Authors: Lady Colin Campbell
‘I’ll do it only if you give the
Sunday People
an interview after the divorce saying that everything you said before is a lie,’ I said, deciding that I might as well use the situation to strike a bargain.
‘Done,’ he said.
So the end was in sight at long last. In May Colin flew down to Santo Domingo for two days to get a no-fault, mutual-consent
divorce. On the day the decree was granted, I celebrated the occasion with dinner and a romantic interlude with Bill Madden. It was the only time my marital bed was ever the scene of good sex.
My second objective had still not been achieved to my satisfaction. Although Colin went along with a story in the
Sunday People
which asserted that we were reconciled when we were in fact divorced, he would not recant his lies about me being a man, or about knowing nothing about my medical history until after our wedding. I announced that I was returning to London, which thereafter became the focal point of my existence, even though I did not officially establish residency there until 1981.
‘But I thought we were staying together,’ was Colin’s response.
‘I never said that. You said it,’ I reminded him. ‘You surely don’t think I’d stay with a man I’m not married to, when he can’t even clear up misconceptions of his own creation?’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘This is a free country. If you want to come with me, you can come as far as Heathrow Airport. Thereafter, you’re on your own.’
For a marriage that had begun with such romance, and had been conducted in an atmosphere of abuse and exploitation, at least it had ended civilly. As I closed down the apartment and packed up my possessions for shipment to London, I made a vow to myself. Never again would I give anyone the opportunity to do to me what Colin Campbell had done, nor would I ever allow anyone, myself included, to use a medical problem for which I had had no responsibility as a club with which to batter me.
T
he end of any marriage is a time for grieving, and grieve I did. I wept for the loss of my dreams, for all the good times I had not had, for all the efforts I had made which had come to nought, for all the pain and suffering and degradation I had endured, for the loss of my innocence, for my introduction to disenchantment, evil and destructiveness. My one consolation was that the trauma was now at an end. I had spent all but the first six weeks of my marriage recovering from broken bones and beatings, and it was a tremendous relief to know that I would now be conducting my life without further physical violence or pain.
Free at last of Colin, I also noticed how deeply I was able to sleep. Ever since his first death threat in March, I had been sleeping with one eye open, so to speak, in case he tried to ‘top me’, as he had put it. Hungry once more for life and its pleasures, as soon as I was settled at Richard Adeney’s house in Notting Hill, where my brother was living, I picked up the telephone and called my friends, and even an attractive man from my single days. Count Giorgio Emo di Capodilista was a scion of a grand Italian family I had met through my ex-boyfriend David Koch. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear from me, and took me to dinner at the Chelsea Rendezvous, then back to his Belgravia mews house, where we did what all adult heterosexuals did in the 1970s.
Attractive and thoughtful though Giorgio was, I decided that I could not circumvent the grieving process by distracting myself with men. I would have to go through it before I could enjoy being with another man. As well as the emotional distress, there were physical effects of what I had suffered to be dealt with. I weighed less than a hundred pounds and could barely eat. And night after night, I had terrible nightmares in which Colin Campbell was beating me or trying to kill me. Sometimes these could be quite embarrassing, for I would scream out in my sleep.
‘Wake up,’ Mickey would say, coming into my bedroom. ‘You’re having another nightmare.’
To spread the burden until I found a place of my own, after a time I went to stay with Mary Anne Innes-Ker. ‘You married into the most notorious family in the British aristocracy,’ she said. ‘There is bad blood there. You should never have married Colin. It was doomed to failure before you took the vows.’
Each day I made a concerted effort to find myself somewhere to live. I yearned for stability. Finally, I stumbled upon just what I wanted: a sweet little house on Denbigh Street in Notting Hill. ‘Don’t take it,’ my brother counselled. ‘It’s too expensive [it was the princely sum of £50 per week]. Why saddle yourself with responsibilities after what you’ve been through? Give yourself a rest. Share a flat.’
Dulany Howland, the American friend who subsequently married into the famous Hunt family from Texas, came up with what seemed the ideal solution, and I moved into a flat in Green Street, Mayfair with a female friend of his and an English chap called Richie Self. A few days later Richie had a dinner party. I was returning from the theatre as the guests were leaving, and ran into Joanna Pinches (now better known as Joanna Wood), the English interior designer, who introduced me to the others. The following day Richie came into my bedroom after work.
‘James Adeane, who was here last night, is smitten by you. He thinks you’re devastatingly beautiful. He wants to meet you.’
I remembered James as being tall, dark and handsome. ‘Richie, I’m not up to meeting anyone yet. I’ve only just been divorced, and frankly, the last thing I want right now is another man.’
