A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  A landscape attributed to Van Goyen would be sold in 1977 for £9,000, as part of the discharge of Lucan’s bankruptcy. Also sold, for £520, were his robes and coronet, the aristocratic regalia that had been made for his grandfather.11 These were kept in Lucan’s ground-floor study. So too was the ivory backgammon board that had been his wife’s engagement present, and a nineteenth-century desk, rosewood and tulipwood, sold by Veronica for £13,200 in 2009. ‘That was my father’s,’ says Jane. ‘Veronica sold some lovely things that we used to slightly weep over.’ Even after the bankruptcy discharge a certain amount remained, such as paintings, jewellery and items of furniture, although Lucan himself had sold a good many things along the way: notably the precious marble heads commissioned by the 2nd Earl of his daughters. By 1974 Lucan would be placating his creditors with a promise to sell ‘the family silver’, a loss as wrenching as that totemic phrase implies, although he may have been beyond caring by that point. The collection included forty-eight George III plates, kept at the St James’s Club and occasionally used for formal dinners; a decorated field marshal’s baton presented to the 3rd Earl by Queen Victoria in 1887; and a truly magnificent William IV candelabrum, a giant thing with nine lights, again inherited from the 3rd Earl: ‘presented to Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Bingham by officers of the 17th Lancers on his retirement from the command of the regiment as a testimonial of their respect and esteem.’ This piece sold for £6,050 at Christie’s in 1976, when the 102 items of silver together made £30,665 (around half the total of Lucan’s debts). Many of the auctioned items were bought back anonymously, by friends, on behalf of his children. A further sale took place in Geneva.

  In October 1964 the Lucans had their first child, Frances. A photograph by Lenare shows a wide-eyed Veronica with her baby, an intensely touching image of the happiness that might have been. An older woman named Lilian Jenkins was employed as the first Lucan nanny, and stayed with the family for eight years, through the births of George in 1967 and Camilla in 1970. Later Veronica would claim that she had not wanted a nanny at all. When she sacked Lilian Jenkins in late 1972, very much against her husband’s wishes, she was said to have been asserting both her autonomy and her status as a mother.12 However, given that she had suffered post-natal depression with each of her children, help was clearly desirable, as well as being the upper-class norm.

  Throughout this period Veronica rarely rose before midday, and lived in as sybaritic a way as her husband had done in his twenties. Lucan was a very generous man. As gamblers do, he would chuck Veronica a gift whenever he had a decent win: usually a piece of jewellery. There were also lunches at San Lorenzo; dinners at the Mirabelle; hair at Carita in Knightsbridge; dresses from Bellville Sassoon; food account at Harrods; golf lessons; hunting with the Whaddon Chase; standing on racecourses in the hallowed square of turf that marks the owners’ and trainers’ enclosure, watching the two horses that ran in her name; attending the Cresta Run and its fabulous ball; staying with the von Furstenbergs, with the Aga Khan; summers in Monte Carlo, Italy, the south of France. It was a holiday life, punctuated by holidays. A lot of women would give their right arm for it. ‘We were a beautiful couple,’ Veronica was to say, ‘and our marriage had its good times.’ It doesn’t sound as though there was much to bitch about.

  Yet the bitching did come, increasingly so, and it was related to the thing that Veronica had previously agreed to accept: her husband’s gambling. ‘She’d said she didn’t mind John gambling,’ as Stephen Raphael put it, ‘yet her chief complaint throughout the marriage was that he gambled.’13 But really the complaint was about something more than that. The gambling became a symbol of a more diffuse sense of marital dislocation. Veronica did not fit into Lucan’s world, and his reaction was to bury himself within it.

  Today we would say: why should she have fitted into his world? Why should she have enjoyed the Clermont, or become friendly with Kait Lucan? A nice mother-in-law, one would have thought, but she wasn’t obliged to agree. Indeed the police accounts of Veronica do present a modern, almost feminist heroine, standing up for reason against the brandy-soaked buffoonery of the 7th Earl and, by the end of this story, emerging the victor in every respect: destroying the man who had, according to myth, sought to destroy her.

