Posts Tagged ‘gay’

The Murder of Ali Fahmy At The Savoy Hotel

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

“What have I done, my dear! What have I done!”


marguerite-fahmy-signed

Marguerite Fahmy

The two court cases were over seventy years apart and the LA suburb of Brentwood is a long way from the relative sophistication of London’s Savoy Hotel in the 1920s but when OJ Simpson was infamously acquitted in 1995, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the shocked reaction around the world would not have been dissimilar to when Marguerite Fahmy was sensationally found ‘not guilty’ of the internationally reported murder of her Egyptian playboy husband at the hotel in 1923.

The Savoy Hotel in 1923

The Savoy Hotel had opened in 1889, and had been no stranger to scandal – it was at Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial where it came to light that he had entertained a succession of rent-boys at the hotel’s room 361. After Wilde had been arrested for gross indecency the presiding magistrate said “I know nothing about the Savoy, but I must say that in my view chicken and salad for two at sixteen shillings is very high. I am afraid I shall never supper there myself.”

However it was still the place to stay for celebrities and royalty visiting London. In 1923 the hotel was still seen as one of the finest in the world and in that year, amongst others, Walter Hagen, Fred and Adele Astaire and the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini (as in chicken) had all stayed there.

Walter Hagen on the roof of the Savoy


Fred and Adele Astaire

A typical dismal drizzly April in London that year had only been brightened by the wedding of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York, Prince Albert – known as ‘Bertie’ to his family and close friends. The house band at the Savoy Hotel – The Savoy Havana Band – made its debut on the BBC on 13th April 1923, not least because the BBC at the time was next door and shared its generator with the hotel.

A few weeks later on the morning of Sunday 1 July 1923 a limousine drove into Savoy Court and the Hotel doorman helped out a couple who were known to the hotel as the Prince and Princess Fahmy. They were accompanied by the Prince’s private secretary, Mr Said Enani. Accurately Prince Fahmy wasn’t really a prince but he did little to discourage the use of the title when away from Egypt.

Savoy Court – the only road in Britain where drivers are required to drive on the right.

The 22 year Egyptian had met his bride to be, a woman ten years his senior, in Paris the year before -incidentally the year that Egypt was granted independence, if not overall control, by the British Government. To many people Marguerite was seen, at best, as a flirtatious gold-digger and more in love with his not inconsiderable fortune than the man himself. They had married in Egypt, first by a civil ceremony on 26th December and then followed by a Muslim wedding in January 1923 where Madame Fahmy, modestly veiled, proclaimed in Arabic ‘There is one God and Mohammed is His Prophet’.

couple-in-egypt

Mr and Mrs Fahmy in Egypt

marguerite-in-veil
After a few days in London, which was experiencing a heatwave, Marguerite Fahmy summoned the Savoy’s doctor – she was suffering badly from external haemorrhoids. She alleged to Dr Gordon, while he was treating her, that her husband had ‘torn her by unnatural intercourse’ and was ‘always pestering her’ for this kind of sex. Already thinking about possible future divorce proceedings she repeatedly asked the doctor for ‘a certificate as to her physical condition to negative the suggestion of her husband that she had made up a story’. The doctor, although respectful, ignored her request.

On the 9th July the couple went to Daly’s Theatre on Cranbourne Street off Leicester Square (where the Vue West End cinema now stands) to see, with hindsight the darkly ironic ‘The Merry Widow’. It had been an incredibly hot day and you can only imagine how uncomfortably warm the theatre must have been in those pre-air-conditioned days (although as far as a lot of the West End is concerned we’re still in those days). Not the ideal conditions for someone suffering from piles I would imagine. The main performers in Lehar’s popular operetta were the 22 year old Evelyn Laye and the Danish matinee idol Carl Brisson.

