Annabel’s
44 Berkeley Square, London
Our tour of Mother’s ’70s London art/society/music life ends this week, fittingly, at Annabel’s the members only nightclub and disco in the basement of the Clermont Club (a casino) where many of Mother’s evenings with Marian and Silvio and members of her ex-pat moms crew ended. The club was founded in 1963 by Mark Birley and named after his then wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart. It is fifty years old this year and apparently still going strong–drawing the likes of Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise and Brian Ferry just as it once drew Princess Anne, Frank Sinatra, Aristotle Onasis, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner. It was exactly the kind of place Mother loved and in London in the 70s being a beautiful young American divorcee with money and some talent was all it took to get her in. The expat community was open to Mother in a way society in New York wasn’t and she really flourished there.
