The Mansions of Limbo (18 page)

T
here are people in fashionable society who, throughout their lives, carry with them the burden of their scandals, as ineradicable from their personality as a tattoo on their forearm. Ann Woodward, the beautiful widow of the handsome and very rich William Woodward, never again after her husband’s death walked into a drawing room, or anywhere else, without someone whispering, “She’s the woman
who shot and killed her husband.” Perhaps it was by accident, as she claimed. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter. It was what people said about her, and she knew they said it. The same is true of Claus von Bülow, the husband of the beautiful and very rich Sunny von Bülow. Even acquitted, as he was, he will never enter a room, or a restaurant, or a theater, without someone whispering, “He’s the man who was accused of trying to kill his wife.”

Another such person, forever notorious, was the beautiful Enid Kenmare, or Lady Kenmare, or, to be perfectly correct, the Countess of Kenmare, a mythic figure of the French Riviera and chatelaine of a great house, the villa La Fiorentina, who lost four husbands, all by death. W. Somerset Maugham, at a lunch party on the Côte d’Azur shortly after he moved permanently to the Riviera, said, “Apparently there is a lady who lives on Cap Ferrat who has killed all her husbands.” Unknown to him, the lady about whom he was speaking, Enid Kenmare, was at the lunch party and heard the remark. She took no offense, and in time she and Maugham became the greatest of friends and played bridge together constantly; she even hid his Impressionist-art collection from the Nazis for him. But people came to say about her, wherever she went, “She’s the lady who killed all her husbands,” a legend that persisted for thirty years, into her old age, and that still is repeated eighteen years after her death.

The beauty of the much-married and much-widowed Enid Kenmare was so renowned in the years before and after the Second World War that it was said people stood on chairs in the lobby of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo to catch a glimpse of her as she passed through. She was reported to be fabulously rich, owing to the various inheritances from her deceased husbands, who included an American millionaire, Roderick Cameron, and three English
aristocrats: Brigadier General Frederick Cavendish, Viscount Furness, and the Earl of Kenmare. She was also a constant and successful gambler, who frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo and Beaulieu nightly, playing mostly trente-et-quarante. Her friends of that period claim that people would drop their cards or chips to look at her when she swept past the entrance without bothering to show the required passport, so well known was she. There were always great stacks of chips in front of her, and she never showed any emotion, whether she lost or won. According to one popular story, she purchased her magnificent estate at Cap Ferrat with her winnings from a single big gambling night at the casino, but, like every story about her, it may or may not be true. “Enid became such a character that people began to invent stories about her, and she told stories about herself that contributed to that sort of talk,” Anthony Pawson, a septuagenarian bon vivant, told me in London shortly before his death in December. “Enid was a mythomaniac,” said an old bridge partner of Lady Kenmare’s on the Riviera. “She’d invent stories, and that could be dangerous. You don’t know why those people lie, but they do.”

“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 aristocrat 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.”