An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (15 page)

There was confusion among journalists and the public between ‘model girls’, as Bronwen Pugh and her colleagues were then called, and ‘models’, as young women were euphemistically docketed when they appeared in newspaper reports of divorce or criminal cases. Anne Cumming-Bell led the way for socially ascendant ‘model girls’ by marrying the Duke of Rutland in 1946 (newspapers still calling her ‘a mannequin’ and reporting that she had always insisted on appearing fully-clothed); Norman Hartnell’s ‘model girl’ Jane McNeill married the future Duke of Buccleuch in 1953; Fiona Campbell-Walter married Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1956; Anne Gunning Parker married Sir Anthony Nutting in 1961. Dior’s muse Jean Dawnay married a major in the Welsh Guards, Prince George Galitzine, in 1963. These, however, were the rare, publicised exceptions. Many model girls acquired husbands who earned less than themselves. They were unable to save because of the enormous outlay required in shoes, nylons, hats, bags, gloves, cosmetics and hair-dos.

Fiona Campbell-Walter met Heini Thyssen on a St Moritz train rather as Astor and Bronwen Pugh met in the same ski resort. Thyssen wooed her with a Ford Thunderbird, and married her post-haste. ‘He had the fastest plane, the best motor car, the most precious paintings,’ she is supposed to have said; ‘of course he had to have the most beautiful woman.’ She was the third of Thyssen’s five wives. Talking about her later, with the smugness of a lifelong womaniser, he said: ‘She wasn’t very intelligent but she would talk endlessly in that wonderful dark brown voice of hers. One day, when we were driving, she asked me a question and I didn’t answer. I said: “You’ve got such a sweet charming voice, you can’t expect me to listen to what you’re saying as well. Just talk to me”.’ Thyssen lusted after Campbell-Walter, although he ungallantly said that she looked better dressed than nude. ‘When it comes to women,’ he philosophised, ‘one should not fall madly in love, travel with them, trust or spoil them. One should, however, show jealousy. Women like that.’
³⁰

Astor was Thyssen’s antithesis as a suitor. Between his first luncheon with Bronwen Pugh, and their next, months later, she underwent an unheralded mystical experience which filled her with joy. She read
The Phenomenon of Man
, by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, discovered St Theresa of Avila, and felt transformed. Astor’s first words on seeing her again were: ‘You’ve changed, what is it?’ Soon he was head over heels. ‘I got a shock,’ he wrote after watching her on a catwalk, ‘as I had always imagined you at work as lovely and gay, and I was knocked off my emotional perch when you looked cold and aloof.’ Unlike Thyssen, he appreciated his fiancée’s talk. ‘The extraordinary thing about you,’ he explained, ‘is that your mind has survived the chicken chatter of the
cabine
for so long, remaining lively, enquiring, and deep.’
³¹

They married at Hampstead register office in October 1960. When news of the impending marriage seeped out the night before, her parents were hounded by journalists. On the wedding day reporters crowded a pub opposite the gates of Cliveden buying rounds in the hope that drinkers would help them to concoct a juicy quote. Dorothy Macmillan, aunt of both Bill’s second wife and his first wife’s ex-fiancé, had the impertinence to show her disapproval of an ex-model viscountess when she met Bronwen Astor.

The newly married couple were united by humour. He liked boyish practical jokes, while she had a jolly-hockey-sticks sense of fun. She described herself as light-hearted, but not particularly amusing, and Bill as a serious-minded man who liked to be playful. Grey Gowrie, whose grandmother gave the new Lady Astor the nickname of ‘The Pencil’ because she looked so long and thin, recalled: ‘Bill was suddenly bubbly and looked so happy. And she had real energy. “Come on, let’s do this, let’s have fun,” she used to say. She was so much better for him than one of those conventional upper-class wives … she gave him back a feeling of being alive.’ There were charades, guessing games, songs at the piano as entertainment for guests after dinner. The women sat in groups discussing their children, dogs and horses. Bronwen Astor liked to embroider. There were no erotic carousals.
³²

