Goodbye Dandy Kim
Nicky Haslam on the life of the glamorous conman who burst onto the Chelsea scene in his vast Bentley convertible in the Sixties
In July, at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Clapham, Michael George Kimberly Caborn-waterfield, known to a near-forgotten generation as ‘Dandy Kim’ – adventurer, charmer, trickster, self-created myth and mythcreator – was commemorated in a memorial service attended by friends, enemies, creditors, flashy former crooks and Kray fag-ends, old lags and loving young family members. Kim made his spiritual exit in the same flamboyant manner he played out his whole life: publicly – except when constrained from doing so by several stretches in jail.
Kim first presented himself to an astonished Chelsea Set in the early 1960s: opulently tanned, white polo-necked, caramel suede-jacketed, he would be seen driving a vast pale Bentley convertible along the King’s Road. The car had the earliest mobile telephone, the size of a suitcase and a radio call-sign: ‘HEIRESS’.
It was an alluring signal. Rich girls and actress/models fed up with skinny unwashed aristocrats flocked to the glamour boy. Kim soon lured one, a tycoon’s daughter, to Gretna, but was swiftly put off the union with ‘a considerable sum’ by her panicked papa.
At this point, he was running an insurance company offering an attractive deal: car cover at half the usual price. Wildly profitable, it operated on the novel business model of never paying out on claims. Inevitably this scheme went wrong, and Kim was obliged to remove not only himself but also, to avoid repossession, his helicopter, which he hid in a haystack. This was the first of several disappearances; various havens, such as North Africa and darkest Australia, hosted Kim and often a well-endowed – in all senses – lady-friend, adding mystique to his undeniable magnetism.
This magnetism flowered early on. Kim was born – crucially, it was to turn out, passport-wise – in Bermuda. His father, Vivian Caborn-waterfield, a Royal Navy pilot and something of a playboy himself, transported Kim, aged nine, to New York at the time of the 1939 World’s Fair, and later introduced him to the shadowy set of war-time Manhattan. It was the milieu he would lifelong frequent, though Vivian attempted a spell of discipline by sending him to school in England. But he was soon sacked for stealing, from another pupil, the means to run away and become a jockey.
Riding out was too much like dull work, and in the mid-1950s Kim was back in New York, living hog-high at the Plaza hotel. His showy lifestyle was funded by an American syndicate operating casinos in Havana. His British passport was essential for purchasing surplus war weaponry in the UK, which was then shipped to bolster the regime of the Cuban dictator Batista against Castro’s revolutionary guerrillas.
Kim came back to England with a load of illicit dollars, of which the wanton dissipation was well covered by gossips and glossies. This suave image received a cinematic sheen when, now engaged to Barbara Warner, the daughter of moviemogul Jack, he robbed the safe in the Warner’s villa on Cap d’antibes of £27,000 (plus ‘certain documents’, as the French court in which he was tried and sentenced to four years’ jail, enigmatically put it).
Traced to Tangier, he was ‘helped’ back to Britain by the Kray brothers. His poise and elegant wardrobe at several court hearings gained wide publicity before he was extradited to jail in France, but the return of the documents to Warner, plus a bribe of £20,000 to a member of the French judiciary – funded by his new heiress girlfriend Sarah Skinner – enabled him to walk free in less than a year.
Soon after this Kim met the writer Jeremy Scott. ‘We became friends, he was best man at my first wedding, around 1964. We spent weekends at Sedgehill, his charming manor in the West Country.’ Scott resisted Kim’s offers of directorships while staying abreast of his schemes. One consisted of starting the first sex shop, named Anne Summers after yet another romance. A second involved developing, along with his current lover Diana Dors, a fraudulent diet. In 1983, they sold the scam to Greg Dyke at Tv-am for the Good Morning Britain slot, during which the hefty blonde star was weighed on camera and shown to have shed poundage. Dyke was unaware that this loss was due to the jockey’s waistcoat fitted with weights, gradually removed each time, which Miss Dors wore beneath her dress.
Scott believes that Dandy Kim had a true flair for promotion and possessed real and diverse talents. ‘Had he chosen to focus them legitimately, he could have achieved genuine success. But his taste was always for quick money, the scam, and the thrill of pulling it off.’ As his devoted granddaughter said, he always preferred telling a whopper when the truth would have more than sufficed. But a worm can turn, as Jeremy was to witness. In 2002, he published his memoir Fast and Louche, which ‘mentioned Kim, not least because I was by now remarried to his ex-wife, Penny Brahms. He sued for libel, threatening to have me knee-capped for disrespect. Copies were pulped, and it cost my publisher £50,000 to buy Kim off.’
Despite this, their friendship lingered. ‘Last spring I heard Kim was in a hospice and went to say farewell. Within the shrunken figure on the bed it was hard to recognise the Dandy I’d known. I recalled a long-ago conversation with him outside the Chelsea Potter, the view dominated by his latest Bentley. “Image is everything,” he said, “wealth unimportant. All that matters are the appurtenances of wealth. Image trumps truth.” This was his mantra. He was utterly unscrupulous. He was also, at times, the most enchanting of men.’
Kim died at 85, broke and unrepentant, but having given his hallmark to the 1960s, a prelude to the ethics of society today. And even in his final exit there was a mythic twist: some rap-obsessed crematory clerk had mis-labelled his casket ‘Michael K-bone Waterfield’.