A friend of hers once reflected on how wonderful it was to love and be loved. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t love people.’ Some of this was bravado. Joe’s girlfriends remembered her as extremely affectionate and romantic. She was also loyal, and never cut her ties with anyone for whom she had cared. But she did her best to dispense with feelings of love or pain. ‘Smile, / Loves of my forgotten nights,’ Joe wrote in one of her poems, ‘Now just a series/ In my mind – / Why have you yet to learn/ That love is just a phase,/ To laugh,/ And turn your face/ Away from time!’
Jorie, Charlotte and Jackki all eventually left Joe to take up relationships with other women – or at least that was the way they saw it. ‘Usually I dumped them because I got tired of them,’ said Joe. ‘I did it in various ways, rather devious, so they didn’t realise they were being pushed.’ In other words, she imagined that unbeknown to her girlfriends she engineered their decisions to leave. Joe framed events so that she was always the protagonist, never had to feel herself inadequate or abandoned.
From 1976 until 1990 Joe lived in Florida and spent the summers in Sag Harbor and Water Mill, Long Island. At Water Mill she entertained the local nuns to tea. All her homes were near the sea, and her menagerie of objects came to include a number of model whales, in remembrance of Whale Cay. Joe liked to go on whale-watching expeditions off Sag Harbor.
Carstairs carried around her suffering and her memories in objects instead of in her head or heart. She was very particular about the arrangement of her things: all the stuffed toys, pictures of boats, the chairs and tables had a place. Women posed the greatest threat to this order. ‘No woman has ever tried to rearrange my house,’ she said. ‘Lots of women try to change furniture. It’s a thing they do – it’s a deplorable trait. All women do it.’
The kernel of her baggage was Wadley. And he had his own baggage – a miniature cheque-book, a wallet, a plastic castle, a cigar case, cufflinks, tie-pins, a wristwatch that ticked, revolvers, golf clubs, a Bible, books of poetry, a dog, and his own dolls. Wadley, she noted with delight in 1976, ‘still looks like a boy . . . He’s 51 now – he will be this Christmas – and he’s still got that boyish look.’ Wadley was a deeply benign influence, Joe believed. He was a model of good behaviour: abstemious, uncomplaining, seen but not heard, he served as a moral example, a tamer of base instincts. Joe admitted that she only had to look at Wadley’s sweet face for a fit of temper to subside. ‘I’m quite sure I would have been a different person if it hadn’t been for him,’ she said. ‘He’s extraordinary what he does for me.’
If she invested objects with emotion, Joe could also seem to have replaced her emotions with objects. It was said sometimes that she had a cheque-book where her heart ought to be – she responded to sickness in others not with sentiment but with offers of money (and often opined that they would be better off dead). Her kindnesses always took material form, the currency in her friendships became her wealth. All the girlfriends with whom she lived remained close to her, tied to her with ropes of money as well as affection. ‘Nobody became my enemy,’ she said. ‘Not one.’ If anyone spurned her money, Joe felt herself spurned. Bart Howard, who visited Whale Cay in the 1940s, recalled that his friendship with Joe never recovered from his decision to pay his own air fare to the Bahamas. ‘She’d lost me, sort of. She was never so nice to me. She liked being able to do something for me.’
In the late 1980s Joe was providing annual incomes for former girlfriends such as Charlotte, Jackki and Jorie; for relatives of former girlfriends, including Ruth Baldwin’s sister; and for a number of former employees and their families. ‘It is the only proper way to behave,’ she maintained. People said she had a heart of gold. Yet these financial ties meant Joe could never be sure her friendships would survive on affection alone. She had to have a heart as hard as gold, because she could not fully trust anyone – except Wadley. It was part of this doll’s magic that he remained untouched by her wealth.
‘We’re like one,’ Joe said. ‘He’s me and I’m him. It’s a marvellous thing. If everybody had a Wadley there’d be less sadness in the world.’
Chapter Nineteen
Only Wadley
As Joe Carstairs aged and slowed, she and Wadley swapped places. Where Wadley had been the innocent and Joe the rogue, he was now the playboy. Wadley, Joe said, had taken to drinking brandy, smoking cigars and playing poker. She claimed that he consorted with Jack Kennedy in the early 1960s. ‘You know, Wadley was friendly with him, in a funny way,’ Joe said. ‘They went to the Bay of Pigs together . . . He had a tremendous liking for him.’ In 1969 Wadley landed on the moon with the American astronauts, and one of Joe’s girlfriends made a painting commemorating Wadley’s space voyage.
