NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  Kitty is a very odd book. Ms. Marshall appears to have absorbed many of the elements of the story of the theft of Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, allowed them to swill around in her head, and finally come up with a fictionalized story of her own—a hybrid, or perhaps a mongrel, of the truth. Marshall’s Kitty is written in the first person and comes complete with heaving breasts, ripped silk, tight corsets, showers of kisses, and, in obedience to some immutable rule of romantic writing, euphemism-laden sexual congress at least once every fifteen pages.

  Cheerful, kindly Thomas Gainsborough encounters the eponymous Kitty, a waif and harlot of London’s East End, in Pall Mall sometime around 1785. Gainsborough paints her, and through the painter she meets “handsome, devilish, Hugh Marcy,” a cad who immediately beds her and continues to do so, at intervals, for the next two hundred pages. Sir Hugh (for he is a baronet) vows to make his street urchin into a duchess, and under his direction she learns to comport herself like a lady, whereupon he immediately falls in love with her.

  Kitty first marries a rich ironmonger, who conveniently dies, and then the elderly and grossly landed Roy Fitz-Alen, Marquis of Ruthyn, Count of Lonmore, Baron of Harden, and, most important, 23rd Duke of Malminster—who dies even more conveniently, leaving Kitty as the staggeringly wealthy Duchess of Malminster and reigning queen of aristocratic society. Marriage to a duke does nothing to impede her activities with Sir Hugh, partly because the old duke has no lead left in his pencil, but mostly because she likes it, as does Ms. Marshall, evidently: “The velvet caress of his kiss was like a million lips on my naked body … he parted the deep folds and gazed at me and slowly traced one finger breast to navel …” And so on.

  Kitty becomes involved in politics as a Whig reformer and is painted by Thomas “Just call me Tom” Gainsborough again, this time as a duchess. “You are by far the most magnificent of my subjects,” he tells her. All London, including the Prince of Wales, is agog at the beautiful duchess and her portrait.

  “What an ascent for Kitty,” mocks jealous Sir Hugh, “from gutter to Royal ante-chamber.” Just in case we haven’t got the point, the author has Kitty’s French dresser explain, with Ms. Marshall’s inimitable ear for dialect, “Zere iss only wan ozzer beauty who can compare wis Miss Gordon [Kitty’s unmarried alias] … she’s zee Duchess of Devonshire.”

  Kitty finally falls in love with one Brett, Lord Mountford, who as a youth, we are told, sat for Gainsborough’s portrait The Blue Boy. Sir Hugh successfully blackmails her and disappears to Constantinople, and Kitty marries Brett, who is, needless to say, “all man.”

  “I doffed my night robe,” Kitty tells us, “and slipped into the pale wisp of green, the déshabille for the nuptial night.”

  And that, mercifully, is that.

  Published in the closing months of the war, Kitty helped to keep the home fires (and, presumably, loins) burning and went through an astonishing eight printings. This novel is, arguably, one of the worst works of fiction ever written in any language, but Ms. Marshall’s steamy effort gave birth to a film of the same name that remains a classic. Kitty, made by Paramount Pictures and directed by Mitchell Leisen, launched the career of Paulette Goddard, in the title role, into the big time. As Goddard’s biographer notes, “a lot of effort went into the conversion of Paulette from Kitty as eighteenth century Cockney street urchin to a Duchess,” and the American actress was required to “speak only in a Cockney accent from breakfast to bedtime.” In the hands of scriptwriters Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg, Ms. Marshall’s bodice-ripper became cleaner, funnier, and a good deal more subtle. Ray Milland plays an attractive and despicable Sir Hugh, and Cecil Kellaway, as Gainsborough, is considerably less excruciating than one might expect. The film was a successful rival to Forever Amber from 20th Century Fox, and earned a massive “$3.5 million in domestic gross rentals” when it opened at the Rivoli Theatre on March 31, 1946. The critics were lavish: “Paulette Goddard has worked up a blazing temperament to go with her ravishing beauty in the title role … she gives the work the correct touch of wry romanticism.” For publicity stills, Paulette Goddard posed in a vast feathered hat, holding a rose in either hand, in a direct parody of Gainsborough’s original duchess, yet again proving the strange durability of that image.

