My encounter with the ‘Dirty Duchess’

I only once met Marg of Arg, as Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, was known in those days, when I interviewed her for the Sunday Express in l986, but it was a memorable encounter. She was living in a service flat in Grosvenor House with her maid and her poodle, Louis. (Later, when I asked who was the most important person in her life, she nominated Louis, though she did remember to add, as an afterthought, “And my son, of course, though he has his own life to lead.” She didn’t mention her daughter, the Duchess of Rutland, who had not spoken to her for 18 years.) She led me into her study and sat ramrod straight in her silk dress and pearls, with her slash of crimson lipstick and almost geisha-like hairdo, and treated me like an exceptionally stupid housemaid.

By that time, she had spent most of the great fortune left to her by her multi-millionaire father, George Whigham, on a series of unsuccessful lawsuits. At one point she actually sued her stepmother (the second Mrs George Whigham) for adultery with her husband, the duke, but then dropped the case, whereupon her stepmother sued her for libel and won ￡25,000 in damages. Lord Forte let her have the Grosvenor House flat at a discounted rent, but by the late 1980s she was feeling the pinch, and was publishing a book, which was the reason for my interview.

It was called My Dinner Party Book, so I naturally started by asking her advice about dinner parties. The gist was: people first, drink second, decor and everything else last. You must seat everyone according to rank, and if in doubt, you consult the Hon Diana Makgill at the Foreign Office, who “knows the name of the smallest baronet’s smallest son’s grandson”.

None of this seemed to bear any relation to my own experience of giving dinner parties. I was never bothered by where to seat the Lord Chancellor (on your right), but I often had to cope with more mundane problems, such as how do you seat gay couples? Or how do you cater for vegetarians, or what do you do when your one spare man cancels, or one of the guests gets very drunk? The duchess had a brisk response to all such questions. Vegetarians? “They eat what they can.” Spare men? “I always invite three or four extras.” Drunken guests? “It never happens.” Gays? “Must we mention this?”

But then she asked why I kept going on about dinner parties – there was so much else we could talk about. Oh, yippee! Roll on the headless man! But, alas, this was a misunderstanding. It turned out she thought her book was entitled Let Me Entertain You: evidently she had never even seen it, let alone read it. When I handed her a copy, she dashed off to phone her publisher and came back in a somewhat less imperious mood.

The headless man was notorious because he appeared in two Polaroid photographs that had featured as evidence in the duchess’s divorce case in l963. They showed a woman, easily identifiable as the duchess from her pearls and hairdo, giving a blow job to a man. But the photos were cropped so that only his torso appeared and in all the gripping News of the World reports he was only ever referred to as “the headless man”. The duchess swore on oath that the penis in the photos was her husband’s, but the duke testified that it could not be his because his was much smaller, and he underwent a medical examination to prove it.

There were rumours at the time that the headless man was either Douglas Fairbanks Jr or the minister for defence, Duncan Sandys, but years later, Lady Colin Campbell, who was briefly married to the duke’s son, Lord Colin Campbell, and became a friend of Marg of Arg, claimed that he was actually Bill Lyons, an American Pan Am exec who was Margaret’s lover before and during the divorce case. Much less exciting.

The duchess fully expected to win her divorce case and had put on a jaunty red-feather hat to celebrate over lunch with friends in Paris. And then she got a call from a journalist, who told her, “I’m afraid you’ve lost, and the judge has clobbered you.” The judge described her as “a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with -normal relations and had started to indulge in what I can only describe as disgusting sexual activities”. When the duchess heard this, she said: “I knew I was listening to my world disintegrate.” From having been society’s brightest star, she was suddenly a pariah.

The new BBC drama, A Very British Scandal, maintains that the duchess (played by Claire Foy) was a victim of what we would nowadays call slut-shaming, and that if her divorce happened today, the #MeToo movement would rush to support her. I’m not so sure.

Quite apart from her sex life, she was obviously a thoroughly amoral woman. She wrote a series of poison-pen letters, trying to prove that the duke’s two sons by his first marriage were illegitimate. Her plan was to make them bastards and then produce an heir herself.

This was difficult, given that the duke no longer slept with her, but she plotted to send a friend to Venice to adopt a new-born boy while she wore padding pretending to be pregnant, and then on the appointed day she would produce the baby – “Behold, the next duke!” But it didn’t work because the friend refused to co-operate. It would have made a good opera plot, and, in fact, the duchess became the subject of an opera, Powder Her Face (1995) by Thomas Adès, which as far as I know is the only opera ever to feature a blow job.

She was not terribly bright and had little or no sense of humour. She fell out with most of her friends, and even her own daughter. She sued her secretary, her maid, and contested her father’s will for 15 years. She loved seeing her name in the gossip columns, but got upset if any of them mentioned her divorce case. I’d assumed that the reason she didn’t remarry was because she wanted to hang on to her title of duchess, but she told me, no – “Titles don’t mean all that much to me. What I really wanted was a millionaire!” But she never found one, and lived alone in Grosvenor House until she could no longer afford the rent.

Then, her son and daughter moved her into a care home, where a hairdresser came every day to maintain her elaborate coiffure. When she died in 1993, the obituaries rehashed all the juicy details of her divorce case. But, after all, that was what she was famous for.

A Very British Scandal is on BBC One at 9pm on Boxing Day