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'We're not useless upper-class girls' More Stories

Melissa Knatchbull and Emily Oppenheimer Turner are the latest successors Kirk Douglas vs Richard Harris:
to the legendary Betty Kenward, author of Jennifer's Diary in Harpers & secrets of the most bitter feud in
Queen. They know the party terrain intimately - but don't mistake them for Hollywood's golden age
aimless socialites, they tell Cassandra Jardine Either I’m out of touch on trans
issues or the youth of today are
Culture
completely bonkers
6 February 2020 • 7:00pm
EXTERNAL LINKS
Why Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood, torture porn for the anti-
Harpers & Queen
woke, deserves no Oscars
6 February 2020 • 5:27pm

Celebrity Big Brother's big loser: the

story behind Michael Barrymore's
disastrous TV comeback
Melissa Knatchbull, left, and co-Jennifer Emily Oppenheimer Turner are
invited to enough parties to fill their pages 10 times over. 'It takes great J-Lo is fabulous – but when did 50
sensitivity,' says Melissa start to look like this?

By Cassandra Jardine
12:01AM BST 03 Apr 2002

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 IN Betty Kenward's day, writing "Jennifer's Diary" looked like a breeze.
Month after month, the redoubtable Kenward, her meringue of white hair
fixed with a velvet bow, would trail around society parties and fill page
after page of Harpers & Queen with twitterings about "pretty" girls and
"charming" hostesses.

Since her retirement in 1991, however, this gushing role has appeared
more problematic. Jennifers have come and gone, sometimes with
unseemly haste. Sue Crewe, now the editor of House & Garden, was the
shortest-lived Jennifer of all and lasted only 11 months. "She hated it,"
says Melissa Knatchbull, one of the two brave women who have recently
taken on the assignment.

I can't quite see what the problem is with turning up to a few good bashes
and stringing together some flattering words amidst a sea of names.
Certainly, Melissa and her co-Jennifer, Emily Oppenheimer Turner, would
appear to be perfectly qualified for the role.

Melissa, 39, the daughter of a judge, used to be married to Joe

Knatchbull, son of Countess Mountbatten and Lord Brabourne, whom she
met at Prince Andrew's 21st birthday party. She is also an actress - fans
of Four Weddings may recall her brief appearance as Mocking Martha,
one of the ex-girlfriends Hugh Grant has to face at the second wedding.

Emily, her junior by six years, is the granddaughter of Philip Oppenheimer,

who ran the De Beers diamond empire; her father, Anthony, owns race
horses and she is married to William Turner, head of Sky Pictures. She
used to work on Vogue as a stylist and paints abstract pictures.
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2002

Between them, they probably get invited to more than enough good
parties to fill their Harpers pages 10 times over. Emily's own wedding in
2000 - attended by Jemima Khan and the Le Bons - was reported as "the

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 ultimate country wedding", with floral displays that would "make Elton
John jealous". To which Emily adds drily, "there was so much pollen that
everyone felt sick".

We meet for a late breakfast at a cafe in Kensington. Emily is already

there, feeling hungover after her sister's 21st. It didn't help, she explains,
that she had to get up for her baby at 6am. Mrs Kenward would be
shocked to observe her unbrushed hair, and even more horrified to hear
that her successor as social arbiter uses dry shampoo.

Ms Oppenheimer Turner's clothes wouldn't pass muster with the old

stickler, either - cords and a T-shirt from Zara, combined with a fake
designer bag and arty snakeskin cowboy boots. Artist and mum, it all
says, not heiress to a diamond fortune.

"I don't talk about my trust fund," she says, with a warning curl of the lip -
but she is happy to reveal that she drives a 10-year-old Golf.

Melissa is late. In her husky, Mariella Frostrup-style voice, she chats

comfortably about juggling acting work (she has just played a small part in
the new Tim Roth film Cromwell and Fairfax) with caring for her 13-year-
old daughter, who is home from school. She becomes more anxious when
we broach the party scene.

She's wearing black Armani trousers (Emporio, not couture) with the
same effortless grace as Lady Helen Windsor, but she, too, plays down
her smart side for all it is worth.

Honestly, you would think this pair were on the breadline to hear them go
on about how they have no clothes to wear to all these parties - "only
black and more black". But since they write the column and don't appear
in it, they aren't offered any clothes by designers. How they wish they had
the perks afforded to Mrs Kenward - the car, the driver, the dress
allowance.

The pair had never met before Lucy Yeomans, the editor of Harpers &
Queen, introduced them to each other in September, showed them a fax

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 machine and a computer and told them to start churning out pages. They
appear to get on well, with Melissa doing most of the talking and Emily
chipping in memories of "hysterical" moments.

So why do they seem tense? Melissa spits it out. "We don't want to be
seen as rather useless upper-class girls."

Their pleasure in what should be a delightful role has been undermined by

the derision attached to being an It Girl. The dreaded phrase has been
used of Emily in the past, notably when she and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
arrived at Ladies' Day at Ascot in a white stretch limousine. "It seemed a
good idea at the time," she says, defensively.

