Byline: PETRONELLA WYATT
THE grounds of Longleat House in Wiltshire, home of the Marquess of Bath, Britain's most infamous aristocrat, are looking bleak in the cold light of a chilly day. The outlook is looking bleak for me, too. The Marquess, now 74, who is best known for his remarkably unorthodox dress sense, his pornographic murals and his series of 'wifelets', is fixing me with a priapic eye while slurping wine from a beer glass.
'I need some more,' he declares loudly. 'Wine?' I inquire. 'No, wifelets, of course.' I suppose I have only myself to blame. A woman friend who knows Bath had cautioned me not to go to Longleat but here we are, in his private penthouse, and there are no escape routes. The rooms, which contain a portable bed with remote controls for the curtains, are interconnected and patrolled by a dog.
Moreover, the Marquess is hardly love's young dream. Today, Bath is wearing a black cap with pink and yellow stripes, a voluminous red nightshirt and baggy pantaloons. His hair protrudes from his hat like old rope while his unkempt beard has a large brown stain, as if a dead marsupial had made it its mausoleum.
'I've gone two years without a new wifelet,' Bath continues in a shrill and plaintive voice. 'At the last count I think I've had 75, but it's really not enough. (He thinks 100 would be a suitable target) What do you say?' Some people believe that if Alexander Thynn had never existed he would have to have been invented. Bath, or the Loins of Longleat, as he is known, has captured the public imagination ever since the Sixties when, as Viscount Weymouth, he bucked convention by dressing like a druid and introduced a new word for mistress into the national argot.
Then there are his murals, or 'muriels', as one of his less artistic wifelets once referred to them. He has slapped paint on practically every wall of the private apartments in the West Wing.
He is anticipating showing me the Kama Sutra room (I should be so unlucky),The Paranoia Room (I'm paranoid already) and Bluebeard's Staircase, which records his life and wifelets, some of whom live in cottages on Longleat's 10,000-acre estate.
Bath says they are his proudest achievement - that and his licentious autobiography Strictly Private, of which he has published six volumes on the internet and is completing the 12th.
HE STARTED painting in 1964, when Longleat and its famous safari park was made over to him by his father Henry, the sixth marquess, who opened the Elizabethan house to the public in 1949.
The young Alexander regarded his father with an animosity that was mutual.
Henry Bath was a sleek and handsome bright young thing, an admirer of Hitler and an authoritarian who detested his son's louche way of life.
(He once startled lunch guests by instructing them to hide the silver under the table, as one of Alexander's less reputable friends - a former cat burglar - was about to arrive.) Bath crinkles his snub nose. 'We certainly had issues. He beat me with a leather riding crop. He also loathed my artistic pursuits, and probably everything about me.' Alexander was sent to Eton and Oxford where he grew a ponytail as a gesture of rebellion. 'When I started daubing the house with paint, daddy finally had a fit,' he recalls.
His mother, Daphne, was more supportive, until she ran away to Tangier with the writer Xan Fielding. 'There was a horrible divorce and then Fielding persuaded her I was a rotten painter, so I lost both my parents. I felt betrayed.' Neither did he have the comfort of siblings. His younger brother, Christopher, was the favoured son, which Alexander resented. (Another brother, Valentine, hanged himself in 1979.) As soon as his father died in 1992, Bath evicted Christopher from the estate. He liked his sister Caroline, who died in 1995, but felt uncomfortable with her husband, the present Duke of Beaufort.
Bath claims to base his life on 'free love' and 'individualism', which has not made for stable relationships. I mention his longsuffering wife Anna Gael, a Hungarian-born actress turned writer, whom he married in 1969. Lady Bath lives in Paris, spending one week a month at Longleat.
'Why did you marry her, Alexander, if you believed in free love?' I demand.
'Wasn't it an act of atrocious hypocrisy?' His response is unlikely to endear himself.
'Because she was pregnant and I wanted a legitimate heir for Longleat.' He had a daughter Lenka, now 37, followed 'three or four years later - I never remember' by a son, Ceawlin. (This is an old Wessex name, Bath being a committed 'regionalist'.) 'Have you ever been in love?' I enquire.
'Or do you just suffer from satyriasis?' He titters like Frankie Howerd.
'That's such a lovely word for being oversexed, isn't it? Ooh, satyriasis, definitely. "In love" is a phrase I don't like to use. Some women have wanted me to. But they have had to drag it out of me. Hee-hee.' It may be a case of 'hee-hee' for Bath, but those closest to him must have often wished to give him the heave-ho. Both his children abhor his behaviour. He sighs. 'It's true. Caewlin (a 34-year-old businessman) has threatened to get rid of all the paintings of my wifelets. I have been an embarrassment. When I went to Lenka's school she would protest: "Dad, please don't wear a handbag." ' For one of Britain's most egregious womanisers, Bath did not get off to a flying start. He remained a virgin until he was 20, though not from want of trying.
He confesses that even a prostitute refused him. 'That was disheartening.
Eventually, I found one who agreed. I didn't like it and was sick because I was drunk.' A few years later, while he was going out with Anna, he met his first wifelet - a girl whose name he forgets.
