11

Master of the Games

ONE ESSENTIAL MYSTERY lying at the very heart of the Clermont and the dramas now unfolding round it has so far been ignored. This is the mystery of gambling itself. What is there about addictive gambling that continues to attract so many people to so many different games of chance around the world? And in particular, what was so special about the gambling at the Clermont Club, and Aspinall’s part in it? Apart from the lure of its exclusive clientele and the pleasures of Annabel’s downstairs, why did it bring so many rich and famous people to its green baize tables night after desperate night throughout the sixties?

The psychology of gambling has always been difficult to explain, and no one has been very good at it. Sigmund Freud, initially fascinated by the subject, predictably decided that addictive gambling was a symptom of dysfunctional sexuality, and then gave up on it. Almost as predictably his disciple Edmund Bergler detected the workings of the Oedipus complex, and others claimed to have discovered strong masochistic tendencies in the psyches of destructively addictive gamblers. None of which gets one very far.

For what it’s worth my own theory is that, just as gambling apparently grew from the use of games of chance to discover the will of the gods in primitive religions, so a lot of high-stakes gambling still resembles an addictive cult religion, in which gamblers entrust their fate to the fall of the cards or the turn of a roulette wheel, much as the faithful place their fate in the hands of the Almighty. The sacrosanct nature of the rules of the game, the stylised rituals of the dealers and the ultimate mystery of the winning numbers, all bring a touch of the supernatural to gambling. At the Clermont, Aspinall moved like a priest among his followers, dispensing happiness or misery through the mysteries of the gaming table.

Like many cults, this was almost something of a racket. Apart from enhancing Aspinall’s own self-image, it of course enabled him to extract large sums of money from his rich believers. More interestingly, he became something of a guru to many of his friends and followers.

Once he had extended his interest from the gambling at the Clermont to his adoptive family of wild animals at Howletts, Aspinall’s charismatic role increased, as he took on something of the power of the dangerous animals he treated as his closest friends. There was nothing particularly original in this. In simpler cultures, gurus and mesmeric figures have frequently impressed their followers by their power over dangerous animals. Christianity itself preserves echoes of earlier animalistic cults in the legends of the saints whose holiness was revealed through their relationship with wild animals, from St Jerome who was tended in the wilderness by a friendly lion to St Francis who expressed his love for all creation through the birds and wild creatures he befriended.

It was typical of Aspinall to identify with the most powerful and dangerous wild animals, and as he remained very much a gambler, the risks he regularly took with them meant that whenever he was in their presence he, and anybody with him, were consciously gambling with their lives. On the whole it was a fairly long-odds bet, but as one sees from the fate of Robin Birley, entrusting a human being with a grown tiger has to be a gamble just the same. Over the years five Howletts keepers lost their lives when the gamble happened to go wrong, and although Aspinall didn’t advertise the fact, his friendly beasts nearly killed him on several occasions.

His body bore the scars caused by bites from his affectionate gorillas and scratches from his playful tigers. On one occasion, when the journalist Lynn Barber was interviewing him at Howletts, a fully grown African male elephant suddenly turned nasty, as African male elephants can, and threw him to the ground where it would have trampled him to death but for the intervention of the keepers. After his rescue it was typical of Aspinall that, though bruised and badly shaken, he insisted on continuing the interview as if nothing very much had happened.

When the Duke of Devonshire remarked that Aspinall was amoral, he did him an injustice. Far from being devoid of morals, Aspinall was a man who probably had too many. The only trouble was that he made his own morality – and most disturbing much of it turned out to be, particularly when he used his animals as models for his personal behaviour and his widely proclaimed political beliefs.

Having identified so closely with his gorillas, that he started to imitate their habits and showed a marked preference for the rules governing the world of animals to that of human beings. From watching how the dominant old silverback gorilla ruled the females in his entourage, he concluded that the idea of women’s rights and women’s liberation was not only ridiculous, but also contrary to nature. He also decided that an authoritarian, paternalistic set-up was the natural model for a human family.

From studying how the animal kingdom operated in the wild he reached some even more alarming propositions. The first of these was that just as the survival of the fittest seems to work in nature, so we should willingly accept the position of the powerful and successful as natural leaders of modern day society. He also believed as firmly in selective breeding for humans as he did for animals, and proclaimed that since animals had as much right to exploit the planet earth as human beings, the time had come to cull something like a billion humans from what he called ‘the urban biomass’, if the world as we know it was going to survive.

