The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder. Errol Trzebinski
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in the cities were plentiful, affording men opportunities for unrestrained pleasure – in this respect Joss was very much a player. In the society in which he had been raised, sexual mores for men were liberal. It was expected of Continental grand dukes and archdukes that they should seek to indulge their sexual fantasies with mistresses rather than their wives. During the late summer, the fashionable German spas turned into the hunting grounds of the most famous courtesans of Europe. By the standards of the day Joss did nothing that others did not do, and many indulged in far more excessive behaviour.
From 1919 onwards Joss paid regular visits to Paris, where he got to know a wealthy American socialite, Alice Silverthorne, with whom he enjoyed an intermittent affair. His girlfriends were usually blondes but Alice was dark and, also unlike the majority of his lovers, close to him in age. In 1923 she married a young French aristocrat, Frederic de Janzé. Alice was bewitchingly beautiful, rich, self-willed and neurotic. ‘Wide eyes so calm, short slick hair, full red lips, a body to desire … her cruelty and lascivious thoughts clutch the thick lips on close white teeth … No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal’ – this was her husband’s adoring and, ultimately, prophetic verdict.12 Alice was to become notorious as the Countess de Janzé, when she was tried for attempted murder in Paris in 1927. She had shot her lover Raymund de Trafford in the groin at the Gare du Nord. She married him five years later and they separated about three months after that. Alice and another beauty Kiki Preston – a Whitney by birth – were part of the American colony in Paris who welcomed Joss into their social circle.
The early twenties saw the Paris of Hemingway, Molyneux and Cecil Beaton.13 Joss thrived in this glamorous climate. Beaton’s photography drew the fashionable world’s attention to the beauties of the day. Joss would get to know most of them well. One of Beaton’s ‘finds’ was Paula Gellibrand, a ‘corn-coloured English girl’ who became one of his muses. When Paula and Joss first met, she was untitled and the daughter of a major who lived in Wales. Joss’s relationship with her would surface haphazardly at distant points on the globe since she would become the wife of no less than three of his friends and, being an inveterate traveller, would appear wherever the glamorous foregathered be it Paris, Venice, New York, London or Antibes. She was tall and languid, and according to Beaton, her ‘eyelids were like shiny tulip petals … [she was] the first living Modigliani I ever saw’.14 Ultimately Paula would happen up on Joss’s doorstep in the Rift Valley, married to Boy Long (whose real first name was Caswell), a rancher and another neighbour of Joss’s – by then Joss and Paula had been friends for fourteen years.
Once Joss disappeared into the wilds of Africa with his first wife Idina, another eccentric socialite in Paris – she and Alice fell for Joss, separately, at roughly the same time – Kiki Preston, Frédéric and Alice, among other friends, would flock after them. The clique which became infamous as the Happy Valley set was formed in France before any of them left for Africa.
History does not relate where Joss and Idina first met. It could have been in Paris, for Idina was there in 1919, mixing with a Bohemian set that would have appealed to Joss. It is possible that they had met in more conventional society even earlier, in Helsinki, when Joss was still living in Denmark, because Idina’s younger sister Avice was then living in Helsinki with her husband Major Sir Stewart Menzies, and Idina would have visited her there. Menzies was a military man but he usually established ambassadorial contact wherever he worked. When Joss was in his thirties, he would become head of the Secret Services.*
It is likely that Joss and Idina had been circling one another for at least eighteen months before their affair started. Idina was another of the beauties who caught Beaton’s imagination – he noticed the way she ‘dazzled’ people.15 Her red-gold hair was styled like a boy’s and, her bosom being too ample for the dictates of fashion, she flattened it so as to look perfect in the gowns created for her by Captain Molyneux – or ‘Molynukes’, as she called him.16 She had been a devotee of his since he opened his house in 1918; his designs made her look taller. It was Molyneux who dressed her when Joss first met her and he would continue to adapt fashion to suit her style for nearly forty years: she had ‘a rounded slenderness … tubular, flexible, like a section of a boa constrictor … [she] dressed in clothes that emphasised a serpentine slimness’. Joss, fashion aficionado, thought that the way she looked and dressed was wonderful.17
Twice married by the time Joss knew her, Idina was eight years older than him. She was the elder of two daughters born to the 8th Earl De La Warr (pronounced Delaware). Their brother, the heir, was Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville and, by the time Joss made his maiden speech in the Upper House, had become 9th Earl De La Warr, Under-secretary of State for the Colonies and Lord Privy Seal in the House of Lords.18 Idina was a legendary seductress. Joss, only nineteen years old, impressionable and driven by lust, had not resisted her wiles.19 He pursued her from 1920 although not exclusively.
Joss called virginity a ‘state of disgrace, rather than of grace’ and was not interested in seducing virgins. Lady Kilmarnock’s view was that young men should have affairs only with married women. Joss, whom she had so bewitched as a young boy with the mysteries of her toilette, seems to have paid a lot of attention to her on this issue as well, as Daphne Fielding can testify. Daphne’s memoir, Mercury Presides, contains a forgiving description of Joss’s flirtation with her (a virgin when Joss knew her): ‘It was inevitable that he should be conscious of such wonderful good looks as he possessed, and with these he had an arrogant manner and great sartorial elegance.’ When her father learned that Daphne had sat out on the back stairs with Joss during a dance, a furore ensued. After she told Joss about the row, he sent her an ‘enormous bunch of red roses’. She had been terrified that the sight of the flowers would incur her father’s wrath all over again, and had hidden them from him – ‘in my bedroom basin until they died – the first present of flowers that I had ever received’. Her fascination with Joss grew as her father’s disapproval intensified: Joss’s scornful way of looking at people, ‘an oblique, blue glance under half-closed lids’, was impudence personified.20 Joss, however, did not return her interest. He would without exception make a beeline for married women.21
The easygoing lifestyle – in which people exercised sexual freedom without anyone suffering – that Joss now adopted would always be attractive to him. Idina, herself an advocate of promiscuity, found Joss irresistible – and one can see why in a picture taken of him as whipper-in to the American Army drag-hounds. As the best-looking in a bunch of four young bloods, he was as usual with the prettiest girl in the group. For his part, Joss relished the element of danger in his relationship with Idina. Her reputation was to him deliciously louche. Her first husband, Captain the Hon. Euan Wallace, MC, MP, had been in the Life Guards Reserve; she produced two sons by him, but after six years the marriage was dissolved. The two boys remained with their father and Idina virtually abandoned them. The society she kept in Paris was decidedly disreputable. Only her pedigree redeemed her. But her family life had not been happy; Idina was only nine years old when her parents separated, and, like Joss, she had grown up precociously and was easily bored. Even at school, classmates had been wary. She was smarter than them. One of her school contemporaries, coming across her years later in Kenya, admitted how terrified she had been of her. On this occasion Idina was as withering as ever: ‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured on meeting her old classmate, ‘I remember you – you never powdered.’22
Joss, madly in love with Idina, was longing to share his life with her. They made secret plans to marry and Joss played the eligible bachelor as