Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (17 page)

I had a personal assistant who was engaged to help me with the health farm. His job that night was to keep the two mistresses apart. I knew them, and who they were. One of them even gave me two dozen roses. One day she rang up and asked Eddie if she could speak to me. She said, ‘Betty, what are you wearing for the party?’ I said, ‘Clothes!’ and put the receiver down. Her name was Sally.

Not surprisingly, Betty has nothing good to say about Mariella. In 1978 Novotny announced that she had started work on her autobiography, in which she announced that she was going to print names and places. She was found dead in her bed in February 1983. It was claimed by the police that she had died of a drug overdose, although others suspected murder. ‘Hah,’ spits Betty. ‘She drowned in her own vomit!’
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Mariella had a daughter by Eddie, who was shunted off to a private school in Switzerland at a very young age. She met Betty’s daughter, and the two of Eddie’s children became very friendly. Betty feels otherwise: ‘I’ve never met her and I never want to meet her. It was a terribly painful time. My daughter said she was a very nice girl. The entire Mariella story doesn’t come up any more. It’s ancient history.’

Even when he was in Rome with Mariella, Eddie came and went regularly. He was never away that long. When asked about Eddie’s time in Rome with Mariella and whether Betty had boyfriends during the times of separation, she said: ‘I’ve always had a few boyfriends – I never let time slip by!’ It can never be emphasised enough that Betty was never a victim to Eddie’s wanderings. When they were together, they were together; when apart, Betty lived her own independent and fulfilling life.

It was during the time that Eddie was in Rome with Mariella that Betty became involved with a consultant who was sent up from his main base to work at an industrial facility near Shenley. Decades later he wrote a poignant letter to her reminiscing about their time together. The relationship went on for about a year, and both entered into it knowing that it would eventually come to an end. Although some might label it an affair, it was far deeper and much more personal for both, as evidenced by his letter. He begins by recalling his first arrival at Shenley, as he drives up the lane to the Lodge, and encounters a magnificent Rolls-Royce being washed by an elegant blonde woman in her forties. As he asked her whether accommodation was available – at that time Shenley was still being run as a bed and breakfast – there was an immediate attraction.

He was joined a few days later by a work colleague, and in the evenings they would go for the evening meal in the nearby town of St Albans. Within a week or two, he recalls, Betty asked him if he would like to have his evening meal with her in the dining room. During their meal she told him where her private bedroom was, at the end of the first floor, and invited him to knock on her door later that evening when the other guests had turned in for the night. So started an intimate and exquisite relationship that continued throughout his time there. Betty talked to him about Eddie’s life and philandering, and showed him all of the bullet holes in the lounge, where Eddie and his cronies would meet and argue.

Late one night when he was in bed with Betty, her maid – who he describes as a simple-minded, uneducated little person – became suspicious about their activities late at night, and knocked on Betty’s private room door with some lame questions about food and meals for the next day. So that Betty could talk with her, he had to escape into the bitterly cold bathroom. He remembers sitting on the edge of the bath totally unclothed, for at least 20 minutes while Betty tried to get rid of her! The crude and outmoded furnace for the coal-fired heating system was always causing problems and, after that night, was the first priority on the list of refurbishments as Betty turned Shenley into a health farm.

The kitchen area in the unrefurbished Lodge was also primitive. Somehow, breakfasts and evening meals managed to be prepared. He recalls being in there one evening after Betty had been food shopping at the local supermarket. The same maid was opening the bags of food. At that time, Sainsbury’s plastic bags had the logo ‘Fresh From Sainsbury’s’. As the maid opened one of these bags, either he or Betty asked ‘what are those?’, to which the maid replied, after looking at the bag, ‘they are fresh froms!’

He was there on a day when an episode of
The Avengers
television series was being filmed at the Lodge. A helicopter chase was part of the programme. Luckily for him, he arrived back from where he was consulting just as the filming was over, but the actors and crew were still there. He met Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee, the principal players. The specially adapted Alouette helicopter was equipped with a stabilised camera platform and was basically a huge bubble cockpit with a skeletal structure behind it. Betty knew he kept a Pentax camera with him, and by fluttering her eyelids and using her provocative charms on the helicopter pilot (he recalls), got him to agree to take the consultant up with him so he could take some overhead pictures of the Lodge, just for Betty. He took off for a 30-minute hovering flight over the Lodge and its grounds while he shot off a roll of film, which he then gave to her.

Betty took him to the local pub where, being close to several film studios, there were often actors to be seen, many of whom knew Betty. He recalls being introduced to Betty and Eddie’s long-time friend Burl Ives, and the actor Patrick Magee. He also went with Betty to London’s West End and visited Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. Betty bought a superbly styled black coat; when he happened to notice a nice suit, Betty bought it for him despite his protest. Typically of Betty, she said, ‘Have it. It’s only money.’

Towards the final months of the consultant’s time at Shenley, Betty became heavily involved in the making of the film
Triple Cross
and was spending a lot of time in Paris. She would regularly phone him at the Lodge in the evenings and tell him what was going on. He was deeply touched that she cared enough about the friendship they had developed to bother to do this.

It was also during his stay that the conversion of Shenley into a health farm began to take place. It started in the basement – with the antiquated furnace. All the guest rooms were being updated and redecorated as well, and Betty progressively got the other guests to leave. But she insisted that he stayed on while he was still working near there. In the basement, a genuine pinewood Swedish sauna was installed along with three cold-plunge mineral baths. Betty had taken on an expert trainer with whom her friend had a good rapport, and he taught him how to perform forward somersaults using just a left, then just a right arm on its own to start the roll.

