Authors: Lady Colin Campbell
‘What’s the problem, then?’
‘I don’t know if you’re aware that I was brought up as a boy. Are you?’
‘So?’ he said, cool as a cucumber.
‘Well, I mean to say it’s well, sort of … well, you know, not exactly run-of-the-mill, is it?’
‘Georgie, I don’t care about bullshit like that. I told you, I can’t stand bullshit. And I meant it.’
‘I’m very relieved to hear that, but there’s something else. I know you said you don’t want children, but suppose you change your mind? I can’t oblige, you know.’
‘I’ll never change my mind. I’m not keen on the little buggers,’ he said with surprising vitriol.
With that hurdle out of the way, Colin, Jeanie and I went down to his trustees the following morning. They advanced him $2,000 from his trust fund of $225,000 so that he could buy me a wedding ring and pay for the elopement to Elkton. Then we picked up a hire car, fetched Cusi, Jeanie’s younger daughter, and set off for Maryland with me at the wheel (Colin couldn’t drive). The romance of it all could not have been more thrilling or in keeping with the spirit of the age. Instead of staying in a smart hotel, we stayed in a roadside motel. How real, I thought, excited at the novelty of fulfilling the forty-eight-hour residency requirement going from truckers’ café to truckers’ café, with only one detour for lunch in a more upmarket seafood restaurant. Colin was so easy-going, such fun, and so utterly endearing that I no longer minded the mad rush at all.
The afternoon before the wedding, we set off, ostensibly in search of a jeweller’s shop to buy rings. Although men from our sort of background did not usually wear rings, Colin had hit
upon the idea of a signet ring bearing his crest for his wedding-ring finger. I was only too happy to buy it for him, and did not think once about the fact that this ring cost much more than mine. Nor did it occur to me that this might be the first of many occasions on which he would exploit an opportunity to gain things he had always wanted but had never been able to afford. Buying the rings, however, took second place to Colin’s astonishingly thorough search for drugs to get him over his ‘jet lag’. It was at this point that the warning bells should have rung, but I had no experience of anyone with a drug problem, so I put this extreme tenacity down to premarital nerves. We spent most of the day driving from drugstore to drugstore, hospital to hospital, town to town, looking for someone who would let him have ‘just a few uppers and downers’. At one hospital, a policeman even asked to see his papers. When Colin produced his passport, he established his respectability by alluding to Princess Anne’s kidnapping, which was big news at the time. Pointing to his title, he said, ‘Her mother is my cousin. My father was the 11th Duke of Argyll, and the 9th Duke’s wife was Her Royal Highness The Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter.’
Suitably bedazzled, the policeman asked him how the Queen was, and when he said he hadn’t seen her for a while because he had been deep-sea diving in Fiji, he let him go. This was the first I had heard of any connection between the royal and Argyll families. When we were safely out of earshot of the policeman, I asked, ‘Are you really related to the Queen?’
‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘At Inveraray we even have a suite of rooms called Princess Louise’s rooms. The one thing everyone loves more than a lord is royalty.’
Although the royal connection would later prove useful to my publishers in marketing my books on the royal family, at the time it was of no significance to me. I had met several members of the British royal family, starting at the age of about six or seven with Princess Alice of Athlone, as Queen Victoria’s granddaughter and Queen Mary’s sister-in-law was informally known. I found them all boring, and hated how most people stiffened into grotesque parodies of themselves as soon as a royal was present. My only concern was that I should not end up trapped in this surreal environment.
‘I do hope that doesn’t mean we’ll have to be cheek and jowl with them when we’re in England,’ I said.
‘Good God, no,’ Colin laughed. ‘I’ve never even met any of them. Pa was banned from court after his first divorce. He was the hereditary master of the Queen’s household in Scotland, but he was never allowed into the royal presence. It upset him dreadfully, but there was nothing he could do about it. Princess Anne did come to Inveraray once. I wasn’t there, but I heard the whole story. Ian went charging up to her and said, “I’m the Marquis of Lorne.” She replied, “So?” turned on her heels and walked off. Cool eh?’
