by Mike Walsh
What do they see when they look through the TV screen into his eyes? The eyes appear at first to be dark brown. But there are moments when they change. A transformation takes place when he is annoyed or angry. As if by some alchemy, he seems to be able to alter the pigment in his irises, which turn from brown to black. It is truly remarkable to watch as his eyes take on an impenetrable, coal-black stare. They become opaque and no light permeates them. He has only done this trick once on television, on World in Action in 1988. So those who fall for him could be excused for not realising just what lurks within.
During these moments of tension the mouth hardens into a vulpine V. The line from the thin bottom lip to the tip of the jaw lengthens, and the rock-black eyes swivel towards you to capture your returning gaze. They turn to darkest stone and leave you disconcertingly shut out of any of that human response we all expect. In this state he can – and has – ranted and raved, threatened and turned to violence. This is what Tanaka Sali saw, and it made her shudder. There is more than just a touch of Heathcliff about him.
No psychologist or psychiatrist is needed to tell you that you are faced with an uncanny act. The names that should be put upon such behaviour are those both of pop psychology and old religious superstition. Is he a psychopath? A sociopath? A cold-hearted shit? An agent of the devil? Possessed? An actor, for God’s sake? For those who have seen him change, obliterate one self for another in the time the rest of us might smooth a strand of wayward hair, there is little option but to wonder if what medical science calls a psychopath and the religious call evil could be applied to the personality of Nicholas van Hoogstraten.
So this is the complex and dangerous man that so many women find attractive.
His first girlfriend was called Yolande. She was a childhood crush. He went with her from when he was eleven until he left school and joined his father on his cruise liner. When he returned from the sea, he lost his virginity. He was seventeen. He has not said who the girl was.
In his youth, he was as obsessed by his looks as any other teenager. His membership of the Mods, that style-obsessed cult of the early sixties, allowed him to wear foppish clothes. Always the individualist, he was not so keen on the anoraks and scooters much liked by other Mods along the English south coast. He wore brocade and silk and ruffled shirts.
It was an androgynous age and his apparent sexual ambiguity would not have put off the chicks. But the skinny white girls hanging around the pop and fashion scene of Brighton in the sixties in their mini-skirts still lacked something for the young Van Hoogstraten’s taste. They were just not as sexy as he had hoped. He was an intense young man. These girls were frivolous. Sex, like everything else, was a serious business for the tyro. It was not until he was living in exile in Liechtenstein in the mid-seventies that he discovered his true desire for women.
The moment came on a train from Zurich to Paris. He spotted a beautiful black African girl. Right away he knew that this was it. He was immediately attracted to her. This girl was his first black conquest. The experience did not disappoint.
‘What do I see in black women?’ he has exclaimed. ‘Sex appeal!’ The fuller, more pronounced African figure, allied to a less inhibited manner, appealed in a way the Twiggy lookalikes of England had not. They did not twitter and simper and behave in so girly a fashion. To this young man they had more, well, more bottom. In their flush of youth, they seemed to him already more complete, more earthy in a D.H. Lawrence kind of way. Just recast the tale of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and here was his lordship and these forces of nature, so avid, uncomplicated, up for it.
Where the girl on the train first went, many others were to follow. From then on Van Hoogstraten was always to have a good-looking black girl as a companion. He says he did have one white girlfriend, with whom he had a relationship lasting several years in the seventies, but all the rest have been black. Some of them were to fall for him, some were just passing in the night. Those who did fall in love were to find to their cost that he loved only one person, and it wasn’t the one inside their black skin – it was the person inside his own.
Perhaps the cost of broken relationships has not always been carried by the women. Those who know Van Hoogstraten recall one young woman who might, just might, have been the one to make a different man of the ruthless young millionaire. Her name was Myrtle and she was from the Caribbean island of St Lucia.
