The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll

To June Elizabeth Cadogan Spicer, my wife,
and our two children, Rupert and Venetia.

And to our two grandchildren,
Alexander and Tara Watson.

I
T WAS AROUND
3:00
A.M. ON
J
ANUARY
24, 1941,
WHEN
the body of Josslyn Hay, the earl of Erroll, was discovered lying curled up and facedown on the floor of his Buick car in Kenya, East Africa. The car had come to a rest over a gravel pit by the side of the Ngong Road, eight miles from the capital, Nairobi. Joss, as he was known to all, had been shot at close range, the fatal bullet entering by the side of his left ear. Even in death, his otherwise-unmarked face remained that of a very handsome man. At thirty-nine years old, Josslyn Victor Hay—twenty-second incumbent of the Erroll earldom, the hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland—was a linchpin of Kenya’s colonial community. Blond, good-looking, clever, an ace card and polo player, Joss devoted a good deal of his considerable energies to seducing women, especially those who were already married. His very arrival in Africa in 1923 had taken place under scandalous circumstances: He had eloped with Lady Idina Gordon, an older divorcée and veteran of two marriages.

Much has been made of Joss and Idina and the famously decadent “Happy Valley” crowd that they gathered around them during the 1920s, although the truth is perhaps a little less exotic. The Hays and their coterie were a small, tight-knit group of mainly British and aristocratic friends and farmers attempting to forge a new existence in the Wanjohi Valley (a place that later acquired the epithet “Happy” due to the good spirits induced by its high altitude). Certainly they found time to enjoy themselves there—house parties would begin at sundown and last until dawn, fueled by alcohol and sexual intrigue. After his murder, it became clear that Joss, who had already been married, divorced, and remarried, and was recently widowed at the time of his death, could have had any number of enemies. He had carried on numerous adulterous affairs throughout his life and had recently begun a relationship with yet another married woman.

Although his death made newspaper headlines around the world, sympathy for the murdered earl did not always run deep. The American press, ever succinct, printed the immortal headline
PASSIONATE PEER GETS HIS.
There was, however, plenty of interest in exactly who had committed the crime. After Joss’s murder, the Kenyan police, and the attorney general in particular, decided the obvious culprit was Sir Henry John “Jock” Delves Broughton. Jock’s new wife, the blond and vivacious Diana, had become Joss’s latest conquest, and the police reasoned that Jock had murdered Joss in revenge for stealing his bride. Jock was duly charged and then imprisoned. He went on trial on May 26, 1941, but was never convicted, and after being acquitted on July 1, 1941, he was discharged. Although his name was cleared, Broughton never recovered from the ignominy of the trial, and he committed suicide the following year. To this date, the Erroll crime remains officially unsolved.

So who shot Lord Erroll? The question hangs in the air. Many possible answers have been given by a number of preeminent writers. The first to set his sights on the story was British journalist Cyril Connolly. A prominent contributor to the
New Statesman
in the 1930s, a critic for many years on the
Sunday Times,
and the literary editor of the
Observer
from 1942 to 1943, Connolly had been fascinated by the Erroll case from the beginning. In 1969, he joined forces with fellow journalist James Fox to undertake a complete investigation of the murder for the
Sunday Times
magazine. The result was published in that same year and was entitled “Christmas at Karen,” its content gleaned from dozens of interviews. With its accompanying photographs, including a picture of Erroll’s head with its bullet wound, Connolly’s article stopped short of naming a murderer, but even so, it reignited the controversy. Fox pursued the case even after Connolly’s death, publishing his book about the murder,
White Mischief,
in 1982. It became a classic of crime reporting and was later made into a film starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi. In both book and film, a heavy shadow is cast over Broughton’s self-proclaimed innocence—after all, Jock was the only person to stand trial for the murder. Many have taken his suicide to be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Since the publication of
White Mischief,
there have been other authors who have either substantiated Fox’s theory or disputed it. In 1997, Leda Farrant published her own version of events—
Diana, Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder
—in which she claimed that it was Diana herself who had committed the killing. According to Farrant, Diana was furious with Joss for refusing to marry her. In the 1999 memoir
Child of Happy Valley,
Juanita Carberry, who grew up in Kenya, related that Broughton had confessed his culpability to her three days after the murder, when she was just fifteen years old. Most recently, the journalist Errol Trzebinski’s biography of Lord Erroll,
The Life and Death of Lord Erroll
(2000), pins the blame on MI6 or a branch of British intelligence. The motive for assassinating Erroll, according to Trzebinski, was that Erroll had fascist leanings. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes also revisited the facts of the case in his 2005 television special,
A Most Mysterious Murder: The Case of the Earl of Erroll,
placing the blame squarely back on Broughton.

A peripheral character in all these narratives is Countess Alice de Janzé. Alice sustained an on-again, off-again relationship with Joss for the best part of two decades and was probably still in love with him at the time of his murder. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1899, this transcendently beautiful American heiress became a French countess by marriage. After she arrived in Africa via Paris, attired in the latest French fashions, she quickly won over almost every man she encountered there, while still managing to befriend most of their wives. Alice was the very definition of a colorful character, and although hardly a well-known figure in our times, she achieved infamy during her own lifetime, making newspaper headlines around the world with her exploits. It is Alice’s story that I will tell in this book.

