Among the people present when Crowley and Rollo Ahmed challenged Dr Cannon at the Mayfair Hotel was a young man named Alan Burnett-Rae. Burnett-Rae didn't know who the character in the brown tweed plus-fours was, and Cannon told him afterwards it was Aleister Crowley. A couple of years later Burnett-Rae found himself, at the age of twenty-five, in possession of a large house at number 56 Welbeck Street, near Harley Street in Marylebone, which he divided into eight or nine small flats with a Belgian steward and his family looking after it. He'd meanwhile got to know Ahmed, and one day Ahmed rang and said he had a friend looking for accommodation: “a very highly evolved personality.”
Burnett-Rae recognised Crowley at once from the hotel confrontation, still wearing the same knickerbocker suit, and on 30 August 1936 Crowley rented room 6, on the third floor. Burnett-Rae wrote a vivid memoir of his stay, during which Crowley made “rather a nuisance of himself”, initially by burning strong incense. He also sent the steward's son out on errands for “strange foods and drinks”; Burnett-Rae particularly remembered pig's trotters, which Crowley liked to prepare Chinese-style.
Crowley seemed to have few possessions except for an incense burner, the famous tweed suit, a few books, and a machine which helped him breathe when he had asthma attacks (this was quite a contraption: it had a drive belt and took cartridges). Burnett-Rae was struck by how unfit he was, and that he had to be abstemious with drink; after a couple of glasses of brandy he fell on the floor “as if unconscious”. Pearl, “the middle-aged widow of a naval officer” as Burnett-Rae describes her, helped him back into his chair and explained he shouldn't drink spirits, due to malaria and other afflictions. This is considerably at odds with other accounts of Crowley's drinking, so unless it was a practical joke it may be that drink was interacting with medication, or the flare-up of some condition.
Crowley suffered from ill-health all his life, and by the Thirties he was trying to take more care of himself. He had long been concerned about his weight and distended abdomen, for which he took a German product called Uricedin. Crowley had also visited masseurs for his weight and general health, including a course of abdominal colon massage from Archibald Cockren at 146 Great Portland Street; Cockren is now remembered for his writing on alchemy, notably Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored (1941). They briefly collaborated in a scheme to market rejuvenation treatment, with Crowley hoping to sell courses of his Amrita rejuvenation pills, featuring his own semen, for 25 guineas a week (about £2000 today), but it foundered and Cockren became one of Crowley's creditors in his bankruptcy proceedings.
He must also have feared that ageing would affect his ability to attract women, and around this time he began visiting not only masseurs but beauticians. At Welbeck Street he went for wrinkle treatment by a Mrs Grant and Mme Arnsohn of Gee Bee Université de Beauté, “complexion specialists” nearby at 7 Mandeville Place, and he later went to Amie McClymont, “beauty specialist”, at 158 Brompton Road.
Along with the incense burning, one night Burnett-Rae heard there was “infernal screaming, shouting and general commotion” as if Crowley was attacking Pearl. Burnett-Rae banged on the door and Pearl appeared, saying Crowley had been having a nightmare. Next morning the steward's son Adolph – he changed his name to Jack a while later – was surprised, as Crowley records it, when he brought Pearl her morning tea and was greeted with “‘Go and shit yourself!’ for a genial ‘Good morrow, fair sir.’”
Calling on Burnett-Rae downstairs, “They appeared perfectly amicable with each other and deeply contrite” about Crowley's alleged nightmare (“an obvious fabrication”), but it was becoming clear Pearl had to go, which she did after settling Crowley's overdue rent (they were living largely on her money), although she still came back to visit.
Burnett-Rae also met Nina Hamnett and Betty May at the Fitzroy Tavern. Hamnett was still on cordial terms with Crowley, but May said one day she would kill him, and added that she was a witch herself. She was drunk, and her companion told Burnett-Rae not to let her know Crowley was in his house, lest she come round and attack him.
Finally, with the incense and the rent, Crowley himself had to go, but he remained friendly with Burnett-Rae. He cooked him curry, and tried to interest him in business ventures such as printing buttons in support of Edward VIII (saying “We want our king!”) during his 1936 abdication crisis. In some respects Crowley had met his match in Burnett-Rae, who once asked him why he didn't seek fame rather than notoriety. Crowley had no use for ordinary fame, he said: he had once thought of the Diplomatic Service as a career, “but can you tell me now who was our representative at the Sublime Porte,1 say, eighty years ago?”