In the 1920s there was another sailor doll, with a face bigger and cuter than Wadley’s – a more crudely sentimental figure. Joe posed with this doll for press photographs, one of which was reproduced in the late 1980s in a boating magazine. Joe Carstairs, aged eighty-eight, wrote to the author of the article: ‘Lord Tod Wadley has been with me for sixty-three years and is actually that age. The picture in the magazine is not Lord Tod and I don’t know who it is!!’ Maybe the rogue Wadley, which Joe could not remember, was a sometime mascot – since she would not endanger the real Wadley by taking him racing with her, she might have taken the mock-Wadley in his place. Wadley was given masks and alter egos to protect him too.
In her insistence that Lord Tod Wadley is ‘actually that age’, Joe effectively dated his birth not from the moment of his manufacture in the toy factory but at the moment he became hers. ‘LORD TODD WADLEY is now sixty-two years old for real,’ she wrote in another letter in the 1980s. The suggestion is that, like her, Wadley experienced a second, authentic birth when the two of them were joined. Joe’s belief in her doll often seems a little crazy, it verges on madness. But, more to the point, it staved off madness. Wadley was the means by which she could split herself in two and – through her bond with him – still be held together.
One night in the mid-1920s after getting drunk (‘awfully scratched’, as she would describe it), Joe had her arms tattooed. She then sat with Wadley for a photographic portrait: she held him on her knee and gazed thoughtfully down, her muscles bulging with inky stars and dragons, a cigarette in her mouth and a beret at an angle on her tightly cropped hair; he looked back, clean-faced and trusting, in a white sailing suit and a cap cocked to echo hers. In another portrait Joe posed in a sailor’s cap and suit, effectively impersonating Wadley, with a woman standing next to her as a foil for her masculinity. She and Wadley were continually changing places, mimicking and recalling each other. Yet another studio portrait of the time shows Wadley alone with his reflection in a mirror. Joe labelled it ‘Narcissus’.
Chapter Eight
I did Look Like A Boy, I Really did
The 1920s was an era which instantly mythologised itself, and Joe Carstairs made herself in its image. For a moment she and the world intersected. Joe loved everything the children of the 1920s loved: speed, machines, fancy-dress parties, treasure hunts, cabaret, nightclubs, cocktails, dancing, motor cars, sex, and – above all – boyishness. Joe Carstairs adapted to her era but outdid it, succumbed to the passions of her time and exceeded them. She took 1920s London as her stage; masculine garb as her costume; cigarettes, motor cars, boats and dolls as her props.
Joe was infatuated by the theatre and had affairs with several actresses. The stage was a place of giddiness and licence, where women and men swapped guises as a matter of course. In June 1920, a few weeks after Joe was demobilised, the legendary male impersonator Vesta Tilley gave her last performance on the London stage. ‘Vesta Tilley was ever a boy whom nothing could unman,’ wrote the critic James Agate. ‘Master of her characters, she was mistress of herself.’ Another critic, W. R. Titterton, remarked: ‘Her soul is the soul of a boy – or perhaps, shall I say, of a girl, at the age when girls and boys are very much alike. She is and always will be a naïve child.’ By dressing as a man, it seemed, a woman could elude the constraints both of gender and of age. As she slipped on her costume she slipped off her maturity, and the public saw her not as sexually double but as unsexed. It was a strange kind of vanishing trick. And one particularly suited to an era which made a fetish of both masculinity and youth.
Real boys, after all, were in short supply – so many had died on the battlefields of Europe and many of those that returned were wounded, mutilated or shell-shocked. Women, having had to take up their work during the war, now took up their image. ‘Healthy young girls are more boyish than boys,’ ran a Daily Mail headline in 1921.
From the early 1920s women’s fashion became increasingly androgynous. The waistlines on dresses dropped dramatically, erasing the female bust, waist and hips in one fell swoop. Sleeves and skirts shortened, revealing long stretches of arm and leg, the lither the better. Women wound wide ribbon around their chests to flatten the outline of their breasts. They cut their hair to a bob, then a shingle (as short as a man’s on the nape of the neck) and then – though this was considered daring – to an Eton Crop, indistinguishable from a male haircut. Men’s clothing was adapted for women: navy-blue blazers, ties, cufflinks, dinner jackets. A few women – Joe included – began to wear Oxford Bags, with billowing trouser-legs that removed any hint of the female form.
