The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Read online

  For my mother and father

  We were so busy keeping you in existence that we had no time to grasp what you were.

  Dolls: on the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel, Rainer Maria Rilke, 1913

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 I was never a little girl

  2 A very healthy little beast

  3 The action of testicular pulp

  4 What do you want with eggs and ham?

  5 An unknown quantity

  6 The water when one hits it

  7 Hullo! My dear fellow

  8 I did look like a boy, I really did

  9 Nobody really knows anything about their behaviour

  10 An absurd manikin

  11 Faint heart never won fair lady

  12 They thought I was most unusual

  13 Alas, now dead, the Bed said

  14 I had a country going

  15 Join hands on the Roadway to the Sun

  16 The Neverland

  17 I don’t give a fuck about the law

  18 It felt like a woman had died

  19 Only Wadley

  Untitled

  Notes

  Plate Section 1

  Plate Section 2

  Plate Section 3

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  At the end of December 1993 a letter arrived at the Daily Telegraph obituaries desk, where I worked, from a woman called Jane Harrison-Hall. She had noticed the name of her godmother, Marion Barbara Carstairs, in the death announcements column of the newspaper. Though Mrs Harrison-Hall had not seen her godmother for decades, she was writing to suggest she might be a suitable subject for an obituary; with her letter she enclosed copies of a few American newspaper articles.

  No one on the desk had heard of Carstairs but when I looked up the name in the Telegraph library files I found a thick packet of newspaper cuttings, most of them reports of motorboat races. It seemed that M. B. Carstairs, born in 1900, had been famous in the 1920s. Always dressed in men’s clothes, she had raced for Britain and established herself as the fastest woman on water. In 1934 she all but vanished when she left England to become ruler of the Bahamian island of Whale Cay (pronounced ‘key’). I wrote an obituary, giving it the heading ‘Joe’ Carstairs because this was the most widely used of the many names she took. The piece was published in the newspaper in January 1994.

  A Telegraph obituary is formal in structure: it is anonymous, written in the third person and without overt commentary; it is topped, tailed and interrupted by facts and figures – the age at death, dates of birth, marriages, divorces, education, appointments, honours. This frame lends authority and authenticity, licensing the anecdotes, eccentricities and asides for which the Telegraph obituary is prized. In form, the obituaries imitate the unselfconsciousness of the figures they celebrate; in truth, they are mischievous and knowing. But the teasing is laced with affection – at the heart of these pieces is a lament, for a century and a spirit which is passing.

  The spirit is embodied in the dotty dowagers and bristling brigadiers who people the obituaries column. These are the characters for whom the Telegraph obituary might have been invented, figures who are comically, heroically British. They are untroubled by whys and wherefores: they just are, and they just do. They persist in the face of disaster, of ridicule, of a radically changing world. The spirit they represent helped forge the British Empire; during the two world wars it made for astonishing bravery (the soldier who acted with ‘reckless disregard for his own safety’, in the words of innumerable military citations); and in peacetime it made for fabulous eccentricity.

  Carstairs was all these things: blithe, bold, courageous, unselfconscious, imperialist, impervious to social change. And, like many of the eccentrics who appeared on the obituaries page, she was born to money: she could afford not to care. Yet Joe Carstairs was no dowager or brigadier – she was a cross-dressing lesbian whose fortune was made in the oilfields of America, in the years that the United States began to displace Britain as a great power. And though she didn’t need to be, she was a relentless entrepreneur. Her ambitions were made the more astonishing by the fact that she was a woman, but they were over-reaching by any standards: fuelled by her money, she pursued a fantasy of autonomy and omnipotence, in which she was variously the fastest creature on the seas, an immortal boy and a great ruler of men. Her projects were so outlandish that they took her beyond fame and notoriety to obscurity.

