Books: Gypsy Blood

LIFE'S A CIRCUS—Lady Eleanor Smith —Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Born "dead" and resuscitated by brandy massage 35 years ago in a "cottagy" house in the seaport town of Birkenhead, was Lady Eleanor Smith. Her father was the Earl of Birkenhead, a tall, olive-skinned aristocrat who started life as plain F. E. Smith. Her paternal great-grandmother was a gypsy named Bathsheba. As between her title and her gypsy blood, Lady Eleanor much prefers to have inherited the gypsy blood. The reason will be readily seen in her autobiography, Life's a Circus: Hotblooded Bathsheba is the perfect alibi for Lady Eleanor's Bohemian adventures, particularly her passionate interest in gypsies and circuses, already productive of two best-selling novels (Red Wagon, Flamenco).

At four little Eleanor was banned from Warwick Square for kicking in the belly a gardener who tried to prevent her wrecking a flower bed. Her father, who told her macabre fairy stories and took her to prize fights, encouraged her "to be cheeky before solemn statesmen," allowed her to bounce up & down on the lord chancellor's woolsack. But "if we were naughty," says Lady Eleanor of herself and friends, "we were certainly never nasty."

Allowed to read whatever she pleased, little Eleanor at nine discovered George Borrow's Lavengro, the classic of gypsy life. Then & there she "knew perfectly well that Borrow's books had changed —forever — my life. . . ." Eventually she found what she was looking for — primitive, half-naked, arrogant gypsies in sultry caves near Almeria in Spain; nude flamenco dancers in the dives of Barcelona; tinkering tribes in the forest of Rumania; Andalusian gypsies who cured her fever with feverish music. But Lady Eleanor's stories of the gypsies are curiously impersonal and sketchy.

Main confessions in Life's a Circus concern Lady Eleanor's makeshift life. Tame boarding school was relieved somewhat by frequent transfers, midnight escapes, one harum-scarum period in the family of a Belgian baron, when she turned a pack of Irish wolfhounds loose in the crowded ball room of the British Embassy.

After three years as society reporter and cinema critic on a London newspaper, she at last found her first really satisfying activity when she threw up the job to travel with circuses, as publicity woman. Between tours she junketed on a Portuguese tramp steamer with a cargo of wild animals and a mad captain. She also got mixed up with a snaggletoothed, hophead Chicago gangster named Kid Spider, who proposed marriage and got her in the bad books of Scotland Yard.

In all her picturesque adventures (naughty but never nasty), Lady Eleanor's most colorful acquaintance was her reckless, extravagant, vain, arrogant, sentimental, witty father. From the one chapter she gives to him, a reader must conclude that he was an even more picturesque throwback to Bathsheba than his daughter, and that she would have done better writing his biography than her own.