Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (16 page)

And so, because of this, all the time I was on the other side trying to keep things going and trying to combat Eddie. It was more difficult at that time, also because Eddie and I were divided. He was happy that he had enough money to live the life he was living, and he did not have the same interest in fighting. Because I ran out of money I had to accept with gall, watching the film still being sold and knowing that we had not been paid.

I even got personally let down by Terence Young. I went to a number one hotel and when it was time to leave I said to the checkout, ‘I will leave my account for Terence Young to pay.’ So I left the bill. They tried to reach Terence in Rome but they couldn’t reach him, so when I got to the airport I was arrested for non-payment of the hotel bill. Eddie had told Terence that he didn’t have to pay the bill.

A year later, in 1967, Eddie got ill. He had worn himself out, Mariella had left him, and so I went to Rome and packed up all his belongings and brought him back to Shenley.

9

S
HENLEY

I
n 1959 Eddie had moved with the antique dealer’s girlfriend to Shenley Lodge, a large country house just north of London which, at the time, was a guest house and for sale. He took it on a lease and invited his friends. He also invited Betty, although he took care to see that the girlfriend had temporarily moved out. Betty could see the potential in the place, but it needed substantial improvement. Eddie was too generous and attracted many hangers on. The local constabulary started to take interest in some of the guests who descended on the club – a great many of whom were Eddie’s underworld cronies. Eventually the money ran out and Eddie left for the Continent with yet another mistress. Betty took over what remained of the lease and started to make plans. Against considerable odds, she managed to borrow the money to start refurbishment. Naturally she had to do all the financial dealings. She suffered several setbacks, one of which was to be arrested shortly after Eddie’s departure and taken to the local magistrate’s court for non-payment of rates (property tax), which Eddie had neglected to pay. Eventually, to rid herself of the undesirables who had been attracted to the place, she gave up the drinks licence.

Betty remembers the time:

We got a licence to sell drinks, which was a disaster really because all of Eddie’s friends came in and drank the profits. They took the licence away from Eddie in 1960, so I had to take over Shenley in order to get the licence back. We turned it into a country club, a place where people could come and stay and eat and drink all night. If you came in just as a member you could only drink until about 11 p.m.

Eventually, after a lot of research and hard work, and with Eddie coming and going, we turned it into a health farm. My journey of discovery into the health farm world took me to France, Germany, Switzerland and America. I was acquainted with the beauty side of the business from my early years in Belgravia. But such treatments as hydrotherapy and the latest methods of exercise and therapies I was not familiar with, and slimming had become big business. We used to have special diets, physical training, plunge pools, saunas, massage and many kinds of treatment. It took a number of us a good couple of years to get it all set up.

Lilian Verner-Bonds described the completed Shenley Lodge as ‘an enchanting place, not like a traditional health farm. Eddie had a habit of making each and every one feel special. He and Betty were the perfect double-act.’
¹

Because she was new to slimming, Betty asked for and got some good advice. She was told that the best kind of advert is to get a very big woman who looks shabby, photograph her, put her through her paces to lose weight, and then go and buy a very nice dress and have the photograph done again. She was told that if she did that, she had to certify that it was true. She had to get a lawyer in, and do what she said she was going to do. Today, such a procedure would be obvious. Then, it was revolutionary.

Betty remembers:

We had some pretty well-known characters there. We had a good connection with nearby Elstree Film Studios, and the people filming there would come and stay with us.
²
We made quite a big gymnasium open to the public and Roger Moore (better known later for his portrayal of James Bond) used to come and work out there during the filming of
The Saint
. Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee stayed during the filming of
The Avengers
, Patrick Wymark during
The Power Game
.
³
Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard and Elspeth March are amongst other names that stayed there. Whilst we were at Shenley it was used as a location for the film
A Clockwork Orange
and the TV show
Inspector Morse
. There were also a lot of sportsmen staying with us at Shenley. The boxer John Conteh did most of his training there.
⁴

When Arab families came to Shenley there were two separate areas, one for men and one for women and they were completely segregated. This makes one of Betty’s stories more remarkable:

The young Prince Ali Althani of Qatar was a regular visitor to Shenley. On one of his visits, the daughters of a well-known cartoonist with
El Ahram
newspaper in Egypt, Amina, who was 16, and Magda who was 17, were staying with us. We heard loud giggles coming from his room, and we realised what was going on. Ali had the girls in his room showing them a pornographic film. What was so amazing was that Ali told us he was showing the girls a film of his country!

Once Ali left for a trip with Olga’s son Alex in his car. Olga was Eddie’s younger sister. She was a great character and a real survivor. She worked at the health farm on the reception desk for years. She was a real optimist and always managed to make the best of any situation. While speeding along a main highway, Ali and Alex trailed a clothing store mannequin’s limbs out of the car window. I have no idea where they got it. A police car spotted it, and thought it was a real body. They were both arrested after police found a gun on the window ledge. I was summoned to the local police station, where I pleaded for the young sheik. I had to make a lengthy statement some days later, explaining away his high spirits. I managed to finally convince the police of his innocence of any law-breaking intentions. He was indeed a handful, but I truly missed him when he died at the age of around 20, having spent many years with us. In fact, his mother used to say, ‘Go home to your English mother,’ when he was really out of hand in Qatar. When he had visitors at Shenley he always introduced me, with a twinkle in his eye, as his mother – often to raised eyebrows. We were very close.