While Joe started to describe herself as an ‘it’, as if she were turning into a doll, Wadley – like Jack Kennedy – became sexually voracious. Despite the fact he had at least one wife (Wadley married in the 1920s and again in the 1940s), he had scores of doll girlfriends. Many of these were gifts exchanged between Joe and her former lovers and some – including three redheaded girl dolls belonging to one redheaded woman – had to be kept away from Wadley to save him from temptation. Wadley even started to breed.
‘Being a man, he had a lot of babies,’ Joe said. ‘And we used to have to pay for that.’ Only one of Wadley’s offspring bore his name. In the late 1970s Ann Azzara, an energetic woman of Irish descent who was married to a New York Italian, struck up a friendship with Joe Carstairs; the older woman’s tales of adventure on the seas reminded Ann, she said, of the stories her father used to tell. Ann had learnt to cook on board her father’s ship and she would make ship’s breakfasts for Joe: marmalade, toast, kippers, herrings and mushrooms. Ann was enchanted by Wadley. When she became pregnant, Joe announced: ‘Wadley did it. Cad-dad did it.’ Ann’s baby was named Daniel Tod Wadley Azzara, and when he was seven Joe taught him to smoke Wadley’s cigars.
In the 1980s Joe embarked with some friends on a property venture in New York, and dubbed the company Wadley Associates: its stationery was imprinted with the Wadley crown. Her philanthropic gestures, too, became firmly associated with Wadley. In the 1980s she introduced him to the sons of her tailor in Long Island, aged four and five. Wadley was dressed elegantly, like an English gentleman, and with him was a bodyguard, a little black boy with a golden gun. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ Joe said to the boys. ‘Wadley is very rich. See his gold chain? If you’re very good, one day he’ll be good to you.’ Every Christmas Wadley would give toys to the tailor’s boys, and through her he set up a fund for them to be educated at college. To another little boy of her acquaintance Joe gave an Acme Thunderer whistle, with a note attached: ‘Merry Christmas to my pal from Tod Wadley. Always whistle when you need someone or something.’ If asked what she wanted as a gift, Joe would reply, ‘I don’t really need anything – get something for Wadley.’
In 1978 Joe asked Hugh Harrison, a handsome man of about sixty who she had met on Long Island, to move in with her. ‘I’ve had it with these fucking women,’ she said. To prove that she was serious, she said he could bring his cat, Bean (cats, of course, were abhorrent to Joe). Hugh had taken to Joe instantly and he accepted her offer. He stayed with her as a friend and paid companion until she died. They lived first in Miami and then in Naples, a well-heeled resort on the west coast of Florida. Joe’s house in Naples was another mock-ship, with solid wooden walls, cathedral ceilings, and the sea on the doorstep. It was lit, like the house on Whale Cay, with copper ship’s lanterns. Joe lived there with Hugh, Bean, a cook, a maid and, as she became more debilitated, a succession of nurses. Bean soon learned that her bedroom was out-of-bounds.
When Joe had an operation for cataracts, she was delighted at the excuse to don a jaunty black eye-patch. She recalled with relish that in the 1920s she had been wearing just such a piratical patch, and a naval officer’s overcoat, when an old man had mistaken her for a boy and tried to pick her up at Berlin railway statio
n. Ever insistent on her virility, Joe would return from a drive and announce that she and Samson (her car) had raced another car at more than 100mph. She would stride into a room full of strangers, her skin tough and tanned, her hair cropped and white, and comment loudly on it being ‘fuck-awful cold’ before rolling up her sleeves to reveal her wrinkled tattoos. On one arm was the scar from a game she had played on Whale Cay in 1950: she and a woman named Betsy had engaged in a competition to see who could hold a burning cigarette to their skin for longest. ‘I was young,’ Joe explained. ‘Fifty . . . Just a child, just a child.’
Joe complained that people were more energetic when she was young. Now there were ‘dope fiends’ everywhere, with their ‘blank, stary eyes’. Maybe she was haunted by the blank, stary eyes of the drug addicts of her youth: her mother, her first idol (Dolly Wilde) and her first love (Ruth Baldwin). Even when in pain, Joe resisted taking any kind of drug. Her doctor, seeing that her spirits were low, suggested that he prescribe Prozac. ‘I don’t take medicine,’ she snapped.
