After the bust, sixteen people were bound over. Aspinall, his mother and Burke were committed for trial. With a straight face, their QC proclaimed: ‘There is no shred of evidence to suggest that anybody even played a game of patience.’ At any rate there was insufficient evidence of illegality. The case was dismissed. The law, it was tacitly admitted, had become an absurdity. It had been that, really, from the first, as evidenced by the 1868 prosecution of a bookmaker for using a position beneath a tree in Hyde Park as his ‘office’. If gambling was legal, then gambling premises had to be legal also. If Aspinall could be arrested, then so too could the organizer of a church-hall whist drive with a ten-shilling kitty. From the moment that his trial ended, the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act was inevitable. It was known, colloquially, as ‘Aspinall’s Law’. The Clermont was not the first casino – that was in a boat on the Thames – but for the next ten years it would be the best, and for that reason the most dangerous. ‘Aspers’, one of his club regulars would later say, ‘did more damage to the landed gentry than Marx and Lenin put together.’
Today, forty years after the disappearance of its most notorious member, the Clermont is seen through a haze of excitable puritanism; as a dark and disreputable vortex of sin, where rich people behaved with the unaccountable carelessness of an age that was past, but not yet dead. It is all part of the Lucan myth, that aristocratic murder should have brewed and been concealed within that sinister palace. It is not quite the truth, of course.
After all, rich people still gamble in casinos, although both the people and the casinos are now very different. The gamblers are mostly foreign. The casinos are, on the whole, quite wilfully dull, their atmosphere remarkable only for being atmosphere-free, like boardrooms full of business people who have taken the Trappist vow, so must conduct their affairs through a minimalist sign language. Nobody drinks or smokes or does anything to break the metronomic click-and-flip of chips and cards. This shows gambling at its truest, perhaps, as an activity of deadly pointlessness. Yet the Clermont, tricked out with all the loveliness human beings can devise – art, amusement, women, food, wine – could create an illusion that gambling was the best possible way of spending one’s life.
It is this, the fact that the Clermont lent so much glamour to vice, that now makes it seem peculiarly pernicious. It was a very beautiful place. It still is. The house was built in the 1740s for Lady Isabella Finch, a daughter of the Earl of Winchilsea (as she was unmarried there was only one main bedroom, with a mirror placed precisely so that she could see the arrivals in the hall below). The architect, William Kent, created something Italianate, a neat palazzo painted in reds and pinks, a gilded jewel box hidden inside solid London stone; as if, when the great black front door opens, one might see Lady Isabella revolving to the sound of a spinet. It is infinitely civilized, as the eighteenth century could be. Opulence, restrained by good taste. The rooms are shaped with absolute refinement. Downstairs, a small lobby leads to a bar on the left. To the right is the golden, fairy-tale, freestanding staircase down which Aspinall once led a pet tiger cub, which then roamed around the gamblers, purring with all the fearsome amiability of its owner. Beyond are the ‘light’ gambling rooms, relaxed and easeful, for games like backgammon that do not take away a man’s fortune. There is the restaurant, red-draped and intimate, where Lord Lucan sat at the far corner; like Lady Isabella, he had a perfect view of who was coming in. Outside is a small flagstoned garden, with the sounds of London close by yet irrelevant.
It was upstairs, in the cube-shaped saloon, that the chemmy table stood beneath lofty ceilings with painted panels and a chandelier of immense, gorgeous, weighty complexity. Lives were wrecked in this room, yet no malaise hovers. The surprising thing about the Clermont is that it feels uplifting rather than doom-laden. More miniature Brighton Pavilion than Hellfire Club. It is not hard to understand why people wanted to go there. It feels like a house, still: a house belonging to a wonderfully rich friend who has welcomed you in to play your favoured, adult games, and who, so long as you remain inside, will protect you.
