15

Alas Poor Dominick

THE LUCAN AFFAIR had shaken the society round the Clermont to its foundations – and the aftershocks continued. Most of the old gambling fraternity, who had gone on playing at the Clermont after Aspinall sold it, had now left for good. The staircase that connected the Clermont with Annabel’s had been removed long ago. Increasingly Aspinall retreated to Howletts and the company of his animals.

Ironically, the two key members of the original Clermont Set who would be most seriously hit by the fallout from the Lucan affair were Jimmy Goldsmith, who had kept himself scrupulously apart from Lucky’s final gamble, and one of Goldsmith’s oldest friends, Dominick Elwes.

The first rumble of impending trouble came when Godfrey Smith, the editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, decided it was time for a fresh look at the Lucan story, and put his youngest reporter, James Fox, on the case. Fox was yet another Old Etonian whose great-aunt, the formidable Lady Astor, had been the first woman member of the House of Commons, but despite his upper-class credentials, he soon found that old friends of Lucan weren’t exactly falling over one another to talk to him. The only member of the Clermont circle he faintly knew was Dominick Elwes. They had met socially on a few occasions, and Fox remembered ending up in ‘paroxysms of helpless laughter’ at his stories. He still rates him as something of a comic genius.

Elwes was also an ex-fellow journalist, having worked for a time on the ill-starred Topic magazine, and he promised to help Fox. Like many very funny men, Elwes suffered bouts of severe depression. He was also invariably broke, so when Fox offered him a £300 commission for a group painting of the members of the Clermont to illustrate his article, he was flattered and readily agreed.

In return, as well as talking at some length to Fox himself, Elwes spread the word among his friends that Fox was ‘one of us’ and it was safe to talk to him.

Several did, including Aspinall, who was particularly forthcoming. Fox also talked to various other old friends of Lucan, including Michael Stoop and Taki. Acting on his own behalf he got in touch with Lady Lucan. He got on well with her, and they talked at length on several occasions. He was one of the few people she had met who sympathised with her plight. After several weeks’ hard work Fox had built up an extraordinary dossier on the closed world of the Clermont Set and the personalities involved in Sandra Rivett’s murder.

When Fox’s article appeared in June 1975, the Sunday Times Colour Magazine had a previously unpublished photograph of Lucan and Annabel Birley on the cover. Inside there was also Elwes’ painting showing various members of the Clermont Set sitting round a table in the dining room at the Club. It was not the best example of the artist’s talents, but one could recognise the faces of several well-known members of the club, including Aspinall, the Earl of Suffolk and a close friend of Elwes’, Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames. James Goldsmith was prominently depicted summoning a waiter.

Fox’s article proved to be a fairly devastating exposé of the closed world of the Clermont, but it was the cover picture depicting Annabel, apparently gazing up flirtatiously at Lucan, that really caused trouble. It had been taken eighteen months earlier, during Jimmy Goldsmith’s fortieth birthday celebrations at his house in Acapulco. Annabel, Lucan and Elwes were among the guests, and after lunch several of them had started taking jokey photographs of each other. Annabel just happened to be sitting next to Lucan and the photograph of her staring adoringly up at him had been part of the joke. Jimmy had been sitting opposite.

Since the photograph was taken, much had happened. Lord Lucan had disappeared, Annabel had given birth to James Goldsmith’s two children Jemima and Zacharias and the last thing she or her lover would have wished to see on the cover of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine was this photograph of Annabel apparently flirting with a now notorious murder suspect.

That weekend everyone involved became seriously worked up, and started fuelling one another’s anger. According to Ivan Fallon, when Goldsmith saw the picture he became angrier than anyone had ever seen him. ‘Goldsmith was a jealous, possessive lover, and this was not only a slur on Annabel but suggested that he was a cuckold.’ Although desperately upset herself, Annabel tried to calm him down, apparently to no avail. One eyewitness described him ‘striding up and down in a towering fury, waving the Sunday Times, gesturing at it, and beginning to shout all over again.’