  An obituary aims to encapsulate how a person looked to the world, not how the world looked to them. It never presumes to enter the subject’s head or heart, and so renders no interior life. It does not deal in meaning and motivation. After writing Joe Carstairs’ obituary, I found that, for once, I wanted to fill in the delicate gaps that characterise obituaries, name the oddities suggested but left respectfully – or wryly – untouched. I wanted to know why Joe Carstairs lived as she did, how the world worked upon her.

  Apart from brief notices in the New York Times and Motorboating magazine, no further obituaries, to my knowledge, appeared. But in the weeks after the Telegraph piece was published, a handful of people who knew of Carstairs got in touch with me and I began trying to find others who remembered her.

  Many of those who proved willing to speak to me about her were, I felt, motivated by the same curiosity that had engaged me. For all her directness of sentiment and action, Joe Carstairs was mysterious to those who knew her: she lived so much in the moment, with so little reflection, that her internal life was almost invisible. Carstairs did not look back and she never explained. She did not speak in the language of cause and consequence, meaning and motivation. ‘I never felt anything about myself,’ she once said. ‘I was just it.’ She believed the world and time exerted no force upon her, were merely backdrops to her performance. ‘She made her life a series of scenes,’ one friend told me. Joe did not see her life as a developing story, did not join up the dots – the obituary, by these lights, was a form that perfectly matched her. She would have approved of its strict adherence to fact and action: only a biography in pictures could have bettered its baldness.

  But I wanted to test this version of her life. I started by visiting Jane Harrison-Hall, the goddaughter who had written to the Telegraph, at her house in Hampshire. She was in her late sixties, and had known Joe only briefly before her flight to the Bahamas in the early 1930s. As a small girl, she had been driven around London in one of Joe’s silver-grey Rolls-Royces. Mrs Harrison-Hall gave me lunch, pulled out her photograph albums, talked to me about her father and his three sisters, all of whom were friends of Carstairs. I sat on a velvet armchair, a dog lying before the fire, lights glowing, rain falling outside, the room lined with rugs and flowers, while I leafed through pictures of Joe Carstairs larking about on beaches and battlefields with Mrs Harrison-Hall’s aunts. Before I left I used the guest bathroom, where I saw on the wall, like a giant clue, a photograph of a comic little man. He was Lord Tod Wadley, Mrs Harrison-Hall told me. The sealskin coat he was wearing had been bought for him by Joe Carstairs, as had his sailing cap and his handmade Italian shoes. It was some time before I grasped the significance of Tod Wadley.

  Over the next year, in London, Lucerne, New York, Long Island, Florida and the Bahamas, I met several of Joe Carstairs’ lovers, friends and employees, as well as members of her family and her Bahamian populace. I visited Whale Cay itself, hitching a lift on a small aeroplane; the other passenger was a man who had been called out to fix
a generator for the couple who were the island’s caretakers and sole inhabitants. After an hour or so the generator was fixed and we had to leave, the plane laden down with fish packed in ice. I had merely glimpsed the ruins of the kingdom Joe had built. As she had predicted, without her the island had returned to jungle.

  I imagined that Joe Carstairs hoped on her death to be left, like the island, to return to wilderness. Yet I also knew that Joe had wanted her extraordinary exploits to be celebrated. As much as she sought exile, she sought recognition. I thought she would be glad to have a book written about her; it was a question of what kind of book.

  There were many things that this book could or would not be. It would not be a book about lesbianism – Joe Carstairs was too singular and strange to be representative of anything other than herself. It would not be a tribute to feminist strength and success – after all, the principle by which she defined herself was male. It could not be a comprehensive or strictly chronological account – there were too many gaps in the available material. But it could be a book which connected Joe Carstairs to the century she spanned, a twentieth-century fable with a twist. And it could be a book which sought to find the stories which fastened together the scenes of her life. I wanted to map the island of Joe’s fantasy. I realised that if I were to write such a portrait, the story Joe Carstairs wanted told and the story I wanted to tell about her would compete for precedence. I suspected I was going to have to work against the grain, extracting meaning where she had thought or wished there to be none.

