Lady Caroline Blackwood - Personal Life

Personal Life

Lady Caroline's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they tied the knot in 1953; and, in 1957, she moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler School. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films. Her marriage to Freud was finally dissolved in 1958 in Mexico. On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), a man who would have been the same age as her father. They had three daughters, although a deathbed admission revealed that the father of her youngest daughter, Ivana, was the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, son of poet and actress Iris Tree and grandson of theatre manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, who suffered from bipolar disorder. Lowell was at the time a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; and, after obtaining divorces from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son. She was distressed and confused in her reactions to Lowell's manic episodes, feeling useless and afraid of their effect on her children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition. In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud’s portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. This heartache was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya from a drug overdose at the age of 18.

In 1977, to avoid tax, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her powers were greatly depleted by alcoholism, she continued to write, including two vivid memoirs of Princess Margaret and Francis Bacon, published in the New York Review of Books in 1992.

She never lost her dark, macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. On her deathbed, British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft brought her holy water from Lourdes, which was accidentally spilled on her bed sheets: “I might have caught my death,” she muttered.

On 14 February 1996, Lady Caroline Blackwood died from cancer at The Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters Eugenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); her son Sheridan Lowell; her sister Lady Perdita Blackwood; and her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909-1945), and her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938-1988).