The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll (10 page)

Frédéric’s subsequent description of Anna-Christine’s willfulness is particularly revealing of Alice’s petulant temperament:

Frédéric was writing from harsh personal experience. “I always get my own way.” “I take what I want and throw it away.” Such exclamations could have been taken directly from Alice’s lips. Whatever his opinion of Alice, Frédéric evidently remained fascinated by his exotic and dangerous former wife.

Nolwen and Paola were now in the legal custody of their father, who continued to do his best to protect them from their mother’s growing notoriety. The girls were living in the apartment in rue Spontini with their Portuguese nanny, the crocodile, the monkey, and the oversized lion cub, but because of the animals, the nanny was threatening to leave. Her name was Denise de Milo-Viana, and years later Paola would remember her as “horrible.” Denise told Frédéric that if he wanted her to stay, the animals had to go. Frédéric duly removed the crocodile and transported the monkey to Parfondeval, where he was placed in the care of Alice’s butler. The lion was donated to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the children’s park in the Bois de Boulogne. While Alice convalesced at Parfondeval, Aunt Tattie took Nolwen and Paola to the Riviera, where Alice briefly visited them in Nice. She spent only a short time there before returning to Normandy. Alice’s lawyers had warned Moya that Alice must convalesce and be seen to do so, as this was the special condition of the court.

Now that it was certain that both parties in the shooting had recovered, the date was set for Alice’s official indictment. Nine months after the events at the Gare du Nord, on December 23, 1927, in the twelfth chamber of the Police Correctionnelle, Alice was charged with “wounding and causing bodily harm” to Raymund de Trafford. According to the newspaper
Le Figaro,
she came to the courtroom that day “a thin little woman in a grey suit. Big, shiny, feverish eyes; high cheekbones; great charm and style,” and with “the guilty look of a naughty girl.” In a photograph of Alice taken that day, she is certainly as beautiful as ever, if extraordinarily pale, looking up at her lawyer—the well-known advocate René Mettetal—with an expression that lies somewhere between fear and defiance. She is wearing a dark cloche hat that masks almost completely her bobbed hair. There are pearls around her neck, and in her white-gloved hands she holds a black fur stole. Her dress is to the knee, revealing her legs in their elegant white stockings. In the courtroom, she had attracted a crowd.
Paris-Soir
reported that, “There were many women in the 12th Chamber where M. Fredin (the most Parisian of Judges) is presiding. All that is fair enough; is this not a beautiful love story?—one of those stories which novelists put together in moving phrases.”

The following description of the court proceedings is a composite taken from the newspaper pages of
Paris-Soir
,
Le Petit Parisien, Le Journal,
and
L’Echo de Paris
for December 24, 1927.

Alice answered the examiner with a yes or a no mostly, speaking French with an American accent. The judges had heard about the circumstances leading up to the shooting but were eager to learn more.

“You have abandoned your husband and children for Monsieur Raymund de Trafford?”

“Yes.”

“Your children?”

“It’s so hard to explain; but I only thought of myself.”

“You don’t seem to realize the serious situation in which you find yourself.”

“Oh yes.”

The examiner, Monsieur Fredin, wondered about the two of them buying the gun together.

“It was I who asked Monsieur de Trafford to accompany me to the gunsmith shop. I told him I had to run an errand for my husband.”

The judge could not stop himself from asking, “And Monsieur de Trafford believed you? In his place, in the situation in which you both found yourselves, I would not have been very comfortable at all.”

Alice smiled sadly and added, “He had no reason to doubt me. He knew I did not want him to go. I was suffering, but I was sure that he was leaving me—in spite of what he wanted, because he couldn’t do otherwise.”

The next question: “If you didn’t want him to leave, why did you buy a revolver?”

She replied, “But it was to kill me, not him.”

“But you shot Monsieur de Trafford while you were kissing him.”

“Not quite. I was holding my gun when he kissed me. I don’t know what went on in my head. I saw, like a drowning woman, all the memories of my life. I wanted to kill myself, but at the last moment in a sort of trance, I fired on him!” Alice was speaking in French:
“Alors, vraiment. Je ne sais pas ce qui c’est passé dans ma tête. J’ai vu comme une femme se noie, dénier tous les souvenirs de ma vie.”

Monsieur Fredin looked exasperated. “Then I don’t understand,” he said.

“I was unhappy. I wanted to kill myself,” Alice emphasized.

Here in the French court, in front of the jury and a packed courtroom, Alice admitted that she had often wanted to kill herself.

“Yes,” replied the judge. “There are some extenuating circumstances in your favor. Monsieur de Trafford had promised to marry you. He did not keep his word. I would also present you, elsewhere, as a gentle person, an excellent mother….”

