74
ALDERNEY STREET: MATTIE PICKETT
The women of Pimlico
Crowley was still close to Pearl, despite her drinking and madness. She helped to fund The Equinox of the Gods, but her “flame of fornication” days were over: she was visiting 11 Manor Place in September 1937 when she got stranded there for the night, and Crowley let her have the bed while he slept on a chair in his clothes.
There were no more official Scarlet Women, but in the Spring of 1938 a significant partner came along in the shape of Mattie Pickett. Just before her came Joan Gibbons, in her early forties, and a “Marvellous pick-up… Opus A.1.”: next day Crowley had to work on book business, “But I have savoured Joan all day. I hope she comes back”. She didn't, quite, but he did run into her again towards the end of the month and made a date for Demos restaurant that went off well: “Joan Gibbons alias Brooks. Kissed her all wrong but she was A.1. No hint of failure. Opus.” (the object this time being success to Crowley's play Mortadello: “Mortadello to go big”). But after that she fades from the scene; he noted in his diary that he didn't want to “compete”, possibly with other men.
On the same evening he wrote that, he found another woman; not on the street but at a drinks party. This was Mattie Pickett, who lived in a basement flat at 139 Alderney Street, Pimlico (Alderney Street itself has more recently been in the news due to the unsolved ‘spy in the bag’ case, with a dead MI6 employee in the top-floor flat at number 36). Born Marguerite Razzal in Texas in 1904, Mattie was a nurse with experience of both ambulance and psychiatric work, and she already knew about Thelema. Crowley wrote excitedly to Karl Germer from Manor Place, as if his own faith had been wavering, that she was “pure Thelemite” and “has been living for 10 years by ‘Do what thou wilt’ told her by a journalist! So, you see, it does work! a staggerer to have a stranger start to convert me.”
The journalist was a man named John Fitzgerald-Hanrahan (1892-1951; originally from Manchester, he was living on Stanwick Road, West Kensington, near Crowley's storage unit). He was imprisoned for cheque fraud in 1939, with a relatively lenient ten-week sentence, after blaming psychiatric problems from a head wound in the First War.1
Altogether Mattie was an exciting find, “the first truly sympathetic woman I have had for years”, with whom he carried out magickal sex for “health – power &c”; “health and energy”, “health and au.” [i.e. aurum, gold: money], and “money for new lodgings”. She was “the best yet – a superb artist”, and at times they were “both completely entranced.”
As with Bobby Barfoot, he told Mattie what he was doing and how to do it; on 14 May 1938 he met her at lunchtime in the Shakespeare pub, still there on the corner by Victoria station, and “taught her the IX0”. This meant she could do it herself, so on one occasion, when he was concentrating on “health – power”, he suspected she was not in tune: “I think she was doing au.” (money).
He took her back to Manor Place, where his landlady disapproved of her (“Letter from Miss Stanton libelling Mrs. Pickett by innuendo”) and to West End restaurants such as Demos and Chez Victor, and he nicknamed her Maat, the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice. But he fell in love with her, and it ended unhappily. She sent him a letter he felt was rude (who knows? – it might simply have said he wanted more of a relationship than she felt able to have) and he sent one back, which no doubt was: “Rude letter from Mattie: my reply ditto.”
After the break-up he even felt he had a kind of succubitic visit from her (or a heart-rendingly acute and transparent wish-fulfilment dream): “Maat came astrally to caress me in sleep, or half-sleep; the most nearly real experience of the kind that I remember.” Next day Frieda took him to Regent's Park Zoo, and he told her everything. He was suffering: “Sudden spasm of sheer misery: took whiskey and The Author of Trixie to bed early” (a 1924 comic novel by William Caine, about an archbishop who writes a novel anonymously).2
A year later, looking for women in Hammersmith, he ran into her again at Hammersmith tube station, by which time she had moved (luckily: the Alderney Street house was destroyed by a bomb the following year).3 “I go into station and who but Mattie?!! Nurse M. Pickett. Basement flat (W. Ken) [i.e. West Kensington was the nearest tube] 62a Castletown Road W14.”
A beautiful and strangely quiet district, Belgravia's more modest sister, Pimlico was run-down between the wars and associated with rented accommodation and lodgings. Anthony Powell describes it atmospherically in his novel Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, with reference to two men Crowley knew, both composers. The character of Moreland is closely based on Constant Lambert, and Maclintick is inspired by Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), the composer who committed suicide, allegedly after dabbling with Abramelin:
We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic. We traversed these pavements for some distance, proceeding from haunts of seedy, grudging gentility into an area of indeterminate, but on the whole increasingly unsavoury complexion.
‘Maclintick is devoted to this part of London,’ Moreland said. ‘I am not sure that I agree with him. He says his mood is for ever Pimlico.[…] Maclintick is always to be found in this neighbourhood, though never for long in the same place.’
‘He never seems very cheerful when I meet him.’
‘He is a very melancholy man,’ Moreland agreed. ‘Maclintick is very melancholy.’
