Life Worth Living (12 page)

‘What are you going to do with your life?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s all very well for you to be footloose and fancy-free now, but what happens when I’m dead? You need someone to take care of you.’

He thought he had found the answer when Max Langner, a German-born shipping magnate who was in love with me, came to Jamaica to see me and brought up the subject of marriage. I had met Max at a ball in New York, and used to have dinner with him about once a week. He could not have been nicer, and I really liked his soul, but I did not like his body, and would not allow any intimacy. To Daddy, however, Max was perfect: he was very well off, he was a gentleman and he was of good character.

‘For God’s sake, Daddy,’ I snapped, ‘the man’s forty years older than me. I don’t want old age creeping all over me, thank you very much.’

‘You’re a silly girl and you’ll live to regret throwing away a good man, mark my words. All you can talk about is love, love, love. You can’t eat love. Love doesn’t put the clothes on your back or the house under your feet. Do you think love buys the cars you drive or the plane tickets you use? You must be practical, child. Max is a nice man. He will take good care of you. You will grow to love him.’

‘Did your sisters?’ I shot back at him. Several of Daddy’s sisters had had arranged marriages, none of which had proved happy. Indeed, my Aunt Mathilde had so hated her husband that she promptly divorced him when her mother died.

Looking hurt, he said, ‘I’m only trying to help you arrive at the right decision. It’s my duty as a father to see you suitably married off.’

‘Well then, Daddy, look at it this way. Why should I marry someone I don’t love, when you waited until you found someone you did love before you married?’

Marriage, I could see, was shaping up to become the new bone of contention between my father and me. I did not expect it to blow up into a full-scale problem, however, for I was only marginally less impatient than he was for that ring to be slipped on my finger.

Some people might wonder why I didn’t escape Daddy’s pressure by getting my own apartment. The truth is that in spite of the changing society, girls from good families did not leave home until they were married. To have broken that convention would have sent a clear and erroneous message to the world that I wanted to lead an immoral life. And I was not about to destroy my reputation, especially as it already had one dodgy aspect to it. Besides, I enjoyed living in the lap of luxury. Not only was it comfortable, but there can have been few households with more interesting visitors. As well as my well-placed relations, such as the chief justice Sir Herbert Duffus, there were family friends like the chief of staff of the army, Brigadier Rudolf Greene, and virtually every musician and artist of note who lived in or visited the country – especially after 1972, when Michael Manley’s People’s National Party gained power and Rita Coore’s husband David became foreign minister.

Rita Coore, the most eminent piano teacher in the West Indies, had been my brother Mickey’s music teacher and lived for music as much as Mickey did. Music to Mickey was almost as important as the air he breathed. Although he was not allowed to pursue a musical career, he made sure that his work, first as a barrister, then a solicitor, did not stand in the way of his great love. Even in his early twenties his knowledge was immense, and acknowledged by such foremost musicians as the pianist Shura Cherkassky and the flautist Richard Adeney. Through Mickey, I developed a love of music which has enriched my life, and through me, he developed a love of art. I was supposedly a gifted child artist, and though I stopped painting once I came out of hospital after the attempt to masculinise me, I still adored pictures and sculpture, and would later embark upon assembling a collection.

Wanting to be married was one thing; lust, however, was quite another. In May 1971, I walked into the Jonkanoo Lounge, a fashionable nightclub in the Sheraton Hotel in New Kingston, with my cousins Elaine Ziadie and Lorraine Azan and some friends. Suddenly, as if I were a marionette, I felt my head swivel round. My gaze alighted upon this tall, blond god-like figure.

‘See that man over there?’ I said to my cousins, ‘I’m going to have him before the night is through.’

This was not a statement of intent, or even of desire. It was an affirmation of something beyond my control. Lorraine laughed, embarrassed. ‘But you don’t even know him.’

‘I can’t think why I said that,’ I agreed. ‘It’s quite, quite ludicrous. I might never even meet him.’