Myrtle was not only very beautiful, she was also a kind, intelligent young woman. ‘Beautiful outside, beautiful inside,’ as Tony Browne put it. The tycoon’s architect was introduced to Myrtle in 1988 by Van Hoogstraten. The two men and another friend had flown to St Lucia to celebrate after Van Hoogstraten had won his court case against Westminster City Council. Myrtle had met Van Hoogstraten some ten years before. It was obvious, says Browne, that she was still in love with him. If he had stuck with her, who knows what he might have become.
But it was too much for Van Hoogstraten. He could never have been expected to commit himself to one woman, even one like Myrtle. Her goodness and kindness would have disturbed, even frightened him. How would he have been supposed to respond? Would she have put up with him the way that he was? Would he have been expected to change, to alter his ways? It would have been like asking a lion to become a vegetarian. Myrtle finally gave up waiting for her charming, wayward lover and married a German dentist.
At the time of the visit to St Lucia, Van Hoogstraten had another girl on the go. She was a remarkable young woman from Ethiopia. Her name was Zaki, and she was five foot six and very attractive. When only thirteen or fourteen she had escaped from drought and starvation with her little brother. Together they walked hundreds of miles out of Ethiopia into Kenya. From there she made it to Europe and finally to the south of England, where she met Van Hoogstraten.
The school of hard knocks was to take its toll and Zaki suffered from depression. She lost her looks, went to seed and her hair fell out. Van Hoogstraten took pity on her. She still lives in a flat on the High Cross estate, where she has security and has become a member of the odd family on the ‘funny farm’, that gathering of retainers, acquaintances, old friends and hangers-on who make up the court of King Nick. A friend once saw Zaki standing in the middle of a road near the estate, holding a doll, looking lost.
Van Hoogstraten became a father for the first time around 1983, with the birth of a son, Rhett Maximillion. The Maximillion was his father’s little joke – maxi-million. Hardly surprisingly, the boy’s mother prefers Rhett, a romantic name familiar to anyone who has read Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel of the American Civil War, or seen the film staring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.
Van Hoogstraten doted on the boy. In the late eighties he told the authors with pride how he had taught five-year-old Max – as he then called him – to flip over the edge of a silk rug with the toe of his shoe in order to count the number of knots per square inch and so judge its quality.
Rhett’s mother is Rosemary Prouse, an English girl with a white father and a black mother. Her father lived in a good Van Hoogstraten flat in Hove. Rosemary herself used to hang out in the eighties with another one of Van Hoogstraten’s tenants, Caroline Williams. The millionaire landlord was often chatty to his tenants and, as long as they were not complainers, he would be quite friendly towards them. He was very friendly to Caroline and they had been lovers since the seventies.
When Van Hoogstraten met Rosemary, she was a party girl – lots of lipstick, and clothes that showed off her excellent figure. She knew what she wanted and Van Hoogstraten took a shine to her. They had a second child, Eugenie, several years later, after Van Hoogstraten had fathered two other children by another woman. That other woman just happened to be Caroline Williams.
Rosemary was hurt by the renewed attention received by Caroline. What also rankled in later years was the way that Van Hoogstraten at first ignored their daughter and always favoured his son, taking him out for rides in his Rolls-Royce. But
in time he began to take an interest in Eugenie, and father and daughter formed a good relationship.
However, it is hard not to see in the father’s initial dismissal of his daughter something of the man’s view of women in general. For Van Hoogstraten, women are inferior to men. Among the pictures in his collection is a Victorian watercolour of an African slave girl. The girl, probably in her early teens, is depicted bare-breasted, staring unabashed directly at the viewer. Van Hoogstraten is especially fond of the picture.
Van Hoogstraten moved from collecting stamps and coins to furniture and women. He expends considerable time and effort in wooing women, though once he has won them, proven to himself that his charisma remains uncracked, and paraded his latest conquest for a while, he can lose interest. The object of his attentions is left wondering what mistake she made to be no longer in favour. The answer seems more usually to lie with him rather than with her. He is not the first powerful man to behave like this.
