Deadly Divorces (9 page)

A
nthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, smiled shyly at his new bride. Nearly 25 years his junior, with soft brown eyes and a wild mane of
brown-blonde
hair, to the 63-year-old Earl Jamila M’Barek seemed be a tantalising mass of contradictions. Overtly sexy as her job in a hostess bar demanded, she also loved to play the homemaker, cooking up delicious meals and serving them to him as though his comfort mattered to her more than anything else. A relatively well off divorcee in her own right, she also seemed gratifyingly impressed by his aristocratic background and substantial inherited wealth. Not yet 40, she was young enough to satisfy his taste for youthful, exotic-looking models yet not so young that she made him
look like a dirty – and foolish – old man. Overall, the Earl was infatuated with his Tunisian-Dutch wife and convinced that despite already having two failed marriages behind him, this time it really would be third time lucky.

It was November 2002 and they’d returned to the south of France, which they had both come to regard as home, after getting married in Holland. The sun dancing across the surface of the turquoise Mediterranean seemed to reinforce the optimism Anthony felt inside. Here he was – a wealthy man with few responsibilities – living on the French Riviera’s glorious Côte d’Azur with its luxury yachts and glamorous women. Now he was married to this gorgeous, fascinating woman with mesmerising eyes that seemed at certain times to be dark pools of sympathy and solicitude and others, when the sun caught them, flashing amber like those of a wildcat.

So determined was the Earl to believe he was doing the right thing that he deliberately blotted out any warning voices that might have intruded upon his honeymoon period. He chose to forget that he’d already cancelled plans for a spring wedding to Jamila as it ‘didn’t feel right’ and he also made a conscious decision not to invite any of his family in Britain to join in the celebration: he could guess what they’d have had to say. In the past couple of years the Earl’s sister Frances and two sons Anthony and Nicholas had watched him lurch from one unsuitable relationship to another with ever increasing disapproval and concern.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper winced as he remembered his previous girlfriend Nathalie Lions, the 29-year-old French lingerie model he had been involved with until recently. Of course he’d been besotted with her, who wouldn’t be? In addition to the dark, exotic looks he always found such a turn-on, she’d also had a perfect figure – tiny waist and large, pneumatic breasts. So what if they were just a little bit surgically enhanced? Lots of women, particularly models, put themselves under the knife to enhance their natural assets these days; it was almost an occupational hazard.

The lovesick Earl had paraded Nathalie around in public like a new state-of-the-art sportscar. He revelled in the envious glances from other men at clubs in the south of France, London and Barbados. She made him feel young again – as if some of her youthful energy rubbed off on him the way her perfume sometimes lingered on his clothes. Anxious not to appear the frumpy sad-sap older escort, he took to wearing lurid silk shirts, leather trousers and gold chains, hoping the garish clothes would detract attention from his thinning grey hair and sagging paunch.

Whatever Nathalie wanted, he’d given her – a
£
100,000 Rolex watch, an Audi TT sports car. Friends and family warned him that he was turning himself into a walking chequebook for the young beauty but he was too infatuated to care. Only when a British tabloid printed revelations of Nathalie’s lurid past as a Penthouse ‘pet’ had
the Earl finally, grudgingly, parted company with his young paramour. By then he’d already lavished around
£
1m on her.

Hot on the heels of the Nathalie Lions débâcle, the Earl knew his impulsive marriage to Jamila wasn’t exactly going to be a cause for celebration among the family back home. He didn’t imagine there would be many champagne corks popping at his 9,000-acre estate in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset when news of his nuptials broke. That’s why he’d kept the wedding deliberately low-key. There’d be plenty of time to prove to them that he’d got it spot on this time, that he was going to be married to Jamila for the rest of his life.

In this at least, he would be proven right. But what the Earl had no way of knowing then, as he lovingly brushed a lock of long, sun-bleached hair away from his new wife’s face, was how little of that life he had left.

