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The Duchess of Alba obituary
Nov. 20th, 2014 10:47 pmMichael Eaude
The Guardian, Thursday 20 November 2014
The 18th Duchess of Alba, who has died aged 88, was one of Spain’s best-known public figures. Her frizzy hair (sometimes dyed red), waxen skin and querulous voice uttering forthright opinions made her instantly recognisable. Never camera-shy and a frequent participant in high-society events, she was a darling of the gossip magazines, television shows and, in her later years, satirists.
The duchess, known as Cayetana de Alba, was also fabulously rich and Spain’s biggest private landowner. She had palaces throughout the country, including the Palacio de las Dueñas in Seville, her main residence, and the Palacio de Liria, where she was born, in Madrid. The castle to which she owed her title is in Alba de Tormes, Salamanca. She usually spent the summer at her house in Ibiza or another in Marbella.
The dukedom of Alba goes back to the 15th century but Cayetana de Alba was only the third female member of the dynasty to be duchess in her own right. Her godparents were King Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenie, his English queen. She was a grandee of Spain 14 times over and possessed 46 noble titles, including Duchess of Berwick, a Jacobite title, as she was a direct descendant of James II (VII of Scotland) and his mistress Arabella Churchill. Her titles gave her several arcane privileges, such as not having to kneel before the pope or being permitted to ride a horse into Seville Cathedral.
Cayetana’s early life was not quite as easy as her background suggests. The 1931 declaration of the Spanish republic resulted in the expulsion of the royal family and social conflict as landless peasants fought to occupy aristocrats’ often uncultivated estates. She hardly saw her mother, who was ill with tuberculosis and died when Cayetana de Alba was eight. She had a peripatetic childhood travelling with her father, until he became Franco’s representative in London during the 1936-39 civil war and ambassador there from 1939 to 1945. In London, the future duchess received a broader education than she would have had in postwar Spain, and hobnobbed with her poor relations the Churchills. Her adored father introduced her into the world of painting and the arts in general; the huge Alba private collection includes paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya.
She inherited the title on her father’s death in 1953. In 1947, she had married Luis Martínez de Irujo in what the French newspaper Libération called “the most expensive wedding in the world”. They had six children, each of whom was given a separate noble title. The duchess was regarded as a great beauty and was reputed to associate, in classic Andalusian upper-class fashion, with bullfighters and dancers. In 2009, she bought a white marble tomb in the San Fernando cemetery, Seville, in order to be buried beside the grave of a bullfighter who was rumoured to have been her lover. Her husband died in 1972 of leukaemia, and in 1978 she married the intellectual and former priest Jesús Aguirre.
The duchess liked to insist that true aristocracy resided in culture and not money. In the 1950s, Picasso wanted to paint her, as Goya had painted one of her ancestors, both clothed and nude. Martínez de Irujo opposed the idea and the duchess reluctantly accepted that being painted, even clothed, by the communist Picasso would have caused an enormous scandal under the Franco dictatorship. Indeed, when she brought some Picasso paintings to a 1950s private showing in Seville, ultra-rightists demonstrated against the exhibition. This led to gossip that she was leftwing. In reality, the duchess, surrounded all her life by servants and pampered as an only child, always did exactly what she wanted. Both she and her father were monarchists with a blue-blooded disdain for Franco and the populist Falange. Her cultural tastes did not stop her from defending her estates tooth and nail, unlike another famous Andalusian aristocrat, the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, who gave away much of her land to workers’ co-operatives.
The tension in Andalusia, where little-cultivated feudal estates still coexist with impoverished agricultural labourers, was shown by a famous clash between the duchess and the agricultural workers’ union (SOC) in 2006. The union organised a mass demonstration in Seville to protest against the Andalusian government’s award to the duchess of the title Hija Predilecta (favoured daughter). The SOC argued that it was a disgrace to honour a landowner who received €2m a year in EU subsidies for the 84,000 acres she owned. The demonstration was dispersed by a police baton charge, leaving 14 injured. The duchess added insult to these injuries, saying on TV, “I couldn’t care less about a few madmen” and “All those demonstrating are delinquents.” To her chagrin, the SOC won a slander case and she had to pay the union €6,000 in damages.
In her last decade she became something of a figure of fun because of her eccentric appearance, habits and statements, and an admirable refusal to live a conventional old age. Jesús Aguirre died in 2001 and in 2008 she entered into a long public spat with three of her children over her relationship with Alfonso Díez, a civil servant 24 years younger than her. “They don’t want me to marry, but they change partners more often than I do,” the never discreet duchess lamented before marrying Díez in 2011. In 2009, a fictionalised television film about her life showed her undiminished capacity to fascinate millions, even in the middle of an economic crisis.
She is survived by her husband and children.
