Authors: Lady Colin Campbell
Colin would later tell me, in February 1975, that he had a partner in Britain who rescued the mess he had made of their carefully made plans. How true this was, I did not know then and I do not know now. Obviously it was in his interest to minimise the part he had played, and it is quite possible that he was the sole as well as prime mover in this sordid scheme. All I know with any certainty is that someone tipped off the
Sunday People
that I had two birth certificates, something that only Colin, Ian, my parents, the registrar of births, deaths and marriages and I then knew.
The
Sunday People,
I was told, sent two journalists out to Jamaica to dig up the dirt on me. Although they were able to get hold of the amended birth certificate, they encountered a solid wall of resistance from friends, relations, staff and servants alike, despite offering bribes to both the rich (who were insulted) and the poor (who were too honourable and decent to succumb). The
Sunday People
now had no option but to bounce the story back into the lap of its paid hitman, Jolyon Wilde.
Meanwhile, in Jamaica, Colin was back on the bottle in a big way, using the ‘pressure’ of the interview with Wilde as an excuse. Now I can see why he needed to drink, but at the time I was incredulous.
‘What pressure? You gave the interview of your own accord. Why make a mountain out of a molehill?’
That Christmas vacation was anything but a holiday.
Colin was totally out of control. But this time my anxiety about the comfort of others was tempered with self-interest, and his behaviour was so irrational that it made the task of announcing the impending divorce much easier. On several occasions my cousin, Abe Azan, who was a doctor, even had to administer sedatives intravenously to calm down Colin, who would work himself up into such Valium-, amphetamine- and alcohol induced states that he seemed in danger of exploding.
By Christmas Day, his behaviour was so bizarre that I could scarcely believe it myself. My father’s nephew, Winston Ziadie, his charming wife Carole and their children came to visit after mass. Their three-year-old son Troy was the most beautiful child you could imagine, and Colin took an unexpected shine to him. So Colin doesn’t dislike all children, I thought, happy to see some good in him. In the hurly-burly of a family gathering of twenty or more people, I did not notice Colin leave the back verandah, but some time later Sharman said to me, ‘You’d better go up to the pool. Colin’s up there with Troy.’ He was in no condition to be in charge of a toddler beside a swimming pool, so I went up to fetch them. Colin was sitting on the verandah with Troy on his lap.
‘Come on, give Uncle Colin another hug,’ he was saying drunkenly, his mouth open like a guppy in search of food. Troy seemed uneasy, as if he didn’t know what was going on, and wasn’t too sure whether he liked it, either.
‘So how are things going?’ I greeted them. ‘I’m going to take Troy down to Carole and Winston.’
When I returned, I let my instincts do all the work. ‘I am not going back to New York with you and I want you to file for divorce as soon as you get back. This separation/non-separation has gone on long enough. The failure of this marriage has been entirely due to you, and you’re going to accept the responsibility and pay the price, both financially and morally. After the divorce, I’ll return to New York, ship my stuff to London and close down the apartment.’
‘It’s not what you think,’ he reiterated.
‘I haven’t said anything about what I think.’
‘You don’t need to. It’s written all over your face.’
‘Colin, you’ve known since last month that I want a divorce, so don’t act as if this is the be-all and end-all.’ I snapped.
So he wanted to put ideas in my head, did he? Fine. ‘Then you tell me this, Colin. If it’s what you are insisting I thought, even though it hadn’t occurred to me, why the sudden interest in Troy when you’ve always gone on and on about how you can’t stand children.’
‘He’s cute.’
‘So is Andrew.’ Andrew was my sister’s little boy of the same age.
‘But Andrew isn’t beautiful.’
‘Shades of Oscar Wilde in the witness box. You obviously don’t realise the significance of what you’re saying,’ I said.
‘I swear it’s not what you think,’ he said again.
‘Whether it is or isn’t makes not a scrap of difference. No one knows about this, and no one will. I’d be too ashamed to repeat it to anyone, if only because it reflects so appallingly upon my choice of husband. But if this conversation is anything to go by, no wonder,’ I said bitterly, ‘you never wanted children.’
