Frances: The Tragic Bride (16 page)

The honeymoon couple stayed in an Athens hotel from 20–28 April. Reg went out drinking most nights, often leaving his bride alone in their hotel. A series of diary entries in Frances’s own handwriting chronicle some detail of their troubled marriage, presumably written to demonstrate the truth of Reggie’s treatment of her and her reasons for wishing to divorce him.

It is a very troubling document, detailed in the following chapter, and it relates to what happened between them after the honeymoon.

However, there is one brief line in her account about that honeymoon week in Athens. It reads: ‘honeymoon sex about three’.

Certainly, this could be interpreted as having sex three times – but it could also mean there were three attempts to have sex, given what Frances told others after they had returned from honeymoon.

Frances, at twenty-one, was not in any way a sexually experienced girl. She came from a background where sex before marriage was still frowned upon – and, like many girls then, she wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night. She had been with Reggie on and off for more than six years. But they had never lived together or even shared a bed on their numerous trips away. It had always been separate rooms.

This was the mid-sixties and huge social changes were already underway in ‘swinging London’, including greater sexual freedoms for some women. Yet in most parts of the UK, including the East End, despite the fashionable short skirts and the immaculate bouffant hairdos, women remained still pretty much where they’d always been: tied to the bonds of family and marriage.

Divorce was complicated and far too expensive for ordinary people. In places like the East End, alcohol and gambling frequently devoured much of the housekeeping money. Women did, mostly, put up and shut up. Ditto for sex. Ditto for domestic violence. All the economic and sexual freedoms now taken for granted today would have been unknown to an inexperienced young girl back then.

Reg, a thirties man to the core, didn’t even allow Frances to go out to work: it might have implied he couldn’t afford to keep her, and dent his image.

The sum total of Frances’s sexual experience would have been limited to foreplay, kissing, cuddling, or ‘necking’ as it was called then. One of Reggie’s early prison letters to her mentioned he had a love bite – presumably from Frances during a prison visit. Later, there might have been times when Reggie pushed the boundaries, persuaded her to bring him to climax through masturbation – ‘a hand job’ – but given the times and the circumstances, Frances knew little of sex.

Reggie, ten years older, had been around the block, with men and women. Lots of women fancied Reggie. There were frequent one-night stands with women, usually hostesses or prostitutes, before and probably during his courtship of Frances. And his ‘experiments’ with men, while covert, had gone on since his teens. Yet none of this means that he was a skilled or considerate lover.

Those early letters from Reggie in prison at the onset of the relationship referred to his affection for her, mentioning cuddling and kissing, so there was obviously normal affection between them at the start, probably heightened by the frustrations of Reggie’s incarceration. (As Albert Donoghue pointed out to me: ‘Bear in mind that while he was in prison earlier on, he was not in his normal state of mind.’) And this was surely true, since the intimacy of those early letters must have deteriorated over time as the relationship changed and Frances started to understand the truth of the situation she was in. The increasing rows and arguments over the years would have changed any genuine affection or warmth she felt at the very beginning, let alone the effect on her of all the very public reports about the twins and their endeavours.

So when it came to consummating the marriage that Reggie had insisted on for so long, all was not as it should have been in the marriage bed. The accounts from those who knew Reggie at the time underline this.

‘He’d talk to me about the times when they went to Spain together and I got the impression he did love her very much,’ Donoghue recalled. ‘But at the same time he told me once that they never consummated the marriage. From the way he talked, he thought it would degrade her. And he’d ask me things like “How do you excite a woman?”

‘I’d say things like “just try to be natural, be yourself, relax.” It was difficult to know what to say.’

Micky Fawcett is a retired boxing trainer and author who was a business associate of the Krays in the years between 1957 and 1967. He too said the marriage was never consummated.

In his book
Krayzy Days
, recounting his life and times during those years, he recalled meeting Reggie and Frances just after the Athens honeymoon.

‘They both joined me for a drink at the El Morocco. I’d hardly said “hello” before she said in front of him, “Do you know he hasn’t laid a finger on me in all the time we’ve been away?” What do you say in return to something like that?

‘Reggie himself didn’t sound angry, though, just defeated. “Cor, I’m glad it’s you she’s told,” he said sadly “and no one else”.’

