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?

BOOK: Frances Osborne, "The Bolter"

Frances Osborne: The Bolter. London: Virago, 2008. 9781844084807. xiv + 319 pp.

Sackville is a name that, to me, will always be associated first and foremost with hobbits, but I'll do my best to banish this association from my mind for the rest of this post. The Bolter is a biography of Idina Sackville, whom I must have first heard of years ago as being one of the central figures of the “Happy Valley set”, a group of more or less rich white settlers living dissolute lives in 1920s and 1930s Kenya. She is mentioned, but not by name, in David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, where we read on p. 441 that Joss Hay, the future Earl of Erroll, “married a twice-divorced woman in 1923”; so the first time I heard her name must have been in the two books about the murder of Lord Erroll that I read in 2005. In any case, I'm glad that I have now read The Bolter; the louche glamour of the Happy Valley is not the only interesting part of Idina's life, and there seems to have actually been a rather nice person behind all that scandalous reputation.

*

Idina's background was more impressive than I had expected (well, not that I had had any definite expectations one way or another). Her father was a somewhat impecunious aristocrat who could trace his family back to the Norman conquest (and one of whose ancestors gave his name to the state of Delaware; pp. 17–18);* her mother, by contrast, was from a family who got rich in the railroad business only a couple generations earlier. Her parents divorced around 1900, when this was still considered highly scandalous. Her mother spent lavishly in support of a curious combination of causes: theosophy, women's suffrage, and the career of a Labour politician named George Lansbury. Idina herself, as a young woman, was briefly involved in the suffragist movement (p. 33).

[*Another famous relative on the Sackville side was the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was a second cousin of Idina's; p. 287.]

Idina's first husband, Euan Wallace, was by all accounts handsome, charming and very rich. At first it seemed like a perfect life of non-stop partying in their seven-floor house in London (p. 41) and the sprawling country house they were building in Scotland (p. 43); but then WW1 broke out and they were separated for long periods while Euan was at the front. Towards the end of the war Idina was ill for several months and Euan found himself new company to party with, friends of her younger sister (pp. 85–6); soon he was clearly more interested in one of them, Barbie Lutyens (daughter of the famous architect), than in his wife. Idina, for her part, also got herself a lover and wanted to marry him. Euan agreed to a divorce, but with it Idina lost not only access to her husband's money but also to their two sons (pp. 106–7).

Idina and her new husband, Charles Gordon, moved to Kenya where life was cheaper and the British government was handing out farmland to WW1 veterans through a sort of lottery (p. 122). Charles won a big plot of land and they started building a farm there, but it soon turned out that their personalities were too poorly matched: she was too driven for him, he was too laid-back for her (p. 127).

They divorced in 1921, after about two years of marriage. Idina moved to London and threw herself into an impressively hedonistic lifestyle, had numerous lovers and became sufficiently notorious that a thinly disguised version of her even appeared as the protagonist of a bestselling novel (p. 134). After a few years, she met Joss Hay, who became her third husband; he was from an old Scottish noble family but had even less money than Idina (p. 139). Their marriage was considered scandalous by the standards of the time, partly because Idina had already been divorced twice before and partly because he was ten years younger than her. On the positive side, neither of them particularly expected the other one to be faithful, which probably improved the prospects that their marriage might last (p. 140).

They moved to Kenya, bought some land and started building a farm. Contrary to my expectations, Idina took farming quite seriously (p. 149); but she and Joss also hosted numerous parties, ranging from respectable ones for distant acquaintances to much wilder ones for a closer circle of friends, where drugs and alcohol flowed freely and people drew lots to decide who would get to sleep with whom that night (p. 157). This sort of lifestyle even had political implications: the white settlers in Kenya wanted to convince the British government to let them have a bigger say in running the colony, but this would be a hard sell if they “were seen to be a bunch of wife-swapping sybarites” (p. 159) :))) Gossip about “the Happy Valley” even reached the foreign press (p. 173). But what was perhaps even more troublesome for Idina and Joss was that they were spending a lot more money than they could afford (p. 161).