  Three cheers would be the modern response to this. Veronica as the voice of the put-upon woman, like Diana, Princess of Wales chatting away and stirring the dirt on Panorama; the only problem being that Veronica freely chose to marry Lord Lucan, she was bright enough to know what he was like, she absolutely loved having a title, and therefore, it would seem, the problem was not so much that she wanted to set herself apart from his world, more that she wanted to belong to it and didn’t.

  It is said that Veronica, despite her dislike of the place, was obliged to go to the Clermont every night, otherwise she would never have seen her husband. This is something of an exaggeration: there were the social events, the private planes to go racing in France (which Veronica herself refused to do), the weekends away, the evenings in restaurants. They spent Sunday evenings with Zoe and Greville Howard at a club in Mayfair. Lucan’s old friend from Eton would also meet them for dinner: ‘She was never a real friend, you know. But I got on with her perfectly well. She wasn’t that easy. You wouldn’t think, after having supper with them, that it had been great fun. It had been OK – just nothing, really.’

  But after a year or so of marriage, gambling did begin to assume a greater importance in Lucan’s life. It is a familiar scenario. Going to the tables became the aristocratic equivalent of having a few quiet pints down the pub with the boys. It was an escape, or seemed to be one, even though it was also work. Money had to be acquired, despite the safety net of the trusts. Lucan dealt in casual thousands: £8,000 could go out on a bad night, but in the 1960s, when he still maintained a degree of control, it would come back in again. He had considerable success at cards and backgammon. ‘He wasn’t supremely good at bridge, but he was quite a good bridge player,’ says Stuart Wheeler; overall he won more than he lost at the Portland bridge club. At backgammon he won the St James’s Club tournament and became the champion of the West Coast of America. He also made money at poker, which he learned at the Hamilton Club and at which he was very good indeed (the façade being what it was). ‘He kept on having these big wins,’ says Bill Shand Kydd, ‘which kept him afloat. He’d get a couple of grand, and squirrel it away.’ The gambling took place at various venues, as did socializing; there was a communal dinner every Monday at the Portland. But it was the atmosphere of the Clermont that had begun to embrace him.

  ‘It was’, says Jane, ‘a home from home. That was where he spent so much time, and Veronica would be there too. I can still see the rocking, actually…’

  As Veronica sat in her finery, she would rock back and forth on the ‘widows’ bench’. ‘On one occasion,’ it was later said, ‘she became distraught and sat constantly pulling her hair.’14 It was only fair that she wanted to go there with her husband. Yet her presence became a clamp upon his mood: although she took up very little space, one was always somehow very aware of her, a tiny white figure amid the merriment.

  The myth has it that Veronica had a singularly terrible time at the Clermont, sitting alone on the widows’ bench while her husband gambled with his chuckling, braying circle of friends. ‘Can you imagine?’ says a detective who worked on the case. ‘If my wife had to sit there like that she’d have plenty to say about it.’ And that, certainly, is a point of view. Some of Lucan’s friends shared it: the myth that they had no sympathy with her situation is much exaggerated. ‘His wife would have had a rotten time, I think,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘I get the impression that she was very lonely there.’ Lucan’s schoolfriend says: ‘I think she had a rough time, in that he pushed off to gamble at all hours – she sat in the corner at the Clermont club, sat on her own while he gambled. Not the whole time, of course. But that can’t have been very easy for her.’ Nick Peto, who later married Zoe and was then a Clermont regu
lar, concurs. ‘Veronica must have had a miserable life, sat there, doing nothing.’

