“She had fantastic posture, wore cabochon emeralds or rubies, and dressed for the evening in diaphanous and flowing gowns,” remembered one of her friends. “It wasn’t so much that she was superior as that she was in another sphere almost. She sort of floated, and she had the most amazing eyes.”
Enid Kenmare’s “other sphere” was, from all accounts, dope. “She kept her beauty because she didn’t drink, but she was a heroin addict. Legally a heroin addict. She was on the drug list, you know, registered. Marvelous skin, never went in the sun,” said a gentleman in New York. Another gentleman, in London, said, “She smoked opium certainly, and took heroin.” A lady friend, more cautious, said, “I never noticed when people took dope.” But another lady friend said, “She lived in a haze of drugs.” Everyone commented on the fact that she drank Coca-Cola morning, noon, and night.
“If Enid were alive today, she would be, let me see, ninety-eight or ninety-nine, I suppose,” said the Honorable David Herbert of Tangier, the son of, brother of, and uncle of various Earls of Pembroke, who knew Enid Kenmare for years and attended her fourth wedding, to Valentine Kenmare. “She walked down the aisle like a first-time bride,” he told me, remembering the occasion. “She was very very wicked. Once, she said to me, ‘Do I look like a murderess? Tell me, do I?’ ”
The other great beauties of her era, to whom she was often compared—Diana Cooper, Daisy Fellowes, and Violet Trefusis—are all dead. So, too, are most of the men she knew. But there are a number still, deep in their eighties now, or nineties, who remember her. Some are in rest homes. Some have come on hard times and live in greatly reduced circumstances from the period in which they flourished. Some are on walkers or canes. One died a week after I spoke with him in his modest bed-sitting-room in London. Another had a stroke. Still another had become so deaf that it was impossible to communicate with her. Different people remembered Lady Kenmare differently. One old gentleman said, “We used to call Enid the cement Venus. Actually, I think Emerald Cunard made up that name.” Another said impatiently, “No, no, not cement Venus. It was the stucco Venus. That’s what we called her. Stucco. Not cement.” Some remembered her quite erroneously. A grand old dowager marchioness, wearing a fox fur around her shoulders, walked slowly across the lobby of Claridge’s in London, leaning on her stick. “I remember Enid,” she said. “She pushed Lord Furness out the porthole.” And there are also the friends of her children, who are now in their sixties and seventies, who were, in those days, the younger crowd. “I don’t think Enid killed anybody, but she might have given them drugs and helped them along,” said one friend of her son Rory, who died in 1985 at the age of seventy.
She was born Enid Lindeman in Australia, one of five children. Her father, Charles Lindeman, raised horses and introduced vines to New South Wales, thereby pioneering the wine industry in that country. In later years, when she bred racehorses in Kenya, she would talk about riding bareback as a child. Her rise to international social status began at the age of sixteen, when she allegedly became the mistress of Bernard Baruch, the American financier and presidential adviser, who was then in his forties. During their liaison, Enid, an accomplished artist, had a brief stint in Hollywood as a scenery painter. Their friendship lasted until the end of Baruch’s life, when Enid returned to New York to say good-bye to him before he died. A skeptic remarked to me that the trip was to ensure that she would be “remembered financially by Mr. Baruch.”
Baruch felt that his beautiful young mistress should be married properly, and it was he who introduced her to her first husband, the American Roderick Cameron, who, like Baruch, was much older than she. They were married in 1913, and he died the following year, leaving her with a son, also called Roderick Cameron, known as Rory, who would himself in time become a known figure in social, literary, and decorating circles.
In 1917 she married for the second time, in England, where she had moved, to Brigadier General Frederick Cavendish, known as Caviar Cavendish. “At that time, it was the thing to do, to marry soldiers,” said Tony Pawson. Peter Quennell, the octogenarian writer, described Enid then as “a very autocratic beauty, greatly admired by her husband’s junior officers.” At White’s Club in London, an elderly gentleman listening to this description guffawed and winked, to indicate that the admiration of the young officers was romantic in nature. Enid was presented at court to King George and Queen Mary when she became Mrs. Cavendish, and was said to be the most beautiful Australian ever presented. The marriage to General Cavendish, who, had he lived longer, would have become Lord Waterpark, produced two children, Caryll, a son, who is the present Lord Waterpark, and Patricia, a daughter, who is now Mrs. Frank O’Neill, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where she continues to manage a stud farm that her mother purchased before her death. That marriage also produced a considerable inheritance.
