Her own childhood was at times lonely and confusing. Growing up with one brother in various castles and villas and on yachts in England and on the Continent, she saw more of nurses and nannies than of her parents. In 1951, when she was nine years old, her father divorced her mother, Lady Isabel Manners, a daughter of the Duke of Rutland, and married Gloria Rubio, the exotic Mexican beauty. Dufferin remembers being “fascinated” but rather mystified by her new stepmother. “She was so beautiful,” she recalls. “She moved like a cat.”
But there was an upside, such as the winter—when Dufferin turned 14 and her father removed her from school—that she spent in Palm Beach with her father, stepmother and a houseguest, Truman Capote, one of Gloria’s best friends. “He was so wicked. I loved him,” she says. Loel was less enchanted by Capote but put up with him because, as she recalls, “he liked to keep his women amused.” A devoted yachtsman and pilot—as a child, Lindy learned to fly a helicopter on his lap—he was said to be cold and distant. “I sometimes think he was better with machines than he was with women,” she says.
Adolescence was often “turbulent,” Dufferin admits. “As the child of a powerful family, you learn to keep as low a profile as possible. When the storm goes over your head, you just hunker down. But it sort of builds character, doesn’t it?” Yet such a life was exciting, too. “We were always on the move. One never knew what was going to happen next,” she remembers. Once, when she was on the deck of the family boat off Antibes, she was startled by a great gurgling in the water, from which emerged a man in a fantastic helmet and wetsuit—Jacques Cousteau. Guinness later financed the purchase of the oceanographer’s ship the Calypso, as well as his Oscar-winning film, The Silent World.
While a debutante, Dufferin fell in love with her cousin, and her life changed abruptly. They bonded, she recalls, over their common background. “The Guinness family is fairly big,” she says, “but we all have the sense of us being from the same team.” Certainly, Sheridan had grown up with his share of great wealth and drama. His father, Basil, was descended from one of Northern Ireland’s oldest aristocratic families, the Blackwoods, and married Maureen Guinness, then one of Britain’s wealthiest and liveliest heiresses. He was killed in Burma in 1945, in the closing months of the war, making six-year-old Sheridan the Fifth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. But the famously formidable Maureen continued to rule over her son—and the roost—for some years.
After their wedding before 2,000 people in Westminster Abbey, Lindy and Sheridan divided their time between London and Clandeboye, where Maureen was still very much in charge for the first few years of the marriage. (Dufferin recalls her as “fantastic” yet “incredibly naughty.”)
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