  After Lucan’s disappearance, even John Aspinall conceded that Veronica had not had much fun at the club. ‘She would sit down on the banquette and hardly speak to anyone. But she had no business to come there.’15 That last sentence is nonsense, of course, typical provocative Aspinall; but the first does give pause for thought. Although it is always said that Veronica endured agonies at the Clermont, nobody ever really asks why. There were other women there, who coped with it happily enough. Was it really such hell, sitting in that beautiful, bustling house? One can think of worse fates. The Clermont had life, style, a sense that one had traversed the VIP rope. It was, at the time, the place to be: a Studio 54 where the drug of choice was gambling. If it required a bit of effort, a bit of social toughness, then so do most things. If it was boring, then so is sitting at home. Of course to the modern sensibility the club does cause a dutiful shudder. It was manly, showy, posh, celebratory of wealth: all the contemporary sins. Fifty years ago, however, and despite the distant rumble of the tumbrils outside, places like that were not merely acceptable but desirable. If one didn’t like them, as members of Lucan’s family most certainly did not, then one might think that the answer was to stay well away from the kind of man who did.

  ‘If I’d been married to a gambler,’ says Christina Shand Kydd, ‘if Bill had been like John and gone there every night – I suppose I would have gone two or three nights a week, and other nights gone to a movie with a friend or whatever. Or Veronica could have come and had supper with us – but she wasn’t like that. At all.’ As Stephen Raphael said: ‘She didn’t create a life of her own.’16 For a clever woman this should have been easy; there were alternatives to the charity ball circuit, which would understandably have bored her. No marriage requires its parties to be conjoined. Veronica’s unusual persistence in shadowing Lucan made him more obstinate in turn. Again it was a familiar situation: that battle of wills – whether it be your mother or mine for Christmas, or who empties the dishwasher every night, or who can sulk for longest after an argument – which to an outsider seems so absurd, and within the marriage assumes a devouring importance.

  And it now seems untenable that a man should go out gambling and a woman be expected smilingly to endorse it. Again, fifty years ago things were very different; it is impossible to apply retrospectively a feminist agenda; equal partnerships, marriages that are also friendships, are too rare today for us to start berating the past about its lack of them. Most of the Clermont women had married a place in the world, as much as a man. This still happens. There are still plenty of women who endure tedious dinner parties sweet-talking their husbands’ business associates, or who maintain strenuous regimes of beautification, in order to justify their place inside architect-designed houses in Ladbroke Square. It is a choice. It is not our ideal of marriage, but it can succeed as well as the more romantic kind, as long as expectations are managed.

  Veronica had, undeniably, got what she wanted from Lucan. She herself would later say: ‘Right from the start I realized that if I were to marry him I’d have to fit in with his life.’17 Why, then, the open discontentment, when the man behaved much as he had said he would, in a place where being an earl and countess still signified? ‘It’s very difficult to describe,’ says Christina.

  She was very remote… I don’t think that John didn’t want her there. At the start anyway. But I mean she wouldn’t make any attempt to make friends with anybody in his life, or any part of his life. She probably felt that she should go. But then when she got there she’d just sit.

  Christina also says that Lucan’s set ‘tried hard with Veronica at first – particularly Zoe Howard’. Zoe, by then married to Greville Howard, became a good friend for a time.

  I was very fond of Veronica, else we wouldn’t have had our lunches at San Lorenzo [then an intensely smart restaurant in South Kensington]. We used to have lunch quite regularly. She was always saying to me, you’re very lucky to be married to a Howard, because your name is in Debrett’s. And I’m not like that. I didn’t know what Debrett’s was! I wasn’t into it at all.

  Zoe would sit alongside Veronica and watch their husbands as they played backgammon. So the image of persistent loneliness is a little misleading, although the impression is definitely that Zoe, just seventeen at the time and full of sweet good nature, was the only woman whom Veronica found unthreatening. ‘I don’t think she had many friends. She wasn’t over-friendly herself. I talked to other girls too, that were waiting, and they were quite fun and jolly. They were all very beautiful women – all smartly dressed. Some were mistresses of course, not all were wives. Everybody was always nice to me.’