  My suspicion was confirmed when I listened to a series of tape-recordings she had made in 1975 and 1976 with a view to having friends ghost-write her autobiography. (Unsurprisingly, the ghost-written autobiography never came to fruition: Joe was a dominating figure, nowhere more so than in the facts of her own life, and one can only imagine what a tricky project it would have been to write her story while she lived. The tapes, though, are the source of many of the direct quotations in this book.) When an interviewer on the recordings asks Carstairs why she did something, she says flatly that she did it because she felt like it. Or she gets shirty.

  ‘We want to find out what gave you that drive,’ the interviewer patiently explains during an attempted discussion of her childhood.

  ‘Why do you want to find that out?’ Joe retorts.

  The interviewer asks Joe how to reconcile two contradictory statements she has made.

  ‘That’s an enigma,’ she replies.

  ‘An enigma?’ asks her friend. ‘You think that’s what you are?’

  Joe firmly closes the subject: ‘Yes.’

  Chapter One

  I Was Never A Little Girl

  In 1905, or thereabouts, Marion Barbara Carstairs was thrown off a bolting camel at London Zoo. She was knocked unconscious; raw steaks were applied to her bruised head; and when she came round she had earned herself a new name, ‘Tuffy’.

  Joe Carstairs told a friend that this was the story with which her biography should begin. Her genesis, by this account, was of her own making: she was born not of human flesh but of her own will, and sprang forth fully formed, a creature of her desire. As she was thrown from the camel’s back she threw off the feminine, proper names of the old century and of her family’s choosing. Instead she took a name that assigned her to no one sex or time, marked her only with her resilience. To start her life story with this mock death and birth was to erase the first few troubled years of her existence, undo the bonds of parentage and gender, and claim the power of self-creation.

  Later in life, she bridled at being accidentally referred to as ‘Mrs’ Carstairs: ‘No man gave me my name,’ she would bark.

  ‘What about your father?’ a mischievous friend once enquired.

  ‘Don’t talk to me that way!’ roared Carstairs. She said of her father only that he was ‘innocuous’.

  If she was saddled with his surname, she swiftly loosed the first names of both parents from her memory. ‘To this day,’ she declared with some satisfaction in 1975, ‘I don’t know my father’s name.’ In the late 1920s she named her series of powerful motorboats Estelle, in honour of her mother. Many years later she discovered, to her amusement, that she had made a vengeful slip – her mother had not been called Estelle but Evelyn.

  Yet, for all her fantasies of self-invention, Joe Carstairs did have parents, grandparents, a flesh-and-blood history.

  Joe Carstairs’ inheritance liberated her, of course, opened the world to her, fuelled her adventures and metamorphoses. But her perpetual supply of money robbed her of the opportunity to be – as her maternal grandfather had been, and as she longed to be – a self-made man.

  Joe Carstairs’ grandfather, Jabez Abel Bostwick, created the family fortune. Born in 1830 into a farming family in New York State, he amassed his money as treasurer to John D. Rockefeller’s Southern Improvement Company. Rockefeller, Bostwick and their cohorts established an adamantine monopoly in the booming American oil and railroad industries of the late part of the nineteenth century. They first bought up most of their rival oil speculators in the choicest states, and then – by threatening to take their business elsewhere – secured massive rebates from the local railroad companies. These rebates enabled them to drive oil prices down and so drive other oilmen out of business.

  In 1879 the Grand Jury of Clarion County, Pennsylvania, brought an indictment for conspiracy against the nine controllers of the Southern Improvement Company, Rockefeller and Bostwick among them. The charges were conspiracy to secure a monopoly in buying and selling petroleum and the use of fraudulent devices to control market prices of petroleum. The nine evaded arrest.