Eventually, Joss left Idina for another woman (and, in the process, got himself horsewhipped by her jealous husband; p. 185). Bankers foreclosed on Idina's farm and she moved to England where, among other things, she had an affair with Oswald Mosley (p. 186; that was a few years before he became notorious by starting his own fascist movement). In 1930 she got married for the fourth time and moved back to Kenya with her new husband, one Donald Halderman, and started yet another farm; but not being the wife-swapping type, he took to threatening her lovers with a gun, and she left him after three years (p. 198).

Idina managed to briefly re-establish contact with one of her sons, David, whom she had not seen for something like fifteen years. By now he was a student at Oxford, keenly moved by the injustices of the world and committed to a kind of christian socialism; but in the end he decided to study ancient Greek history rather than become a priest (p. 223).

Idina returned to Kenya and a life of partying, although by then “the old Happy Valley set were sinking into a haze of drugs and alcohol” (p. 226). She travelled to Rwanda with her friend, the travel writer Rosita Forbes (p. 227), and to Greece with her son David, who had by then graduated (p. 230). She had a few more boyfriends, but it was not until 1939 that she married for the fifth (and last time), to an RAF pilot named Vincent Soltau (p. 234). Only half a year later, they were separated by the outbreak of WW2: he was posted to Egypt and travel between there and Kenya was not exactly easy in wartime; but Idina still cared for his two children from a previous marriage (p. 276). They divorced at the end of the war (p. 279).

Idina lost a lot of people during the war. Joss, her third husband, was murdered in 1941 (the case was never quite cleared up); less than a month later, Euan, her first husband, died of cancer, aged just forty-eight and with a promising political career; later that year, Alice de Janzé, an old friend of Idina's, committed suicide (pp. 239–42). Idina had a brief but happy reunion with her other son, Gerard, when he was posted to Mombasa as a pilot in 1943*; but after a few months, he went missing on one of his airplane missions (p. 248). David, meanwhile, was parachuted into Greece to help its resistance movement, and got killed by the Germans (p. 250).

[*Leading to one of the funniest passages of the book, when a senior officer upbraided Gerard for being seen in the company of such a notorious woman: “ ‘she's old enough to be your mother.’ / ‘She is my mother,’ was the reply.” (P. 246.) :)))]

After all these shocks, Idina had a nervous breakdown (p. 252), followed soon afterwards by womb cancer (p. 256). She managed to re-establish relations with her daughter, who by then was a grown-up woman herself. Idina's circumstances in the post-war period were getting somewhat straitened, so that she couldn't even afford to travel to England every year. Despite an operation, her cancer returned; she died in 1955, aged sixty-two, and was buried in Kenya.

*

This book was a very pleasant read, and from its style I was not surprised to find that the author's next book was a novel. At the same time, she never goes so far as to invent whole conversations and the like, as some biographers do; her narrative always sticks to facts such as could be found in her sources. It was also nice to see how well-researched this book was. The author is a great-granddaughter of Idina's (though her eldest son David), so she could get much material from all sorts of extended relatives; she interviewed people who had once known Idina, as some of them were still alive in the early 00s when she was researching this book; she even visited one of Idina's old farms, now inhabited by a large Kenyan family (p. 270).

ToRead:

• Annie Brassey: A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’. A book by Idina's maternal grandmother, who spent a long time sailing in the South Seas, together with the whole family. Mentioned here on p. 19.
• Dorry Kennard: A Roumanian Diary (1918), a book “about her travels alone in Rumania” (p. 95). The author was a friend of Idina's.
• Michael Arlen: The Green Hat (1924). A novel whose protagonist is based on Idina; mentioned here on p. 134. It was also made into a movie starring Greta Garbo (p. 10).
• Rosita Forbes: Appointment in the Sun (1949). The author was a travel writer and a friend of Idina's; this book covers, among other things, a 1937 trip to Rwanda, on which Idina was also present (p. 227).
• James Aldridge: The Sea Eagle (1944). A novel “about a man fighting with the Greek guerrillas”, mentioned here on p. 253.
• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate; Don't Tell Alfred. Three novels featuring a character nicknamed “the Bolter” and based on Idina (p. 9). This is also what the title of the present book refers to. But it strikes me as a bit unfair to Idina; sure, she bolted from some of her husbands, but some also bolted from her.