Many middle-class women, who were expected to abandon their working lives on marriage, were relieved to become the subordinate partners who did not have to take full responsibility for the future. Some found fulfilment playing new roles that were supportive and secondary to their husbands. Bronwen Astor, as the wife of a lordly Croesus, had to accept his settled ways more than most women. Some of her husband’s Cliveden guests were condescending towards her because she was not upper class (‘the class system was much stronger then’, she recalled). Bill Astor, who disliked the way she pronounced ‘round’, tried to teach her to say ‘rauwnd’. She felt socially precarious. Her biographer likened her position to that of a junior partner joining a well-established firm: she had to move discreetly to win acceptance.
³³

Bronwen Astor felt as disempowered by Cliveden’s traditions and staff as Maxim de Winter’s second wife in Daphne du Maurier’s novel
Rebecca
, after moving into his great house Manderley. The household staff in 1960 comprised a chef, assistant cook, butler, valet, housekeeper, laundry maid, sewing maid, three housemaids, two footmen, two secretaries, two stable-hands, two chauffeurs, two carpenters, a night-watchman, a handyman, and eight gardeners. In 1965, shortly before his death, Astor estimated that it cost £40,000 a year to run Cliveden. Everything was already the way that he wanted. His young wife shifted a sofa, replaced some curtains and attempted to make her clothes fill the spacious wardrobes in her dressing room. Her lady’s maid, who had come from the Duchess of Roxburghe at Floors Castle, was mortified by how few dresses the new Lady Astor owned. The maid laid out the clothes that she judged should be worn each day by her mistress, who had no choice in the matter; but soon left Cliveden declaring that she could not work for a woman who did not know how to behave. The chef resigned when Bronwen Astor visited the kitchen to discuss the day’s menus, and opened the refrigerator to see what was inside; Bill Astor pacified the man’s outrage, and she had to apologise.

Nicky Haslam, who had been Bronwen Pugh’s walker, recalled visiting the Astors around 1962:

We turned in to the gates of Cliveden [and] … circled a vast fountain, its cavorting creatures carved of meat-pink marble, before the last long stretch of drive to the palatial facade. The new Lady Astor, wearing an unusually shapeless mustard-coloured country suit, met us in the vast pseudo-baronial hall. It was strange to see her pouring tea amid tables bearing publications like the
Farmer and Stockbreeder
, and the
Tractor News
, rather than
Jardin des Modes
or
L’Officiel
… However rich the Astors, however grand and gilded the Cliveden salons, however
luxe
the food served in them, the upstairs arrangements were curiously Spartan … single gentlemen’s quarters were narrow bedrooms off school-like corridors, not very near a huge communal washroom, and far above the main rooms. The hard mattress in my room did not, however, stop me having a little rest before dinner. I slept through the dressing gong. A footman was sent to wake me, and I hit the dinner table just as an elaborate
soufflé
was being brought into the astonishing blue-and-gold French
boiserie
’d dining room. Bronwen motioned me to my place … and I was relieved to find the
soufflé
was the
entrée
rather than the pudding. I hadn’t entirely blotted my copybook in this aristocratic, ruling-the-country company.

The next morning Bill Astor took us to meet a friend who had a cottage on the estate. His name was Stephen Ward. Within a few months the scandal of his trial and suicide was to bring irredeemable sorrow into Bronwen and Bill’s marriage.
³⁴

FOUR

Doctor

In the spring of 1960, Randolph Churchill, son of the wartime Prime Minister, ricked his back while lifting a bundle of snowdrops out of his shooting brake. Physicians examined him, radiologists x-rayed him, pharmacists supplied analgesics, but he remained in acute pain. Finally he resorted to an osteopath, who diagnosed his trouble in five minutes and cured it in ten. ‘Osteopaths,’ Churchill wrote in his
News of the World
column, ‘do not make extravagant claims for themselves and do not guarantee cures; but the best of them think that they can be of some help in nearly every ailment and disease save tuberculosis and cancer.’ He criticised the General Medical Council which, ‘like the Boilermakers Union, is a closed shop, and would like to keep the nation’s illness in their own hands whether they can cure it or not’. Churchill’s story drew nearly 300 letters from patients praising osteopathy and another ninety enquiring about the practice.
¹

The principles of osteopathic medicine had been founded in the 1870s by a doctor on the American frontier called Andrew Still. All diseases, according to Still, result from abnormalities in or near the joints: the body contains natural antidotes, which can use the nerves and bloodstream to cure physical diseases, but these antidotes are nullified if the skeletal framework is distorted. Still’s cures were based on manipulation of what he called ‘lesions’ in bones, muscles, joints, ligaments caused by injury, infection, physical strain or nervous stress.

