Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Francis Bacon felt the same, which was why he spent several months in Tangier every year, and while he was there in 1962 his friend, the wild young actor Stanley Baker who was there on holiday introduced him to the Twins. Baker had got to know Reg by visiting The Double R and all four of them went out to dinner at a local restaurant.

  Once they were sitting down comfortably, Ron noticed a boy he knew at a nearby table and called him over. Then, instead of introducing him, he ordered the boy to kneel down and kiss his shoes. Clearly frightened, the boy obeyed. Ron said nothing, took no notice, and the boy scurried off, looking terrified.

  Ron’s behaviour made a great impression on Bacon who was deeply shocked and later told his biographer, Michael Peppiat, that he ‘felt this was a horrible thing to do to anyone.’ But while Ron’s behaviour repelled him it also fascinated him.

  According to Peppiat, Bacon believed, like many in the 1960s, that East End criminals ‘possessed some ruthlessly virile sense of amorality’, and what particularly turned him on was the thought of ‘succumbing to a man like Ron who was beyond good and evil, totally immoral, and would stop at nothing’, even murder.

  Clearly a masochistic homosexual like Francis Bacon offered an extreme example of the psychic force that Ron projected, which makes the reaction of a strictly heterosexual tough-guy actor like Stanley Baker to the Twins particularly interesting. Even for him violence came into it, for Baker apparently told Francis Bacon afterwards that he ‘thought it was terribly smart to get to know the Twins, because of their reputation as the most violent and feared operators in the London underworld with a number of grisly murders to their credit.’

  What is fascinating about this is that although by 1962 the Twins, and Ron in particular, had inflicted every known form of grievous bodily harm on somebody or other, the one crime that he and Reg would both avoid for nearly four more years was murder. In 1962, there was still capital punishment for murder and like most of their predecessors, the old East End villains, the Twins actually had no intention of taking the ‘nine o’clock walk’ to the gallows. In spite of this, now that they were fast becoming the legendary twin monsters of the 1960s the rumours grew that they were killers.

  Until the end of 1962, most of the tales about the Twins came from members of, or visitors to, Esmeralda’s Barn. Then suddenly all this changed with the arrival on the scene of a keen admirer and self-appointed publicist of the Krays who began the process of turning them into the monsters who would haunt the imagination of the 1960s.

  David Litvinoff was one of a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in the poorest part of Whitchapel in the 1890s. One of his brothers, Emmanuel Litvinoff, was a poet, and another, Barnet Litvinoff, was the friend and biographer of Ben Gurion. As a child, great things were predicted for the third son, David, who was very bright and had a gift for words. But he also had a wicked streak and became the black sheep of the family. He was homosexual, loved low life, and tried to be a villain. The 1960s found him living with a pretty ex-stable boy called Bobby Buckley in a flat in Ashburn Gardens, off the Gloucester Road in Kensington.

  By now, rather than do anything as dull as working for his living, Litvinoff was involved in the only true career he ever had – as a talker, joker and teller of elaborate tall stories to some of the most interesting people in Chelsea. Before long he was at the centre of one of the most colourful and influential cliques in Swinging London.

  As well as talking, Litvinoff also loved to gamble, but when he tried his luck at Esmeralda’s he was less successful, and he finally confessed to Ron that he owed the club over £3,000. Keen as ever to take advantage of this sort of situation, Ron suggested an agreement that would suit them both.

  In lieu of payment Ron accepted the short lease that Litvinoff owned on the flat in Kensington, provided that his boyfriend Bobby Buckley was included in the deal. Litvinoff could go on living there together with Ron and his former lover, to which Litvinoff agreed. So it was that for the next eighteen months Ron came to be living at a smart address in fashionable Kensington with Litvinoff and Bobby Buckley, and all three of them getting up to God knew what together.