But to describe how it really was is near impossible, because people perceived it differently. One knows that everybody drank and smoked and looked smart as paint. This was the 1960s, but most people still used the legal high rather than the illicit, and dressed like adults rather than Jimi Hendrix. One knows, too, some of the things that John Aspinall did there. He had extraordinarily good food and wine, and in the days before it became illegal would encourage his gamblers to drink hard at the tables: ‘He liked you to get lit up,’ says a Clermont regular. His staff were among the best in London, and one who remains at the club is extremely loyal to what he viewed as a very decent employer. He held parties that were bacchanalian, as if devised by Nero. One night he threw a ‘barbarians’ party’ for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, with fifty midgets and everybody eating with their bare hands. Apparently Fahd loved it. He created an air of lustrous, smooth perfection, shot through with the throb of unpredictability. One went in there to win, but of course one might lose.
It was a man’s world, no question. Men showing off to each other, really. Buccaneering, not with swords but with money. Behaving as they are no longer supposed to do. Not as badly as they did in the eighteenth century, when a woman would have taken her life in her hands if she had walked into a gentlemen’s gambling room, but still with a Mad Men swagger that has them condemned (possibly secretly envied) today.
There were some amazingly attractive women around: Sally Crichton-Stuart, who married the Aga Khan; Min Musker, Aspinall’s second wife; Zoe Peto, a seventeen-year-old model then married to Greville Howard; Christina Shand Kydd; Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who went gambling on her wedding night with her first husband, Mark Birley, and made the mistake of drawing his attention to herself rather than the game: ‘You never interrupt a man who is running a winning bank,’ she later scolded herself.10 But the wives were beautiful incidentals, part of the theatre in their long sleek column dresses, there to adorn and charm and send a sweet stream of Shalimar into the Stuyvesant. Some of the men were womanizers, which can be another form of showing off to each other. James Goldsmith, who attacked romancing with the speedy force of a fly-half, had three wives, plus adjuncts: he conducted an affair with Lady Annabel when married to Ginette Lery, and took Laure Boulay de la Meurthe as his mistress when he married Lady Annabel. Ian Maxwell-Scott, who lived at the club during the week, was said to have played away from his devout Catholic wife, Susie. ‘All I want is for him to be here,’ she told her children’s nanny, ‘and he has these popsies hanging round the Clermont.’ Inevitably there were a few upmarket tarts. Veronica Lucan later claimed that the gamblers wanted to plant one of them on her husband. She was said to chafe bitterly against the sidelining of women, from her position on what was known as ‘the widows’ bench’ beneath the staircase. Yet to her sister Christina, whose husband Bill gambled occasionally at the club (one night winning and losing £70,000), the Clermont was straightforwardly enjoyable: simply the nicest place in London. Christina says:
It was a very, very glamorous place, no question. Full of friendly, amusing people. Of course it was a man’s place. I mean there weren’t many girls gambling – mainly John Aspinall’s mother. But they’d always break for dinner, there’d be a really good dinner party in the middle, but normally the wives would go home after dinner and the men would continue into the night. The gambling would start, and the wives might stay for half an hour and watch, but then they would leave. And the men would go on until two or three in the morning.
Stuart Wheeler recalls:
It was all very friendly. If you didn’t gamble upstairs [at chemmy], they didn’t bother you. You could play backgammon downstairs in considerable comfort, and a lot of people would be doing that. I think their feeling was that, if they allowed people who liked gambling very much to have a good time and so forth, in the end they would go and gamble at the casino games, and in the end they would make money out of it. And it probably
worked, I should think.
Aspinall was very good at making everybody feel they were his best friend, and the atmosphere was as if you were in a very important place. It might have been unnerving to an outsider, but if you were part of it, it was very relaxing, actually.
Daniel Meinertzhagen, the youngest of Lucan’s gambling circle, who lunched with him most days after his separation from Lady Lucan, went to work at the Clermont soon after coming down from Oxford. At university he had become a gambler: ‘I remember one morning, in the early hours, carrying my roulette paraphernalia from Trinity to New College, walking past the Dean…’ Then he met a relation of Aspinall’s and the die, as it were, was cast. ‘It was an extravagant, decadent atmosphere – far and away the most exciting of the casinos. And I was a little scrubber from Oxford, and I walk in and there’s King Fahd, Onassis, Niarchos, Andrew Devonshire. A bit intimidating, yes. But it could turn a young man’s head.’
