NECROLOG

JOANNA HARCOURT-SMITH

oanna Harcourt-Smith was born into a wealthy but complicated and dysfunctional family when her mother Marysia’s waters broke as she was playing bridge at the Palace Hotel, St Moritz, in January 1946. Marysia’s husband, Hungarian financier and lawyer Árpád Plesch, described by Joanna as “one of the most malefic creatures to roam the Earth”, had formerly been married to Marysia’s mother, the immensely rich Leonina Caro Ulam, once the mistress of Béla Kun, head of the short-lived and bloodthirsty Hungarian Soviet Republic. When Leonina died (or, according to Joanna, had been stabbed to death by her husband Plesch with a silver dagger) the evil