Stepping into the frame

I was always very vague about what Hannah Rothschild actually did. I knew that she was Lord Rothschild’s eldest child, quiet sister to the more flamboyant Nat, and presumably rich in the way Rothschilds are. In fact, I knew she was rich because she once invited me to a party for Nicky Haslam at her stunningly beautiful house in Little Venice. I occasionally ran into her at art parties, or at the Hay Literary Festival, and she was always friendly, but somehow self-effacing. I assumed she was a lady of leisure with mild literary and artistic interests: it never occurred to me that she might have ambitions. I now realise that was a grievous mistake. But it is a mistake seemingly everyone made — she was only recently deemed worthy of an entry in Wikipedia.

In fact, she has been working hard and building a reputation for several years, first as a television documentary-maker (her subjects including Nicky Haslam and Peter Mandelson), and then, three years ago, as the biographer of her great-aunt Nica Rothschild, “the jazz baroness”, who ran away from England to take up with Thelonius Monk and to hang out with jazz musicians in the States. Nica was the Rothschild rebel, the one who got away, and considered something of an embarrassment to the family. From studying her life, Hannah wrote that she learnt “to value choice over convention and, above all, to be more courageous”.

And perhaps we are seeing the fruits of that courage now, because Hannah Rothschild, at nearly 53, has suddenly emerged from the overwhelming shadow of her family to appear as a powerful woman in her own right. In August she takes up her appointment as chair of the National Gallery — the first woman ever to hold the job — but before that she is publishing her first novel, The Improbability of Love, which is being translated into six languages and already has “some quite swanky people” fighting over the film rights.

I was keen to interview her about the novel, but also about the heady but secretive business of being a Rothschild. Secrecy is a family obsession and it is rare indeed to find any Rothschild prepared to talk about anything, ever. I once interviewed her father, Lord Rothschild, about a new art gallery he was building at Waddesdon Manor, the fabulous Rothschild House near Aylesbury, but it was a painful business. Incidentally, I’ll call him Jacob in this article because otherwise there are too many Rothschilds, but I would never dream of calling him that to his face. He inspires not merely respect, but awe.

I wanted to interview Hannah at home — mainly because I wanted to see her beautiful house again — but she insisted I come to her office, presumably to mark her new professionalism. It is in her father’s headquarters in St James’s with the Rothschild five arrows shield outside — the five arrows denoting the five brothers who set off from the Frankfurt ghetto in the early 19th century to found their great banking dynasty in all the capitals of Europe. The house is predictably full of good art and sculpture — I notice a Giacometti (her father bought his first Giacometti at the age of 17), a Sickert and several Gorkys, and that is just on the staircase. Hannah’s office is huge, on the first floor, with a big bay window overlooking the street. “You must have bagged the best office!” I exclaim, but she says drily: “You haven’t seen my father’s.” She works here four days a week, 9 till 7, then one day a week at Waddesdon.

She offers coffee or tea, briskly checks that my tape recorder is working, manages to get my digital recorder working, which I never can, and settles down to talk about her novel. It is set in the London art world of Old Master dealers, collectors and auctioneers, and is bound to cause uproar in the hushed salons of Mayfair and St James’s. It exposes the business of Old Master dealing as an utter snakepit — fakes, smuggling, dodgy attributions, the lot. It also casts some intriguing light on the lifestyle of exiled Russian oligarchs, who live in constant fear of assassination. The novel is a fast-paced imbroglio of skulduggery, dirty dealing, even murder, and finishes with a sort of James Bond flourish when the British security services finally intervene.

She says she started the novel many years ago, but then gave up and put it away in a drawer. But after the success of The Baroness, “My agent, who is rather fierce, said you must have a dud first novel hiding in a drawer, so I got it out, and did a complete rewrite.”

She knew about the art world from her father, of course, but also from making several TV documentaries about auction houses in the 1990s. Before that, she had studied the history of taste as part of her history degree at Oxford, and briefly worked for the Old Bond Street art dealer Colnaghi’s. She says the characters in her book are not based on real people, but I’m not sure I believe her — one of them, Barty, is quite obviously Nicky Haslam. And what about all those exiled Russian oligarchs who have to pay 30% of their income to “the Leader” in order to stay alive? Does she know that for a fact? “No. I have no idea if that’s true, but I have to say it’s interesting how some oligarchs are allowed to move freely round the world, and some aren’t and you think: what’s the deal here? I’m pretty sure there must be some kind of backhanders going on.”

The novel’s heroine, Annie McDee, is a private cook in her early thirties who lives in a grotty flat and travels by night bus. At first she seems a bit of a dishrag — she has just been dumped by a long-term, controlling, boyfriend and has moved from Devon to London where she knows nobody at all, and suffers from desperate loneliness. Then one day she buys a painting in a junk shop, which turns out to be... I won’t spoil the plot, but many adventures follow in the course of which Annie stops being a dishrag and eventually finds love.

