In November Beryl and Dessie were reported as taking part in a charity darts match where the other celebrities included Lord Semphill, Amy Johnson, Steve Donohue and Jimmie Wilde. But the biggest attraction was His Majesty the King, who was said to ‘throw a pretty dart’.16 Within a month the royal dart-thrower would have abdicated his throne in order to ensure the help and support of the woman he loved.
The King’s Secret Matter had now reached crisis proportions. The US papers were running banner headlines speculating on the probability of a ‘Queen Wallis’. All society had been discussing the couple’s liaison for months (since the king’s holiday with Wallis on the yacht Nahlin in September, and even prior to that), and now ordinary citizens were becoming aware of it. When British newspapers, previously muzzled by protocol and loyalty, reported the divorce of Wallis and Ernest Simpson, the seriousness of the situation was fully revealed. In December the abdication was announced. Edward, king no more, went abroad. The Duke of York, now reluctantly King George VI, sat on the throne of England. When asked what should be done about the coronation planned for Edward on 12 May, the harassed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin reportedly snapped, ‘Same day. New king!’
While Dessie worked at the theatre, Beryl was out every night, dining and dancing until the small hours. ‘I loved to dance,’ she told me. ‘I used to be very good at it.’ Mollison was a particular friend with whom she had a casual affair, but Dessie disliked him. He was a rough, hard-edged heavy drinker, aptly nicknamed ‘Brandy Jim’. ‘He did drink rather a lot,’ Beryl said. ‘So I started to avoid him after a while. I hardly drank then.’17
‘He was coarse, boorish and arrogant in his manner,’ Dessie said, and this is borne out in his own writing, for a bigger piece of conceit than his memoir Playboy of the Air would be hard to find. ‘Before the London–Melbourne Race,’ Dessie recalled, ‘Tom had a piece of grit in his eye. Seeing that Mollison had a neatly pressed handkerchief in his breast pocket he asked if he might borrow it. Mollison took out the handkerchief, blew his nose on it and handed it to Tom. Tom simply let it drop to the ground, he never liked him after that.’ Dessie also remembered receiving a call from a friend who managed the Grosvenor House Hotel. ‘We’ve had the most awful night here. Jim Mollison and Amy Johnson had a fearful row and he’s beaten her up. The bathroom looks like a slaughterhouse…’ There were lots of equally unpleasant anecdotes about Mollison from other sources, but he was, undoubtedly, a good pilot and a brilliant navigator.
Dessie was annoyed to come home from the theatre one night to find Mollison and Beryl in the sitting room. ‘Mollison was so drunk he could not stand up, but when I came in, Beryl told him he’d better leave. She knew how much I disliked him. Astonished I said to her, “But you can’t let him go in that condition – he can’t even walk properly!” Beryl simply shrugged and raised her eyebrows. I had a bed made up for him in Tom’s old dressing room and he spent the night there. But I was very cross with Beryl for putting me in that position.’18
Shortly after this Dessie put the house on the market. The constant daily reminders of Tom were too sharp, and the house far too big. The two women moved from St John’s Wood to a flat in Stockleigh Hall. Sometimes, as time went on, when Beryl was at one of her innumerable parties, she would call Dessie after a show and ask her to come and join them. Occasionally Dessie would go along. ‘They were always very bright and cheerful parties, and I was grateful because it made me go out and meet people.’ One night Dessie was in her dressing room when she received such a call. A voice said, ‘You don’t know me. My name is Charles Hughesdon. I am speaking for Beryl Markham. We are having supper at the Hungaria Restaurant and Beryl asks if you would care to join us after the show.’ It was the same Charles Hughesdon who had crashed in Tanganyika during the ill-fated Johannesburg race. Later, when another friend of Beryl’s came over to the table Charles asked Dessie to dance, and went on dancing far longer than politeness demanded.19
On the next evening Beryl and Dessie were having supper at the Savoy Hotel with a group of friends. Charles threatened to gatecrash the party and Dessie spent the entire evening anxiously looking over her shoulder. On the following Sunday, Charles went to lunch at Dessie’s flat. The two had already fallen headlong in love, but Beryl was hardly to know this when she came in after lunch and sat talking. After a while she got up, went over to the writing table and scribbled a note which she unobtrusively slipped to Charles before leaving them alone. After she’d gone Charles said to Dessie, ‘Nice friend you’ve got!’ and showed her the note which invited him to try to get away somehow and join Beryl that evening.20
