Redeeming the Duchess of Depravity
She was the dazzling society beauty at the centre of the ‘Headless Man’ court case that scandalised Sixties Britain. But a new movie that retells her gilded life and tragic fall from grace will cast her in a VERY different light
AS LORD Wheatley sat to present his judgment in the oak-panelled Court of Session in Edinburgh that May morning in 1963, you might have heard a pin drop. For months now, the private lives of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, two of British high society’s most prominent members, had played out in the courtroom in excruciating detail.
There had been allegations of extra-marital affairs, break-ins and, most shockingly of all, photographs of a ‘headless’ man – rumoured to be variously a movie star, a senior politician and a former Nazi – in the most compromising of positions. It had become the most scandalous divorce case of the age.
In his four-and-a-half-hour judgment, the judge did not mince his words. ‘The Duchess of Argyll is a highly sexed woman who has ceased to be satisfied with normal sexual activities and has started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite,’ he declared.
‘A completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied by a number of men, whose promiscuity had extended to perversion and whose attitude to the sanctity of marriage was what moderns would call enlightened, but which in plain language was wholly immoral.’
Hundreds of miles away in Paris, the ‘wholly immoral’ woman whose character had just been assassinated in a judgment that would be reported around the world was in the middle of a dress fitting at the exclusive salon of Jacques Griffe.
Upon hearing the news Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, reacted as she did to so many of the brickbats sent her way: she simply ignored it.
The extraordinary tale of the Duchess of Argyll has continued to scandalise and fascinate for almost 60 years.
Hung out to dry by an aristocracy that had once adored her, abandoned by friends and lovers and categorised as a ‘fallen woman’, hers is a story that through today’s more enlightened lens seems almost tragic.
No wonder, then, that her life is finally being adapted for the small screen.
A Very British Scandal will be written by the same team who produced A Very English Scandal, which dramatised the Jeremy Thorpe saga that rocked the British government in the 1970s. It will star Claire Foy, who played the Queen in the first two seasons of The Crown, as the duchess, and actor Paul Bettany as the 11th Duke of Argyll.
‘I’m so excited... to explore through this story how often shame, judgment and controversy surrounds a woman’s sexuality,’ Foy said of the project.
Certainly, there can be few British women in the 20th century who experienced such public shame and humiliation as Margaret, who, as a result of the judgment that day in Edinburgh, never recovered her reputation.
INDEED, the show’s executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins went so far as to describe her recently as the ‘first woman to be publicly slut-shamed’.
How did it all go so wrong for a beautiful, aristocratic young woman who once wrote that she expected her life to be ‘roses all the way’?
The 11th Duchess of Argyll was born Margaret Whigham, in 1912 just outside Glasgow, where her father was head of the international Celanese Corporation, which manufactured man-made fibres. When she was still a baby the family moved to New York, where they lived a life of luxury and privilege.
But Margaret never quite fitted in, and at the age of six her mother whisked her off to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her, astonishingly, as lacking a sense of humour. She also later saw Lionel Logue, King George VI’s speech therapist, who unsuccessfully treated her for a stammer. It was a condition she would struggle with for life. Her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, once told her if she had a stutter she would always be a failure, and Margaret often felt like a disappointment to her.
At an early age she turned to men for validation, becoming pregnant at 15 after her first sexual encounter, with the actor David Niven. He was 17. Her parents covered up the affair and arranged for a termination, but the incident traumatised her.
THE family returned to London and in 1931 Margaret became a debutante, dazzling society with her luminous pale skin, long brown hair and emerald green eyes, and going on to be named ‘Deb of the Year’.
Romances followed thick and fast. There was Prince Aly Khan, whom she promised to convert to Islam for, the married millionaire aviator Glen Kidston (when he died in a plane crash later that year, Margaret was said to have fainted upon hearing the news), and the Earl of Warwick, to whom she was briefly engaged after a six-day courtship. She dumped him a few months later for Charles Sweeny, an American millionaire, whom she married in 1933.
While Margaret became a staple on the London social scene, featured in the newspapers and gained fame for her dinner party conversation, it was not a happy marriage. She was desperate for a child, and suffered eight miscarriages and a stillbirth in her quest to become a mother. The couple eventually had three children, but Margaret found Sweeny a distant husband, more often to be found in a nightclub than the nursery.
In 1943 during a visit to her chiropodist in Bond Street, she fell 40ft down a lift shaft, hitting her head and seriously injuring her back. Sweeny declared the incident had turned her into a ‘nymphomaniac’, and said she was never the same again.