For my part, I have been aware of Alice’s name since childhood. Alice was a friend of my mother, Margaret Spicer. The two women met in Kenya when they had both newly arrived there in 1925 (at that time, my father, Roy Spicer, was serving as commissioner of the Kenya police). At the time, Alice and her husband, Count Frédéric de Janzé, were staying with their friends Joss and Idina in the Wanjohi Valley. Margaret and Alice had much in common. Both were Americans abroad—Alice from Chicago, Illinois, and my mother, born in Larkspur, Colorado. They were both fluent in French: Alice had arrived in Paris in 1920, chaperoned by her aunt; Margaret had been educated in Montreux, Switzerland. As new arrivals in Kenya, they found themselves surrounded by a predominantly British expatriate crowd, so it is perhaps not surprising that they sought each other out. Alice and my mother were both musical, and they often entertained the Happy Valley circle by singing popular American songs and spirituals from the Deep South, with Alice accompanying on the ukulele. My mother’s friendship with Alice lasted until 1927, when she left Kenya to return to England. Evidently, Alice held a considerable fascination for my mother—as she did for so many who knew her—because when my mother died in 1953, I came into the possession of her diaries and family papers, and it was among these that I discovered numerous press cuttings and references to the glamorous countess. As well as the papers and cuttings, my mother left me her copy of
Vertical Land,
a book of sketches depicting life in Kenya in the mid-1920s, written by Alice’s husband, Frédéric. For most readers, the characters in Frédéric’s
Vertical Land
appear to be fictional, since he changed the names of the real-life characters he described, but my mother had decoded these pen portraits, writing in pencil in the margins of her copy the true names of the characters.

In one story in
Vertical Land,
Alice appears as Delecia, an elegant American who is seen pulling up at Nairobi’s exclusive Muthaiga Club in a low-slung Buick piled with luggage and a lion cub. Later in the book, in a portrait entitled “Just Like a Gipsy,” Frédéric described another woman who could only be Alice, her ukulele transformed into a mandolin. The passage is characterized by the rather flowery Symbolist language fashionable in France at the time, and as such, it gives us a highly stylized version of her person and presence:

Like most depictions of Alice, the portrait raises more questions than it answers, but there is no doubt that Frédéric was correct in his assessment of Alice as “unstable and suicidal.” She was a woman who suffered throughout her life from the demons of melancholy, and who tried to take her own life on a number of occasions. Alongside this dark streak, however, was a vein of impetuous and often reckless daring. As a young heiress, she quickly tired of the Chicago debutante scene and began to explore the Jazz Age nightclubs of the city, starting up an affair with a local mobster. After being banished to Paris by her family, she took a job at a French fashion house by day, cutting a swath through the city’s clubs and cafés by night. It was in France that she won her independence from her family when she married Frédéric, the sensitive, intellectual count who took her to Africa to help cure her of her unhappiness. After only a few months in Kenya, she decided to build a home there, leaving her two young children in France, too fearful of being a bad mother to grace them with more than the occasional visit. In Africa, her marriage to Frédéric fell apart after she started affairs with the two men who would become her great loves, Joss and her second husband, Raymund de Trafford.

As I began to research her life, the Alice I discovered was a lesson in contradictions. She could be bold and eccentric: She would go out riding alone among wild animals, kept a Nile crocodile in her bathtub in Paris, and launched herself with abandon into affairs with a string of dubious lovers. But her letters and other writings often reveal a sense of wrenching need and, at times, overwhelming unhappiness. In 1941, only eight months after Joss Erroll’s murder, she finally succeeded in taking her own life at home in Kenya. She was forty-two. In virtually every depiction of the Erroll murder to date, Alice is described, suspected, and cleared of suspicion. She is written about without any depth or explanation of her origins, her moods, her strengths and weaknesses. Her stunning beauty and great wealth is noted and then, in each instance, the author moves on. In Michael Radford’s 1987 film of Fox’s book, Alice was played by Sarah Miles, who portrayed her as an irresponsible and dizzy drug addict. The truth in such matters is, of course, always more complex and usually more interesting. Such was the case with Alice. (In fact, Alice never took drugs other than barbiturates for sleeping, relying on absinthe-spiked vodka cocktails for her highs.)

The more I read and investigated, the more I came to see that within the Alice legend were dozens of compelling anecdotes, inconclusive leads, and half-told stories. Through my research, I  discovered a woman who was, in fact, central—rather than peripheral—to the Erroll case. She seemed to me a figure worthy of further scrutiny, someone who needed to be placed in her full context. How did an American such as Alice end up in British colonial Africa? What was the nature of her affair with Joss? What hard evidence has ever been produced about the murder? What psychology has been deployed? According to anonymous letters sent to Jock Delves Broughton’s defense counsel during his trial, the assassin was, in fact, a discarded mistress.