Posted on 01/21/2002 4:52:16 PM PST by dighton
COLIN MacIVOR, who has died aged 72, began his career as a Jesuit before moving into an unequivocally secular existence; his sometimes rackety and occasionally disastrous progress, however, never destroyed his true vocation, which was for setting the table on a roar.
Brilliant, witty and outrageous, MacIvor exemplified panache while retaining the gifts of sympathy and generosity. Yet he had his demons to fight.
An outwardly brazen Englishry covered complex feelings about class, which made him distinctly unreliable when discussing his past, and which meant that he drew his most profound satisfactions from foreign sources.
He was also plagued by bouts of manic depression that led him into wild self-destructiveness, and once into a violent criminal assault.
Colin Patrick Francis Alexander MacIvor was born on October 13 1929 on the Isle of Wight. The MacIvors were Catholics from Northern Ireland; Colin's father worked in the coal trade.
He died, however, when his son was three, and Colin and his two elder sisters moved with their mother to Cardiff, where they lived in straitened circumstances, supported by their maternal grandfather.
Colin was sent to a Catholic school in the city, where he not only proved outstanding academically, but also became a useful scrum half. At 16, he joined the Society of Jesus, which two years later sent him to study at Pullach, near Munich.
MacIvor would claim that the post-war years had been a splendid time to be in Germany - "many of the natives had only one limb and all of them felt guilty". He learnt perfect German, made many friends, and discovered a passion for philosophy.
In 1952 MacIvor went up to Campion Hall, Oxford, where he was sufficiently idle to obtain only a second-class degree in PPE. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a sudden and conclusive loss of faith.
Always impulsive, he jumped off a train at Swindon when returning to Oxford with a party of Jesuits. He had no money, no connections and no possessions save an overnight bag.
By 1957, though, he was employed in New York by the advertising agency J Walter Thompson. Americans, particularly American girls, found him a glamorous and romantic figure, not least for his long Jesuit coat. While in New York he fathered a son, whose mother had him adopted.
In 1959, he married another American girl, Sheila Haynes, and was posted by Thompson to Frankfurt. There he became fast friends with Heinrich von Trott, the brother of Adam von Trott, who had been hanged in 1944 for plotting to kill Hitler.
The opportunity to become creative director for another agency, Clifford Bloxham, brought the MacIvors back to London in 1962. But MacIvor's approach to advertising became increasingly dilettante. He talked of writing a novel but preferred the bohemian attractions of the Chelsea Arts Club. His marriage was dissolved in 1964.
More hurt than he liked to admit, MacIvor threw up advertising and reinvented himself as an entrepreneur. The Balkans featured largely in his schemes, rarely to any effect. A film project in Chelsea proved a fiasco.
In 1972, he became managing director of the Manchester Tobacco Company. After six years he moved to Ireland, with the aim of reviving silk weaving in Dublin. He also married Susanna Waldo, the daughter of a New York newspaper tycoon, and recently divorced from the actor and comedian John Fortune.
But within hours of this match (so he recalled) MacIvor realised he had made a catastrophic mistake. His gathering despair became concentrated in a crazed grudge against Sir Arthur Sugden, head of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which had incurred his wrath when he was at Manchester Tobacco.
In 1980 MacIvor cracked completely. Equipping himself with chloroform, padding, Elastoplast, and twine, he hired a car and drove to the Sugdens' home at Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire. "My name is Colin MacIvor," he told Lady Sugden when she opened the door, "and I have come to kidnap you."
He then proceeded to truss up Lady Sugden and shut her in the boot of his car, attempting in the process to apply the chloroform pad. His victim suffered serious injuries.
With Lady Sugden in the boot, MacIvor drove to Manchester airport and telephoned Sir Arthur. "I've got your wife," he told him, adding that he should meet him in the airport lounge with £50,000 in old notes.
Sir Arthur duly turned up at the airport, but MacIvor, fearing a trap, did not approach him. Instead, he drove a mile from the airport and stopped the car to check on Lady Sugden.
When he opened the boot, however, she managed to escape, shouting for help. Passers-by noted the number of the car, so that when MacIvor returned it to the hire company, he was arrested.
The police, MacIvor remembered with satisfaction, beat him up; and when they found that he lived in Dublin beat him up again. He stood trial five months later, charged with burglary and carrying away Lady Sugden against her will, and also with demanding money with menaces.
MacIvor was skilfully defended, for his wife retained Sir David Napley as his solicitor, while in court George Carman successfully pleaded that the accused had been out of his mind.
The judge ordered MacIvor to be detained in Lancaster Moor Hospital, where he soon recovered his equilibrium. Yet on release his future appeared grim.
His marriage had now ended in divorce, and he could not conceive of anyone employing him. A friend in public relations, however, obtained him a job in a company entrusted with revamping the image of British Airways.
Then in 1984 MacIvor had the luckiest break of his life when he met Marie-Pierre Moine, a Frenchwoman who had read English at Oxford, and was living in London writing about cookery. They married in 1988.
One blow still awaited MacIvor; when he took Marie-Pierre to visit his son in America, they discovered that he had been killed in a car crash just before their arrival.
Their marriage, however, brought great happiness. Previously fearful of French family life, he revelled in the appreciation, admiration and affection he found in France, and greatly enjoyed visits to the house which Marie-Pierre and he acquired at St Malo.
MacIvor was never more impressive than in his last months, after cancer had laid him low. His natural benevolence seemed to increase as life slipped away; and he treated visitors with a courtesy which suggested that his chief concern was for their ease and pleasure.
"You are so funny," a boy wrote to him, "you like football, and never say the expected, unlike most adults."
One of his last acts was to introduce his first and his third wives to each other, and he smiled happily as they animatedly conversed across his bed. At the end a nurse asked how he was feeling. "I'm on the bridge, sword in hand," came the reply.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.
Kathleen Soliah should hire his lawyer.
A person who kidnaps a woman like that should be in jail, not hailed as a fascinating personality. But then, what do I know?
You're right about jail. I posted this because it was such an unusual life (and a well-written account), not to endorse MacIvor as a splendid fellow.
He stood trial five months later, charged with burglary and carrying away Lady Sugden against her will, and also with demanding money with menaces.
Bad company, those menaces.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.