It was never entirely clear how serious he was in some of his pronouncements. Did he really believe that we should follow the example of the Inuit who, he claimed, used to leave grandmothers who were past their sell-by date outside their igloos waiting to be eaten by a passing polar bear? And when ex-president Nixon told him that a nuclear bomb would possibly produce two million casualties, would he really mean it when replying that this would not be enough?

Over one thing he undoubtedly was serious. Convinced that the earth was being swamped by human beings at the expense of almost every other species, he certainly believed that the concept of the sanctity of human life was an outrageous heresy. In his eyes, there was nothing sacred about human life. Given his guru status among his followers and friends, words like these undoubtedly had an influence on many of his extreme right-wing friends in the Clermont like David Stirling, who had started the Special Air Service, and who tried to organise a private army of armed vigilantes to oppose the miners’ strike of 1973. There was also Lucky Lucan, who had apparently been brooding for some time on the teachings of Adolf Hitler, and who certainly had little time for ideas about the equality of women or the sanctity of human life.

*

In Aspinall’s eyes the behaviour of his animals had also justified his treatment of his faithless first wife, Jane, and the way that, after their divorce, he had firmly kept the children from ever seeing her. It also led to the curious ending of his second marriage.

Although his second wife Min had devotedly cared for his animals, even acting as a faithful foster mother to his tiger cubs, she had always been longing for a child of her own. Finally she had a daughter, who was christened Mameena after yet another Rider Haggard character. But little Mameena had a congenital heart defect and died three months later. As her death almost coincided with that of his favourite tiger, Tara, it was hard to tell which caused Aspinall the greater heartache, when the baby and the tiger were buried side by side at Howletts.

Mameena’s death brought something of a crisis to his marriage. Since Aspinall was theoretically convinced that, like his tigers and gorillas, humans should engage in sex solely to propagate the species, and he and Min appeared incapable of breeding, he finally suggested it was time for them to part. Min apparently raised no objection.

Since there were no children to fight over, and since, in contrast to his first wife Jane, Min had not turned against her male partner, the divorce was amicable. Min soon remarried and became the mother of three healthy children, but Aspinall was even quicker off the mark.

For him it was a case of third time lucky. His choice was not only young and pretty, but the two small boys from her first marriage had proved her fertility. Lady Sarah (‘Sally’) Curzon was the widow of a man after Aspinall’s own heart, the young racing driver Piers Courage. Like Aspinall with his animals, he too had gambled regularly with death. Unlike him he had paid the price in a motor-racing accident a year earlier.

For Aspinall, Sally had a further attraction. Since she was a Curzon, her genetic make-up included traces of that ‘most superior person’, the great Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary. After ‘mating’ with Aspinall she successfully produced a son, whom he grandiloquently named Bassa Wulfhere, after the grandfather of Alfred the Great.

He also decreed that at six months old, Bassa Wulfhere should be introduced to his friends the gorillas. Lady Sally entered the gorillarium and entrusted their baby son to the dominant female gorilla. The gorilla peered inside its nappy to see what sex it was then, with the baby tucked under her arm, swung up into the trees, and showed him to the other females in the community. When all the female gorillas had thoroughly examined baby Bassa, his gorilla mother brought him down to earth and returned him safely to his human parents.

After this Aspinall had no doubts over Sally’s suitability to be his wife. Shortly afterwards he told his secretary at the Clermont to ring her up and inform her that they were getting married on a certain day. This was one occasion when the female was not totally submissive to the wishes of the male primate. Instead she telephoned his secretary back and informed her that not only was the day that Mr Aspinall suggested inconvenient, but that if he wished to marry her she’d like to hear his proposal in person. Aspinall was apparently quite put out, as he had been on the point of winning a game of backgammon. Later he did manage to propose, and they married shortly after.

It proved a lasting and a happy marriage. For Sally, having been married to a racing driver, there were fewer hair-raising thrills, nor mercifully any repetitions of Robin Birley’s encounter with the tiger. Although they made no further forays into breeding after Bassa Wulfhere, she turned her maternal instincts to nursing orphan baby gorillas. On one occasion Aspinall paid for a premature baby gorilla to be placed in the premature baby unit in a local hospital. Sally says that she never questioned Aspinall’s intellectual superiority; in return he paid her what, for him, was the greatest compliment an honorary gorilla could pay a woman. ‘She was,’ he said, ‘a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable.’