carl-brisson

Carl Brisson

evelyn-laye

The beautiful Evelyn Laye

Daly's Theatre

The couple returned to the Savoy after the theatre for a late supper, however the meal was disrupted by a huge argument which had recently become almost a daily occurrence. Ali had even appeared in public with scratches on his face and Marguerite had been seen with dark bruises on her face ill-disguised with powder and makeup. The row this time degenerated to such an extent that Marguerite picked up a wine bottle and shouted in French ‘You shut up or I’ll smash this over your head.’ Ali replied ‘If you do, I’ll do the same to you.’ They eventually calmed down, not without the help of the head-waiter, and went to the ballroom to listen to the Savoy Havana Band. The house band no doubt would have been playing at one point Yes, We Have No Bananas or perhaps Ain’t We Got Fun both big hits that year. It wasn’t long before Marguerite, after refusing the offer of a dance with her husband, retired to her room.

Mr Said Enani, as a witness in court a few weeks later, said that Mr Fahmy, in full evening dress, had decided to take a cab in the direction of Piccadilly even though the hot balmy weather had now turned into one of the worse thunderstorms in living memory. When asked the reason why he went, he said he did not know. Although we can perhaps presume that Ali was either visiting an unlicensed nightclub or on the search for either a male or female prostitute both of which frequented the area in high numbers around that part of the West End.

At around 2.00am the hotel’s night porter passed the door to the Fahmy’s suite but heard a low whistle and looking back saw Ali Fahmy bending down apparently whistling for Marguerite’s little dog that had been following the night porter down the corridor. After continuing on his way for just three yards he suddenly heard three shots fired in quick succession.

He ran back and saw Marguerite throw down a black handgun and also saw Ali slumped against the wall bleeding profusely from a wound on his temple from which splinger of bone and brain tissue protruded. ‘Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, mon cher?’ (what have I done, my dear?’) Marguerite kept saying over and over again.

sir-edward-marshall-hall-kc-portrait

Sir Edward Marshall Hall - The Great Defender

Marshall Hall was almost 65 at the time of Marguerite’s trial and was a household name. He was six feet three, handsome for his age, and a commanding presence in the courtroom. He was commonly known, after being responsible for several famous acquittals, as ‘The Great Defender’. Marshall Hall’s final speech to the jury in defence of Marguerite, or Madame Fahmy as the press were now calling her, slowly became a character assassination of her dead husband. he portrayed him as a monster of Eastern amoral bisexual depravity. (Not too) subtly Hall accused both Prince Fahmy and his private secretary of being homosexuals.

Ali Fahmy

The public gallery consisted of many young women some of whom were noted to be barely eighteen. Marshall Hall looked up to the gallery saying ‘if women choose to come here to hear this case, they must take the consequences’. None of them left. Meanwhile he turned the attack on Ali to sodomy. Fahmy, said Hall, ‘developed abnormal tendencies and he never treated Madame normally’ Asking them to disregard the fact that the victim was younger than his wife. ‘Yes, he was only 23 years old,’ he told them. ‘But he was given to a life of debauchery and was obsessed with his sexual prowess.’ He went on to remind them that, as an Oriental man, his wife to him was no more than a belonging and that however much he may have acquired the outward signs of urbanity and sophistication, he was forever an Oriental under the skin.



When Marguerite took the stand, she was encouraged by the Great Defender to describe her life as a Muslim bride and to a lot of observers this was when the case turned her way. She testified at one point how she had been sitting ‘in a state of undress in which her modesty would have forbidden her facing even her maid’, she had noticed a strange noise and she pulled aside the hangings that screened an alcove and ‘saw crouching there, where he could see every move she made, one of her husband’s numerous ugly, black, half-civilized manservants, who obeyed like slaves his every word’. She screamed for help, but when her husband, appeared from an adjoining room he only, laughed, saying that “He is nobody. He does not count. But he has the right to come here or anywhere you may go and tell me what you are doing.”

It was like a scene from Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, the extraordinarily popular film released the year before, and the women in the gallery were treating it as such.

Before he summed up, the judge, referring to the public gallery said, ‘These things are horrible; they are disgusting. How anyone could listen to these things who is not bound to listen to them passes comprehension.’ However he had been swayed by Marshall Hall’s defence, that pandered to the prejudices of the tie, and during the summing up endorsed Marshall Hall by saying ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt they have not the same views…’

The jury, after less than an hour’s consideration, announced ‘not guilty’ to both the charges of murder and of manslaughter, and Madame Fahmy was discharged and was now a free woman.