‘Don’t say no so readily. He’s one of the most eligible bachelors in England. He has two estates; he is the grandson of the Canadian multimillionaire Sir James Dunn, and his Uncle Michael is the Queen’s private secretary.’
‘Richie, there are times when I feel so drained I can barely put one foot in front of the other. This is not a good time for me.’
‘He’ll be sympathetic. He knows what suffering is all about. His mother committed suicide.’
‘Richie, it’s sweet of you, but the answer has to be no.’
It was the beginning of months of persuasion. I even received an invitation to go cruising in the Mediterranean on a yacht James was taking there, even though my sole encounter with him remained that chance meeting in the hallway at Green Street. When I did finally meet James properly, I liked him immediately. He was every bit as good-looking as I remembered, and had a voice that rumbled and a warmth that was detectable beneath a taciturn, almost brusque exterior. Like Bill Swain, he was sufficiently like Daddy to trigger whatever elements of a father complex I had. But life had taught me to remain true to my instincts, and I stuck to my decision.
Any temptation I had to do otherwise – and I did have them – was quashed when the dark and simmering presence of Colin Campbell in the background thrust itself to the fore once more. He had been in touch, promising one thing one day and delivering the opposite the next, and I had tolerated this because he had said he would give a true version of events to a popular tabloid, the
News of the World
– on the condition, of course, that I sold them an interview. I went along with all this, and even allowed myself to be interviewed, only to have Colin pull the plug and refuse to talk on the grounds that he saw no reason to give them two stories for the price of one.
Now he had seen my article, and freaked out. ‘You blame me for the break-up of our marriage. You say I took out my moodiness on you.’
‘It is a highly sanitised version of the truth. How can you object to it?’
‘And you want me to take back what I said?’ he observed angrily.
‘Yes, Colin. Because what you said wasn’t even an exaggeration. It was an outright lie. Surely you see the difference.’
If he did, he gave no indication of it. We were now back to where we had been before the signing of the separation agreement, and true to form, he was blowing hot and cold. One morning he telephoned me and begged me, for the umpteenth time, to resume using the name Campbell. The same afternoon he rang again, this time to accuse me of hanging on to his family silver, which he had asked me to look after until he found somewhere permanent to live. I drove it round to where he was staying and dumped it on the pavement.
Then he was hospitalised for surgery to his stomach, shot by years of abuse, and asked me to visit. But when I arrived, he told me to keep it short, as he didn’t want his friends knowing he was still seeing me. I promptly left and refused to return despite his relentless entreaties.
The last straw was when I picked up the
Daily Express
, owned by Colin’s half-sister Jeanie’s uncle, Sir Max Aitken, and saw an interview he had given in the William Hickey gossip column. He had repeated his lies about his ignorance of my medical history, and had stated that this, and my inability to have children, were the reasons for the break-up of our marriage. He needed to marry a woman who could give him children, he said, to secure the Argyll dukedom’s line of succession (something he has singularly failed to do in the two decades that have since elapsed). He had divorced me out of a magnanimity, since an annulment would have destroyed me. Worse, his so-called revelations had been picked up by the
Evening News
, which took the opportunity, in the guise of reporting that I had been seen on the town with Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, to repeat the canard.
Colin’s perverse comments wiped out all the headway I had made towards recovery. Finally, I understood what he had meant when he had said he could destroy me. He would hound and abuse me, using the press instead of his fists to batter me. Moreover, he expected to get away with it, because he knew that the Jamaican political situation had now degenerated to the extent that my father was seriously worried that his assets would be nationalised, and that I would therefore not have the means to sue the newspapers.
He was right in his assumption that my father would not back me in expensive litigation, but he reckoned without my resourcefulness and determination. I tried to get the Hon. Vere Harmsworth, now Lord Rothermere, who owned the
Evening News
and whom I knew from Jamaica, and Max Aitken to publish corrections. When they waffled and flannelled and failed to deliver the goods, I sued them myself – and, for good measure, the
Sunday People
too. I was quite prepared to go without food to nail the lies. If something is important, one must make sacrifices.
The next year was a dark period indeed. Lawsuits in Britain were fraught with problems. First, there was no possibility of a contingency arrangement, which meant that you had to keep your lawyers ‘in funds’. Then there was the bizarre system of solicitors doing some of the work, and barristers the rest, and you had to pay both for what was often the same thing. And barristers and solicitors charged twice the fees of their peers elsewhere, even in the United States.
