Life of a Lord

To most Americans, the fifth Lord Harlech is the sometime walking, traveling and concertgoing companion of Jacqueline Kennedy and the man widely rumored to be her transatlantic suitor. Many also remember him as Britain's highly successful Ambassador to Washington under John Kennedy. In Britain, however, Harlech is increasingly drawing attention as a man of versatile talents who is making his mark on British life and business. Harlech is already Britain's national film censor and rates as a potentially influential Tory politician. Recently, he took on a multimillion-dollar private venture as the chief executive of a new commercial-television consortium, which begins programming next week with a Special by two of its other stockholders, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Harlech, 49, is well connected in both Britain and the U.S., where his friends from New Frontier days consider him practically part of the clan. "He has a nice urbanity and a rather sardonic view of people and events," says Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Adds Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "He has the savoir-faire, the savviness, the wisdom that Harold Macmillan had 25 years ago." Also like Macmillan, to whom he is related by marriage, Harlech has profited by a set of thoroughly gilt-edged circumstances. His father served for 28 years as a Tory M.P. and for two as Colonial Secretary, and his mother was a member of the legendary Cecil family, a prominent force in British politics since the 16th century.

President's Friend. Of all the circumstances that have affected his career, however, the luckiest was a college-age friendship with John F. Kennedy in the late 1930s, when Father Joe was U.S. Ambassador to London. While Harlech, then William David Ormsby Gore, was slogging through a series of unglamorous diplomatic jobs, his friend got elected President and specifically requested Ormsby Gore as Britain's Ambassador to Washington. "I trust David as I would my own Cabinet," said Kennedy--and he saw more of David than he did of most of his Cabinet.

Ormsby Gore turned up frequently on Hyannis Port weekends, at Bobby's Hickory Hill seminars and often in White House inner sanctums. He was beside Kennedy in the Situation Room when the President won his terms on the limited test-ban treaty, urged Kennedy to publish photographic proof of the Cuban missile buildup and persuaded him, over Navy objections, to order a delay in intercepting Russian ships, thereby avoiding a direct confrontation with the Soviets. "It was a freak of history," he says of his influence then. "Those years proved to be the most rewarding of my life." They also instilled in him a loyalty to the Kennedys: Harlech has already endorsed Bobby's presidential candidacy over British TV.

Most of his decisions these days are somewhat less fateful. Harlech is now deciding, for example, just what sort of programming to give the 3.6 million television viewers in Wales and the west of England who are awaiting their first look at what the Harlech Television consortium has in store for them. Recruited a year ago by friends to join the venture and lend it his name, Harlech has invested $120,000 of his money and 80% of his working time into organizing the venture. When normal operations begin, he will commute between company headquarters in London and the twin production centers in Cardiff and Bristol. "I've had a hell of a lot to learn from the beginning," he says. "I've been conscious of not being an expert."

For at least one day a week, TV Boss Harlech switches media to the cinema, fulfilling duties that make his signature mandatory on every film shown in Britain. As a censor, he complains, "You get criticized no matter what you do." In fact, Britain picks as its censors men whose judgments are unlikely to attract criticism, and Harlech has come in for little of it from either the public or the industry. No film buff, he views only the films that his staff screens out as controversial, recently decreed minor cuts in Ulysses and Fanny Hill.

Flippie Brood. Since his wife's death last May in a head-on auto crash, Harlech has led a fairly quiet, solitary life except for a series of jet-age visits with Jackie. He accompanied her on a regal six-day tour of Cambodia in November, joined her in February at the Georgia plantation of former Ambassador to Great Britain John Hay Whitney, and escorted her, hand in hand, to Trader Vic's restaurant in Manhattan. Despite their obvious pleasure in one another's company, both have flatly denied rumors of a romance; Harlech says he has disavowed them "a dozen, no, a hundred times" to friends.

After Lady Harlech's death, Harlech also retired from the deputy Tory leadership in the House of Lords. If the Tories are returned to power in the next election, though, he could well be in line for a Cabinet seat. Meanwhile, besides his new business, there are his three homes to attend to--an apartment in Kensington and country mansions in Shropshire and Wales--and two Shropshire dairy farms to supervise. Harlech commutes among them in a custom-built Gordon-Keeble sports car with a top speed of 140 m.p.h. (he has two warnings on his license; the third means suspension). He spends a good deal of time with his children, who are living, breathing catalogues of where the young are at. Jane, 25, the wife of the owner of a mod boutique named Hung on You, favors garish antique clothes. For her wedding in a Roman Catholic church (Harlech's children were raised in his wife's religion, but he is an Anglican), which she planned without informing her parents until the day ahead, she chose a mid-calf Victorian model. Julian, 27, heir to the title, hires himself out as a male model. "My hands are my specialty," he explains. "Being long and delicate, they're useful for cigarette ads." Victoria, 21, lives with her grandmother, and the two youngest, 16-year-old Alice and 14-year-old Francis, attend school, Alice in Manhattan.

Harlech seemingly suffers no embarrassment over his flippie brood. When Jane and her husband were picked up, though not charged, in the company of a pot-stocked party of moor campers, police found their infant son Saffron tucked away in a pile of hay. Jane's explanation: "It was very warm in the hay." Harlech stuck by her. "Jane knows what she's doing," he told reporters. "She's no child." And besides, Harlech himself is not always the model of upper-crust orthodoxy. He recently snowed up at Harvard for an advisory committee meeting of the Kennedy Institute of Politics--which Jackie also attended--wearing a lilac shirt and purple tie.

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