It was also strongly associated with prostitution, probably due to the proximity of Victoria Station. During the split with Mattie, Crowley consoled himself, somewhat vengefully, with another woman on the same street. This was Ethel Donley, at number 113: “another Alderney (street) cow” – Alderney is a type of cattle – and “dreadfully well-meaning”, and moreover “one in the eye for Maat”, as he thought of it, although he was “three parts drunk, agonizing for Maat.”
Other women in the area included Peggy Young, in the basement at 87 Gloucester St SW1, and Rose Wilson, at 46 Lillington St SW1 (“Fat toothless hag – & superb!”).4
Crowley also had frequent sex with a woman named Maisie Clarke, overlapping with Mattie. She worked a regular beat in Hyde Park but her bed was on the Victoria edge of Pimlico at 1 Gillingham Street (at the corner with Vauxhall Bridge Road, currently a sushi bar).
Crowley had a number of ‘works’ or ‘operations’ with Maisie in 1938 specifically directed to bringing on the likely war, hoping for an “A1 War” and putting their mixed fluids on a dagger. He was not only a regular client – he records having sex with her about 25 times – but they grew to know each other socially and ate together, although he continued to seek her out in Hyde Park. Sadly and rather touchingly, she cried when she felt excluded from his more middle-class circle.
When things were good with Maisie they were very good (“Opus… Superb opn.”), but they didn't always run smoothly. Nonetheless he thought of taking her on as his housekeeper, and at best found her pleasant company: he even wondered if another woman, Mary Wilcox (“amusing”), might be a “possible Maisie.” It seems to have petered out in boredom and bitterness after a couple of years, but at his most affectionate Crowley invented a dish in her honour. This was along the lines of Peche Melba (invented in the 1890s by Escoffier at the Savoy, in honour of the great soprano Nellie Melba) and it was Peche Maisie: “Steep peaches in cream with sugar whipped up with Kirsch & Benedictine. Ice some hours.”
Crowley had also had what might briefly have seemed a classier and more exotic option with Lady Edmee Owen, a French woman and former actress around twenty years his junior. She lived about a mile down the Vauxhall Bridge Road at 1 Drake House, Dolphin Square, a newly built (1937) Pimlico apartment complex associated with single men working unsociable hours (members of parliament and waiters, for example) which would develop a strange reputation for spies and scandals of one sort and another. “I am getting really keen on her”, Crowley noted in July 1937.
Born Edmee Nodot, at the age of 16 she had married a wealthy, 60-year-old Englishman – tea and rubber trader Theodore Owen – and used his money to finance a career as an actress. They separated due to her adulteries, but were still technically married when he was knighted in 1926, making her Lady Owen. Better yet, his death in the same year now made her fabulously rich. Edmee continued to have affairs, the most fateful with Dr Gastaud, a doctor-beautician helping her with her weight. Becoming jealous of Gastaud's wife, Lady Owen bought a gun and shot her four times.
Madame Gastaud survived, and Lady Owen received a five-year sentence, serving three. In 1934 she published her autobiography, Flaming Sex,5 and she also colluded with sensational magazine accounts with extraordinary illustrations, notably a photograph of her jewellery-covered hand holding a gun and captioned “Ma main, la main qui cajolait les enfants, la main qui caressait les animaux” (My hand, the hand that used to pet children and animals).
Lady Owen developed a passion for gambling and in 1936, perhaps unknown to Crowley, she had gone bankrupt for the catastrophic sum of a million pounds. Their fledgling relationship soon petered out – he may have had a lucky escape.
Not least of the women Crowley knew in Pimlico was Bertha ‘Bill’ Busch, the eighth of the official Scarlet Women. Having moved to London with him, they had drifted apart but she had stayed. In 1935 Crowley told Gerald Yorke that she was living with a boxer he knew, who forced her into prostitution and beat her face black and blue, but this is a typical Crowley retrospect on the unlucky fate of former friends and may not be true; he also alleged Mathers had put his wife Moina on the street.
Towards the end of the 1930s she was living at 82 Warwick Way, and then in 1939 at 3 Cornwall Street (a demolished street at the back of Dolphin Square, now under Pimlico Academy sports area) with an older man, retired Royal Artillery captain Harry Frowd St. George Caulfield. She was described as a saleswoman of household machinery (possibly sewing machines or vacuum cleaners). She knew Crowley's then girlfriend Margot Cripps, and she still had sex with him occasionally, a couple of works being dedicated to the success of an invention he was trying to patent, his ‘Memodial’ for phone numbers.
At the beginning of the war Bertha was judged not to need internment, and opted not to be repatriated. But then, bizarrely, in September 1944 she was sent back to Germany (it is hard even to imagine how civilians were safely conveyed to Germany, only a couple of months after the D-Day landings; possibly it took Red Cross help, and might have been on compassionate grounds). It was the worst possible moment to go home, with Germany falling and Russian invasion imminent, and the rest of her story is presently unknown.6