Meanwhile, Raymund, who was not called as a witness in the trial but had insisted on appearing, was permitted to speak. He was described in the
Tribunal Gazette
as “tall, strong and speaking bad French.” He delivered his testimony rather coldly and flatly. “I am responsible,” he insisted. He hardly glanced at Alice, who, in turn, stared unblinkingly at the man she had come so close to killing.

Raymund went on to explain to the court: “I had asked Madame de Janzé to become my wife; she wanted to. But my family didn’t want her to.”

Raymund then recalled what had taken place at the gun shop.

“And what did you think?” he was asked about Alice’s purchase of the revolver.

“Nothing. I was in another part of the shop.”

His memory of the crime itself was confused.

“Madame de Janzé approached me and asked me if I really wanted to leave. I replied yes. Then I saw the revolver in her hand. I seized it at the handle. She had already fired.”

The salesman who sold the gun to Alice gave brief evidence, and so did Dr. Paul, the surgeon who had operated on both Alice and Raymund, saving their lives.

Alice’s attorneys delivered their pleas of mitigation. Monsieur Gandel was said to have pleaded “indulgently,” saying, “The accused is a sick woman for whom doctors have found extenuating circumstances. She has been an excellent wife and admirable mother, until she met the person responsible for the crime…. But one must not forget the other dignified man, who has forgotten and forgiven everything. I hope that they get back together again.” (He was referring, of course, to the count de Janzé.)

Finally, Monsieur Mettetal entered his plea on Alice’s behalf, his voice full of compassion and feeling, hinting to the tribunal that this had been a “
crime passionnel
.” It was a crime that the French understood very well: a crime committed for love. In the end, the tribunal was lenient and the judge ruled in Alice’s favor. She was ordered to serve six months but was “
condamnée avec sursis
” (given a suspended sentence), allowing her to leave the court on temporary probation. She was also ordered to pay a fine of one hundred francs (around four dollars), a pittance for a wealthy heiress like Alice and a fraction of what she would have paid under French law for shooting a deer out of season.

Alice was free to go. No sooner had she walked out of the Paris Police Correctionnelle court on December 23 than she began making plans to travel back to Kenya. In April 1929, President Gaston Doumergue fully pardoned her, but he was later criticized for having done so.

A
FTER HER RELEASE,
A
LICE INFORMED
F
RÉDÉRIC
that she was leaving Paris immediately for Africa. Again, there was no question of her daughters going with her. They would remain in Paris, in their father’s custody, as agreed to in the terms of the divorce. Alice did want to take the monkey and lion, but although Frédéric knew that she could easily arrange for Roderigo’s return from Parfondeval, he forbade her to remove Samson from the zoo. By now, the lion was almost fully grown, and besides, it was unlikely that the zookeepers would have given him up. The count appeased Alice by promising to visit Samson regularly to make sure that he was well cared for. Alice left Paris for Marseilles and sailed for Kenya, with her monkey in the hold.

She arrived in Mombasa in January 1928 and immediately caught the train to Nairobi, before motoring up to her house in Wanjohi. After surveying her empty animal cage and living quarters, she went to stay with Joss and Idina, perhaps reluctant to spend time in isolation after the ordeal of the trial. Joss was about to announce that he was marrying Mary Ramsay-Hill. Idina, meanwhile, had begun a new affair, this time with “Boy” Long, a good-looking rancher who had been invited to Kenya by Lord Delamere to manage his cattle at a place called Elementaita, in the Rift Valley. In other words, the happy dynamic formerly enjoyed by Joss, Idina, and Alice had shifted considerably. Each day, Alice went up to her house to visit her farm. Her servants had remained on during her yearlong absence, paid for by Geoffrey Buxton’s manager, and her old car was driven out of its garage and revitalized. There was much to do.

Alice’s return had coincided with the arrival of a giant plague of locusts in the region. No one had anticipated the invasion. Alice’s smallholdings of maize were devastated, along with most of the arable farmland in the area. David and Mary Leslie-Melville and Geoffrey Buxton, whose farms were both nearby, had been similarly affected. To each of these neighbors and her wider circle, Alice related the dramatic story of her yearlong absence and explained how sorry she was to have caused everyone so much embarrassment. In her time away from Kenya, Alice’s legend had grown. At the Muthaiga Club, the regulars had begun referring to her as “the fastest gun in the Gare du Nord,” a description that stuck. After her arrival, Alice’s movements were eagerly documented by the Parisian fashion and gossip magazine
Le Boulevardier,
which often included a newsletter from East Africa. The settlers were evidently a little proud of the notoriety that the glamorous countess had brought to the heady world of the white highlands. In general, Alice’s Kenyan friends were inclined to forgive her. They had always been suspicious of Raymund, never really accepting him into their circle, and may have privately suspected he had gotten what he deserved. Only two of Alice’s old allies were not so readily available. Lord Delamere, Alice’s loyal supporter after her arrival in Africa, was now preoccupied courting Lady Gwladys Markham, daughter of the Honorable Rupert Beckett. He would marry her in May 1928. Margaret Spicer, one of Alice’s closest friends in Africa, had returned to London to have a baby.