*

Now in his mid-forties, Aspinall was showing signs of calming down and enjoying married life. In 1972, he and Sally even spent a summer holiday with Goldsmith and Annabel aboard their yacht at Corfu. Dominick Elwes was there, with his latest girlfriend, Helen Jay. After all those debutantes and fashion models, Helen was something new for Elwes. One of the pretty Jay twins whose father Douglas Jay had been a minister in Harold Wilson’s first Labour government, she had studied sociology and politics at the new Sussex University, and was working as a current affairs researcher for the BBC. Elwes must have found this liberated young left-wing woman a refreshing change from his earlier girlfriends, while she found him funny, witty, and ‘one of the most glamorous men I’d ever met.’

To begin with she enjoyed the equally glamorous world of the Clermont and Annabel’s, where Dominick was in his element and something of a star. Most weekends they’d go to someone’s country house where the spoiling and the fun continued with Dominick usually at the centre of it all.

But although she enjoyed Annabel’s she felt less at home in the Clermont and began to find the atmosphere ‘uncomfortable’, especially for women, who tended to be treated with considerable suspicion. Surprisingly, the one person she got on well with was Goldsmith. He christened her ‘the champagne pinkie’ and enjoyed discussing politics with her. She found him very clever at defending the extreme right-wing views he shared with Aspinall and most other members of the Club.

Like Aspinall he took it for granted that the upper classes were racially superior and that the rich should be free to make a fortune without any government restriction. He also seemed to think that he and his friends were facing some sort of communist conspiracy which they would have to deal with to retain their rightful position in society. As Goldsmith had never encountered anyone seriously arguing to the contrary before, Helen thought it was a pity that somebody so bright had never had the benefit of a university education.

For Elwes the two years of his love affair with Helen included periods when he finally seemed to be escaping from his life in London and his dependence on the Clermont. Still hoping to follow the example of his father, he started painting seriously and he and Helen spent several months in New York where he worked on the portraits of a rich businessman and his family. Later, he took a job as artistic designer with a hilltop tourist settlement being built at Cuarton near Málaga in southern Spain. Here he was finally free to live an independent life, and while they were in Spain he met the drama critic Kenneth Tynan who was attending the bullfights with his wife, Kathleen at the nearby town of Ronda.

In Tynan, Elwes seemed to find something of an equal as a talker and an entertainer, with much the same attitude to life and a similar sense of humour. While he and Helen and the Tynans enjoyed Spain and made one another laugh, Elwes was a world away from his dependent status at the Clermont and was happier than Helen had ever seen him. In her biography of her husband, Kathleen Tynan summed up the two men’s friendship: ‘Dominick Elwes was a bounder and a wit and Ken adored him.’

But back in London Elwes soon slipped back into his old dependency on the easy patronage at Berkeley Square. It had been going on too long for him to kick the habit, and as usual he was broke. Painting portraits didn’t pay the bills. Besides, he always needed company and an appreciative audience for his stories and his conversation. In the end it was this dependence on the world of the Clermont that ended his relationship with Helen.

As she says, ‘Dominick was a wonderful person and I loved him, but I wanted things I knew that he could never give me, like a family of my own. The Clermont was his family, and I knew that it always would be. As there was someone else in my life by then for whom marriage seemed a much more likely prospect, my romance with Dominick had to end.’

*

By that summer when he entertained his friends aboard his yacht in Greece, Goldsmith was richer than ever in his life before. At heart he was still the same high-rolling gambler Aspinall had recognised in the sixteen-year-old boy he met at Oxford. But during the boom years of the late sixties, he perfected the technique of taking on old companies, closing their less profitable components and using the assets to build up the share price of Cavenham Foods, then purchasing yet more companies. Instead of chemmy, where you invariably lost, this was a form of casino capitalism from which, provided you kept your nerve and skilfully worked out the odds, you could walk away with quite prodigious sums of money.

At the Clermont, he often played backgammon with an unassuming character in a woollen cardigan called James Slater. Goldsmith enjoyed playing with him for two reasons. The first was that, although Slater was a skilful player, Goldsmith could usually beat him in the end. The second was that as head of Slater Walker Securities, Jim Slater was probably a billionaire. A highly successful ‘asset stripper’ and manipulator of stocks and shares, he had transformed the world of British business and made Slater Walker the hottest financial institution in the City.