  It was largely thanks to Litvinoff that Esmeralda’s Barn began to form a bridge between two separate and dynamic worlds in 1960s London which had already begun to intermingle – the nostalgically resurgent world of East End villainy of which the Twins were becoming the most famous representatives and the celebrity-conscious showbiz world of Swinging Chelsea.

  Time and place are crucial for most things in life, and one of the many fascinating things about the Twins is how they now invaded the imagination of a small but influential group of celebrities, headed by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones who lived near to one another in the most desirable parts of Chelsea. These were glamourous people, artistic, rich and highy influential. They were trendsetters who stood emphatically for certain things – youth and freedom from the old taboos of sex and class. At heart most of them were self-indulgent anarchists. And as pioneers and eager practitioners of the new drug culture, which brought them into unwelcome contact with the law, culminating in the notorious ‘Redlands bust’, which ended up with Jagger and several of his friends in prison, they had little sympathy with the law or the police. They were easygoing over sex, on the basis of the more of it the better, and they loved Morocco for the climate and the easy availability of drugs. Those who were jealous of them called them the Chelsea mafia, but George Melly got nearer to the truth when he called them the Chelsea Popocracy. By the time that Ronnie got to know him, Litvinoff had become their ‘unoffical court jester’.

  The group’s king across the water was young Paul Getty who was still clinging on to his position as the favourite son of the reputedly richest and meanest man in the world, the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. Young Paul had recently bought beautiful Queen’s House on Cheyne Walk and commuted between there and his house in Tangier. He and his glamorous wife Talitha were often high on drugs themselves. Other Rolling Stones were near neighbours, including Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards, together with their girlfriends such as Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg.

  There was also a rich young bisexual painter called Donald Cammell who wanted to be a film director and rented a room above the Pheasantry Club in King’s Road Chelsea to be near his teacher Annigoni. According to his brother David, Donald Cammell was ‘utterly fascinated’ by the Krays and couldn’t hear enough about them. So was another all important member of the Popocracy, the influential young art dealer gay ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser. Soon, in one way or another, most of the Popocracy was becoming obsessed with Litvinoff’s stories of the Twins, and the day would come when Mick Jagger and his Chelsea friends would play an all-important role in adding to their legend.

  This was the point at which the cult of criminal celebrity from the old East End began to meet the new pop culture of the Swinging Sixties in earnest. As much as with any of the other iconic figures of the time, the Twins were truly children of the Sixties. Without gay liberation, changes in the gaming laws, and the abolition of capital punishment, their phenomenal career would not have been a possibility. In addition there was one other largely unsuspected social change which now proved crucial in their rise to fame and notoriety. This was the breaking down of centuries old barriers in London between the West and the old East End, where the Twins had grown up. This was a process which the historian of the East End, Iain Sinclair, has compared with the coming down of the Berlin Wall, as two-way traffic expended between the east and west, and London began to reunite itself.

  In his own strange way, David Litvinoff played a part in this, through his after-dinner magic and the stories he told about the Twins and the world they came from. But there was also a more sinister side to Litvinoff’s activities.

  Ever since the days of the billiard hall, Ron had encouraged a following of teenage boys for sex. As a cover for their activities, he used to call them his ‘information service’, which they also were, since he
paid them for any scraps of information they could find about his enemies. Once he was settled in Esmeralda’s Barn he revived the information service, and ran it from the flat in Ashburn Gardens for himself and for a few gay friends. Typically it was Litvinoff’s idea to extend the information service to a number of rich and influential homosexual members of his widespread West End social network, supplying them with rent boys and way-out sex shows. Besides broadening the acquaintanceship with ‘important’ people, both Ron and Litvinoff were very much aware from the start of the possibilities for blackmail which their little scheme could offer.

