At first glance it seemed like he had it all, being the heir to an earldom and the best part of 20,000 acres of Yorkshire, not to mention being sent to Ampleforth for £46,740 a year Rupert Everett was one of them. his contemporaries.
But the life of Viscount Pollington, who has died aged 64, is a stark reminder that there is so much more important than hereditary status and wealth.
Until a redemptive marriage at the age of 58, Johnny Pollington, eldest son of the 8th Earl of Mexborough, seemed to be marked by a succession of tragedies.
These began when his mother Elizabeth, daughter of the sixth Earl of Verulum, ended her marriage and took Johnny and his younger sister Alethea from Arden Hall, the family seat in Yorkshire, to live in London, where they succumbed to alcoholism and depression. , which sometimes requires breakfast in bed at four in the morning.
In the words of an aristocratic friend, it was “a troublesome childhood.” Johnny had a constant cold and was sniffling all the time.’
Norma Pollington with her husband Viscount Johnny Pollington, who died on October 23
In adulthood, both Johnny and Alethea experimented with narcotics.
These seemingly reinforced Alethea’s belief that she was trapped in a love triangle involving her former fiancé, James Gilbey, and Gilbey’s best friend, Diana, Princess of Wales, whom Gilbey playfully nicknamed “Squidgy.”
Alethea’s dependency on drugs led her father to cut off her benefits. It also convinced Gilbey to end their relationship.
Alethea later said she was shocked by the emergence of the so-called ‘Squidgy Tapes’ – recordings of intimate conversations between Gilbey and the Princess of Wales, in which Gilbey said to Diana: ‘Oh Squidgy, I love you.’
In September 1994, Johnny Pollington found his sister dead in her Chelsea flat, the victim of a cocktail of heroin, cocaine and antidepressants.
But instead of reporting her death, he embarked on a one-man mission to track down those who sold her the drugs.
It ended in ‘a scuffle’ at a house in Barnes, south-west London, after which he went to a pub and set up ‘three or four doubles’.
Alcohol could not give him peace of mind. The following year he was arrested after threatening to kill customers at the Grove Tavern, in Knightsbridge, London.
He was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and two years’ probation.
Arden Hall (pictured) in Yorkshire, the family seat of the Earls of Mexborough
In the late 1990s he retreated to a basement flat on the border of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, where he and two others spent their days smoking crack cocaine, sending the butler to ‘score’ the drug for them .
Friends feared this would be how his life would end. But despite associating with an old school friend, Dominic French, who was regularly in and out of prison, Pollington avoided the same fate.
Then, in 2017, he fell in love with divorcee Norma Phoenix, an exceptionally talented photographer who had also worked as a consultant.
They married the following year. “She was devoted to him,” says a friend, explaining that Norma – “a very, very good person” – went “through hell and high water” for her husband.
Norma described it as ‘an amazing rollercoaster but one I will never forget’ when she announced Johnny had cancer earlier this year.
“His physical pain is excessive and my emotional pain is excessive,” she warned friends. “We are a good couple, but we cherish every last month and minute together.”
“She was always with him, at Trinity Hospice,” says one of those friends. “Her faith is unwavering.”
In addition to Norma, he is also survived by his father, 93, and a half-brother and half-sister from his father’s second marriage.