• María del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y Silva, 18th Duchess of Alba, born 28 March 1926; died 20 November 2014
(The Guardian reader comments to follow)
The Guardian, Thursday 20 November 2014
Wealthy and eccentric Spanish aristocrat who was a darling of the gossip magazines
The 18th Duchess of Alba, who has died aged 88, was one of Spain’s best-known public figures. Her frizzy hair (sometimes dyed red), waxen skin and querulous voice uttering forthright opinions made her instantly recognisable. Never camera-shy and a frequent participant in high-society events, she was a darling of the gossip magazines, television shows and, in her later years, satirists.
The duchess, known as Cayetana de Alba, was also fabulously rich and Spain’s biggest private landowner. She had palaces throughout the country, including the Palacio de las Dueñas in Seville, her main residence, and the Palacio de Liria, where she was born, in Madrid. The castle to which she owed her title is in Alba de Tormes, Salamanca. She usually spent the summer at her house in Ibiza or another in Marbella.
The dukedom of Alba goes back to the 15th century but Cayetana de Alba was only the third female member of the dynasty to be duchess in her own right. Her godparents were King Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenie, his English queen. She was a grandee of Spain 14 times over and possessed 46 noble titles, including Duchess of Berwick, a Jacobite title, as she was a direct descendant of James II (VII of Scotland) and his mistress Arabella Churchill. Her titles gave her several arcane privileges, such as not having to kneel before the pope or being permitted to ride a horse into Seville Cathedral.
Cayetana’s early life was not quite as easy as her background suggests. The 1931 declaration of the Spanish republic resulted in the expulsion of the royal family and social conflict as landless peasants fought to occupy aristocrats’ often uncultivated estates. She hardly saw her mother, who was ill with tuberculosis and died when Cayetana de Alba was eight. She had a peripatetic childhood travelling with her father, until he became Franco’s representative in London during the 1936-39 civil war and ambassador there from 1939 to 1945. In London, the future duchess received a broader education than she would have had in postwar Spain, and hobnobbed with her poor relations the Churchills. Her adored father introduced her into the world of painting and the arts in general; the huge Alba private collection includes paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya.
She inherited the title on her father’s death in 1953. In 1947, she had married Luis Martínez de Irujo in what the French newspaper Libération called “the most expensive wedding in the world”. They had six children, each of whom was given a separate noble title. The duchess was regarded as a great beauty and was reputed to associate, in classic Andalusian upper-class fashion, with bullfighters and dancers. In 2009, she bought a white marble tomb in the San Fernando cemetery, Seville, in order to be buried beside the grave of a bullfighter who was rumoured to have been her lover. Her husband died in 1972 of leukaemia, and in 1978 she married the intellectual and former priest Jesús Aguirre.
The duchess liked to insist that true aristocracy resided in culture and not money. In the 1950s, Picasso wanted to paint her, as Goya had painted one of her ancestors, both clothed and nude. Martínez de Irujo opposed the idea and the duchess reluctantly accepted that being painted, even clothed, by the communist Picasso would have caused an enormous scandal under the Franco dictatorship. Indeed, when she brought some Picasso paintings to a 1950s private showing in Seville, ultra-rightists demonstrated against the exhibition. This led to gossip that she was leftwing. In reality, the duchess, surrounded all her life by servants and pampered as an only child, always did exactly what she wanted. Both she and her father were monarchists with a blue-blooded disdain for Franco and the populist Falange. Her cultural tastes did not stop her from defending her estates tooth and nail, unlike another famous Andalusian aristocrat, the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, who gave away much of her land to workers’ co-operatives.
The tension in Andalusia, where little-cultivated feudal estates still coexist with impoverished agricultural labourers, was shown by a famous clash between the duchess and the agricultural workers’ union (SOC) in 2006. The union organised a mass demonstration in Seville to protest against the Andalusian government’s award to the duchess of the title Hija Predilecta (favoured daughter). The SOC argued that it was a disgrace to honour a landowner who received €2m a year in EU subsidies for the 84,000 acres she owned. The demonstration was dispersed by a police baton charge, leaving 14 injured. The duchess added insult to these injuries, saying on TV, “I couldn’t care less about a few madmen” and “All those demonstrating are delinquents.” To her chagrin, the SOC won a slander case and she had to pay the union €6,000 in damages.
In her last decade she became something of a figure of fun because of her eccentric appearance, habits and statements, and an admirable refusal to live a conventional old age. Jesús Aguirre died in 2001 and in 2008 she entered into a long public spat with three of her children over her relationship with Alfonso Díez, a civil servant 24 years younger than her. “They don’t want me to marry, but they change partners more often than I do,” the never discreet duchess lamented before marrying Díez in 2011. In 2009, a fictionalised television film about her life showed her undiminished capacity to fascinate millions, even in the middle of an economic crisis.
She is survived by her husband and children.
• María del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y Silva, 18th Duchess of Alba, born 28 March 1926; died 20 November 2014
(The Guardian reader comments to follow)
