On Whale Cay, Joe sought not to turn boys into men but men – and women and girls – into boys. She was always surrounded by ‘little people, little boys’, a friend recalled. For all her sexual exploits, Joe seemed to hanker after a sexless, pre-pubescent kingdom. In her fantasy land, there was no breeding, only self-invention. Joe expressed her horror of procreation in Living Death, one of the poems from her first volume:
The lustful lungings of the masses,
Trundling home perambulators,
Striving to increase the nation—
Indiscriminate copulators.
When Joe gave out the wages at the store on a Friday she would make a speech to the workers. Sometimes in this speech she complained that there were too many babies being born on the island – ‘Keep it in your pants,’ she suggested.
As Joe saw it, sex not only bred children but also betrayal. She proved this in her own life by repeatedly cheating on her lovers, as her mother had before her. ‘I’m much more loyal to friends than I am to the other kind,’ Joe said. Lord Tod Wadley was her ideal: he was a little man who had no genitals and he was a child immaculately conceived, a motherless boy.
Mothers are anathema to the Neverland. When at the end of Peter Pan Peter visits the grown-up Wendy, now a mother herself, she feels ‘helpless and guilty, a big woman’. ‘Hallo, Wendy,’ says Peter. ‘ “Hallo, Peter,” she replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as possible. Something inside her was crying, “Woman, woman, let go of me.” ’ Joe’s desire to always be fit and trim was a desire to ward off womanliness, to preserve the body of a boy and so earn eternal admittance to the Neverland. ‘Joe has breasts?’ the son of a friend asked with mock-incredulity when she was in her eighties. ‘That’s difficult for me to think about.’
The erasure of adulthood carried cruelty with it. The Neverland, Barrie notes, will last for as long as children are ‘gay and innocent and heartless’. Joe’s games and practical jokes were laced with spite. She would make gratuitous assertions of her power. One friend remembered that during a fishing trip Joe spotted a stingray, and insisted that everyone jump in the water. In Peter Pan the Lost Boys are not allowed to speak of their mothers in Peter’s presence, and ‘When they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.’ If people did not play by Joe’s rules on the island, she threw them off.
This cruelty came into being, though, to stave off grief. Peter Pan, like Joe Carstairs, presents his exile on the Neverland as a wilful escape: ‘I ran away the day I was born.’ But towards the end of the book he reveals that he once flew back to his mother, only to find the window shut and another boy in his bed. Mothers, he decided, were ‘very overrated persons’. When the Darlings and the Lost Boys, ignoring his warnings about mothers, decide to leave the Neverland, Peter ‘cared very much; and he was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who as usual were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland that every time you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off as vindictively as possible.’
The sadness and cruelty of the Neverland surfaces in a poem Joe wrote in 1941. It concerns Wadley’s genesis in the Swiss mountain stall from which Ruth Baldwin had bought him in 1925, and it casts Wadley as a Lost Boy:
He stood upon a snowclad wall
The tiny mountain guide
A little bent old woman
Sat knitting by his side
With all her wares around her
The stall was very neat
At Rosegg in the Engadine—
Upon a mountain peak
Her customers were many
The season in full swing
Beyond the hills and mountain rills
The churchbells softly ring
But there’s sadness to my story
As often is the case
The shining little mountain guide
Was stolen from his place
The little bent old woman
Had loved him as her son
Even though he was a toy-child
He was the ‘only one’!
In Joe’s poem Wadley is stolen from his foster mother, transported like Peter’s companions to a motherless land. Joe stored her memories in Wadley instead of herself, and this poem must carry the memory of a scene from her own past. Perhaps Joe is remembering the nanny she loved, from whom she was taken. Or maybe she is imagining that before the birth of her siblings she was, though just a girl-child, still her mother’s ‘only one’ – and that she was loved then as if she were a son.
Chapter Seventeen
I don’t give A Fuck About the Law
Sometimes – and this was the joy of having a doll with which to play – Wadley could be the angel to Joe’s devil, the spotless sailor boy to her pirate, Peter Pan to her Captain Hook. From the moment she reached Whale Cay, Joe was an outlaw as well as a lawmaker.