The opening of Shenley Lodge health farm was likely to take place before his consulting work was finished and he talked this over with Betty. He was now the only person occupying one of the refurbished rooms, everyone else having departed, and all the other internal work was virtually over. He remarked that he will forever be grateful to Betty for saying to him one night that she wouldn’t hold the opening party until his work was over, a matter then of maybe four to six weeks. With the huge investment involved in the project and all the other interested investors involved, he said he would probably never know how ‘this amazing woman’ arranged this on his behalf. Who else, he wonders – about to embark on such a venture – would have been this thoughtful. On his final Friday morning before leaving for the very last time, he and Betty had coffee together on the balcony overlooking the rear garden. The departure was emotional for both, and he says that his tears were unashamed when finally saying goodbye to this warm, tender, caring, yet determined and resolute woman who had widened his horizons in many ways and changed the course of his life. He said that ‘even though we both knew from the start of our friendship that it would be over one day and we both would go our separate ways, it was during these last moments with her that I suddenly realised just what Betty had meant to me during my stay’. Clearly, he had fallen in love with her.

He and his later ex-wife received an invitation to the delayed opening party of the health farm later in 1967. This was the first and only time he met her ‘notorious and courageous, yet dubious husband’. He seems to have had no idea that Eddie was there with two mistresses. He remembers that Betty wore an exquisite pink dress and, seeing her again, thoughts of their year-long relationship raced through his mind. He stated that the warmth, elegance, poise and strength of character of this woman were a privilege for him to know.

Later in the 1960s Eddie lived with Betty at Shenley for a while, but at some point he was off again, living with a girl in a flat in the exclusive Barbican in the centre of London:

I remember one day I was coming up to Shenley and in those days I had a Rolls-Royce we had acquired just before he met one of his women. The day before he moved in with her the Rolls was at home, so I said, ‘All right. You’ve got the woman, then I’ll have the Rolls.’ Yes, I exchanged Eddie for a Rolls-Royce! I had that Rolls for years, it was the twin of one that the Duke of Gloucester had.

About two or three years after I got Shenley I was still driving laundry to the launderette. In those days we still had it as a residential health club but we didn’t have the commercial washing machines we had when we had the health farm. Someone once said, ‘You’re the only lady that drives a Rolls to the launderette!’

I also had a Bentley when I was at Shenley. Somebody had smashed into my Rolls-Royce. It was a diplomat and they couldn’t do anything to him so it got written off. Then I got the Bentley and I wouldn’t let Eddie drive it to the pub in case he smashed it up. We had such rows about it that I decided to sell it; I sold it to someone in America. The car had already gone and then I received the cheque and it bounced so I never got paid for that, I just lost it! The solicitor said that it would cost more money to fight for it, so we just left it. After Eddie had died I lost all my jewellery too, I sold it to a pawn shop.

A lot of the early days when I was running Shenley, our daughter lived at our flat in London with our nanny. She was old-fashioned and quite scary. Eddie once said: ‘There’s only one woman I’m afraid of and Jesus, that’s your nanny.’ She was offered Princess Margaret’s children, but she turned them down. Eventually she did go to St James’s Palace and worked there for a while, but then she came back to me and came to Shenley.

Eddie was living with a woman just a few streets away and was always tearing about in a little white sports car, with her in a red fox fur hat and blue jeans and him in a beret, trying to recapture his youth. They were absolutely petrified in case Nanny saw them.

Meanwhile, Shenley was continuing to attract an international clientele, and in particular the previously mentioned visitors from the Middle East. Thus, Eddie was unusually well placed to find out what was happening in places where British Intelligence couldn’t get agents in. ‘I never knew whether he was still providing information when we were at Shenley,’ Betty says. ‘It’s often been asked, “Was he still a spy?” Once a spy, always a spy, I suppose.’

While Eddie was away, he never kept any steady communication with his daughter. Betty says, ‘I kept up the communication between him and my daughter. I used to send parcels from him to her and write letters or cards to him from her, and we kept up this pretence for quite a time.’

Of Shenley, Betty says:

Shenley Lodge represented a very demanding time for me both physically and mentally. Everyone who came through the doors had a problem: emotional or otherwise, so you became a counsellor from the word go. I always said anyone could open a health farm, but few people were able to run one successfully because of the many, many and varied demands. I spent many hours of my days talking to people, persuading, cajoling and encouraging, especially very young people from overseas left in our care. Some of them were here for quite serious operations. I went daily to London’s Harley Street to visit and comfort one young boy of 14 who came to us.
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He came to us wearing irons (calipers) and after a severe operation and long convalescence he left for home able to walk without his irons. These successes made the long periods of hard work and anxiety so worthwhile. Parents would come with them and stay for a while, see that they were being cared for, and then just leave them with us. This happened time and time again.

One of my many outstanding although not particularly pleasant memories of Shenley was of a New Year’s Eve party for 150 people, with a buffet and a steel band. So much preparation and expense had gone into this. Come the day, it snowed heavily making it impossible to reach us, more so as access to Shenley was by way of a fairly steep, winding narrow road. We had spent days heating the building, the only means being by way of fuel fires – lovely to look at but hell to maintain. Staff for the occasion came in before the snow, and as a result they couldn’t get out and visitors couldn’t get in – all except a Scotsman, his wife, and a friend who, having paid for the evening, were hell-bent on getting there. They abandoned their car in the local village, hitched up their skirts and trousers, and arrived soaking wet and thoroughly chilled just before midnight. They had the entire party to themselves. It took two days before anyone could get in or out, so ending up an expensive disaster.

One famous actor was a regular with us, since he was doing a lot of filming at the nearby MGM studios. I used to get him his brandy in his morning coffee and drive him to the studio. He used to be in such a state. He was wonderful. He used to sit on the floor and play with my daughter. He loved nothing more than coming back from the studios and playing with her.