The Beryl Markham Mystery
Vanity Fair 01.10.1984

Profile of the aviatrix Beryl Markham who had published, back in her 1942 brilliant autobiography, ‘West with the Night’ about her childhood in Kenya and her solo record breaking flight across the Atlantic. When I met her she was quite old and her memory wasn’t great. She was also quite evasive about her book and I discovered on my visit that it had been written by her writer husband at the time, Raoul Schumacher. Beryl was, par excellence, one of the great Kenya characters: wicked, adventurous, flighty, amorous, tough, ruthless with men and brilliantly funny. In her youth she had been irresistibly attractive to any man who dared to get close to her.

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