Frances: The Tragic Bride (12 page)

Reg knew all too well how much Frances hated the endless barhopping. Yet he continued to drink to excess, surrounded by his minders most of the time. When he took Frances out at night now, there were always the hangers-on, the people who wanted to keep in with the twins, sucking up to Reggie, wanting his approval, paying their respects. People said they had everyone in their pocket: the law, the press, nothing could touch them. ‘Well-known businessmen’ the press called them. The journalists didn’t care to describe them otherwise.

She’d spend hours getting ready, carefully choosing her outfits, making sure her hair was perfect, on their nights out – yet it was wasted energy really, because it was impossible to relax or feel comfortable with him when they went out to pubs or nightclubs.

Reggie would be constantly jumping up all the time, moving around the place, shedding largesse and instilling fear in equal amounts. She felt isolated, shut off from the rest of the world.

The consequence of all this was the rows between them that started to be a regular occurrence. They usually began when they were on their way home from a night out or after she’d spent an evening in the kitchen at Vallance Road, waiting for Reg to come home.

That was her life: waiting for Reg to finish whatever it was. It was too much, she kept telling him. It wasn’t a life she wanted. Sometimes she’d be defiant, determined: it’s over, she’d tell him, and run out of the car, climbing the stairs at Ormsby Street, falling on her bed sobbing, resolute that she had to finish with him for good.

Then there’d be a day or two’s silence, and he’d turn up again, all promises and apologies. Huge bouquets of flowers like she’d never seen. More jewellery. A beautiful gold bracelet. A necklace with a small diamond at the bottom, prettier than anything she’d ever owned.

Then, under the intensity of his persuasion, his insistence that they had a wonderful future to plan, she’d relent, in the way women do when, deep down, they still want to believe in their man, hoping for change – even if everything was starting to point to the contrary. And all the time, there was a nagging question at the back of her mind. Suppose she did break off with Reg for good? Who was going to dare to start coming round Ormsby Street to take out ‘the Kray bird’?

It was so frustrating. Reggie insisted he loved her. He’d say it all the time. So why couldn’t he see that love meant being together, sharing everything, not dumping her there at the kitchen table with his mum while he went out with his twin?

Violet, Frances sensed, wasn’t really her ally. She saw no wrong in her twins. She seemed to lap up the glamour around them, thought everything her boys did was marvellous. She was so proud of them. Oh no, there was never a word of criticism from Vi’s mouth. Not like Elsie, who’d make her disapproval known if she saw or heard something she didn’t like.

In fact, Violet Kray was very well versed in domestic politics. To Frances, she was outwardly maternal, because that was what her Reggie wanted. Underneath it all, she didn’t really think this girl was good enough for her Reg, he’d yet to find one that was. She looked good. But she didn’t seem interested in cooking or doing things for her man. She just sat there. Looking nervous.

Maureen Flanagan remembered a night out at the Astor Club with the Kray family: ‘Charlie Kray, the twins’ brother, invited me. Vi was going too. I didn’t want to come with my husband so it was agreed with Charlie that I’d accompany Vi. I told my husband I was going out with the girls.’

Maureen and Violet dressed to the nines for their night in Mayfair. Mrs Kray was immaculate in a beautiful blue dress with a fur stole, Maureen in a slim sheath with a little mink bolero. They were driven to the club in one of the twins’ cars, by one of their minders.

‘It was obvious Violet had been there before,’ remembered Maureen. ‘We all sat at a little round table. We’d been told that Lita Roza [a successful popular singer of the fifties] was going to be singing. Freddie Mills [a very well-known boxing champion who later committed suicide in highly suspicious circumstances] came over to say hello, then we were joined by Charlie with two male friends.

‘Then Reggie came in with Frances. She was perfect. She had her hair swept up with a sleeveless blue brocade tight dress just to the knee and a mink stole, the kind with all the tails hanging down.

‘I thought to myself, “You never went out and bought that, Reggie’s got it on loan for the night, just to make sure you look as smart as his mum”. Mrs Kray’s stole was white mink; Frances’s was dark brown. Then Lita came on and started singing: she too had the same upswept hairdo.’

