The Importance of Being Kennedy. Laurie Graham

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       PRELUDE

      I happened to be in London in January 1970 when I got a call from my office to say my Aunt Nora had died. We were just finishing up the photo shoot for a big piece on platform shoes for Sassy! magazine so I was able to get away to Derbyshire in time for her funeral. Darling Aunt Nora, who'd started life three to a bed in Ballynagore, had a duke and a duchess at her Requiem Mass. If Aunt Ursie had lived to hear that she'd have popped her corset bones.

      I didn't really start getting to know Aunt Nora till she ferreted me out in Saks Formal Wear in 1947 and stood me lunch. She had a nifty figure and beautiful skin for a woman in her fifties. She was wearing a tweed suit, I remember, petrol blue, fully lined, with a great corded buttonhole detail. Old-fashioned but very classy.

      She said, ‘It's one of the perks of working for a lady who keeps up with trends. When the rest of the world won't be seen dead in a garment it can always be passed along to the help.’

      We hit it off right away. She'd been a hazy, absent relation when I was a kid. She did visit, but too rarely for me to know her.

      ‘Your Aunt Nora is with the Kennedys,’ Mom used to say, and as we had another aunt who was a nun in Africa I also pictured Aunt Nora in a grass skirt and the Kennedys as some kind of ferocious tribe. In a sense I suppose I wasn't so very wrong.

      Aunt СКАЧАТЬ