He says that his private life is ‘very boring’ as he has always had a string of monogamous relationships with different women. But he has a habit of not quite severing links with some of his past lovers – or maybe they just won’t let him go. Either way, things are more interesting and the girls – past or present – are kept on their toes. The artist Pablo Picasso liked his sexual arrangements complicated. It was more fun that way. Similarly, there is always a buzz of sexual tension around the Sussex tycoon.
Van Hoogstraten chooses not to live with any of his women, saying that to do so would be to lose his independence. They would always want to know where he was. His life would not be his own. He calls his women his bitches, his property. He may feel he owns them – and he certainly can be good to them – but he does not always like paying for his responsibilities.
Rosemary decided Van Hoogstraten was not pulling his financial weight towards their children. She took him to the Family Division court, claiming £2 million in maintenance for the children. He was furious. He settled before the court hearing, reputedly for £1 million.
According to Van Hoogstraten, the relationship with Rosemary ended ‘when she clicked that I thought more of Rhett than of her’. He says the same has happened with the other women by whom he has had children. Amazingly, he and Rosemary have since settled their differences. She now lives in a small but pleasant mews house that he has renovated for her. Generosity with Van Hoogstraten sometimes only requires a little persuasion.
The woman Van Hoogstraten was seeing while he was continuing his relationship with Rosemary Prouse is perhaps the most interesting of all his women. Caroline Williams is a handsome Nigerian with a degree in philosophy. She is shrewd, worldly and intelligent.
For many years Caroline has handled a great many of Van Hoogstraten’s affairs. She is a director of several of his companies and keeps an office at the Courtlands Hotel. They met in the seventies when Van Hoogstraten came round to her flat to collect the rent. Caroline remembers her first impression of the young landlord, dressed ostentatiously in a full-length fur coat.
‘I thought, who the fuck does he think he is?’ she said on a BBC documentary many years later. She was filmed in the Courtlands Hotel, standing beside Van Hoogstraten, who was seated at a table, looking slightly embarrassed.
‘Why did you split up?’ the reporter asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ Caroline replied. Then she looked at Van Hoogstraten. ‘Why did we split up?’ she asked.
Van Hoogstraten appeared even more uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Caroline was clearly still mad about him.
When they first met, Caroline was young and pretty, with good legs which she showed off to their best advantage with short skirts and thigh-high leather boots.
She and Van Hoogstraten have two children, both boys. The younger child, now about eleven, is called Louis, after Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose masterpiece was the Palace of Versailles. The older one is named Seti, after the ancient Egyptian king remembered for his work on the great colonnaded hall at Karnak begun by his father, Rameses I, and his astonishing galleried tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It is worth remembering that Seti was also a keen gold miner.
Those who know how Van Hoogstraten runs his business affairs see Caroline as the person who can be trusted always to do what is best for him. During his murder trial at the Old Bailey in 2002, she showed her solidarity by sitting in the public gallery on many occasions throughout the long proceedings. She was always beautifully turned out, wearing expensive clothes and much gold jewellery.
There have been many other women, including one called Jennifer, a beautiful, petite woman with an hour-glass figure, who also showed her support at the court. And recently there has been the fiery teenager Tanaka Sali, who dared to defy him.
Tanaka arrived in Britain from Zimbabwe at the end of 2000, her airfare paid by Van Hoogstraten. She was sixteen or seventeen and the experience blew her mind. She had been a frequent guest at the millionaire’s Zimbabwean estates, but her new life with a room in the Courtlands Hotel was her real introduction to a life of luxury and ease. She was still a student and continued at college in Brighton, studying for her GCSEs. But at night the student turned into a millionaire’s mistress.