After this incident things began to cool between the two women, especially in the spring of 1937 when Beryl could not raise enough money to pay the increasing number of bills which came flocking in. In order to keep up with the smart lifestyle and constant round of parties, dinners and suppers, she needed a good wardrobe. Milliners, shops, and dressmakers were pleased to provide clothes for her; she was good-looking, well known and wore them so well. Her vitality, deer-like grace and sense of chic ensured that they would be noticed. Dessie had introduced Beryl to her own dressmaker, the young Teddy Tinling, who was not known then for tennis clothes, and he made the two women some beautiful gowns. Likewise Dessie’s milliner produced some lovely hats for Beryl – tiny frivolous affairs which Beryl wore at a cheeky angle over her forehead. But when the bills were presented Beryl couldn’t pay them. In the end, she simply replied that she was going to declare herself a bankrupt. Dessie was mortified because so many of the creditors had taken Beryl as a client on her introduction. She made it clear how she felt and Beryl moved out of the flat.21
No formal bankruptcy claim was ever filed, and Beryl settled with her creditors out of court for five shillings in the pound. This was backed up with a promise to repay the balance when she was able but it remains open to doubt whether Beryl ever seriously intended to honour this offer, for she had a preposterously irresponsible attitude to money. She was almost certain of getting sponsorship for ‘The Big Race’, she told her creditors, which would enable her to pay them off; she had already been offered an aeroplane, a Northrop Delta IC, registration G-AEXR.
This big race had already been announced in the press: a transatlantic race from New York to Paris. The prize money, put up by the French government to mark the tenth anniversary of Lindbergh’s solo night, included £30,000 to the winner, but with additional prizes for fastest time over various legs of the course, the winner might expect to collect anything up to £50,000. Initially there was to be a mass start, but the rules were changed after protests regarding safety, so that contestants could choose any day in August to make the flight. The winner would be the pilot with the fastest time. Contestants could fly solo or with a crew.
It was too good an opportunity to miss, and every pilot of note was looking for sponsorship. Early British entries included Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson, and Beryl. Howard Hughes, Roscoe Turner and Amelia Earhart entered from the USA, whilst Mussolini’s son, Bruno, was a member of the Italian team. ‘Every country with an air force is determined to win for the prestige value,’ the Daily Express announced.22
Initially Beryl had an unlikely partner in her bid for sponsorship. This was Jack Doyle, a handsome boxer who had recently broken into show business, having appeared in a film and made several cabaret appearances as a singer. Doyle fell for Beryl and for a few weeks the pair were inseparable. Beryl even gave him a few flying lessons. ‘I hope he was a better lover than he was a singer,’ a friend of Beryl’s said caustically. Doyle’s manager was convinced that he could get sponsorship for the pair in the big race, but it all came to nothing. The relationship swiftly ended and Doyle went out of Beryl’s life as quickly as he had entered it.
Beryl rented a flat at a smart address off Wigmore Street, and continued living life very much as she always had. She was always beautifully dressed and always in the middle of anything that was going on, yet with her quiet, casual manner she often se
emed to be standing back, assessing it, rather than joining in. An acquaintance who recalls her in those days said that there was a sort of bright, pearly luminescence about her. She nearly always wore white, and with her clear healthy skin, fair colouring, blue eyes and blonde hair she stood out, even in a crowd – almost as if she glowed. ‘Your eyes were somehow drawn to her. There was a calmness about her, and when you spoke to her she looked you in the eye and listened, as if what you said was the most important thing in the world.’
She saw very little of Gervase. This may have been by private agreement between Beryl and Mansfield. Dessie could not remember Beryl ever visiting her son during the time Beryl lived with her.
