I have a dirty little secret: I enjoy celebrity trash.
Not rooting through Dumpsters in Bel Air, Midtown Manhattan, or outside the Miracle Mile in Manhasset for real trash, perish the thought! Even though it’s perfectly legal to go through Hedgefund McGotbucks’ recycling bins after he’s had Belshazzar, his gentleperson’s gentlebeing, order the thirty-first footman to take his discarded paper and plastic to the curb, I don’t actually do that. For one thing, dear Hedgy is off at the Badbookistan All-Ages Ortolan Shoot right now, and I really dislike Belshazzar’s taste in carbonated beverages (stevia, *blech barf ack ack ack ack ptui*).
For another, as rich and annoying as Hedgy and his lovely wife, the former Ivy Cornell-Brown (of the Dartmouth-by-the-Strip-Mine Dartmouths, of course, don’t you know anything?) can be during a killer game of Scrabble, they deserve their privacy just like everyone else. “Mummy always said one’s name should appear in print only when one is born, marries, and dies,” Hedgy remarked over drinks at the St. Vesuvius Oldsters reunion a few years back, and truer words were ne’er spake.
Nor do I mean all those tabloid articles about the love lives, reproductive histories, or pastimes of those sad, terribly déclassé, people who used to be somebody. Cast members of television shows that were cancelled during the second Bush administration, movie stars on their fourth (or fifth) spouse, Wall Street failures ground to dust by Hedgy and his siblings when they tried to corner the Ruritanian nunfruit market and use the proceeds to buy a seat on the Obsolete Commodities Exchange...not only are most of these alleged scoops outrageous and obvious lies, they are dull beyond belief. When I say that I’d rather read the collected adventures of Batboy from the late and much-missed Weekly World News than even acknowledge their existence, I am only speaking the truth.
No, I mean good celebrity trash.
You know exactly what I mean, and kindly stop pretending you don’t. Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Glamour, Vogue, Time, the Sunday editions of great metropolitan newspapers like the New York Times, Boston Globe, et al., sometimes even The Atlantic or another magazine of commentary and belles lettres — every single one of them publishes profiles of movers, shakers, and sundry deal makers. Some are flattering, some are not, but nine times out of ten these pen-portraits of the rich and famous contain enough salacious details about their subjects’ personal lives, scandals, and misbehaving relations to satisfy even the nosiest fan. The only difference between them and the tabloids is that this particular brand of gossip is well written, based on solid research, and features gorgeous photographs of Hedgy’s cousin Olivetti Bestseller-Gotbucks meditating over her morning coffee before settling down to a hard day at her bespoke flower arranging dojo, not a grainy picture of Olli before she puts on her face. The content is not all that different, and I say this as someone who has subscribed to Vanity Fair for around twenty years.
The modern master of enjoyable celebrity trash was of course the late Dominick Dunne, the exceptionally well-connected brother of John Gregory Dunne (and thus the brother-in-law of Joan Didion). Best known today for a series of romans à clef based on famous crimes, his coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, and the tragic death of his daughter Dominique at the hands of an abusive former boyfriend, Dunne was a fixture in Vanity Fair for a quarter of a century.
Little wonder — Dunne knew everyone, was welcome everywhere, and his accounts of what used to be called Café Society back when Ivy’s great-grandfather Princeton was in short pants are some of the wittiest, most devastating descriptions of how The Very Rich Are Indeed Different ever penned. My personal favorite, from Dunne’s The Mansions of Limbo, is a hilarious tale of how an Australian heiress known as, my hand to God, “Pitty Pat,” nearly married a gay Qantas flight attendant for his non-existent Venetian princely title, then was left at the altar when the groom eloped with his best man four days before the nuptials were to be held at St. Mark's Cathedral in between the customary Venetian floods.
Yes. Really.
Dunne has been criticized, with some justification, for constant namedropping, reliance on true scandals for his novels, and for being less than objective as a journalist. All the same, his work is a prime example of Good Celebrity Trash: entertaining, well-written, even occasionally heartbreaking.
For all that, Dominick Dunne was as the gentle slopes of Mount Tom compared to the true Everest of Good Celebrity Trash: the Victorian master of crime, gossip, and warmongering thrillers, William Tufnell Le Queux.
Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities, and Crooks, by William Le Queux — it’s hard to know which of William Le Queux’s multitudinous books to feature tonight. He was astonishingly prolific (thanks at least in part to the efforts of several ghostwriters), wrote in multiple genres, and was both popular and influential. If one looks solely at his fiction, he could have been a Victorian version of James Patterson, with around 150 novels, most of them bestsellers; if one looks at his non-fiction, he could have been a Jack Olson, with around 20 books about true crime, history, political analysis, espionage, and propaganda. This (alleged) memoir was the final book of his long and somewhat checkered career, and the title perfectly sums up his life, at least as he wished to present it to the world.
Le Queux was born in London in 1864 to a French immigrant and his English wife. This is not especially noteworthy — London was the great melting pot of Europe, with immigrants pouring in from throughout the Empire and beyond — except that Le Queux’s later work, particularly in the 1890s, was less than flattering to France and the French. He was English-born, English-bred through his mother, and what started as the typical Victorian prejudice against the non-English blossomed into full-blown xenophobia by the mid-point of his career.
It’s not clear how this happened; something turned him against his father’s people, and the non-British in general, but whether this was childhood trauma, bullying by his schoolmates over his odd surname, or something else is beyond the scope of this diary. What is clear is that after a brief apprenticeship under mediocre society portraitist Ignacio Spiridon, Le Queux turned decisively and permanently to the pen in his early 20s.
