Evelyn Bostwick was born on 20 June 1872, and as a girl was known as Fannie (her first name was Frances). Much as her daughter Joe was to become a leading light of the London ‘speed set’, Evelyn Bostwick became a conspicuous member of the Long Island ‘hunting set’ and showed horses in Madison Square. At eighteen, she gave a hunt breakfast at the Bostwick townhouse, ‘an event’, according to the New York Times, ‘which created much discussion in society’. That year, Evelyn started to dabble in drugs.
She also became betrothed to a young New Yorker, but their engagement was broken off shortly before the wedding day. In 1891, Evelyn announced that she intended to marry Captain Albert Carstairs of the Royal Irish Rifles, a Scotsman she had met on a trip to Europe. The wedding took place on her twentieth birthday, two months before Jabez Bostwick’s death.
The marriage lasted a decade but little record of it survives. It is difficult to know whether it was Evelyn or her daughter, Joe, who effectively erased those ten years – and with them Albert Carstairs, Joe’s father. Did Evelyn tell her daughter nothing of their life together, of him, of the circumstances of her birth? Or did Joe choose to forget it all? Something of Albert’s life before his marriage can be gleaned from Army lists: he served in Egypt in the 1880s as a captain in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, and in 1891 was posted with the battalion to Malta. But he retired from the Army when he married in 1892, so his movements in the last years of the century are uncharted. As for Evelyn, vague anecdotes have been passed on about her serving as a nurse with the Red Cross in the Boer War and later racing a yacht against the Kaiser. Almost 100 years later, in the 1980s, her daughter Joe watched a videotape of White Mischief and remarked that her mother’s world was similar to the jaded, dissolute expatriate society portrayed in the film.
It is not clear in which countries Albert and Evelyn lived, whether they even lived together. Evelyn was never a faithful wife, and perhaps we cannot assume that Joe was Albert Carstairs’ daughter. The birth smacks of accident: the couple had been married for eight years when Joe was born, they divorced soon afterwards, and Albert seems to have made no attempt to keep in touch with his only child. He re-enlisted with the Army just a week before her birth. Maybe he was erased from her story because he abandoned her; or maybe she was illegitimate, and the identity of her father truly was a blank. If so, her claim in 1975 not to know her father’s name carries an extra charge. Among Joe’s collection of photographs was a blurred image of a fair young man, moustached, in uniform, marked ‘Carstairs?’.
We do know that in 1900 Evelyn was living in London. On 1 February that year, she gave birth to Marion Barbara Carstairs at 115 Park St, Mayfair, a red-brick house in a newly built terrace. Just a few years earlier the street had been purged of its workhouse and public houses, to become one of the best roads in the smartest district in town. Mayfair was the nucleus of the London Season and – with the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square – a magnet for rich Americans. ‘London’s my town,’ Joe said later. ‘No question. Lord Fauntleroy, that sort of thing.’ In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel of 1886, Little Lord Fauntleroy, the son of an American woman and an English army captain, leaves the United States to take up the title and inheritance left him in Britain by his father. This was the land of Joe’s lost father, too, which may explain why she was so anxious to lay claim to it.
Joe’s inheritance was neither British nor aristocratic, but American and newly minted. And in the first few years of her life the fortune which was to sustain her was being reviled as the fruit of corruption. In 1902 a highly critical ‘History of the Standard Oil Company’ was serialised in the American magazine McClure’s: it denounced the ruthless tycoons who had formed the company, Jabez Bostwick among them. And in 1905 the Reverend Washington Gladden, a pillar of the Congregationalist Church, refused a donation from Bostwick’s partner John D. Rockefeller. ‘Is this clean money?’ he asked. ‘Can any man, can any institution touch it without being defiled? In the cruel brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people in the hundreds robbed of their little, all to build up the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster that a human being may become.’
Joe’s mother, perhaps to counter her reputation in Europe as a ‘dollar princess’ – a princess of tainted dollars at that – somehow contrived to become a lady-in-waiting to Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII. (‘I think she liked girls,’ Joe Carstairs remarked of Alexandra, though she seems to have based this belief solely on the fact that the Queen wore high collars and ties.)