Joe liked to watch boxing on television; George Foreman was her favourite, and she greeted his appearances with ‘There’s my George.’ She also watched videos: swashbuckling adventures starring the likes of Errol Flynn; films which involved shooting animals in India or Africa; films about maritime disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic; and Jaws: ‘Oh, how I loved Jaws,’ said Joe. ‘I liked him – the shark.’ She enjoyed anything featuring David Niven, whom she thought she resembled in her staunch and elegant Englishness. Joe’s favourite blazer bore a British crest and golden buttons bought in the 1920s. She used to bemoan the loss of British power and prestige, especially in the former colonies: ‘England’s gone down the drain, dammit!’
And Joe watched videotapes of Dietrich films. She effected a kind of reconciliation with Marlene when she went to one of her concerts in Miami and then sought an audience with the star backstage. ‘She kissed me,’ Joe said afterwards.
As she got older, Joe lived more and more simply, and talked mockingly of the ‘rich kids’ who lived in Naples. She had always shunned conspicuous displays of wealth. She used money in strictly functional ways: to build boats, to shoot animals, to buy cars, to run an island, to dress smartly, to keep the house clean, to provide for her friends and workers. If she could not use her money to build and make, she barely spent any on herself at all. Some things were worth spending on, though. In the late 1980s Joe donated her racing trophies to the newly opened National Motorboat Museum at Pitsea, Essex. She paid for their shipping to England and for a bullet-proof cabinet to house them. (When the museum came to insure the trophies, it discovered that they were not the silver-plated originals, but solid silver copies cast after the house at Mulberry Walk was burgled in the 1930s.)
Joe inspired love in those she used her money to ‘look after’. While living in Miami on the St Pete she met a man who had idolised her since the First World War. William O’Brien, or ‘Obie’, was serving in the Coldstream Guards in 1917 when he read an article in the News of the World which described Joe’s work as an ambulance driver in France. He cut out the article and carried it with him for years, even after emigrating to Florida. In the 1920s he read with pride of her motorboating victories and in the 1960s was overwhelmed finally to run into his hero. Joe employed him as a boat mechanic and gave him a sailor-doll. Obie called Joe ‘The Skipper’. After her death he wrote: ‘I have lived and worked for her boats . . . and I have always loved her.’
When Joe left Long Island for good in the late 1980s she offered to provide an income for her tailor, Joe Visone, and his wife, ‘Mrs Joe’. The Visones declined the offer. ‘I don’t want it,’ Joe Visone told Joe Carstairs. ‘I want you.’ Her friends too repaid her generosity with love. After the war, Bardie Coleclough lived apart from her husband, Air Vice Marshal Sir William Tyrrell, surgeon to the King. She became a Communist, a CND activist and a maniacal vegetarian and Rolls-Royce enthusiast. The money Joe sent her each year safeguarded her independence. In 1986, the year she died aged eighty-nine, Bardie wrote to Joe: ‘You have given me freedom. I miss you still and forever Klep.’
Joe’s world, though, was increasingly peopled with her dolls. As a present for Joe, Hugh Harrison sent off for a ‘Mea Doll’, whose blank face was superimposed with a photograph of the face of its owner. Joe Carstairs kissed the face of her Mea Doll so fervently that it became rubbed away and smeared with red lipstick; another doll in Joe’s image was sent for, in case the face of the first vanished completely. Friends of Joe gave the twin Mea Dolls gifts – tennis racquets and sweatshirts emblazoned with the letter ‘W’ for Wimbledon – and the pair became known as the Tennis Boys. Then there were other dolls, together a silent spectacle of Joe’s fantasies: the Chinaman, the cowboy with his horse, the golliwog, the guardsman, the old man, the sailor boys. Many had talismanic qualities – on occasion Joe was given toy elephants, but she refused to accept them unless their trunks were erect, pointing upwards ‘for luck’.
Towards the end, Joe changed her will at least twice a year, carefully charting out her relationships in the language of cash and possessions – in total, some sixty-eight versions were drawn up. In her final will, she shared the bulk of her fortune – about $33 million before tax – between Hugh, Charlotte, Jackki, Jorie and her girlfriend, John Howcroft and his wife, and Dorothy Edwards, the secretary of Joe’s lawyer. In addition, she made more than thirty individual bequests to friends and employees, ranging from $5,000 to $600,000 and totalling about $2,500,000. She made specific bequests of the most precious of her possessions.