Another person who was equally upset by the picture was young Robin Birley. He was now fifteen, at school at Eton, and still undergoing painful operations on his face. This had made him particularly vulnerable. Schoolboys can be notoriously cruel to one another, and Robin was getting used to taunts from the young gentlemen around him over his appearance. They already called him ‘Tiger Birley’. Now they could tease him over the picture of his mother and her friend the murderer on the front of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. On hearing of this, his father Mark became almost as furious as Goldsmith.

The question everyone asked was how had the Sunday Times obtained the picture? They couldn’t ask James Fox, who was away on holiday on a Greek island with his girlfriend, and who would not have told them anyway. But someone must have given him the photograph, and the only person Goldsmith in particular could think of was Dominick Elwes. Everyone knew that he had been talking to Fox, and they knew that the Sunday Times had paid him for his painting. He was always short of money. Who else could it have been?

In fact Elwes had had nothing at all to do with it, and had not even known of the photograph’s existence. It had actually been taken by Annabel’s friend, Victoria Brooke, who later married Sir Paul Getty, and was among a batch of holiday snapshots which found their way to Lucan. While Fox was interviewing Lady Lucan, he had come across it in a photo album. With her permission he had borrowed it, together with some other photographs, to illustrate his article. Michael Rand, the magazine’s veteran picture editor, had picked it out at once as a striking picture for the cover.

But with so much anger in the air, somebody had to be blamed, and word rapidly got round that not only was Elwes responsible for the photograph, but that he had somehow ‘betrayed’ his friends by introducing James Fox into the Clermont circle in the first place. Unable to fight back, Elwes was an ideal scapegoat, and soon found himself banished and ignored by many of the very people he had dined with, and amused, and always thought of as his friends. Only a few stuck loyally by him. Aspinall was one of them. Before going off on holiday, Fox had in fact assured him that Elwes was definitely not the source of the offending picture. Aspinall believed him and did his best to calm things down and place the accusations in perspective. But this was one occasion when Goldsmith would not listen to him. When Aspinall tried to argue with him, he remained implacable. As Goldsmith was now his paymaster, Aspinall’s old authority over him had gone.

‘Dominick has betrayed my friendship. That’s the worst thing any man can do to a friend. I’ll never speak to him again. Dominick has betrayed me,’ he thundered down the telephone. And that was that. Charles Benson also tried arguing on Dominick’s behalf when meeting Goldsmith on holiday in Sardinia. He found him still so eaten up with anger that he utterly refused to listen to him either.

From then on the whispering campaign that started building up against Elwes was not unlike the witch-hunt which had built up in the Clermont Set against Lady Lucan. No one had a good word for him – and many still haven’t to this day.

The cruellest thing about this witch-hunt was that Elwes had betrayed no one. It was all very well for these millionaires to blame him for accepting £300 from the Sunday Times for his painting. He had actually painted it in the Clermont dining room, where everyone could see what he was doing, and he had made no secret of who had commissioned the painting in the first place.

The fun of his company and the brilliance of his talk no longer counted. Over the years he had aroused jealousy and made enemies. He had always been too clever and too good-looking, and had sometimes treated women badly. But what made him truly vulnerable, within the company he kept, was the fact that he had no money.

In the past this could be overlooked, because he was personable, charming and by far the most amusing character around. He was never asked to pay a bill at the Clermont. He was accepted as the club’s very own court jester, and traditionally court jesters have always had a licence of their own. Suddenly that licence was revoked.

Mark Birley had spoken barely a word to Goldsmith since he took away his wife, but because of the sympathy both men felt for Robin, they decided they must be united and teach Elwes a resounding lesson. For years Birley had welcomed him to Annabel’s and recently to Mark’s, the new club he had started in Charles Street, Mayfair, and had never charged him. Now, out of the blue, Elwes received an unpaid bill for £17.45, together with a curt demand for payment. Simultaneously Goldsmith wrote him an angry letter, saying that he never wished to see him again.

As the exclusion and what Old Etonians call the ‘mobbing up’ continued, Elwes did his best to fight off deep depression and ignore what was happening. It wasn’t easy. The most painful blow of all came in the form of a letter from Robin Birley, bitterly blaming him for selling the photograph of his mother to the Sunday Times.