Melissa tackles the issue diplomatically: "I should be flattered to be called

an It Girl at my age, but those who market themselves on their
background often have a sticky demise. They haven't contributed anything
and they haven't anything to fall back on."

Not yet household names in art or acting, they run the risk of being
branded party girls. And in neither of those worlds are good social
connections considered a plus point - a fact made plain to them soon after
they emerged from their country boarding schools and happy homes.

At the time, they both saw themselves as social rebels. "I wasn't a
debutante," says Melissa. "I went off to New York instead and married a
man who wasn't interested in parties." "I was never even asked if I wanted
to be a deb," says Emily. "I was covered in paint, with dirty hair."

Despite the wish to get stuck into a profession and not trade on their
names or connections, they found their society branding inescapable.
Emily's close friend Tamara Mellon, who runs Jimmy Choo shoes, talks of
being glad that her married name "gets under the radar" and doesn't, to
most people, shriek banking millions. But, as an Oppenheimer, Emily has
not been so lucky. "At City & Guilds art school, people did wonder what
this posh girl was doing," she remembers. Some asked if she was related
to the physicist who developed the atom bomb; others were well aware of
the diamonds glinting in the background.

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 The acting world is even more stuck on working class credentials, so it
was unfortunate for Melissa that, two weeks after she started at Webber
Douglas drama school, an article appeared about her in Harpers &
Queen.

"It was some people's perception that I had an unfair leg up," she
observes; ever since, she has found herself only offered roles "close to
herself", never anything stretching. "Acting is an anti-snob profession,"
she observes, and now that she has more time for work, with her daughter
at boarding school, she would not like Jennifer's Diary to count against
her.

It seems strange that they took the job if they worry about being thought
aimless socialites. Perhaps Melissa was hoping to find a new husband, I
suggest. "I don't expect to meet a man at a party," she says, although
Emily notes that she met her ex-husband at one. "And look where that got
me," Melissa replies.

"I had been stuck at home with the baby all day," Emily says. "I wanted to
get out more, so I asked if I could do a style page and was offered
Jennifer as well."

Melissa, too, found she had "become too introverted" as a single mother
and was looking for writing work, preferably related to the arts.

Their vision of themselves appears to be as social radicals with a mission

to bring Jennifer's Diary to the people - "inspiring" others with the visions
of beauty and achievement that they put on the page. "We are New
Harpers," they say, sounding like a political party.

New Harpers stands not for the old aristocracy who used to fill the pages -
"I think we agree that the old Season has lost its purpose," says Melissa -
it stands for the new celebritocracy of writers, artists, singers and fashion
designers. The very people that Betty Kenward would have roundly
snubbed.

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 In the three issues they have produced so far, the change is evident. In
come the Stings and Jaggers, out go the Lady Thingummies. No more
hunt balls, plenty of media bashes. Out go headshots, in come top-to-toe
pictures of fancy frocks. The magazine still has the old-fashioned habit of
referring to women as, say, Lady Black when Barbara Amiel is known in
her own right, but the editor likes it that way.

Eventually, they hope to change that and make the prose a little "spicy".
The April issue pays tribute to the likes of "dynamic media duo Matthew
Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch" and "gorgeous as ever" Saffron Aldridge,
but the glowing adjective count is already on the way down. Chatty
remarks are in the ascendancy. But, as in Kenward's day, criticism can
only be inferred from what is not said, who is not mentioned. No one is
pictured looking less than their best. Even with their fine connections, they
have to keep the invitations rolling in.

That has been harder than they envisaged. "The old Harpers was rather
blase and people said, 'I don't want to be in it'," says Melissa. As for the
celebrity studded events, they face hot competition from Hello, OK!, Tatler,
Vogue and Vanity Fair - some of whom have fat cheques to wave. Heavy
duty spade work with PRs is required. "This is an incredibly under-rated
task," explains Melissa. "You can't force your friends to let you cover their
private parties. You face rejection when you ask, which can be very
embarrassing. You've got to be very comfortable with people and have the
innate social elegance to know when you are stepping over the line. You
have to be quite well connected and have, I'm afraid, a lot of intelligence.

"But if you are going to break new ground, you have got to be prepared to
offend. It takes great sensitivity. Discretion is our business. We would
certainly not reveal that a man is with his mistress at Annabel's when we
know the wife."

Once they've got to a party with their photographer, the bother isn't over.
Sometimes, as with the launch of the tiara exhibition at the V & A, they
find it splashed all over the papers. Then the hosts start to ring and fuss.

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 "There are some funny moments that can get quite tense about what gets
in and what doesn't," Melissa says. "Hostesses want their best friends in
the magazine, or they want the pictures touched up. We have to decide
who is interesting."

What they are saying is that this is no job for mere It Girls. Producing
Jennifer's Diary is a job for a politician, a diplomat and a military tactician,
and it also calls upon their skills as artist and actor. It should not be looked
down upon - and nor should they.

Maybe, but I hope they can relax and enjoy it, too. Parties, after all, are
meant to be fun.

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