Strange, twisted and true
THE QUEEN OF WHALE CAY by Kate Summerscale Fourth Estate, $220 Truth, as the maxim goes, is stranger than fiction. And certainly, were 'Joe' Carstairs a creature of imagination, she would seem a weird, grossly exaggerated character. As it is, the truth of her pampered and peripatetic existence renders fiction redundant.
Carstairs, who would boast that she 'came out of the womb queer' (using the word in its quainter sense, although its modern-day meaning is just as apt), was a butch and eccentric lesbian, who inherited the American Standard Oil fortune, smoked cheroots, wore men's suits, cropped her hair, tattooed her arms, raced powerboats, had a revolving door policy on lovers - who included Marlene Dietrich - then left it all behind to become plenipotentiary of a desolate island in the Bahamas.
Kate Summerscale came across her strange and twisted tale while working as editor of British newspaper The Daily Telegraph 's famed obituaries column. When a pile of clippings arrived from one of Carstairs' relatives, sandwiched between the normal daily diet of what Summerscale describes as 'dotty dowagers and bristling brigadiers', she was immediately intrigued.
'Fuelled by her money,' she writes in The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of Joe Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water, '[Carstairs] pursued a fantasy of autonomy and omnipotence, in which she was variously the fastest creature on the seas, an immortal boy and a great ruler of men. Her projects were so outlandish they took her beyond fame and notoriety to obscurity.' Marion Barbara Carstairs was born in Mayfair, London, in 1900, daughter of a captain of the Royal Irish Rifles who decamped when she was five. Her mother, Evelyn, was an opium addict who had myriad affairs and later lived with a mad Russian scientist who used her money to conduct bizarre experiments on the healing powers of pulped primate testicles. So perhaps it is no shock that she grew up a trifle odd.
After finishing school, she fell in with the Parisian lesbian literary set. Her first lover was Dorothy Wilde, niece of Oscar. This was followed by a stint in Ireland as a driver for British officers. Then, in the early 1920s, back in England, she became obsessed with powerboat racing, using her inheritance to build a series of dangerously fast boats and indulge in even faster living. Sex, parties, drugs: the Roaring Twenties were for Carstairs one long and speed-crazed debauch.
Then, in 1934, she vanished, purchasing the West Indian island of Whale Cay, where she lorded it over the native residents and set about building her own private empire. A string of lovers came and went, seduced by Carstairs during 'hunting expeditions' to America, but her constant companion was Lord Tod Wadley - a strange little leather-faced doll upon whom she lavished more care and attention than she ever would on a human being.
Summerscale's first book is an intriguing work, full of the rich fruits of painstaking research and short enough to romp through in one or two sittings. If it is not snapped up by some Hollywood type, she can count herself most unfortunate.