Elwes had known Robin from his childhood, and knew all that he had been through, the sufferings inflicted by the tiger, and the way he had endured the operations ever since. The last thing in the world he would have wanted was to cause him more unhappiness.

Elwes’ last girlfriend, Melissa Wyndham, has never forgotten how she went round to his brother Tim’s Chelsea mews house in Stewart’s Grove, where he was currently living, only to find him standing there, holding Robin’s letter, reproaching him for what he’d done, and saying how it caused him so much misery at school.

‘I don’t think I can stand any more of it,’ Elwes told her. ‘I just can’t take any more.’

Recently I asked Robin Birley about the letter. He replied how much he subsequently wished he’d never sent it. ‘It is the one letter I have seriously regretted writing all my life.’

It was shortly after receiving this letter that Elwes escaped for a brief holiday to the south of France. Daniel Meinertzhagen, one of his old Clermont friends who had stuck by him, had arranged for him to stay for a few days in a villa at St Jean Cap Ferrat. At the airport Elwes met another figure from his past, the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. Dempster had often written in the Daily Mail about his love affairs and his glittering social life, but this was now a very different Elwes who tearfully recounted what had happened and protested his innocence. Since Dempster knew James Goldsmith, he telephoned him shortly afterwards, but Goldsmith refused to speak to him.

It seemed as if, as well as his former friends, fate also had it in for Elwes now. His few days in France did nothing to alleviate his misery, and he decided to return to Cuarton in Spain and try to paint in places where he had been happy in the past. Within a few days of getting there he fell down a cliff and broke his right hand and ankle. Then he received news that his father was dying. He got back to England just before his death.

In the old days, when things went wrong he would have gone to a party, amused his friends and got on with life. Now he felt as if his friends had vanished and nothing seemed funny any more. Melissa Wyndham did her best to cheer him up, but she was very young, and his depression was something no one could alleviate. He spent a few days in the house in Stewart’s Grove and tried his best to cope. In his heart Dominick Elwes knew that he had had enough. Hoping to raise his spirits, Melissa planned to take him off to Dublin for a short holiday on 5 September, and told him she would pick him up and drive him to the airport at around 5.00. Instead, on that afternoon, he took a lethal dose of sleeping pills washed down with whisky.

She found him when she arrived at the house early that evening. Beside the bed was a note written by this man who had once been one of the funniest and most attractive men in London.

‘I curse Mark and Jimmy from beyond the grave. I hope they’re happy now.’

*

If James Goldsmith was affected by Elwes’ death he never let it show, for by now, like a gambler on a winning roll, he was on the point of getting everything he’d ever wanted. With that magic touch of his he seemed incapable of losing.

Thanks to the gambler’s instinct which had prompted him to cash in so many of his holdings and place the money in the bank, he was in a powerful position. Almost alone among the big financial players in the City, he found himself immensely rich and free to act entirely as he wished. During the summer of 1975, he was gambling for the highest stakes of all. By then his old friend and mentor, Jim Slater, had been getting into quite horrendous difficulties through improvident investment in the tempting financial markets of Singapore, and the whole future of the Slater Walker empire was at risk. Slater, dispirited and sick, was suggesting that as Slater Walker’s major shareholder, James Goldsmith, should take over as chairman. But Goldsmith was in no hurry to decide.

Early in July 1975, just a few weeks after that infuriating issue of the Sunday Times, Goldsmith and Annabel were invited to dinner by her old friend David Frost and his wife at their house in Belgravia. It was the sort of discreet, high-powered evening Goldsmith enjoyed, particularly when he learned the identity of the Frosts’ other guests, none other than the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, his wife Mary, and his confidante and former secretary, Marcia Williams. In the court of Harold Wilson, almost everyone seemed to get a title in the end, and Marcia had been ennobled the previous year, becoming Baroness Falkender.