A barber came regularly to the house in Mulberry Walk to crop Joe’s hair. Her suits and jackets were flawlessly cut by the best tailors, and kept immaculately clean. She wore stiffly starched Peter Pan collars, navy-blue berets, reefer jackets. But she did not consider herself butch: boyishness lent her lightness and elegance. ‘I did look like a boy,’ Joe said later. ‘I really did. But I was not a stomper.’
In his memoirs, Quentin Crisp recalled the fashion of the 1920s: ‘The short skirts, bobbed hair, and flat chests . . . were in fact symbols of immaturity . . . The word “boyish” was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously.’ In pursuit of an athletic slenderness, the young women of the 1920s went on diets, skied, played squash and tennis, raced boats, cars and planes, and trained in the gymnasium. ‘Women’s fondness for sport fixes the present severe contour,’ remarked the fashion designer Monsieur Worth. ‘These masculine lines make women look young.’ Joe was, and remained, ‘absolutely mad on physical fitness’. ‘God gave me a marvellous body,’ she explained, ‘and I like to keep it that way.’ Distinctly chubby in 1921, she exercised rigorously to become lean and muscular.
In the 1920s an enthusiasm for sport and for the wholesome pleasures of the great outdoors ran alongside the decadence of the metropolitan scene, its ‘dope parties’, exotic cocktails and lurid make-up. Joe straddled both worlds. With the Coleclough sisters, she went skiing and tobogganing in Switzerland, rode horses in Hampshire, sailed and swam off the coast. With Ruth and her actress friends, she dressed up and drank and danced through the night. In the countryside Joe sought to preserve and enhance her youth, in London to show it off, to thumb her nose at age. ‘I couldn’t stand old people,’ she said.
Friends noted that Joe had the voice of a professional actress, resonant, full-bodied and with an American lilt. She was theatrical in her behaviour, too. Joe would walk into a room, head straight for the mirror and strike a pose, three fingers inside her jacket pocket, the thumb and little finger outside. ‘Marvellous,’ she exclaimed. The smouldering expressions of Rudolf Valentino, the idol of the silent screen in the early 1920s, are echoed in several studio portraits of Joe Carstairs. In almost every photograph taken of her at the time, Joe is holding a cigarette. She admitted that though she smoked cigars, cigarettes, cheroots and pipes, it was merely for effect: she never inhaled. The cigarettes were props, symbols of glamour and masculinity, like the cigars she said she had accepted from her father and Roger de Perigny, and stolen from Francis Francis.
The Canadian actress Beatrice Lillie, a friend of Joe’s, became the most celebrated of the male impersonators on the West End stage. ‘I was known, in fact,’ she recalled in her memoirs, ‘as the best-dressed man in London.’ Lillie was one of the stars of the Midnight Follies floor show at the Hotel Metropole, which ran nightly from 1922. The dining-tables at the Metropole formed a horseshoe around a large dance-floor hung with glowing Chinese lanterns. On the stroke of midnight, three loud knocks signalled the start of the show; the orchestra paused and the diners hurried from the dance-floor back to their tables. Then the performers, many of them having just taken their curtain calls at the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Strand, emerged from a curtained recess to stage a fast succession of turns – dances, jazz numbers, topical sketches, songs and comic monologues.
In 1925 Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney appeared at th
e Metropole. Gwen, an elegant woman with a sleek dark bob and horn-rimmed spectacles, was the woman after whom Newg was named. She sang baritone and played piano and cello. Gwen and Norah had met while performing in Army camp concerts during the First World War, and appeared as a double act in London and provincial variety theatres throughout the 1920s. In 1921 a critic noted that they contributed to ‘the musical excellence and the gay repartee’ of the revue Pot Luck at the Vaudeville. In The Punch Bowl, a revue playing at the Duke of York’s in 1924, Norah Blaney dressed up as an eighteenth-century Venetian courtier to sing a sentimental ballad; then delivered a comic speech on the removal of the Eros statue from Piccadilly Circus; and then sang with Gwen at the piano. Their partnership was broken off, according to Gwen Farrar’s entry in Who’s Who in the Theatre, in May 1924 and resumed in September 1925 – it may be significant that it was during this interval that Joe named Newg for Gwen.
