BOOK: Paul Spicer, "The Temptress"

Paul Spicer: The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice de Janzé and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010. 9780312584184. viii + 262 pp.

After reading The Bolter, a biography of Idina Sackville, a few weeks ago, what better way to continue than with another biography of a notable member of the Happy Valley circle. The Temptress was published only a couple of years after The Bolter, and I actually bought both books at the same time. I think reading them one after another turned out to be a good idea; many of the same people appear in both of them and they complement each other nicely.* Another thing they have in common is that Spicer, too, had something of a personal connection to the subject of his book: his mother had been a friend of Alice de Janzé during the 1920s, and he himself lived in Kenya for a few years in the 1950s and got to know some of the people who still remembered the protagonists of his book (p. 213). Once again I couldn't but be impressed at how much work goes into a biography like this and how (as he describes in a very interesting appendix) the author practically drew on a network of connections woven over the course of a whole lifetime to get the contacts and information that eventually enabled him to write this book. He had been working on it from 1994 and it was eventually published in 2010 (p. 220).

[*I did find one small discrepancy: Spicer writes (p. 68) that Idina arranged for her daughter to be raised by Idina's sister in England; but in The Bolter p. 199 we read that she was raised by Idina's brother Buck.]

The book does have one significant downside in comparison to The Temptress: there are no endnotes here, only a bibliography. Thus you have no way of knowing what source exactly he used to support this or that statement in the book. It's really a shame that, after all the enormous amount of work that went into a book like this, they would end up publishing it without endnotes.

*

There are also some differences between the protagonists of the two books. For one thing, Alice's life was shorter and sadder than Idina's, clouded by mental illness (cyclothymia, something akin to bipolar syndrome; p. 41) and several suicide attempts, including finally a successful one. For another thing, she was much richer; at no point in this book does she have the slightest reason to worry about money, let alone have a bank foreclose on *her* farm. Her father was a successful businessman, and her mother was descended from the two most powerful families of 19th-century Chicago (p. 13); but alas, that is no guarantee of a happy childhood. At the age of seven, Alice lost her mother, who died after Alice's father locked her out of the house one cold winter night after a particularly bad row (p. 15). I don't know what to be more shocked at — the husband's callousness, the fact that he was never prosecuted for it, or the fact that the poor woman couldn't go to some neighbours for help.

Still, Alice's father seemed to be fond of her, and spared no expense to make her happy; but after a few years, her mother's relatives successfuly sued to deprive him of custody because he had apparently been spending money from Alice's trust fund (p. 19). They sent her off to a boarding school, where she made her first suicide attempt. Nevertheless, a few years later, she successfully entered Chicago high society as a debutante; but she soon grew tired of that kind of life, began frequenting nightclubs, and was rumoured to have a gangster boyfriend (p. 24).

To prevent scandal, her aunt took Alice to Paris, where she met her future husband, Frédéric de Janzé. I was interested to learn that his mother was actually also an American, and that his family's comital title dated only to 1815 (pp. 27–8). He seemed to be more in love with her than she with him, but she agreed to marry him anyway. She had a hard time fitting into French high society, and even in her husband's family people had a tendency to look down on her (p. 36). Her husband's brother and his English wife even spread rumours that she had some black ancestry (p. 40) :)))

In 1925, the de Janzés moved to Kenya, hoping that a change of environment would be good for Alice. To arrange such a thing logistically was not exactly trivial, but what impressed me the most was when I read that the 600-mile stretch of railway from Mombasa into the interior of Kenya had been built in a six-year period, 1895–1901 (p. 48). In my country we have recently spent a good deal more than six years on a stretch of railway less than 20 miles long, and haven't yet so much as set a single shovel into the ground.

They stayed for some time with Joss and Idina Hay, whom they had already got to know in Paris a few years earlier. Alice made a number of friends, started an affair with Joss (her long-suffering husband seemed to be remarkably phlegmatic about it), and felt so much happier than in France that she decided to buy a farm in Kenya and settle there permanently (p. 65). (It seems that there may even be a physiological reason why the abundance of bright sunlight helped her mood; p. 71.) She left her two daughters in Paris to be raised by her aunt and by Frédéric's mother; indeed one can't help feeling that Alice was more interested in her exotic pets (including, but not limited to, a baboon, a lion cub, and a baby crocodile; pp. 79–81, 89) than in her children.