By the time Joe fell from the camel – aged five or so – she had reason to feel orphaned. Her parents had divorced, her father had disappeared, she had been shuttled around Europe, between countries and nannies, and in 1903 her mother had remarried, producing a second daughter. Shortly afterwards, she bore a son.
Evelyn’s new husband was Francis Francis, another British army captain (in the circumstances, it was fortunate that Evelyn no longer went under her first name, Frances). Her new children were Evelyn Francis, known as Sally (born in 1904), and Francis Francis Jr, known as Frank (born in 1906). Joe did not care for her step-family, nor they for her. She derisively described Frank as ‘a little girl’s boy’, though she admitted that because he was a boy their mother was ‘slightly doting’ with him. Joe said of herself: ‘I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer.’
She was prone to scrapes and tumbles, sometimes wilful, sometimes touched with farce. The camel from which she was thrown at London Zoo bolted because a waiter flicked a napkin near its tail. If taken to a party dressed in a white frock, Joe would run outside and roll in the mud. She was lifted off the back of her Shetland pony, Nigger, by a bramble bush. ‘From the time I learnt to walk, I ran,’ she said. ‘My mother said I was a bull in a china shop.’
Captain Francis disapproved of his wild stepdaughter. ‘He thought he’d cure me,’ recalled Joe, ‘but he didn’t.’ This wildness, the sickness which was not cured, was even then a euphemism for her masculine behaviour. When Francis caught the little girl, aged eight, stealing his cigars, he punished her by ordering her to sit down in his study and smoke one. If you’re sick, he said, go out, throw up and come back. Joe, who had been pilfering his cigars for some time, sat down and calmly smoked her way to the end.
Though Francis and Evelyn did not divorce until 1915 their marriage had long since crumbled. Evelyn had many affairs – it was said that the son of an English peer killed himself when she left him – and she took up and dropped her children as lightly as she did her lovers. Francis looked after his son and daughter in London, and when he heard that his estranged wife was planning a visit he would have Sally and Frank’s nanny hide them in the attic. Once, Evelyn kidnapped Sally and Frank from the Coburg Hotel, and took them to her mother’s house in America. ‘Don’t worry,’ Nellie Bostwick told the distraught Francis. ‘She’ll get bored with them in time.’ And so it proved.
Joe Carstairs had not even an anxious father to protect her from her mother’s whims, and Evelyn, for all her negligence, seemed determined that her daughter should form no other attachments. According to Joe, Evelyn grew so jealous of a nanny to whom Joe was close that she fired her. This nanny, whom Joe had promised to marry when she grew up, for many years sent egg-warmers to her former charge.
Evelyn’s vaulting moods were fed by alcohol and heroin. Within hours she could descend from brilliance to incoherence, her shimmer and charm dying into bitterness and loose cruelty. On the occasions that she was with her children she was often absent in spirit, the drugs rendering her glazed and vacant. Because of her unnatural volatility, Evelyn was both hated and adored by her eldest daughter. ‘She was beautiful, she was bright, she was extraordinary,’ Joe said, ‘but she had this terrible thing of taking dope . . . She was unpredictable, to the limit of all.’
The young Joe Carstairs was in thrall to a wayward, mighty force which she had no means of resistin
g. In later life she would, very rarely, admit to having felt vulnerable. ‘What was going to happen?’ she said once. ‘I never knew. I was a strong little brute but, you know.’
To survive, Joe constructed a fantasy of private power around herself, as if building a raft on the waves; this fantasy was to manifest itself throughout her life in her desire for walled, moated worlds – for boats and islands. One of her few happy memories of childhood was of sailing in her own dinghy on the sea near Southampton, armed with crackers and a jug of water. And she made little vessels from twigs. Even then, boats represented autonomy amid chaos. Who or what did she admire, a friend asked her, when she was a child? ‘I didn’t admire anything,’ Carstairs replied. ‘Except boats.’
All the stories Joe purveyed about her childhood were designed to illustrate her defiance and self-sufficiency, to prove that she was ‘a strong little brute’. She did not cry when beaten with the back of a hairbrush, she said, because it would have made ‘them’ happy. She boasted of what a bully she was: she particularly liked to stick pins in her baby brother Frank.
