The Queen of Whale Cay
A feature article by Kate Summerscale

In 1934 "Joe" Carstairs, the fastest female speedboat racer in the world, announced that she was exiling herself to a private island in the Bahamas. "I am going to live surrounded only by coloured people," she told the British press. "I am not even taking a motor car, for when I bought the island there were no roads. Now I am building roads and a residence, but my only means of transport will be two 10ft dinghies. The island is about 1,000 acres in extent and is nine miles long I cannot say if I will ever return."

Carstairs had been renowned in the 1920s not only as a powerboat racer, but also as an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune and as an "invert" who smoked cheroots and dressed in men's clothes. Having driven ambulances in France and Ireland during the Great War, she ran a Daimler chauffeuring business in London in the 1920s. She loved everything the children of the Twenties loved: speed, machines, fancy-dress parties, practical jokes, treasure hunts, cabaret, cocktails, dancing, motorcars, sex, and boyishness. "I did look like a boy," she said. "I really did."

In her boats she wore a reefer jacket, a beret and Oxford bags; when posing for studio portraits she donned sharply cut suits, slicked back her crew cut, lit a cigarette and gave the camera a sultry Valentino gaze. Carstairs had dozens of affairs with women: after Dolly Wilde - the niece of Oscar - she dallied with a string of actresses, Tallulah Bankhead among them. "I was never a little girl," Carstairs declared. "I came out of the womb queer." In 1918 she had married a French count, but only to secure money from her mother (a femme fatale and drug addict whose fourth husband was the notorious "monkey-gland surgeon" Serge Voronoff). As soon as her mother died Carstairs had her marriage annulled on the grounds that it had never been consummated.

Carstairs delighted in stirring things up, whether the waters of the Solent or the sensibilities of the older generation. But now, aged 34, she planned to disappear. "I want to be left alone," she said. "There was a time when I couldn't live my own life, could not get away from publicity. Well, that's over."

Joe Carstairs died 60 years later and she was indeed all but forgotten. The Daily Telegraph was notified of her death but no one on the obituaries desk, where I worked, had heard of her. In the newspaper cuttings library, though, Carstairs' motorboating achievements were fully documented: in her own boatyard at Cowes she built some of the most beautiful and powerful boats of the day; she went on to take almost every cup in her class; and she raced for Britain against the world champion Gar Wood, coming close to victory and to death. To her bitter disappointment, she narrowly failed to beat her great rival, or the world speed record.

The information about her life after 1934 was sketchy, and once I had written the obituary I decided to find out what had become of her. Far from abandoning her ambitions, she had embarked on a project more daring and bizarre than her bid for supremacy on the water. In the Bahamas she created an island kingdom, at once a fantasy world and a private fiefdom in which her subjects lived according to her will.

When Joe Carstairs first set eyes on Whale Cay she claimed the island spoke to her: "Come on," urged Whale Cay, "I want you."

"This island," Carstairs maintained, "had a particular liking for me."

She bought Whale Cay for £40,000 - a trifle by comparison with the £500,000 or so she had spent on motorboat racing. When she arrived, the only inhabitants were a black couple who kept the dilapidated lighthouse, and the island was wildly overgrown. Carstairs relished the challenge: "I don't think anything is worthwhile unless you fight for it," she said. "Faint heart never won fair lady." She hired seven men from Nassau, the capital of the colony, to help her clear a path and lay road from one end to the other.

"The natives didn't like work," Carstairs said. "They had to be shown in detail each step they took. On top of that it was unbearably hot. We wallowed in dust to our knees. Sand flies and other insects bit us almost to the point of distraction. I almost surrendered the island there and then. But I'm stubborn."

Carstairs, dressed always in khaki, worked alongside the roadlayers. One morning, she said, they were taking their lunch by the track - she ate oranges, they rice and peas - when she slipped a knife from her belt and hurled it at a snake. "And by God I cut that goddamn snake's head right off." The men were impressed, and from then on called Carstairs "The Boss". "I was a leader," said Carstairs. "I could do anything."