The first ten-elevenths of the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury’s life was about as far removed as possible from his later decadent existence on the French Riviera. Born on 22 May 1938, Anthony Ashley-Cooper had shouldered the mantle of responsibility from an early age after his father died when he was only 8. From then on, he’d spent his time shuttling backwards and forwards between Paris – where his French mother lived – and boarding school at Eton. During his
holidays he often stayed in Dorset with his grandparents, getting to know the estate he would one day inherit.

Wimborne St Giles is a sprawling estate that takes in four villages and a huge seventeenth-century family home. It is quintessentially English in the way Americans always envision English country life to be – tea and cakes in the afternoon, church fêtes on the village green and a meandering river by which to picnic on long, hot summer’s days. The various Earls of Shaftesbury have overseen the estate with a generally benevolent, progressive patriarchy. The 7th Earl was a leading child labour reformer in the Victorian era and his work in making education compulsory for everyone led to him being commemorated by the statue of Eros in London’s Piccadilly Circus, whose arrow points directly in the direction of Wimborne St Giles.

The motto of the Ashley family is ‘Love, Serve’ and for the first 60 years of his life, the 10th Earl seemed to accomplish both those things with a dutiful cheerfulness. After succeeding to the earldom on his grandfather’s death in 1961, he ran the estate with efficiency and respect, earning a reputation for himself as a leading conservationist. He knew most of his residents on the estate by name and became president of the Hawk and Owl Trust and vice-president of Sir David Attenborough’s Butterfly Conservation charity.

In matters of love Anthony Ashley-Cooper wove a slightly more erratic early path, however. He just wasn’t attracted to
the English rose debutante type whom he’d described while at Eton as ‘round shouldered’ and ‘unsophisticated’. Instead he much preferred the dark, smouldering looks of the Mediterranean women whom he met on a skiing holiday. In 1966 he married Italian born Bianca le Vien, the former wife of an American film producer that he met on a skiing holiday. As she was a divorcee more than 10 years his senior, the marriage raised many a perfectly groomed eyebrow among the British upper classes particularly as it took place in secret without any of the groom’s family present. When it ended a decade later due to his infidelity, the Earl once more became one of the most eligible men in the country, causing a flutter in the hearts of ambitious society matrons with daughters of marriageable age. His second venture into matrimony was with another divorcee: Christina Casella, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador. This marriage would last nearly a quarter of a century and would produce two male heirs, Anthony and Nicholas.

On his regular foreign jaunts Anthony enjoyed a break from stiff upper lip constraints and gave full rein to his fondness for good living and heavy drinking. Despite this, he was always careful to maintain his image at home as a committed member of the ruling elite. As the twentieth century wound to an end, it appeared the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury would live out his life in predictable respectability, carrying out his estate duties with diligence and keeping his playboy streak buried.

Some men go through a mid-life crisis in their forties or fifties when they start to question who they are, what they’re doing and what direction they want their life to take. Anthony Ashley-Cooper was over 60 when the death of his beloved mother triggered a full-blown identity crisis. He was completely devastated by her death as only sons of widowed mothers often are. It made him re-evaluate everything about his life and find it all cruelly wanting. Suddenly the man he’d tried so hard to be all those years – the conscientious, conservative family man – was exposed as a sham. It was a mask he’d worn to please those around him.

The death of a parent comes as a two-pronged attack. It at once takes away the compass by which we’ve steered our lives up to this point and at the same time reminds us sharply of our own mortality and of the fact that life is not – as the cliché goes – a dress rehearsal. Anthony
Ashley-Cooper
’s sister, Lady Frances, describes her brother as being left an ‘orphan at the age of 61’ by their mother’s death. She believes it caused him to ‘lose his grip on reality’.

The Earl, however, would have described it as finally facing up to a different reality – one he’d been suppressing all his life. Without his mother he felt bereft and at the same time liberated – a uniquely confusing combination of emotions. He missed her terribly but equally he felt as if a weight had been lifted off him. The burden of being the ‘good son’ and the ‘responsible aristocrat’ and of living up to expectations he now saw had been foisted on him. At an
age when most people are pocketing their free bus passes and slipping quietly into retirement, Anthony
Ashley-Cooper
decided it was time to start again. He was going to be reborn.