That evening, Patricia Fleischmann, who was my matron-of-honour, arrived by train with Kate, Jeanie’s daughter from her marriage to Norman Mailer. We had a riotous dinner, all caught
up in the unfolding drama. Afterwards, we turned in early so that we would be fresh for the big day. Colin and I had still not made love – we were never alone, not for one minute. I did not regard this as ominous: I had never had a lousy lover, so it did not occur to me that such a thing as sexual inadequacy could jump off the pages of women’s magazines and land in my bed.
Saturday 23 March, 1974 was a chilly but sunny spring day. I awoke nervous as the dickens, but even surer than before that I was doing the right thing, for Colin had been so endearing and solicitous the night before. Patricia Fleischmann stayed with me as I dressed for the wedding, while Jeanie, Kate and Cusi kept Colin company in Patricia’s room until it was time to go down to the courthouse for the marriage certificate.
‘It’s bad luck to see one another,’ Jeanie had warned, and thereafter she resolutely kept us apart.
Only when we were about to be married did I see Colin. He was so handsome, so sweet and so funny that I floated through the ceremony on a cloud of romance.
Only one thing spoiled it. Flashbulbs popped throughout, and even if Joe Dever, the society columnist, was Colin’s best man, I still wondered how such a large contingent of the press had found out that we were getting married. The short answer to that was through the Campbells themselves. I was marrying into a family which measured its worth in terms of publicity instead of with the yardstick of sterling virtues. Of the three siblings, Jeanie was the only one with a bona-fide relationship with the press. Through her mother, the Hon. Janet Aitken, she was the granddaughter of the first Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron who owned the
Express
newspapers and the
Evening Standard
in Britain. For many years Jeanie had written an American diary for the
Standard,
so she not only knew a plethora of journalists but also understood the way the press worked. Ian and Colin, who were not Aitken’s children, had no link to the Beaverbrook dynasty. Such knowledge as they had had mostly been acquired through their disreputable father, who had ‘worked’ the print medium the way a cheap whore ‘works’ the street.
I did not know that the family had a history of whipping up perfectly ordinary situations into worldwide sensations. Twice in the last eighty years the Argyll family had generated global scandals. The first had been the greatest scandal of the Victorian age – greater even than the Oscar Wilde debacle that followed shortly afterwards. This involved the previous Lord Colin Campbell, a syphilitic whose wife Gertrude refused to sleep with him for fear of reinfection after having been ‘cured’ of the disease, which nevertheless first crippled her and finally killed her at the age of fifty-three. His reaction was to enforce his conjugal rights, and when she retaliated by acquiring a legal separation, he tried to have her imprisoned in Paris on a trumped-up charge. When that failed, knowing that divorce was the greatest taboo of the age, he prepared an action against her on the grounds of adultery, citing three men as co-respondents (he added his doctor as a fourth for good measure when the man was ill advised enough to tender a bill for services rendered during the trial). Although he was not granted a
divorce, the previous Lord Colin Campbell did succeed in making the previous Lady Colin Campbell the most notorious woman in the British Empire at a time when the sun never set on British territory.
The second global scandal involved Colin’s father Ian and his third wife, the celebrated beauty Margaret Whigham Sweeny, whom he divorced, using his great uncle Colin’s divorce tactics (three co-respondents, with a fourth added when expedient), after Margaret refused to hand over £250,000 as the price for a ‘clean’ divorce in 1959. ‘Big Ian’, as the six foot Duke was known in the family (Colin’s pint-sized elder brother was uncharitably called ‘Little Ian’), exploited the mess he created for pecuniary advantage, selling stories about Margaret to tabloids such as the
Sunday People
in Britain. After the divorce, when Margaret silenced him through the courts, the despicable manner in which he had supplemented his paltry annual income of £1,000 became public. He then suffered the greatest ignominy a British gentleman can endure: he was booted out of his clubs on the grounds that he was not fit to associate with gentlemen.
Had I known the family’s predilection for scandals, I would have grilled Colin very carefully before marrying him. And I certainly would not have married him once I found out that he admired his father. I deeply deplore destructive and ungentlemanly conduct. He, on the other hand, could see nothing wrong with it. As it was, after our marriage I posed in blissful ignorance for the press with Colin standing proudly beside me. I had no inkling that I was being set up as a commodity for exploitation. I had become Lady Colin Campbell, an entity which had to be milked to keep Colin in a style to which he had never been accustomed. The first step along that road was to gain maximum publicity on both sides of the Atlantic to turn us into well-known personalities. If the marriage worked, Colin fully intended to use our public image as well as my private attributes and talents – and my father’s money – to fill his empty coffers. And if it did not, he intended to follow the precedent of his father and great-great-uncle: he would create a scandal and sell stories about me to the newspapers on the back of it.
