APPROACHING Cliveden can be daunting. You drive past the greenery of forest and fields and skirt the voluptuous Fountain of Love with its marble damsels and cherubs cavorting around a giant scallop shell. Finally, you enter the lime-tree-lined drive, as ramrod-straight as the Champs-Elysees, with a bed of washed gravel that leads noisily to the entrance columns of the rectangular, three-story Italianate pile.
If it happens to be dusk, the yellow lights within gleam, making the manor look both cozy and grand, inviting but also somewhat intimidating, much as it might have appeared to a late arrival during a ball given by the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Orkney, the Prince of Wales or any of the other nobles who called it home at various times over the past three centuries.
At Cliveden (the name comes from the steep chalk cliffs along the Thames and is pronounced to rhyme with ''lived in''), it's important to remember that you are a ''house guest.'' At least that's what written on the directional signs, which shy away from any suggestion that you are headed for a hotel with, God forbid, something as crass as a reception desk.
My family -- my wife, one of my two daughters, my son and myself -- decided to put Cliveden's hospitality to the test in early April and travel the 25 miles or so west from London to Buckinghamshire. To complete the image that we had been casually traipsing around the countryside and decided to drop in on a friend -- albeit a friend who happens to live in one of England's foremost stately homes -- we even brought along the dog, a cocker spaniel who has been noticeably well behaved since suffering through six months of quarantine four years ago.
The illusion of guesthood was carried forward by the ''footman'' in tails who came to take away my car, disregarding the mud streaks on the door and the crumpled maps and odd bits of snack in the rear seat. To register, I was guided into the imposing wood-paneled Great Hall, the central chamber linking the manor's main rooms, and seated at a writing desk that used to belong to Lord Astor. The form had a space, next to surname, marked ''title,'' into which after a moment's thought I scribbled the lone abbreviation ''Mr.''
Continue reading the main storyA few minutes later, we were ensconced in the Vanderbilt suite, a spacious arrangement of two adjoining rooms, foyer and large bathroom with his and hers wash basins. The bedroom was done in shades of ivory and pale yellow, with two twin beds side by side under a half-tester -- a sort of headboard canopy topped by a coronet. The furniture was comfortable -- mahogany tables, sofas and chairs in coordinated pastels and chintz.
My 21-year-old daughter, Liza, was reading the list of aromatherapies on offer, my dog, Daisy, had found a Scotch-plaid covered dog blanket and a dog dish, and my son, Jamie, 13, was surfing through the television offerings (plenty of videos but no satellite because a dish would ruin the look of the exterior). A housekeeper discreetly knocked, addressed us by our surname (we later learned it was written on a slip affixed to the door) and offered to help us unpack. By now I'm thinking that friends like this are hard to find.
It's all part of the studied graciousness that makes Cliveden one of the most splendid places to stay in England. With 37 suites and rooms and a staff of 146 (yes, that works out to four per room), the hotel has climbed to the top of the ratings in the 10 years that it has been open. Needless to say, it also leads in price, with rates ranging from $356 for the smallest room (prices at $1.64 to the pound) to an unbelievable $1,110 for the Lady Astor suite. Appropriately enough, the suite is named after Nancy Astor, the American millionairess and hostess who moved here after marrying the second William Waldorf Astor and who in 1919 became the first woman in Parliament to actually take her seat in the House of Commons. Look to the right as you register and there she is, in the famous 1908 portrait by John Singer Sargent, her chin tilted up so that she gazes brazenly over one shoulder. It's easy to imagine her declining King Edward VII's offer to play bridge with the famous one-liner: ''I am afraid I can't tell a king from a knave.''
