At first glance, he might have seemed to have it all, being heir to an earldom and most of 20,000 acres of Yorkshire, not to mention being sent to Ampleforth school, for £46,740 a year, where Rupert Everett was among his contemporaries.
But the life of Viscount Pollington, who died aged 64, offers a stark reminder that there are many things that matter more than status and inherited wealth.
Indeed, until his redemptive marriage at the age of 58, Johnny Pollington, eldest son of the 8th Earl of Mexborough, seemed to be defined by a succession of tragedies.
These began when his mother Elizabeth, daughter of the 6th Earl of Verulum, ended her marriage and took Johnny and his younger sister, Alethea, from Arden Hall, the family seat in Yorkshire, to live in London, where she succumbed to alcoholism. and depression. , and sometimes required breakfast to be brought to him in bed at 4 in the morning.
In the words of an aristocratic friend, it was “a complicated childhood.” Johnny had a constant cold and was always whining.
Norma Pollington with her husband Viscount Johnny Pollington, who died on October 23.
In adulthood, both Johnny and Alethea experimented with narcotics.
This apparently intensified Alethea’s belief that she was trapped in a love triangle involving her former fiancé, James Gilbey, and Gilbey’s closest friend, Diana, Princess of Wales, whom Gilbey jokingly nicknamed ‘Squidgy’.
Alethea’s dependence on drugs led her father to cut her allowance. She also convinced Gilbey to end their relationship.
Alethea later said she had been devastated by the emergence of the so-called ‘Squidgy Tapes’, recordings of intimate conversations between Gilbey and the Princess of Wales, in which Gilbey told Diana: ‘Oh, Squidgy, I love you.’
In September 1994, Johnny Pollington found his sister dead in their Chelsea flat, the victim of a cocktail of heroin, cocaine and antidepressants.
But, instead of reporting his death, he embarked on a one-man mission to hunt down those who had sold him the drugs.
It ended in “a fight” at a house in Barnes, south-west London, after which he went to a pub and drank “three or four doubles”.
Alcohol failed to give him peace of mind. The following year, he was arrested after threatening to kill customers at the Grove Tavern in Knightsbridge, London.
He was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and placed on probation for two years.
Arden Hall (pictured) in Yorkshire, which is the family seat of the Earls of Mexborough.
In the late 1990s, he retreated to a basement on the border of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, where he and two other people spent their days smoking crack cocaine, sending the butler to “get” the drug for them.
His friends feared that this was how his life would end. But, despite dealing with an old school friend, Dominic French, who was regularly in and out of prison, Pollington avoided the same fate.
Then, in 2017, he fell in love with divorcee Norma Phoenix, an exceptionally talented photographer who had also worked as a counselor.
They married the following year. “She was devoted to him,” a friend tells me, explaining that Norma – “a very, very good person” – went through “difficult times” for her husband.
Norma described it as “an incredible rollercoaster, but one I will never forget” when, earlier this year, she announced that Johnny had cancer.
“Your physical pain is off scale and my emotional pain is off scale,” he alerted his friends. “The two of us are the perfect couple, but we treasure every last month and every minute together.”
“She was always with him, at Trinity Hospice,” reflects one of those friends. “His faith is unwavering.”
In addition to Norma, he is survived by his father, 93, and a half-brother and half-sister from his father’s second marriage.