Tanaka was not the first woman with whom Van Hoogstraten had a stormy relationship. He met Agnes Gnoumou, yet another African beauty, in the flat of one of his tenants on the French Riviera. Agnes was born in the Ivory Coast in 1965. She was bright but left school when she was twelve. At the age of seventeen she met a French architect and moved to Paris.
When Van Hoogstraten met her she was living in a tiny flat in Cannes, having fled there in 1990 when her relationship with the architect had foundered. She was working in a dress shop and was trying to rebuild her life. Van Hoogstraten took an instant liking to her looks. The millionaire and the young African beauty were unable to talk much as he had no French and she had only a word or two of English. But it didn’t stop Van Hoogstraten. He got one of his tenants to act as translator.
Unknown to Van Hoogstraten, the tenant tried to warn Agnes not to get involved with her attentive new suitor. Soon the beautiful young woman was wearing expensive clothes and jewellery and accompanying the dapper tycoon around the best restaurants and clubs in town. She told a reporter from the Brighton Evening Argus that she liked Van Hoogstraten because he was handsome and looked like Richard Gere, who had recently starred in Pretty Woman.
Soon the rows began. Agnes found Van Hoogstraten would fly into a rage at things she considered minor but which he saw as important, such as how one behaved while walking in public. After their disagreements he always won her round and after a while she moved into his apartment and was given a large allowance. Agnes spent time in England and took English lessons. The relationship had its ups and downs. Agnes says she received telephone calls from Caroline Williams, telling her to stop seeing Van Hoogstraten. When she found she was pregnant, Agnes had an abortion at a clinic in Richmond. Van Hoogstraten did not visit her.
Despite their stormy relationship, they finally got married. The ceremony was held in Las Vegas, a surprising choice by Van Hoogstraten, who so often complained that other people were tacky or acted like ‘peasants’. Agnes got pregnant again and this time kept the child. She had a baby boy, whom the couple named Orrie.
Regardless of the child, the relationship continued on its tempestuous course. Occasionally Van Hoogstraten gave Agnes expensive gifts. Almost immediately they would vanish, taken back and put into a vault as part of his collections. For the woman attracted to a wealthy and powerful man, it must be dispiriting to discover that she has married a miser.
According to one of his former business associates, Van Hoogstraten was afraid of Agnes. By 1998 he would not be alone with her. The child was not enough to save the marriage, and by 1999 Agnes found herself struggling to bring up her son on a small allowance from his father. The expensive clothes, jewellery and the car were all gone – taken back by her husband.
Van Hoogstraten often referred to Agnes as ‘the mad woman’. He seemed unaware of his own role in precipitating her violent behaviour. After one particularly bad row he told her that he hated all women. She became very bitter about her predicament as the discarded wife. Eventually she lost her child completely to the tycoon. Orrie, now aged seven, lives in England, where he is looked after by another one of Van Hoogstraten’s women.
Alone in her tiny flat, all Agnes has left to remind her of her child are a few photographs of a smiling, bright-eyed little boy with curly russet hair. She also has a collection of photos of herself with a good-looking man with well-groomed hair who looks a little like Richard Gere.
8
THE DEAL
To a man like Nicholas van Hoogstraten, wealth is a measure of self-worth. Anyone not motivated by money is likely to think that all individuals should be measured by what is inside them, not what they have in the bank. But to understand why men like Van Hoogstraten feel as they do, one has to understand the mystical allure of ‘the deal’.
For those with an entrepreneurial mind, the deal is a religion. Its appeal can only be understood by those initiated into the dark arts of wheeling and dealing. Before any deal can be made, there must be painstaking preparation – forming a plan, researching the strengths and weaknesses of the other side, thinking how to outmanoeuvre them, estimating the risk, the amount of money to be put up against the money to be made, the negotiations, the haggling. All of these are enjoyable, to be sure, but nothing compares with that moment of victory when the deal is clinched, the entrepreneur is sure the thing is his, that he has succeeded, has it in his grasp, and knows in his very soul that he has outwitted the opposition, beaten them, won.