Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  As for Reg’s marriage, even Ron appeared to have accepted the idea of it by now. Only a few months earlier, when Reg had brought Frances to Esmeralda’s Barn, Ron had been so abusive that a fight had broken out and the Twins had needed to be dragged apart or they might have killed each other. But that was all behind them now and Ron was cheerfulness itself. Apparently delighted with the idea of his brother’s marriage, he behaved to Frances like some old gay uncle. ‘So you’re joinin’ the family are you, Frances dear? Hope you’ll enjoy it,’ he would say whenever he saw her now.

  In spite of this, Frances told Reg that she found Ron ‘creepy’ but he told her not to be so silly. ‘Ron has his little ways, but once you get to know him you’ll see he has a heart of gold.’

  The one member of the family who couldn’t hide her feelings was the Twins’ mother Violet. Even several years later, after Frances had died, she confided to me that ‘Frances was never good enough for my Reggie. When he brought her round to see me she’d just sit there, polishing her nails, and you know what? She couldn’t even make us all a cup of tea.’

  However, with the rest of the family, especially Grandpa Lee and Auntie May, assuring her how much they loved her, Frances was not particularly concerned about the feelings of her future mother-in-law. What did worry her was the sheer determination of both the Twins to make the wedding such a grand occasion. She knew that her Reggie was famous but until now she’d never realised just how famous, and when he promised her the East End’s wedding of the year she always said it wasn’t what she wanted. ‘Reggie, dear, I just want you,’ she’d say. But seeing how much he’d set his heart on a grand wedding she finally gave in, as she usually did with Reg, and went along with it.

  The one setback to the wedding that did occur was completely unexpected. Without discussing it with Frances beforehand Reg had booked the big red-brick church of St James the Great for the wedding, and she knew how much he wanted Father Hetherington, the priest in charge, to marry them. The Twins had known Father Hetherington since childhood, but when they asked him to officiate he refused. To make matters worse he told them that he hoped they’d not go through with it.

  Frances was surprised at how calmly Reg accepted this. All he said was, ‘Why, Father? Tell me why.’

  ‘Because I don’t think either of you has any notion of what marriage is about. Nor can I see the faintest chance of you finding lasting happiness together. Worse still, if you insist on getting married I fear you’ll end up causing lasting harm to each other.’

  Frances had never heard anyone talk like this to Reg before and had it been anyone but Father Hetherington there would certainly have been trouble. But Reg controlled himself.

  ‘What do you mean, Father?

  ‘I’m sure you know what I mean, Reg, but I’ll say no more.’

  ‘Are you telling us we can’t get married, then?’ said Frances.

  ‘Not at all. I’m sure Father Foster will be happy to officiate, if you insist. But I cannot.’

  When they asked Father Foster, he did agree. Being younger and very friendly with the Twins, he was possibly more broad-minded than Father Hetherington and there was no question of him refusing.

  From what Reggie told me later, I’m sure that he saw marriage to Frances as his last chance to escape – from the ties of twinship, from any slur that there might be upon his sexuality and from being taken over totally by Ron. Certainly to start with he thought that pretty Frances would provide a magical escape to a normal life, and he honestly believed that Father Hetherington was wrong. Like Frances, he might even have thought that love would conquer all.

  But, like Father Hetherington, Ron knew quite well that it wouldn’t, and because he knew Reg through and through he simply smiled the contented smile of somebody prepared to wait. I’m sure he knew exactly what would happen and was determined that it would. Nothing could ever come between him and Reg, especially not a silly girl like Frankie Shea. Just give Reg time. He’d learn.

  In the meantime, in the midst of the excitement following their acquittal, something that would be of considerable significance to the future of the Twins now made its first appearance. Through the publicity created by the wedding, change was in the air.