Joe took particular pleasure in beating actresses at their own game, outwitting them with her own disguises and impersonations. On one occasion she called at Norah Blaney’s flat dressed as an electrician, in a wig and overalls; she had examined all the light fittings before she was recognised. In a similar costume she put up a ladder outside the house of Gwen Farrar, and plastered the front with posters described by the Daily News as ‘very inappropriate’.
The theatre had come to the restaurant, the dance-hall and nightclub – and, as if in reply, private parties became exercises in theatre. Fancy-dress parties proliferated in London and dancing became a mania. In 1925 the Evening News reported, rather pointedly, that Joe Carstairs ‘can dance a Charleston which few people can partner’. Joe and Ruth threw parties in nightclubs, aboard the Sonia, on pleasure boats on the Thames; their parties at Mulberry Walk were so riotous that neighbours petitioned to have the women evicted. At some of these gatherings all the guests ended up in the nude, but the dress code was usually fancy dress – once, as a slightly cruel joke, Joe indicated fancy dress on only half of the invitations. Guests were invited to come to Joe and Ruth’s United States party as ‘Hijackers, Yegs, Wops, Kikes, Co-Eds, Kappa Kappa Gammas, Arnchies, Buckras, Dictys, Crapshooters, Bums, Gobs, Dames and Pullman Porters’. Joe went as a Marine; Ruth as a Mexican bandit.
In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published in 1928, the hero is a sexual chameleon, who puts on trousers to become a man, skirts to become a woman; clothes, in this fantasy, do not disguise but transform the fluid creature within. ‘There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them,’ writes Woolf. ‘[They] mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.’ The shape-changing parties of the 1920s perfectly suited the half-secretive, half-flamboyant lesbian demi-monde. These disguises were at once deceptions and proclamations.
For monied women in the post-war years, it was possible to move in circles where promiscuity was chic, homosexuality new and daring. Though Joe lived with Ruth Baldwin through the late 1920s, she made it a point of honour always to have several girlfriends on the go. Ruth, too, had numerous affairs with others. Their passion for one another seems to have survived intact.
The luminary of the bisexual actresses Joe numbered among her friends was Tallulah Bankhead. Having enjoyed moderate success on the American stage, Tallulah took England by storm in 1923, when she was twenty-one. She became a darling of London society, relished for her brazen wit, filthy language and shameless sexual behaviour. ‘I’m as pure as the driven slush,’ she boasted. Tallulah was a cult figure, particularly popular with young women. When she appeared in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels at the Globe in 1925 the press condemned the play as ‘vile’, ‘obscene’, ‘degenerate’, but the show ran for months. In 1928 thousands of female fans mobbed Tallulah on the opening night of Her Cardboard Lover, almost overturning her cream Bentley in the rush. She and Joe had a brief affair. ‘My family warned me about men,’ Tallulah said, ‘but they never mentioned women!’
Joe’s actress friends hired X Garage cars to ferry them about. Joan Mackern took Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney to their first BBC broadcast. She also drove Tallulah and Gwen on a treasure hunt round London, which kicked off at Hyde Park Corner and finished at 4 a.m. with breakfast for all at Norfolk House, St James’s Square. Joan, Gwen and Tallulah came in second, ahead of the Prince of Wales, and won £5.
Teddie Gerard, another actress friend of Joe’s, appeared in A-Z with Bea Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence. ‘Miss Teddie Gerard, looking properly scared, stabs a pursuing Chink,’ noted one reviewer. A slight, dark woman with Oriental features, Teddie was born Thérèse Théodora Gérard Cabrié in the Argentine in 1892 and worked as a dancer in Paris before the war. She was acquainted with the set of literary and artistic lesbians in London which included Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge. Joe was not part of this, or any, intellectual clique. There is a cursory mention of Joe in Una Troubridge’s diary entry of 30 October 1923: ‘Teddie and Jo Carstairs arrived at 11.30 [p.m.] . . . and stayed til 1.30 when we were glad to see the back of them.’