  The story of Kitty, precursor of My Fair Lady and a host of other modern Pygmalion tales, is now a familiar one. Whatever Hollywood and Ms. Marshall’s fervid imagination may have done to it in the process, the tale of the poor girl who becomes a great lady through the molding and coaxing of a wicked man she loves is one that the original Kitty would have recognized, and relished.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Le Brigand International

  On July 24, 1893, The Pall Mall Gazette announced beneath banner headlines the solution to “A Seventeen years mystery.”

  “We are able today to throw some light upon the mystery of the century, and to announce news concerning Gainsborough’s celebrated picture of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the beautiful and witty electioneering duchess to whose fascination Walpole and other contemporary writers paid such lavish tributes,” the article began, before going on to recount the story of the sensational sale, theft, and disappearance of the painting.

  “That was many years ago,” the writer continued, “and the fate of the Gainsborough picture threatened to remain for all time as speculative as the identity of the author of the Letters of Junius or the Man in the Iron Mask. But a man in a sackcloth mask has made a revelation about this portrait of the beauteous Georgiana. A prisoner in the Prison de Louvain, wearing the mask which in Belgian gaols is the penal badge, has been interviewed by an emissary of The Pall Mall Gazette, to whom the prisoner confessed that it was he who broke into Messrs. Agnew’s on that memorable night and stole the picture … the name of the scoundrel was Adam Wirth. He was none other than the celebrated thief who has earned for himself the proud title of ‘Le Brigand International.’ ”

  There is a certain amount of journalistic license here on the part of the Gazette. Worth had not exactly confessed; he had been entrapped. The previous May, “a man named Marsend went to the prison at Louvain armed with an official pass authorising him to see Wirth. The prison authorities took him for a detective.” Worth, on the other hand, assumed Marsend was a solicitor who might help him salvage some of his fortune from the traitor Curtin, and believed his visitor was “a man of business, merely come to settle some vexed questions between the convict and his wife, who lives in England.” In fact, Marsend appears to have been a freelance journalist of a most dubious kind who had been tipped off to Worth’s past and now hoped to trick the convict into admitting his part in the Gainsborough affair. Marsend was at least partially successful. Worth, starved for company, seems to have been uncharacteristically free with his reminiscences about the Gainsborough theft and other details of his life. Even so, it was rather less than a full “mea culpa,” and the Gazette had to admit when Marsend’s story was published that Worth “has confessed with a certain amount of circumstantiality … and we are not in a position yet to put his confession to the test.”

  As Sigismund Cust, M.P., editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, later recounted, Marsend and another man had approached him, saying “they had a clue to the whereabouts of the picture” which they were prepared to sell. They claimed to be working “in consort” with Agnew’s and also to have obtained the interview with Worth through the Foreign Office. Cust had given the men some money on account and had promised them more “when they produced the picture,” as they assured him they could. The editor then took out his pen and set to work, turning the information provided by Marsend and his accomplice into publishable material. As Cust later told Agnew’s, “his principal object in going into this thing was to get what he called ‘copy’ for his journal. But, of course, he would be only too glad if his efforts resulted in our getting back the picture.”

  The article concluded with a piece of classic journalistic overstatement: “Worth has promised, however,
to supplement the information already given with further facts, which may enable us at no distant date to say with some confidence whether or not the confession is a genuine one.”

  Worth, of course, had promised no such thing, and when the article was published he realized, too late, how he had been snared. The arrest and unmasking of Worth had caused a minor sensation the year before, but the revelation that the man who had posed as Henry Raymond was the man who had stolen the Gainsborough rekindled the story with a vengeance. Mr. Cust of The Pall Mall Gazette had done his homework, and while his prose was somewhat overblown, his information was largely accurate, describing in detail most of the crimes perpetrated by Worth over the preceding twenty years, his arrest in Liège, and his current, uncomfortable situation.