The prosecution was refused by the judge, seemingly in awe as much as anyone else to the Great Defender, to cross-examine Marguerite ‘as to whether or not she had lived an immoral life’, to show that she was ‘a woman of the world, well able to look after herself’.

If she had been cross-examined properly the jury would have found out that not only had Marguerite been a teenage common prostitute in Bordeaux and in Paris and had an illegitimate daughter when she was just fifteen, but she had also become a trained high-class courtesan (it was said that she always spoke in a rather stilted French because of elocution lessons). Not only that but Marguerite’s husband was not alone in having inclinations towards the same sex: it was found out by a private detective hired by the prosecution that it was well known in Paris that Madame Fahmy “is addicted, or was addicted, to committing certain offences with other women and it would seem that there is nothing that goes on in such surroundings as she has been moving in Paris that she would not be quite well acquainted with…”


The world’s press reported the case with undisguised glee, mostly portraying Mardame Fahmy as less than innocent in more ways than one. The French newspapers concentrated on the fact that the jury considered the case as if a crime passionnel defence was allowed in English law.

Marguerite Fahmy after the trial

Marguerite Fahmy after the trial

After the verdict Marguerite soon left for Paris where she found out that she had no claim to her late husband’s fortune as he had left no will. After a failed, and slightly ludicrous plot where she pretended that she had been pregnant and subsequently borne a son (who would have been entitled to his father’s fortune). She was now almost a laughing stock in Parisian society and became relatively a recluse. She died on 2 January 1971 in Paris. She never remarried.

A big debt to this post is Andrew Rose’s excellent book about the notorious murder entitled Scandal at the Savoy originally published in 1991. The author has copies still available and can be contacted at andrewroseauthor@googlemail.com.

Billy Jones – Yes, We Have No Bananas!

The Savoy Havana Band – I’m Gonna Bring My Girl a Watermelon Tonight

Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Bessie Smith – Sugarfoot Stomp (Dippermouth Blues)

Jeanette MacDonald – Merry Widow Waltz

Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra – Happy Feet

Erik Satie – Gnossiennes No. 1

Benson Orchestra of Chicago – Ain’t We Got Fun

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The Kings Road, the Gateways Club and The Killing Of Sister George

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

 

“They had me in bed making love to the girl…close, like baked beans”

Susannah York, Beryl Reid and Coral Brown at The Gateways 1968

Susannah York, Beryl Reid and Coral Brown at The Gateways 1968

In a book originally put together by Hunter Davies in the late sixties called The London Spy – A Discrete Guide To The City’s Pleasures, there are two chapters written specifically for gay and lesbian visitors to London.

The first, entitled ‘Men For Men’, notes around twenty venues where men could meet ‘soul or bed-mates and/or escape the attentions of the fat girls with whom you flew over on your chartered 747′. One of these clubs, under the sub-title of ‘non-dancing clubs’ was called Gigolo at 328 King’s Road (now a carpet shop) and was described by the book as an “Aptly named, hot, incredibly packed coffee bar. A frotteur’s delight. Lots of Spanish waiters and terrified Americans. The Rolls-Royce outside could be the one to whisk you away from it all.”

In the second chapter called ‘Women for Women’ and written by the novelist Maureen Duffy, there is mention of just one venue – the famous Gateways Club.

The Gateways had been in existence at 239 Kings Road on the corner of Bramerton Street in Chelsea since the thirties. It became more or less exclusively lesbian during the war when a huge number of women came to London to work or were stationed nearby and needed somewhere to go they could call their own.

The once green door that led down to The Gateways club

The once green door in Bramerton Street that led down to The Gateways club

A man called Ted Ware took over the club during the war, purportedly winning it in a poker game (“I raise you my lesbian members-only club…”). He married an actress called Gina Cerrato in 1953 and she soon took over the running of the club, joined, after a few years, by an American woman called Smithy who originally came to England as a member of the American Airforce. After an arranged marriage in the early sixties Smithy stayed in London for the rest of her life.

