Cigareets and whisky and wild, wild women?

More Gay History month material, I hear you ask! - well, how about these two most extraordinary women..?

Marion Barbara 'Joe' Carstairs [PDF] (1st February 1900 – 18 December 1993) was a wealthy British power boat racer known for her speed and her eccentric lifestyle. She usually dressed as a man, had tattooed arms, and loved machines, adventure, and speed. Openly lesbian, she had numerous affairs with women, including Oscar’s niece Dolly Wilde, Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead and Marlene Dietrich.

During WWI she served in France with the American Red Cross, driving ambulances. In 1920, with three former colleagues from the Women's Legion Mechanical Transport Section, she started the 'X Garage,' a car-hire and chauffeuring service that featured a women-only staff of drivers and mechanics. In 1925 she inherited a fortune through her mother and grandmother from Standard Oil. In 1934, Carstairs purchased Whale Cay, an island in the Bahamas where she lavishly hosted guests such as Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Catherine Ruth Baldwin (17 February 1905 – 31 August 1937 [yes, her birthday would have been today, which prompted me to create this post]) was an American-born English socialite, part of the Bright Young Things crowd and a key figure in the “Lesbian Bohemia” of the '20s and '30s.

As Joe Carstairs’ lover and secretary, she spent freely and lived very much for the moment - she even turned the kitchen in the house they shared into a bar. Apart from a prodigious appetite for drink, Ruth Baldwin used both cocaine and heroin, and enjoyed partying and had a penchant for fighting over the multiple women in her life.

She once told Carstairs, “The world is one’s oyster if taken at will.”

When Carstairs purchased her first motorboat, Baldwin gave her a Steiff doll that Joe named Lord Tod Wadley, which became her lifelong totem of good luck.

Joe had clothes made for him in Savile Row and had his name placed with her own on the name plaque on the door of her London apartment at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea. She had him photographed in various tableaux and carried him with her on official business - everywhere but when she was racing her boats, for fear he might be lost.

Carstairs' friends described Ruth Baldwin thus: “She was wild. She was such fun. Ruth, she was really wild.” However her wild life caught up with her, as she died of a suspected overdose at a Chelsea party at the home of Gwen Farrar on 31 August 1937, while her friends, among whom was Dolly Wilde, listened to a boxing match in the next room.

Carstairs was bereft. She crossed the Atlantic from Whale Cay aboard the French liner Normandie, the most expensive ship in the world, and took Baldwin's ashes along with her to Whale Cay, where she built a church to house them. When she sold Whale Cay, she removed the ashes.

When Carstairs died in Naples, Florida, in 1993 at the age of 93, Lord Tod Wadley was cremated with her. Their ashes and those of Ruth Baldwin were buried in Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York.