The bolter

She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art.Some say she was "the Bolter" of Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love. She "played" Iris Storm in Michael Arlen's celebrated novel about fashionable London's lost generation, The Green Hat, and Greta Garbo played her in A Woman of Affairs, the movie made from Arlen's book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; she was the model for Molyneaux's slinky wraparound dresses that became the look fo the age--the Jazz Age.Though not conventionally beautiful (she had a "shot-away chin"), Idina Sackville dazzled men and women alike, and made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in love--five husbands in all and lovers without number.Hers was the age of bolters, and Idina was the most celebrated of them all.Her father was the eighth Earl De La Warr. In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, hers was as old as a British family could be (eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy and been given enough land to live on forever . . . another ancestor, Lord De La Warr, rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, became governor of Virginia, an