The Bahamian cays, between Florida and Cuba, were the flattened peaks of a giant submarine mountain, and Carstairs was god of her own portion of this watery Olympus. To live on Whale Cay was virtually to live in the sea: its land was oolitic limestone, formed by the compacted skeletons of billions of marine creatures, and the surrounding waters teemed with fish. Carstairs, who had always found freedom in boats, was in her element.

She cleared the coconut groves, which had been choked with weeds, and planted 3,000 new palms. Her men sowed fruit and vegetables in pockets of soil among the rocks, while the women were assigned to pull up weeds on the roads - they became known to Carstairs and her coterie of white friends as weeders or weedresses. Carstairs did not approve of women labourers: "If there weren't so many lazy men, women wouldn't have to go to work."

She rebuilt the lighthouse and put up a power plant, a radio station, a schoolhouse, a church, a general store and a museum for her racing and big-game hunting trophies. At the store the workers used their wages - $4 a week for men, $3 for women - to buy lard, rice, sugar, tea and coffee. The Whale Cay granary, chock-full of guinea corn and coconuts, was one of the biggest in the Bahamas. Carstairs bought more islands - Bird Cay, Cat Cay, Devil's Cay, half of Hoffman's Cay, a tract of land on the huge island of Andros 60 miles away - and acquired a former rum-running cruiser to dredge the beaches and make a harbour.

The Bahamas were undergoing a severe depression, and Joe Carstairs' arrival was a godsend to many. As the buildings of Whale Cay went up and the roads went down people poured in from neighbouring islands. Eventually 300 men were working on the Great House, poling sacks of cement up the river by barge. The house resembled a sturdy Spanish villa, white, with red tiles and wrought iron railings, and the lawns were planted with palm, tamarind, almond and sea grape trees. The natives lived in shacks in Buckle Cut, a stretch of land adjoining the walled enclosure of the Great House, or on the boats in which they had sailed to the island.

Wherever she went on Whale Cay - in her trucks, her motorcycle, her boats - Carstairs carried with her a leather man-doll, about a foot high. His name was Lord Tod Wadley. A girlfriend had given Wadley to Carstairs in 1925 and, though intended as a gift, he became the love of her life. Wadley was a boy who would never grow up. The plaque by the front door of Carstairs' house in Chelsea had read: "Marion Barbara Carstairs and Lord Tod Wadley." Once, she said, a man called at the house claiming to have served with Lord Tod during the war. Carstairs had dozens of studio portraits made of her doll: one shows him alone with his reflection in a mirror and is labelled "Narcissus".

Wadley was everything to Carstairs: companion, protector, alter ego. She showered him with gifts: suits from Savile Row, shoes from Italy, golf clubs, cowboy outfits, sailor's suits, a wristwatch that ticked, revolvers, a Bible, a dob, and his own dolls. Poems were written and sculptures made in his honour. "We're like one," she said.

"He's me and I'm him. It's a marvellous thing. If everybody had a Wadley there'd be less sadness in the world."

Many of the Bahamians on Whale Cay believed in obeah, a form of voodoo, and as far as they were concerned Wadley was Carstairs's fetish, a being with supernatural powers. As a friend observed, "Wadley was her religion." It seemed to the people that Carstairs was charmed: like an obeah-man, she could detect and deal with miscreants, cure illness, punish her enemies. "They had a great belief in me," she said, "they thought I was most unusual."

Carstairs became a kind of bush doctor on the island. One woman, a weeder, came to her complaining of heart trouble. "I will cure you," said Carstairs. She gave the woman Peptobismol, and her condition rapidly improved. The weeder would come to dance for the Boss in gratitude. "You've brought me from the grave," she exclaimed. Other remedies were less mysterious: Carstairs and an island woman cured a man who had been constipated for six weeks by administering six enemas. "Let's operate!" was one of Carstairs' favourite rallying cries.

Carstairs was fearless in confronting troublemakers. One Saturday evening she heard there was trouble at the store, where a dance was being held, and went over from the Great House with a torch. The people were cowering indoors: a man with a knife was outside, they told her, complaining that he had been charged too much for beer - "He's coming in to cut us." She told them to open the doors at once, and found outside a man brandishing a pen-knife. "Look, my good chap," she said, "you come over to me and I'll smash you across the bloody face with this torch. That'll be a damn sight worse than what you can do with that stupid little pen-knife." She then ordered that he be removed from Whale Cay and deposited on a distant island. One of the islanders agreed, with belated gallantry: "We're not going to have the Boss cut to pieces."

