Frances: The Tragic Bride (11 page)

Frances may not have been greedy but she was, like many young girls, very keen on make-up and beauty routines, as Rita went on: ‘She loved make-up, doing her eyes, always having her hair done. She had very long nails, beautifully shaped. I remember her painting her nails with nail hardener. She got her hair done at Ray’s in Bethnal Green Road. Her hair always looked immaculate. You’d never see her without make-up.

‘She used to say, “I like to dress nice – to please him.”’

Rita Smith told me that it was her belief that had Frances and Reggie been able to develop their relationship in a normal way – crucially, spending time alone together – things might have been different. But the twins’ world didn’t permit such togetherness.

‘They didn’t get a lot of privacy, really,’ Rita continued. ‘If they were at Violet’s house, there were always people in and out; if they wanted to talk about something, they’d have to go in the front room. And Ronnie was always around, anyway.’

Ronnie was there, of course, the night Reggie first took Frances out to show her their new acquisition, Esmeralda’s Barn. At the roulette table, she was encouraged to have a flutter. In the club’s restaurant, they dined on fresh lobster, juicy steaks, and Frances laughed, in delight, when the maître d’ wheeled out the huge dessert trolley, groaning with fresh strawberries, black forest cake and all kinds of exotic gateaux. No, she didn’t want any more, she assured Reggie. Not even the cheeseboard. She’d just have her usual tipple, black coffee.

Reggie looked at his girl quizzically. He knew Frances was very weight conscious and tried to diet sometimes. But he did worry about her health.

When he’d first gone into prison, she’d written to tell him that she’d fainted one day at work. He’d told her to go and see a private doctor with the money he’d given her, and she’d written back to say she’d seen the doctor, and everything was okay. Some time later, she’d mentioned in a letter that her nerves were bad, and her hands were a bit shaky.

He’d written back that it was all that coffee she drank: ‘Coffee is only a stimulant and can’t do you any good,’ he’d told her. But with his obsessive curiosity about everything she did, he’d wondered what else was going on. ‘I hope you’ve not been taking any of them slimming tablets because they can make your nerves bad,’ he’d written.

Frances had assured him she wasn’t taking any tablets. But now, tonight, he noticed something he’d not spotted before. When she went to pick up the cup, wasn’t there just the tiniest hint of a shake in her hand? Or was he just imagining it?

Then Ronnie leaned across the table, interrupting his train of thought.

‘C’mon Reg, we’ve gotta go and talk to ’im,’ he boomed. And Reggie, momentarily, brushed his concerns to one side and switched back into business mode. Frances was fine. They were raking it in and the protection business had unlimited potential, now that the new West End casinos were springing up. Any problems, he’d sort them.

He was well and truly back in control.

CHAPTER 5

THE GILDED CAGE

B
y the autumn of 1961 it was well over a year since Reggie had come out of prison. Yet Frances continually stalled on their wedding plans, still insisting she was too young. Reggie took her on a short trip to Rotterdam in the Netherlands early in November, perhaps in an attempt to convince her, but there was no sign of any wedding bells.

Rita Smith remembered seeing quite a lot of Frances around that time. She had sensed somehow that Frances’s home life at Ormsby Street wasn’t that happy. Her brother Frankie had left home for good. ‘Her parents were never in and she was left on her own a lot of the time,’ Rita explained. ‘That’s why she liked coming to our house. One day she said to me, “You’re so lucky to have a mum and dad who are here for you. I have to make my own tea when I get in.”

‘Sometimes, if Reggie was going out somewhere and she didn’t want to go with him, he’d come next door to me and say, “Is it alright if Frankie comes and sits with you tonight?” Then he’d come back later and pick her up.

‘She’d say to me, “Oh, I wish you’d come out with us.” But I had Kimmie, she was only a baby then. Frances loved being with us. I think she felt more comfortable here. I got the impression she didn’t enjoy the clubs, the showbiz parties he took her to. She wanted a quiet, ordinary kind of life.

‘We used to get the chairs out in the back garden and he would go and get jellied eels and she loved it.’

Rita noticed a distinct tension between Frances and Ronnie: ‘She’d be sitting in Aunt Violet’s house and he would go, “Why don’t you make a cup of tea?” and she would just ignore him. Then Reg would say, “Leave her alone. I’ll make the tea.”