Gina at the Gateways

Gina at the Gateways

Gina at her usual place by the door (screen grab from the film)

Gina at her usual place by the door (screen grab from the film)

Smithy behind the bar

Smithy behind the bar

The membership fee during the sixties was just ten shillings (50p) and no guests were admitted after ten o’clock to discourage people who had spent their money elsewhere. Maureen Duffy explained that ‘rowdies or troublemakers’ were often banned immediately. Being excluded in those days was more than just embarrassing, it was unbelievably inconvenient – the nearest alternative lesbian club would have been in Brighton. Dining out with a girlfriend was often too expensive for a lot of women and even into the sixties women wearing trousers were actually banned from most restaurants. Pubs were still unpleasant places for  women especially if unaccompanied by a man. In 1969 the London Spy guide book’s main advice for women looking for a drink was, essentially, to avoid pubs if they were alone, saying;

You may be thirsty, but nobody, nobody will believe you.

So for many lesbians the Gateways Club was the only relaxing and affordable place they had to go.

still-entrance

The Kings Road in 1968

The Kings Road in 1968

Boutique shopping on the Kings Road 1968

Boutique shopping on the Kings Road 1968

After entering a dull green door on Bramerton Street there was a steep set of steps leading down to the cloakroom (looked after usually by Gina) and the entrance to the club. The smokey windowless cellar-like room was only 35ft long and featured a bar at one end ‘manned’ usually by Smithy. Entertainment was a fruit-machine by a pillar in the centre and a jukebox opposite the bar. It was never known whether Gina and Smithy were a couple (Ted eventually died in 1979) but many suspected they were.
Regulars of the Gateways at the bar (screen grab from film)

Regulars of the Gateways at the bar (screen grab from film)

During the eighties the club became quieter probably because other lesbian and gay venues were opening in London, and eventually Gateways only opened at weekends. The local neighbourhood in Chelsea was also becoming more and more upmarket and the club lost its late-licence in 1985 due to complaints about loud music. Not long afterwards the famous green door was subsequently closed for ever.

Between the 9th and 16th of June in 1968 The Gateways club became internationally famous when it appeared as a backdrop to many scenes filmed for The Killing Of Sister George, a movie starring Beryl Reid, Coral Browne and Susannah York. In 1960, York, a starlet at the beginning of her acting career and newly married, lived in a house at World’s End in Chelsea just a few hundred yards from the Gateways. Although it’s reasonably safe to say that York wasn’t a regular.

Susannah York at her Kings Road flat in 1960

Susannah York at her Kings Road flat in 1960

The Kings Road flat with a rather avant-garde painting 1961

The Kings Road flat with a rather avant-garde painting 1961

York in 1965

York on the embankment in Chelsea, 1965

York in 1967

York in 1967

A publicity still from Donald Cammell's film Duffy 1968

A publicity still from Donald Cammell’s film Duffy 1968

Robert Aldrich, the director, whose previous film was the slightly more macho The Dirty Dozen, decided to include actual customers rather than extras when they filmed scenes in the club. Gina, Smithy and the regulars performed stiffly and uncomfortably in front of the camera but when the film was released, for a lot of people, this was the first glimpse of a hidden lesbian sub-culture they had ever seen.

Robert Aldrich celebrating Beryl Reid's birthday during filming

Robert Aldrich celebrating Beryl Reid’s birthday during filming

York and Reid dressed for the Gateways fancy dress scene

York and Reid dressed for the Gateways fancy dress scene

Beryl Reid in the back of a taxi with nuns scene

Beryl Reid in the back of a taxi with nuns scene

When Beryl Reid was first introduced to The Gateways she said;

If I had been here before I did the play I’d never have done it. I didn’t realise they held each other and went to the gent’s loo.