If Joe felt sorry for being cruel or naughty her penance was private and self-administered. She recalled that as a means of atoning for her misdemeanours she would run to a beach, lie in the sand and sweep her arms up and down to make the images of ‘saints’, or angels. On the heads of the sandy saints, as if to enact her own forgiveness, she drew halos. ‘I thought I was helping,’ she explained, and added, to remove any suggestion of compliance or virtue, ‘helping myself’.
By her account, she was eventually deemed so ‘dangerous’ to her half-brother and half-sister that she was sent away to a boarding-school in America. It seems likely that she exaggerated the danger she presented in order to lessen the pain of her expulsion: her banishment, she tried to suggest, was not a mark of her powerlessness but of her power. ‘I let them think it was a punishment,’ she said, ‘but I knew damn well I was going to have a bloody good time.’
In a one-page autobiography she compiled in her nineties, she effected this inversion neatly with a single phrase: ‘Left family aged 11.’
Chapter Two
A Very Healthy Little Beast
In 1911 Joe Carstairs was wrapped up in a raincoat, driven to Southampton and put on an ocean liner bound for New York. The raincoat was the last vestige of the old dark world. Joe was entranced by the liner, a floating island, a complete, knowable world hemmed in by the sea. As she described it, the journey to America was a liberation, and Low Heywood – the girls’ boarding-school she went to in Stamford, Connecticut – an idyll.
Joe spoke sparingly of her schooldays but with ease and lightness, as if this period of her life was so untroubled that there was little to say. She arrived ‘a little dot of a thing’ and won instant popularity by doing the seniors’ French homework for them – she had learnt fluent French from a nanny. Even then, she recalled, ‘I used to hold forth – God knows what about’, and she relished the attention provoked by her ‘frightfully English’ accent. She claimed to be unable to count to ten and she could muster little concentration when reading, but she was a passable student and a good games-player. Joe loved wearing the school uniform. ‘I was pleased with myself even then,’ she said. ‘I was a very healthy little beast.’
Ever mindful of her health, she ate oranges rather than sweets, and used her pocket money to buy boys’ pyjamas and shoes. Her room-mate, Caroline Dubois, also liked to dress in boyish clothes. ‘She was so good-looking,’ Joe recalled. ‘I tell you, we were just something.’ Joe fell in and out of love with various girls, she said, but ‘I didn’t have any kind of sexual ideas . . . There wasn’t time to do it at school, I had so many other things to do.’ She revelled in being a scamp, a boy. Many years later, when she was middle-aged, she took two friends to see her old school. She told a caretaker they encountered there that she was a former student. To her delight, he explained that she must be mistaken as this had always been an all-girls’ school.
Yet Joe’s mother cast her shadow over these sunny schooldays. On the passage to America Joe had done her best to leave behind all the stuff of her past – her new-found happiness must have entailed a fierce act of will – but somewhere it lingered. ‘I was frightened of what might happen,’ Joe said. ‘She was doping, I was enjoying myself to the full at school, terrified she was going to write and tell me to come home.’
For all her fears of being recalled by her mother, Joe saw her only once in this period – in 1915. That year, Evelyn divorced Francis Francis to marry her third husband, Roger de Perigny, in the Catholic church in Warwick Street, London. De Perigny was a French count and a sub-lieutenant in the 19th Regiment of the French Dragoons. Joe adored him. ‘He was marvellous,’ she said. ‘He was a boy.’ What was more, he treated his stepdaughter as a boy, adapting his racing car, a Peugeot, so that she could drive it, offering her his cigars and introducing her to his many mistresses – once, Joe proudly recounted, he took her with him on a visit to a Parisian brothel. ‘He was absolutely the greatest charmer of all time,’ Joe said. ‘I was like his son almost. He thought I was the end.’ He may also have been the first man Joe met who was not under the spell of her mother. For once, Evelyn was the betrayed rather than the betrayer. She eventually left her third husband on account of his persistent infidelity.
During other holidays from school Joe sometimes stayed with her grandmother, Nellie, in New York. In his will of 1892 Jabez Bostwick, an ardent patriot, had stipulated that only those of his heirs resident in America should be entitled to a share of the fortune. Since he died soon after Evelyn’s first marriage, this clause may have been designed to punish his daughter for marrying a Scotsman and leaving her country. But Nellie Bostwick, ignoring his wishes, had ensured that generous incomes were provided for Evelyn and her children. It was Nellie to whom Joe expressed her ambition to be a doctor. (Evelyn vetoed this: ‘She was jealous of me, fundamentally,’ Joe said.) And Joe begged Nellie to let her go to war. Nellie Bostwick, a woman of some influence as well as resolve, persuaded the American Red Cross to send her sixteen-year-old granddaughter to drive ambulances in France. In 1916 Joe, who had been shuttled back and forth between the Old and New Worlds since birth, crossed the Atlantic for the seventeenth time in not quite as many years; the ocean had come to seem her natural element, the liners the still centres around which her world turned.