  During the aftermath of the Boothby scandal, followed so swiftly by the Twins’ acquittal at the Old Bailey, the news media had found itself in something of a quandary. It was widely known and accepted that the Krays were among the most powerful and dangerous criminals in London. But because of the establishment cover-up, and because Lord Goodman, as he now was, had gagged the press so thoroughly, no one in the media dared say so. It was certainly not possible to describe how the Twins had used Boothby’s money to fix the McCowan trial, let alone to hint at the protection rackets, the long-firm frauds, the violence and the Twins’ connections with the Mafia. So when, after the acquittal, two smart young journalists, Lewis Chester and Cal McCrystal, interviewed the Twins for an article in the Sunday Times they had a problem. Because of the newspaper’s fear of libel, they could not refer to the Twins as criminals, still less could they even mention what they did.

  Instead, with considerable ingenuity, the two journalists wrote a full-page human interest piece about the Twins, avoiding any reference to crime. Instead, they always referred to Ron and Reg as ‘the two famous sporting twins’ who were ‘part of the culture of the old East End’. There was no explanation of what the Twins’ favourite ‘sport’ might be but from now on ‘East End sporting twins’ became the phrase the press invariably adopted when describing them. Equally important, Chester and McCrystal were the first writers to use words like ‘myth’ and ‘legend’ when describing why the Kray Twins were suddenly so popular.

  This popularity spread to other writers on the Sunday Times and a few days later Francis Wyndham, novelist and feature writer in the paper’s colour magazine, wrote to the Twins asking for an interview. Never ones to miss a chance for self-promotion, the Twins turned up next day at the Sunday Times offices to meet him. It was then that their adventures in the world of upmarket publicity really started.

  From the beginning, Wyndham and the Twins got on famously together. They invited him to Vallance Road to meet members of the family, who reminded Wyndham of characters out of Charles Dickens. There was some truth in this and while he was preparing his article for the magazine, David Bailey, who had worked for the paper in the past, was commissioned to take the accompanying photographs.

  As an East Ender, born and bred in Leytonstone, Bailey knew about the Krays and got on well with them, so much so that he arranged the photo shoot in the West End studios of Vogue fashion magazine, where he often worked. As well as using the studio for his fashion photographs, he sometimes shot his celebrity portraits there as well so at the time it seemed no big deal to him to be taking the Kray Twins there. But something remarkable did happen that day in the studios of Vogue magazine when Bailey used his camera to record the moment when the Swinging Sixties came face to face with the two most dangerous criminals in London. The result was one of the most memorable photographs of Bailey’s whole career. His portrait finally became the Twins’ monument, and forty years on there is still something terribly disquieting in that tortured image of the Twins.

  But Bailey’s role in the story of the Krays was not over. The Sunday Times never used Wyndham’s article and rather than waste that double portrait Bailey decided to include it in his ‘box of pin-ups’, an impressively boxed and packaged limited edition of his prestigious portraits of key celebrities of the 1960s. These included pop stars like the Beatles and Mick Jagger, actors like Peter Sellers and Michael Caine, and models and starlets like Jean Shrimpton and Marianne Faithfull. To include that image of the Twins among such figures enrolled them in the ranks of accredited Sixties celebrities. For the benefit of anyone who was not too sure about the Kray Twins’ claim to fame, Francis Wyndham wrote a fulsome piece about them which was printed on the back of their portrait.

  The so-called celebrity cult
ure really started in the Sixties. It was very much the product of what Marshall McLuhan called ‘the electronic media’ and unlike fame, which rested essentially on achievement, celebrity was primarily concerned with image – on being, as Henry James first put it, ‘famous for being famous’ – hence the importance of so many young photographers in the culture of the Sixties. Hence also the importance of the Bailey portrait at this point in the Twins’ rise to fame. It didn’t matter that, with the hush-up of the Boothby scandal, nothing of real importance about them could be stated in the press. To go with Bailey’s virtuoso portrait of the Twins all that was needed was Francis Wyndham’s explanation not of what they did but of why they were celebrities.

  Starting from the premise that the East End was like the American Wild West, Wyndham went on to describe the twins as cockney versions of famous outlaws such as Jesse James, and there was a lot of talk of myths and legends and folk heroes. ‘To be with the Twins is to enter the atmosphere (laconic, lavish, dangerous) of an early Bogart movie’.