  11

  Enter Boothby: 1964

  THIS IS THE point at which the Kray Twins enter the secret history of the 1960s through a scandal brought about by Ron which thrust them into politics at the highest level. Because it was hushed up by the political establishment the Twins, predominantly Ron himself, became the untouchables of London Crime. For the next three years the fallout from this scandal would leave parliament, press and the police impotent to deal with them, and as the Twins’ reputation as untouchables grew this proved to be the basis for everything that followed. To make sense of how this happened we must turn briefly to the old scoundrel who by the early 1960s was probably the most popular political celebrity in the country, and trace the political and criminal events which brought him and Ronald Kray together with such fateful consequences for politics and crime in Britain.

  At the beginning of 1964, Robert John Graham – Baron Boothby of Buchan and Ratray Head as he had styled himself since receiving a peerage six years earlier – had been leading a dangerous double life. During the thirty-eight years he’d been in parliament he’d had his share of ups and downs, but his emergence as a TV celebrity had given a much-needed late-life boost to his ego and his erratic career.

  But there had always been a hidden side to Robert Boothby. Behind the famous public figure was a drunk, a liar, a reckless gambler and a bisexual with a taste for rough-trade sex and teenage boys. With fame and age his recklessness had been increasing and since it was his hidden life that brought him into contact with the Krays, it is to this that we must turn.

  Back in 1924, Boothby’s election at the age of twenty-four as Conservative MP for East Aberdeenshire had made him the youngest member of the House of Commons. The spoiled only son of a Scots insurance magnate who sent him to Eton and Oxford to acquire the accent and the manners of the English upper classes, he was ambitious and good-looking, and could talk the hind leg off a haggis. Churchill took a shine to him, and on becoming chancellor of the exchequer in 1926 the great man appointed him his parliamentary private secretary. For a while Boothby was being tipped as a future prime minister himself. But his prospects were not quite as rosy as they seemed.

  At Oxford a homosexual scandal had briefly threatened his university career. It was sorted out, as these things tend to be at Oxford. But the truth was that, until the early 1960s when homosexual acts between consenting adults began to be decriminalised, anyone hoping to combine an openly gay existence with a serious career in British politics had problems. And that included Robert Boothby.

  ‘I thought men shot themselves for that sort of thing’ was King George V’s reaction to the news that Lord Beauchamp had been caught in bed with a man; and as recently as 1954 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu had spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs for an indiscretion with an aircraftman. Boothby was very much aware of the danger. If the trouble at Oxford had taught him anything, it was the need to be discreet – and so his double life began. Since he was technically bisexual, this wasn’t difficult, particularly as his behaviour wasn’t camp. This meant that while he was primarily attracted to men he was also attractive to women and was perfectly prepared to go to bed with them if necessary. He even got himself engaged to an American heiress until she grew bored when nothing happened and sailed back to America.

  Then, at the age of twenty-eight, he very nearly came unstuck. He was a considerable snob and particularly enjoyed the company of the English aristocracy, as did an older Scots MP from a similar background, his friend and colleague Harold Macmillan. Some years before, Macmillan had married a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, Lady Dorothy Cavendish. They were already the parents of three children when, to complicate the lives of all concerned, the Macmillans invited Boothby to join them on a shooting party. Lady Dorothy’s hand touched his, the lightning struck, and she discovered that she was passionately in love with him.

  As the daughter of a duke, Lady Dorothy was used to getting what she wanted and, feeling painfully frustrated, she pursued her husband’s friend with all the eagerness of her passionate nature. A foreign holiday together convinced her that they were made for one another, but when she broke the news to her husband he was so upset that, according to one account, he threatened suicide. On recovering his self-control he made it clear that whatever happened he would never divorce her. This must have come as a considerable relief to Boothby and his affair with Lady Dorothy continued.

  At times he seemed unable to resist her. At other times he was so anxious to escape that he married Dorothy’s young cousin Diana Cavendish, hoping this would put Dorothy off. (It didn’t, and the marriage ended two years later.) Which was more or less how things remained until war broke out in 1939, with Boothby stringing Dorothy along and the infatuated Dorothy always coming back for more. Oswald Mosley, who knew them both, recalled several occasions when an excited Dorothy was on the point of bolting, but at the last minute Boothby always let her down.