Harold Wilson had a disconcerting way of taking the most unlikely people into his confidence and giving them the feeling that he trusted them implicitly. He did this now with Goldsmith. On the surface this was most improbable. Goldsmith had never made a secret of his strongly held right-wing beliefs. He had been a keen supporter of Wilson’s Conservative predecessor, Edward Heath, and had Heath won the 1974 election, Goldsmith even had hopes of a ministerial appointment in his government, which would have carried with it a peerage.

Wilson, a wily operator, must have been aware of this, and seems to have spent some time reassuring Goldsmith that, far from being the rigid Marxist he had been represented in the past, he was actually a good social democrat who wanted few things more than the chance of cooperating with an entrepreneur like Goldsmith. He also made Goldsmith feel that he regarded him as something of a financial genius.

Whether he really did or not, it is clear that Harold Wilson was behind Goldsmith when, early that autumn, he entered into serious negotiations for the rescue of Slater Walker. As far as the government was concerned, Slater Walker was so large and influential that its collapse threatened a serious loss of confidence in the City, particularly from all-powerful overseas investors, which could have landed Harold Wilson’s government in a highly inconvenient financial crisis.

James Slater’s extraordinary career as the financial wunderkind of the sixties, ended on 24 October 1975 with his resignation as chairman of Slater Walker. But potential panic among the money men was averted by the news that none other than James Goldsmith was succeeding him as chairman, backed by a rescue package from the Bank of England of £60 million. (It was later disclosed that the rescue operation of Slater Walker ended by costing the British taxpayer nearly £110 million.) Since the whole rescue operation was underwritten by the government from the start, it must have been done with the knowledge and the backing of James Goldsmith’s latest friend and admirer, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

By that autumn everything Goldsmith wanted was in place – social status, a vast amount of money, influential friends – and given a modicum of luck it should have worked. Instead, a chain of interlinked misfortune ended by destroying Goldsmith’s dreams of power and splendour in cosseted anonymity at the top of English society and politics. The odds against this happening were so improbable and so extreme that one is tempted to see this as the moment when that curse of Elwes struck and changed James Goldsmith’s life forever.

*

The first link in the chain was in fact already there in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. For Goldsmith the cover picture was bad enough but it wasn’t really that important. What caused the trouble was something that hardly anybody noticed at the time. In the article Fox included Goldsmith’s name among the guests who lunched at Aspinall’s house in Lyall Street on the day following Sandra Rivett’s murder. Actually he wasn’t there. That was all, a simple error, but it was enough.

After Elwes’s funeral at the Roman Catholic cathedral at Arundel, a memorial service was arranged at the Jesuit church in Farm Street. It was an emotional occasion. John Aspinall spoke first. Understandably in the circumstances, he made no reference to the behaviour of the dead man’s friends. Instead he launched into an elaborate oration, comparing him to an Anglo Saxon bard, and seemed to blame his fate on his genetic inheritance.

Then, something of the bitterness his death had caused began to surface. Dominick’s brother Tim was so upset that he found it difficult to read the lesson, and it was left to the friend who had ‘adored’ him, his fellow wit and bullfighting aficionado Ken Tynan, to speak up for him, giving him something of the praise that he deserved. ‘Even Peter Ustinov had bowed the knee before him as a wit and raconteur’. He said Tynan also spoke of how Dominick had squandered his gifts before those who simply had more money. But this was not all, as the congregation left the church, Dominick’s cousin, the rugby playing Lord Rennell, was so incensed that he landed the considerably larger John Aspinall a straight left to the jaw, with the words, ‘And that’s what I think of your bloody speech, Aspinall.’

Aspinall simply rubbed his chin, remarking that he was used to dealing with wild animals, and the incident went no further. But the pugilistic skill of a nobleman achieved something which the eloquence of Ken Tynan couldn’t, and made it into the early editions of the evening papers.

There was still no reason to foresee this causing Goldsmith any trouble. After all, his Lordship’s anger was directed not at him but at Aspinall, and anyhow it had been a very small paragraph in just one newspaper. It was not the sort of press furore that one might have expected from the trouble that ensued. Nor would it have done so if Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye had not noticed the paragraph just as he was looking for something to liven up the pages of next week’s edition.