At first sight, Annie bears no resemblance to Hannah, but Hannah says firmly: “She is my younger self, before I got married, before I had children. When I was in my twenties I had a bad love affair and I thought that moving would somehow cure the heartbreak — silly idea — so I went to live in north Kensal Rise, an area I was not familiar with at all. And I kept notes and I remember writing about the feeling of displacement, and looking through people’s windows and seeing people look as if they knew what life was about.” And did she travel on night buses? “I still do — I actually genuinely like night buses because I love looking into other people’s lives, and I like the kind of anonymity of it somehow.”

Was she, like Annie, desperately lonely? “Yes, very, very lonely. I think loneliness is a theme that I return to quite often. I mean, that’s why I made the film about Nicky [Haslam], and one about Peter Mandelson. It’s something I keep going back to.” But is Annie only lonely because she pushes love away? “Yes. That’s very perceptive of you. But after her rotter boyfriend dumps her, she then thinks, ‘I can’t risk any more, its too scary, I can’t risk having a relationship.’ ”

In her biography The Baroness, she recalls that she first met her great-aunt Nica when she was 22 and at a particularly low point in her life. “I felt inadequate, incapable of making it in my own right, yet unable to make the most of the privilege and opportunities available to me.” She kept applying to the BBC and not getting in, and her father kept finding her jobs that she was never any good at. She was drawn to Nica because she was the one Rothschild who got away, who kicked over the family traces.

I’ve always fantasised about being a Rothschild — all that money, all those houses, all that art and fabulous wine (Château Lafite, Mouton Rothschild) and brilliant connections all over Europe. But Hannah points out that it does come with strings attached — namely the heavy weight of family expectations. “I felt very inadequate when I was growing up. Because although I went to these very good schools and university [St Paul’s, Marlborough, Oxford], I had a thoroughly undistinguished career at all of them. Whereas the rest of the family were very clever. My aunt Emma got into Oxford when she was about 15; my aunt Nell Dunn, on my mother’s side, had written these quite seminal works [Up the Junction, Poor Cow], which I admired very much. And my great-aunt Miriam was completely, dazzlingly brilliant and a world expert on fleas and butterflies. So even the female role models were hard to live up to. And then when you got to the men — my grandfather and father both got firsts, and I remember when I got a place at Oxford my grandfather rang to ask, ‘What scholarship did you get?’ And actually I was really quite lucky to get in at all — I’m not being falsely modest, it’s true — so there was no question of a scholarship. And my grandfather said, ‘She’s let us down!’ I wasn’t particularly good at anything.”

In fact, she had what sounds like a breakdown in her last year at Oxford and dropped out without taking her degree. “I was really muddled and lost. I think it was a combination of different things — the fact that real life was coming towards me quite quickly; I had my first broken love affair; I messed around with drink and drugs. It was quite a frightening time, actually. I went home and it took a long time — five months — of trying to pick myself up and put myself together again. And actually the thing that really helped was that I went to India with a friend, backpacking, and there was something about reducing life to the really basic co-ordinates of feeding yourself, getting from A to B, finding somewhere to sleep, that I found stabilising.”

So Annie is based on Hannah when she was in her twenties. But there is another female character in the book, Rebecca Winkleman, who is very different to Annie. She is in her fifties, cool, controlled, controlling, but she is under the thumb of her 92-year-old father, Memling, a famous international art dealer. I wondered if there was anything of Rebecca in Hannah?

“Well, insofar as I work with my father, and the feelings of working in quite close proximity with someone who is an authority figure — there’s lots of resonances there.” In the novel she writes that, “To live under Memling’s rule was alternately luxurious, infantilising, and sometimes demoralising.” Would she say that about working with her father? “I think if I had come to work with my Dad earlier in my life, it would have been demoralising, but because I chose, or he chose, or we decided to work together when I was older and had got some career under my belt, and more independence, it’s a much more equal relationship. But I’m very, very glad I didn’t do it earlier.” Did she show him the novel? Yes, she says, “He loved it, but was delighted to find two ‘dreadful’ mistakes — I got the year of Caravaggio’s death wrong and misplaced the Late Renaissance by one decade!”

Hannah started working with her father only three years ago. He kept asking her to join him, but “I held off, held off. I felt it would be overwhelming because he is such an extraordinary person, I felt I would be crushed by it. It was only three years ago that I finally felt, ‘Actually now I’m ready for this.’ ” Later, worried that she might have given me the wrong impression, she emails to say that her father is in no way like Memling Winkleman: “Memling is cold and process-driven; Jacob is emotional and mercurial. His brilliance is being able to marry intuition with conviction. As a colleague, he is encouraging, supportive and exacting. The ‘problem’, if there is one, is keeping up with him.”

I’d always assumed that she was being groomed to take over Waddesdon, and that her brother, Nat, would take over the investment side. But no, it turns out Nat is not involved at all, whereas she is on the board of the finance company, which consists of an investment trust, RIT, and an asset-management company. “I had to go back to night school and do maths — literally — I had to learn really basic things, like balance sheets and profit and loss accounts. Because I thought, ‘If I’m going to do this I’ve got to do it very seriously.’ And I’d had no background in it. I did business studies at A-level, but I didn’t retain any of it. So I went back and learnt. I still have a coach because there are intricacies of that sort of thing that are quite complicated.” But can you really learn about high finance just by going to night school? “Well, I suppose some knowledge must have rubbed off. I didn’t feel frightened of it because I’d grown up with people talking about that sort of stuff.”

