PARADISE FOUND: Mustique
As late as the 1960s, Mustique was a couple of square miles of sand and wild cows. Now the Caribbean island is the bolthole of the gilded and bohemian elite. Originally published in Issue 56 of The Rake the transformation, writes JAMES MEDD, was the work of one man, a British aristocrat with reserves of willpower as deep as his pockets…
An island named after an insect infestation is surely no one’s first idea of paradise. Yet since the 1960s, Mustique has been just that: a privately owned, reassuringly inaccessible castaway retreat for the jet set. This tiny landmass in the Caribbean, little more than two square miles of sand and wild cows, was transformed into an expat colony of million-dollar beachside villas, a local shop stocked with caviar and a beach bar so iconic it was mocked-up for the wedding reception of the heir to the British throne.
As the meeting point of ancient aristocratic privilege and permissive-society decadence, it has become a byword for rock-star extravagance and royal misbehaviour, a model for the new lifestyle of the super-rich and the venue for a party to which everyone, whatever their background or aspirations, would accept an invitation. And behind it all was a single man: capricious, controlling and tyrannical, prone to rage, chaos and snobbery, and with no qualification apart from a sense of entitlement bred into him by the English establishment and his innately hedonistic, bohemian spirit. His story, and Mustique’s, suggests that if paradise can be found on Earth, it will have been built on money, geography and, above all, the force of human will.
Mustique was first recorded in the 15th century, when it was seen from afar by Spanish sailors. Two centuries later, pirates used it as a treasure island for hiding ships and spoils. Next came European colonialists, planting sugar cane and giving the island buildings that survive, in name at least, to the present. When the sugar boom ended, Mustique was left to its cows and goats, and a succession of uninterested owners.
That was until 1958 and the arrival of Colin Tennant, the man who made Mustique. Later the 3rd Baron Glenconner, Tennant was a scion of one of the 20th century’s foremost bohemian aristocratic families, nephew of Stephen Tennant, one of the Bright Young People celebrated by Evelyn Waugh, and grandson of Pamela Wyndham, leading light of high-minded society group the Souls. Fortunately, there was also a practical streak in the family, and considerable wealth amassed from manufacturing chemicals that allowed Colin to indulge his aesthetic calling. A restless enthusiast unburdened by self-consciousness or shame, he loved to talk and to stand out from the crowd, exhibited in a taste for vinyl clothes and paper underwear. He saw himself as heir to the Souls and the foundation of Mustique as a continuation of that — “an entirely natural reproduction of certain aspects of my life”. He was at once the best and worst person to create a new society: relentlessly energetic on the one hand but chaotic, arrogant and extravagant on the other. The point, perhaps, is that no one else would have done it if he hadn’t.
Tennant was on a trip to inspect family business concerns on Trinidad when he heard that an island in the nearby St. Vincent group was up for sale. He arranged a tour and, without landing, put in an immediate offer. The three sisters whose family had owned it for the past century, and used it for a little farming and the occasional holiday, were happy to be rid of it. The sum of £45,000 got him the island, replete with all buildings and contents, but it was, as his wife, Anne, pointed out, a terrible investment. For all its wild beauty, there were no roads, little workable farmland, and — despite his father’s stipulation that no purchase should be made without it — no water.
The new lord of Mustique defied the doubters. He built a new village for the small population of locals, freeing up the best site on the island, and a reservoir to solve the water problem. Land managers slowly created an infrastructure, and when one of them burnt down his base, the 18th-century Great House, he commissioned Oliver Messel to draw up a replacement. This renowned theatrical set designer ended up building a further 15 houses on the island, setting an elegant and imaginative architectural template and in the process creating a new colour, Mustique Green.
Tennant had determination but no clear plan. He flirted with growing Sea Island cotton, but produced little more than enough to have Turnbull & Asser make him shirts and pyjama suits. He did, however, possess a talent for publicity. His masterstroke came in 1960, when he offered his old friend Princess Margaret a plot on the island as a present for her wedding to Messel’s nephew Anthony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. Margaret was intrigued and came to survey her new acquisition while honeymooning on the Royal Yacht Britannia. Her first impression was not good. “The island looked like Kenya,” she later recalled, “burnt to a frazzle. We drove down a path, the only road, and sat in the bush whacking mosquitoes.” Snowdon dubbed the island “Mustake” and never set foot on it again, but Margaret kept faith. Tennant continued to build his kingdom, and she returned a decade later. Her lodging was still shockingly basic, but this time she fell in love: “The power went on and off at random. We didn’t care. It was a getaway, a back eddy.”
From then she returned every year for three decades and quickly set about bullying Tennant into building her a house on her plot. This had never been part of the deal, but his patience for her ways was unending, even when she kept moving the marker posts on her plot to extend her territory. The house, Les Jolies Eaux, a pun on the area’s name, Gelliceaux, was finished in 1973. Margaret furnished it with items she had received free from the Ideal Home Exhibition and various porcelain manufacturers. Encouraged by Tennant, she lived on Mustique like a Roman emperor. Rising late each day, she would drop in for a drink at the island’s only hotel, the Cotton House, then make her way to the beach for a picnic and a swim. While she slowly moved through the water, a courtier would be assigned to accompany her so that she had conversation at all times. As she emerged, there would be a basin of fresh water to get rid of sand from her feet. In the evening, she was entertained either by Tennant or another homeowner. Margaret’s paradise was to be off-duty, free to do as she wished away from the public eye, but still attended as royalty. Even when she was staying as a guest in other houses on the island, the owner was expected to bow or curtsey whenever she entered a room.