Ingram’s journalistic instincts suggested there just might be an interesting story here. Which unfortunately for all concerned, there was, as his reporter Patrick Marnham soon discovered. Almost the first thing Marnham did was to dig out a cutting of Fox’s article from the Sunday Times, stating erroneously that Goldsmith had been present at the lunch which Aspinall arranged among Lucan’s friends the day after the murder. As no correction had been published, Marnham and Ingrams had no way of knowing that he wasn’t there.

A mistaken report about James Goldsmith’s presence at a lunch may have seemed a relatively minor detail, but a minor detail it was not once Marnham started working on his article, which he entitled, ‘All’s Well that Ends Elwes’. It was enough for him to believe that Goldsmith had been present at that meeting of Lucan’s friends the day after his disappearance. If Goldsmith had been there, argued Marnham, not unreasonably, such a powerful character would almost certainly have dominated the proceedings. More than that, with his wealth and his overseas connections, who better than James Goldsmith to then decide to help smuggle his old friend Lord Lucan out of the country.

It was clearly a hypothetical piece, and had Goldsmith been lunching off smoked salmon with his friends in Lyall Street that day, Marnham’s hypothesis would have been perfectly reasonable. Since he was not, the article was clearly libellous, but because of the absence of a published apology for the Sunday Times’s mistake, no one at Private Eye had any way of knowing this. For several weeks following Marnham’s article, the Eye’s financial columnist, Michael Gillard, otherwise known as ‘City Slicker’, began relating various details of Goldsmith’s business affairs which other papers had failed to mention. The most embarrassing of these was the fact that when he took over as chairman of Slater Walker, and saved the company from disaster with public money, he was already one of the company’s major shareholders.

*

It was never clear exactly why Goldsmith was so disproportionately angry over the article in a paper like Private Eye. Undoubtedly the picture in the Sunday Times had already upset him, making him over-sensitive on the subject and over-wrought about the press in general. He had always treasured his anonymity, but must have been aware that by English standards his private life was somewhat unusual. Like most of her friends, Annabel often found the magazine amusing but, unfortunately, her lover didn’t share her sense of humour.

At the same time Goldsmith had influential friends who thoroughly agreed with him about the dangerous influence of Private Eye, and may have reinforced his perception of the need to take action. Since their first meeting at the Frosts, Goldsmith had been seeing more of Harold Wilson. Each week Mary Wilson had been having to endure what she regarded as the tasteless humour of ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’, which was written by the man Goldsmith now saw as the source of all his troubles, Richard Ingrams. Baroness Falkender had more serious reasons still for perceiving the magazine in a negative light since it had recently disclosed the existence of two children, fathered by a journalist on the Daily Mail. As for the Prime Minister, Private Eye embodied almost everything Harold Wilson hated in the British Press – its irreverence, its apparent irresponsibility, and worst of all, its dangerous habit of unearthing awkward facts at awkward moments.

This meant that, when Goldsmith made his final move he did so believing he had the full support of the Prime Minister. When he launched his libel action against the magazine in February 1976, he wasn’t satisfied, like most rich plaintiffs, with any ordinary libel proceedings under civil law against the editor. Instead he decided to unleash a legal broadside of Nelsonian proportions. On 2 February his lawyers fired off not one but a resounding battery of sixty-three writs for libel, most of them addressed to the principal newsagents and distributors of Private Eye throughout the country, warning them in chilling terms of the legal hazards of selling the magazine in future. As for the unspeakable Ingrams, he found himself accused of the virtually forgotten crime of criminal libel.

This was truly fearsome stuff. The law of criminal libel had been used by Stuart governments against journalists they disapproved of, and the agitator, William Prynne had his ear cut off and was branded on the cheek with the letters S L, standing for Seditious Libeller. In 1813, although he kept his ears and wasn’t branded, the celebrated editor and journalist, Leigh Hunt, spent two years in gaol for calling the Prince Regent ‘a fat Adonis of fifty’. Unsurprisingly this law had become largely forgotten and was hardly ever used. Winston Churchill employed it to get Aspinall’s hero, Oscar Wilde’s old lover Lord Alfred Douglas, six months’ in prison for suggesting that he had made money from the Battle of Jutland. It was also used against a journalist who suggested that King George V had been a bigamist.