Jacob set up his independent investment trust in l980, when his uncle Sir Evelyn de Rothschild kicked him out of the family bank. What made it more painful was that Jacob’s father, Victor, whom he had brought into the bank, sided with Evelyn. It was quite a savage defenestration — he wasn’t even allowed to use the name Rothschild. So he called his trust RIT Capital Partners. Most of the shareholders are very old now — “Dad calls them, not unkindly I hasten to add, Grandad’s Army, because they bought shares when he started the company over 30 years ago. And you see them getting older and older at every AGM. But I suppose you hope that then they give the shares to their grandchildren, so you refresh the membership.” Hannah sits on the board, but only as a non-executive director — “I’m not given the levers to pull — I don’t go around saying, ‘Buy yen this morning.’ ” Could she potentially mount a boardroom coup to sack her father, as his father and uncle did? “No! Because the board consists of 14 people and it would have to be a unanimous board decision. And anyway I think it would be a very bad idea! He’s very good at what he does.”

But it seems as if her father, now 78, is gradually shifting his responsibilities on to her. “I don’t know about shifting, but certainly sharing them more and I’m learning on a daily basis. It’s interesting. I’m 52, and I have siblings, and there are eight children, including my nephews and nieces, so I’m almost getting to the stage where I’m thinking more about the next generation.” Has her father told her what is in his will? “No. I wouldn’t dare ask either!”

One responsibility she probably can’t take over is Yad Hanadiv, the vast Israeli charitable foundation that Jacob inherited in 1988. It was worth £90m then and is worth £3bn now. It built the Israeli Knesset and Supreme Court and supports many science and education projects. Hannah sits on the board, but it is unlikely that she could ever take over the chairmanship from her father, given that she is barely Jewish. Her father is only half-Jewish, and her mother, Serena, is Catholic, and the family has never been observant. “I don’t think my father would go to the cinema on Yom Kippur, and my mother wouldn’t race a horse in her colours [Lady Rothschild is a keen racehorse owner], but that’s purely out of respect. We were a very secular family. But, having said that, there is a big pot of money and what do you do with it?’ She thinks one of her cousins or a member of the younger generation will probably take over — “It will be interesting to see when, er, when the time comes.”

Secrecy is, of course, a great Rothschild trait, one they believe to be key to their success. Hannah’s Wikipedia entry is notably terse on her private life — it says only that she was married to an American film maker called William Lord Brookfield in the 1990s, and is now divorced. She says she didn’t write the entry herself and doesn’t know who put it in, “but good, I’m glad I’m living up to the Rothschild name! I was married for a very short time, six years, and we had three children and I think it’s fair to say we were completely unsuited. What we have done — and I’m very proud of this — is I think we co-parented very well. We live a very short distance from each other and the children go between the two houses endlessly. And I’m really, really pleased we managed to do that.”

She had a few affairs after her divorce but says there is no special man in her life now. “And I’m honestly quite happy about that. I’m not ecstatically happy about it, but I am quite happy. I live alone, with my three daughters and two dogs and I work really hard. I’ve got fabulous kids, great friends, so I don’t feel the absence of a significant other. In the past it was more of a problem, but now actually I feel quite fulfilled and calm.”

She lives in the house she grew up in, in Little Venice. Until recently she also had a house in Devon, but has now sold it because she didn’t go there enough. She thinks eventually she will probably have a house at Waddesdon (where she works one day a week). “But right now I find it hard enough to look after one house.”

And of course from August, she will be in charge of the National Gallery, which she says is “a huge, huge honour” especially as there hasn’t been a woman chair before. Critics have carped that she got the appointment through nepotism, but in fact she has been a trustee of the National Gallery for the past seven years, and in charge of liaison with the Tate, and was on the boards of the Whitechapel gallery and the ICA before that. She accepts that one of her main tasks will be fundraising to fill the gap between the government’s ever-diminishing grant and the visitors’ ever-increasing numbers and, “I don’t think anyone ever thinks, ‘Wow let’s go and do some fundraising, what fun!’ ” But I don’t feel ashamed or awkward about it, because it’s in such a great cause.” And of course, she has a secret weapon — her father was chair of the National Gallery from 1985 to 1991, and she can always consult him.

The one drawback to her new appointment is that she will probably not have time to write another novel. “I’m really worried about that. I’ve got an idea for one — based on that Indian trip I told you about and the idea of two women going back in middle age to this place that meant a lot to them when they were young. I would absolutely love to write it, but I honestly can’t see how I’ll get the time, and I do feel sad about that.” I bet she does find the time. I get the impression that now she’s finally found her ambitions in life there’ll be no stopping her.

The Improbability of Love, by Hannah Rothschild, is published by Bloomsbury on May 21, priced £14.99. Click here to buy it for £12.99 (inc. p&p) from the Sunday Times Bookshop