Duchess of Argyll who fell pregnant at 15, had 88 lovers during marriage and took infamous porn picture has life turned into TV series
Evidence in one of the most shocking divorce cases heard in 1940s Britain included a Polaroid picture of the Duchess wearing nothing but a string of pearls, pleasuring a mystery man in her Mayfair apartment
WEARING nothing but a string of pearls, the Duchess of Argyll is pictured pleasuring a mystery man in the bathroom mirror of her Mayfair apartment.
The blurry Polaroid is just one of many racy snaps found by her husband, who claimed she had taken on an amazing 88 lovers.
Her suitors included Cabinet ministers, Hollywood actors and royals, earning her the nickname “the Dirty Duchess”.
Now her life is to be made into a TV spin-off of the BBC’s award-winning A Very English Scandal, which aired last year.
Executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins claims the Duchess was the first woman to be “slut-shamed”.
She was also subjected to what was then the longest, costliest divorce in British history.
Presiding judge Lord Wheatley called her “a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men”.
The duchess was born Margaret Whigham in 1912, the only child of a Scottish millionaire.
COMPLETELY PROMISCUOUS
Her biographer Lyndsy Spence described her as “a daddy’s girl with an absent father, living with a jealous mother who sought to remind Margaret of her every shortcoming”.
As a young woman, her beauty was renowned in society and she was courted by princes and millionaires.
She was just 15 when the future movie star David Niven, two years her senior, got her pregnant while holidaying on the Isle of Wight.
Her furious father sent her to a London nursing home for a secret termination.
“All hell broke loose,” the family’s cook, Elizabeth Duckworth, later recalled.
As a young woman, the pretty, witty socialite welcomed playwright Noel Coward, actor Cary Grant and oil tycoon J. Paul Getty to her Mayfair home.
Her family may have hoped calmer waters were ahead when she wed US golfer and gambler Charles Sweeny in 1933. Instead, police were forced to seal off roads as 3,000 Londoners tried to gatecrash the wedding.
As Margaret Sweeny, she was immortalised by P.G. Wodehouse in his lyrics to the song You’re The Top, from the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes.
They had three children, though one was stillborn, and divorced in 1947. Several years earlier, she narrowly survived falling down a lift shaft.
In 1951 she wed Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, the third of his four marriages.
After tying the knot at Caxton Hall register office, the Duke took her north to his ancestral seat, posing for pictures carrying her over the threshold into Inveraray Castle.
She later said: “I had wealth, I had good looks. As a young woman, I had been constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired and was included in a ‘Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World’ list.
“‘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.”
They lived in luxury, skiing in St Moritzx, Switzerland, sailing off Nassau in the Bahamas and sunning themselves in the South of France. Fashion designers clamoured to the Duchess, who never rose before 11am, when she would get her daily manicure and pedicure.
But by 1954 the Duke accused her of a string of affairs. Lovers reportedly included US comedian Bob Hope and French singer Maurice Chevalier.
On a warm day in 1958, local lad Michael Thornton, then 17, found himself on the Argyll estate. Margaret offered him a drink and a bath. As he soaped himself in the tub, the Duchess stepped into the bathroom — naked. Her intentions were clear.
By this point, the Duke and Duchess lived separate lives. He got an injunction barring her from the castle — renovated with £100,000 of HER money — and by 1959, divorce proceedings had begun.
The Duke — who referred to his wife as “S” for Satan — blamed their troubles on her affairs, while Margaret said his drinking made life intolerable.
As the Duke pursued his adultery claims, Margaret alleged he was having an affair with her own stepmother. She later withdrew the claim and paid out £25,000 when sued.
The Duke raided her desk in their Mayfair house, convinced he would find evidence of infidelity. He struck gold.
In a diary, days of illicit encounters were marked with a “V”. He also found incriminating letters and 13 racy Polaroid snaps. One showed her naked but for a three-strand pearl necklace, performing a sex act on a lover.
Another was a full-frontal that has come to be known as the “Headless Man” picture, in which she stood naked, facing the camera, next to a tall nude man. His head was out of shot.
Gossip-mongers ached to know his identity and the Duke was required to pose naked to prove the torso wasn’t his.
Names touted included Transport Minister Ernest Marples, German diplomat Sigismund von Braun and her friend Peter Combe.
Duncan Sandys, then Secretary of State for the Colonies and Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, has been named as the man receiving oral pleasure, while film star Douglas Fairbanks Jr was named as the other man.
He denied it. Margaret’s friend Paul Vaughan suggested Sandys was the headless figure, saying: “She did say to me quite clearly that ‘Of course, sweetie, the only Polaroid camera in the country at this time had been lent to the Ministry of Defence’. If that wasn’t running a flag up the pole, I don’t know what was.”
After three years of wrangling, the case was heard over 11 days in 1962. A ruling was delivered in May 1963, with Lord Wheatley granting the Duke his divorce on the grounds of the Duchess’s adultery with Combe.
His horror clear, the judge said: “There is enough in her own admissions and proven facts to establish that by 1960 she was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men.
"She . . . had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities. Her attitude to . . . marriage was what moderns would call ‘enlightened’ but which in plain language was wholly immoral.’’
Lord Wheatley slammed the Duke, who admitted showing erotic photos at a party in New York, but kept his sharpest criticism for the Duchess, adding: “Her explanations were unconvincing . . . she was lying. She seemed a malicious woman.”
Her finances creaking, Margaret opened her 13-bedroom house on London’s Upper Grosvenor Street to tourists but the venture failed. Still regularly rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, she penned a column for Tatler magazine called Stepping Out With Margaret Argyll — but that flopped too.
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In 1978 she sold the house and moved into a penthouse apartment at the nearby Grosvenor House hotel. As the money dwindled, she moved steadily down through the floors.
Some luxuries she clung to. Margaret could not boil a kettle, her stepmother said, so the live-in maid stayed on. So did a parade of poodles. There was another constant, too.
When she died penniless in 1993, aged 80, she had not let on about the Headless Man.
BUT WHOSE HEAD IS IT?
WE may never know the identity of the “Headless Man” in the infamous Polaroid photographs, though candidates include:
WILLIAM H LYONS: He worked for US airline PanAm and is said to have been Margaret’s lover for six years.
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS Jr: Movie star was named as Margaret’s lover in a secret report on the Profumo Affair spying scandal. He and Margaret denied he was the Headless Man.
DUNCAN SANDYS: A 2000 C4 programme “proved” the Tory MP was the Headless Man based on Margaret’s claim the only Polaroid camera in the UK had been lent to the MoD, where Sandys was a minister.
JOHN COHANE: US ad man cited by the Duke as one of his wife’s lovers. Lord Wheatley said he had “the morals of a tomcat . . . a self-confessed wolf”.
PETER COMBE: Ex-press officer of Savoy hotel whose supposed fling with Margaret was key to divorce. But friends said Combe was gay.
SIGISMUND VON BRAUN: German diplomat and brother of Wernher, who invented the Nazis’ V-2 rocket.