Seductress (41 page)

Where her feet went, her libido followed. On nights of the full moon she and her tribal boyfriend ventured deep into the forests to watch the Kikuyus perform their mating dances. At these all-night ceremonies dancers in black and white monkey hides and colored feathers gyrated in a circle to determine “who stayed the longest and leapt the highest.” Sex, she learned early, had nothing to do with sin and monogamy. The name of the game was stamina, pelvic virtuosity, and the quantity and quality of partners.

Five semesters at a Nairobi boarding school proved futile. She terrorized the staff, once carrying a matron bodily out of the classroom and biking off through the gates to the Athi Plains. And her
dawa
created its own tourbillion. “It was impossible,” recalled one classmate, “to keep track of the number of small boys who wanted to marry her.”

Once back at the Njoro farm, she reverted to her old untrammeled existence. Sleeping in a mud rondavel on monkey skins, she came and went as she wished, and haunted the stables, where she acquired enough expertise to become “head boy” of eighty Thoroughbreds. On her horse Pegasus, she traveled to gymkhanas and race days throughout the county and made off with all the prizes. The local Masais called her “She who cannot fall off a horse.”

She was equally unseatable in affairs of the heart. Released from guilt trips, inhibitions, and ideological freight, she took sex neat—at her pleasure, on her own terms. Hardly the preferred “lie still and think of England” approach for proper Edwardian maids. Beryl’s marriage at sixteen therefore turned out predictably. When Jock Purvis, a landholder twice her age, disappointed (premature ejaculations and drunken scenes), she cruised the colony for lovers and accrued so many that her husband hammered “rows and rows” of nails for each of her infidelities.

After two years she left him and careered around Kenya, taking up horse training and cavorting with the Happy Valley set. Without money or backers, she cracked the all-male preserve of the racetrack and cadged favors until she won the first woman’s trainer’s license in Africa. Through demonic dawn to dusk toil, she brought in a string of victories and became the country’s top trainer.

On the party scene she played to win as well. With her blond marcelled bob, red-lacquered nails, and high-boned beauty, she radiated a Garboesque glamour and “dressed like Solomon in all his glory.” She was one of the star swingers of the Muthaiga Club revels, dancing, drinking, and mate swapping the nights away. The men “surrounded her as surely as bees to a honeycomb” and nagged her with marriage proposals.

When her divorce came through, she finally succumbed to pressure and married Mansfield Markham. This dashing, rich aristocrat, a titled Mr. Darcy, did everything superhumanly possible to keep her down on the farm. After a shoot-the-moon buying spree in Paris, he gave her a blue-ribbon horse farm and fleet of finest Thoroughbreds.

But she strayed anyway. She led safaris and got so involved with Prince Henry, duke of Gloucester that the queen mother intervened and bribed her off with a lifetime annuity. A baby born at this time was probably Henry’s, but Mansfield gamely accepted the boy as his own and raised him in England while Beryl restarted her life in Africa.

Free again at last, she discovered the ultimate form of female gadding, flight. She found the “world without walls,” the open frontier, and the rip of speed, danger, and altitude she craved. In 1933 she became the first Kenya-trained pilot to gain a commercial license and launched a daredevil business. Piloting a crude biplane over uncharted flatlands where one mishap meant certain death, she spotted game for safaris with a Luger and vial of poison at her feet.

Even more glamorous with a new nose bob and a Parisian makeover, she was the femme fatale of the Rift Valley. Her “delicious sense of humor,” combined with a “one of the boys”
sans gene,
had a bewitching effect on big-game hunters and her flying buddies. Then there was the off-the-meter bedcraft. Those who experienced it said she provided “the most startling and erotic sex of their lives.” During a two-month period she juggled twelve lovers simultaneously, without any contretemps, a feat attributable to her ability to make each partner feel as though
he
were “the one who interested her.”

Among this cavalcade of inamorati, she nearly captured the one man who might have kept her interest. Denys Finch Hatton, Kenya’s premier Casanova, was Beryl’s male counterpart—a high-T adventurer, rolling stone, and free spirit. He discarded his effete deskbound lover, Isak Dinesen, and romanced Beryl on long devil-may-care flights through Africa, filled with song, laughter, poetry tutorials, and torrid sex. His freak death at takeoff on a trip they’d planned together (which she canceled at the last minute) left her shattered for years.

