Kiki Preston is the name and hedonism was the game. My name isn't Kiki, that's just what my chums from the club call me. My parents named me Alice.
Alice Gwynne to be exact.
The story I have to tell is one of sex, drugs and Royal-rolls. This is not a tale of fiction.
Oh no, this is as real as it gets.
REAL LIFE and I don't mean your everyday interpretation of life. This was life in all its animalistic simplicity but set in the highest peaks of society.
It was the 1920's and I was at the top of the food chain. I entered the pride and slept with the lions and it is this tale I wish to share with you.
2 months before I had given birth to Prince Georges, illegitimate, son, I was at the highest point in society. We took anything we wanted to, including the flesh of each other. We answered to no one - Or so we thought -.
You may of heard of us already. We were quite prolific and our tragic end must have raised a few eyebrows. Otherwise, why would I have been called from the grave to tell this tale? I do hope my funeral was the party I had asked for, I wonder who turned up? Sorry, you want me to begin. OK, let me decide where to start...
My mother passed down many things to me in my younger years, but her pious virtue was not one of them. Because of her virtuous ways there isn't much to tell you about my mother. But the rest of my family certainly has some pedigree worth mentioning.
This is probably why I found myself gravitating towards people of power and influence. It just surprises me that it turned out to be me who ended up with all the power and influence. Although this story rotates around the Royal family and the elite circle of socialites it surrounded itself with, you may be surprised to know that even with my historic roots and middle/upper-class upbringing, I was relatively unknown and deemed to be unworthy of acceptance into the infamous 'Happy valley club'. But that was all soon to change.
I am an ambitious woman if nothing else.
Like butter wouldn't melt...
Following my father's death, I was raised in Europe, Paris actually, although we would occasionally return to our New York residence for brief periods of time. When the time came, I was sent to England to be educated.
Ahh, Paris, London, Milan, we sure did have a good start to life. But it didn't go to my head, well not at first...
My first husband was a military man and after he finished his service we settled down in Paris to raise our own family.
Horace R. Bigelow Allen, he was my first husband and gave me my first child, Alice Gwynne Allen. This was a wonderful time but I knew something wasn't right. I thirsted for the freedom and desired the chance to make my own way in life. This was half the reason I chose to rename myself. My time with Horace did have some significance in steering my towards my tragic destiny...
It was while we were living together, in Paris, that I met and befriended some of the future key members of the infamous Happy Valley set, such as Alice de Janzé, Lady Idina Sackville, Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, and Sir Jock Delves Broughton.
To me, there was something appealing about a life of scandal, heavy alcohol consumption and drug-fuelled wife-swapping
(What can I say? I have got dutch roots too).
It was November, 1924, when Horace and I were officially declared as divorced.
As you will learn from what you are about to read it was my time to shine, and boy did I shine.
Enter, Kiki Preston.
Had we not already sold our souls that is.
Jerome "Gerry" Preston (15 March 1897 – 28 May 1934). He was wonderful man, a Harvard alumnus from Colorado. By the time I met him him, he was a dashing investment banker, described by some as being "a creature of instincts" and "untamed".
For someone who was yearning for the high-life, this was just what I needed.
On September 13th, I had lunched with Kay and then we spent the night at my Paris apartment. We spent the next few days together before Kay departed to America, on September 16th. It wouldn't be until Oct 1934 until we crossed paths again. I'll always remember our time with the greatest fondness and I have to give credit to Kay for giving me my obsession with the high-life.
Believe it or not, this dutch styled mansion, on the shores of Lake Naivasha, was given to us by friends.
It seems it truly is what you know, not who you know.
Muthaiga was different. While I lived in Paris I was a spectator to the glitz and glamour of high society. But once I had introduced myself to the Muthaiga Country Club, the favored watering hole of the Happy Valley Set, I began making friends that lived on a different plain altogether. It was here that I became even closer friends with Alice de Janzé, Lord Erroll and his wife, Idina, and aviatrix Beryl Markham.
Even for the most debauch inhabitants of the Happy Valley community, I was a pronounced scandalous presence among the set, noted both for my beauty, as well as my wild lifestyle. Gin soaked partying, playing backgammon all-night long and rampant drug abuse, that was what made the Valley so Happy. Our friends at the club affectionately named us "the black laughter"
Unfortunately, by the mid to late 1920’s, I had become what you now refer to as a notorious drug addict, my drugs of choice being heroin, cocaine and morphine.
What? I like to mix it up a little.
I remember my good friend Cockie, once wittily remarked
"She's very clever with her needle".
And I was too!
I got so accustomed to injecting myself whenever I wanted to. I often found myself injecting in public.
Like I said at the beginning, I was top of the food-chain and I took what I wanted.
Due to my habit of always carrying a syringe I earned the rightful title of
"the girl with the silver syringe".
Of coarse, behind every "notorious drug-addict" there must be an even more notorious "drug-dealer"
I do regret introducing Mary to drugs. Some girls just can't handle it I suppose.
Many of my acquaintances and lovers would lose their inhibitions by my needle. I was the go-to-girl for all things considered to be hedonistic. My lovers were many and I was always the one in control even when I entertained Royalty.
I had George wrapped around my little finger. To the point where Prince Edward would later come to banish me from England because of the effect I had on his little brother, George, Duke of Kent.