  It is said that Veronica was far too bright for most of the people who went to the Clermont (in fact several of Lucan’s friends were Oxford graduates; whether they put their brains to good use is another question). She was, as the policeman Roy Ranson put it, ‘an intelligent woman sentenced to a life as an upper-class bimbo’; not especially flattering to the other wives and girlfriends. It is also said that she was looked down upon as socially below the salt, although logically this should have applied to her sister as well, which it did not.18

  Yet Veronica’s own perceptions of her role at the Clermont could be very different from those cited on her behalf. ‘I enjoyed the club, it was a waking-up time,’ she later said. ‘I knew he [Lucan] was a gambler. I therefore did a gambler’s moll act with him. We posed as a happy holiday couple but we were in these situations to make money. Making money was the principal objective and we were a team.’ In oblique reference to her apparent solitude, she also said: ‘I sat away from my husband when he played so I might come and go without being obvious, so he’d never associate me with winning or losing.’ In direct contradiction of the myth that Lucan abandoned her to loneliness, she said: ‘I suppose I saw more of him than most wives did of their husbands, because I saw him in the daytime and at night.’19

  Rightly or wrongly, this implies a collusion with Lucan, a sort of secret bond. So too do Veronica’s criticisms of other people at the club:

  Most of the women… resented me because I had married one of the gamblers and they couldn’t get their boyfriends to marry them. Not only had I married one of the gamblers but I had married the most attractive man in the Clermont… Most of the women subsequently wouldn’t speak to me or went out of their way to be rude to me.

  Enmity or rivalry between women is not uncommon. It is entirely possible that, intentionally or otherwise, some of the Clermont WAGs made Veronica feel out of place. Their glamour, too, may have been an issue. En masse they were like Bond girls. Veronica’s youthful glow had begun to dim; photographs of her on holiday with the Howards show a thin-faced woman with narrow eyes, attractively cool-looking by today’s standards but definitely underpowered by those of the time. Very much the peahen. One of the club members now describes her as ‘a mousy, bitter little woman. Completely out of her depth in that ambiance. She hadn’t got beauty or charm.’ Easy to say that this is a frivolous and ungallant view. Not so easy to spend every evening like Jane Eyre in the midst of Casino Royale.

  When, in 1966, Vittorio De Sica offered a film role out of nowhere to her husband, this would have seemed like further confirmation of his physical superiority. ‘There goes that expensive gentleman,’ said the mother of one of his gambling acquaintances, as he strolled casually out of the Eden Roc hotel. Veronica was later to say that people were always watching Lucan, speculating about him sexually; there is almost certainly some truth in this, because it is what people do. Nevertheless one has the sense that, Othello-like, she was hyper-alert to any hint that he might seek to stray, and that this was part of what made her so determined to stick to his side. In fact, as his old schoolfriend says, Lucan was as guiltless in this regard as Desdemona. ‘He could have gone off with somebody else. He never showed any sign of it.’

  Veronica claimed to have got along well with the male gambler
s – ‘it was the women who resented me, not the men’ – and some of them did take a liking to her. ‘She had a sort of quaint humour, which I thought was quite endearing,’ said Michael Stoop, while Daniel Meinertzhagen, who displays none of the Clermont set’s mythical kneejerk loathing for Veronica, recalls a drive with her in which she was very good company. ‘It was when John was around that the trouble started.’ That, indeed, was the crux of it. Despite her stated camaraderie with Lucan’s friends, Veronica said: ‘I know for a fact that some of the men wanted their girlfriends to sleep with John so that they could find out what Lucky was like in bed... They didn’t have his background or his breeding and they were constantly trying to pull him down to their position. Naturally, that included sex... They tried to plant prostitutes on him and all sorts of things.’20

  Whether or not this is how it was, and one strongly suspects that it was not that way, it all sits very well with the image of the Clermont as a hotbed of vice-ridden decadence. One can say that this world of Lucan’s was awful, and that it was to Veronica’s infinite credit that she did not fit, that she was ‘a square peg in a round hole’, as Nick Peto puts it. But that is not quite the truth, either.

  One night at the Clermont, Veronica threw a glass of wine over another woman. In that milieu, it had the edifice-shattering momentum of a stolen kiss in E. M. Forster.