  All this was fairly harmless and the Twins of course loved it. For them it was invaluable publicity and it set a very large ball rolling. It was this that worried another photographer who also worked for the Sunday Times and who wielded considerably more influence than David Bailey. This was the Queen’s new brother-in-law Lord Snowdon. As a young photographer he had lived in the East End where he’d learnt enough about the Twins to strongly disapprove of turning them into Sixties heroes. It was largely thanks to Snowdon’s influence that David Bailey’s box of pin-ups never found a US publisher.

  By now it was time for Reg’s wedding. As one might have guessed, Reg had got his way and this really did turn out to be the East End’s wedding of the year. And suddenly the Twins were on display, surrounded by a fascinating mix of criminals and celebrities.

  They were observing the first law of celebrity which states that ‘a celebrity is celebrated for being a celebrity’ and they can usually be spotted in the presence of other celebrities – in this case Diana Dors, Joan Littlewood and Tom Driberg, who were all at the wedding.

  Another telltale sign of true celebrity is the presence of photographers, in this case the crown prince of Sixties snappers in person who, dressed in a blue velvet suit, drove up in a matching blue Rolls-Royce. David Bailey had recently left his best-known model and girlfriend, Twiggy, and confirmed his own position as a celebrity by marrying a film star, the French actress Catherine de Neuve.

  This was the only time since his rise to fame that Bailey condescended to become a wedding photographer, together with Francis Wyndham as his assistant.

  But as far as the wedding was concerned, only one person and one alone was in command. As the organ started up the marriage hymn ‘Oh Perfect Love, All Love Excelling, the response from the congregation was far from perfect. It was the sort of awkward situation when nobody felt like joining in, and suddenly Ron showed what he really felt about the marriage as he started marching angrily up and down the aisle.

  ‘Sing, fuck you, sing!’ he shouted. And as usual when ‘the Colonel’ gave the orders everyone obeyed.

  The reception that followed was at the now notorious Glenrae Hotel in Seven Sisters Road, where not long before the Twins and Mad Teddy had been arrested. But now it was crammed with starlets, gangsters, members of the two families – and Tom Driberg. As for pretty, nervous Frances, she was caught in a situation that she would never understand and a nightmare that she was never going to escape. Because of that unforgiving bond that ruled the Twins, the conflict between them would end up destroying her.

  The marriage was a nightmare almost from the start and even the honeymoon was doomed. From his schooldays Reg remembered pictures of the Acropolis overlooking Athens so, wishing to impress his bride, he picked on Athens for their six-day honeymoon. What he didn’t know was that the Athens of the 1960s had barely recovered from Greece’s civil war and it was not the place to take a girl like Frances. There were no smart shops, no sexy nightclubs, nowhere interesting to go, and naturally the couple didn’t speak a word of Greek. Since Frances found it hard to hide her disappointment, so did Reg, and instead of a romantic beginning to their marriage every evening Reg left her in their hotel bedroom while he went out on the town and got completely drunk.

  When they returned to London, Reg continued to get everything wrong. Wanting to spoil Frances with a smart West End existence, he rented an apartment in a luxury block near Marble Arch, but almost from the start Frances hated it. Violet had been right about one thing. Her new daughter-in-law couldn’t cook. She also missed her friends. The West End was unfamiliar and she felt lonely and homesick for Bethnal Green. Although he kept telling her he loved her, Reg was miserable and lonely too and was soon drinking more than ever to disguise his inadequacy. He was ten years older than his bride, a homosexual gangster who preferred neat gin to making love to her, and despite all the fuss about the Wedding of the Year the marriage died before it even started.

  Somehow they endured four wretched weeks together, staring at the traffic around Marble Arch before they realised that their only hope lay in getting back to the East End. Even now this just might have worked had Reg chosen any other place to live than in the empty flat directly under Ron’s at Cedra Court.

  I always wondered why he did this, for Reg wasn’t totally naive and must have had some idea of what would happen. One can only suppose that, as usual, he was being torn between his longing to escape from Ron and his awareness that he couldn’t live without him.

