restricted" girls were when she was young while conceding that she had had her first affair at 17 with a "man who was quite well-known and ... still alive [in 1986]". She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay, briefly a diplomat and later a painter, who was the stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office. Lady Avon was quoted by Wyatt as having told him that she had resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime information minister and British ambassador in Paris (1944–1947), who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother: "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from". She informed Cooper in 1947, following a weekend in the country with Anthony Eden, at which the only other guest was the French ambassador to Britain, that Eden "never stops trying to make love to her". When Cooper was raised to the peerage (eventually choosing the title Viscount Norwich), he sought Spencer-Churchill's views as to a title—"Think, child, think ... Have you any suggestions? (not funny ones)"—and she was the recipient of the last letter that he wrote (from White's club) shortly before his death at sea on New Year's Day, 1954. Other friends Among the future Lady Avon's many other friends, several of whom were some years older than she, were the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford (whose sister Deborah wrote of an encounter with Avon some 20 years after they had been débutantes together that she found her "rather alarming"), painter Lucian Freud, and choreographer Frederick Ashton. When she was still in her teens James Pope-Hennessy modelled on her the character of Perdita in London Fabric (1939) and dedicated the book "To Clarissa". Gerald, Lord Berners, used her as the basis of a character in his novel Far From the Madding War (1941), while photographer Cecil Beaton, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The journalist and author Sofka Zinovieff claimed that, after her grandmother, Jennifer Fry (of the Fry's chocolate family), separated in 1944 from her grandfather, Robert Heber-Percy, who was Lord Berners's closest friend, Spencer-Churchill and Beaton amused themselves by riffling through underclothes and love letters that Fry had left in a drawer at Berners's country