British heiress who slept with Garbo and Dietrich but loved only the doll she was buried with
THE particulars are certainly tempting: a 711-acre private island with more than a dozen white sandy beaches surrounded by the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean, and accessible only by boat or plane.
This very private paradise comes complete with a grand mansion built of concrete and steel, guest cottages, staff quarters, a lighthouse, airstrip and even a museum.
But if the sheer beauty of Whale Cay (pronounced ‘key’) — up for sale at $20 million (£14.5m) — is not beguiling enough, the history of the place is irresistible.
For more than four decades it was the domain of an outrageous, speed-loving, crossdressing British lesbian heiress who enjoyed high-profile relationships with, among many others, the actresses Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead.
Marion Carstairs, who was born in Mayfair in 1900, sported tattoos and smoked cigars. She preferred to be known as ‘Joe’, wore men’s clothes and styled herself ‘Queen of Whale Cay’, ruling it with an iron fist.
To the Bahamians who worked in her fruit plantations, she was ‘the Boss’. Uninvited visitors, however, were met by her toting a gun or a brandishing a cutlass, and thrown off the island. Armed guards patrolled the coastline and a machete-wielding watchman stalked the interior.
When an American pilot landed his seaplane just off the Cay, he didn’t stay long. ‘A short stock-built dame came popping out of the house with a double-barrelled shotgun in her dukes [hands] and dull menace in her lovely orbs [eyes],’ he reported.
On another occasion, a group of American tourists innocently rowed ashore — and were promptly taken prisoner. They were marched with hands bound to the lighthouse, where they spent the night locked up. No explanation or apology was offered.
‘I don’t give a f*** about the law,’ Carstairs loftily declared.
But then she had always treated life’s conventions with haughty indifference.
With riches inherited from her American mother, heiress to the Standard Oil billions, she spent money as the fancy took her, lived a life of jet-set glamour and as Britain’s speedboat champion was feted in 1920s London as the ‘fastest woman on water’.
Her uninhibited private life certainly challenged the moral codes of the time. Decadent and libidinous, she changed lovers with extraordinary frequency — a photograph album of her girlfriends was said to contain 120 pictures.
At 17, she was consorting with a bohemian set in Paris and became infatuated with Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dolly, a drug-taking bisexual party girl, who introduced her to sex. ‘My God what a marvellous thing,’ she later said. ‘I found it a great pity I’d waited so long.’
ACCORDING to her birth certificate, Carstairs was the daughter of army officer Captain Albert Carstairs, a Scot serving with the royal Irish rifles, although given her mother Evelyn’s proclivities he may not have been her biological father.
Evelyn was addicted to alcohol and heroin, and outrageously unfaithful. A year after Marion was born, the marriage was over and Evelyn was moving on to the second of her four husbands.
Aged five, Marion was knocked unconscious by a camel at London Zoo, and when she came round announced she would answer only to the name ‘Tuffy’. Eccentricity was taking root.
In 1916, she lied about her age and persuaded the red Cross to take her on as an ambulance driver. It was there she was seduced by Dolly Wilde, a fellow driver.
Liberated by war work and sex, she began wearing men’s clothes and reinvented herself as ‘Joe’. She was ‘never a little girl,’ she once said. ‘I came out of the womb queer.’
When news of her gay affairs reached her mother, she was ordered to marry or risk losing her inheritance. In an act of spite, she chose as her husband a French aristocrat, Count Jacques de Pret, whom she believed was having an affair with her mother.
The marriage was never consummated, its only purpose to allow her access to her trust fund, which she split with her new husband — although they parted after the wedding reception.
When her mother died three years later, the marriage was annulled and Marion Carstairs reverted to her maiden name.
Now off the leash, she wore trousers, tailored jackets, tuxedos and a beret — all made in Savile row and constructed so as to flatten her breasts — and pursued her voracious sexual appetite.
She was indifferent to criticism and decorum. Despite her riches, she lived above a garage in South Kensington, worked in a bar in Margate, a chicken farm in Southampton and a Bugatti showroom, before buying a fleet of Daimlers and setting up the X-Garage, a women-only chauffeur service.
She had an arrangement with the Savoy Hotel, taking guests to West End shows, and also transported grieving families to the war graves in France and Flanders.
She was a renowned party-giver and discovered powerboat racing in her 20s, quickly establishing her own yard on the Isle of Wight. In 1924 she won every race she entered and, two years later, the Duke of York’s trophy, a four-mile dash down the river Thames.
But the prestigious Harmsworth Trophy, established by Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, always eluded her.
With the death of her maternal grandmother, Carstairs became even richer and more lavish in her spending and generosity. She secretly backed Malcolm Campbell’s successful attempt at the world land speed record in Bluebird in 1931 with a £10,000 donation, and also began to travel on a lavish scale. She escorted a party to the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean for a treasure hunt, learned to surf in Hawaii, shot game in India and apparently met cannibals in Papua New Guinea.
Then, in 1934 complaining of high taxes in Britain, she sold her boat yard and sailed west. It was in the Bahamas where she found her next reincarnation, paying £8,000 for Whale Cay.
Under her direction, the island was transformed from a lush, untamed paradise to a thriving community with 26 miles of signposted roads, a wireless station and electricity plant, hospital, school, church and laundry.
WHEN immigrants from neighbouring islands flocked to live and work there, she was — paradoxically, given her own behaviour — shocked at the lack of respect many of them showed to their marriage vows. So she ruled only couples who married in the church and lived respectably in the houses she had built could remain on the island. Any lapse would result in banishment.
She also forbade strong liquor and voodoo practices.
As her fame spread, she entertained movie stars and artists. The Duke of Windsor, who became Governor of the Bahamas in 1940, and his wife, the former Wallis Simpson, visited several times, as did an endless array of beautiful young women, many of whom shared Carstairs’ bed.
Several lovers were black, but none Bahamian. Carstairs preferred sophisticated women she met on trips to New York and the South of France to local beauties.
It was in 1939 that she began her affair with Marlene Dietrich, whom she called ‘Babe’. During a voyage from the Bahamas to Antibes on the riviera, she passed the Hollywood star’s private cove.
Dietrich’s daughter Maria later recounted 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 sailed closer, however, ‘he turned from a sexy boy into a sexy, flat-chested woman’.
Carstairs and Dietrich met for assignations on the boat, and so infatuated did Carstairs become that she offered to give Whale Cay in its entirety to the actress. Although they eventually parted acrimoniously, with Carstairs describing her as ‘a wicked old woman, a bitch’, she left her a beach on the island in her will.
During World War II, Carstairs built a deep-water harbour on her island for the royal Navy, and after a U.S. ship was torpedoed off the coast, led an intrepid night rescue mission, evading U-boats, to save 46 sailors. It was only when she put the men ashore at the Bahamian capital Nassau that they realised their saviour was not a man but a 42-year-old woman.
In her 70s, after suffering ill health, Marion Carstairs began to tire of island life, and in 1975 sold up and moved to Miami, where she lived out her remaining years.
For all that she packed into her life, for all her many lovers, she had only one lifelong companion. It was a foot-high doll, given to her by a lover and which she christened Lord Tod Wadley and dressed in handmade suits from Savile row and Italian slippers.
When Carstairs died in 1993, Lord Tod was still in her arms. The doll was cremated with her and their ashes buried together.