  Jabez Bostwick had just built his family a stately five-floor townhouse on a corner of Fifth Avenue, New York, overlooking Central Park and near the residences of the other American oil tycoons. The house was equipped with elevators and electricity, and flanked by a stable. In the year of Jabez Bostwick’s indictment the petroleum on which he had founded his fortune literally exploded in his face when he stepped down to the basement of his new house to repair a leaking gasoline tank. He survived the injury, again eluding disaster.

  The Southern Improvement Company continued to flourish, and in 1882 was registered as the Standard Oil Trust, with nine trustees and capital of some $70 million. Its directors had exploited and outwitted the market economy, competing with such ruthlessness that they had all but destroyed the competition. Bostwick expanded into railroads.

  Jabez’s wife was Helen Celia Bostwick, known as Nellie. She was the only family member from whom Joe Carstairs acknowledged any emotional descent. ‘Of all the grandchildren, she liked me the best,’ Carstairs said many years later, ‘and I was the most like her. I think I’m awfully like her, with my rages and violent tempers.’ Nellie Bostwick was a fierce matriarch, even more stubborn and unyielding than her magnate husband. ‘She was a wicked old lady,’ recalled Joe with pride, ‘rough, tough, she wanted her own way. She was a wonderful person . . . She had great power.’ The stories Joe Carstairs told about her grandmother served to demonstrate her passion and her discipline. To calm her rages, Nellie would advance down the staircase at Park Avenue belting out operatic arias. A fervent supporter of the New York police force, when she spotted a policeman in Central Park she always halted her carriage to hand him a quarter. Nellie had a habit of voicing the exact opposite of what she meant to say, to outrageous effect. Once, she was taking a walk with the eight-year-old Joe in New York – Nellie walked ten blocks a day – when they came across a man she knew who had recently suffered a death in the family: ‘I’m so glad your sister is dead,’ she told him.

  ‘I thought this was marvellous,’ Joe recalled. ‘I broke up. I thought everything she did was marvellous.’

  Jabez Bostwick died at his estate in Long Island in August 1892. The newspapers reported that he met his death while trying to rescue some horses caught in a fire in the stables. But rumour had it that he had in fact gone in to the blazing stables not to save horses but to s
alvage his favourite carriage: he tripped over its traces, hit his head against the wall and fell unconscious to the ground, where the fire overtook him. He left a fortune of $10 million.

  In his obituary in the New York Times Jabez Bostwick was described as an active member of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church who neither drank nor smoked, a prompt and punctilious businessman, a philanthropist with a ‘staunch, unchangeable character’. The obituary hinted also at something beyond this god-fearing solidity: ‘He was a restless man,’ it noted, ‘always entering into new ventures.’

  Joe Carstairs was to inherit both the immutability and the restlessness of her grandfather. And in the spirit of Jabez Bostwick, she was to harbour a passion for vehicles, for man-made power and locomotion, which more than once brought her close to death. She would have saved her cars or motorboats before any animal – she found horses, cats, dogs at best uninteresting, at worst repulsive. She invested her ambitions and affections in engines, fuelled by the oil her grandfather had drilled.

  Jabez and Nellie had three children. The eldest daughter, also Nellie, was married at nineteen, lost a baby son at twenty-one, an infant daughter at twenty-four, and her husband at twenty-five; she remarried six years later and died in 1906, aged thirty-eight. The only Bostwick son, Albert, died in 1911 at the age of thirty-three – reputedly of drug abuse. The middle child, Evelyn, was the mother of Joe Carstairs.

  In photographs taken at the turn of the twentieth century, Nellie Bostwick gives the camera an imperious, spirited glance; her younger daughter, Evelyn, gazes into the lens with a demure, pretty intelligence. Yet those who became entangled with Evelyn Bostwick saw her as fearless, capricious, a femme fatale. The disparity between Evelyn’s portraits and her nature may be a mark of her complexity, or of her capacity to dissemble. ‘She showed me there was such a thing as fear, which I have never felt since,’ Joe said in old age. ‘I’ve never been frightened of anybody except my mother.’