About a half an hour later, Maureen said, Ronnie turned up with a driver.

‘Then from nowhere Ronnie’s fave boy of the time came in. But he didn’t sit with us. Everyone kept coming over from the other tables to pay their respects to Vi. That was the twins’ rule. If you come to our table, you show respect to our mother.

‘What I noticed about Frances before, at Vallance Road, was she was wearing these little white fabric gloves, with little stones embedded in them. The more nervous or agitated she got, the gloves would be off, on the table, but she’d be twisting them around. That night at the Astor I noticed she was doing it again. The gloves were pale blue to match the dress. The more people came to the table to say hello, pay their respects, the more she’d be twisting those blue gloves around.

‘Reg noticed. At one point he put his hands over the gloves as if to calm it, his hand over her hand and over the gloves. So she’d stop twisting them for ten minutes. But if he got up and left the table to talk to someone, it would start again.

‘The table-hopping was quite a Mafia style thing, going over to say hello to the other wives and girlfriends. But the minute he got up she’d be “Where you goin’, Reg?”

‘He’d just give her a lopsided smile and say, “I’ll be back.” Then he’d look at his mum as if to say, “Take care of her”. Once he left the table, you could see she was on tenterhooks. The minute he was back, she’d look relieved. “He’s back, everything’s okay.”

‘I think the story was, he didn’t really want her to go anywhere without him. He didn’t want people stopping her, asking her questions. He was probably quite charming when they were on their own. Because his twin wasn’t there. Yet he didn’t want to leave Frances with her family, so it was always Mrs Kray.

‘I always used to say to Mrs Kray, “Don’t you think Reggie’s a bit overprotective?”

‘She didn’t disagree with me but she said, “Look how people come up to me all the time in the street. ‘Oh, Violet, how’s the boys?’ Frances wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

‘I must admit, Mrs Kray was very clever at handling people. She’d turn the questions round. Charlie was the same way. He looked like a movie star and he could talk to anyone, turn it round to “’Ow’s your little boy, then?” deflect the attention away from the family, what the twins were up to. Charlie and Vi both had fantastic memories. So anything anyone told them about themselves they could remember and bring it up.

‘Violet knew her son was overprotective, but she also knew Reggie didn’t want Frances to have friends. Anyone who might have had influence with her against him, he didn’t want her anywhere near them.

‘I would have gone out with her. I actually asked Mrs Kray one day if I could take her out.

‘Mrs Kray said no. “What about the cinema?” I pushed. The answer was always no.’

And so Frances started to worry more and more. Underneath the fear, the nervy gestures, she was beginning to wonder what would happen to her without him. She was stunning, no question of that, her hair longer, nestling on her shoulders, making her look more luminous, especially when she gave that smile. Yet the dazzled young teenager, awestruck by the travel, the perfumed glamour of the West End clubs, the smiling, bowing maître d’s had gone. For good.

Alone in her bedroom at Ormsby Street, she’d go over it again and again in her mind: how could they have any kind of life together if there were always these guys around them? Let alone even thinking about
him
, the mad twin who hated her. Well, the feeling was mutual. He was a fat pig.

As for Reggie, he veered between his attempts to placate Frances whenever they rowed and a growing conviction that Frances herself was not responsible for all these arguments and critical outbursts. Permanently suspicious of others having any influence or control over Frances, he decided it was her family, namely Elsie, who was turning her against him.

Not a man to relinquish an idea, the suspicion of Elsie soon developed into something quite sinister. Elsie Shea, he decided, was his enemy. She and she alone was poisoning his beloved Frankie’s mind against him. She’d already wound him up when she insisted on him returning the engagement ring he’d bought Frances, saying she didn’t like it. He’d fumed. But he’d still gone off and changed it. But Elsie didn’t like that, either.

‘He bought Frances a little dog, Mitzi,’ recalled Rita Smith. ‘But her mother wouldn’t have it in the house.’

