Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [256]
Her subsequent rise—despite many other contenders who pursued her, some of them successfully—to become first Alex’s main romantic interest and then his wife aroused even stronger resentment among Alex’s brothers—though, to be fair, they would have disliked any woman who deflected Alex’s attention away from them. It did not help matters that Merle, a great beauty, developed a somewhat haughty attitude toward Alex’s brothers and their wives or that her tastes were fabulously expensive. In the mid-thirties Alex had Cartier in London design for Merle a necklace of twenty-nine massive uncut emeralds suspended from a diamond and platinum collier, which became the most photographed Cartier necklace of all time and was to become the centerpiece of the Cartier show in 1997, this among many other gifts; while Alex’s brothers didn’t mind a bit when Alex spent a fortune on himself, they took a dim view of his spending money on Merle, particularly since Merle, in the mid-thirties, was keeping her options open and still accepting bids from a number of other men, as well as carrying on an affair with a handsome young actor named David Niven.
Perhaps as a result of this, I heard, even as a child, a great deal about Merle, much of it in the form of whispers that adults fondly suppose children will not overhear. It was thus that I learned that Merle had in fact been born not in Tasmania, the child of a dashing English jockey and his colonial bride, as Merle’s official biography had it, but in Bombay as Estelle “Queenie” Thompson, a “chee-chee” (or Anglo-European or half-caste) girl of mixed parentage.
The Anglo-Europeans in British India were a breed apart, descendants of English soldiers or Welsh railway laborers who had married native women. Anglo-Europeans were “protected” subjects in the Raj, but had no right to a British passport or to residence in the United Kingdom. Ridiculed and looked down upon with undisguised contempt by the British, whom they imitated insofar as they were able to, despised as casteless by Hindus and as infidels by Muslims, theirs was a small, separate, and embattled community, entirely Christian (because of the Welsh railway workers, the Anglo-Europeans were mostly “Chapel”), in which social prominence, such as it was, depended almost entirely on skin color. The lighter the skin, the more chance a pretty chee-chee girl had to pass. (There was almost no chance for the boys to pass, of course.)
Queenie had passed so successfully that she became a feature of Bombay nightlife while still in her early teens and eventually made her way to England as the girlfriend of a wealthy young Englishman. She went on to become an “exotic” dancer in London’s West End, eventually becoming the star attraction at the glamorous Café de Paris and the girlfriend of the expatriate black American jazz musician Hutch.
Her beauty was extraordinary and much admired by everybody from the Prince of Wales down. She had a heart-shaped face, dark, almond-shaped eyes—“bedroom eyes,” as they were then called—gleaming black hair, a long, swanlike neck, wonderfully graceful, long-fingered hands, “like those of a temple dancer,” as one admirer, stumbling rather too close to the truth for comfort, wrote in describing her, and full, perfectly shaped lips that curled up at the corners so that she always seemed to be giving a knowing, erotic smile. It was a face that promised a certain lush sensuality, too exotic to be English, despite the pale, ever so slightly olive complexion.
Already the toast of London, Queenie’s