Of course, I had no idea what I had got myself into. I happily accompanied Colin, Jeanie, Patricia, Kate and Cusi to Joe Dever’s club in Philadelphia, where the columnist graciously hosted our wedding breakfast. I was ecstatic. I had achieved everything I had ever wanted: I was married to a great guy, a great-looking guy, and a guy from a suitable background. True, he had no money, but we were both young and we could work, and you did not need much money living in Fiji, which is where we meant to reside. Money aside, he was perfect. I looked forward confidently to a happy marriage.
After the celebratory luncheon, Colin and I said goodbye to everyone and set off for the Endicott Hotel on Rittenhouse Square. As we checked in, my heart beat ever faster in anticipation of the pleasures that lay ahead. No sooner had the bellboy taken us upstairs, deposited our luggage and departed with his tip than Colin and I would fall into each other’s arms and make mad and passionate love, sealing our marriage and
marking the beginning of a good and constructive lifetime together.
Colin, however, had other ideas. Making no move to fill the empty space looming between us, he said, ‘I’m exhausted. I still haven’t recovered from my jet lag. You don’t mind if I rest for a while, do you?’
Covering my disappointment, I said, ‘Of course not. While you do that I’ll phone Mummy and my brother and sisters and give them the news.’
Somewhere in a corner of my mind into which I did not wish to delve, I did register how odd it was that he had not even kissed me since our marriage. The eternal optimist, I put it down to tiredness and looked forward to a show of ardour when he awoke.
When Colin finally surfaced, he did not leap upon me, as any of the other men I had been out with would have done. In fact, he suggested that we took a walk around the city, as this might be the only time we would ever be there. How perspicacious of him, I thought, misunderstanding his motives and setting a pattern which became the hallmark of the marriage as it lurched ever downwards to its ultimate destination.
Our great romance was certainly not following any script known to lovers. After we’d strolled around for a few minutes, Colin suggested we stopped in a ‘pub’ for a drink. We then went from ‘pub’ to ‘pub’, as he called the bars. Because I did not know him, I had no idea what to make of his behaviour; but I didn’t like it one bit.
However, I wasn’t about to start out my marriage by being demanding, so I gave him his head and let him get on with it. When I got hungry, I said so, and we went somewhere nondescript where I ate and he drank.
‘My stomach is bothering me,’ he said. I seized upon that as the explanation for his strange conduct.
At about ten o’clock a buoyant Colin and a perplexed and increasingly annoyed Georgie were approaching Rittenhouse Square on the way back to the Endicott Hotel when a passer-by stopped and asked Colin, who was smoking a cigarette, for a light. Within seconds he had asked this stranger back to our room. I was so taken aback I literally gasped. What’s he trying to avoid? I wondered, developing a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I found out ten minutes later, after the hotel receptionist refused to let him take his ‘friend’ up to the room on the grounds that it was against hotel policy. He fulminated, I agreed it was an intrusion upon his liberty and we headed upstairs as the ‘friend’ was being led out by the hotel staff. No sooner had we closed the door of our room than Colin began pacing the floor like a caged beast. Sucking on his cigarette, he stomped back and forth.
‘I wouldn’t take it so much to heart if I were you,’ I said, thinking he was still annoyed at the hotel staff.
‘It’s nothing to do with that. I’m uptight because I might not be able to satisfy you. You see,’ he said, dropping the first bombshell, ‘I’ve never had a relationship with a girl in my life.’
Stunned, I said, ‘I’m not sure I’m following you.’
‘I’m not a virgin or anything like that. I’ve had sex with prostitutes. In fact, Pa sent me to a bordello when I was sixteen. He said that was the best way to break your duck.’
Suppressing the thought that this was surely a conversation which we should have had before the wedding, and wondering where Jeanie had got the idea that Colin was some sort of Lothario, I resolved to be gracious and constructive. In a funny sort of way, I was suddenly almost relieved that it was something which I believed to be trivial.