Alice was relieved to find herself welcomed back into the highlands circle for the most part. Her return was to be short-lived, however. In February 1928, less than a month after her arrival, Alice was contacted by an immigration officer and given notice that she must leave the country. Her passport was revoked and “prohibited immigrant” was written across it. She was given twenty-eight days to make arrangements for her departure. Alice was a divorcée, living alone without a new husband. As a general rule, single women were not admitted into Kenya at all. If a woman was engaged to someone living in the region, she arrived and went straight to Mombasa Cathedral to be married, before even embarking on the train to Nairobi. (Margaret Spicer went through this exact rigmarole in order to qualify for entry on her arrival in 1925.) It transpired that Alice had made a powerful enemy in Kenya during her last visit: the governor’s wife, Lady Joan Grigg. Lady Grigg, the colony’s self-appointed moral guardian, had never liked Alice, and now saw her opportunity to get rid of the countess altogether. After the incident at the Gare du Nord, it would have been easy for Lady Grigg to argue that Alice was a single, dangerous, and unstable character and should not be allowed to disturb the sanctity of other married families living in the area. Lady Grigg had her husband’s ear on this matter, and Alice had no other recourse than to obey orders. Lord Delamere was otherwise engaged, and she had no influential connections among the authorities to argue her case.

With enormous reluctance, she began to arrange for her passage and to pack her possessions. She saw her lawyers and authorized them to rent her house, in the hope that the tenants would keep the place in good order and employ her loyal servants. In the period prior to her departure, she was with Joss often, and there is plenty of evidence that she slept with him at this time, despite his new attachment to Mary. This pattern of frequent separations and intermittent sexual reunions between Joss and Alice would continue for years to come. Certainly the couple were seen together on the afternoon of February 28, 1928. On that day, Karen Blixen, the future author of
Out of Africa
—who had been living and farming in Kenya with her husband, Baron von Blixen-Finecke, since 1914—related in a letter to her mother that she had been visited by both Joss and Alice. Karen had been running errands in Nairobi when she met Joss, the newly titled Lord Erroll—he had succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father that very month—and invited him home for tea. Joss asked if he might bring along Alice.

That same afternoon, Karen Blixen received some unexpected guests: Lady Lucie McMillan, the widow of American millionaire Sir William Northrup McMillan and the McMillans’ old friend Charles Bulpett, both longtime Kenya residents. With them were two American tourists who had just arrived in Nairobi by steamer. Karen gleefully describes the ladies in her letter to her mother as “really huge and corpulent.” They had been driving around the countryside, hoping to see a lion, so they could regale their fellow passengers on the ship later on. The Americans were also eager to talk about “all the dreadfully immoral people in Kenya, Americans too unfortunately.” The “worst one of all” was Alice de Janzé, whose exploits at the Gare du Nord had made headlines in the United States. Aware that the main subject of discussion was due to arrive at any moment, Karen let her guests continue with their tirade. When the infamous Alice arrived, Karen took mischievous delight in making the requisite introductions, to the extreme embarrassment of the American visitors. Karen told her mother, “I don’t think that the Devil himself could have had a greater effect if he had walked in; it was undoubtedly better than the biggest lion, and has given them much more to talk to the fellow passengers about.”

Alice left Africa in April. Back in France, she took up residence in the apartment in rue Spontini. Hairdressers, manicurists, and masseurs were summoned to revitalize her. She visited her children, who were living with Frédéric. Along with the loss of Kenya, she had one more sadness with which to contend. Soon after she  had left France, Frédéric had decided to visit the Jardin d’Acclimatation to see Samson. On his arrival, he was told that all the cats there had been transferred to a circus. Frédéric went to the circus immediately. There he found a magnificent black-maned Masai lion half-asleep in a cage at the back of a tent. In his account of the incident in his book
Tarred with the Same Brush,
Frédéric wrote, “At last he got up and my heart stood still with horror—down his right hind quarter ran a jagged scar, Z shaped. It couldn’t be Samson, but no two lions could have that same scar!” Frédéric called out to him. The lion cocked an ear and stalked over suspiciously. Frédéric put his hand through the bars. The attendant called out, “
Vous êtes fou, monsieur, il est très dangereux!
” The lion suddenly rolled over on his side, his back against the bars. Frédéric scratched him on the forehead; the lion put out his immense red tongue and licked Frédéric’s hand, purring gently, delighted to be petted in a way that was evidently so familiar to him. It was Samson. Frédéric went to see the lion every day for a week, determined to buy him back from the circus. On his last visit, he was happily scratching Samson’s brow when a female trainer, later described by Frédéric as a “fiend in pink tights,” arrived unexpectedly. She cracked her whip at Samson, ordering him to perform a new trick. The poor lion was driven, panting and crouching, into the corner of his cage. When the trainer turned her head for a second, Samson sprang at her, landing his massive paw along the side of her skull. A revolver shot rang out, then another. Frédéric wrote:

If Frédéric had permitted Alice to take Samson back to Kenya, the lion would have survived. We do not know if Alice reproached her former husband for his decision, but it is clear that she would have been deeply affected by the death of her beloved pet, especially as it coincided with her painful exile from Kenya.