In the early eighteenth century, the Bahamas was an anarchic Pirates’ Republic. More than a thousand pirates roamed the archipelago, plundering ships and taking refuge on the islands from the law and from storms. On the tiny cays they buried their treasure, repaired their boats in the harbours and creeks, set up their ships’ guns on the shore and whiled away the hours – like Joe – with games and skits. The men would entertain themselves by staging mock trials and executions.
Joe had sailed to Cocos Island in search of buried treasure in 1931, and on Whale Cay she hoped to unearth chests of gold. She did find some evidence that the island had been a pirates’ lair: there were cannon balls in the waterholes, and she turned up an old Spanish knife, which she added to the collection in the museum.
The most famous of the eighteenth-century buccaneers was Edward Teach, or Blackbeard, who in Peter Pan is described as the man whom Hook served as bosun before becoming a captain himself. Almost as celebrated in the Bahamas were the pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. These female buccaneers defied the laws of the land and the superstitions of the sea: traditionally, having a woman on board a ship brought bad luck. ‘They wore Men’s Jackets,’ wrote Captain Charles Johnson in his eighteenth-century history of the pirates, ‘and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads . . . each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their Hands and cursed and Swore at the Men.’ When the two were captured and threatened with death, Mary Read said she approved of the punishment: if it were not for hanging, she reasoned, cowards would turn to piracy and deprive the truly courageous of their spoils.
Anne Bonny’s captain and lover, Jack Rackham, was something of a dandy, known as ‘Calico Jack’ because of his penchant for bright waistcoats, ribbons and breeches. In Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie notes that the ‘dark nature’ of Captain Hook was run through with ‘a touch of the feminine, as in all great pirates’. Pirates inhabited and exploited the fringes of society, and this translated readily into sexual ambiguity. The confusions of gender in the Bahamian pirate myths were such that at one point, it was said, Mary Read joined Rackham’s ship disguised as a sailor and Anne Bonny, mistaking her for a man, tried to seduce her.
Marlene Dietrich, who herself made a career out of sexual ambiguity, knew Joe Carstairs as ‘The Pirate’. The two met in the summer of 1937 in the South of France; every year Joe gave her workers a holiday in the months of July and August and took herself off to the United States or Europe. At first Joe studiously ignored Marlene, who reproached her for this when they were introduced – ‘Why didn’t you look at me?’ ‘Because you were Dietrich,’ Joe replied. They met again in 1938 and together bought a boat named Arkel.
In the summer of 1939 Joe sailed a schooner from Whale Cay to the Cap d’Antibes to see Dietrich. An account of the meeting between the two is given by Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, in her biography of her mother. Dietrich was on holiday in the South of France with her lover (the novelist Erich Remarque), her daughter, her husband and his mistress.
One day, everyone was ‘a-twitter’. They congregated along the rocks like hungry sea gulls, searching the surface of the sea. A strange ship had been sighted making for our private cove. A magnificent, three-masted schooner, its black hull skimming through the glassy water, its teak decks gleaming in the morning sun, at the helm, a beautiful boy. Bronzed and sleek – even from a distance, one sensed the power of the rippling muscles of his tight chest and haunches. He waved at his appreciative audience, flashed a rakish white-toothed smile, and gave the command to drop anchor among the white yachts. If he had run up the Jolly Roger, no one would have been surprised. The first thought on seeing him had been Pirate – followed by Pillage and Plunder.
My mother touched Remarque’s arm. ‘Boni – isn’t he beautiful? He must be coming here for lunch. Who is he?’ She watched him being rowed ashore. Dressed in skin-tight ducks and striped sailor’s jersey, he climbed the steps leading up to the Eden Roc and turned from a sexy boy into a sexy, flat-chested woman.
(When Joe ran into Greta Garbo at a New York optician’s, this sexually ambiguous screen icon, too, mistook her for a man. ‘Hello, Miss Garbo,’ Joe said. ‘Hello, sir,’ Garbo replied.)