The first year of the new Millennium was a tumultuous one for the 10th Earl. He divorced his wife Christina after 24 years together and moved out of the Wimborne estate, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to his son Anthony. Settling briefly in Hove, on the south coast, he embarked on the bar-hopping lifestyle that would characterise his last years, finding comfort in the kind of female company that can be bought for the price of a bottle of champagne. Drawn back to France, he acquired a luxury flat in Versailles, recreating wholesale two rooms from his late mother’s house in a desperate bid to inject some familiarity and stability into his increasingly wayward life. But it was in the south of France, the playground of the idle rich, that Anthony found a place that appealed to his latent lust for glitz and glamour and his repudiation of the mundane and the middle-of-the-road, the dull and the dutiful. It would take the Earl a long time to realise that the French Riviera was just like the glitterballs that adorned the ceilings of the nightclubs he was so fond of – sparkling and seductive on the outside but at heart empty and hollow.

There was a time when Cannes and Nice attracted the crème de la crème of celebrity society drawn by the fashionable clientele of its resorts, the dramatic rocky
coastline and the legend that had built up over the years. There was a decadent social scene where Europe’s beautiful people partied away against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. By the time the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury became a fixture at the clubs and bars here, however, the whiff of glamour had been largely overpowered by the stench of corruption.

Where once A-list film stars, writers and painters had walked bare foot along the beaches and danced al fresco on sultry summer nights, now the Côte d’Azur played host to a very different type of visitor. Organised gangs from Russia and North Africa now worked and played in the streets and squares stars such as Brigitte Bardot had once made their own. Around themselves they built up a seedy underworld of shady clubs and high- (and not so high) class prostitution. These were the kind of places where money can buy you anything – from a conversation to a private dance – and lonely old men with pockets deep enough to fork out
£
30 on a glass of bubbly can find plenty of willing company.

This was where Anthony Ashley-Cooper gravitated during the loose, lost years following his mother’s death. Several nights a week, the 6ft Earl, wearing one of his distinctive outfits often teamed with outsized red and black glasses, would knock on the metal grill of one of the private members clubs and burst in, introducing himself with the words: ‘I’m the Earl of Shaftesbury. I’m a millionaire.’ Not surprisingly Anthony never lacked
company for his forays into the Côte d’Azur’s shadowy underworld where he became known simply as ‘The Count’. There was always a steady stream of attractive young women happy to hang on his arm in exchange for money or jewellery, or trips to exotic locations.

While he loved the variety and the excitement of having lots of different women around him, the Count missed the comfort he’d enjoyed during his marriage: the feeling that there was someone there to come home to, to look out for him and to look after him. So when he met Jamila M’Barek she seemed like the answer to his prayers. Glamorous and attractive, and no stranger to the hostess bars he so loved, she appealed to his newly awakened wild side. As a mother of two, however, she also had a nurturing streak that gave him hope that he might once again be cared for, as he had been when his mother was alive.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he’d murmur into her ear. ‘I don’t want to be without you.’ But Jamila M’Barek had more pressing things on her mind than taking care of an ageing, alcohol-sozzled admirer. Growing up one of seven children of an abusive father, she’d learned young that life didn’t always offer up its bounty on a plate and that sometimes you had to do things you might not choose to in order to ultimately get what you want. In Jamila’s world, the end almost always justified the means. Like all of us, she was looking for love but for her love had become inextricably linked with money. It was a dangerous misconception.

Although her former husband – a Dutch millionaire – left her pretty well provided for, Jamila wanted more. She craved financial security and relished the finer things in life but seemed to lack the strong will and self-discipline needed to carve out a career for herself. Instead she relied on her greatest asset: her own physical charm. While her children were mostly cared for by their grandparents, Jamila had plenty of time to focus on herself, making sure her hair and clothes were perfect, watching and waiting for someone or something to come along and provide her with the life she believed she deserved. As she approached 40, often finding herself surrounded in the hostess bars by women half her age, Jamila must have known that her window of opportunity was closing fast. The Earl of Shaftesbury was just what she needed.