"He's not going to cut anyone to pieces," Carstairs returned. "He's going to have his face smashed in."

Each morning islanders with problems or grievances would line up outside the Great House and wait for Carstairs to emerge from breakfast. She would listen to the complaints, which often concerned fights over beer or women, and pass judgement. Adulterers were usually banished from Whale Cay but in at least one instance she had the culprit horse-whipped; he complained to the British government but it ruled that whoever owned an island in the dominion was effectively judge and jury over the people. "I had a country going," said Carstairs. "I ran a country."

Carstairs issued admonitory notices on every aspect of her subjects' lives.

"Notice," read one. "I eat brown rice in preference to white. Therefore, if brown rice is good enough for me and my household, it is good enough or even too good for the people. M.B. Carstairs." To encourage marriage, she organised scores of weddings and provided newly-weds with small, neat houses. Carstairs, meanwhile, entertained a succession of girlfriends in the Great House. "They just fall in my lap," she said. Few were kept on for long: after a while Carstairs would find herself thinking, "Oh, God, I've got to go to bed with her again." Some she had trouble getting rid of. In one case she palmed off a girlfriend on a Hollywood film star who needed to marry as a cover for his homosexuality. But she kept photographs of all her conquests. Was she a great lover? a friend asked her. "I was made to think so. Everybody else thought so, so I thought so too. I would have liked me." So she was sensational in bed? "Oh yes."

The Bahamians who lived on Whale Cay remembered Joe Carstairs with respect and affection. They were like her own children, they said. Carstairs sacked white managers who worked the blacks too hard. As long as the islanders behaved, she allowed them some fun. At Christmas she provided 55-gallon drums of wine, and the weekly dances at the store were renowned throughout the Out Islands.

She insisted that the people contribute to a health-care fund, which insured them against hospital treatment, and that they go to Church every Sunday. The island priest was a whisky-drinking exhibitionist who was said to interfere with his choirboys; Carstairs threw him off Whale Cay when he contracted syphilis. She had a horror of illness, and to prevent the spread of disease she at one point forbade travel between islands. She inspected the Whale Cay houses for cleanliness every month. Four women ran her laundry, and the quality of their washing was so celebrated that visitors to the island would bring with them suitcases of dirty clothes. "If one went to the bathroom and took off a shirt," a friend remembered, "three or four black women would come and grab it and take it to the laundry room." Carstairs changed her shirt two or three times a day and ordered 40 new ones at a time from her tailor, who also provided clothes for Wadley.

Children born on Whale Cay were usually taken to Carstairs to be named, a tradition that stemmed from the days of the slave plantation. She dubbed the first boy Samuel Octagon Brennan: Octagon was the brand of soap stocked in the store. Joe loved little boys as equals. "They think of me as one of them," she explained. "They like me like another little boy."

Carstairs appointed a band of law enforcers: four guards armed with sawn-off shotguns and a watchman with a machete. She also established a boy scout troop, the 87th Bahamas, in effect a private army of almost 100 men. To teach her soldiers to drill she showed them a film of guards parading at Buckingham Palace and instructed them to copy their moves exactly. During exercises the troops sometimes flinched and scratched as they were bitten by mosquitoes. Carstairs admonished them: "Look here. You're not to stir even if a Bengal tiger snaps at your ankles. Get it?" According to Carstairs, mosquitoes did not bite her because they could tell she was not afraid of them.

When intruders landed on Whale Cay, Carstairs liked to see them off herself. In 1940 Damon Runyon wrote in his syndicated newspaper column about a friend of his who had stopped at the island in his amphibious plane. "He came back in a big hurry, reporting in some alarm that when he landed in the water there was a short, stock-built dame came popping out of a house on the cay with a double-barrelled shotgun in her dukes and dull menace in her lovely orbs."