Thereafter, until after the divorce, I spent as little time with Colin as I could. Although I remained civil, I spoke to him only when I had to. No words will ever convey how utterly bereft I was. I felt an utter fool for having stayed and stayed and stayed with someone who patently had not been worth the trouble. My one consolation was that enough time had elapsed since the wedding for me to leave without the brevity of the marriage being ridiculous, or its failure reflecting upon my femininity. Had I been able to walk away with at least a vestige of respect for Colin, I might have had less of a sensation of having been sullied, but now there was nothing I could do but swallow hard, throw back my shoulders and hope that I could live down a marriage made in hell.
Colin, meanwhile, was playing an altogether more mercenary game. On 28 December, Jolyon Wilde telephoned Colin at Duncan’s on the north coast of Jamaica, where we were staying as the guests of Judy Ann MacMillan, the Jamaican artist who is my oldest friend (our mothers were best friends when we were children). This time he was moving in for the kill.
In the Jamaican countryside in the days before mobile phones made everyone accessible, no private country houses or beach cottages had telephones. We were contactable only through the hotel adjoining the MacMillan beach cottage. As a result, I had to suffer the indignity of talking to Wilde about the most private matter of my life on a public telephone in a public place.
‘We know you changed your sex,’ he insisted when Colin handed me over. ‘I’ve got your original birth certificate in front of me. It says you were born George William Ziadie, male, and that your name was changed to Georgia Arianna Ziadie, female, in 1971.’
‘If you had read it carefully, you would have noted that it states that the birth certificate was amended, which means that my sex was not changed. Birth certificates in British territories can only ever be amended if a genuine mistake was made at the time of registration. They cannot be altered if the person in question changed sex.’
‘Your sex was changed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. There’s no point in denying it. We have the proof.’
‘How odd it is that you have proof of something that never happened, at a place I’ve never been to in my life,’ I said icily.
In an effort to gain my co-operation, Wilde then began mentioning what he must have thought were large sums of money. ‘You can make ten, maybe twenty thousand pounds out of this if you give us the exclusive.’
‘Just who is “us”?’ I asked, laying a trap for him.
‘The
Sunday People
.’
‘Ah. The same publication you were representing when you spoke to me on Friday 13 December.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, almost proudly.
‘Now, Mr Wilde,’ I said with exaggerated politeness. ‘You tell me, what sort of person puts her trust in someone who has already shown himself to be untrustworthy?’
‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he said nastily. ‘If you don’t cooperate, we can still write the story and it will be harder on you.’
‘In other words, if I don’t sell you my foot, you’ll chop off my hand?’
‘That’s about it.’
I pointed out that I did not need the money he was offering. Remembering what Olga Maitland had said in London when we had gone to lunch at Walton’s, I said, ‘I’ll sue you if you print anything about me that isn’t true. I did not change my sex and you cannot say I did.’
Eventually Wilde asked to speak to Colin. ‘And why on earth would you want to speak to him?’ I asked.
‘He has a right to comment on his wife, doesn’t he?’
I leaned on the railing while Colin stood listening to whatever it was Wilde was saying. I was delighted when he responded with, ‘My wife is as much a woman as any, and more than most.’ He then motioned to me to get him a drink, which entailed going to the house for my purse before fetching one from the hotel bar. I was itching to stay and listen, but I did not want to antagonise Colin. I couldn’t take the chance of him turning against me at such a crucial moment. Obviously, he was getting rid of me so that he could say things to Wilde behind my back that he would never have dared say in front of me.
It was only after the article was published that I learned what Colin had said. The opening sentence of the article was: Lord Colin Campbell last night revealed that his wife of nine months was once a man. I was incandescent with rage when I finally saw this treacherous epistle, which was not until several days after it was published. In the interim I had only my brother’s word from London that the story had been ‘terrible’ and was a ‘pack of lies’. He could not read the article out to me because he had not kept it (‘Too disgusting,’ he said), which was touching, but frustrating too. In the days before fax machines and overnight courier services, both Jolyon Wilde and Colin
Campbell had relied upon my isolation to achieve their objective.
