obit of the week
[Meant to send this out the other day, after Gawker wrote it up…]
Telegraph (London) - July 7, 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/07/04/db0402.xml
Count Gottfried von Bismarck
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44,
was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a
pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant
waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor
and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck
showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life
of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip
columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a
dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either
end of the table.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air
of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off
by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour”
charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the
jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he
made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an
enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and
the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics,
Philosophy and Economics.
Von Bismarck’s university career ended in catastrophe in June 1986,
when his friend Olivia Channon was found dead on his bed, the victim
of a drink and drugs overdose. Von Bismarck admitted that his role in
the affair had brought disgrace on the family name; five years later
he told friends that there were still people who would not speak to
his parents on account of it, and who told his mother that she had “a
rotten son”.
In the reunified Germany, von Bismarck managed several telecoms
businesses and, armed with a doctoral thesis on the East German
telephone system, oversaw the sale of companies formerly owned by
Communist East Germany to the private sector.
By the late 1990s von Bismarck was working for Telemonde, Kevin
Maxwell’s troubled telecoms firm based in America, with
responsibility for developing the business in Germany; the company
collapsed in 2002 with debts of £105 million. Von Bismarck eventually
returned to London, where he became chairman of the investment
company AIM Partners, dabbled in film production and promoted
holidays to Uzbekistan.
Never concealing his homosexuality, von Bismarck continued to appear
in public in various eccentric items of attire, including tall hats
atop his bald Mekon-like head. At parties he would appear in exotic
designer frock coats with matching trousers and emblazoned with
enormous logos. Flitting from table to table at fashionable London
nightclubs, he was said to be as comfortable among wealthy Eurotrash
as he was on formal occasions calling for black tie.
Although described personally as quiet and impeccably mannered, von
Bismarck continued to live high on the hog, hosting riotous all-night
parties for his (chiefly gay) friends at his £5 million flat off
Sloane Square. It was at one such event, in August last year, that
von Bismarck encountered tragedy for a second time when one of his
male guests fell 60 ft to his death from the roof garden. While von
Bismarck was not arrested, he was questioned as a witness and there
were those who wondered - not, perhaps, without cause - whether he
might be the victim of a family curse.
Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen was born on
September 19 1962 in Brussels, the second son of Ferdinand, the 4th
Prince Bismarck, whose own father had served in the German embassy in
pre-war London until a feud with the ambassador, von Ribbentrop,
ended his career.
As a talented young scholar, Gottfried had studied at what he
described as “an aristocratic Borstal” in Switzerland and worked at
the New York stock exchange before going up to Christ Church, Oxford.
Von Bismarck never fully recovered from the death in June 1986 of
Olivia Channon, the striking 22-year-old daughter of Paul Channon
(later Lord Kelvedon), then one of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet
ministers.
To celebrate the end of their finals, von Bismarck and Olivia Channon
had taken part in a drinking bout involving excessive amounts of
champagne, Black Velvet and sherry before she overdosed on heroin. At
the inquest her cousin, Sebastian Guinness, described how he and
other revellers had repaired to von Bismarck’s bottle-strewn rooms,
where Olivia was found dead the following morning.
Von Bismarck himself was charged with possessing cocaine and
amphetamine sulphate and was later treated at a £770-a-week addiction
clinic in Surrey. Following Olivia Channon’s funeral, at which he was
said to have “wept like a child”, von Bismarck was ordered home to
the family castle near Hamburg by his father.
His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to
settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds
of von Bismarck’s favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor
bearing a chequebook.
The tabloids quoted words of repentance from von Bismarck himself -
“My days of living it up are all over. This past week has just been
too much” - but although he was reported to be leaving to finish his
studies at a German university and eventually to enter German
politics, in the event he was treated again for alcoholism at a
German clinic.
He returned briefly to Oxford, where local magistrates fined him £80
for drug possession; he wiped away tears as his lawyer offered
mitigation, pointing out that since the Channon affair von Bismarck
had received a bad press in Germany.
Doubting whether he would be able to find work in his own country,
von Bismarck was said to be planning to study at a university in Los
Angeles while continuing to receive treatment for his drink problem.
Olivia Channon’s death, his barrister said, would prove to be a
shadow over von Bismarck’s head “probably for the rest of his life”.
So it proved.
He never married.