In 1933, Enid Cavendish married the very rich Lord Furness, known as Duke, short for Marmaduke, heir to the Furness shipping fortune. He had a private railroad car, two yachts, and an airplane. They were each other’s third spouse. Lord Furness was himself no stranger to homicidal rumor and controversy. His first wife, Daisy, had died aboard his yacht the Sapphire, on a pleasure cruise from England to the South of France, and he had buried her at sea. “They say she was pushed off the yacht, but no one could ever prove it,” said Tony Pawson. Thelma Furness, his second wife, in her memoir, Double Exposure, glides over the event of her predecessor’s death. “They were forced to bury her at sea. There were no embalming facilities on the yacht, and they were too far out to turn back to England and not near enough to Cannes to make port.” Had he been tried and convicted, it is said that, as an English lord, he would have been hanged with a silk rope, but there was never an arrest or a trial. Thelma, during her marriage to Furness, had become the mistress of the then Prince of Wales, and it was she who, inadvertently, brought her friend Wallis Warfield Simpson into the orbit of the prince, thereby losing her lover, her friend, and her husband. After Furness’s subsequent marriage to Enid, he several times sought out his former wife, with whom he remained on friendly terms, for solace. His marriage to Enid was never happy. Thelma Furness was of the opinion that Enid got Furness on drugs. In her book, she tells of an occasion when Furness was nervously biting his knuckles. “We went up to Duke’s suite.… Duke took off his coat and asked me to give him an injection—a piqûre. I couldn’t do this because I did not know how; I had never handled a hypodermic needle. Finally, he asked me simply to pinch his arm, and he gave himself the injection.” Of the last time she saw him on the Riviera, she wrote, “I’ve never seen a man look so frail, so mixed-up, so ill. I cried, ‘Oh, Duke, if I could only put you in my pocket and take you away.’ ”
Elvira de la Fuente, a longtime Riviera resident who was a great friend of both Enid and her son Rory and a fourth at bridge with Somerset Maugham, sat on the quay at Beaulieu recently and talked about Furness’s death in 1940. “Furness died at La Fiorentina,” she said. “He used to get drunk every night. He was carried out of there when he died. There was a rumor that Enid killed him. I don’t think she did, but she was quite capable of letting him die.” The most persistent story of Furness’s death was that it took place in the little pavilion at La Fiorentina, which Enid had constructed overlooking the sea, and where she and her friends played cards every day. On the night Furness became ill, she went back to the house to get his pills, locking the door behind her. The next morning he was found dead in the pavilion. Furness’s death left Enid a very rich woman, and Thelma Furness tried to have her charged with murder, but Walter Monckton, the pre-eminent lawyer of the day, refused to take the case, and it never went to trial.
Enid’s last marriage, to the sixth Earl of Kenmare, took place in 1943. He was an enormously fat man, 255 pounds, who once accidentally sat on a dog and killed it. Known as Valentine Castlerosse until he became an earl, he had a reputation for lechery and avid gambling that made him disliked in certain segments of society. He was the first English aristocr
at to write a gossip column. Hopelessly in debt, he was rescued by Lord Beaverbrook, who paid him £3,000 a year plus expenses to write a column for the Sunday Express. Kenmare’s family estates in Ireland were massive, 118,600 acres, but yielded only a modest annual income by the standards of the day, £34,000. He once said of his life, “I dissipated my patrimony; I committed many sins; I wasn’t important.” Elvira de la Fuente remembers that Enid sent her son Rory a telegram saying, “Do you mind if I marry Valentine Castlerosse?” “Valentine used to be married to Doris Castlerosse, who was a great friend of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. She’d be about a hundred now,” said de la Fuente. Doris Castlerosse died of an overdose of sleeping pills mixed with drink in 1943. Three weeks after the inquest into her death, Enid and Kenmare were married in a Catholic ceremony in the Brompton Oratory. One guest described the event as “taking place in a nightclub setting, for all the titled crooks and rogues in London were there.” When Kenmare died less than a year after the marriage, Chips Channon, the English diarist, wrote of him, “An immense, kindly, jovial witty creature, Falstaffian, funny and boisterous, and always grossly overdressed; yet with a kindly heart and was not quite the fraud he pretended to be.” “Enid was supposed to have given him an injection, but I never believed that,” said Tony Pawson. As Kenmare had no direct heir, the inheritance was to go to his bachelor brother, Gerald. Eventually it went to Beatrice Grosvenor, the daughter of his sister, but Enid, in one of her boldest ventures, claimed to be pregnant, although she was approaching fifty at the time. She was thus able to hold on to the income from the Irish lands for an additional thirteen months. Said Tony Pawson about the pregnancy, “I never heard that, but Enid was up to that sort of thing.”