‘Wilde says he gave you a break and made the story tame. The only reason he did that is because I promised him an exclusive on your life story if he went easy on you,’ said Colin.
‘You
what
? You
promised
him
my life story
? Let me get this straight. You, my ex-husband-to-be, promised him
my
life story? By what right did you promise someone something to which you have no right?’ I shrieked.
‘I was only trying to help,’ Colin said lamely. ‘I thought it would make things better for you.’
‘When I left you talking to Wilde, I was under the impression that he didn’t have enough information to run
any
story
at all
,’ I countered, little realising how close I was to the truth. ‘Just who were you helping, Colin? Me, or my deadliest enemy?’
‘I know the press better than you.’ That old line. ‘If I hadn’t done what I did, he’d have hacked you to death. You should be thanking me. You can learn from my experience. Since you don’t want the focus to be on you, let’s sell our joint story. Wilde has promised me he’ll let you deny the allegations of a sex change.’
‘How very magnanimous of him. The cheek of it,’ I exploded. My sisters and parents were listening on the back verandah, disgust at Colin written all over their faces. ‘He’s going to allow me to deny the very slur he created, as if it were some favour. A slur, incidentally, Colin, which he put into your mouth. How come you’re not furious with him for taking such a liberty when you’ve smashed me and others around merely for being nice to you?’
‘Don’t take this so personally. It won’t do you any good. The only way to achieve your ends is to give him what he wants. We can make a packet for ourselves in the process and the publicity will do your book good. Stop being so negative. Now that you’ve had this publicity, your reason for refusing to publish the book with Warner’s disappears. Don’t you see the advantage?’
‘All I see is that you’ve been fine-tuning the details of a deal which you have every reason to know I would never have allowed you to strike. What I want to know is, when did these discussions with Wilde take place?’
‘I’ve phoned him and he’s phoned me.’
‘You’ve phoned him?’ I screamed. ‘When and where?’
‘Here. I even spoke to him this morning.’
‘You have one hell of a nerve, using my parents’ money to set up a story which I don’t want to sell. Listen to me, and listen very carefully.’ I enunciated every word exaggeratedly. ‘I
will never – repeat, never – sell the story of my life to a newspaper
. Apples will have to grow on lilac trees before I would ever even
spit in the direction of Jolyon Wilde, or that rag he represents. What I find astonishing in all of this isn’t that Wilde will write this sort of disgusting material, but that any husband of mine, even one as debauched and deranged as you, would try to edge me in the direction of someone who has done his level best to destroy my reputation.’
My parents warned me not to give Colin any more information about myself or any of the family.
‘Keep your mouth shut and he won’t have any information to purvey,’ Mummy advised. ‘Mark my words, if you don’t keep a lid on that Judas, he’s going to sell you down the river.’
Controversy then raged within the family for the next week on the question of whether I should return to New York with Colin. I wanted to stay in Jamaica, a decision my father supported. But my mother and Sharman argued that I must return, otherwise I would be leaving myself open to the possibility of him selling a story claiming he had dumped me. Against my better instincts, but appreciating the logic of their argument, I boarded a flight for New York on Sunday 5 January 1975. Colin Campbell was with me, full of assurances that we would find a way to defeat the slurs which had now circumnavigated the globe on the front pages of just about every tabloid from Fleet Street to Freetown.
Within half an hour of our arrival at the apartment in New York, I answered the door to be confronted by the pinched features of Jolyon Wilde. Without a word, I went to close the door, but he pitched his weight against it, elbowed me in the side and forced his way in.
‘What gives you the right to force your way into my home?’ I demanded.
‘You husband invited me.’
‘My husband
invited
you?’ I echoed in disbelief.
‘How else would I know when you were arriving?’
‘And what, pray, did you do that for?’ I hissed at Colin.
Both men answered at the same time, Colin once more mouthing his nonsense about ‘our’ story; Wilde cutting straight to the bottom line.
‘He’s said I can have the rights to your life story. I’m here to collect.’