Among the future Clarissa Avon's many other friends, a number of whom were some years older than she, were the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford (whose sister Deborah wrote of an encounter with Lady Avon some 20 years after they had been débutantes together that she "found her rather alarming"), painter Lucian Freud, and choreographer Frederick Ashton. When she was still in her teens James Pope-Hennessy modelled on her the character of Perdita in "London Fabric" (1939) and dedicated the book "To Clarissa". Gerald, Lord Berners used her as the basis of a character in his novel "Far From the Madding War" (1941), while photographer Cecil Beaton, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The journalist and author Sofka Zinovieff has claimed that, after her grandmother, Jennifer Fry (of the Fry's chocolate family), separated in 1944 from her grandfather, Robert Heber-Percy, who was Lord Berners' closest friend, Clarissa and Cecil Beaton amused themselves by riffling through underclothes and love letters that Jennifer had left in a drawer at Berners' country home, Faringdon House, in Oxfordshire. A few years' later, while working at "Contact", Clarissa became friends with the writer and journalist Alan Ross, who subsequently married Jennifer Fry.