  “He made his entry into the world of crime with the boldness of an Alexander who meant to reign in the realms of felony, and to conquer every criminal sphere … he embarked on a sea of extravagance and gaiety, concealing the Gainsborough picture like the man who locks up unquoted shares. Taking an expensive house in Piccadilly, and furnishing it with the taste he had acquired by his frequent visits to the mansions of the wealthy in the practice of his profession as a burglar, he kept his carriage and pair, received much company, and organised nice, cosy little steam launch parties for river picnics, his favourite diversion.”

  Why, the author wondered, had Worth refused to part with the valuable Gainsborough? He concluded that Worth had been simply unwilling to take the risk. “A picture of this sort, unlike the swag which the melting pot can instantly render unidentifiable, could not be brought to any market without the risk of immediate detection. The thief thus found himself the possessor of a fortune which he could not realise, an Aladdin’s lamp which he knew not how to employ, a storehouse of wealth to which he could not get the ‘open sesame’!”

  Never suspecting that Worth might have other reasons to keep the picture and knowing he was not likely to be contradicted, the author gave full rein to his imagination: “Every now and then the picture, buried beneath some heap of rubbish, would rise up in his memory and cause him severe qualms, for the possession of it was a standing menace to his safety … he tried to forget the picture’s existence, willing to neglect it, yet loath to destroy anything so potentially valuable.”

  Not surprisingly, the story prompted what we would now call a “feeding frenzy,” and the Pall Mall Gazette’s report was reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Some were doubtful. “Nothing is said in the account of the present whereabouts of the painting,” noted The Daily Telegraph, and “until that information is forthcoming there will be sceptics.” The Bath Herald agreed: “Messrs. Agnew, no doubt, will believe in the truth of the story when they have their picture back.”

  Another writer in the New York Sun, cranking up his prose to near erotic levels, fantasized that Worth had stolen the portrait “to worship” the sexy duchess in secret. The anonymous writer was not so wide of the mark, but realizing he might be in danger of overdoing things, he suddenly concludes, on the basis of no information whatever, that Worth “had used the dastard knife for the mere sake of loot. A guerdon of dross, and not the gratification of unholy but artistic passion, was to be his reward.”

  The Manchester Courier suggested “the story may or may not be true but it is not an improbable yarn” and wondered whether Worth, if he was indeed the thief, was also a romantic “haunted during sleepless nights in gaol by visions of the lovely face of the stolen ‘Duchess’,” who might now “unburden his mind” and relieve his conscience by agreeing to return it. “As the felon has been a sort of artist in his own line, perhaps he has some respect for the artistic achievements of nobler men.”

  Worth was both haunted and burdened by the Duchess; he was an artist, in a way, but he had absolutely no intention of returning the painting. Trapped, increasingly infamous, and irritated that he had been so incautious when dealing with Marsend, Worth granted only one interview in the wake of the Pall Mall Gazette furor, to a local paper, the Indépendence Belge, in which he claimed the whole thing had simply been a joke on his part. Worth insisted that,

  in the course of the interview Marsend began to talk of the famous painting which was stolen 17 years ago, [and] seeing the interest which his visitor took in the affair [he] thought it would be interesting to “green him up” and accordingly told Marsend that he knew the receivers of the picture; and himself possessed in England a reduced copy of it.

  He pretended to be vastly amused that Marsend, and The Pall Mall Gazette, had believed his story. Indeed, he went into “fits of laughter” for the benefit of the Belgian interviewer, and “his laughter was apparently sincere.” It was an elaborate bluff, and the journalist for the Independence Belge fell for it. “It seems certain,” the paper reported, “that the Pall Mall’s story is the result of a hoax, pure and simple; that the secret of the famous picture is not at Louvain; and that the art world must renounce its newly awakened hope of seeing again one of the most admirable masterpieces of English painting.”

  But not everyone was so convinced. “I still retain the belief that Worth has control of the Gainsboro’,” Robert Pinkerton wrote to his brother.