In 1972 the Clermont was sold to Playboy and Victor Lownes took over. His wife Marilyn, the former centrefold with the goddess body, worked occasionally on the club reception.
What was fascinating about the Clermont for us – there were five of us bunnies, on reception – it really was like a gentleman’s club. There was this old man, Tom – oh my goodness, he was their butler. When you walked in, the gentleman’s cloakroom was on the left. Tom used to shuffle in – he had dark trousers and a waistcoat – and they’d say Tom, can you get me this, get me that… He was in service. That was the mentality. He’d shine their shoes, he had all the brushes to brush down their coats, cologne – and he would go out and get a certain paper that they needed, or he would tell Billy Edgson, on the door, to get it. So they treated him almost like their butler. And that’s why they liked going there, because they could still be those people with servants. It’s like all of us, we go where we’re comfortable and where we feel at home.
Victor Lownes has a similarly benevolent, faintly baffled take on the club that he acquired for just £500,000. The ludicrous price, which Playboy recouped in just three months (not three nights, as legend has it), is further evidence that the Clermont was only intermittently profitable for Aspinall, although he was also impatient to turn his attentions to his nobler enterprise of wildlife conservation. ‘He only really wanted the British upper classes gambling there. He filled it with his friends, and he’d tapped them out. Once he’d busted them out, they didn’t have any more money to gamble. We took our highest rollers out of the Playboy, who had never been admitted to the Clermont under the old regime, and we took them over there immediately.’
It was later said that the club changed, lost its cachet, after the 1972 sale to Playboy. It was even said that Lownes employed bunny girls as croupiers;11 this is untrue. To all intents and purposes things went on much as before, including Tom the butler and Billy the linkman. The girls at reception wore normal clothes, with not an ear or tail in sight. ‘Playboy followed a successful formula,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen, refuting the myth that the old guard was muttering Blimpishly into its martinis about the new ownership. ‘It didn’t change as much as you’d think.’ It is true that a craps game was established upstairs, and that this was regarded as slightly infra dig. It is also true that the little staircase that took the gamblers straight down to Annabel’s was sealed off by its owner Mark Birley, denying instant access to the jeunesse dorée below; but that had happened already. In fact the change had begun before John Aspinall sold the Clermont. Outwardly everything stayed the same, but the living, breathing club was slowly becoming a facsimile of itself. How could it not, when the shadow of uncertain times was falling upon it? Money was evaporating, draining away; unless it was oil money. Even Aspinall, who still showed his face regularly after selling the club, would lose his lot when the stock market more than halved in value in the early 1970s. ‘Nice person, Aspinall,’ says Lownes.
I had no problem with him. And his mother – she used to bring a chimp in a carrycot, and leave it with reception while she went in and gambled. She was a very interesting person. Nice person.
The Clermont guys were part of the atmosphere. They were a bit like schoolboys. They were pleased to be welcome there, even if they weren’t gambling. I was comping them all meals and stuff. And hundred-year-old brandy – they were happy to be drinking from this wonderful liquor cellar that I got from Aspinall. And we were bringing over these Arabs and whatnot, and we wanted them to see that they were in with the British aristocracy. They liked that. Of course!
A year or so before the Playboy takeover, Lord Lucan took his sister, Jane, and her American husband for dinner at the club. Her reaction was different again. It would surely have been her parents’ reaction also:
I thought it was a nightmare. Such an unreal and distasteful world to me. I have one visual memory of sitting at the Clermont – there was a very nice sitting-room area [beside the staircase], and we sat there I think with Veronica, and John was somewhere at the table. I never saw him at work… It was just being around the great and wealthy and all was always slightly distressing to me. But that was my hang up, as they say nowadays.
