Authors: Lady Colin Campbell
I tried to lead as normal a life as possible. Above all this meant seeing friends, irrespective of Colin’s state, or whether he tagged along or not – and he not only broke arrangements but was an unpredictable companion when he did turn up. Mark Friend was then living in New York, and I often saw him. We would go together to see Huntington Hartford in his beautiful apartment at Beekman Place, or the Cuevas (Rockefeller) family at their house in the East Sixties. Barbara Taylor Bradford was also a good friend, as was Sarah Spencer-Churchill, and I saw a lot of them, too, though I always met Sarah on my own. Charles Dismukes the attorney and Charles Patterson of Hammacher–Schlemmer were also firm friends, as were Harrison Cultra and his partner, Dick Barker, whom I’d met shortly after my wedding. I also kept in close touch with Frances Bacal, my guardian when I was at FIT, who was as horrified as all my other friends by Colin’s antics. But everyone except Sarah put up a brave front whenever he was present, drunkenly holding the floor or lurching around like a robot with fused joints. No matter how kind they were, however, the sad fact remained that my husband was an excruciating embarrassment.
It was with considerable relief that I received a letter from Bill Paley late in August. He wanted to offer me a job at CBS. A meeting was arranged for mid-September. In the meantime, I
awoke each morning to a sodden addict delivering recommendations as to how I should ‘play’ my meeting with someone he had never even met.
I was careful not to rock the boat. After five weeks on the booze and drugs (Colin had three doctors supplying him with Valium, and dealers with God knows what else), he was a complete stranger to reason or civility. It was pointless discussing anything with him, so whenever I couldn’t escape or ensure the presence of a third party, I just let his ravings wash over me. Two days before my meeting with Bill Paley, Colin stumbled over to me in an approximation of good natured drunkenness and held my chin upwards to give me a kiss on the cheek (this was very unusual, but he was well pleased with what he construed as my submissive acceptance of his hectoring).
‘Everyshing’sh gonna be awright when you get the job, jusht you wait andshee,’ he said, and collapsed on top of me, breaking three of my ribs.
After the doctor left, Colin was more solicitous than he’d been since the early days of our marriage, but by the following day, he had returned to his customary frame of mind.
‘You’d better get that job from that rich Yid. I don’t care if you have to screw him as long as you get it. We need the bread.’
‘You disgust me,’ I said, the words popping out before I had a chance to swallow them.
‘I disgust you?
I
disgust
you
? You, a little colonial are disgusted by the son of the Duke of Argyll, chief of the Clan Campbell and Lord of the Isles? Thanks to me, you’re related to the fucking Queen of England, you stupid cunt. I’ll show you what disgust is all about.’
With that, he launched himself in, fists flying. After the initial flurry of blows, I thought he had stopped. After all, when he smashed up my face, it had all been over in moments. But this time it was different. As I was getting up off the floor he turned around, his face frighteningly distorted, aimed very deliberately at my trunk, and kicked me as hard as he could in the same ribs he had broken the day before.
Winded, I wondered if I was going to die. Initially, I could do nothing. Only when the shock of the impact wore off did I gulp as hard as possible, hoping to get some air into my lungs, which felt as if they had collapsed.
Colin stood over me, glowering, an expression of satisfaction besmirching what I had once seen as a handsome face. That expression intrigued me. I had seen it in enough films, and once before on a living face (his, when he had first hit me). It was pure, unadulterated viciousness.
‘Get up,’ he ordered.
Unable to breathe, much less speak, I was certainly not in a fit state to get up. He launched into a frenzy of kicking, all the while screaming, ‘If you won’t get up, take these like a woman.’
I cannot describe how terrifying it is to be kicked by a man doing a convincing impersonation of a crazed fiend, especially one who is nearly seven inches taller and several stone heavier than you. The need to escape was atavistic. I could still barely breathe, but my instinct for survival propelled me to try scurrying for the bedroom. Colin thwarted my every attempt to flee, dragging me back with brutal relish. Sometimes it was by my hair; others by my neck or arms; once by an ankle.
‘You’ll never escape from me,’ yelled a crazed voice like something from a bad 1940s Hollywood movie.