Once, it was said, an American cruiser moored off the island, and its passengers rowed up to the shore, disembarking at one of the beaches. On hearing of the intrusion Carstairs had her men paint their faces and armed them with weapons. Led by Carstairs, wielding a huge cutlass, they swarmed out of the jungle uttering strange cries and took the trespassers prisoner. At dusk the Americans were dragged up to the lighthouse, their hands tied behind their backs. There Carstairs reappeared, dressed as a fantastical Great White Goddess, while her people chanted and danced around a fire before her. After the ceremony the Americans were locked in the garage; they were released at dawn.

A steady stream of friends visited Whale Cay from England and America, sometimes 20 at a time. Carstairs took them to hunt birds and wild goat on neighbouring islands, to see the Blue Hole, a 35ft crater at Hoffman s Cay or to swim off Devil's Cay. They had the run of Whale Cay: there were cars to choose from, and a beach for every wind. (The black workers had their own beach: "We couldn't have them all over the place," Carstairs explained.) Guests took part in fishing competitions with cash prizes, and would return from a couple of hours at sea with enough fish to feed the island; the barracudas and sharks were hung under the fruit trees. In the evenings there were films, poker games, boxing matches and parties: at one of these all the guests were naked except Carstairs, who wore just a hunting knife strapped round her thigh.

Often Carstairs played tricks on her friends. One night she briefed a group of islanders to shine up their faces, strip down to their shorts and drum menacingly outside the Great House. She then told her guests inside that the natives were rioting. "The blacks are going to kill us all," she warned. "Pansies first, women last." Having whipped up a suitable panic, and sent her friends scuttling upstairs, she strode out and shot off some guns. Then she returned to the house. "I think it's going to be alright now," she said.

Carstairs loved an audience, not least because the joke, in the end, was at the audience's expense. Her doll, of course, was a wonderful prop for her practical jokes and for her myth-making. But in her love for Lord Tod Wadley, if nothing else, she was quite serious. "I was never entirely honest to anyone," she confessed later in her life, "except to Wadley."

Each summer, Carstairs gave her workers two months' leave and took herself off to the United State's or Europe. In 1937 she met Marlene Dietrich in the South of France. At first Carstairs studiously ignored Marlene, who reproached her for this when they were introduced - "Why didn't you look at me?" "Because you were Dietrich," Carstairs replied. They met again in 1938 and together bought a boat named Arkel.

In the summer of 1939 Joe sailed a schooner from Whale Cay to the Cap d'Antibes to see Dietrich. In her biography of Marlene Dietrich, her daughter Maria Riva describes Carstairs' arrival:

"A strange ship had been sighted making for our private cove. A magnificent, three-masted schooner, its black hull skimming through the glassy water, its teak decks gleaming in the morning sun, at the helm, a beautiful boy. Bronzed and sleek - even from a distance, one sensed the power of the rippling muscles of his tight chest and haunches. He waved at his appreciative audience, flashed a rakish white-toothed smile, and gave the command to drop anchor among the white yachts. If he had run up the Jolly Roger, no one would have been surprised. The first thought on seeing him had been Pirate - followed by Pillage and Plunder."

Dietrich nicknamed Carstairs "the Pirate"; Carstairs, Maria noted, "was the only one who ever called Dietrich 'Babe' and got away with it". Throughout the summer Maria would help to dress her mother for daily rendezvous on Carstairs' ship, Sonia II. These meetings were kept secret from Marlene's lover, the novelist Erich Maria Remarque - Carstairs and Dietrich enjoyed a heady, clandestine affair.

Carstairs was dark, tough and compact where Dietrich was fair and willowy; and Carstairs's mysterious exile counterpointed Dietrich's extraordinary fame. They were fascinated by one another. Carstairs was so infatuated that she offered Whale Cay to Dietrich, population included; Dietrich declined, but accepted a beach. (The deeds were found in her effects after her death.)

