Gwen Otter was “the last of the Chelsea hostesses”, part of a Bohemian scene that overlapped with the world of the A∴A∴ members and what Victor Neuburg called “those wonderful days in Chelsea before the War” (the First War). She was said to look like a ‘red Indian’, and claimed descent from Pocahontas. Otter's salon was in a plain, red brick house at number 1 Ralston Street, on the corner with Tedworth Square. Evelyn Waugh remembered it having black walls with a gold ceiling and “piles of tasselled cushions in the style of the earlier Russian Ballet. She could not bear solitude and her house was always full, spongers mixing indifferently with well-known figures of the stage and arts.”
Crowley was a regular guest, and it was here that short story writer Katherine Mansfield tried mescaline. She became upset by a spent match lying not quite straight on the carpet and said she could do up the buttons on her nightgown, “if we talk to them very gently”, while repeating every now and then, “Pity that stuff had no effect.”
It was also at Gwen Otter's that Viola Bankes found Crowley. Bankes, a thrill-seeking upper-class Englishwoman remembered for her 1934 autobiography Why Not?, writes that by around 1930 “For ten years the name of Aleister Crowley had excited me in the fashion that all Europe in the eighteenth century was excited by Cagliostro.” And then “One night at a dance my partner and I were discussing flagellation and other ancient and modern habits”, when – as if by association – her partner told her Aleister Crowley was in town. “Do we know anyone who knows him?” said Bankes.
And so it was – Otter being a friend of the partner, it turned out – that one Sunday lunchtime Bankes found herself walking up the front steps of No.1: “I trembled with excitement like a schoolgirl going up to receive a prize! Aleister Crowley had stirred in me, as no other man or woman had ever done, the most violent longing to see and speak to him. It always seemed to me that if half the stories concerning him were true he belonged rather to mediæval times than to our own.”
Crowley was there, standing in front of the fireplace, “large of figure and inscrutable of face, watching us with glittering green eyes.” He was with his current wife, Maria Teresa de Miramar, but Otter had put Bankes next to him at luncheon, and in the dining room Bankes noticed an Augustus John picture of Crowley on the wall: “The drawing, which was in profile, had a mystic look on the upturned face which illustrated yet another side of the poet, magician, and traveller…” 1
Comparing the portrait to the man, she found Crowley less impressive in the flesh: “He had neither the powerful compelling features of a magician nor the strong and nervous hands of a poet. His hands were unusually small and well-kept, and reminded me of a delicate bird's claws; rapacious, perhaps, but not masterful. His voice, which I had imagined would be sonorous, was light and rather high for a man.”
But like Svengali, or the Crowley-derived villain Mocata in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, “There was no doubt that this man, with his colossal will-power and deep occult knowledge, could dominate a weaker and untrained will to the extent that is called magnetism, and could, if he wished, obtain absolute mastery over the mind and body of his subject.” ; “In repose, the eyes held the sleepy reserve of the Oriental, but when he opened them wide and deliberately fastened them on another person, that person could scarcely fail to feel the thrill of magnetism that emanated from their green depths.”
Crowley suddenly turned to Viola and said, “I like you”, moving his chair around so he could look into her eyes. “You were born under Aquarius or Sagittarius,” he said, ”with your peculiar profile. Take your hat off and let me see you better.” Crowley then stood up and slowly walked toward the end of the table so that he could survey her better, finally saying “Yes … I can see you are an Aquarius.”
“How did you guess?” asked Viola; “I didn't guess,” said Crowley; “I knew”.2
The writer Ethel Mannin attended Otter's Sunday gatherings, and she remembered the Aubrey Beardsley prints and the anachronism and the strange atmosphere: “there is a curious quality about those parties, difficult to define. It is not that the people she collects are particularly queer… but everyone else seemed curiously unreal, like people talking and eating in a dream. I had the feeling that we had all somehow got into a land where it was always Sunday afternoon.”
She also remembered Crowley, “that high priest of black magic who likes nothing better than to be regarded as His Satanic Majesty the Prince of Darkness, and who would take it as a compliment to be called an arch-devil… Knowing that Crowley is one of Gwen Otter's oldest friends I asked her if she could tell me the truth about him and the dark stories of drugs and black mass circulating about him, but I gathered… that there is no clearly definable truth about him – ; save that he is a poseur who has come to believe in his own poses – so that they are no longer poses – and that having built up this sinister reputation for himself he goes on playing up to it.”
Otter remained a good friend to Crowley right from the pre-1914 A∴A∴ days (despite being “expelled”), and writing book reviews for The Equinox, through to lunching with him in the 1930s; he still knew her when she moved to 27 Margaretta Terrace – a more atmospheric location, also in Chelsea – in 1932. She figures as Miss Badger in his novel Moonchild, where he elevates her address from Ralston Street, with its tenement-like frontage, to Cheyne Walk (Chelsea's best address, home to Pre-Raphaelites and Swinging Sixties Beautiful People). Victor Neuburg observed that their friendship left her unscathed, and she said of course it did: she wasn't in love with him, and she never lent him money.