Senior management goes to great lengths to avoid the H-word. ''We opened as a house that took in paying guests in March 1986,'' recalled Stuart Johnson, director and general manager, sitting in the Great Hall guarded by suits of armor and draped with the 1710 tapestries commemorating Marlborough's battlefield triumphs, woven for the Earl of Orkney, owner of Cliveden from 1696 to 1737. Mr. Johnson raised a flute of Champagne before a fire roaring under the 16th-century stone chimney piece, which was lifted from a chateau in Burgundy, with an intricate carving of St. George lancing the dragon. ''The phrase house guest is particular,'' he added, explaining, ''We are a stately home that has become a five-star establishment. We have guests. We don't have clients.'' With the relish of a storyteller warming to his subject, he tells of the night an 8-year-old girl in pajamas wandered in search of her parents into the fine Waldo's restaurant downstairs. ''The staff took care of it,'' he recalled. ''I didn't even know of it at the time. That's as it should be. Cliveden is a home. If you were giving a dinner at home and your child came down in jimjams at 9:30 -- what's the difference? We're not stuffy. We don't look down our half-moon glasses and say: 'oh, that person shouldn't be here.' People are welcomed here for themselves, not for who they are.''
Other guests during our stay were an assortment of monied Europeans, the odd American couple back for a second or third visit, young newlyweds who -- if they are on their honeymoon -- get monogrammed bed mats placed on the floor on either side of the bed. Cliveden is proud that it attracts so many British guests, who make up over 65 per cent of their clientele. This makes it more attractive to Americans, since it contributes to the British ''country weekend'' atmosphere it is striving to create.
They are also welcomed, it must be admitted, for what they pay. And with horseback riding and all manner of sports, tea served while cruising on the Thames, and a spa offering everything from massages to seaweed body wrap and reflexology, the charges mount like autumn leaves, all the faster because no chits are signed (that would erode the illusion of guesthood). No wonder one guest wrote in the visitor's book: ''Cliveden changed my life. After just one weekend here I decided to get very rich.''
The mansion was built by the Duke of Sutherland in 1850 after its predecessor was destroyed by fire. The architect was Charles Barry, who also was co-designer of the Houses of Parliament. It is the third house on the site, the first two having burned to the ground. It is owned by the National Trust, which received the estate as a gift from the Astors in 1942 and which leases the villa to a private corporation to run as a hotel. This means that the 376 acres of woodland and formal gardens, dotted with grottoes, statuary and sarcophagi, are open to the public for much of the day, but reserved exclusively for paying guests in the early morning and late afternoon (there are tours of the house itself twice a week April to October). If you've ever wanted to test the maxim ''living well is the best revenge,'' then order an English breakfast in the Terrace dining room whose six enormous windows overlook the spectacular triangular box hedge with cat mint in the interior, and afterward stroll along the Borghese balustrade (dating from 1618 and imported from Italy by Lord Astor) and wander among the ornately shaped gardens on the bluff above the Thames.
The beautifully paneled Waldo's, which won a star from Michelin, is the hotel's culinary showplace. We dug into the Cornish crab with lime pimentos and potato and chive salad and the filet of beef with smoked foie gras, girolles and artichaux poivrade. For dessert, we recommend the hot apricot souffle and wild strawberry ice cream. In spring, the hotel puts on a special six-course truffle menu.
There is a special canine menu: noisettes of ''chunky'' in sauce aromatique, delice de Pal on a bed of Winalote, and Trio of Lights, Spleen and Lungs. But we decided not to order any of it for Daisy. We didn't want to spoil her.
Most spectacular of all, in terms of furnishings, is the French Dining Room, available for private parties, which contains some of the finest French gilded paneling in Britain. It comes from Madame de Pompadour's dining room at the Chateau d'Asnieres just outside Paris. William Waldorf spotted it there, bought it and had it reassembled.
Replicating the life style of some of those who stayed in this glorious estate may not be a good idea. From its inception, scandal has been an uninvited guest at Cliveden. It was built as a hunting lodge by the Second Duke of Buckingham in 1666 to entertain his mistress, the Countess of Shrewsbury. He killed her husband in a duel, was eventually dropped by King Charles II and died penniless. Frederick, Prince of Wales, leased Cliveden from 1737 until his death 14 years later, an arrangement that allowed him to live away from the hostility of his father, King George II.
After passing through the hands of two other dukes, Cliveden was purchased by the Astors in 1893 and extensively refurbished. It was transformed through Nancy Astor's energy and social skills into a venue for prized weekend invitations. People like George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin and T. E. Lawrence frequented the place. In the 1930's, however, Cliveden became notorious as a reputed center of pro-German sentiment. Despite the Astors' protestations, ''Cliveden Set'' was synonymous with the pro-appeasement lobby, conjuring up visions of luxurious dinners involving naive aristocrats and scheming Nazis at which Britain's national interest was sold down the river, as depicted in the book and film ''The Remains of the Day.''