Carstairs was one of the few people able to shock Marlene Dietrich. One evening Carstairs, Dietrich and the American soprano Grace Moore were invited to a formal dinner on the Riviera. When Carstairs met the other two women in the hotel for cocktails they were horrified to see that she was dressed in men's black tie, and insisted she change into a dress. Shortly afterwards Carstairs reappeared in an elegant gown and Dietrich and Moore saw, to their even greater consternation, that her arms were bare and covered with tattoos; she was sent to put back on the tuxedo. Even in this milieu, Joe was outlandish.

Six years later Remarque used Joe Carstairs as a character in his novel The Arch of Triumph, but returned her to her first incarnation, where she sailed in to the cove gleaming and boyish, by rendering her as a man. Dietrich wrote to her husband, "How do you like Remarque's new book?...He paints me worse than I am in order to make everything more interesting, and he succeeds. But everything from Fouquet's to Scheherazade to Antibes, Chateau Madrid, Cherbourg, Lancaster Hotel, even 'Jo' on the boat. Of course, he couldn't make it a woman."

(When Carstairs ran into Greta Garbo at a New York optician's, this sexually ambiguous screen icon, too, took her for a man. "Hello, Miss Garbo," Carstairs said. "Hello, sir," Garbo replied.)

Carstairs and Dietrich subsequently fell out and Carstairs spoke of her former lover in vitriolic terms. But, curiously, she still described Dietrich as "the only person who might get me". On Whale Cay, Carstairs was the actress, the myth, the icon, the outlaw, the centre of the world. Marlene briefly interrupted that fantasy: she was a star with a wider orbit, a mythic creature of greater power. Carstairs was jealous.

After her affair with Dietrich, Carstairs began to emerge from her seclusion. In 1940 the Duke of Windsor was made Governor of the Bahamas, in an attempt by the British government to shuffle him and the Duchess into obscurity. When the Windsors arrived in Nassau the 87th Bahamas, Carstairs' soldier-boys, were among the troops lining the streets: they bore nickel-plated staves and were immaculately turned out, their limbs shining with oil.

The next year the Duke and Duchess paid a visit to Whale Cay, and Life magazine took photographs of their progress round the island. "Damn it," said the Duke of Windsor as he inspected the roads, "why can't all the Out Islands make roads like these?" Carstairs showed them her boats in the dock, and took the Duchess into the cabin of one of the yachts. The Duchess saw Wadley. "Who is that?" she asked. Carstairs introduced her: "That's my boy, that's Wadley." "My God," said the Duchess, "he's just like my husband."

Soon Life and the Saturday Evening Post ran cover stories trumpeting Joe Carstairs' achievements. In March the film director Gabriel Pascal premiered his Major Barbara in Nassau, in honour of the Windsors, and he too visited Whale Cay. "With the possible exception of Katie Hepburn," he said, "Miss Carstairs is the cleverest woman I ever met. I'd like to have her in my next picture."

The number of people living permanently on Whale Cay - which stood at 150 in 1939 and 250 in 1940 - now swelled to 500. "People are so desperately in need of work," Carstairs told The Tribune in 1941, "that they take any risk in reaching my island. Twelve people left Andros to come to Whale Cay the other day but only three reached it - the other nine were drowned. Some of these belonged to families of my people." The Herald, a liberal Bahamian newspaper, described Carstairs's achievement as "the greatest story since the landing of Christopher Columbus in this colony".

The success of the settlement on Whale Cay convinced Carstairs that she could revitalise the entire colony. In an attempt to initiate a social and economic revolution in the Bahamas, she set up the "Coloured League of Youth", an organisation to help black Bahamians produce and sell their own food. The goal was self-sufficiency. Just as in her private life Carstairs strove to need nothing and no one (Wadley excepted), in her public projects she preached self-reliance and independence above all else.

The league was at once an altruistic endeavour and a bid by Carstairs to extend her empire, to defy the white ruling class in Nassau and become the de facto ruler of the colony. She more than once voiced the opinion that she ought to be made Governor. "Everybody would have followed me," she said.

Inevitably, her plans antagonised the white merchants who held power in the Bahamas. In an interview with an American newspaper she accused them of ignoring the economic and physical well-being of black Bahamians, and they were incensed. Carstairs was condemned as an "ungracious guest" who had "been given refuge in this colony from features she did not like about her own country" and was now "slandering the good name of these islands". Her newspaper interview caused the biggest sensation in the Bahamas since the announcement that the Duke of Windsor was to be appointed Governor. The government discussed hauling Carstairs before the Bar of the House or of deporting her. She had overstepped the mark.