David Hicks, the English decorator married to the daughter of Earl Mountbatten, was a frequent visitor at La Fiorentina. “They used to say about Enid, she married first for love: Cameron. And then to Cavendish, for position—it was a very good name. Then Furness for the money. And Kenmare for the title,” he said. But there were lovers too. “The Duke of Westminster was in love with her,” said Tom Parr, the chairman of Colefax and Fowler, the London decorating firm. The Duke of Westminster, Britain’s richest man, had been a friend of two of Enid’s husbands, Furness and Kenmare, and the third of his four wives, Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, was sometimes a visitor at La Fiorentina. “There was one of the Selfridges too, of the store,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “A rich man. He gave her money. He was very unattractive too. Some women can only go to bed with handsome men. With Enid, it didn’t seem to matter.”
“Before the war, the international upper classes were doping a great deal, but none of them showed it,” said Tony Pawson. “They weren’t like those drug addicts today.”
“There was a terrible scandal in New York, but I wouldn’t want to talk about that,” said an ancient lady in London. In Paris, an ancient gentleman said, lowering his voice, “Have you heard what happened in New York? Such a scandal!”
The New York scandal they were referring to was what has become known in social lore as the Bloomingdale scandal. Donald Bloomingdale, a sometime diplomat, was forty-two, handsome, a rich man who enjoyed an international social life, maintaining apartments in Paris and New York. “Donald had very chic French friends,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “He spoke French well. He was quite a snob. He married one of the Rothschild heiresses, the sister of one of them, but the marriage didn’t last.” Donald Bloomingdale was also a particular friend of Enid’s son Rory. “Rory was very much in love with Donald Bloomingdale, but at the time Donald was in love with an Egyptian, called Jean-Louis Toriel, who was very drugged,” Elvira de la Fuente told me. Toriel was an unpopular figure among the fashionable friends of Donald Bloomingdale. Tony Pawson remembered that Toriel had a dachshund that he turned into a drug addict. “A horrid little skeletal thing. Too awful. He was really evil.” On several occasions, Bloomingdale went away for drug cures, but, because of Toriel, he always went right back on drugs, once while driving to Paris immediately after his release from a clinic in Switzerland.
In the winter of 1954, Enid Kenmare and Donald Bloomingdale were in New York at the same time. People remember things differently. Some told me it happened at the Pierre. Some said it happened at the Sherry-Netherland. And some said it happened at the since-razed Savoy-Plaza Hotel, which used to stand where the General Motors Building now stands on Fifth Avenue. At any rate, Donald Bloomingdale wanted some heroin, and Lady Kenmare gave it to him. One New York friend of Donald Bloomingdale’s told me the heroin was delivered in a lace handkerchief with a coronet and Lady Kenmare’s initials on it. Another New York friend said the heroin was in the back of a silver picture frame containing a photograph of Lady Kenmare. However it was delivered, the dosage proved fatal. “It was apparently a bad mixture,” said Tony Pawson. The rich Mr. Bloomingdale, who would have been far richer if he had outlived his very rich mother, Rosalie Bloomingdale, was found dead of an overdose the next morning by a faithful servant. Good servant that he was, he knew how to handle the situation. It was not his first experience in such matters. He called the family lawyer immediately. The lace handkerchief with the coronet, or the picture frame with Enid’s picture, or whatever receptacle the heroin had come in, was removed, as were the implements of injection. The family lawyer called the family doctor, and the police were notified. Meanwhile, Lady Kenmare was put on an afternoon plane with the assistance of her good friends Norman and Rosita Winston, the international socialites, who for years had leased the Clos, a house on the grounds of La Fiorentina. “She was out of the country before any mention of Donald’s death was ever made,” said Bert Whitley of New York, who leased another house on the grounds. The servant, who had been through previous scrapes with his employer, was left money in Bloomingdale’s will, as were Rory Cameron and Jean-Louis Toriel, the Egyptian, who later also died of a heroin overdose. The newspapers reported that Bloomingdale’s death had been caused by an overdose of barbiturates. No connection between the countess and the death of Donald Bloomingdale was ever made publicly. “But everybody knew,” I was told over and over. “Everybody knew.”