For nearly an hour Colin continued to abuse. Finally, even he grew tired, and he collapsed, wet with the effort, on to the sofa. It’s over, I thought automatically, so punch-drunk I could no longer feel relief or any other emotion. But my brain was still functioning. I dragged myself to the bedroom and on to the bed, planning to telephone the doctor as soon as I could summon up the strength. I was in acute pain. I had had a bad cold as well as the broken ribs from the day before, and these new injuries – whatever they were – left me in agony every time I tried to breathe or, worse still, had to cough. When I felt stable enough to call the doctor, I picked up the telephone by the bed.
I don’t know whether the click of the telephone in the drawing room alerted Colin, or whether he was lying in wait for me to ‘make a mistake’, as he put it, or indeed whether he just happened to be coming into the room, but I never did get to speak to the doctor. He strode in, arms folded, legs apart.
‘Put it down,’ he ordered.
He crossed over to the phone, grabbed it out of my hand and erupted into a frenzy of furious blows.
‘You bitch, who are you phoning? What are you going to do? Tell people I beat you up? What sort of wife tells on her husband? You’re worse than my fucking mother.’
As the blows rained down upon me, I lowered my head and covered it with my arms, trying to protect my skull, which was taking the greater part of the punishment.
At the first opportune moment, I made a dash for the front door, hoping to get outside to safety. But Colin blocked my exit and dragged me back, beating and kicking me. Thereafter, every time I tried to escape, the same thing happened. Throughout, he kept saying, as if it were something to be proud of, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not touching your face,’ and ‘You’ll never get away from me. Never.’
The attacks went on for over six hours. When the abuse had still not stopped after midnight, I realised I would have to be resourceful if I were going to get out of the apartment alive. I went into the bathroom while Colin lay prone on the sofa, gathering his strength for a further bout. Opening the medicine chest, I took out all of his Valium tablets. There must have been about a hundred. Good, I thought, flushing all but six down the lavatory, let the bastard think I’ve taken them all. I swallowed
the six tablets in the certain knowledge that they would do me no lasting harm, remembering what constituted a safe dose from the time I had tried to force my father’s hand in Jamaica.
I have no recollection of what happened after the tablets took effect. Patricia Fleischmann later told me that Colin rang her and said I’d tried to kill myself. She telephoned for an ambulance, which took me to the Lennox Hill Hospital. The first thing I remember was the medical team asking me my name. They also asked me what I’d taken and how many, and I told them. They nevertheless took the precaution of pumping my stomach, and I will never forget the terrible sensation as they inserted the tube, or my struggle to stop them.
The next day I was interviewed by a psychiatrist. All suicide attempts were treated as criminal matters in New York in those days, for suicide was against the law. You could not be released until you were perceived as being no threat to yourself.
‘I did not try to kill myself,’ I insisted, repeating what I had told the medical staff the night before. I explained how it seemed the only way to escape from a battering that had gone on for over six hours. And the evidence was there for all to see. My ribs had been re-broken; my body was a mass of bruises and contusions. My neck was completely discoloured from the innumerable times Colin had choked me. My arms were covered in finger marks and bruises from kicks; my legs looked like a Rorschach test. My bosom was a splodge of purple. My back, which I had not yet seen, was so black and blue that not one square inch of white flesh remained, and my little sister would tell me that it remained marked for over a year thereafter.
‘You need Al-Anon,’ the psychiatrist said.
I must have looked perplexed, for she then explained, ‘You’ve never heard of it? It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous, only it’s for the victims of alcoholics.’ She wrote the name and a telephone number on a notepad, tore off the piece of paper and handed it to me with an expression of profound kindness. ‘We can release you, if you want,’ she said.
‘But is it safe for you to return home?’
‘I’m sure it is,’ I replied, keen to get out of the hospital.
Because Colin Campbell was my next of kin, the hospital contacted him to pick me up. One would imagine that anyone who had so brutalised his wife would have turned up full of remorse, but once we were in the taxi on the way home, it became apparent that Colin felt anything but guilty.
‘Don’t you try to stick me with the blame for your suicide attempt,’ he said, colder than an icy river. ‘It’s your own trip.’
Shocked, I asked, ‘What are you talking about? I didn’t try to kill myself. Taking those tablets was the only way to escape from you. I don’t want to die, I want to live. And I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I haven’t been able to do since you entered my life.’
