Oil heiress who was ‘the fastest woman on water’
As a paradise isle goes on sale for £14.5million, we look at the extraordinary life of its former owner, a speedboat-racing, cross-dressing lesbian who had an affair with Marlene Dietrich
SHE once declared that “dull is a word that should be torn to pieces to see what it is made of ”. Certainly there was never a moment in the exotic life of Marion Barbara Carstairs that could be described as dull. Even the briefest precis is breathtaking.
For a start, Marion was known to everyone as Joe. She dressed as a man, smoked cigars and cheroots, had tattoos on her arms and was the lesbian lover of Hollywood stars including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Tallulah Bankhead.
Not only that, she was rich. Stinking rich. Her billionaire grandfather was a founder of Standard Oil and when her mother died Carstairs inherited a fortune. It financed a hedonistic lifestyle, allowing her to live as she pleased and to hell with what the world thought.
At 17 she moved to Paris where she had her first “marvellous” lesbian encounter. In her 20s she raced hugely expensive speedboats, eventually setting a speed record and earning herself the title: “fastest woman on the water”. In her 30s she bought an island in the Bahamas and ran it as her own country.
She was known as the Queen of Whale Cay (pronounced “key”) and for the next 40 years ruled the natives with a sword in her hand, set her own laws (adultery was declared illegal) and hosted riotous parties packed with celebrities, film stars and guests such as the Windsors – ex-King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
Carstairs died in 1993 at the age of 93. But today, if you have £14.5million to spare you can buy her special piece of paradise – because Whale Cay island, with its 12 miles of shoreline and white sandy beaches 90 miles east of Miami, is up for sale.
You get a lot for your money. The 711-acre island features the Great House, built to Carstairs’s design, a guest cottage she built for Dietrich, music room, staff dormitory, storage and maintenance buildings, museum, laundry room, seaplane hangar, lighthouse – and your own private airstrip. The island also comes with a treasure trove of memories of her extraordinary life.
BORN on February 1, 1900, in Mayfair she might have been just another spoiled Edwardian rich girl were it not for the three addictions from which her mother suffered: alcohol, drugs and husbands (four of them). Carstairs hated her and could not wait to leave home.
In Paris, Carstairs threw herself into a string of lesbian affairs, including one with Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly. She dressed as a man, called herself Joe and drove ambulances for the American Red Cross during the First World War – and after it, going back to the battlefields to help re-bury the dead.
Her mother loathed her daughter’s lesbianism and had threatened to take away Carstairs’ inheritance if she did not “buckle down and get married” – so one month short of her 18th birthday she tied the knot with the French aristocrat Count Jacques de Pret.
But this was a marriage in name only. After the wedding the couple split the dowry and parted amicably – the union was never consummated.
Back in London, Carstairs dressed boyishly in baggy trousers and suits made on Savile Row to flatten her cleavage. One friend described her as looking like “an exuberant schoolboy”.
She started the X-Garage in Kensington, a women-only chauffeur service hugely popular in fashionable circles. Then in 1924 her mother died and Carstairs inherited the lot, becoming rich beyond her wildest dreams.
She blew a fortune in the maledominated world of speedboat racing. “I have no bent for art or for such accomplishments as one usually associates with girls,” she explained. “I liked the boats. I liked the way they behaved. I understood them.” Carstairs set her sights on the world’s most prized race, the Harmsworth Cup, commissioning three boats capable of more than 100 miles an hour. None of them completed the race – Carstairs and her mechanic were thrown into the water – but she was the fastest woman and the following year set an American speed record.
Everything changed in 1934. On holiday in the Bahamas she came across Whale Cay island and fell in love, saying: “Come on, Whale Cay, I want you.” She bought it for $40,000 – equivalent to $750,000 (£540,000) today – and a new bohemian life was born. She began sailing and one day in 1939 took her schooner past Marlene Dietrich’s private cove. Dietrich’s daughter recorded the scene.
“At the helm, a beautiful boy,” she wrote. “Bronzed and sleek – even from a distance, one sensed the power of his rippling muscles, of his tight chest and haunches.” As Carstairs came closer though, “he turned from a sexy boy into a sexy, flat-chested woman”.
Bisexual Dietrich quickly fell under the Carstairs spell and they had regular assignations on the yacht. Carstairs was so infatuated she even offered to give Dietrich her island.
But the Hollywood star was not the only love in Carstairs’s life. She kept photos of all her female conquests – there were said to be 120 – but her enduring love was Lord Tod Wadley, a foot-high stuffed leather doll given to her by a girlfriend called Ruth Baldwin.
THE doll, dressed in suits and uniforms, was her constant companion for the rest of her life – the Duchess of Windsor said it looked like the Duke. She would often ride her motorbike round the island with Lord Tod strapped on the back and the voodoo-practising natives believed the doll had special powers. Not surprisingly perhaps, Lord Tod was even cremated with her.
Carstairs dressed in naval uniforms and the 200 local inhabitants called her “Boss” because she ruled with an iron fist. Once a group of American tourists turned up and Carstairs arrested them at swordpoint, marching them to the lighthouse then locking them up for the night. They were released without apology – “I don’t give a **** about the law,” Carstairs said.
She did not lack courage. During the Second World War when she learned an American ship had been torpedoed 350 miles from Nassau, she sailed through U-boat-infested waters without lights and rescued 47 sailors who were close to death after days drifting at sea. It was only when she put the sailors ashore that they realised they had been saved not by a young man but by a woman of 42.
As she grew older, the celebrities no longer craved her friendship or her generosity and she became even more of a reclusive “queen”, giving herself the right to name all the island’s newborns and forming a private militia armed with machetes.
In 1975, however, possibly because of advancing age, she sold her beloved island and moved to Florida. Eighteen years later, with Lord Tod at her side, she died.
Their ashes, along with those of her long-time love Ruth Baldwin, were buried at sea near the Old Whaler’s Church in Sag Harbor, New York. The once fastest woman on water was at peace at last.