Probably nobody knew better what happened that night than Walter Beardshall, who was Lady Kenmare’s butler and valet at the time and who remains her fervent supporter to this day. Now crippled by post-polio syndrome, Mr. Beardshall lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is mostly confined to a motorized wheelchair. “I traveled around the world with Her Ladyship,” he told me. “Elsa Maxwell spread the rumor that I was her gigolo, and everyone gossiped about us, but I wasn’t. I was twenty-four at the time, and Lady Kenmare was sixty-two.” According to Beardshall, the incident happened at the Sherry-Netherland. “Mr. Bloomingdale had a permanent suite at the Sherry-Netherland, and we were his guests there. He filled Lady Kenmare’s room with flowers and everything. The next morning the telephone rang very early, and Her Ladyship asked me to come to her room as quickly as possible. ‘How fast can you pack?’ she asked. ‘We’re leaving for London.’ We had only just arrived in New York. She said, ‘I had dinner last night with Mr. Bloomingdale. He told me I could borrow his typewriter so that I could write Rory a letter. When I called him this morning, his servant told me that he was dead. I was the last person to see him alive. We have to leave. You know how the American police are.’ ”
After the Bloomingdale incident, Somerset Maugham dubbed his great friend Lady Kenmare Lady Killmore, although some people attribute the name to Noel Coward. At any rate the name stuck.
“Did Enid ever talk about Donald Bloomingdale?” I asked Anthony Pawson.
“It was always a tricky subject,” he said. “She didn’t talk too much about it, because of all the rumors going round.”
“Did Rory talk about it?” I asked a lady friend of his in London.
“Those stories about Enid were never discussed. I mean, you can’t ask if someone’s mother murdered someone. Rory told me, though, that once, when she arrived on the Queen Mary, the tabloids
said, ‘Society Murderess Arrives,’ ” she replied.
“When Donald died in New York that time, we all expected to know more about it, but nothing came out,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “She ran from New York after that.”
Daisy Fellowes, another of the stunning women of the period and a famed society wit, maintained a sort of chilly friendship with Enid. The daughter of a French duke and an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, she didn’t think Enid was sufficiently wellborn, describing her as “an Australian with a vague pedigree.” Once, in conversation, Enid began a sentence with the phrase “people of our class.” Mrs. Fellowes raised her hand and stopped the conversation. “Just a moment, Enid,” she said. “Your class or mine?” After the Bloomingdale affair, Daisy Fellowes announced she was going to give a dinner party for twelve people. “I’m going to have all murderers,” she said. “Very convenient. There are six men and six women. And Enid Kenmare will have the place of honor, because she killed the most people of anyone coming.”
Lady Kenmare was aware of the stories told about her, and she was sometimes hurt by them. Roderick Coupe, an American who lives in Paris, told me of an occasion when the social figure Jimmy Donahue, a Woolworth heir, cousin of Enid’s friend Barbara Hutton, and often rumored to have been the lover of the Duchess of Windsor, asked Enid to his house on Long Island. After a pleasant dinner, he began to ask her why she was known as Lady Killmore. She explained to him that it was a name that caused her a great deal of heartache. Donahue, who had a cruel streak, persisted. “But why do people say it?” he asked several more times. Enid Kenmare finally announced she was leaving. Donahue told her he had sent her car back to New York. Undeterred, she made her way to the highway and hitchhiked to the city.
The Mansions of Limbo Page 14