While the Dietrich family dubbed Joe ‘the Pirate’, Joe, Maria noted, ‘was the only one who ever called Dietrich “Babe” and got away with it’; her other nicknames for Dietrich were ‘Mother’ and ‘Doctor’ (the latter derived from her initials, M.D.). Throughout the summer Maria would help to dress her mother for daily rendezvous on Carstairs’ ship, Sonia II. These meetings were kept secret from Remarque – Joe and Marlene enjoyed a heady, clandestine affair.
Joe was dark, tough and compact where Dietrich was fair and willowy; and Joe’s reclusive exile counterpointed Dietrich’s extraordinary fame. Joe was the enigmatic stranger, Marlene the mysterious star; Joe was the androgynous boy to Marlene’s ambiguous nymph. They were intrigued and excited by each other.
Joe was one of the few people able to shock Marlene Dietrich. One evening Joe, Dietrich and the American soprano Grace Moore were invited to a formal dinner on the Riviera. When Joe met the other two women in the hotel for cocktails they were horrified to see that she was dressed in men’s black tie, and insisted she change into a dress. Shortly afterwards, Joe reappeared in an elegant gown and Dietrich and Moore saw, to their even greater consternation, that her arms were bare and covered with tattoos; she was sent to put back on the tuxedo. Even in this milieu, Joe was outlandish.
Six years later, Remarque used Joe Carstairs as a character in his novel The Arch of Triumph, but returned her to her first incarnation, where she sailed in to the cove gleaming and boyish, by rendering her as a man. Dietrich wrote to her husband, ‘How do you like Remarque’s new book? . . . He paints me worse than I am in order to make everything more interesting, and he succeeds. But everything from Fouquet’s to Scheherazade to Antibes, Chateau Madrid, Cherbourg, Lancaster Hotel, even “Jo” on the boat. Of course, he couldn’t make it a woman.’
Joe was so infatuated that she offered Whale Cay to Dietrich, population included; Dietrich declined, but accepted a beach. (The deeds to a portion of the island were found in Dietrich’s effects after her death.)
When Dietrich and her party returned to America and Joe to the Bahamas after the summer of 1939, the two women continued to see each other. Marlene visited Whale Cay and Joe visited Hollywood. But the friendship soured. After the holiday in France, Marlene decided to employ a companion for her thirteen-year-old daughter. Joe recommended a woman who had worked as her secretary in France. The woman sexually assaulted her young charge. Maria remembered her as a woman whose repulsive masculinity was in striking contrast to Joe’s beguiling boyishness:
Although she wore her tailored suits with a skirt and painted the nails of her sausage fingers deep red, this made absolutely no difference to the general effect of – ugly male. With close-set eyes, bulk that overshadowed her pylon legs and very small feet, her resemblance to a rhinoceros was startling. I expected any second her ears to wriggle and a pilot bird to pick insects off her hide.
Dietrich was unaware of the assault at the time, but eventually sacked the woman on suspicion of forging cheques. She was furious with Joe for having introduced her to their lives. She also accused Joe herself of stealing her gem-encrusted bracelet, a gift from Remarque. Joe claimed that Dietrich had given her this bracelet, and one is tempted to believe her, if only because her thefts usually had a comic bent, and she usually boasted about them. On Whale Cay, true to her nickname ‘Klep’, Joe arranged for one of the servants of the Duke of Windsor to pilfer from Government House the Duke’s cigars (for herself) and the Duchess’s perfume (for her girlfriends).
Joe later spoke of Dietrich in vitriolic terms: she was ‘a wicked old woman, a bitch, not a good person. She was a very stupid woman. No mind, no nothing up there. I don’t think she could act, either.’ Dietrich had been very shy when she was young, Joe said; as she got older she became ‘more flamboyant and nasty’. But, curiously, Joe still described Dietrich as ‘the only person who might get me’. On Whale Cay, Joe was the actress, the myth, the icon, the outlaw, the centre of the world. Marlene briefly interrupted that fantasy: Marlene was a star with a wider orbit, a mythic creature of greater power. Joe was jealous.
It was soon after her fling with Dietrich that Carstairs came out of seclusion. She announced her intention to revolutionise the whole of the Bahamian archipelago, befriended the Windsors, wrote poetry, flirted with the idea of starring in films and endeavoured to be a war hero. In 1942 she got the chance to play the brave and benevolent buccaneer.