Perhaps it explains her own brush with death soon after. One Christmas she found herself at the coffee plantation of Kenya’s resident sadist, John Carberry, who defied her to make the “water jump,” the infamous westward flight across the Atlantic. The feat was considered suicidal; more than thirty pilots had already failed in the attempt, and five women died. But Beryl picked up the gauntlet. On September 4, 1936, she taxied down the runway against 50 mph headwinds, without radio capacity and with only two fuel tanks. Battling fatigue, gales, and several hair-raising spinouts, she crash-landed twenty-one hours later in Nova Scotia. This made her the first person to fly east to west nonstop, a more daring stunt than Lindbergh’s or Earhart’s.

Her achievement, though, was soon forgotten. After a brief turn in the spotlight—a New York City motorcade and radio show with Milton Berle—she returned to a chilly reception in England. Perceived as a déclassé home deserter, she could find no sponsors for further flights and spent the next ten years eddying around America.

She migrated by instinct to Hollywood, the asylum of choice for glamorous escapees and soldiers of fortune. She worked as a consultant on
Safari
with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., beach-partied with stars, and married a sometime ghostwriter and professional charmer named Raoul Schumacher. By now she should have learned. Except for a book they wrote together,
West with the Night,
about her African adventures, the marriage played out like the other two.

Restive in captivity, Beryl soon grazed the territory for “dashing young men” and bedded them without apology or concealment. When Raoul caught her red-handed with his best friend, they officially separated, though he remained “absolutely besotted” with her and broke down mentally when she left. During her final months in America, Beryl flew reconnaissance missions for the war effort and gallivanted with Burl Ives, Sir Charles Mendl, and a doctor half her age.

At forty-seven she backtrailed to Kenya and undertook the second-greatest challenge of her life. When another siren-adventurer might have kicked back and dusted her trophies, Beryl returned to horse racing after a thirty-year absence, without connections or start-up funds. In only two seasons she reestablished herself as the leading trainer. Her horses won the St. Leger four times; the East Africa Derby, five; and the prestigious Kenya Triple Crown—victories so astounding that track habitués accused her of using voodoo, a “Beryl Bloom,” brewed with African magic.

The voodoo didn’t stop with horses. Men couldn’t resist her. Her farm manager, Jürgen Thrane, idolized her, and her jockey, Buster Parnell, said he loved her “like a lover.” In her fifties she looked decades younger and held court at her posh cottage “like the Queen of Sheba.” “She was a knockout,” recalled Parnell; “there wasn’t a woman in Nairobi could hold a candle to her. It was almost,” he added, “as though she had a hundred watt bulb in her head and the rest of us had only seventy-five.”

The next ten years put her radiance and “fantastic ego” to the test. All her horses fell ill of a mysterious disease, and after a demoralizing venture in South Africa, she returned to Kenya broke, down on her luck, and old. But the
dawa
still blazed. Approaching seventy, she reconquered the track (twenty-three winners in 1972) and crackled with swish and fight. When thieves robbed and beat her, she tongue-lashed them in Swahili; when revolutionaries raked her car with gunfire, she swanned into the Muthaiga Club with blood streaming from a nick in her neck.

Men continued to swarm. A fortyish bachelor whom she called “Fweddy dahling” visited her for overnights three times a week, and George Gutekunst, who filmed her documentary in 1983, fawned over her. “I ADORE YOU,” he wrote in one of his letters, “take care of yourself until I can . . . see and kiss you again.” But take care of herself she did not. Living dangerously to the last, she drove her battered Mercedes through town like a bat out of hell and died in 1986 five months after falling from the top tier of the racing stadium.

Powerful seductresses who desert home, play with the boys, sportfuck, and win too many prizes are profoundly disturbing. Hence the canonization of the sexless, safely married Amelia Earhart and the denigration of Beryl Markham. She broke the feminine contract and torched the double standard, unpardonable offenses to traditionalists of both sexes.

Women especially loathed her and vice versa. “I certainly have nothing to do with women . . . EVER,” she snapped. One bit her finger to the bone, and her modern female biographers inflict her with neuroses and an unhappy life.