Fawcett’s account of those years in Krayworld had some other intriguing insights into Reg’s relationship with Frances, so he agreed to talk to me at the Mayfair Hotel, in London’s Piccadilly.

At our meeting he told me that Frances’s remark didn’t surprise or shock him at all.

‘Once you knew what he was like, the honeymoon, Greece, the David Bailey wedding photos, it was all like… acting,’ Fawcett told me. ‘I think she said it to humiliate. “Nice holiday? With him? He’s fucking useless.” That was the gist of it.

‘It’s a terrible thing to say, I realise it is. But if you knew the level of madness around them, the boundaries that were set… it was just… unusual.’

The comment ‘I’m glad she said it to you’ was, according to Fawcett, all about Ronnie.

‘He wouldn’t have wanted Ronnie to hear those words,’ he went on. ‘Ronnie used to make nasty comments all the time like “You seen ’is bird, Mick? Ain’t she got ’orrible legs?” Which wasn’t true at all.’

Fawcett told me that Reggie later confided in him that he could have straightforward sex with other women. ‘But not Frances,’ Fawcett continued. ‘He had a bit of a Madonna complex about her, nothing to do with love. In his mind she was a bit of an idol, nothing to do with love between a man and a woman. Somehow he felt she shouldn’t indulge in sex. He didn’t say it in so many words. And I’d known him to go with other women, hostesses in the West End clubs. But with Frances… it was different.’

Fawcett first met the twins in their billiard hall days, before Reggie started courting Frances. ‘I knew there were stories about Reggie being gay. At the billiard hall one day someone said, “You know the twins are gay.” I went “WHAT?” Then it sank in. All these younger men around in the billiard hall, of course, they were gay.

‘One fella in Bow told me, “Oh yes, so-and-so is Reggie’s boyfriend.” He didn’t want to be known as a gay person, he really didn’t want to be gay. But I think it overtook him now and again.’

Before the marriage, Reggie would occasionally ask Micky Fawcett to drive Frances home to Ormsby Street from Vallance Road.

‘On one occasion she said to me, “I suppose he’s told you that I mustn’t talk to anyone. It’s ridiculous. All my friends, I’m not supposed to talk to them – because he gets annoyed.”’

Micky Fawcett told me about one major incident before the wedding which demonstrated Reggie’s fear and paranoia about Frances having anything to do with other men.

One night, a suspicious Reggie had been spying on Frances, sitting in his car, watching her house. Frances wasn’t home and he was very worried. Sure enough, a car drove to her front door late at night and a man dropped Frances off.

Reggie carefully took a note of the car registration. Then he got dealer friend to identify the owner. Later he told Micky of his suspicions over a drink in the Grave Maurice pub:

‘I’ve got his address,’ said Reggie. ‘And I wanna do him.’

Micky Fawcett knew what was going on.

‘I knew, right away, why Reggie had come to me because he was terrified Ronnie would have found out and driven him mad. The main thing for me was to give him a getout.’

Fawcett promised to sort it out.

‘And Reggie let me get on with it. Perhaps, deep down, he wanted only to know that Frances wasn’t playing around.’

That same night, Micky was awoken at 5 a.m. by someone knocking on his window. It was Reggie. He couldn’t sleep. He wanted Micky to track the man down immediately. Micky persuaded him it was too early and they drove around for a couple of hours. Reggie was still agitated but eventually Micky convinced him it would be better if he dropped him off at a friend’s house while Micky went round to the man’s address.

‘Reggie seemed relieved he didn’t need to go himself. His own way of dealing with things would have been less direct than his brother’s. But just as violent in the end.’

Micky then went round to the man’s house, driven there by a friend. Later he found out that the suspected boyfriend was a car dealer in his mid-twenties. And married.

‘You were seen with Reggie Kray’s bird,’ Micky warned when the man answered his front door.

‘He ran back into his house and said, “Tell me through here”, through the letterbox.’ recalled Micky. ‘He was crying, snivelling, all his nose was running. I’d only said a few words but now you couldn’t get any sense out of him. Then I got him to open the door again.

‘“It’s nearly on you,” I said. “Behave yourself in future.”

‘I went back to Reggie and assured him that the man driving Frances was the father of a girlfriend, an innocent lift home.

‘Reggie said to me: “She ain’t pregnant, is she, Mick?”

