Nancy Schoenberger Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Doubleday, 377 pages, $27.50
Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931–96) was a descendant of the playwright Sheridan; great-granddaughter of the Viceroy of India who annexed Burma to the British Empire; daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a promising, but hard-drinking Irish politician, who died fighting the Japanese in Burma, and of a vain, selfish, empty-headed heiress to the Guinness millions. Cared for by a series of irresponsible and often cruel nannies, she grew up in a crumbling Georgian mansion on a 5,000-acre estate outside Belfast. She was rich, beautiful, bright, witty, and talented, but, traumatized by childhood neglect, by the loss of her father and rejection by her mother, she became depressed, alcoholic, and ill. One of her husbands was insane, one of her daughters (a heroin addict) committed suicide, and her beloved brother died early of AIDS.
She was married to three exceptional artists and lasted about five years with each of them. The painter Lucian Freud kept weird nocturnal hours, drank heavily, gambled recklessly, and was consistently unfaithful. His early paintings of Blackwood are as sensuously appealing as the Venus of Botticelli. The tragic Hotel Bedroom (1954), in which the handsome Freud gazes down at his suddenly aged and wretched wife, suggests that something has gone terribly wrong with their marriage.
The stunningly attractive Israel Citkowitz, a protégé of Aaron Copland, had stopped composing by the time he married Blackwood. He mainly looked