Beryl disagreed. She claimed she’d had “as good a lot of yesterdays as anyone might want”: “dangers and pleasures,” movement, and “horizons.” Her idea of hell was the contented feminine norm—marital bondage. Her most terrifying nightmare wasn’t death in the icy Atlantic or an elephant charge, but being eaten alive by an army of siafu ants, “minute, numberless, and inexorable,” devoured inch by inch by the dull domestic grind. As her enemies charged, she was a “tramp,” one of Inanna’s lionhearted prowlers, sex questers, and saboteurs of the established order.

Members of this underground sorority recognize each other, and in 1983 Martha Gellhorn, the macha war reporter and seductress, drove sixteen miles through the bush to visit her. When she arrived, she found the eighty-one-year-old Beryl in tight Pucci pants, entertaining two rapt young men. Martha clicked instantly. This woman, she wrote, was not “your run-of-the-mill Circe. Imagine Circe casting a spell on Ulysses so she could go along on the journey, learn navigation, see the world. . . . It was easy to entrance the whole lot, that being her nature, and she knew what she wanted: knowledge and adventure.”

 

“Prostitute” in Arabic means “She who goes out.” It all originated with Inanna, the prototypic
kar-kid
“who roams about.” When this wayward goddess sallied forth, she decked herself in whorewear, toured the taverns, took her pick, and got paid for it. One of Inanna’s main personas was “Hierodule of Heaven,” or Holy Harlot, and her priestesses were sex professionals. Prostitution in ancient Sumer was a sacred, not a profane, business. The prehistoric worship of the female sexual principle still endured, and the marriage ceremony marked the most hallowed event of the year.

At this supreme rite Inanna’s priestess copulated with the king, thereby investing him and the populace with
hi-li,
the eros and creative spark of all being. In thanks, he placed gift offerings on her altar, a practice continued at later shrines where worshipers left money on the laps of sacred prostitutes.

Judeo-Christianity came down hard on these erotic high priestesses with their transcendent powers and condemned them to hell and the dregs of society. But archetypes aren’t so simple to dislodge. The “divine hierodule and seducer” won’t be banished to the underworld; she crops up all over Western history, eluding the law and staking out her ancient claim to male adulation and munificence.

One of the most elite cadres of sex professionals, paradoxically, surfaced in the sexist stronghold of the ancient world. Terrified of the maelstrom of sexual passion, Athenian civilization confined women to home, stripped them of rights, and put them under the jurisdiction of fathers and husbands.

Only one group escaped: prostitutes. These ran the gamut from the one-obol
dicteriades
who stood naked in the doorways of public brothels to the regal hetaerae who owned their destinies and lived in state. Independent, educated, and footloose, hetaerae mingled equally with men, chose their lovers, and enjoyed the status of modern movie idols. They were Aphrodite’s chosen people, mysteriously suffused with beatitude and liberated from the lot of mortal women. Renowned for their brains, they wisely traded on this numinous effect to enhance their prestige and ensure their freedom. Like their mythic counterparts, they were a race of rovers, love pirates, and sensationalists.

The fabulous Rhodophis began as most did, in dire adversity. A slave at the royal court of Samos, she weaseled a passage to Egypt as a ladies’ maid and seduced a Greek tourist, who sold his inheritance to marry her. But marriage bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Samos. She jumped ship and meandered through Egypt until she reached Naucratis, “a good place for beautiful prostitutes,” where she earned such sums she built a pyramid “to render her name immortal.” According to legend, she haunted her pyramid for eternity, appearing nude to wayfarers and luring them into endless treks through the desert.

A generation later Phyrne capitalized more deliberately on her goddess aura. A raw recruit who arrived in Athens at thirteen from the harsh caper fields, she found herself outgunned. The agora teemed with gorgeous hetaerae accoutered in blond wigs, chandelier earrings, heavy cosmetics, and transparent purple chitons. The girl, however, devised a shrewd counterstrategy. Instead of competing with these birds of paradise, she niche marketed herself as a luxury model, shrouded in divine mystery.

She swathed her perfect body in an opaque
deplos,
wore no makeup or wig, made love in the dark, and charged exorbitant fees, adjusted to her tastes. Once a year she staged a sacred striptease. At the annual Festival of Poseidon she walked naked from the holy temple through the crowds to the shore and reenacted Aphrodite’s birth from the sea.