Reid, when shown the script for the film, also baulked at the sex scenes (the original play had none, in fact when Robert Aldrich first went to see the play he didn’t realise it was about lesbians at all) and said;

They had me in bed making love to the girl…close like baked beans…I said ‘No, not on your nelly – or maybe her nelly’. I just could not do it. The thought made me sick. It may be silly, but that sort of physical contact, starkers, with another woman frightened me to death.

The younger actress Susannah York, who was used to playing free-spirited roles in some of her earlier films, was extremely uncomfortable with the ground-breaking sex scene in the film. Aldrich later wrote;
Susannah was a bitch to her [Coral Browne] because she [York] simply didn’t want to do the scene.
Coral Browne, Beryl Reid and Susannah York

Coral Browne, Beryl Reid and Susannah York

The Killing of Sister George can’t be said to be exactly a ‘positive’ view of lesbianism and indeed a critic at the time it was released, suggested that the film ‘dealt with lesbians entirely through the eyes of heterosexual males’. It was a groundbreaking film in many ways and despite the somewhat cliched dialogue, the movie only condemned or criticised the various characters’ foibles and hypocrisies and not really their sexuality. Aldrich said of the character played by Beryl Reid;

Sister George’s loud behavior and individuality . . . are encompassed in her personality, they’re not a product of her lesbianism. . . . She didn’t give a shit about the BBC or the public’s acceptance of her relationships.

The scenes Aldrich filmed at The Gateways were actually notable for their lack of sensationalism (unlike other films at the time trying to cover similar subject matters) and showed the regulars dancing, drinking and flirting just like any other londoners in any other London club.

Beryl Reid learning to smoke a cigar for her role in the film

Beryl Reid learning to smoke a cigar for her role in the film

Buy The Killing Of Sister George DVD here

Buy Maureen Duffy’s novel The Microcosm (set largely at the Gateways Club) here

UPDATE: I got an email from Gina Ware, the daughter of Gina and Ted Ware. She wanted me to correct the fact about Ted winning the club in a poker game. It was actually a boxing match in 1943 being shown at The Dorchester! It cost £100 to transfer the licence.

Gina, interestingly, also wrote:

By the way, Gina and Smithy were not a couple in the romantic sense (though in some senses God knows whose business it is other than theirs bless ‘em). I do know the full story and can assure you I am right. But I can say this, I have never known a friendship like it. They were both at my father’s side when he died. Three more interesting, kind-hearted and unique people you will seldom meet.

I also found these amazing photos which are part of the LIFE collection. They are marked just as Chelsea with not even a date but they are of the Gateways Club and were taken around 1953/4.

Gina Ware around the time of her marriage in 1953

I received this email from Gina about the photographs (which are no longer online):

They are fantastic pictures. Lovely one of my old man bless him. And the pictures of the women speak volumes. Jill Gardiner (author of ‘From the Closet to the Screen, Women at the Gateways Club 1945–85′) and I struggled so hard to try to bring out the particular flavour – it doesn’t conform with the usual views in so many ways. Her publishers edited out a lot as did the Guardian when they published Mum’s obituary – hate to say it but they actually were very inclined to politically correct us in a way I found a bit sickening and counterproductive. Some of it I understand but some of it is just about not wanting to admit that these women were not quite as oppressed and in the closet as they would like to believe – they were not rescued from oblivion and misery by the gay rights movement and academic feminists, they were doing fine themselves – in fact many of the older women reckon they made things that were heading in the right direction (and were a lot of fun) worse. And this is working class women, not privileged arty sorts.

I have hundreds of postcards written by members back to my Dad at the club from all over the world where they were out exploring to find out what the gay scene might be. I even have one where someone writes to say she and her girlfriend were up Macchu Picchu (I think) in Peru and met another member – and that was in the 50s! The material I have gives such a unique view, so direct as well.

It’s kind of sad for me looking back at it all – I so wish I had someone left who would remember exactly who all those people were. Dad wouldn’t be surprised – he always said it was going to be an incomparable story one day. He used to laugh at the News of the World’s strapline ‘All human life is here’ – they don’t know they are born he would say!

Good times at the Gateways Club

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