Lady Antonia: captivated by Pinter’s black eyes

A year after the death from cancer of the playwright Harold Pinter, his widow Lady Antonia Fraser is publishing a memoir of their love affair. And having jealously guarded her privacy during a relationship that lasted more than 30 years, she has decided to write and talk for the first time publicly about the affair that shocked London society in 1975, she being married to the Tory MP Hugh Fraser and he to the actress Vivien Merchant.

Having met briefly before, Fraser and Pinter (pictured above at their 1980 wedding) were both invited to a dinner party following the first night of his play The Birthday Party in January. It was at the home of her sister Rachel Billington, whose husband Kevin had directed the revival.

Across the table, Pinter "looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears, like a satyr". As Antonia was leaving, she went over to tell him she had enjoyed his play. "Must you go?" he asked. She decided to stay. At 2.30am he gave her a lift home. She asked him in, and gave him champagne. "He stayed until six o'clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine."

The fact that both had been married for 18 years - and that Antonia had six children by Hugh Fraser - deterred neither of them. "I always wanted to be in love," she wrote in the diaries she has mined for the memoir. "Ever since I was a little girl. And I always wanted to know a genius, which I suppose Harold sort of is... I was lured, compelled by a superior force... which was simply irresistible."

Writing in the Times, Valerie Grove notes: "Those who were around in the mid-1970s will recall what a shock it was, how scandalous and thrilling. Today's celeb couples look puny and one-dimensional compared with Pinter and Fraser's star quality. She had enchantment and mystery, the blonde Roman Catholic high-society historian and femme fatale; he was the enigmatic Jewish actor-turned-playwright and screenwriter from working-class Hackney, famous for pauses."

After several clandestine meetings over the following weeks, often in hotels, Fraser's husband asked her on April whether she was in love with Pinter. She admitted she was and disappeared with her lover to Paris and a suite at the Hotel Lancaster. "Harold drinks a hell of an amount," Fraser wrote in her diary.

Pinter proposed marriage on June 13 in the Belvedere restaurant in Holland Park and two days later she accepted. She found the prospect of telling her husband "beyond anything ghastly" so she asked Pinter to come to her home in Notting Hill. As Valerie Grove wrote: "The two men drank whisky (Pinter) and brandy (Hugh Fraser) and discussed cricket and Proust; Antonia fell asleep on the sofa. A scene out of Pinter."

The Frasers' marriage was dissolved in 1977 but Vivien Merchant did not give Pinter a divorce until 1980. Two years later, the actress died of alcoholism.

'Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter' is published on January 11 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

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