Just off Regent Street at 55 Beak Street, the Harlequin Club was a key Bohemian site in 1920s Soho, and it was frequented by friends Betty May and Nina Hamnett. May, “Tiger Woman”, born in the East End, was a model, singer, and hardcore Bohemian who claimed to have been an Apache in Paris, and Hamnett was a former member of the A∴A∴ who had been introduced to Crowley by Ione de Forest. Daughter of an army officer, she studied art at the Slade and was an artist's model for Epstein, Augustus John and others; “Modigliani said I had the best tits in Europe”.
Both women had already been prominent, ‘life and soul’ members of an earlier Soho club known to Crowley, the Crab Tree club on Greek Street, which was started by Augustus John and ran from 1912-1914. Both wrote memoirs, and both were to play a role in Crowley's long downfall between the wars.
Betty May had recently married Raoul Loveday, a bright young man just down from Oxford, and she was a friend of Betty Bickers, who was another Harlequin regular. Learning of Raoul's interest in Crowley, Bickers introduced them, and May was disturbed when Raoul came home after three days smelling of ether and talking about his travels on the astral plane. Crowley was a bad influence, and May attempted to keep them apart. At one stage May and Loveday lived in a room above the Harlequin, and she writes of him coming home in a terrible state and knocking on their window (“We were in the third floor of one of those tall houses in Beak Street”) having climbed up a drainpipe.
Hoping to keep Loveday and Crowley apart, May found “another room whose address should not be known”, in Fitzroy Street. This worked for a while until one day there was a knock at the door, and she opened it to find “a ponderous man attired in a Highland kilt… on one of his very small hands was a curious ring.” He was also carrying a wand with a snake on it, and wearing cosmetics and a black glossy wig. Announcing “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, he invited himself to dinner and produced a bottle of hock from his sporran.
In Crowley's version of events, Raoul had committed “the fatal folly of marrying a girl whom he had met in a sordid and filthy drinking den in Soho, called the Harlequin, which was frequented by self-styled artists and their female parasites. One of these went by the name of Betty May. Born in a slum in the East End, she had become an artist's model of the most vicious kind”; subsequently they lived “in one filthy room in Fitzroy Street, a foul, frowsty, verminous den”. Crowley was appalled when Loveday took him to the Harlequin, where he saw Betty May singing, “three parts drunk, on the knees of a dirty-faced loafer, pawed by a swarm of lewd hogs, breathless with lust… Her only idea of life was this wallowing in the hog trough nuzzled by the snouts of the swine of Soho.”
When Crowley returned to Cefalu, Loveday followed (followed in turn by Betty, who disliked it intensely). In 1923 Loveday caught typhoid and died, either from drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat or – more likely – drinking the local water, which Crowley had warned him not to do.
This stimulated a campaign of vilification in the press, where Crowley – already noticed for the Rites of Eleusis, his German propaganda activities, and Diary of a Drug Fiend – became “A Man We'd Like To Hang”, “The King of Depravity”, and “The Wickedest Man in the World”. May was a major source for this, and later published her sensational ghost-written autobiography, Tiger Woman (1929). Three years later Hamnett published Laughing Torso (1932), a minor classic memoir: it has only a relatively brief mention of Crowley, but led to the ‘Black Magic Libel Case’.
As for the Harlequin, it came to a sad end. It was run by a former Café Royal waiter named Yannis (“Johnny”) Papani, who enlarged the premises by taking the cellar walls out, not realising they were structural. He came back after a short prison sentence, opened the door, and was killed when the building collapsed.