Even though she recovered, the marriage ended in 1947, and Margaret found herself alone in postwar high society, drifting through
a number of love affairs. ‘She did go from man to man,’ her friend Barbara Cartland once said of her.
‘She didn’t have love affairs which lasted a long time.
‘I think men found her rather boring after a time.’
Certainly Margaret had a penchant for the glamorous, frothy side of life. She adored fine clothes and shopped at Dior and Balenciaga. She holidayed in St Moritz and the South of France.
She had inherited plenty of money and maintained a beautiful apartment in Mayfair full of antiques and fine pieces of furniture. Once a week, a man would arrive from Aspreys to wind up the clocks. She met Ian Campbell, then heir to the Dukedom of Argyll, on a train in Paris, and found him dashing and mysterious. She fell for his easy charm and tales of derring-do during the war, and the pair married in 1951, by which time he had inherited the title. Life, she thought, was perfect, and she settled into her role as duchess, and as chatelaine to the stunning family seat, Inveraray Castle.
‘I had wealth, I had good looks,’ she wrote.
‘As a young woman I had been constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired, and was included in the Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World list. I was also mentioned by Cole Porter in the words of his hit song You’re the
Top. The top was what I was supposed to be. I had become a duchess and mistress of an historic castle. Life was apparently roses all the way.’ The future, however, proved to be far thornier than she could ever have imagined.
While much has been made of the duchess’s infidelity, it was the duke who, even from the early days of their marriage, sought comfort elsewhere. He visited brothels in Paris (where he would often pay using Margaret’s money) and abandoned her for weeks on end to court other women.
He owned a huge collection of pornography and was said to have taken his first wife, 18-year-old Janet Aitken, daughter of Lord
Beaverbrook, to a Parisian brothel on their honeymoon, informing her: ‘You have a lot to learn.’
Margaret, bored and lonely, retaliated, and is rumoured to have had affairs with several local men in Inveraray, as well as Bob Hope and the actor Maurice Chevalier.
The couple drifted apart and began living separate lives. But the duke, conscious of his own reputation being besmirched as a cuckold, could not cope with his wife’s infidelity. He even barred her from Inveraray Castle, despite the fact that she had sunk £100,000 of her own money into renovations.
Matters came to a head when he hired a locksmith to break into his wife’s Mayfair home. Inside he found the notorious Polaroid photographs, which featured a man on his own engaged in a sex act, and others picturing the duchess naked save for a string of pearls with a male companion. The man’s head had been cut off in each picture. There was also a diary detailing some of her various dalliances.
The evidence formed the bedrock of the divorce case at the Court of Session, and names flew as all of society speculated on the headless man’s identity. Could it be the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jnr?
Or Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Defence and son-in-law of Winston Churchill who, at the time, was said to be the only man in Britain in possession of a Polaroid camera? Or even the former Nazi Sigismund von Braun? The duchess wasn’t saying.
Recently, author Lyndsy Spence, who wrote a biography of the duchess, The Grit in the Pearl, suggested the mystery man was an American millionaire named Jim Thomas, to whom Margaret was briefly engaged following the collapse of her first marriage.
Lady Colin Campbell meanwhile, claimed that the duchess (her former mother-in-law) had told her it was actually Bill Lyons, a Pan Am executive with whom she conducted an affair.
DURING the court case the duke also presented a list of 88 men Margaret had reportedly slept with during their relationship, which included two government ministers and three members of the Royal Family.
Was it all true? It scarcely seemed to matter, after Lord Wheatley’s damning judgment.
‘In many ways, Margaret was one of the first Me Too victims as her husband stole her personal property and used it to violate her in court,’ says Spence.
‘Producing those pictures and ruining her reputation was a horrific thing to do. It should never have been allowed to happen.
‘As a divorcée, she was portrayed as a mentally unstable villain and cast out. She was viewed as a freak show.’ Margaret had also lost much of her money in the case. She never married again, although she did have other lovers, and in the 1970s moved into a suite in the Grosvenor House hotel, where she would entertain guests, briefly wrote a column for Tatler and owned a succession of pet poodles, all named Louise XIV.
She was eventually evicted from the Grosvenor in 1990 for unpaid bills and spent her final days in a nursing home in Pimlico. One writer who visited her before her death in 1993 said that ‘like a lot of those society women, she could never accept when she was wrong’. How strange then, that now, history might well regard her as having been right all along.