‘“Wot are you on about, Reg? I’ve told you, this is wot ’appened.”

‘“Are you sure?” said Reggie.

‘“I tell you, this is wot ’appened.”

‘And he didn’t query it. He was the most sceptical person you ever met who didn’t believe anything anyone ever said. But he was worried about what Ronnie would think.’

I asked Micky if he thought there was anything going on between Frances and the married car dealer.

‘Definitely. I made up the story I told Reggie, my motive was to quieten Reggie down. And not rock the boat. I knew he would believe what I said. He wouldn’t WANT bad news. Or an inquest from Ronnie. She was definitely having some sort of relationship with this guy. I found out later that his wife heard all the commotion and apparently she was told I’d threatened him because he’d been a bit drunk in one of the Kray clubs – a cover-up story. The man definitely had something to hide.’

Micky’s story tells us that despite her fears and nervous behaviour, Frances was not overwhelmingly intimidated by Reggie. She did, at least, accept the attentions of other men before the marriage, no matter how briefly, perhaps in the vague hope of finding a new boyfriend who would release her from the situation somehow. Her remark to Micky Fawcett about the honeymoon does not indicate someone who was browbeaten or scared of her husband, worried about a reprisal once they were alone. Did she really understand how humiliating such a comment was when addressed to another man? Or was she just too innocent to perceive its impact?

My feeling is she did know it was shaming. Yet the rebel in her, the girl that had told Reggie he’d be better suited to someone else, that he was a nobody away from his own environment, wanted the truth to be out there. Somehow.

Yet the incident with the man giving Frances a lift home took place just before they embarked on the desperately tragic, brief time that was to be their life as a married couple. Here’s an outline of what happened once they came back from Athens in those weeks they ‘lived together’ as man and wife.

Although it is well documented that Reggie rented a furnished luxury apartment for them ‘up West’ in a big block of flats near London’s Marble Arch, and that the couple later moved to a flat underneath Ronnie’s flat in Cedra Court, Clapton, Frances’s diaries and, much later, her mother Elsie’s account of their married life, show that, in fact, they more or less lived like gypsies.

At different times after the wedding they stayed briefly at Vallance Road, in a flat in Chingford (presumably belonging to a friend of Reggie’s) and on several occasions, both in London and abroad, Frances was left to stay in hotels alone. As with the honeymoon, the attempt to live as man and wife was a total disaster.

The Marble Arch flat, while luxuriously furnished, left Frances totally isolated. Most days, Reg would go out, leave her in the flat alone, return home to change his clothes, then go out again and return in the wee small hours, very drunk.

Frances had no friends nearby, no job to go to, her entire life was now in the hands of her husband. Very soon, it became obvious that this wouldn’t work. Why Reggie decided it would make sense if he and Frances moved into the same block of flats as his twin is baffling: he knew all too well how damaging the undercurrent of animosity between his wife and his twin could be.

Virtually anywhere in London would have been better than Cedra Court. He had the means to pick and choose. But the truth was, Reggie wasn’t comfortable anywhere away from his twin. He’d wanted Frances; he’d got her. Now there were three of them in the marriage, a terrified young wife, a jealous, possessive madman who detested the sight of her and an equally intense, obsessive husband. It was enough to send even a stronger woman over the edge.

Yet there was a brief, outward appearance of normality on a social level in this time. Occasionally Frances would accompany Reggie to nightclubs or parties.

But it was the same old routine: the same circle of criminals, minders and Kray hangers-on. Plus a sprinkling of celebrities. There is a
Daily Express
archival photo, taken at El Morocco, days after the couple had returned from honeymoon, which says so much. Reggie, surrounded by well-known celebrities of the day and his proudly beaming mother, are all looking at Frances. She is stony faced, staring ahead bleakly. Reggie merely looks at her sadly, a pained, quizzical expression on his face. Everyone else is smiling. There is the nub of it: Frances had nothing in common with this glamorous bunch – they were not people she could relate to in any way. Nor did she care to make conversation or try to eagerly flatter the celebrities her husband and his twin courted so assiduously. She was no longer the starry-eyed young girl. She was Reggie’s missus, his property. Socially she’d clammed up. Not that surprising when you consider that her husband didn’t want her talking much to anyone, anyway.