Fate, however, intervened in the form of Billy Young Chin, the companion of this Adonis. Someone in our group knew Billy, the owner of a large carpet factory, and before I had a chance to draw breath, I was being introduced to the object of my desire, Bill Madden, Billy’s adviser from Monsanto, the American textile giant. Bill immediately asked me to dance. Never before had I wanted someone the way I wanted him. It was atavistic, compulsive.

‘I want you so badly,’ he said, as if I needed words to convey what his body was already telling me.

‘So do I,’ I gasped, short of breath from the passion and excitement of it all.

Bill was staying at the hotel, and within a half hour of meeting, we had slipped out of the nightclub, crossed to his room, and made mad and passionate love. Never before or since have I been so instantly attracted to someone as I was to Bill. He was physical perfection – six foot three, with the body of a professional athlete and the scent of an angel. I would gladly have stayed in a hovel with him, as long as we could have continued making love the way we just had, but he was due to leave for New York, where he lived, the following day. I cheered up when he told me he’d be returning in a few weeks.

An hour later, Bill and I returned to our friends in the Jonkanoo Lounge. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ Elaine said.

‘I did it,’ I said.

‘You’re lying,’ Lorraine hoped.

‘No, I’m not. It was absolutely wonderful.’

‘But he won’t respect you,’ Lorraine said.

‘I’ll worry about that tomorrow,’ I replied, still glowing from the encounter.

Bill Madden was the first man I had met since Bill Swain whom I thought of as a serious marital prospect. My criteria, regrettably, were different from my father’s. I cared nothing about bank accounts or suitability or indeed good character. All I cared about was love and lust. To me, love started with lust and was consolidated in the bedroom into companionship and a shared life. I had an infinitely flexible attitude and was only too willing to adjust to the ordinary neuroses so many people seemed to display. As for good character, it never occurred to me that anyone would be malevolent or treat me badly.

Bill was undoubtedly interested in me, which was just as well. I had vowed after Bill Swain that I would never again become entangled with someone who did not return my love, a principle to which I have adhered religiously. And in a way, Bill II was suitable. Although he was not rich, he was a good earner with prospects. Well educated and solid to the point of stolidity (as it turned out), his character and background would have appealed to dear Daddy. Our attitudes, however, were not quite so complementary, for while he was a WASP from a good family, he was much too prissily East Coast ‘proper’ for my taste.

This disparity reared its head on the first evening we had dinner upon Bill’s return to Jamaica. We were having drinks with a bunch of corporate couples he knew. The conversation swung around to airlines. I said in passing that I did not like Pan-Am, as the service was never as good as on other airlines. No sooner were we on our own on the way to the restaurant than he hauled me over the coals for being ‘controversial’ and ‘indiscreet’, concluding that I might have ‘offended’ someone.

‘Bill, I didn’t tell some woman that her husband was ugly as sin, or vice versa. I merely gave a perfectly innocent opinion. If people take offence at something as stupid as that, surely they’re not worth worrying about.’

If you could have seen his face, you would have understood why I never became Mrs Wilson Hadley Madden. If our approach to life was out of kilter away from the bedroom, it certainly wasn’t in it. Making love with Bill was like going to heaven alive. So, too, was lying with him afterwards. Within a month of his departure, I was in New York, with Mummy and Daddy’s approval, to see if something would come of this new romance. Unfortunately Bill proved to be as wishy-washy in matters of the heart as he was in conversation. I wanted love and passion and excitement and interest in bed and out, but the only part of Bill which seemed capable of reaching great heights was the one which no one saw when he had his clothes on.

Naïvely believing that I might shock him into action, I asked him for dinner early in the summer of 1971. I was staying at a friend’s apartment on East Seventy-Third and Park while he was away for the summer. My cousin Elaine Ziadie was visiting me from Chicago, so I made up the numbers with someone attractive I knew from my early New York nightclubbing days. Russell Price had studied for the priesthood, given it up and become the boyfriend of my friend Peggy de Benedictis, and now they had broken up. He’d often flirted with me in the past, so I asked him to make Bill jealous. At some point during the evening, however, my interest in Russell suddenly became
more real than illusory. Thereafter I let the two men fight it out among themselves. Bill, of course, was hardly going to win the contest when he couldn’t parry and knew about only one type of thrusting. Although I did feel an almighty bitch when Bill realised, at the end of the evening, that he was going and Russell was staying, I cheered myself up with the thought that it served him right. Faint heart never won fair maiden. I only wished I could erase from my memory the crestfallen look on his face.