No sooner had we stepped through the door to the apartment than Colin started haranguing me. This time I rose to the occasion.
‘Wasn’t it enough that last night you proved what a big man you are by beating up a defenceless woman? You want another shot? Is that it? You haven’t had enough of a fix at beating up someone who is half your size? Well, go find someone your own size to beat up, you perverted bully,’ I screamed. ‘This isn’t last night and I’m not going to be silent. I’ll scream down the building if that’s what it takes to keep you away from me.’
His response was to move towards me menacingly, his lip curled in his now characteristic expression of malevolence. Without saying a word, I stepped towards the coffee table, picked up my silver cigarette box and hurled it at him. He side-stepped the missile and it crashed through the huge picture window and down into East Eighty-Third Street below. Without missing a beat, I grabbed the purple Scottish cut-glass fruit bowl Maggie Weir had given us as a wedding present, and flung it across at him. Regrettably, that, too, missed.
‘You cunt,’ he snapped, storming off.
It proved to me that the way to deal with a bully is not to be nice, or kind or gracious, but to pick up a bigger club than the one he is using and hit him with it, with more force and, it is to be hoped, more painful consequences.
Exhausted, I went to bed. At six o’clock, Sal, the doorman, awoke me by ringing the buzzer. ‘Mrs Campbell, Mr Barker is on the way up to see you,’ he said. My God, I remembered, I’d arranged to have Dick Barker over for a drink. Before I had a chance to change out of the shorts and T-shirt I’d been sleeping in, Dick was ringing the doorbell. Dick, of course, was gay, so I didn’t think twice about my appearance on opening the door to him. He gasped. ‘My God, Georgie, what’s happened to you?’
‘Colin,’ I said simply.
‘I knew he was violent, but I never expected him to be violent with you. You can’t stay here,’ he said dramatically.
He crossed over to the desk, picked up the telephone and called Margaret Hawkins, a good friend of his and recent friend of ours, whose father was the president of Ireland at the time.
‘Get your passport. Don’t bother with anything else – not even your toothbrush,’ Dick said to me once he had rung off.
I spent the night at Margaret’s and the following morning, Dick put me on a plane to my sister Sharman in Canada. When my brother-in-law saw me, he insisted upon examining me. Afterwards, he declared, ‘This is the worst case of wife-beating I’ve seen in all my years as a doctor. I’ve got to phone Uncle Mike. He’ll kill that lunatic when he hears what he’s done to you.’
Oh my God, I thought. That’s all I need, Daddy being brought into this. Dreading the inevitable recriminations and criticism, I
stood by as Ken made the call and described my condition. To my surprise, Daddy, for once, did not put me in the wrong.
‘I knew he was no good from the moment I clapped eyes on him,’ he said. ‘Come back home and I’ll arrange a divorce for you.’
Coming from a devout Catholic like my father, it was support indeed. But I knew it wasn’t right to return to Jamaica, to being the daughter, when I had the potential to be my own person in New York. So I decided to return to the apartment I had found and paid for and the life I hoped to make for myself. Colin was the problem, so he could leave.
It was a penitent husband to whom I returned. My departure had really scared him. Doubtless the prospect of living solely off his own paltry income, or worse, actually having to work for a living, had brought him to his senses. I was still young, and a lot less worldly-wise than I am now, so I listened while Colin once more swore undying remorse, as he had done the previous May. I agreed to give him one last chance. Once more he made empty promises to give up drinking (he had a drink in his hand at the time) and the drugs which, it now emerged, he had been taking all along. I shuddered to think what he had been up to, or where he had got them.
‘I don’t want to know,’ I said. ‘If the police pick you up, I want to be able to say in all truth that I didn’t know what you were up to, or when. Just make sure you don’t bring
anything
into this flat. When I say
anything
, I mean
anything
. From grass to LSD to cocaine, whatever. If you think I’m going to end up serving fifteen years in an American prison because you’re too self-indulgent to say no to the things that are ruining your life and your health, you can think again. And Colin, if you think you can lie to my face and sneak behind my back the way you did after your last set of undying promises, let me spell out the consequences to you. They’re spelled D-I-V-O-R-C-E.’