Yes, I wined and dined with those in the highest echelons of society. One prince scared to be near me and the other infatuated to the point of obsession. George and others who come from this part of society, have appetites that any outsider would consider quite excessive but to us it was quite normal. Swapping husbands for the night was a regular occurrence at the club and it didn't just have to be heterosexual. Prince George was well known to be Bi-sexual and I know this for a fact. In a, most memorable, ménage à trois, Prince George shared me with a devastatingly handsome young Argentinian, Jorge Ferrara, the bisexual son of the Argentinean Ambassador to England.
You don't get banished for nothing you know and it wasn't just about the drug's and parties(Edward knew how to party when he wanted to. But Edward was next in line for the throne and he had to be a lot more secretive than his brash brother). The consequences of what we did would be far more dangerous to the Royal family than anything I inflicted on George and that is why I was sent away to Switzerland, in 1926. I will come back to this moment in time, but for now I will finish my life-story. This won't take much longer as, unfortunately, there is little of it left to tell.
On December 23rd, 1946, I would leap from my 5th floor apartment window to meet my maker. This would be only 20 years after I had given birth to the illegitimate son of Prince George, Duke of Kent.
By this time in my life I was a shadow of my former self. 'Kiki' had long since left the party. My companion, Lillian Turner, would later confirm this to the coroner with her accurate, but somewhat simplified, observation.
"Kiki had been in poor health, depressed and nervous."
But I had more than enough reason to be. Not only was the partying beginning to show its side-affects, I had also been dealt some tragic blows during the 1930's. This culminated in the death of my Son(Not to be mistaken with child I had with George), on June 6, 1944. My dear son, Ethan Allen, was killed during the Normandy Landings. Ethan was serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force at the time of his death. This would be the most devastating of losses but it wasn't the only bereavement I would have to deal with.
Sadly, during the 1930s and 1940s, I experienced a long string of tragic losses, as many people from my circle of relatives and friends found untimely deaths.
On November 16, 1933, my cousin, twenty-six year-old golden boy and socialite William K. Vanderbilt Jr., was killed in a car accident in Miami, Florida. My brother, Erskine, was also in the car, but suffered minor injuries. Bad luck seemed to follow those guys. On August 1935, Erskine suffered another accident, when his car collided with a truck, injuring three. Erskine Jr. was tried and fined $50.00 and also sentenced to a thirty-day suspended sentence. Punishment enough, you would think, but Erskine later suffered paralysis in 1938.
On May 28, 1934, My 2nd husband, Jerome Preston, died at the Hotel Pierre, in New York, aged thirty-seven. This made me a widow at the relatively young age of thirty-six. However, it wasn't long before I had found husband #3.
In February 1937, my brother-in-law, sportsman Lewis Thompson Preston also died, at age thirty-seven.
On January 25, 1941, another close friend, Joss Erroll, was mysteriously murdered in Kenya at the age of thirty-nine. Later that year, in September 30th, her friend and fellow American expatriate in Paris, Alice de Janzé bereft after the death of Erroll, committed suicide with a firearm. The poor girl. This was the 2nd attempt she had made to end her life.
That was pretty much the end of the Happy valley clique. We sure did burn bright...
This is more than enough to bring down the strongest of constitutions. Following all this tragedy was the death of my own son and that was too much for me to bare. I do hope those I left behind forgave me for doing so, there was only so much I could bare and no parent should out-live there children.
Of coarse my legacy does not end here. What I have told you so far, would indeed be enough to make a very entertaining movie. But there is still a little bit of Kiki left behind. A secret that turns this entertaining article, into a present-day scandal. One that could effect the foundations of the whole of the British Royal Family....
Augustus 'Cass' Canfield.
George was devastated when he was ordered to stay away from me. Evermore so, when he learned that I had been sent away to have our baby in secret. I knew that they were never going to let me keep my child and for that reason I gave no struggle when they adopted him to an American couple. I was just thankful that they were allowing us to even exist. I am certain that George was behind this leniency and I will always be grateful for that.
Our son went on to do great thing and obviously out-lived both his biological parents. Cass's life-story will never be officially confirmed, but it has always been too obvious to deny with any kind of honest sincerity.
However there was one moment that did stick out and it was one that must have turned the spectators blood cold(If that's possible for a Royal).
The moment that George's brother, Henry, first laid eyes on his forgotten nephew must have been one to remember, I do wish I could have lived to see it.
You see, Cass, like his mother, had more than one marriage. Laura Tennant, who later became the Duchess of Marlborough, was his 2nd wife. It was at one of Laura's Royal engagements, that Uncle and Nephew would stand in the same room for the first time...
Like I said, it must have been a huge shock to Henry and it seems he made his astonishment quite obviously.
After this moment, both Prince Henry and Cass's 2nd wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, both agreed that the real parents of Augustus Cannfield were, indeed, George and I.
The forgotten Prince
Canfield was born on September 9, 1926 and was the adopted son of Augustus “Cass” Canfield, American publisher of Harper and Row and his first wife Katherine Temple Emmet. Michael later served in the US Marine Corps in World War II and was wounded at Iwo Jima.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1951 he worked as the London representative of Harper and Row. Married twice, first in 1953 to Lee Bouvier, younger sister of Jackie Kennedy, whom he divorced in 1958 and then to Laura Tennant in 1960, who later became the Duchess of Marlborough. Canfield died on December 20, 1969, of heart attack in flight, while in route from New York to London, at the age of forty-three.
Hope you have enjoyed this tale of Royal whodunit.
PTYAY
Writen by Rebel Dan, based on notes taken from Wikipedia.
Images sourced from google.