By the end of 1941 Carstairs's grand plans were scuppered. The white establishment would have nothing to do with her, the Coloured League of Youth disintegrated, and even her islanders started to leave her. When the United States entered the war many Bahamians moved to America to fill the farm and factory jobs that had fallen empty, or to work on the airfields being constructed in New Providence. She was no longer needed.

Carstairs tried to contribute to the war effort. When the British Navy issued a request for boats to use as minesweepers, she immediately offered her finest schooner. "This ship," Carstairs wrote in a press release, "one of the most beautiful private schooners in the world, has been placed by Miss Carstairs unreservedly at the service of His Majesty's Navy." His Majesty's Navy turned the ship down as unsuitable. Carstairs offered her schooner to the American Navy and again it was refused.

She presented the Duke of Windsor with a plan to establish fighting and farming task forces which would make the colony self-sufficient during the war. He ignored it.

Carstairs, of course, longed to serve in the war herself. She asked the advice of Francis Francis, her half-brother by the second of her mother's four husbands, on how to enlist. He hit her where it hurt. "Wrong age," said Frank, "wrong sex."

Thwarted as a lawmaker, Carstairs became an outlaw. To begin with, she exacted a series of small revenges on her half-brother. In 1946 she sold Frank the small island of Bird Cay at a massive profit. A year later, enraged to hear that he was charging his workers to buy vegetables which they had grown, she mounted a night-time raid on Bird Cay, sending out a posse of men armed with cutlasses to raze Frank's crops. When the police tried to interview her about the raid she refused to allow them on her land. In another attack, Joe Carstairs scuttled all her brother's boats, stranding him on his cay.

For the next 30 years Whale Cay was Carstairs' secret playground, her pirate's lair and a Neverland where she and Wadley could be immortal boys together. When a friend remarked in the 1970s that times had changed she retorted, "You bet they have - not my times, though." But, however fiercely she resisted it, her times did change. When the Bahamas gained a degree of independence in the 1960s Carstairs found herself without an obedient populace. And her body was giving out - her legs, her teeth, her eyes. In 1975, aged 75, she was obliged to sell Whale Cay. It fetched just under $1 million.

Carstairs was devastated at the loss of her island. "I could've aone out and shot myself," she said. She had cried only once in her life - at the death of the girlfriend who gave her Wadley - and now she cried again: "It felt like a woman had died." Her favourite racing boat was consigned to the bottom of a river on Whale Cay - "I left her there, to die."

Carstairs moved to Florida with Lord Tod Wadley. As the years passed his beady eyes remained bright and his smile stuck fast but his leather face darkened, cracked and peeled. Soon it was plastered with tiny band-aids. "I know he's old," Carstairs said. "He's an old dolly, bless his heart, but my God he's still got that boyish smile and look."

She mourned Whale Cay to the end, so much that she could not bear to see beaches and rocks pictured on television. "I've become an absolute coward," she admitted. "I can't face it. I can't look something in the face that I've left behind." She died in Florida aged 93, convinced that without her the island would wilfully revert to wilderness. "It wants to go back," she said.

In the course of researching Joe Carstairs' life I visited Whale Cay, hitching a lift on a small aeroplane the other passenger was a man who had been called out to fix the generator The island was virtually deserted. A couple live there as caretakers and a few luxury holiday homes; have been built at one tip of Whale Cay, but these are used for only a few weeks of the year. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are grown over, the Great House is boarded up. As Carstairs predicted, the island has returned to jungle.

I wanted to know, though, what had become of Lord Tod Wadley. In her will, Carstairs left $33 million and a plethora of toys and mementoes, each of which was allocated to a friend or employee. But there was no mention of Wadley. It seemed astonishing that she had not provided for his future, as she had for all her other precious objects by entrusting him to the care of a friend. Evidently no friend was close enough: I discovered that, in accordance with Joe Carstairs' wishes, she and Wadley had been cremated together.