This, indeed, is what the Clermont was: a place where the privileged would assemble. In its glory years of the 1960s, it had a name that signified. There was a dazzling completeness to it, a theatrical gleam, as if one could walk in and be absorbed into another world. Every night was like an opening night, prickling with the sense that this was the place to be. Whether one liked it or not, and of course not everybody did, it was infinitely more than a repository for aristocratic throwbacks. Frank Sinatra went. So did Elizabeth Taylor, Lucian Freud, Ian Fleming, the American philanthropist Paul Mellon, the racing driver Graham Hill, Mick Jagger (Aspinall – who really was Jagger’s ‘man of wealth and taste’– hollered across the dining-room: ‘Good to see you here, Mick. Glad to see you’ve joined the middle classes. Why do you put on that ridiculous voice when we all know you’re a perfectly good middle-class man like the rest of us?’12). John Betjeman went, because he was in love with the building. The French novelist Françoise Sagan went. She was a heavy gambler, but the dangerous allure of the Clermont almost did for her.
Someone brought her a little pile of chips in exchange for a little piece of paper which she happily signed. To her left there was talk of horses, to her right of regattas. Meanwhile her little pile of chips disappeared, one after the other. Hardly had one pile vanished than a splendid valet would place another on a silver tray in front of her and she would sign another piece of paper…13
After a while she asked how much she actually owed, and John Aspinall wrote it down on another little piece of paper, brought to her by the valet. Her debt was £80,000. Being a true gambler, Sagan stayed. By the end of the evening she owed £50. ‘It was a great pleasure to have you at my tables,’ said Aspinall, exerting all his lupine charm as she paid the cashier, ‘especially since the French are generally so lacking in sang-froid when gambling.’
Within this assorted crowd of the famous, the onlookers, the upper classes, the grand old ladies who wore hats at the tables, were the people who would later become known as the Clermont set. In fact they were only a part of the whole, but what united them was that they were friends of Lord Lucan. John Aspinall himself, James Goldsmith, Charles Benson, Daniel Meinertzhagen, Ian Maxwell-Scott, Stephen Raphael, Michael Stoop, Dominick Elwes: the set, the inner circle, as it is perceived to be, that stands at the imagistic heart of the Lucan myth.
These men have been written about repeatedly, perhaps more than any other aspect of this story. The gamblers who protected Lord Lucan, the Happy Valley set transported to the darkened brick of Mayfair; indifferent to the world outside, applying the code of the club to the rest of life, as the 3rd Duke of Grafton had done when he gave a Treasury pension to a broke gambler. Muriel Spark rendered them in Aiding and Abetting with vast dollops of Scottish contempt. Her admirer Evelyn Waugh would have dealt with them more equivocally. One can imagine the elliptical conjurings: ‘Lucky’
Lucan and his lamb chops, the dull-eyed assemblage around the chemmy table muttering ‘banco’ and ‘suivi’ and ‘neuf, old boy, do forgive’, the hovering sense of cosmic boredom, the bass notes of falsity within the image of antiquity. Liberal-minded writers have described them with a kind of horror. ‘Casinos should be the preserve of the rich: it keeps these people away from the rest of us.’ They were an ‘overbearing, disdainful cast of characters’, atrociously right-wing, ‘a group distinguished by its wealth, arrogance, misanthropy and, ultimately, murder’.14 The police, succinctly, called them ‘the Eton mafia’ (although only half of them actually went to the school).
At the heart of it all is Lord Lucan, seated at the table that came to comprise his life. Lucan, whose personality was subsumed into his obsession, whose habits became as addictive as his addiction: the same meal, the same vodka martini, the same gambling. The aristocratic ace in John Aspinall’s hand, a waxwork created to embody the lifestyle that led to nowhere. A figure from Hogarth, subject of a series of tableaux entitled The Gambling Earl that took him from chiselled dreamboat of Le Touquet to puffy-eyed bankrupt of Belgravia.
Lucan could sit in his tight little circle of players, within the constrained little circle of his mind, and outside the world could change as much as it liked. The pickets could rant and the bombs could explode, but the Clermont would still enclose the players in its velvet grip. Meanwhile his countess sat downstairs on her bench, abandoned and afraid, as her husband steadily disposed of his birthright, in the company of the men who would shield him against her with their silence.
A Different Class of Murder Page 12