  Poor Lady Dorothy. Her husband wouldn’t divorce her, her lover wouldn’t elope with her, and the truth was that the situation rather suited both the men involved. For Macmillan, who was more interested in politics than in sex, a divorce on any terms would have been disastrous to his all-important political career; while for Boothby, who had even less intention of exchanging his political career for a life with passionate, garden-loving Lady Dorothy, his ‘affair’ provided invaluable cover for the double life that he was leading. In the gay parlance of the time, Dorothy had become his ‘beard’ and he her ‘walker’.

  On one occasion, Lord Lambton, who was in parliament with Boothby before inheriting his title, asked him, as one bounder to another, what Boothby saw in her.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ Boothby said, ‘she reminds me of a caddie I once seduced on the golf course at St Andrews.’

  Boothby may have been more honest in the reply he gave his cousin, Ludovic Kennedy, who asked him the same question. ‘Dorothy has thighs like hams and hands like a stevedore, but I adore her,’ he replied. Possibly he did; but, whatever the truth behind this curious relationship, as the years rolled by the lies and the deceptions needed for his double life, combined with worries over his mounting gambling debts, can’t have helped whatever judgement he might have possessed. As his debts rose, so did his reputation for accepting money in return for political favours. When war broke out and Churchill rewarded him with a place in his wartime government, Boothby was either stupid enough or desperate enough to make a deal with a rich Czech refugee, to use his influence to free his assets, impounded under wartime regulations. More stupid still, he lied about this to a parliamentary committee. When Churchill heard about the matter and sacked him, Boothby asked him what to do. ‘Get yourself a job with a bomb-disposal unit,’ the old warhorse growled, thus ending a long friendship – and Boothby’s political ambitions – until the arrival of TV brought his salvation.

  Suddenly he was like an old pirate fallen on good times. He called himself a maverick, and like many an old rogue was an accomplished raconteur with a fund of stories, many of them untrue. When the students of St Andrew’s University voted him their Rector he claimed that he was the most popular politician in the country. Quite possibly he was. At one stage the Any Questions? TV programme, in which he was a star performer, claimed an audience of seventeen million. But he was also dangerously conceited and attributed his success to his memorable ‘deep brown’ voice. ‘Tony,’ he once boasted to
Lambton, ‘it’s as if I’ve got my cock in my throat.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not someone else’s, Bob?’ Lord Lambton answered.

  Like Lambton, Boothby loved to be outrageous and it seemed that he could get away with anything. Few men, on hearing that an old friend whom he’d been cuckolding (at least in theory) for nearly thirty years had just become prime minister would have instantly asked him for a peerage. Still fewer men in Macmillan’s situation would have said, ‘Of course Bob must have a peerage if he wants it’, and promptly raised him to the House of Lords.

  Since Boothby finally destroyed all Dorothy’s letters – and Macmillan burned all Boothby’s – we’ll never know for certain why the prime minister acted as he did. I once did have a chance to ask him. ‘Because I thought it would please Dorothy,’ he replied, and changed the subject. My own feeling is that Macmillan, who liked to play the aristocrat that he was not, wished to demonstrate that sexual jealousy was too tediously middle-class to have seriously bothered him – which was almost certainly untrue.

  As for the new Lord Boothby, by now he really should have been content. Verging on sixty, he was the Houdini of British politics and had got away with so much in his lifetime, that he probably felt that he could get away with anything. The demanding double life that he’d been leading now for nigh on forty years was flourishing. He had a fine flat in Belgravia and a perfect butler with the similarly perfect (and actually quite genuine) name of Goodfellow who shared his tastes and tended him like the wife he almost was. Now, to gild his lily, came his title, which as a man of inordinate vanity he loved, together with the deference, the robes, the embossed coronet on his writing paper, the right to sign his name with effortless simplicity ‘Boothby’ which went with it.