‘She wanted to go to work. He’d give her money and say, “There’s no need to go to work.” But you didn’t know, perhaps she was too scared to go to work.’

Maureen Flanagan, former ‘Page Three’ girl and actress, was a regular visitor to the Kray twins’ home in the early sixties.

Maureen, or ‘Flan’ as she’s known, was a hairdresser at the time. At twenty, she was a newly married girl working in a local salon. She’d go round to the Vallance Road house each Thursday evening to do Violet’s hair. Her friendship with the Kray family became one which would eventually span a lifetime, until the end of their lives.

‘The first time I met Frances would have been around the end of 1961,’ Flan said. ‘She was sitting in the kitchen, where Violet made the tea.

‘I didn’t have to ask who she was, of course, because I already knew that Reggie was going out with the Shea daughter. Everyone knew who she was. I’d also heard that she was very lovely. I’d got that from Mrs Kray. “Oh, you know, Reg’s got a girlfriend, she’s very pretty, Flan,” she told me.

‘I remember looking at Frances and thinking, “Oh yes, you are lovely.” She was a beauty, hazel eyes, thick browny auburn hair, nice skin and a nice little rounded figure.

‘But it was her face that drew you in – especially her eyes.

‘Knowing the twins, and with me thinking Reggie was a far more handsome man than his twin, I did think: “Hmm… they make a nice looking couple, especially when the man looks as if he’s been around a bit, like Reggie.”

‘That was how it worked in the East End back then, a good-looking young girl and a man several years older. And I knew Reg well enough to know that he’d want someone who was outstanding to look at. So that when he walked into a place, she was on his arm and they’d be a pair close to perfection.’

In those days, Flan, a stunning leggy blonde, was also well known as a local beauty. ‘So as girls do, I checked her out carefully. And she was immaculate, just a straight pencil skirt and a sweater. But not a hair out of place.

‘I went straight into hairdresser mode: “Oh you must be Frances, I’m Maureen,” I said. “D’you ever wear your hair up?”

‘“Yes, in a pleat,” she said shyly. Well, we all had that hairdo. Upswept hairdos were all the rage.

‘“Before I go, I’ll put it up for you,” I promised her.

‘I could see she was shy. I suppose she didn’t like to say no. She just nodded.

‘She seemed a bit timid. But she had a lovely smile. Then I did Mrs Kray’s hair, put the rollers in. When I’d finished I said, “Sit here Frances and I’ll put your hair up.”

‘What I noticed was you had to keep talking to her to get a response. And when you asked her a direct question, she seemed a bit cagey when she answered you. Like I’d just been to see Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood in a film called
Love with the Proper Stranger
. I’d been telling Mrs Kray how handsome Steve McQueen was, so I asked Frances, “Have you seen that film?”

‘“I don’t go to the cinema,” she said.

‘That was a bit unusual. All young girls of her age went to the cinema. I was only a couple of years older than her but it felt like I was ten years older. Later, I realised that Mrs Kray talked to her as if she was about ten.’

After a while, Flan noticed something else about the young girl.

‘The other funny thing I noticed that first time was she seemed fixated on the clock.

‘“What time is it?” she said after about an hour – even though she was wearing a watch. It was about 9 p.m. “What time do you think Reggie will be here?”

‘This went on constantly. It was obvious she was worried about when he was coming back.

‘As I did her hair, she asked again. I kept thinking, “Why do you keep asking the same question?” It was very odd. If he left her there at 8 p.m. and said he’d be gone for a couple of hours, why bother to ask? You could see that she was depending on him coming back for her. It was strange. It was as if she was worried he was going to leave her there.

‘I did a lovely pleat at the back for her, with a bun on top. Lots of backcombing and lacquer of course. Then she looked in the mirror. Silence. You couldn’t tell if she liked it or not.

‘Then she asked Mrs Kray, “Do you think Reg will like it?”

‘“Of course. It looks lovely,” Violet assured her.

‘I thought to myself, “What about you, do you like it?” It was all about Reg.

‘To me, she seemed like a very nervous girl. I’m quite good at drawing people out. But whatever you said to her, you could see it wasn’t just shyness that made her so reticent. She seemed to live on her nerves. Maybe she’d been like that before she knew Reggie, that was her personality.’