For Goldsmith to invoke such laws against an editor like Ingrams showed, if nothing else, a certain lack of proportion. For him also to threaten the magazine’s distributors suggested that his real aim was to drive it out of business. Above all his actions showed a fatal lack of common sense and humour. Did he really want Ingrams imprisoned? Was he genuinely wanting to suppress a satirical magazine which amused so many people? As Alexander Pope once asked, ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’

During the ensuing months it was clear that Goldsmith did. His old friend Anthony Blond described meeting him soon after his legal action started. ‘Jimmy became wilder and madder whenever I suggested he stopped persecuting Private Eye. “They have attacked my son,” he said. “I will throw them into prison. I will hound their wives even in their widows’ weeds.” All this was most anxious making.’

It was indeed, not least for Richard Ingrams and the staff of Private Eye when Judge Wien in his wisdom decided that the case was so serious that Ingrams would have to face the charge of criminal libel in a higher court.

As too often happens with the English libel laws, Goldsmith was relying on the power of money to force his enemies into submission. Private Eye fought back in the only way it could – by ridicule. Goldsmith was not used to being ridiculed, so when in the next issue of the Eye he was christened ‘Goldenballs’, he grew angrier than ever.

He was angrier still when Private Eye began what it called ‘the Goldenballs campaign’ appealing to its readers for financial contributions, not only for the legal fees, but effectively to guarantee the future of the magazine. The response brought in some unexpected contributors, including several enemies of Goldsmith. The millionaire businessman Tiny Rowland, sent £5,000 and as the campaign snowballed it produced a widespread feeling of dislike for Goldsmith. Almost overnight, through what appeared like vindictiveness, Goldsmith was showing signs of losing any popularity he might have ever had.

It also lost him what one biographer called the ‘congenial anonymity of the rich’ which he so enjoyed. Warned by his lawyers that his opponents would be certain to exploit the eccentricities of his private life he decided to pre-empt them. Once more he relied upon his old friend and ally, the Evening Standard Paris correspondent Sam White who, from his eyrie in the Crillon bar, wrote about ‘James Goldsmith, the man with two families.’

While all this was adding to what Dr Johnson called ‘the public stock of harmless pleasure’, it became a trial of endurance between Goldsmith and Ingrams. Ingrams finally publicly apologised for libel, and Private Eye contributed £30,000 towards Goldsmith’s infinitely greater legal costs, but Richard Ingrams’s nose and ears had not been cropped, nor was he languishing in prison.

As for Goldsmith, whatever hopes he’d had of avenging his father’s humiliation by proudly entering politics in Harold Wilson’s government were over, although it seems as if he very nearly made it. On 19 May 1976 the front-page headline in the Daily Express proclaimed something that would have made everything worthwhile: ‘IT’S LORD GOLDSMITH’. But, not for the first time, the Express was mistaken.

What had hapened was that Harold Wilson was bowing out of politics, and helped by Lady Falkender, who had written out the names of his candidates for his ‘resignation honours’ on lavender paper, had included James Goldsmith, for a peerage. However the Scrutiny Committee, which vets all nominations for peerages, turned him down. Instead he got a knighthood for reasons which were never very clear. His citation states that his knighthood was awarded for ‘services to exports and ecology’.

By the time the case ended in 1977, it was clear that for Goldsmith the Private Eye affair had become an unmitigated disaster. After hubris comes nemesis. Ivan Fallon was a relatively sympathetic biographer to Goldsmith, but his judgement on the case was unrelenting. ‘It changed Goldsmith’s image indelibly,’ he wrote, ‘from that of a businessman with a clever mind, and an immense capacity for making money, into that of an obsessive, angry right-winger, determined to curb the freedom of the British press.’

It also marked the final breakup of the Clermont Set, which had begun so happily nearly twenty years before. Goldsmith, following his father by effectively leaving England rather than making a name in English politics, started a new career and business life abroad. It proved immensely lucrative, but it was also very different from the one he planned before his old friend Lucky Lucan murdered Sandra Rivett.