What it really felt like to be raised in the House of Guinness

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has one word to describe the Guinness dynasty. “He says, ‘You Guinnesses are all a bit dotty,’” says Ivana Lowell, scion of Ireland’s most notorious and (for decades) richest family. “And [my second-cousin, fashion muse] Daphne [Guinness] says ‘We’re all bonkers.’ But I think we’re just a normal, abnormal family, like everyone else’s.”

Well, not quite like everyone’s. As Netflix’s just-launched House of Guinness, written by Knight, shows the clan behind the black stuff were (and still are) an extraordinary bunch, exuding scandal, panache and tragedy.

Despite her protestations of ordinariness, it was Lowell, 59, who realised her family’s dramatic potential while watching Downton Abbey one Christmas in Ireland with a clutch of her glamorous cousins. “I thought, ‘We would also make such good TV — the difference is it’s all true.’”

Having taken a proposal to Knight – who’s currently writing the next James Bond film – a decade later, Lowell’s vision has now been realised. We’re speaking the morning after the London premiere, which saw the current hipster generation of Guinness cousins – including Daphne, model and DJ Lady Mary Charteris, and designer Jasmine Guinness – assembled besides Lowell on the red carpet. “I was so nervous, but they all loved the show.”

Yet, rollicking as it is, House of Guinness only touches on the family’s Victorian era, as the four children of Sir Benjamin Guinness, who’d transformed the family brewery into a global behemoth, fight for their share of his empire, which today has been estimated to be worth nearly £1bn.

If a second season is commissioned, as they hope, Knight and Lowell will focus on subsequent generations, whose lives have often been described as “cursed”. Calamities to strike the family include the assassination of Anglo-Irish politician Walter, Lord Moyne, in Egypt in 1944; socialite Tara Browne’s death in 1966 in a car crash, immortalised by The Beatles in “A Day in the Life”, and the suicide of Henrietta Guiness in 1978, who jumped to her death from a bridge in Italy, having previously proclaimed, “If I had been poor, I would have been happy.”

Lowell is dismissive of the curse tag. In her 2010 memoir Why Not Say What Happened? she writes, “It’s a handy way to excuse generations of entitlement, self-indulgence and general bad behaviour.”

“We’re a huge family and every family has its trials,” she says now. “I don’t think it’s true all rich people are unhappy. I know a lot of rich people who are very happy and I also know – well, not poor people, but people doing OK who are unhappy. As one of my cousins says, ‘We’re a very jolly tribe.’”

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Her upbeat attitude is striking, since in fact Lowell’s life exemplifies the poor-little-rich-girl narrative. Her childhood was blighted by neglect, sexual abuse, a near-fatal accident and losing her father, stepfather and sister before the age of 13.

“But I never thought any of it was that shocking. When I told my shrink, she said, ‘It’s amazing you’re still standing.’ I was confused, I thought, ‘Isn’t this what most people go through?’”

Lowell’s grandmother Maureen was known, with her two sisters, as “the glorious Guinness girls”. She became the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. “She was eccentric and wonderful, she loved bawdy jokes. She had a false penis she’d put on the end of her nose, and dressed up as an Irish maid when the Queen Mother came to these very grand dinners, and push people towards the bathroom, saying, ‘Would you like to go?’ But she was also a bit of a snob. She and her sisters had all the money in the world but wanted to be accepted into society, because the Guinnesses were beer and trade, so they all married into the aristocracy.”

While Maureen pursued her social life, her children were neglected. Her daughter, Lady Caroline Blackwood, had to beg for scraps from workers on the family’s Bangor estate, because her nanny stole her food. Nonetheless, Maureen dreamed of her daughter Caroline marrying well. “But Mum was having none of that.” Instead, as an 18-year-old debutante and renowned beauty, she ran off with the painter Lucian Freud. “He was everything my grandmother hated: Jewish, divorced, an artist and impoverished.”

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By now a beatnik, after she and Freud divorced, she married the equally unsuitable Jewish musician Israel Citkowitz, who Lowell grew up believing to be her father. He died when she was seven, by which time Blackwood had married the American poet Robert Lowell, who brought her up as his own, but struggled with manic depression and – like his wife – alcoholism.

The Guinness fortune had little bearing on Lowell’s childhood in a freezing mansion full of broken furniture and peeling wallpaper in Kent. “My upbringing was chaotic to say the least. I never felt rich at all. We never had any food; I can’t remember ever having a meal with my parents. The travel writer Paul Theroux and his wife came to stay and all they were offered all weekend was vodka and champagne. They were so hungry they had to find apples in the orchard to munch. I met him 30 years later and he said, ‘Thank God, you’re still alive, I never thought you’d make it.’”

So lonely was Lowell that she admits in her memoir, which is being republished to coincide with the Netflix show, that aged six, she looked forward to nighttime visits from her nanny’s husband, who’d sexually molest her. She was far more traumatised when shortly afterwards, she tripped over the cord of a boiling kettle, leaving third-degree burns over 70 per cent of her body. She spent nine months in hospital and when she left, had to learn to walk again. Years of plastic surgery followed. “These events scar you forever, in my case literally,” she says wryly.

Robert Lowell died when she was 12, and the following year her sister Natalya died of a heroin overdose, aged 18. After Blackwood’s death from cancer in 1996, she learned her real father wasn’t Citkowitz but Ivan Moffat, the British screenwriter of Giant. Her grandmother was delighted. “She said, ‘Oh good, darling. You might not be part-Jewish after all. That means you’ve got a much better chance of getting married.’”

In contrast, Lowell, who’d never liked Moffat, was “angry and confused. I thought, ‘Oh no, not another thing, Mum!’ but I couldn’t address her directly because she’d gone.” By then, she too was an alcoholic, with It-girl status in London and New York. She dated Harvey Weinstein’s producer brother Bob, who was abusive to her, before marrying interior designer and fellow hedonist Matthew Miller (they rapidly divorced). When pregnant with their daughter Daisy, now 26, she went into rehab and turned her life around.

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Today, she lives in East Hampton, New York with Daisy, who works in real estate and for whom she’s tried to provide a “disgustingly normal” life. Despite her generational trauma, it’s notable and moving that Lowell speaks of her family with huge affection. As she grew older, she and her mother forged a close friendship based on boozing and a shared gallows humour. “Our favourite expression was ‘This is too bad, even for us!’ We said it when Mum got cancer.”

She laughingly describes their family friend Marianne Faithfull visiting Blackwood on her deathbed. “She was in a leopard bodysuit and heels and jumped into bed with Mum, twisting her morphine tubes. She kept saying, ‘Sayonara, Caroline.’ As soon as she left, Mum pressed the button for more morphine and said, ‘Was that wonderful or rather awful?’ It was the kind of thing we both found so funny.”

The memoir acted as a final “catharsis. I was trying to understand, why was my Mum – and all the adults – so careless, but writing it, I realised she was doing the best she could possibly do.

“When I’d finished, it was time to close up the book and start a new chapter, which I hope will be good. If you dwell on the negative aspects of your life, it would literally drive you mad. You can’t stay miserable for the rest of your life.”

She and Daisy had small parts in House of Guinness. “They ended up on the cutting room floor, but she didn’t mind, it was just a bit of fun to celebrate the series.” As they walked the premiere red carpet, Daisy exclaimed: “‘Mum, this is really real!’ Normally, she thinks Mum’s an idiot, but she’s very proud of me and her family and the incredible labour of love it took to build the Guinness brand.”

If there is a Guinness curse, it sounds like it’s finally been broken.

House of Guinness is on Netflix now