England’s pre-eminent practitioner of osteopathy, Herbert Barker, acquired a busy practice in London by calling himself a ‘manipulative surgeon’ rather than using the old title of bonesetter. He accepted that surgery, anaesthetics and medicines were required to treat many conditions, but succeeded in helping hopeless patients whom orthodox surgery had failed. Although Barker was denounced as a quack by the medical hierarchy, which insisted that the healing arts were the exclusive prerogative of people who had undergone training in teaching hospitals, a grateful nation gave him the accolade of knighthood in 1922. ‘He had the gift of healing,’ it was written after his death. ‘He believed firmly in himself, he exuded confidence, and his personality was striking. He willed his patients back to normal life, and he did not leave them alone until they were cured.’
²

The British Medical Association resented osteopathy’s claim to be a separate science, and defeated the osteopaths’ application for statutory recognition in 1935. Hospitals would therefore not appoint osteopaths to their staff, and there was no free osteopathy available under the National Health Service. Instead, a voluntary register of osteopaths was established (with 300 names by 1960). Established practitioners had more fee-paying patients than they could manage. Physicians sent cases of fibrosis, neuritis, sciatica, slipped disc, frozen shoulders, locked ankles, arthritic knees, backache, tennis elbow and flat feet to osteopaths. The patients, after undergoing manipulation and paying their fees, reported good results.

Osteopathy became a modish form of cosseting. Lady Brenda Last in Evelyn Waugh’s novel
A Handful of Dust
(1934) went up to London from her husband’s gothic seat ‘for a day’s shopping, hair-cutting or bone-setting (a recreation she particularly enjoyed)’, and planned her adultery with a second-rate snob while lying ‘luxuriously on the osteopath’s table, and her vertebrae, under his strong fingers, snapped like patent fasteners’. Barker felt that many diseases or pains had an element of temperament, nerves, diet or habit in their cause, and therefore urged osteopaths to foster close practitioner-patient relationships: every patient ‘must be treated as a personality and not as a “case” – every treatment being different because every patient is different’.
³

Stephen Ward was attracted by the osteopathic tradition of cultivating personal contacts with patients. He aspired to Sir Herbert Barker’s influence, although like Barker’s his skills were excluded from the medical mainstream. His position was that of a gifted, ingratiating outsider.

Ward was born in 1912 at Lemsford vicarage in Hertfordshire. The village of Lemsford stands on the edge of the park surrounding Brocket Hall, then the country seat of a Canadian railway millionaire called Lord Mount Stephen. Ward was the middle of three sons of a country clergyman who had married the daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner. There were coronets in the remoter branches of his family. On his mother’s side he was descended from Irish lords called Castlemaine. The traveller Wilfred Thesiger, himself the heir-presumptive of Lord Chelmsford, was his first cousin. Ward attended a public school called Canford, newly opened in 1923 in a sprawling Dorset house which had been the seat of Lord Wimborne. The school’s Latin motto
‘Nisi dominus frustra’
could be irreverently translated as ‘Without a Lord everything is in vain
’
, which might have suited Ward in certain moods.

Instead of an English university after Canford, Ward went abroad (like Bill Astor) to improve his foreign languages. He was in Hamburg in 1929–30, where he did translation work for the local office of the Shell Oil Company, and then worked as a Paris tourist guide to fund his French lessons. In 1934 he went to study at the osteopathic training school which had been established forty years earlier at Kirksville, Missouri. This interest in osteopathy may have been spurred by his father’s lifelong spinal affliction, which gave him the look of a hunchback. Stephen Ward’s qualifications entitled him to practise as a physician in the USA, but were not recognised by the British Medical Association. Henceforth he used the prefix of doctor. (At his trial the prosecution addressed him with wintry scorn as ‘
Doctor
’, as if the title were bogus.)