Jonathan Dimbleby first set eyes on “enchanting, mesmerising” Susan Chilcott,
the soprano, at a supper party given by mutual friends. “I thought she was
magnificent and intriguing and I thought I would like to see her again – and
I didn’t,” he says.
That fleeting thought might have remained the sort of innocently entertaining
“what if?” occasionally mused on by the long-married if he had not, five
months later, been asked to interview Chilcott for his local paper, The Bath
Chronicle.
Bel Mooney, Dimbleby’s wife, later said the incident reminded her of the movie
Sliding Doors in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a woman whose career and love
life are radically altered according to whether or not she catches a certain
train.
What if Dimbleby had been busy with other things that day? He and Mooney would
almost certainly be celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary this year and
quietly congratulating themselves on the stability and longevity of their
relationship while so many friends’ marriages had fallen by the wayside.
Instead, face to face with the soprano, the flicker of interest he had felt at
dinner blazed into an all-consuming passion that upended his life. Chilcott
had been playing the title role of Jenufa at the Welsh National Opera and
“when she described Jenufa’s fate [Jenufa’s child is drowned] her eyes
filled with tears and I was very moved by that”, he says. “Sue was really a
very down-to-earth person but I saw the intensity and the glow inside her of
understanding.”
Some weeks later, as Dimbleby relates in his book, they began a love affair.
That same day or the day after – he doesn’t remember clearly now – Chilcott
found a lump in her breast and shortly afterwards was given the news that
she was dying. Extraordinarily, Dimbleby, given the newness of their
relationship, his public profile and, not least, his marriage, felt
compelled to leave home to look after her. Even now, five years later, he
can’t explain why.
“It felt like an unstoppable force,” he says. “I knew what I was doing but I
didn’t know what the outcome would be. It was odd, but I didn’t want to be
away from Bel either – I felt absolutely torn. But I was entranced; and then
of course we didn’t know how long she had – it might have been a few weeks
or months or it might have been a few years. It was a very powerful,
overwhelming experience and also a kind of test.”
We are sitting in a gloomy room at his club in central London. Dimbleby is
small and surprisingly pale, but his voice is unnervingly familiar from
years of chairing Radio 4’s Any Questions? He is casually dressed in a
rumpled jacket and open-necked shirt and talks animatedly about his
nine-month-old daughter Daisy, whom he clearly adores and has found it
difficult to tear himself away from that morning.
A “miraculous” outcome to the past few years’ drama has been his marriage to
Jessica Ray, a publicist more than 30 years his junior.
He is equally at ease discussing his journey through Vladimir Putin’s
“crypto-fascist state” for his BBC television series on Russia which starts
next month. Affairs of state are his thing as a scion of the Dimbleby
dynasty and journalistic grandee – or perhaps affairs of prospective heads
of state: one of the high points of his career is his famous interview with
the Prince of Wales, who confessed that he had been unfaithful to Princess
Diana with Camilla Parker Bowles (Dimbleby was later a guest at the wedding
of Charles and Camilla).
Talking about his own affair, however, is a different matter. It has taken
five years for him to feel able to speak about what happened and even now
it’s clearly a struggle. He hesitates, choosing his words carefully, caught
between the desire to be honest – and, as a professional broadcaster
himself, a “good interviewee” – and the fear of exacerbating the pain that
the entire saga has inflicted on his family.
He feels strongly that what started as a journalistic exercise in Russia ended
up as “a redemptive journey” and that as part of his wanderings among
shopkeepers, farmers and students on the 10,000-mile journey from Murmansk
to Vladivostok he might be able to give his audience an insight not just
into modern Russia, but also into the nature of grief.
“The journey released what had been bottled up,” he says. “It gave me time to
relive and to think about what had happened. Pain continues for a long time.”
What strikes one on reading his book is not just the poignancy of his doomed
love affair, but also how rare it is to hear a man admit to depression or
emotional frailty, especially one who is used to crossing swords with
politicians. He consulted a psychologist after Chilcott’s death: “He said I
looked all right on the outside but he was like a surveyor looking at a
building, searching for the cracks.”
Despite being an opera lover, he never heard Chilcott perform. “When we first
met she said, ‘You must come and hear me sing’, and there were one or two
opportunities but I couldn’t make it, and she said, ‘Never mind, there’ll be
another time’. Neither of us knew what was about to happen.”
Their affair instantly threw him into an emotional maelstrom. One can only
imagine the hurt of his wife, with whom he has since achieved a “good,
loving modus vivendi”, and the fury of his children, Dan, 34, and Kitty, 28.
At the same time he was dizzily in love, establishing himself as a temporary
father to Chilcott’s son and, as she weakened, battling to find her suitable
palliative care, the person who instantly grasped the gravity of what he was
doing was Chilcott herself. “She quite fiercely said to me, ‘You must not
throw your life away on this, I can manage, I can cope’, but I couldn’t do
that,” he says. “I couldn’t say yes, I’ll stay where I am, and even if I had
I think it would have been just as disastrous. My mind and my heart would
have been with Sue even if I’d had the security of the family there.
“I think what happened was sort of inevitable. You don’t always write the
script, do you? And we had some wonderfully happy times, Sue and I.
Sometimes we’d laugh and say, ‘Imagine if someone came up with this as the
libretto for an opera, no one could take it on’.”
Other than among close family and friends, their affair remained secret.
Although it was a relief not to have the tabloid newspapers knocking on the
door, it meant that after Chilcott died there was no acknowledgment of
Dimbleby as her lover or of his loss, which probably intensified his
anguish.
“That was one of the most painful things,” he admits. “I couldn’t be open. I
was in a pretty fragile state and I couldn’t speak freely about how powerful
the whole experience had been without causing more pain to my family, who
didn’t understand, although Kit, my daughter, was astonishing. She didn’t
like it – she was angry from time to time – but she was very loving.”
Dimbleby moved back home to his farm outside Bath, but trying to restore his
marriage was useless. A few months later Mooney moved out. It was the end
for Dimbleby too: “I’d planted hedges, I’d loved the farm for years, but it
was an empty shell for me.”
A friend spotted a suitable house in Devon and on impulse he bought it. Then,
three years ago, on an outing to the Barbican in London with the pianist and
broadcaster Iain Burnside, Chilcott’s old friend, he met Jessica.
“In the opera world everyone knows Iain and a young girl with chestnut hair,
an opera singer, came along and said ‘Hello’, and alongside her was another,
smaller girl, on crutches, who introduced herself. I immediately thought:
what a lovely person – she’s so modest, but so confident and beautiful, and
all the qualities that make a woman alluring. She looked vulnerable, I
suppose, and brave . . .” Once again he was lost.
Last March they married in Devon. “And the wonders of technology being what
they are, we had a baby three months later,” he says cheerfully.
Daisy is the joyful postscript to this happy ending. At 63 he is relishing
being a father again: “The sense of the miracle is so sharp. Your priorities
have altered. Yes, work still matters, I want to still climb mountains
because they’re interesting mountains to climb, not because I want to be at
the top of them.”
In short, he has had the luck of the devil and doesn’t take it for granted: “I
never thought I would find happiness again. I’m happy because I have an
adorable wife who seems to love me, an adorable child and Bel, whom I still
love and who still loves me. We aren’t all wrecked on the rocks; somehow
we’ve been able to come through it.”
