The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘For me, bizarre was normal’
Mariella Novotny, the queen of 1960s London’s ‘permissive society’, mixed with statesmen, strippers and spies – then vanished
In the dying days of the 20th century I was researching the life of my grandfather, Charlie, a con man implicated in the corruption of Flying Squad officers. During his trial at the Old Bailey in 1978, Charlie alleged he had been set up by a mysterious blonde called Mariella Novotny, codenamed Henry. In court, he claimed: “She is the woman who arranged for the war minister Mr Profumo to be dropped from the cabinet. She gave evidence to the Lord Denning inquiry but that evidence never appeared.”
The judge told him to stand down and stop being silly. A few days later, just as things were beginning to look lively, and names were about to be divulged, Charlie died.
I was intrigued by the idea of Mariella – this shadowy figure, 4ft 7in in bare feet, with a Fabergé lorgnette to make up for her short sight – stalking London’s underworld on the trail of villains and bent coppers. I looked her up, and uncovered the story of a very strange woman – some of this strangeness invented, to heighten her appeal, but most of it tragically very real. Mariella was a 20th-century call girl who pursued literary fame and political notoriety, and who ended her days an agent provocateur, before dying in 1983, on her 42nd birthday, of an overdose.
By the time she was 19, this selfappointed Queen of London’s Permissive Society had already made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. The first time was as a wayward minor in a case of whiteslave trafficking in New York and Washington, featuring the most powerful man in the world, the president-elect John F Kennedy, in December 1960.
“JFK was simply called the Senator,” wrote Mariella. “It seemed quite natural to be taken aside for a quiet talk. He talked about England briefly, but locked the door and undressed as he chatted.” She was believed to be part of a vice ring set up by an alleged communist agent, Harry Alan Towers, who was also a well-known British film producer. FBI officers called it “The Bow-tie Case”; in this guise, Mariella makes a cameo in Javier Marías’s 2016 novel Thus Bad Begins.
Did Mariella really play nurse and patient with JFK while reporting to the Soviet Union? The evidence suggests she did, the other “nurse” being an international call girl, the Chinese-born Suzy Chang. No wonder J Edgar Hoover was in a lather. When the ring was bust, Towers escaped to Moscow. Mariella was kept as chief witness in his trial: “Confident, pretty, with a sense of humour... she looked like a model, not like a whore... she made no great denial of the charges,” was the assistant district attorney’s impression. On May 31 1961, Mariella made her own escape, aboard the Queen Mary. She ate her meals at the captain’s table under the supervision of a CIA agent, who had given her the ticket in the first place. They just wanted her to shut up. But two years later, the young “Monroe lookalike” was receiving rave reviews for a major part in another sex scandal with implications for national security: the Profumo affair.
Mariella’s husband, Horace “Hod” Dibben, was a close friend of Stephen Ward, the osteopath and high society pander at the heart of the Profumo scandal. Hod, who was 56 when he married the 18-year-old Mariella in January 1960, was well known on the orgy circuit that Ward frequented. He dealt in antiques and rubbed shoulders with American millionaires such as Huntingdon Hartford, the A&P supermarket heir, and the movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Hod also had a hand in running the notorious London nightclubs the Black Sheep and Esmeralda’s Barn – the Kray twins’ entry into high society.
Ward, according to Christine Keeler, was fascinated by Mariella. He had never met a girl like her. Unlike his provincial popsies, Mariella had intellectual leanings, an inscrutable air, a haughty bearing and a mysteriously “Eurasian” appearance, with slanting eyes.
And she wasn’t just a pretty face. She spoke of art and antiques; she had flawless taste and manners. Her bedtime reading was Bertrand Russell. She told exotic stories about a runaway communist and a fairytale castle in Prague, where her childhood was spent. In the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the aftermath of war, her portrait, she claimed, was “engraved on the nation’s banknotes, and [her] birthday declared the Czechoslovakian National Day of celebration”. It was hard to remember she was born in Sheffield – which was exactly what she wanted.
Her name was actually Stella Marie Capes. She claimed to be the daughter of a Czech airman and niece to the communist Czech president, but the only thing that is certain is that her mother was a shorthand typist from Coventry. When Mariella was a hat-check girl at the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly in 1959, she told a reporter that her mother had taken her to join her father shortly after the end of the Second World War. At this point Mr Novotny was building up the family estates from his palatial home in Prague. Every day was Christmas, she said, with velvet dresses, parties and riding horses. With the Soviet invasion, Mariella’s uncle, who was a communist, told his anticommunist brother to take his family back to England.
It is possible that there is a grain of truth in this: perhaps she was in Czechoslovakia in 1948. But it is also easy to understand how a lonely girl born to a single mother in a cash-strapped, northern city would invent far-fetched stories. Somehow Mariella was separated from her parents, and washed up in a displaced person’s camp outside Vienna, where she witnessed war crimes – including rape. “My memory is seared by brutal experiences as a child in refugee camps,” she said.
Back in England, a chubbycheeked 16-year-old Mariella made her debut as a topless dancer at the Windmill Theatre in Soho. Soon she was waitressing at Hod’s nightclub, The Black Sheep (which catered to “black sheep from the titled families, because they are the rarest”) but she was so shortsighted that she spilled the goulash, and was sacked. Hod saw her crying, took pity, and proposed. Her engagement ring was a 200-yearold antique, diamond and sapphire. David Bailey was the photographer at the wedding. The cake had 18 tiers coated in marzipan icing, one for each year of her life. It proved to be stuffed with sawdust.
With Hod as Pygmalion, Mariella developed an appetite for extreme and intricate acts of sadism. “The bizarre became normal for me,” she said. She called herself “the Government’s chief whip”. The gambler Lord Lucan and the flying ace and SOE operative Count Manfred Beckett Czernin were just a few who indulged their curiosity.