Queen Elizabeth was another early visitor. Arriving in 1966 on a tour of the West Indies, she found a greeting party of locals in long dresses, morning coats and top hats, all taken from a trunk of old clothes in Tennant’s house. Despite this, and the lack of material comforts, she and Prince Philip enjoyed the rare combination of privacy and sunshine the island granted them. Mustique later became a favourite haunt of Prince William and Kate Middleton, but most of the first inhabitants were merely very smart and very rich, attracted not only by Tennant’s vision and his sales pitch, which involved a grandly theatrical beach picnic and much flattery, but by the tax-free status he’d managed to put in place. The first to buy land was Honor Svejdar, née Guinness, in 1970. Her Messel-designed houses, Clonsilla and Phibblestown, are still intact and owned by the family.
At the time, Mustique still had much of the desert island about it: removed from the hoi polloi, occupied by the extravagantly wealthy, but closer to subsistence living than five-star. Alan Whicker, then in his pomp as television’s globe-trotting reporter of human folly, visited the same year and was shocked, asking Tennant, “We are drenched, eaten alive by mosquitoes. How can you call this paradise?” Even when things improved, it was surprisingly humble. Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the banker turned business manager to The Rolling Stones and a regular visitor, described it as having in the early seventies “the feel of a holiday village on the south coast [of England] or in Normandy”.
Yet they continued to come. Celebrated visitors in the early 1970s included Paul Newman, Raquel Welch, and record label magnates Ahmet Ertegün and Chris Blackwell. Tennant sustained the hype, allowing it to be thought that buyers would be accepted only if they were sufficiently good looking, and telling a story about turning down a man who had been so vulgar as to fly over the island in a helicopter. His biggest boost, after Margaret, came when Mick and Bianca Jagger built a Japanese-style house on the beach at L’Ansecoy Bay, on the north of the island. Their presence gave the island the Studio 54 decadent-society sheen, and an enduring appeal to rock stars. David Bowie was one, building his own villa, a multi-roomed complex in Japanese and Scandinavian styles called Britannia Bay House. It remains one of the most spectacular of the island’s many architectural follies, despite strong competition from Moorish pavilions, French châteaux, American plantation houses and post-modern fantasies. “It’s a whim personified,” he told Architectural Digest. “What you have to realise is that Mustique is a fantasy island.”
This fantasy took many forms, and rumours of wild parties were inevitable and persistent. Already exaggerated by the press’s inability to gain access, they were further provoked by Margaret’s use of the island to conduct her affair with Roddy Llewellyn, unsubtly enough that her husband taunted her with threats to drop in on her. The Labour M.P. Dennis Canavan even complained in parliament about her behaviour: “Here she is, going away with her boyfriend to a paradise island while we are being asked to tighten our belts.” In reality, though life on Mustique was indeed a constant party, that being its greatest attraction, it was more of the country-house variety than the tabloid press might have supposed or wished. The island was small enough and the guest-list self-selective enough to make all present feel they were on holiday together, at a highly exclusive camp. Nights at Basil’s Bar, run by another legendary island figure, Basil Charles, may regularly have turned into days, but the great events still revolved around Colin Tennant. His 50th birthday celebration in 1976 was the culmination of his vision for the island, a week-long pageant for residents and his family that peaked with a Gold Party on Macaroni Beach, replete with gold-sprayed trees and grass and his own grand entrance accompanied by two boys dressed only in gold codpieces.
By the time he celebrated his 60th birthday, however, Tennant was no longer Lord of Mustique. As well as his party, 1976 had also seen the introduction of a service charge for residents, a tipping point for their tolerance of his chaotic and extravagant government. His hand forced, he sold the majority share in his Mustique Company to Hans Neumann, a Venezuelan businessman he trusted to retain the spirit of the island. Tennant stayed on for a decade, keeping a plot on which he had Messel build a new Great House. Constructed around a central dome, this was typically grandiose, and included a white marble pavilion imported from India, where it had been built for the Maharajah of Bharatpur. When Tennant finally left, in the mid eighties, to start all over again in St. Lucia, it was bought by Sergei Kauzov, the former husband of Christina Onassis, who promptly demolished it.
Ordinarily, this act of destruction might have stood as a symbol of the fate of the island — gloriously eccentric aristocratic whimsy crushed by the soulless bulldozer of the global oligarchy — but Mustique has survived. It remains a playground for a gilded but resolutely bohemian elite. With a little over 100 houses, there is still no dock deep enough for a megayacht, and nowhere to land a private plane. As Bryan Adams, keeping up the rock-star quotient in Hans Neumann’s Messel-designed villa, has it, the secret to building a paradise is to make it just big enough. “In St. Barts they’ve turned their island into Saint-Tropez,” he told a rare visiting reporter. “Here, it’s the opposite. We have a little boutique, a little restaurant. That’s the whole idea.” Still the same idea, and still Colin Tennant’s.
Originally published in Issue 56 of The Rake.
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