SUSAN "SHOE" MARY TAYLOR - "HIPPIE" MISTRESS OF JONATHAN GUINNESS, 3rd BARON MOYNE

First published October 2nd 2020

SUSAN "SHOE" MARY TAYLOR - "HIPPIE" MISTRESS 

OF JONATHAN GUINNESS, 3rd BARON MOYNE

This month we change the mood a little and leave America and her Presidential Mistresses for Great Britain and the Peerage. My guess is that wherever there is royalty, nobility, aristocracy - or wealth - there have been and are Mistresses.

We may never know if France, Great Britain, or Spain have more of them.  Certainly France has the reputation of tolerance, while in Spain there has been the tradition of the Big House for the Wife and the Little House for the Mistress - so a place within the culture for mistresses. However, the expectations on Spanish women to marry as virgins and hold to their virtue as wives, seem to be a pressure French women don't feel so much.

Great Britain seems to somewhere in between. This country was the scene of the "Swinging Sixties" and sexual liberation, though not quite the feminism of the United States.  (Those of you familiar with the rock stars of that era probably know most of them wanted a traditional wife, not a careerist.) Mistresses are acknowledged but also protected by a man's closest friends, his employees, and his family while publicly it's best kept a secret.  A good example would be Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, the debutant who was his Mistress and is now his wife. Reportedly Camilla may have even helped Charles pick Lady Diana Spencer to be his wife and she may have wished to remain his mistress and share him. Friends of his arranged to host the couple and allow them the use of their homes to meet up alone for years. Diana, however, did not wish to man share or cooperate in allowing her husband this Princely privilege.

SUSAN "SHOE" MARY TAYLOR 

1944-2014

Commonly referred to as a "hippie,"  Susan Taylor had three children with Jonathan Guinness, Diane, born 1981, Aster, born in 1984, and Thomas, born 1986. They bear the Guinness surname.  Jonathan Guinness has sired eight children in his life, and these last three extramarital children were born during his second, very long marriage to  wife Suzanne Lisney, who he was married to from 1964 until her death in 2005.

In 1989 he published a book called "Shoe - Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor." In some reviews of the book he wrote about her, Show was slammed.  One news article that appeared July 6, 1989 in The Sun had an opinionated title, "Always the Mistress - Never the Bride!"  (What an old biddy that writer was!)

Notice that it wasn't titled "Always a Cheat - Never Not!" condemning Lord Guinness! In other words, the woman in the relationship is to blame so let's ignore that one is married, the other not.  Let's ignore that one has the power of money and title, the other hardly.  I could go on but refer to what I said about Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.  Rarely does a person have a long term Mistress without that being known to one's circle who are accepting and understanding.

I first heard of "Shoe" when I was on my cell phone watching the latest pre-Coronavirus-19 fashion runway shows, something I like to do each season though I can rarely afford very expensive clothes and am not "hanger thin." I love to see what the designers are up to and see the models we all hear about, stars they are, prancing the walk.  (Putting one foot in front of the other and not tripping is an art!)  This lead to videos on Daphne Guiness who is "hanger thin" and a woman of uncommon fashion. Her mother was the wife Suzanne, Jonathan's second wife, the one who died in 2005.  Daphne is considered an eccentric fashionista, willing and able to carry off some very unusual designs. She seems to live for fashion, for dressing. I wanted to know more about Daphne but it lead to the discovery that her father had Shoe as a mistress.

To the book:  Amazon - Great Britain reviewed the book and had this to say, "This book celebrates the charisma of a singular woman, Shoe, who started life as a butcher's daughter in Oldham, took the hippie trail to Europe and the East in the 1960's and then led a life rich with colour and incident.  She went to prison in Tunis, sang for Salvador Dali in Spain, sat at the feet of gurus in India and Japan, rode an elephant in Beirut, worked in an orphanage in Sri Lanka and a health farm in Ireland.  She survived eight months in prison, the trauma of a gang rape in Morocco and struggled for seven years against the ravages of bulimia"

In accounts I've read on line about Susan, the following account for her being defined as a hippie: hitchhiking, world travel and intrigue, busking, living in communes and staying in places where everyone slept on the floor,  rallies for the legalization of marijuana, playing in the occult - magic, eastern religion.  The list goes on.

Like other Mistresses covered here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot who've had extramarital children, whom others call illegitimate,  such as the children of Gordon Getty or Aldo Gucci, there is no hiding adult children with lives of their own.  When the children are recognized, supported, and loved, even as children of a Mistress, they are in a far better place in life than a child born illegitimately into poverty, abandoned by a birth father, and left to attend the School of Hard Knocks.

One cannot help but be utterly fascinated with Shoe, as Jonathan Guinness certain was.

Her obituary that appeared in the Telegraph was a life story in itself, which I will link to later in this month.

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