That August the American ship Potlatch was torpedoed off Bird Rock Passage, 350 miles from Nassau, and Carstairs was asked to mount an expedition to find the survivors. Joe sailed out on her rescue mission in the Vergemere IV, without the use of lights or radio, through waters known to harbour German U-boats. Dead sailors floated past on the Gulf Stream, their corpses mutilated by sharks. Near Bird Rock Passage, Joe put on the ship’s lights and searched the waters. Eventually, she spotted forty-seven American sailors hanging on the deck and sides of a small native schooner. The native boat, too laden down to carry the men to safety, had found the sailors on a deserted island. For thirty days and nights they had lived off sharks, low-flying birds and prickly pears. Many of the men had the fruit’s spines in their tongues. All of them were blackened with the sun.
As soon as they boarded the Vergemere, the American sailors leapt down the hatches, devoured all the ship’s food, and drank most of the water. Several were sick and raving; one had gone mad, and Carstairs and her crew tied him up. A terrible night ensued: the men, some of them on the verge of death, lay about decks awash with diarrhoea. In the morning a few of the sailors asked if they could shave. ‘No!’ said Joe. ‘You’ve been drinking enough water, you’re not going to shave.’ ‘How about when we get to Nassau?’ one asked. ‘To hell with that,’ Joe replied. ‘You can grow your bloody beards.’
They managed to reach Nassau without loss of life, despite the pitching sea and beating sun, to be met by the Daughters of Empire, a group of ladies of the Bahamian establishment headed by the Duchess of Windsor. ‘There they were,’ said Joe, ‘the little white things, all pristine. They weren’t properly organised. They didn’t have enough stretchers, they didn’t have enough ambulances. I was furious.’ According to Joe, only when the rescued sailors reached land did they realise that their captain had not been a young man but a forty-two-year-old woman. A year later, the men of the Potlatch threw a party in Joe’s honour in New York.
In 1943 Joe set up the North Caribbean Transport Company, to carry bananas, ice, sugar and rum from Haiti and Cuba to Miami. Her fleet consisted of Sonia II, the schooner spurned by the British and American navies, Vergemere III and Vergemere IV, the ship built on the island. Many of the cargo ships that usually worked these trade routes had been conscripted by the navy, so Joe’s small fleet served a useful purpose. ‘It’s a sort of war work,’ she said. Sonia co
uld carry 10,000 stems of bananas at a time, and the many boatloads of sugar ferried by Joe to Nassau were credited with having ended a sugar famine in the Bahamas.
But Joe was poorly rewarded for her heroic rescue of the Potlatch sailors or her several attempts to assist the war effort. The people of the islands gossiped about her as if she truly were a treacherous pirate. There were rumours during the war that Joe flew a swastika flag on Whale Cay and that the German U-boats in Bahamian waters were being victualled on her island. The rumours were utterly unfounded. Perhaps they sprang from Joe’s tenuous association with Axel Wenner-Gren, to whom she sold vegetables for canning during the war. Wenner-Gren was blacklisted by the Allies for his active links with the Axis powers. The richest living Swede, he had exiled himself to the Bahamas in the 1930s, was a friend of the Windsors, set up businesses on the islands and owned a clutch of cays, several fast motorboats and a huge private yacht (the largest in the world, staffed entirely by pro-Nazi former officers of the Swedish navy). Joe Carstairs and Axel Wenner-Gren did have many things in common, but Nazi sympathies were not among them.
In 1946 Joe sold Bird Cay, two miles from Whale Cay, to her half-brother, Francis Francis. She had bought the island before the war for $8,000, and she turned a huge profit by selling it to Frank for about $150,000. ‘Poor Frank,’ she said gleefully. On the day she completed the sale she was in high spirits. An islander whose wife had just given birth to a boy approached her and asked if he could borrow a boat. ‘Goddammit,’ said Joe. ‘You caught me on a good morning. I just sold Bird Cay to my brother. Go to Hutch Lowe and tell him to give you anything you need.’ And she handed him a £5 note.