This turned out to be the best decision of his young life. Le Queux was a natural writer, with a fluid and very readable style, and soon he was regularly hitting the Victorian equivalent of the bestseller lists. Mysteries...science fiction...spy novels...even old-school swashbuckling romances...he wrote them all, in a steady stream that began with something called Guilty Bonds in 1893 and continued in a steady, somewhat pulpy stream for the next forty years. Those wishing to sample his golden prose, which frequently is as rich and thick as quadruple-fat crème fraîche, can sample over eighty of his books over at Project Gutenberg.
And what books they are! Here are but a few of his works, most of which are blessed with titles nearly as ridiculous as those of the webwork mysteries of the late, great Harry Stephen Keeler:
- A Secret Sin; or, A Madonna of the Music Halls (was she tone-deaf?)
- Three Glass Eyes (and a haircut, two bits!)
- Whoso Findeth a Wife (findeth her where, prithee?)
- The Sign of the Seven (Seals? Sleepers? Deadly Sins?)
- The Red Hat (BORING)
- The Little Blue Goddess (was she sad? dunked in indigo? cyanotic?)
- The Tickencote Treasure: Being the Story of A Silent Man, A Sealed Script, and A Singular Secret (wha — )
- The Money Spider (“THIS IS THE MONEY SPIDER. HE COMES AROUND ONLY ONCE EVERY 70 ZILLION YEARS, REBLOG FOR GOOD LUCK AND A BOUNTIFUL CROP OF DADDY LONGLEGS IN THE COMING YEAR….”)
- Bolo, The Super-Spy, by Armand Mehjan (yes, that’s the title, not the name of one of Le Queux’s ghostwriters)
- The Golden Face: A Great Crook Romance (I got nothing)
Le Queux’s best-known work is probably the 1906 thriller The Invasion of 1910, which not only hit the bestseller lists but sparked a wave of anti-Germany hysteria when it was serialized by one of Le Queux’s buddies, newspaper publisher Lord Nordcliffe. This ridiculous book, which posited that the Kaiser had sent a cadre of highly trained actors dressed as German soldiers to terrorize London, managed to scare a great many Britons silly. It was widely read, widely imitated, and plenty of writers (Le Queux included) made plenty of money from it and a whole zeppelin-load of similar volumes that whipped the reading public into a positive frenzy in the last years before the Great War buried the long nineteenth century in mud and ruin.
So prolific was Le Queux, even allowing for the increasing use of uncredited collaborators toward the end of his life, that fully eight novels and a collection of short stories were published after his death. They were the usual action-packed nonsense (one was titled The Crinkled Crown, unfortunately not on Project Gutenberg), but the mere fact that they appeared at all speaks volumes about how popular the old warhorse was long after literary tastes had changed.
It was just as well that Le Queux could churn out multiple books a year. He was an inveterate traveler, had expensive tastes, and mightily enjoyed rubbing elbows with the rich, the famous, and the royal (not necessarily in that order). One of the reasons he employed ghostwriters, especially after he’d become a fixture in high society, was that his royalty payments simply could not keep up his expenditures. You want to gossip with the no longer crowned heads of Europe, break your bank account at Monte Carlo, or spend a night exchanging witty badinage with household names, you better have the coin to afford a good tailor, rooms at a fine hotel, and first-class fare on the latest ocean liner.
That is what the bulk of Things I Know…. is about: Le Queux’s career as a celebrity author/Friend of the Famous/occasional adventurer. Oh, there are chapters allegedly about his youthful exploits, and several juicy anecdotes about famous women, but then we have beauties like “What the Sultan of Turkey Told Me,” “The Love Romance of King Peter of Serbia,” and “Evenings with ‘Carmen Sylva,’ Queen of Roumania.” There are even several illustrations depicting Le Queux, assorted royalty, the celebrated poisoner Dr. Crippen, and “My Brigand Bodyguard in Northern Albania,” the last of whom turn out to be half a dozen men sitting down behind the great author, who stares directly at the camera, mustache and all.
And then there is Le Queux’s contribution to the literature on Jack the Ripper, a convoluted and wildly implausible theory that involves a “spy” (who was actually a journalist), Rasputin’s secret papers (which were not secret), and a crazed doctor (who did not exist) that the Russian secret police allegedly had sent to London to make Scotland Yard look bad (?????). British crime historian Donald Rumbelow devotes several highly entertaining pages to Le Queux in The Complete Jack the Ripper, and to say that he discredits the alleged espionage expert is putting it mildly.
William Le Queux, author, gossipmonger, and all-around celebrity in his own right, died in the coastal town of Knokke, Belgium in 1927. What precisely he was doing there I have been unable to discover, but Knokke has been a favorite watering hole for English expatriates since the 19th century, with an Anglican church, excellent train connections to the rest of Europe, and several casinos. Whether there were any incognito royals or celebrities worth gossiping about in 1927 is unknown, but if William Le Queux was there, it’s a safe bet someone famous was in the vicinity.
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Have you ever gossiped with a celebrity? Gossiped about a celebrity? Read a William Le Queux book? Heard that Jack the Ripper was a Russian doctor? Been to Knokke? Gotten knokked on the head? It’s a chilly night here at the Last Homely Shack, so throw on a sweater, come to the fireside, and share….
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