The race was due to take place in August, but in late April the Americans requested a postponement, claiming that there was too little time to get machines ready for such a potentially dangerous project. Beryl had already entered in a French aeroplane because she had been unable to get an English sponsor. Eventually, after much argument and dire warnings that the scheme was suicidal, the transatlantic race was called off. A race went ahead but the course was changed to a 4000-mile circuit which started from Marseilles and took contestants down the Mediterranean, over Italy and Greece to Damascus, returning directly over Europe to Paris. The prizes too were changed so that the top prize was £15,000. With these changes the race became almost a military affair between the European nations, each anxious to display aerial superiority. In the event the Italians, who had entered six aeroplanes, took first, second and third places. After the race Mussolini is said to have stormed at the winning pilot for not allowing his son Bruno’s plane (which came in third), to cross the line first.23
The changes to the race left Beryl out on a limb. Her French backer, a friend of Dupré’s, withdrew his support, for with the ocean flight abandoned, he was now able to find a French pilot. Beryl managed to get a wealthy South African syndicate, including I. W. Schlesinger,24 to back a new entry, but they too eventually lost interest in the French race. However, they put a new proposition to Beryl and in June she sailed to New York with a mission to find an American machine, capable of at least 200 mph. It was thought, though never confirmed, that her intention was a round-the-world flight. If so, she had left her attempt too late, for at the time of Beryl’s arrival in the States, Amelia Earhart had already set off with Captain Fred Noonan to encircle the globe at the equator. It was her second crack at the record; an earlier attempt in March had failed at Honolulu when the Lockheed Electra plane crashed on the runway and was damaged.
After flying across the country to California with Frank Hawks (the man who introduced Amelia Earhart to flying), Beryl stayed in Los Angeles. Here, she was generally expected to take part in the Bendix Air Races, but she made it known that she intended to wait until Amelia returned from her global flight in order to meet her.25
Sadly, in early July, the world learned that Earhart and Noonan were lost in the Pacific Ocean between British New Guinea and Howland Island. Amelia had always known that the leg from Lae in New Guinea was the most difficult of the flight. Howland was flat and only two miles long by half a mile wide, and therefore difficult to find, unless navigation was totally accurate. The Electra would be out of radio range for most of the flight and she would have no way of checking her position for 1800 miles. By the time the couple left Lae on 2 July they had flown 22,000 miles and made twenty-two landings. Now as they journeyed eastward their remaining ports of call were Howland, Honolulu and home by Independence Day – 4 July. Their last message was relayed by Amelia. She was clearly disturbed at having been unable to make a previously arranged radio contact with a US naval ship and her voice was uncharacteristically anxious as she said: ‘We are on a line of position 157 dash 337. Will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.’ They were never heard from again.26
In an unlikely manner, Beryl found herself in the middle of the press hysteria surrounding Amelia’s disappearance, for when the news came through she was staying at the home of Jacqueline Cochran, another blonde aviatrix who broke numerous records. Much later, in May 1953, Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier in a North American F-86 Sabre jet.27
Like Beryl, Jackie Cochran had had an unconventional childhood. The adopted daughter of a poor family, she had been dressed in sacking and left to run wild and barefoot around the Southern saw-mill towns, without any education, while her adoptive parents searched endlessly for work. Like Beryl she had the reputation for single-minded determination to achieve: ‘When Jackie Cochran put her mind to do something she was a damned Sherman tank at full speed,’ said a friend. When she grew up she went to work in the beauty business. She worked hard, earned a lot of money and learned to fly. Eventually, having already achieved great wealth by her own efforts, she married a wealthy friend and despite a series of hazardous, largely unsuccessful early record attempts, she eventually became one of the most respected women pilots in the United States.28
At the time Beryl visited her, Jackie and her husband lived in sybaritic luxury on a thousand-acre ranch with an olympic-sized swimming pool, private golf course, stables of thoroughbred horses and an army of servants. In addition to the other facets of her overwhelming personality Jacqueline Cochran claimed to possess extrasensory powers. There was some evidence for this, well known among their friends, who knew that Jackie was often able to tell them precisely what her husband Floyd was doing at a given time, even though he may have been hundreds of miles away.29
After Amelia disappeared an immense search for her by the US Navy, authorized personally by President Roosevelt, was instigated. Jackie was simultaneously contacted by George Putnam (Amelia’s publisher husband) in a desperate hope that her clairvoyant powers could assist the search for her missing friend. The press clustered around Coachella Ranch like flies around a honey pot while its chatelaine willingly provided what help she could.