BUT Cliveden's true notoriety came in the 1960's. It began on a hot July weekend in 1961 when a house guest of the Astors, Secretary of State for War John Profumo, wandered out by the swimming pool in his dinner jacket and met a naked Christine Keeler whooping it up with her companion, a society osteopath named Stephen Ward. Mr. Profumo's affair with Miss Keeler, who was also involved with a Soviet spy called Yevgeny Ivanov, led to his ignominious resignation and contributed to the downfall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Labor's victory the following year, in 1964. Compared with the ''scandal of the century,'' Cliveden's lease to Stanford University as an overseas campus, from 1969 to 1983, was a nonevent.
History has left its mark on Cliveden. Poke around and you can find a sketch that Dr. Ward did of Christine Keeler (in Waldo's); the spot where the young Churchill, sent off to get some exercise by boating instead took the boatsman off for a meal and a cigar; a stick used to push Harriet Duchess of Sutherland uphill after riverside tea with Queen Victoria; a Latin inscription contributed by Gladstone; the amphitheater where ''Rule, Britannia'' was first played in 1740; a lawn emblem commemorating the Duke of Buckingham's duel, and even an alcove in which a biographer of Frederick, Prince of Wales, found the inscription:
Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,
Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?
Here, where the charms of Art with Nature join,
Each social, each domestic bliss is thine.
The illusion that you are a guest -- and that friendship and its glories can't be bought -- lasts up until the bill is presented.
Cliveden, as in 'lived in'
Cliveden, Taplow, Berkshire, SL6 OJF England; telephone from the United States (800) 747-6917, fax (800) 747-6918, from Britain (0800) 545 063, fax (0800) 454 064.
Getting There
Cliveden is about 25 miles west of London. By car it can be reached by leaving the M40 highway from London at junction 2 or from junction 7 of the M4 highway; each route takes about 40 minutes. It is 20 minutes by car from Heathrow airport and 50 minutes from Gatwick. The nearest railway stations are Taplow and Burnham, each two miles away (Burnham has 24-hour taxi service; a ride to Cliveden is about $16), and it is six miles from Slough station. A chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned Jaguar is available for transfers, tours or visits to places of interest. Being driven from Heathrow costs $97 and from Gatwick $178 (prices at $1.62 to the pound).
Room Rates
The hotel has 37 rooms and suites. The smallest rooms start at $356, for one or two people, and the most expensive suite is $1,110.
A fee of $8 per room booking is added and paid in full to the National Trust. For lunch or dinner guests there is a $4 National Trust fee.
Included in these room rates is afternoon tea; use of the Pavilion Spa, which has a 60-foot indoor and outdoor pools, massage, sauna and steam rooms; indoor and outdoor tennis courts; squash court; billiards room; air-conditioned gymnasium; library of video film and classical CD's; guided walks of Cliveden's gardens on specially recorded tapes by the actor Robert Hardy, and access to the whole estate and gardens, maintained by the National Trust.
There is a weekend package that includes two nights, Continental breakfast and dinner, $1,126 for two people.
Another package, available Sunday to Thursday with a minimum of two nights, includes daily Continental breakfast and dinner and two hours of massage or beauty treatments; the price is $559 per night per couple.
Extras
Regular treatments in the Pavilion such as aromotherapy, massages or relaxing facials range from $49 for 30 minutes to $65 for 60 minutes. Some treatments are individually priced, among them a-one hour ''perfector'' facial, a nonsurgical face-lifting technique using electrical stiumlation, said to smooth out wrinkles, $74; and a 60-minute seaweed body wrap is $65.
A group cruise on the Thames upstream to Marlow (an hour and a half) or downstream to Windsor (two and a half hours) can be arranged. For a group of 12 the cost is $526 round trip to Marlow or $802 round trip to Windsor. A whole day is $1,085; one hour is $381 (subsequent hours, $154). A light lunch at $31 or a traditional picnic at $42 can be provided.
An hourlong afternoon cruise is $78 a person and includes tea.
There is baby sitting service at $8 an hour and a children's menu.
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