Yet I had little choice but to pursue this course of action. Unless I could put a stop to these stories, each repetition would add credibility to them. This would doubtless have a cumulative effect, shrinking the number of men who would be interested in me, and quite possibly affecting my friendships as well. As it turned out, only a handful of people were ever put off, notably Davina Wodehouse, then Richie Self’s girlfriend, now Countess Alexander of Tunis. I am grateful to the rumours for weeding her and her ilk out of my circle of friends.
My counsel was the eminent QC David Eady. At first he was confident that the newspapers would settle quickly. I sincerely hoped so, for I was so afraid of spending any money at all on anything except the case, lest I be forced to throw in the towel, that I was living in a financial straitjacket. I seldom entertained, which is fatal for a recent divorcee: not only do you invite more loneliness into your life than is healthy, but you also relegate control of a significant part of your social life to others.
The time had come to cut my ties with the past. It was never going to be possible to have a civil, civilised or positive relationship with anyone as malevolent, changeable and cruel as Colin Campbell. I wrote him a letter telling him why I never wanted to see him again. And fed up with the British newspapers referring to me as Lady Colin Campbell, I instructed
The Times
to issue the following announcement in the court circular: Lady Colin Campbell wishes in future to be known by her maiden name, Miss Georgia Ziadie. Not one British newspaper ever respected my stated wish.
Although Colin Campbell did not reply to my letter, he reacted immediately to the announcement in
The Times
. Two or three times a day, every day, he plagued me about it. ‘Stop phoning me,’ I demanded.
‘But it’s so humiliating! The whole world knows that you don’t consider one of the greatest titles in the land a fit name to bear.’
In October, I allowed Colin to come to Green Street to collect the paintings I was still holding for him because he refused to pick them up from Mickey. These did not include the pictures he had taken, unbeknown to her, from his own sister Jeanie’s house in Jamaica. In New York, he had refused to have her come to our apartment in case she saw them. I had arranged for them to be returned to their rightful owner without telling Colin.
He settled himself on the sofa and proceeded to prattle on and on about his wretched name. ‘You’re doing yourself no favours,’ he said. ‘You’ve played right into Ian’s hands. He’s banging
around Scotland telling everyone you were forced to give up the name.’
I had no means of knowing whether Colin was telling the truth, but I was quite prepared to be manipulated into changing my mind if there were the slightest chance that he was. It certainly seemed in character for Ian.
‘Is that a fact?’ I said, my blood pressure rising. ‘Well, it looks as if your brother’s resourcefulness has won the day where your persistence failed.’ I consoled myself with the likelihood that I would remarry within a year or two. Then I could safely kiss that hated name Campbell goodbye.
Colin departed with his pictures tucked under his arms. That’s the last I’ll ever see of you, I thought as he retreated down the stairs. But my luck was out. That evening, as I was dressing for a dinner party, Colin returned, and kept his finger on the buzzer until I let him in.
‘Please come back to me,’ he implored, slobbering over me while I tried to put on my make-up.
‘Colin, you don’t seem to understand English. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to speak to you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. If you won’t have the good grace to leave, at least sit on the bed and stop being a nuisance.’
James Adeane was calling to collect me, and when he rang the doorbell, Colin jumped up. ‘Why don’t you go down first?’ I said, hoping to avoid an awkward confrontation.
‘Nah. I want to see the man my wife’s going out with.’
‘Your ex-wife, you mean,’ I said, walking out of the flat with him in front of me, bobbing and weaving down the stairs like a coconut tree buffeted by a storm.
At the front door, I introduced them. Colin’s greeting was, ‘What do you want with a bitch like her?’
‘Goodbye, Colin,’ I said, hoping it really was.
‘I want a quiet word with my wife,’ he demanded of James whose eyebrows shot me a look of sympathy. ‘I don’t have any money to get home. Can I borrow a quid?’
‘You’ll have to walk home, I’m afraid. I do not have the pound to lend you. Goodbye, Colin, and good luck,’ I said with finality, taking James’ arm.
This small but pointed gesture of contempt must have done the trick, for I have never seen him since.
Returning to a normal existence was not an entirely smooth process. I had had so much publicity that it was impossible to walk into a roomful of strangers without half of them knowing ‘all about me’, or so they believed, and promptly ‘enlightening’ the other half as soon as my back was turned. This was truly galling. Not only did one have to labour under a host of
misconceptions, but one had to do so without stripping oneself of one’s dignity. This I accomplished by studiously avoiding direct mention of my personal life. Those who tried to bring it up were invariably met with a blast of icy reserve which chilled them into silence. Although I understood that people were bound to be curious, I had a right to my privacy and my dignity.