Joe Carstairs reached Paris shortly before the Americans joined the Great War. Her mother was living in the city with a chihuahua which Joe described as ‘a horror’: ‘He used to pretend he had heart trouble,’ Joe claimed, ‘by lying on his back with his legs up, and she used to feed him brandy.’ While Joe idealised inanimate objects, investing them with the loyalty and innocence of children, she attributed to animals the treachery and guile of adults.
Joe moved in to an apartment in Montparnasse with four other ambulance drivers. The flat was cheap to rent because it had a glass roof, through which the girls could see bomber aircraft flying overhead. Paris was heavily shelled, Joe recalled: whole sides of houses fell down and people lay bleeding in the streets. She was driving an ambulance in the Place de la Concorde when an aircraft was shot out of the sky, to fall in the snow before her. She picked the pilot, a Frenchman, out of the wreckage and found he was dead.
In Paris she had her first sexual encounter, with a woman in a hotel room – ‘I said, “My God, what a marvellous thing.” I found it a great pity I’d waited so long.’ She then became infatuated by Dorothy Wilde, a fellow ambulance driver who shared her flat in Montparnasse. Joe and Dolly had an affair, and Joe was to cite Dolly as one of the four women who changed her life.
To those who knew her, Dolly Wilde was so potent, so unprecedented, that she seemed a character from a novel rather than from life. Like Joe Carstairs, she has not made her mark on history – she was a creature of the moment.
Dolly Wilde was born in 1895, to Willie Wilde and his wife, Lily. Oscar Wilde was her uncle, and after his death she was the only mem
ber of the family to bear his name (such was Oscar’s social disgrace that his two sons took their mother’s name, Holland). Willie, like his younger brother, was tall, fleshy and languid; he aspired – hopelessly – to Oscar’s conversational and artistic brilliance, and died a drunk in 1899, when Dolly was four. Lily remarried. The only childhood memory Dolly relayed to her friends was of eating sugar cubes dipped in her mother’s perfume.
Oscar died in Paris in 1900, exiled and reviled for his homosexuality, sick, broken and broke. Fourteen years later Dolly burst upon the Parisian scene like a resurrection. This resurrection, though, was marvellously inverted: her uncle had loved boys, she loved girls; she was the mannish woman to his feminine man. He might have stepped through a mirror to become her.
When Dolly died, young, her friends wrote down their memories of her, and in 1951 privately published their recollections in a slim paperback. According to Rosamond Harcourt-Smith, Dolly had ‘the same oval face as Oscar . . . the same dark hair growing in a peak on the brow, the same long, boneless white hands’. Dolly was tremendously proud of her hands, their tapering fingers, their soft narrow wrists and palms; they were, another friend remarked, so white and perfect as to be curiously inexpressive. Alice B. Toklas, the lover of Gertrude Stein, wrote of Dolly’s ‘almost mythical pristine freshness’. Dolly had the hips of a boy, the shoulders of a man, and the grace and loveliness of a girl – she was once described as a statue made of gardenia petals, with two huge violets for eyes. ‘Half-androgyne’, said the great love of Dolly’s life, Natalie Clifford Barney, ‘and half-goddess’.
Natalie Barney, a rich American expatriate and patron of the arts, was the most famous lesbian alive; the writer Remy de Gourmont dubbed her l’Amazone after seeing her magnificent bearing as she rode astride through the Bois de Boulogne. Natalie Barney’s Friday night salons, at which tea and chocolate cakes were served, attracted the celebrities of the day: Rabindranath Tagore, Paul Valéry, Proust, Gide, Eliot, Cocteau, Colette, Rilke, Joyce, Pound, Hemingway; before the war, Mata Hari rode naked at Barney’s salon on a white horse wearing a turquoise-studded collar.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 2