Lila, one of our favourites, was another young Arab client at Shenley who was a long-stay patient sent by her parents to lose weight. Her father had left gift boxes of chocolates for the staff. One day we found her on the flat part of the roof, flinging the empty boxes over the side, having (of course) consumed all the chocolate.

The royal families of Iran, Jordan and Qatar enjoyed happy times there and kept in contact with me long after. We were noted for our care of young Middle Eastern people, who mainly came to England for serious operations. One family whose son was in Britain for major surgery came prepared to stay for several months – after a week they left happy in the knowledge he would now be safe and happy with us. We visited him regularly in his London hospital, comforting him when he was sad. He made a spectacular recovery. One Libyan general’s wife stayed with us for a year after an appendectomy.

The heiress Henrietta Guinness spent a lot of time with Betty and Eddie at Shenley.
⁵
Betty was very sympathetic to Henrietta:

I think she was terribly mixed up and desperate for affection. She spent the last Christmas with us before she died. She said that it was the happiest Christmas that she had ever spent because we put things on the tree for her. I remember giving her some knickers and tights and she took everything off and put them on, and thought that it was absolutely fabulous that she was treated like a normal person. She came back and forwards to Shenley like a homing pigeon. She left to visit the man she had a child with in the Middle East somewhere. She became pregnant by this man, whose mother was a chamber maid in a hotel. One day she was very depressed and jumped 250ft from a bridge and killed herself. That was a shattering blow to me – when you know someone for a long time and something like that happens, it’s just devastating.

Captain Dusty Rhoads, from the American Air Force came to stay with us whilst his plane was being serviced at the de Havilland aviation facility in Hatfield – the place that Eddie was supposed to have blown up during the war! He had such a wonderful time at Shenley that he said he wanted to be buried there! We had a lovely lunch, which I can still picture today. We were all giggling and really enjoying ourselves. Then he had to go to pick up the plane again, and collect an Arab king’s wife who had been holidaying in the Pyrenees. After he picked them up with all their jewels and clothing, the plane crashed and they all lost their lives. That was one of the hardest days for me.

That wasn’t the only hard day for Betty, not by a million miles. By the time the refurbishment was completed, Eddie had met Mariella Novotny. Betty recounts: ‘She used to sneak in to stay with him whilst I was in London. I knew about it since the staff kept me informed; Eddie’s sister was our receptionist. Eddie always denied the affair. But he went to Rome on a short trip with her, and ended up staying a while.’ Years, in fact.

Mariella was up to her neck in the national scandal of the day, the Profumo Affair.
⁶
A Marilyn Monroe lookalike, she became a striptease dancer, supposedly to support her widowed mother. Novotny also worked as a prostitute in London. Another major participant in the Profumo Affair, Christine Keeler, reported that, ‘She was a siren, a sexual athlete of Olympian proportions – she could do it all. I know. I saw her in action.’
⁷
In 1960 she married Horace Dibben, a wealthy antiques dealer and nightclub owner thirty-six years her senior. Her engagement ring was an antique 200-year-old diamond and sapphire confection. Novotny travelled to the United States in 1961, and was arrested by the FBI and charged with soliciting for prostitution. She was also of interest to the FBI in no small part because she came under investigation for having claimed to have slept with President Kennedy. Within a few weeks she had slipped out of the country using a false name and returned to Britain, where she once again took up running sex parties in London, along with her husband.

There is no suggestion that Eddie ever attended one of these parties. It is likely that he met Mariella through his osteopath, Stephen Ward, another major figure in the Profumo Affair. Ward had been Eddie’s osteopath for some time, giving him treatment for the back injuries he had suffered during his last parachute drop into England on behalf of the Germans. Eddie had been shoved out of the plane and became entangled in his parachute, and landed very badly on his back on a concrete path. He and Stephen Ward used to go drinking together: they often went to a famous pub called The Star. Ward travelled in society circles, and was a key player in introducing various girls such as Novotny and Keeler to high-up political figures like Profumo. Betty remembers Ward well: ‘Stephen had a cat and he gave us this damned cat as a present, and it used to poop in the bath. I remember Eddie and I had a terrible row about it.’ This is the cat that Betty gave away after tossing Eddie’s clothes out of the window (as recounted in Chapter 3). In the end, Stephen Ward was prosecuted for living on the immoral earnings of prostitution; he committed suicide in August 1963. Betty says: ‘It was a terrible shock when Stephen committed suicide – I’m sure he was driven to it.’

During the time in the 1960s when Eddie and Betty were living apart, she was kept very busy with Shenley, so her life was very full. Eddie spent much of that time in Rome with Mariella, and also living in a house in Hyde Park Square with both Mariella and her husband. Betty was still financing a certain part of his lifestyle, although he did have some funds from selling the rights to the film
Triple Cross
, which was what he was living off in Rome, as well as his fees for television appearances. When asked if she wondered whether or not Eddie would ever come back, Betty replied:

I did miss him but he was that kind of person. I knew that when we married. We had a good physical relationship but many women were also attracted to him. I always knew he would come back and he always did […] Her [Mariella’s] mother even used to ring me up, wondering what to do. She said: ‘She’s got a whole trunk of whips in the basement. What do I do?’ I said, ‘Get rid of it.’ Her mother Connie was a truly sweet lady, who felt sorry for me being deserted for her daughter. She kept me up to date with news of her and my husband’s whereabouts. She walked miles to telephone boxes to speak to me secretly.

To Betty’s disgust, Eddie brought Mariella to the grand reopening of Shenley Lodge as a health farm. She even sat on the front desk at Shenley posing for photographs. In fact, he had
two
mistresses there. Betty recounts: