He was ‘Gorgeous Georgie’, the pin-up Prince of Hearts who wooed the ladies during the Roaring Twenties.
And she was Kiki, known as The Girl with the Silver Syringe, a crazy, evil and dangerous woman to know. She was also the love of his life.
Tall, dark, shapely and uninhibited, Alice Gwynne came from the legendary Vanderbilt family, the equivalent of American royalty. He lived in Paris and became part of the wild crowd that gathered at Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith’s jazz club in the Pigalle district.
Prince George, son of King George V and younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI, arrived in the city after he and the Royal Navy separated. George claimed that he was forced to leave his position as a lieutenant because he was suffering from motion sickness.
The admirals saw things differently. They were also fed up with George’s bad behavior and general disregard for the rules.
Soon, the wayward royal would be forced to take on a much more mundane role – inspecting factories in industrial England – but for a few brief weeks he had the opportunity to relax and have fun away from his father’s disapproving eyes and ears.
There was a strong American contingent in Paris in the 1920s, made up of artists, models and writers, and from this bohemian crowd Alice Preston stood out. She had recently acquired a nickname due to her resemblance to the model Kiki de Montparnasse, companion of the poet Jean Cocteau and famous drug addict.
Prince George in a second lieutenant’s uniform. He spent fourteen years in the Navy.
Tall, dark, shapely and uninhibited, Alice Gwynne came from the legendary Vanderbilt family, the equivalent of American royalty.
Prince George, Duke of Kent in San Francisco, California in 1928
Her husband, Jerome Preston, was wealthy and, like his spouse, a party animal; one person who knew him described him as “untamed.”
Like her Montparnasse namesake, Kiki Preston became addicted to drugs and was introduced to Prince George.
Not long after they became lovers, the Prince was ordered to return home. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her. “Come to London,” George pleaded. And Kiki went to London.
Word soon spread that the royal was taking cocaine and morphine, provided by his girlfriend. He was visited by representatives of the king and told in no uncertain terms to leave Britain and not to return.
George was taken to the country house of his elder brother, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor), which adjoined the Windsor estate. Under his watchful eye, George quit drugs.
His father gave him one last warning and told him to find a suitable wife. In a surprisingly short space of time, he chose Princess Marina of Greece, who for several years had unsuccessfully placed her hat on the Prince of Wales.
Shortly after their engagement was announced, Prince George and his fiancée, Princess Marina of Greece, posed for the Mail in the garden of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia.
George was told to find a suitable wife. He is pictured, far right, with his fiancée, Princess Marina of Greece, and his brother, the Prince of Wales, second left, in 1932.
Prince George married Princess Marina of Greece on November 29, 1934 at Westminster Abbey.
They married in 1934. But for George, Kiki Preston remained the love of his life.
Following the elegant Parisians as they drift towards the warmer climes of Africa, Kiki and her husband Jerome built a house on the shores of Lake Naivasha, in the heart of Kenya’s Happy Valley. Among his new friends were Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, the five-times-divorced Lady Idina Sackville, the drug dealer Frank Greswolde Williams, and the socialite and later murder suspect Alice de Janzé.
By now, Kiki’s drug use had become brazen, openly shooting up at parties and happily living up to her nickname “The Girl with the Silver Syringe.” Meanwhile, back in London, Prince George had settled into his marriage, which turned out to be a surprising success.
It was whispered that during their time together, Kiki had given birth to George’s son. In 1926, a boy named Antoine Karslake (later known as Michael Canfield) was born secretly in Bern, Switzerland, and adopted by a New York publisher.
The two never lost touch. When war broke out in 1939, Kiki returned to her New York home while George changed into an RAF uniform. And when the prince visited President Roosevelt in 1941 at his New York residence, he found the opportunity to contact his forbidden love.
Between them, they hatched a plan to help George’s brother-in-law, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, the former regent of the Balkan state who had been interned by the Allies on suspicion of Nazi collaboration and placed under house arrest in Kenya.
The house where Paul was imprisoned at Lake Naivasha was in such poor condition that it was feared he might commit suicide. So George and Kiki arranged for him to be moved to nearby Preston’s, the lake house she still owned, where the prince and his wife, Princess Olga, spent the rest of the war in comfort.
A year after that meeting in New York, George died in a mysterious plane crash in Scotland, the circumstances of which have never been fully explained. It was a devastating blow for Kiki, who, having been widowed in 1937, was now holed up in a New York hotel with her mother.
Alice ‘Kiki’ Preston, third from right, at the Palm Springs Desert Inn marking the premiere of The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938
Josslyn Hay, later Earl of Erroll, and his wife, the former Lady Idina Sackville. Five-times-married Idina gained notoriety as part of the Happy Valley set
George died in a mysterious plane crash in Scotland, the circumstances of which have never been fully explained. It was a devastating blow for Kiki.
In January 1941, his friend the Earl of Erroll had been murdered in the famous (and still unsolved) White Mischief case. Shortly after, her friend Alice de Janzé shot herself by shooting herself in Kenya.
His grief was compounded by the death of his son Ethan Allen, 25, killed during the Normandy landings on D-Day.
On December 23, 1946, Kiki jumped from the fifth floor of the Stanhope Hotel in New York and died at the age of 48.