Meet the Indiana Jones of Fulham; INTERVIEW
LONDON EVENING STANDARD Tuesday, 10 July 2001
Byline: NEIL NORMAN
She's a blue-blooded adventurer, happiest on expedition with a gun and cheroot. Neil Norman meets the Honourable Alexandra Foley BY the time you read this, the Honourable Alexandra Foley, bona fide adventuress, gun collector and blue-blooded English uber-eccentric, will be shooting the rapids in a particularly treacherous tributary of the Amazon with explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell. During the 10-mile journey, conducted in reed boats of a design employed 1,000 years before Christ, Foley will attempt to take photographs to record the third phase of Blashers's massive Kota Mama expedition.
She was introduced to Blashford-Snell at a drinks party the day after she had bought his book on the Kota Mama expedition. She had just returned from a period in New York, and Blashers was looking for a photographer. A few drinks later, she got the job.
Alex Foley is the real McCoy, the modern female equivalent of Indiana Jones.
The scion of a family whose title dates from the 18th century, she has a "platform of friends" and contacts that stretch from Texas to Tasmania via Timbuktu and has an awesome collection of antique handguns.
"We all have that Nirvana moment," she says over fish and chips at a restaurant near her Fulham home. "It is the moment that we feel we would be most happy. My Nirvana moment is this: sitting outside a white adobe mission in Mexico, smoking a cheroot, with a gun in a well-worn holster. I've been fascinated by guns since I was five. My brother was allowed them and I wasn't, so I used to play with his. Eventually, father bought me a golden Remington toy revolver, and I never looked back." With a history that includes exploring the depths of the ocean on the 1996 Titanic expedition to heading safari parties in Africa, she has combined the elements of exploration and collecting into something like a career.
The first woman employed in Sotheby's Arms and Armour department, she has refined her work and her personal obsessions into a cohesive whole.
She had joined Sotheby's as a humble porter, progressed to cataloguing and eventually worked her way into Arms and Armour. Everything was going great guns until the recession kicked in.
"I was laid off in 1991. So I decided to go to America. I wanted to go to Harvard. Having left school at 15, I always had a complex about not having a degree."
A leading member of The Explorers' Club in New York, chapter secretary of The British Explorers' Club, plus proud owner of a red convertible BMW 325i, affectionately known as Boris the Beamer, Foley is a oneoff. Hers is a more percussive heartbeat than most.
She attributes this spirit of adventure to her upbringing. Born in London, she is the daughter of Adrian Gerald Foley, the eighth baron in succession to a title that was created in 1776. A renowned pianist and composer, Lord Foley married Californian heiress Patricia De Meek after they met on a blind date under circumstances that would fuel the plot of a racy romantic novel.
"My father met my mother in New York during Huntingdon Hartford's 1958 stage version of Jane Eyre with Errol Flynn. Father was employed simply because they needed someone who could play the piano on stage. It was a terrible flop because Flynn was drunk." The marriage lasted five years and was finally dissolved in 1971. By then, young Alex had been shuttled around between the USA, Spain, and Marbella.
"I have never really lived with my parents during my life," she says. "I was brought up by a nanny who used to read Conan Doyle stories to me at bedtime."
At 41, Foley could easily pass for a decade younger. The clear, unlined face, the shock of blonde hair and the sheer, effervescent energy of the girl leave one breathless in her wake. She has cut a swathe through the cream of several high societies including those of Manhattan, Marbella and London. She is, says one well-connected colleague, better connected than anyone he has ever encountered.
It's not hard to see why. If the wealth of names she tosses into the conversation fails to impress (and these include Buzz Aldrin, Somerset de Chair, Ian Fleming and her godfather Ivor Bryce, the original model for James Bond), her knowledge on subjects such as weapons, hunting, nano-technology and financial analysis is bound to get you sooner or later. She is the ultimate tomboy - with a strong streak of real femininity.
AFTER two marriages, she is now single, though she is currently seeing a fellow whom she "hasn't figured out yet". "I've been married a couple of times," she says with a deceptive airiness. "In New York I married a Hungarian, Transylvanian actually; a devastatingly attractive man, much older than me with long flowing hair and a penchant for wearing cloaks. My first marriage in my twenties was a silly mistake. I'm a terrible romantic, I get very involved. I'm a typical Aries. I go forward with a whole heart."
Undoubtedly the greatest weapon in the armoury of Alexandra Foley Public Relations, formed two weeks ago, is the girl herself.
"One of the symptoms of my odd childhood is that I'm passionately committed to my friends and, in a sense, they have become my family. And I've always loved survival equipment. It is perhaps a product of the break up of my parents - the essential need for survival. For my 13th birthday I was asked what I wanted and I said a camouflage water bottle. The guns thing is obviously for protection. As a child the only programmes I used to watch were Westerns. I was glued to The Virginian. It's the kit. The romance of having your first leather holster." She sighs, adrift in childhood memories.
"The trouble with being sensitive and romantic is that you do everything so full-heartedly, you're very vulnerable," she continues. "Intelligent people realise that all this masculine stuff is actually deeply feminine.
It's quite pathetic, really, because I am quite delicate. I don't mind shooting the rapids on this expedition but I'm glad I don't have to do any climbing. I'm terrified of heights."
Publication information: Article title: Meet the Indiana Jones of Fulham; INTERVIEW. Contributors: Norman, Neil - Author. Newspaper title: The Evening Standard (London, England). Publication date: July 10, 2001. Page number: 25. © Solo Syndication Limited. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group.