If Elsie had already made it clear this relationship was not to her taste, Frances’s brother was totally distracted by his own concerns. Frankie Shea was in love. He’d met a beautiful dark-haired girl, Lily, nicknamed ‘Bubbles’. She worked in a club and they’d become an item. By the summer of 1962, Lily was expecting his child. Yet though he welcomed the idea of fatherhood, Frankie couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, or avoid getting involved with the wrong people, usually in robberies. Sometimes he’d wind up in court and get off but at one stage his involvement in a warehouse break-in led to a six-month prison sentence, because the judge decided to make an example of him. For Elsie, the only good news that year was that she’d be a grandmother. Frances too was thrilled at the idea of a new baby in the family. She loved kids. Little Kimmie, Rita’s girl, was a real favourite.

Frances went on three trips abroad that year. In April 1962, there’d been an eleven-day cruise, which took in Majorca, Gibraltar, Algeciras and Morocco. Then in August, a friend of Reggie’s drove Frances and Reggie down to the south of France for a holiday.

According to Reggie, who recalled the holiday in his memoir,
Reggie Kray’s East End Stories
, the couple had a major row while sitting outside a bistro.

At one point Frances told him: ‘You’re nothing outside the East End. You’re not known here in France or anywhere else in the world’, a retort meant to wound but a truth, nonetheless, that no one else would have dared to pass on to Reggie. This was hardly the remark of a cowed, intimidated young woman. Frances was nervous as hell within the edgy framework of Vallance Road or any place where Ronnie might appear. Away from this environment, however, she’d deliver home truths in no uncertain terms. She’d always been honest with him, right from the start. It was one of the things he’d always liked about her.

For Reggie to repeat these words nearly half a century later and commit them to print is remarkable. Though in the book he claimed his response to her remark was to spur him on towards an ambition: to be known ‘in a circle much larger than my own’.

In September, Frances went on another holiday, to Spain. Rita Smith recalled Reggie sometimes paid for Frances to go on holiday to Spain with friends. ‘He trusted her there. But while she was on holiday with her friends, that’s when she started taking purple hearts.’ These street drugs were hugely popular with young people in the early sixties, and were a combination of amphetamine and barbiturate.

According to Rita Smith, when Reggie found out Frances had been taking purple hearts he went mad: ‘He found out who was supplying them and he never supplied her again. Or anyone else.’

It may well have been on the Spanish trip that September that Frances first started experimenting with drugs, though the remarks Reggie made in his letters from prison make it clear that she’d mentioned trying slimming tablets before that. Reggie, of course, knew about drugs because he took them himself: he’d pop tranquillisers such as Librium from time to time. Or take purple hearts. Such drugs were proliferating throughout London by the early sixties, easily acquired in the pubs and clubs of the East and West End by anyone.

If young people weren’t smoking hashish or ‘grass’ (marijuana) they were popping the pills so easily bought for very little cash; in fact the idea of taking drugs as a recreational high was fast seeping into the culture. Certainly, the Kray twins had ready access to any kind of prescription drug they wanted. Yet when and where Frances first sampled illegal street drugs – and what they were – must remain open to question. Rita’s assertion that Reggie couldn’t stand the idea of Frances taking purple hearts is, yet again, another indication of the control he wanted to exercise over every aspect of her life. Don’t do as I do. Do what I tell you to do.

Consider all the actions and words Reggie relentlessly deployed to control the woman he believed he loved above all else. In view of this, would it be that surprising if Frances did, by then, feel so hemmed in by the trap she was in that she started believing that drugs or pills were, in some way, a fairly reliable means of switching off from the increasing fear she felt so much of the time?

People use drugs to change or distort their reality, often because they can’t deal with it. Alcohol can do it. Pills can do it in a different way.

For Frances, maybe it would simply have been easier at times to just blot out the reality and let the drug take over…

CHAPTER 6

PRELUDE TO A MARRIAGE

C
hristmas is an odd time of year; sometimes it brings out the best or the worst in people. It’s a time for sharing joy, celebrating with children, loved ones, friends. Yet it can also be a point when suppressed emotions or tensions that have simmered away through the year explode unexpectedly as the year draws to an end. Rows. Recriminations. Ultimatums. Just days before Christmas 1962, Frances and Reggie had the worst fight they’d ever had.

Reggie was now spending more time than ever with his twin. Frances was distressed and angry about the way ‘The Ronnie Factor’ was affecting any time she did spend with Reggie.