Lord Astor, too, was a regular weekend visitor to Hod’s 16th-century Sussex mansion, and the couple were often asked back to Cliveden, Astor’s estate, where John Profumo, the war minister, met Christine Keeler, his nemesis. Mariella said she “did not take to” Profumo; when Ward’s friend, Eugene Ivanov – the Soviet naval attaché who was also sleeping with Keeler – mentioned Mariella’s missing Czech father, and hinted that he could assist in arranging a visa to Prague, she realised she “was being set up”. She later wrote that Ivanov “was known for being able to put information on Khruschev’s desk 20 minutes after receiving it”.
In December 1961, Mariella was the hostess of the notorious Man in the Mask orgy – later fictionalised in the film Scandal, with Britt Ekland as Mariella. A clutch of MPs, TV personalities and embassy officials arrived at her flat in Hyde Park
Square, to be greeted by Stephen Ward, wearing just a sock. Everyone else was naked. There was a man strapped between two wooden pillars in front of the fireplace, wearing nothing but a masonic apron and leather mask. “A flail or whip was in front of his naked figure. As each guest arrived they gave him one stroke, then left the man to join the party. When he was released before dining, he was ordered to remain beneath the long table, out of sight.” Mariella was strong on detail but she refused to divulge the identity of the man in the mask – not even in her diaries, let alone for newspapers eager to hear her account.
Mandy Rice-Davies, who arrived later with Keeler, spotted Mariella in bed with six men. “I didn’t know where to look. After all, I was only 17, even if I had been around. I remember spotting this plate of tangerines – they were a rarity in winter in those days – and I attacked those tangerines and some chocolates until I felt sick.”
Lord Denning, when he later came to investigate Profumo, was horror-struck by Mariella and Hod. He wanted to hand-deliver his invitation to them to appear before his inquiry, but was talked out of it by his private secretary, Thomas Critchley, who admitted that his own “curiosity to meet them was immense”. As Critchley put it in his diary: “Hod Dibben was allegedly a man of fathomless depravity in whose hands Stephen Ward was clay... in addition to his interests in black magic he had a tremendous appetite for sex, so long as it was perverted enough.”
What I found in Hod’s records had major implications for the Profumo story, pointing to a network of politicians and gangsters, prostitutes and policemen that would make an enemy of the state’s mouth water. And it was Mariella, according to Espionage, who “blew the whistle on Keeler’s simultaneous affairs with Ivanov and Profumo”. Yet when the bestselling Denning Report came out in 1964, there was nary a word about Mariella. She was furious.
Mandy Rice-Davies arrived at Mariella’s orgy: ‘I didn’t know where to look’
Shortly after the Profumo affair, Mariella encountered a famous safe-cracker-cum-national treasure. Eddie Chapman, aka Agent Zigzag, was England’s most successful wartime double agent – so successful, in fact, that Adolf Hitler himself had awarded him the Iron Cross in 1943. Mariella adored Eddie because, in her words, “he has
never lied about being a conman, a jailbird, an adulterer, blackmailer, traitor, thief or liar”.
Eddie, Mariella and the voyeuristic Hod established a ménage à trois in a 15th-century castle on the outskirts of Rome, nipping in to town to visit Marlon Brando on the set of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. (Mariella thought Brando “overweight and undistinguished”, yet he “came on strong with the superstar attitude”. To show him she was no ingénue, with lorgnette in place, she swept her gaze imperiously down to the screen god’s crotch.)
When the trio were interviewed by French TV, Mariella was asked what she had left behind in England. “Hypocrisy,” she replied, her eyes glinting. In 1964, she had Zigzag’s child. “I look like an angel on the outside. That’s how people see me,” she told Zigzag. “But I am like
a demon inside. I have known all the suffering of the world since I was a little girl.”
In 1969, Mariella was back in west London, and told the Daily Mirror: “The swinging scene was a swinging shadow. I think there will be a much better quality about everything in the next 10 years... The one thing I will not do is write my memoirs,” she fibbed. Instead, she said, she was writing novels.
King’s Road, her first novel, was published in 1971. Written in the Harold Robbins style, it claimed to fictionalise “the high life and low life of London’s turned-on, beautiful people”, flitting between the Chelsea popocracy and the world of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, commander-in-chief of the British Black Panthers (self-appointed “archbishop of violence in this
country”) in Ladbroke Grove. The prose has the quality of a runaway train. Iain Sinclair called it “a trashy docu-novel… written by the Czech ‘model’ and amateur spook, Mariella Novotny… The book features all the usual elements of sex/dope craziness, including lesbian couplings and voyeurism.”
Drugs come up a lot in the novel. Although Mariella denied using street drugs and alcohol, she admitted to a dependency on prescription medication. In Ladbroke Grove, where she researched the Black Power scene, her drug use got dirtier. She saw herself as a reporter, and this was her cover. She also got into politics, and discussed prison reform with the social reformer Lord Longford at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool.
But Mariella was trapped by society’s expectations of her, and by her own addictions to sex, fame, and
now drugs. In 1978 a doctor, Caroline Olsson, revealed details of a lesbian encounter with Mariella that occurred while Mariella was in a detox clinic. Like most of the men who had met her, Olsson had fallen under Mariella’s spell: “She wanted me to be her slave, mentally and physically. But she demanded too much from me.”
In the mid-1970s, when the world was entrenched in the Cold War, I discovered that Mariella was laying waste to a Caribbean prime minister. Two-way mirrors and microphones were hidden in a room at Brown’s Hotel. The call girl turned novelist was now styling herself an agent provocateur. “I can rattle skeletons in many important cupboards,” she said.
There were bungled attempts on her life. In the 1970s, Michael