Wells [née Chapman], Alberta Constance [Dee; other married name Alberta Constance Ayer, Lady Ayer] (1925-2003), journalist, novelist, and broadcaster, was born on 19 March 1925 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, the elder daughter and second of four children of John William Chapman (1898-1967), journalist, and his wife, Hazel Gertrude, nee Young (1899-1995). She was descended on her father's side from the Scots theologian Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), who co-founded the Disciples of Christ, and on her mother's from the Llewellyns of Prince Edward Island. Her genetic inheritance came largely from the Llewellyns. She was known to them as Deezie and had her Welsh grandmother's tawny chestnut hair, sculpted face, and bright blue eyes. Her father, a journalist on the family newspaper, the Providence Evening Journal, and in awe of his wife, moved the family to the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to be public relations officer with the New England Telephone and Telegraph Co. She described her mother as 'the most untrustworthy, destructive person I have ever known'. She became an atheist aged seven and grew up 'a crafty quick witted savage' (Rogers, 244) with a jaundiced view about the existence of goodness.
In 1943 Dee Chapman joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps, where she met the poet V. R. (Bunny) Lang, a gifted eccentric who became her greatest friend. It was the beginning of doing what she liked. She worked for the New York publisher Random House, but in 1947 bought a one-way ticket to Paris. Originally destined for the Sorbonne, she ended up modelling surrealist gowns for Schiaparelli and working in the American embassy. There she met Alfred (Al) Wells, a career diplomat. They married in 1948 but were divorced in 1954 after Dee, with her daughter Alexandra (Gully) (b. 1950) in tow, left her husband in Rangoon.
By the early 1950s Dee Wells was resident in Holland Park, London. Her defining personal event came in 1956 when she danced the foxtrot with Alfred Jules (Freddie) Ayer (1910-1989), the most famous English philosopher of his age. She had been living with the economist Robert Neild, but Ayer had a 'pagan vitality' and a 'sharp, sham-destroying mind' which proved irresistible (Rogers, 7). The two of them were bohemian, indefatigable socializers, and part of Hugh Gaitskell's Hampstead set of intellectuals; their powerful synergy turned them into 'iconic public figures' (The Observer, 20 June 1999). They married on 18 July 1960, found an old farmhouse in the hamlet of La Migoua, outside Le Beausset, Var, France, in 1962, and had a son, Nicholas Hugh, in 1963. By then Dee had established herself as a journalist in Britain. A staff job as books editor for the Sunday Express in 1958 was followed by broadsides for the Daily Herald, a socialist paper that looked as if it had been printed on bread. When it was relaunched in 1964 as the broadsheet Sun she continued her lively, opinionated column.
The most talented communicators in the 1960s gravitated towards television. Dee Wells's gifts as an expositor made her a natural for the satire boom. Her appearances on the late evening vaudeville-cum-current affairs show Not so Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964-5) propelled her into the Rediffusion programme Three After Six, one of the first chat shows, appearing four evenings weekly with her co-hosts Alan Brien and Benny Green. Her husky, let's-get-it-straight voice could turn the air blue. But if hectoring was her great fault, her soft spot for animals and her hatred of social injustice redeemed her. She became vice-president of the Abortion Law Reform Association, and in the early 1970s, with the activist Chris Spotted Eagle, mounted a benefit for the Lakota Indians in memory of the massacre at Wounded Knee.
In 1964 the Ayers moved from 13 Conway Street, Fitzrovia, to another tall Georgian house in Regent's Park Terrace, Camden. Alan Bennett's sketch Life and Times in NW1 (BBC2, 1964) identified their particular set, and Marc, the cartoonist Mark Boxer, took up the baton, deploying the awful String-alongs, parodying Freddie and Dee, in a cartoon strip for The Listener in 1967. While they were being profiled in magazines as 'particularly happy' (Sunday Times), fault lines were nevertheless appearing in the Ayers' open marriage. Freddie later said, 'I grew predatory and less nice' (Evening Standard, 31 Aug 1984). In 1971 Dee began a relationship with Hylan Booker, an African-American fashion designer, and described their time together as her years of 'sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll' (Rogers, 307). She said of her roman a clef, Jane (1973, dedicated to Lang, who had died in 1956), 'I was idle and I had a perfectly good typewriter and half a box of paper' (Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2003). The novel became an international bestseller, was translated into seven languages, and sold a reputed two million copies. In 1979 Dee, who had become Lady Ayer when Freddie was knighted in 1970, gave 'up the unequal struggle to become a true English lady' (Rogers, 315), and moved with Hylan to New York. The 1980s were her doldrum years. Hylan left her about 1984, her health was ruined by smoking (her lower leg was amputated in 1992), and she had become the 'prematurely retired' character of Tom Stoppard's biographical play Jumpers (1972). She wrote to Freddie in 1983, the year before they divorced: 'I sit all day at the typewriter, and nothing comes; it's a terrible feeling.'
Dee later told Jonathan Miller, 'Freddie became so much nicer after he died' (referring to the fact that Ayer's heart had stopped for four minutes in 1988, after a cardiac arrest) (Rogers, 347). Freddie's third wife, Vanessa Lawson, had died in 1985. Dee, who 'said she saw herself as a character in Rebecca but she couldn't figure out which one' (Fairey, 220), married him once again, on 26 April 1989, at Westminster register office. Freddie died that same year. Dee lived on at 51 York Street, London, surrounded by deep green walls, her nineteenth-century journeyman portraits of prize bulls, and Phillip Bradley's magic realist portrait of her looking like a puritan mother from the Mayflower. She made peanut butter sandwiches for the squirrels in Regent's Park and appeared in 1990 on Ned Sherrin's programme Plunder, contributing personal memories of BBC TV moments.
Dee Wells died on 24 June 2003. She was survived by her daughter and son. After a funeral at Golders Green crematorium her ashes were buried with Freddie's under the lime tree behind La Migoua. The Danish-born aristocrat Claus von Bulow, who had transformed the independence of her last ten years, spoke of her 'Zolaesque fervour' and 'American willingness of heart'. She never lost that 'combination of boredom and rebelliousness' (Edward St Aubyn, in Never Mind, 158). Her motto was 'never apologize, never explain'.
Alan Brien Jane Hill
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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