'Why did you call them wifelets? I ask. 'Was it because it was easier than remembering their names?' A blush suffuses his round cheeks.
'Because wifelets sound nicer than concubines. But I admit I can't recall all their names. Some didn't last long.' 'They sound more like one-night standlets.' He is immensely tickled by this.
'Hee-hee. What a funny remark. Is it your own?' Bath appears chary of love, or any real attachment. The charitable might say that the failure of his early relationships left him emotionally damaged.
'You may be right,' he cries eagerly.
'When I was very young I was hurt by people. I determined never to open up again.' Not feeling so charitable myself, I say this is bunkum.
'We've all been hurt,' I point out. I suggest he is a selfish man who has traded on his social status to behave like Louis XV, who similarly kept nameless mistresses in the grounds of Versailles.
'I never traded on my status!' 'Would you have swapped Longleat for a council house?' 'No.' 'Well, you wouldn't have got one single wifelet if you weren't a marquess.' 'You're unfair. I'm a wonderful figure of a man.' He says I have no idea how hard it has been coping with the squabbling of the wifelets.
'What did you do?' 'I took out my hearing aid.' NOWADAYS, there is less need for such drastic measures. 'There are only about two wifelets,' he says disgruntled. 'I'm looking for someone in their 30s. How old are you?' '65,' I reply.
He peers at me through purple spectacles.
'You're very well preserved,' he trills.
'Well, I've got to have a new one. It's no fun sleeping with my dog.' Bath ponders life's vexing realities.
'The trouble is my deteriorating sexual capacity. I've tried Viagra. It's a grave disappointment.' So, too, has been his inability to father more than one child with his wifelets - he has an illegitimate daughter aged eight, who he sees infrequently. He is obsessed with founding a dynasty. 'I have been a failure in the children game. There is still time. Do you like children?' I panic. 'Only on toast.' 'Right ho. Let's go and see the paintings. My ancestors first.' Bath has painted 150 portraits of his ancestors - executed in migraine-inducing swirls of colour. I feel his genealogy is based more on imagination than fact.
His alleged ancestors consist of every monarch since William the Conqueror, as well as Ethelred the Unready, Robert the Bruce and the Roman historian Tacitus, whose daughter, he insists, married one of his relatives.
Is there anyone he's not related to?
He appears to consider the question gravely. I am not sure if he has heard me, because his hearing aid is going 'wee-waw'. For the first time I feel sorry for him. Perhaps this painted 'family' is a substitute for the one he missed as a child?
We traverse more corridors and reach a winding staircase. 'This is the Bluebeard Staircase,' Bath announces proudly. 'These are pictures of 71 of my wifelets.' I notice they have had their heads severed. 'That's because I couldn't fit in their bodies.' 'Do you subconsciously want to cut off their heads?' 'Maybe. When they squabbled.' We move on to the Paranoia Room, done in 1968. There is a policeman doing something unspeakable to a small child.
'Father figure,' says Bath cheerfully. Then there is a dragon-like mother standing over an unborn foetus. 'These murals are my therapies,' he says. 'I like the shock of the grotesque. Images that stand for my persecution.' MUCH of his anger finds expression in murals of a very explicit nature. One corridor is full of female nudes.
'They show I was interested in sex but I wasn't getting any,' he squeaks.
We move on to his favourite room, the Kama Sutra, which used to be his bedroom. Waking up there after a wild night must have been daunting.
The bed has a tiger skin throw and is embellished with rhino noses and mirrors. The walls show people engaged in such improbable acts that Bath admits he made most of them up.
'Very few are actually in the Kama Sutra. Do try out the bed.' This is an invitation I find eminently resistible. Eventually, I gingerly perch on the edge. Bath is wheezing. He manages, however, to heave himself onto the bedspread. I suddenly realise that there is something malodorous in the air.
It is Bath.
'Do you ever have a bath?' I ask.
He giggles. 'I'm not the best of washers. I can't remember when I last washed my hair. It's a bit overgrown.' I tell him six wifelets could live in it.
But Bath, beneath his carapace of eccentricity, is an astute businessman.
He has run the estate extremely well. Longleat is worth as estimated [pounds sterling]178million. Last year alone, 360,000 people visited the house and grounds.
'Despite what nasty people say, I'm not a lightweight. When I'm gone, I'd rather be thought of as a knave than a fool.' 'I'm sure you will be, Alexander.' 'More drinky-poos,' he declares. He helps himself to his fourth glass of rose. By now he is becoming rather too high-spirited for my own good. His pink hands hover like miniature helicopters and he begins to sing in a high-pitched voice: 'Where do you go to my lovely?' 'Home,' I say firmly.
He looks peeved, like a baby whose rattle has been taken from him. It is hard not to pity him, sitting among his murals and obsessing about immortality, while hoping for an increasingly rare visit from a wifelet.
It seems a derelict, loveless existence.
But perhaps not. The Marquess of Bath is in love with himself, and as Oscar Wilde said, that constitutes a glorious lifelong romance.