In 1926 Alice fell in love with Raymund the Trafford, yet another upper-class Englishman who had recently moved to Kenya to try his hand at farming. This was the final straw for the de Janzés' marriage; Alice decided she wanted a divorce so she could marry Raymund (p. 87). But alas, Raymund's family were very stuffy Catholics who disapproved of divorce; she sought to have her marriage annulled by the Pope, but Raymund, whose family was still threatening to disinherit him, told her he was breaking up with her (p. 91). This pushed her into despair, and when saying goodbye to him at the Gare du Nord in Paris, she shot him and then herself. As she explained it later, she had initially intended simply to commit suicide, but in the last moment had decided to kill him as well (p. 97). The shooting was even alluded to in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, Tender is the Night (p. 97). In the event, they were seriously wounded, but the doctors managed to save both of them. She apparently had a very strong belief in the afterlife and may have thought she would be able to get together with Raymund there (p. 98).

She was prosecuted for the shooting, but the court was impressed by the concept of a crime passionnel, and she was given a six-month suspended sentence and a negligible fine; and a few years later she was even pardoned by President Doumergue (p. 107). Ah, those wacky Frenchmen and their sympathy for a crime of passion committed by a beautiful woman — I'm very happy to see that sometimes the stereotypes do have a basis in truth :)

Alice returned to Kenya, where most people did not seem to think any worse of her (and jokingly called her “the fastest gun in the Gare du Nord” :)); p. 109), but apparently there was a law that forbade unmarried women from immigrating to Kenya, and she had to go back to Paris. She diverted herself by investing in a fashion business (p. 114) and by having a busy social life. Her marriage eventually did get annulled and after a long campaign she finally persuaded Raymund to marry her (p. 120).

It seems that pretty much from the start, their marriage was troubled by frequent rows, as well as by Raymund's gambling habits (p. 124). Within a few months it got to the point that she paid him to go to Australia and preferably not come back any time soon (p. 127); but, technically she was now married and so could move to Kenya again. She bought one or two houses, made new friends, and even made a trip to America to see her aging father one more time (p. 141). Her own health was beginning to decline, both mental and physical, even though she was only forty years old (pp. 147, 153).

In 1940, Joss Hay (Lord Erroll) was found murdered and the book describes the subsequent investigation and trial in a good deal of detail. As is well known, the main suspect at the time was Jock Broughton, a friend of Joss who was thought to have killed him out of jealousy because Jock's wife, Diana, was going to leave him for Joss. Broughton was tried but acquitted, and from the description in this book it seems clear that the prosecutor was nowhere close to proving his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. For one thing, the bullets found on the crime scene didn't match those from any guns known to have been in Broughton's possession (p. 177).

I remember reading in Errol Trzebinski's book that the British secret service may have been involved in the murder, for political reasons, but Spicer is skeptical of this theory, as Joss Hay was too small a fish to merit an assassination plot (p. 184). Instead, Spicer presents some signs that Alice may have been the murderer. The idea is that she found it intolerable to lose Joss to Diana Broughton, whom she disliked intensely (mostly for being younger and prettier than Alice; pp. 157–8); so the murder might have been due to jealousy and perhaps a hope of reunion in the afterlife, similar to the attempted shooting of Raymund (pp. 186, 209). There isn't much in the way of really solid evidence, however: Broughton's lawyer received anonymous notes hinting that a former lover of Joss is the murderer (p. 185); there are some strange reactions and statements by Alice after the murder (p. 189); several people knew about a confession letter that Alice left after her suicide, but the prosecutor seems to have decided not to reopen the case, and the letter's whereabouts are unknown (p. 206); years later, a neighbour of Alice's found what seems to have been the murder weapon, buried close to the boundary between their farms (p. 208).

Over the next months, Alice's health grew worse, and she committed suicide in September 1941, and in a very romantic way too; she filled her room with flowers, took some pills, and shot herself (p. 195). The book concludes with a few paragraphs about the subsequent life and careers of her various friends and lovers (pp. 198–203).

*

This book was an interesting and enjoyable read, especially the part about Alice's possible involvement in the murder of Lord Erroll, although I can't help feeling that unless that confession letter can be found, the rest of the evidence doesn't quite reach ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ levels, just like that against Broughton didn't. It was also interesting to read about Alice's family background and early life, which I don't remember seeing in the other Happy Valley–related books I've read so far. But there is also a sombre side to this book: it was sad to think that someone can be born with every advantage — wealth, beauty and so on — and still end up depressed and suicidal. If someone like Alice committed suicide, what hope is there for the rest of us?