On a happier note, it was during this time that Alice resumed her friendship with Paula de Casa Maury (née Gellibrand). Paula was in the process of separating from her husband, the marquis de Casa Maury, and by the end of 1928 they had parted ways (de Casa Maury went on to marry Freda Dudley Ward, formerly mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales). Alice and Paula, as two newly single women, now had even more in common than ever. They accompanied each other on various adventures during this time; the following year, they decided on the spur of the moment to go to South America on a cargo boat with only two private cabins. Alice maintained her title of countess and, like the marquise de Casa Maury, enjoyed playing the part of the beautiful, scandalous, titled divorcée. There is no doubt that the two women attracted a great deal of male interest wherever they went. In addition, they could share their passionate interest in fashion. Alice eagerly began wearing her skirts short above the knee, and décolleté evening gowns hung from thin straps over her shoulders. Paula had become a fashion icon in Paris and was beginning to create her own clothes. “It was a desire to have an occupation in life, instead of wandering from one tea party to another,” Paula later said of her designs, adding, “I am tired of the eternal complaint that English women do not know how to wear their clothes.”

Alice was evidently inspired by Paula’s new enterprise, because it was after her return to Paris that she decided to invest in the fashion business herself, buying a substantial shareholding in the designer Jean Patou’s Paris salon. Patou had opened his salon in 1919 and was making a name for himself as a haute couture designer, creating not only gowns but also sportswear for women, bathing suits in particular. He had already expanded into the American market, having dressed film stars such as Mary Pickford and Louise Brooks. On a visit to New York in 1925, he was so impressed by the long-legged American girls he encountered there that he auditioned five hundred young women, choosing six of them to accompany him back to Paris as models (a masterful publicity stunt). In 1928, however, he was still struggling, and Alice, along with her friend Idina, decided to help bail him out. Under the two women’s sponsorship, Patou could begin to develop his new perfumes and other sidelines to help subsidize his couture line, a business model that fashion designers continue to follow to this day. Alice, Idina, and Paula would themselves wear Patou and direct their influential friends to the salon.

Despite this new business distraction, Alice was restless. Although her time in Paris enabled her to explore her interest in fashion and play a more active part in the lives of her children, her focus remained on Raymund. She was in frequent contact with him and began visiting him regularly in England. It was as if by threatening to leave her, Raymund had triggered a need in Alice to hold on to him at all costs. The shooting had been her first attempt to prevent him from leaving. Now she resolved to get him back for good. Her sense of their relationship as unfinished business continued to blind her to his considerable character flaws. It is tempting to draw comparisons between Raymund and Alice’s father. Both men were unreliable, irascible, profligate, compulsive gamblers and womanizers—which may go some way to explaining Raymund’s continuing appeal for Alice. It is possible that her inability to countenance rejection by Raymund had its roots in her adolescence. One thinks of how Alice was forcibly removed from her father’s care as a teenager, and wonders if she was revisiting and trying to rectify this trauma in her relationship with Raymund.

In June 1927, less than three months after the shooting at the Gare du Nord, Alice and Frédéric had been granted a divorce. The marriage was officially annulled by Pope Pius XI in August 1928. There was no longer anything to prevent a legal Catholic union with Raymund. What’s more, if she could persuade Raymund to become her husband, she would be permitted to return to Kenya without delay, a high priority for Alice. But first, she needed the de Trafford family’s blessing. In London, Alice called on Raymund’s brother Rudolph at his house in Westminster. Rudolph’s son, Dermot de Trafford, the future sixth baronet, recalled a visit from Alice during this period. Dermot’s room and nursery were at the top of the house. Alice climbed all the stairs and warmly greeted him, explaining to his French governess that she was a friend of the family. Dermot remembered that Alice told the governess about her life in Africa and her animals there. (Afterward, the governess remarked unkindly to Dermot that Alice’s French was not very good.) Alice visited Rudolph and Dermot on more than one occasion, even going to stay with the de Traffords at their country home, Clock House, in Cowfold, Sussex, where she signed the visitors’ book with a flourish. Meanwhile, Raymund went back to Kenya at the end of 1928 to receive his other brother, Humphrey, who had decided to see Raymund’s farm and to meet a few old friends. That a single man like Raymund could travel freely to Kenya in this way must have rankled Alice and left her feeling doubly bereft.