Although he always denied that he was an asset stripper, Goldsmith learned a lot from Slater, and in the early seventies had an unbroken run of luck with a succession of deals which culminated in 1972 with the acquisition of Allied Suppliers, for £86 million. Following James Slater’s example, he diversified his financial interests and began investing heavily on Wall Street.

As a good friend, he encouraged Aspinall to do the same. At the time Aspinall had a fortune estimated at £2–3 million, and when this ran out, he continued gambling on the American markets by borrowing. With his investments doing well he was clearly feeling optimistic, and since the zoo at Howletts was expanding and needed space for yet more species, in a fit of financial recklessness he purchased yet another run-down property – the enormous mock-oriental palace overlooking Romney Marsh, which had been built for the eccentric multi-millionaire, Sir Philip Sassoon, at Port Lympne.

More reckless still, and convinced that his financial future was secure, he suddenly decided to retire from the Clermont. It was never very clear exactly why he did so. He probably felt, as William Crockford had felt before him, that he had ‘cleaned out all the regular gamblers in London of their ready cash’, and had little taste for the new wave of oil-rich Arab gamblers coming from the Gulf. He undoubtedly found his animals at Howletts more interesting than their counterparts in Berkeley Square, and in a fit of misdirected generosity sold the Clermont for £500,000 to Victor Lowndes, the London representative of Hugh Heffner’s Bunny Club. Lowndes supposedly recouped the purchase price in three nights’ gambling.

One of the first things the new management at the Clermont did was to remove an original William Kent fireplace from the hall. The only person who complained was Elwes and within a few days it was returned. Later when Aspinall sold off the wine cellar which Maxwell-Scott had so painstakingly built up for him, it brought in more than twice what Lowndes had paid him for the club.

On top of this, within a few months Aspinall was facing a disastrous fall on Wall Street followed by a run on sterling. Like a wary gambler, Goldsmith had seen the great bull market ending and by ruthlessly offloading all his available holdings and property, including much of Cavenham, when the great crash came a reassuring portion of his assets was safely in the bank.

He had already warned Aspinall, of course, but as usual Aspinall had shown himself the lesser gambler. Suddenly he found himself facing bankruptcy. He supposedly earned £180,000 in a month at blackjack and mortgaged the house in Lyall Street, but with outgoings on his animals running at over £300,000 a year the outlook wasn’t hopeful.

This was one occasion when his friendship with Goldsmith really counted. Now a multi-multi-millionaire, for the next four years Goldsmith became what Aspinall called his ‘lifeboat’ against the stormy seas of bankruptcy. Goldsmith could easily afford this, and later got his money back in full, but it changed the whole balance of power between them. The old silverback gorilla had been beaten by his younger rival. Henceforth it was Goldsmith, not Aspinall, who would call the tune.

*

One service Aspinall performed for Goldsmith was over his affair with Annabel Birley. By now it had been going on for nearly ten years, despite the fact that she was still married to Mark, and Jimmy was becoming impatient. Aspinall understood his feelings all too well. Like any potent primate, Jimmy wished to have children with Annabel, and since she was not far off forty, time was running out.

Just as Aspinall had encouraged their affair in the first place, so it was he who now brought it to its culmination. During a visit to Howletts, he firmly instructed Annabel to ‘go and breed with Jimmy’. Such was his Svengali-like influence over her that ‘breed’ she duly did. A year later, at the age of 41, she had their first child, his third daughter, called Jemima. Since Jimmy had been too busy, it had been Annabel’s husband Mark, who had taken her into hospital the day before the birth. Jimmy arrived later that evening with a ruby and diamond brooch and a sapphire and diamond bracelet.

Many years later, in the memorial book prepared after Aspinall’s death, his goddaughter Jemima wrote thanking him for her conception, adding how he had ‘persuaded and coerced my reluctant mother into “breeding” with my father in the first place.’

After the sale of the Clermont, the old members went on seeing one another. They still gambled together at Aspinall’s house in Lyall Street. They still had holidays together, and they often met at Howletts. The regulars continued to frequent the Clermont under the new management, where everything went on much as before, but they depended on Aspinall as much as ever. One of them who was still influenced by Aspinall’s mesmeric power was Lucky Lucan.