Russell was a diverting entertainment, in and out of bed, but hardly a prospective husband. Within three months the passion had burned itself out, so I rang Bill, hoping that this time the special relationship which existed between the sheets could bounce out of bed with us. Despite all the signs to the contrary, I had my priorities straight. Marriage was what I wanted, and marriage was what I would have. However, our second attempt to make things work served only to confirm that Bill and I had nothing in common except good sex. Every time I saw him the same thing happened. From the moment we met until we were in bed, I kept on thinking, ‘Why doesn’t he just shut his mouth and open his trousers?’ He was so dull that I always saw him as flat champagne and myself as a syringe trying to inject fizz into it. Much as I wanted to fall in love with him, his personality prevented me from ever getting beyond the infatuation stage. Recognising that this was hardly a good basis for a continuing relationship, I left for Christmas in Jamaica, deciding not to get in touch with him when I returned to New York. Nor did I see him again until the night of my divorce from Colin Campbell.

In theory, finding a husband should have been easy; in practice, it was proving to be rather arduous because I was so picky. Because Jamaica so far proved against the odds to be such a propitious hunting ground, I decided I would stay on for another extended holiday. This time, I thought, I will occupy myself fully and make use of my interests and talents until the holy grail comes along. Christmas might have been a time of joy for people like us, but for many of the poor, it was a time of want. I devised the idea of getting the relations and friends who owned shops and factories to donate presents which I could distribute among poor children. All day, every day, I canvassed for donations, casting a wide net that reached even companies I did not know, until I had enough presents for several hundred children. It was at this point that a good idea became sullied by political expediency. I had asked Victor Grant, the attorney-general, for his thoughts on the best way of distributing the presents. He told me he would make some arrangements. On the appointed day, his wife Anna and I were bundled into a car, a large van following behind with the presents, and driven off to villages I had never even dreamed of. It gradually dawned on me that we were being taken all over his constituency, and that the presents were being given to the children of his supporters. I was so angry I could barely speak.

Those, of course, were the days when people still believed you could change society with a pure heart and kind deeds. Viewing Victor as an aberration, I plunged into my next project: raising money for the department of obstetrics and gynaecology of the University Hospital of the West Indies, which needed a machine to monitor the heartbeat of foetuses. I asked the French pianist
Andrée Juliette Brun (the Princess Oukhtomskaya in her private life) to give a recital at the State Theatre in aid of the cause. The gala concert couldn’t fail, I reasoned, because all the music-lovers would turn out to hear her play, while all the socialites would come to see the princess, and to be seen by their friends seeing her. Andrée and her boyfriend Jim Anderson, who lived in New York, were refreshingly unopportunistic after Victor. In return for their help, I arranged for BOAC (now British Airways) to fly them out and for the Skyline Hotel to put them up until they came to stay at our country house on the north coast.

The event itself was a howling success. Andrée’s playing was superb, and the State Theatre was sold out. All my friends and relations advertised in the programme, which raised a small fortune for the hospital. Even the governor-general, who was the guest of honour, turned out to be a game old thing. I had last seen him the previous New Year’s Eve, when he had been the guest of my cousin Joe-Joe Ziadie at a ball, and had been full of life. Now, however, Sir Clifford Campbell fell asleep and began snoring. For all of one second I had a dilemma. Should I wake him, or should I tolerate such interference with an artist’s performance? In my scale of values, pandering to governors-general came a long way beneath consideration for a fee-paying audience and an unpaid performer, so I gently poked him with my elbow. When that didn’t work, I poked him harder. It did the trick, and he awoke with a start.

‘You jab me any time I doze off,’ he whispered, giving me a beatific smile. ‘At my age, it’s a struggle to stay awake unless I’m on my feet.’