Vanished earl chose to walk on the wild side

When the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury walked down the marble steps of the Noga Hilton Hotel on to the spotless pavement of the famous Croisette in Cannes on the evening of November 5, he faced a familiar choice: to turn left or right.

If he had turned right, the tall, 66-year-old English aristocrat would have found himself among boutiques selling Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Fendi, Gucci and Christian Delacroix, where the playboy millionaires of the French Riviera step off their yachts or descend from their Porsches for a new Rolex or diamond necklace.

It is the image that Cannes, city of film stars, festivals and monied sunseekers, likes to present to the world, conspicuously wealthy, cosmopolitan and impossibly glamorous.

But 21 days ago the thrice-married Lord Shaftesbury did not head towards the boutiques where he had been a regular, showering expensive gifts on a succession of girlfriends.

Instead he turned left, up a side street leading from the chic Croisette and into a basement hostess bar or nightclub, a regular habit.

Within 24 hours he had vanished without trace, setting off an international criminal investigation amid a swirl of rumours ranging from a nervous breakdown to murder.

French police said the peer had been in a "fragile" state of mind after a row with his latest girlfriend on the eve of his disappearance, when she threatened to leave him because his once high-rolling lifestyle had become ensnared in the more tawdry attractions of the Riviera.

In the past 30 years Lord Shaftesbury was a regular at some of the most exclusive establishments in Cannes, the cigar room at the Carlton and the bar of the Hotel Splendid, holding court with ex-pats and pan-European high society.

But more recently he frequented a different type of watering hole. With names such as Pandora, Carre Blanc and Le Paradis, they promise "American showgirls". Others advertise "private dances" and "hostess interviews". The hostesses come from Eastern Europe and North Africa. Drinks cost from £15 ($40) up to £300 ($800) for champagne.

This is the seamy side of Cannes, inhabited by bon vivants, chancers and conmen. It is also the world Lord Shaftesbury, born Anthony Ashley-Cooper with an aristocratic lineage that can be traced to William the Conqueror, entered that night for one final time.

One bar owner, who said he spoke briefly to the peer that evening, told the Independent that Lord Shaftesbury seemed preoccupied.

"He was charming, well-spoken and nicely dressed," said the owner. "But he had been coming more regularly, drinking more. He also seemed melancholy. He talked to a few of the girls. But that night I don't think he was interested in anything else other than to talk to them."

The day after, November 6, Lord Shaftesbury left the Noga Hilton, a £130-a-night ($340) glass-and-steel pleasure palace facing the Mediterranean with its own casino and select nightclub, and was seen nearby.

It was the last sighting of the debonair aristocrat, and the start of a mystery that connects the neon-lit hostess bars of the Riviera to the 3640ha family estate in Dorset, where previous earls have changed British society. The first earl founded the Whig Party and the seventh was the Victorian philanthropist who helped to stop child labour in mines.

Some, including the earl's sister, Lady Frances Ashley-Cooper, believe her brother's eccentric nature led him to disappear on a whim rather than in "a tragic ending".

Thierry Bensaude, the Nice lawyer representing the titled environmentalist and patron of the arts, said: "I am hopeful he has come to no harm and will reappear soon. The idea that he has fallen victim to attack does not ring true.

"We would have found his body by now. I think abduction unlikely. He has probably taken himself away for a few days."

Others are less confident. Lord Shaftesbury's mobile phone has gone dead, his bank accounts have been accessed and he usually contacts his family or friends every few days. British police said the peer's Barclaycard had been used to withdraw £200 ($530) in cash in the past week, but they did not know where or by whom.

The saga has sent the French media into a frenzy, spawning reports of his kidnap by Mediterranean gangsters over a 200-year-old family painting to suicide by a man with a complex love life, haunted by money troubles which could not be drowned in alcohol.

The peer owns a house in nearby Antibes as well as a £1 million ($2.6 million) flat in Cannes and a home in Paris, and the inquiry has ranged from East Sussex resort of Hove, where he rented a £500,000 Regency apartment, to the City of London, where a £1000 gift was bought over the phone using the peer's credit card. But the focus remains on Cannes and its nightlife.

In Barracuda, another pick-up spot, the peer was claimed to have steadily drunk large amounts of vodka and other spirits on November 5, provoking a row with his Moroccan girlfriend, Nadia, 33, who has two children. She said the peer planned to marry her.

She told the Nice Matin newspaper: "I argued with him about his night in Barracuda. I told him if he carried on drinking like that, I wouldn't stay with him. I wanted to provoke him, to make him react."

A French police source said: "In the hours before his disappearance, he had been made emotionally fragile by a number of factors. It is possible that just one upset would have been enough to push him to make an insane gesture."

The source said the peer arrived in the Riviera on November 3 after telling Anthony, his 27-year-old son and heir, he wanted to "sort things out" with his estranged third wife, Jamila Ben M'Barek, an Algerian-Dutch nightclub hostess he married in 2002.

Lord Shaftesbury met his wife for lunch in Cannes on November 5. M'Barek, who has said she spoke to her husband of her concerns about the company he was keeping in Cannes nightspots, claimed he had been drinking heavily and complaining of money troubles.

The Eton and Oxford-educated aristocrat, whose fortune has been estimated "in the low millions", speaks fluent French and inherited his title at 22 from his grandfather (his father died when he was 9) and rapidly set about fulfilling the family motto, "Live, serve".

He was a pilot in the Royal Air Force and married his first wife, Bianca Le Vien, in 1966.

She divorced him 10 years later for adultery, and the same year he married Christina Casella, the daughter of a Swedish diplomat. The couple had two sons, Anthony, the heir, and Nicholas.

That marriage ended in 2000. Then came a string of short-lived and expensive love affairs. During his two-year relationship with Nathalie Lions, a 29-year-old lingerie model and former Penthouse nude, he claimed to have spent up to £1 million on gifts, including a £100,000 Rolex watch and an Audi TT sports car, and handed over cheques for £50,000 on demand. The relationship ended in 2002.

The state of the peer's finances were said to be so extreme that Lady Frances had been considering legal action to take control of them.

Doubtless those praying for his safety will bear in mind the words of one ancestor. The 3rd Lord Shaftesbury, in his 1711 treatise, Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, wrote: "The extending of a single passion too far or the continuance of it too long is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery."

 

-INDEPENDENT