Jackki was given, among other things, ‘my large black wooden elephant, my silver jug, my gold plaque with sun emblem, my large natural bear and pillow of Wadley which is on my bed’. Hugh was to have ‘my two Mea dolls, my two handmade wooden chairs in the Florida room together with my two needlepoint pillows, the raccoon in the chair in my room, my plate in the frame in my room, my two stuffed boy dolls, my soft yellow dog with the long fuzzy tail, my large and small tortoises and my ceramic yellow and spotted dogs’.
Joe left John Howcroft, who had helped run Whale Cay in the early days, ‘my ceramic sea gull and wooden ship, both of which are on the piano in the living-room, my stuffed dog John, the stuffed dog in the chair in my bedroom, the picture of my ship which is in my room and my bronze of Wadley’. To Ann Azzara went ‘my large leather penguin which is in the Florida room, my book on Lord Tod Wadley and my framed poem about Wadley, both of which are in my bedroom’. (The book on Tod Wadley consisted of photographs and captions.)
Doris Cook, Joe’s housekeeper in Naples, was allocated ‘my stuffed bear with eye shade, two old men, one of whom is on a horse, my stuffed soldier and camel and any other stuffed animals and dolls that she may want, other than those specifically bequeathed herein’.
All personal property not identified in the will could be distributed at the executor’s discretion – except the toys. Joe inserted a clause to this effect. ‘I direct my Executor to make such distribution as he may believe I would wish of my furniture and other tangible personal property wherever located which is not hereinabove effectively bequeathed to other beneficiaries . . . excepting however that all stuffed animals and dolls which are not specifically bequeathed or taken by Doris Cook shall be burned.’
Joe boasted of having outlived her younger brother and sister – Sally and Frank both died in the 1980s – and placed bets on the fact she would live to ninety-four. She had terrific rows with Hugh over which of them was the more manly (he was gay, a fact that she used against him). ‘She sure doesn’t mellow,’ Hugh remarked. But in truth the fight was going out of her and sometimes after a bruising exchange Joe would sit repeating to herself, ‘I never cry, I’ll never cry, I never cry, I’ll never cry.’ If she was upset she would huddle with Wadley in her bed. She liked Hugh to address each furry toy and doll in turn when he came to her bedroom to say goodnight; Joe replied on their behalf. ‘Goodnight, Tennis Boys.’ ‘Goodnight, Hugh.’ ‘
Goodnight, Raccoon.’ ‘Goodnight, Hugh.’
Joe began to refer to her limbs as detached and insensible, as pieces of meat. Her legs were legs of lamb, then mutton. ‘Let’s put mutton to bed,’ she would say to her nurse; she sent out money to earthquake victims, and speculated on the possibility of cooking up her mutton legs to give to the poor. Her substitute limbs, in turn, came to life. Joe Carstairs called her walking frame ‘Spider’ (it bore a sign with its name) and her walking sticks ‘my two boys’.
Joe became terrified that somebody might hurt Wadley, and sometimes would withdraw from an argument for Wadley’s sake, afraid that her adversary might damage him in anger. She once went back to her car to fetch Wadley on a sunny day, in case he was uncomfortably hot. More realistically, she had a horror of moths.
And Wadley did decay. His beady eyes remained bright but his leather face darkened and split. Soon it was plastered with tiny band-aids. ‘I know he’s old,’ Joe said. ‘He’s an old dolly, bless his heart, but my God he’s still got that boyish smile and look.’ Once, when Wadley’s arm was damaged, Joe sent him to a toy-mender. But she could not bear to be separated from him for long, and after a sleepless night sent for him to be returned at dawn.
‘You never really needed anybody,’ a friend said to her.
‘Only Wadley,’ Joe replied.
‘What would you do if something happened to Wadley?’
‘No,’ Joe said quickly. ‘I don’t want to consider it.’
Her friend persisted. ‘What would you do if you were driving your car and . . .’ Joe interrupted sharply. ‘No. I don’t want to talk about it.’
A woman who encountered Lord Tod Wadley in the 1980s was disturbed by the doll, could not shake him from her mind for days. ‘He looks so lively,’ she said, and then, ‘like something dead’. Instead of transcending life and death, Wadley oscillated between them, uncannily.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 16