  Also, Ron’s power as the dominating twin was getting stronger by the day and since the unhappiness and strain of his marriage were simultaneously weakening Reg there was little he could do against him. Every evening Reg and Frances had the same routine. Just before seven Reg would pour himself his first neat glass of Gordon’s gin, followed by another, after which he’d disappear upstairs leaving Frances to watch television and go to bed alone. Instead of sleeping, she was often kept awake by the sound of music and male laughter from the flat upstairs.

  When Reg finally did return, sometimes as late as three or four in the morning, he was often paralytic and could even be sadistic. He would shout obscenities at her and she told a friend that on one occasion he was actually foaming at the mouth. She insisted that he never hit her but he certainly threatened her with violence. He also warned her that he would hurt members of her family. Knowing how much she feared the sight of blood, he cut his hand and let the blood drip over her. Also knowing how she dreaded guns, he threatened her with one. Sometimes he sobbed and blamed her for the fact that their marriage was unhappy. Once she awoke in the dark in the middle of the night and knew that beside her was her husband and another man.

  By now Reg was reverting to a Jekyll and Hyde existence and effectively becoming two quite separate people. In the morning when he woke the husband of the midnight hours had gone and in his place there was the gentle Reg who was once more kind and thoughtful, and for whom nothing was too much trouble. He never seemed to have a hangover, and in the morning he was always sober. As for Ron, although Frances sometimes recognised his voice shouting from above she rarely saw him now except when he passed her on the stairs. Every time this happened his greeting was the same. ‘Cheer up, Frances dear. You’re lookin’ worried.’

  In fact she was terrified of Ron by now and understood the power he had over her husband. To one girlfriend she confided her belief that Ronnie had bewitched him. ‘Ron possesses him,’ she said.

  Frances endured eight weeks of misery before returning to her parents. She told her mother that the marriage had become a nightmare. When her mother asked her what she meant, Frances sobbed that her husband was a pervert and was unable to make love to her. The only time he tried to was by pretending that she was a boy and attempting to take her from behind. ‘I feel defiled,’ she sobbed. ‘What can I do? No one else will ever want me.’

  I once asked a cousin of the Sheas why Frances didn’t leave Bethnal Green, and start a new life
somewhere else. ‘How could she?’ he replied. ‘Bethnal Green was the only place she knew and her family was all she had. Besides, Reg had warned her that if she ever ran away from him he’d always follow her and find her.’

  I’m sure that this was true, but I’m also sure that there was more to it than that and that both she and Reg had now become dependent on each other. In years to come she would continue to obsess him from beyond the grave. Otherwise it’s hard to understand what happened next. No sooner was Frances safely back in Ormsby Street with her family than Reg started coming round to see her as he used to do when they were courting. And since her parents wouldn’t have him in the house, he’d stand patiently outside on the pavement until Frances opened her bedroom window. Then they’d talk, often for an hour or so. Before long this was becoming something of a habit and hardly an evening passed without it happening. But the marriage itself was clearly over, and with it vanished any hope Reg ever had of escaping from his fate. As for Frances she was henceforth at the mercy of the Twins.

  15

  Killing Cornell

  WHILE REG’S MARRIAGE was collapsing, crime was booming and the summertime of 1965 was full of promise for the Twins. The police were keeping clear of them, no other gang would challenge them, and having benefited so dramatically from the cover-up of the Boothby case the Twins had finally become what they liked to call themselves – ‘the untouchables’ of the London underworld.

  To begin with they appeared all set to take advantage of this chance that fate and the Establishment had given them. They already had their network of protection throughout London, bringing in steady money from the clubs and casinos that they ‘minded’. Their long-firm frauds were set to bring them in much more. Fresh rackets were increasing, and no other gang in London cared or dared to tangle with them. By now the name of Kray had taken on a more specific meaning. What other criminals had ever done what they had done, seeing off Scotland Yard, winning a major trial at the Old Bailey, and boasting influential friends in parliament?