  The Gazette, in true Fleet Street tradition, defended its story in the very next edition. “Certain newspapers, although availing themselves in their news columns of the benefit of our article on Adam Wirth … have, nevertheless, discovered in our report indications that the confession is not to be relied on.” C. Morland Agnew, William’s son, was interviewed and acknowledged that the convict Worth was indeed the prime suspect. “The firm have recently had negotiations with people acting on Wirth’s behalf with a view to the restoration of the painting,” the Gazette recounted, “and those negotiations are still pending.” Bending the truth more than a little, the younger Agnew claimed: “We could have had the picture back several times since the theft,” but for a high-minded refusal to contemplate getting the portrait without the thief. “The negotiations for the return of the picture never included the delivery of the thief into custody. We could not think, of course, of continuing negotiations of that sort,” Morland protested, falsely.

  William Agnew himself feigned insouciance when asked about the Pall Mall Gazette account, but the entire Gainborough episode still rankled, partly because it was still costing him money. Just a few years earlier, in 1887, he had been forced to make good on his debt of 1,500 guineas to the engraver Samuel Cousins when the latter died, even though the Gainsborough “was never engraved after the painting was stolen.”

  “There may be some truth in the rumor … but personally I know nothing whatever of the matter,” he told the New York Sun, which then noted that “Mr. Agnew expressed a column with a shrug.” After so many false alarms, the art dealer reportedly “heard the news with the calm indifference of a man who sees an old friend in a summer suit.” But Messrs. Agnew were neither calm nor indifferent. Indeed, the Gazette story and its aftermath had led to a fresh flurry of activity in Old Bond Street and Scotland Yard as a series of more or less shady characters emerged out of the woodwork, some of them former associates of Worth, claiming to be able to broker a deal with the convict. In William’s words: “Mysterious men came to me and said, ‘We think we can lay our hands upon the painting,’ but invariably wound up with a request for £20, or £50, ‘just to cover the initial expenses of inquiry.’ ” Marsend even tried to capitalize on his scoop and once more “made an application to the authorities in Belgium for permission to have an interview with the convict Wirth, but the authorities declined to grant this permission without Mr. Marsend producing to them an authority from Mr. Agnew that such interview was desired by him.” Another man, by the name of McLeod, also offered to act as a go-between, for a consideration. This McLeod, Morland Agnew reported back, claimed “he was Wirth’s associate and … knows all about the picture and is agitating now in order to get money to assist Wirth.” McLeod was sent packing.

  Throughout 1893, the
letters hurtled back and forth between Scotland Yard, Agnew’s, and the various lowlifes scenting a scam. They got nowhere; Worth categorically refused to discuss the matter. Sticking to his story that the whole thing had been a misunderstood prank on his part, he refused to be interviewed by Marsend, McLeod, the Belgian authorities, Sir George Lewis, “or by anybody else”—a position he resolutely adhered to for the remainder of his sentence. “Nothing could be done by anyone,” an Agnew’s official complained.

  Late that summer, Superintendent Shore came to visit Morland Agnew at the Piccadilly gallery, in a somber mood. “Undoubtedly the picture was about and might be recovered,” he told the dealer, but not without cooperation from Worth himself. “He said that the authorities had known for some time that the man Worth, now in prison, was the thief,” Agnew wrote, “but that it was quite impossible for the police to bring any real proof, nor could the police proceed against anybody who was in possession of the picture as being in possession of stolen goods. The robbery was some 17 years ago and it would be quite impossible to proceed against anybody.”

  Worth could not be forced to surrender the painting, only persuaded, Shore explained. “There was nothing to be done.”

  For the Victorian press and public, the image of a master criminal at bay refusing to surrender his last remaining symbol of wicked power was a piquant and powerful one. The Duchess had come to represent many of the values of that often self-satisfied society, the artistic reflection of wealth, position, and power. That she could still be held hostage by a jailed international bandit subtly undermined such complacency. Threats, inducements, and punishment had all failed to loosen Worth’s tongue, or his grip on his only possession, and so, as the years of imprisonment crawled by, he continued to wage the strange campaign of defiance he could never win but refused to lose.