The aircraft had come down in the water and was still afloat, she said. Both Amelia and Fred Noonan were still alive, though Fred had suffered a fractured skull and had been unconscious since the accident. She mentioned the US Coastguard cutter Itasca and a Japanese fishing boat, both of which were in the search area. She even provided a precise position for the wreck, though the navy were not able to find anything when they eventually reached the spot. For two days Jacqueline claimed to ‘know’ that Amelia was alive, and gave details of the aeroplane’s drift on the water. Then she sensed her friend was dead.30 Since the aeroplane was never traced these claims could not be proved, but Jackie was so shaken by the experience that she never again publicly used her clairvoyant ability.
One person who would not have been surprised by this performance was Beryl. She was in the habit of consulting clairvoyants from time to time, having absorbed the African’s belief in magic during her upbringing. When the reporters, who only gradually drifted away from the ranch, realized that Beryl was a guest, she too was interviewed. She told them that she was very distressed at the news, but more determined than ever to continue her own aviation career. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet Amelia Earhart,’ she said, ‘this time I’d hoped to see her in Los Angeles on her return. Miss Earhart’s loss is all aviation’s.’ Asked what she would have done, had she been in Amelia’s position in the South Seas, she replied, ‘I’d have probably tried to land in the water with the wheels folded into the wings. The plane would stand more chance that way than on a jagged reef. Then I’d have taken to my emergency lifeboat.’31
Beryl remained in the United States for five months. She made many friends and travelled extensively in the west. Because the motion picture offer from Columbia was still open, she inevitably visited the studios and as a result she made contact with people who were part of the movie scene. She was often taken to the sets of films and on one occasion she was taken by the prominent screenwriter Anita Loos32 to the set of the movie Conquest, where she was introduced to the star Greta Garbo who was playing Marie Waleska to Charles Boyer’s Napoleon.
At the time, Garbo was just about to enter upon her much-publicized love affair with Leopold Stokowski, the brilliant and flamboyant conductor who was later to become a great friend of Beryl’s. Anita Loos, author of the best-selling Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, seems to have been a busy hostess, for she introduced Garbo to Stokowski at a dinner party and claimed that ‘Stokie’ had decided in advance of their meeting that he was going to have an affair with Garbo. According to other guests at the dinner, Stokowski turned on such mesmerizing charm that Garbo was hypnotized by the man with the hawk-like face.33
At first the gossip columns merely noted that the pair were often seen together; however they discounted a romance since it was known that Stokowski motored a hundred miles north every Friday evening to spend the weekend with his wife and children at their Santa Barbara home. All through that autumn the press continued to hound the pair, who both shunned publicity. It was not until the following spring that the real storm broke when they spent a holiday together in Europe. Later Beryl, who was very much a part of the circle of people in which they moved, was to say of Garbo that the star’s avoidance of publicity was no pose. ‘She is a very timid person who sincerely shrinks from meeting crowds of strange people.’34
Beryl spent some time looking at the powerful new aeroplane engines developed by Al Menasco Incorporated for the Ryan Aircraft Company specifically for air-racing. She even discussed the possibility of purchasing a Ryan STA, but the matter was left in abeyance pending a meeting with her backers. Undoubtedly her main reason for making the trip to California was to take up the offer from Columbia to make a motion picture of her transatlantic flight, with Beryl in the starring role. But within weeks of her departure from California Beryl told a woman reporter that ‘the bargain with Columbia had been declared off’.35 For a while she let it be thought that the studios had lost interest in the story because so much time had elapsed since the time of her flight that public interest had waned. But much later she told friends the real reason. She had not photographed well in the screen tests.36 She was bitterly disappointed. In December she sailed for Africa.
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