so mythically suggested – but the cost to other people remains somewhere in the mist.
JAN MORRIS: The life of both sides: a biography | By Paul Clements | Illustrated | 608 pp. | Writer | $35