The next time Maureen went round to do Violet’s hair, she asked her why Frances had kept asking about the time.

‘I think she thinks once he’s gone out of that door with Ronnie, he’s never coming back,’ Vi said.

Maureen Flanagan said she was convinced that by that time, Frances sensed danger whenever Reggie went out with Ronnie.

Which was pretty accurate. Ronnie had a very dangerous presence; there was no question of that. It was part of what made the Kray twins so charismatic, yet so feared.

An insensitive or less-thoughtful girl might have chosen to believe Reggie when he reassured Frances, time and time again, that his twin was really a lovely person underneath the scary menace. However, Maureen’s account makes it clear that Frances was already troubled by the dangerous aura around Ronnie, long before they married. Instinct alone told her he was a seriously malevolent force. He scared the life out of her. And there was no mistaking Ronnie’s rejection of her very existence. He couldn’t hide it and didn’t care to try to.

‘She might have been naive and vulnerable. But she would have known straight away that Ronnie didn’t like her, was jealous of her taking Reg away from him,’ said Maureen. ‘So every time he left the house with Ronnie, leaving her with his mum, that’s what would have been what was going through her head.’

But if Frances was starting to be scared a lot of the time, Reggie too was feeling edgy. Ronnie never let up with the sneers and taunts to Reggie about Frances when he was with his twin. It all made for a very tense atmosphere at Vallance Road.

One night, Reggie took Frances to the Hirondelle cabaret club, just off Regent Street, where they had dinner and watched a floorshow. Frances wanted to go home afterwards but Reggie insisted on looking in at Esmeralda’s.

It was quite late by then. Both twins were seriously drunk, Ronnie even more so than Reggie. A sly comment from his twin and Reggie, who’d managed to restrain himself until then, flipped, lost it. A vicious fight ensued, typical of the kind of scrap they’d been having all their lives, though this time they didn’t hit or roll around on the floor battering each other. They just screamed insult after insult at each other. Verbal abuse of the worst kind. Frances, terrified and unused to the volley of violent abuse, burst into tears and ran into the ladies’ loo. By the time she came out, Ronnie had staggered off into the night, still muttering evil threats to his twin, reminding him what a useless, sick bastard he was. He’d had it with him.

Ronnie then left Vallance Road and moved into a luxury flat in a thirties’ block in Cedra Court, Clapton, but the change in their day-to-day living arrangements didn’t really alter the twins’ relationship very much. No matter how violent their exchanges or rows, Ronnie was always going to be able to hook Reggie in, and to push him towards extremes.

Yet witnessing the row had triggered something in Frances: it brought it home to her, in no uncertain terms, that all the smart clothes in the world, all the beautiful trinkets or the trips to glamorous places couldn’t hide the fact that she had unwittingly become a part of the underworld, a hidden realm where violent men schemed, fought, swore vengeance, drew blood and where fear, that sickening terror she felt inside every time she saw Ronnie’s face, was running the show.

She hadn’t been completely blind to what the Krays represented, certainly. It was impossible not to know, anyway. Everyone talked about them in the East End, though she’d noticed that these days very few people asked her anything at all about Reggie or their courtship: now she was known as Reggie’s girl, people were too scared to probe – in case she ran back and told him they’d been asking questions.

Now Frances was starting to see for herself where her place was within the twins’ world: a pampered doll, controlled by an intense, possessive man who wanted her to be influenced only by himself.

She’d gone along with it. Hadn’t she left her job, stopped work because he said there was no need for his fiancé to have to work, that he’d take care of everything? He wanted to own her – and keep her to himself at all times in a beautiful, gilded cage, someone to take out and show off, certainly, as a partner for the successful businessman he believed he’d become. Yet socially, as far as other people were concerned, she was a no-go area: Reggie’s property.

She’d speak up, tell him what she thought. Then would come promises galore that they’d leave the cage, build a dream home in the suburbs, have their own life one day, away from Ronnie and all the ‘taking care of business’ distractions.

Reggie would do everything in his power to reassure her of all this. They’d had some lovely weekends together at the family’s caravan in Steeple Bay, Essex, just the two of them. Then, Frances felt they were like any other normal couple, but most of the time Reggie inhabited that other world, the gangster world of smoky pubs, bars, nightclubs and extortion through fear, the only world he felt comfortable in. With his scary twin.