Joe flourished in the world of action rather than intellect. To her friend and fellow yachtsman Anthony Heckstall-Smith, she was ‘the epitome of the twenties. A neat, trim little girl who, with her short cut hair and blue beret worn at a jaunty angle, her flashing white teeth, infectious laugh, was like an exuberant schoolboy with her zest for speed and adventure.’ In his memoirs Heckstall-Smith recalled the aftermath of a party on the Sonia which he joined off the Isle of Wight after a day racing motorboats.
One of Joe’s guests fell overboard quite late at night, when all the boats were up in davits and the crew asleep in the fo’castle. I, too, was sitting below in the saloon, in my pyjamas and dressing-gown, talking to another guest before going to bed, when we heard cries for help. We both dashed on deck.
It was a very dark, rather windy night, with a strong spring tide running through the roads to the westward. In the excitement and the confusion, it was difficult to discover exactly what had happened, for even Joe seemed momentarily unnerved. My companion in the saloon seized a lifebelt and dived over the side while Joe was still for’ard urging the crew to action. I remember running aft and hearing cries of ‘Help!’ Looking over the stern, I saw one of the guests, Ruth Baldwin, struggling in the water. So in I went, throwing off my pyjamas. Soon the frightened Ruth, who was twice my size, and I were struggling together, and, frankly, I thought she would drown me. As we floundered about, the terrible realisation dawned upon me that Joe had shouted that Mabs, another guest, had fallen overboard. She had said nothing about Ruth. So no one knew that either she or I were in the sea. In that streaming tideway, even had I been alone, to swim back to Sonia would have been almost beyond my powers as a swimmer. Supporting the frightened Ruth, it was out of the question. All I could do was to turn on my back and allow the tide to carry us along, farther and farther from the yacht.
How long we were in the water I do not know, but it must have been some considerable time before we were eventually picked up by the launch of a nearby yacht – the Amphitrite, owned by Colonel Gage – which was anchored not far from Sonia and whose crew had heard our cries for help. By the time the launch reached us, I was practically unconscious. Somehow, in the mêlée, Ruth, too, had parted company with her pyjamas, so the pair of us were stark naked.
Since Colonel Gage was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, as soon as I recovered I realised just what a scandal the whole incident would cause in Cowes on the following day.
‘Let us,’ I said to Joe, who was in my cabin giving me brandy, ‘Let us leave for Southampton at dawn. I’m sure you can no more face the gossip and tittle-tattle of the morrow than I can!’
Then I went mercifully to sleep. When I awoke, we were lying off Hythe, and a few hours later, the whole party were speeding to London in two of Joe’s fastest motor-cars. Even so, Cowes was agog with the story for weeks to come, and I had quite a hard time explaining how and why Ruth Baldwin and I were drifting about the roads deshabillées in the middle of t
he night. When Colonel Gage suggested that he should recommend me for a medal of some sort or other, I pleaded with him to forget the whole incident.
Joe and Ruth seemed to be forever falling into the water or into trouble, capsizing, bobbing back to the surface. Theirs was a topsy-turvy world, in which women smoked cheroots and drank brandy, lesbians were caught naked with nice young men, dolls paraded as lords and heiresses as mechanics. Joe ploughed her ambulance through the debris of the First World War, and then her motorboat through the debris of the Thames; she delighted in stirring things up, whether the waters of the Solent or the sensibilities of the older generation. It was a bravura performance, like the precarious skimming of a hydroplane: powered by her money, Joe lifted herself clear of censure by dint of nerve and speed.
Chapter Nine
Nobody Really Knows Anything About their Behaviour
For fear of sinking, Joe Carstairs did not allow herself to slow: when one of her ambitions was achieved, a new one swiftly replaced it. By 1927 Joe had won the major competitions in the one-and-a-half-litre class, and she set her sights on the most prestigious motorboating prize in the world, the Harmsworth British International Trophy.
Alfred Harmsworth, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, had established the competition in 1903, the dawn of high-speed motorboating. The boats entered for the race could be up to forty feet long, and no limit was placed on engine size; as a consequence the contest became a playground for millionaires, and a testing ground for the most powerful and experimental craft of the time. In the first decade of the Harmsworth, the British won the trophy five times, the Americans four times, the French once. During the war the competition was suspended. It was contested again in 1920 at Osborne Bay, off the Isle of Wight, and was won for America by Garfield Wood in Miss America, a boat powered by twin 900hp aircraft engines.