The last thing Rice-Davies ever did for Ward was to attend an exhibition of his drawings that opened the same day as his trial started. Any money made was to go towards his legal costs, and Ward hoped Rice-Davies coming along would create a buzz and increase sales. Rice-Davies says that Ward’s royal paintings were left unsold until an elderly man in a bowler hat appeared to pay £5,000 in cash for them. Rice-Davies believes the portraits were bought on behalf of the royal family.
After the trial, Rice-Davies found her notoriety a hindrance, and claims in her book that since the Profumo Affair, lots of inaccuracies have been written about her. She received sacks of mail when she was in the headlines and many of the letters were obscene. She was also conned by a publishing company that arranged for her memoirs, entitled The Mandy Report, to coincide with the release of the Denning Report. She never saw a penny of profit for them. It took the Great Train Robbery to push her off the front pages, she says.
Eventually, Rice-Davies worked in cabaret and toured the world performing. She set up home in Israel and set up a chain of clubs and a restaurant in her adopted country. She married and in 1968 had a daughter. She helped the government by promoting tourism, and during the periods of war in Israel, entertained the troops, worked for various charities and raised funds.
Rice-Davies puts her success down to how she has been treated and vilified, as it made her desperate not to fail, and for people to see that and comment on it. Surprisingly, she was probably one of the only individuals associated with the Profumo Affair who didn’t fail. However, the fact that she is known colloquially as ‘Randy Mice-Davies’ perhaps shows the misogyny involved at the time still very much exists.
Rice-Davies was one of the many witnesses in the Ward case who found that if she refused to testify in a way that suited the police, she’d be risking her own liberty. Having refused to give a statement about Ward, Rice-Davies was intercepted at Heathrow as she tried to board a flight to Madrid. The police charged her with possessing a forged driving licence and invalid insurance and was sent to Holloway for a night, highly unusual for such minor charges. With an unusually high bail set, and the police insisting they would find a reason to re-arrest her even if she paid it, she relented and helped with inquiries.
Rice-Davies went to court over her driving charges and was fined £42. She finally headed off to Spain but was arrested again upon her return. This time it was for the alleged ‘theft’ of a TV set she had rented for her Bryanston Mews flat, which she had been unable to enter since Rachman’s death. After she testified against Ward on 28 June, the theft charge was dropped.
Post scandal, Rice-Davies played Maddie Gotobed in Tom Stoppard’s farce Dirty Linen in Oxford. The Oxford Times’s critic Frank Dibb said of her performance: ‘In the pivotal role of the nubile panties-shedding secretary, Mandy Rice-Davies gives a neat, briskly projected and lively performance.’17
Chapter 6
Bill Astor – Destined for Disappointment
Bill Astor’s forefather was a Spanish butcher who settled in Germany in the eighteenth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century, after failing to win as a candidate for the state assembly of New York, a rich descendant, William Waldorf Astor, decided to settle in Britain instead. Three years later, one William Waldorf bought Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster. An Italianate palace, it was set within 400 acres or so of wooded land, perched above a bend on the River Thames.
William Waldorf found acceptance into English society difficult; he had argued with Cliveden’s previous owner, giving the duke cause to talk him down to the Prince of Wales. William Waldorf, however, instead determined to buy his popularity, purchasing horses from the royal stud, and winning the prince over enough to encourage him to visit Cliveden. Later he bought the Pall Mall Gazette to ensure his position, encouraging the writing of ‘society paragraphs’, but compiling a list of exactly who not to include, so they might think better of his powerful discretion.1 Instead of ingratiating himself with the right people by the power of his publication, however, after ordering Sir Berkeley Milne out of a concert he was hosting, and thus upsetting the royal family (Sir Berkeley was in command of the royal yacht), William Waldorf was very much not a welcome member of high society.
In 1906, the house was passed to Waldorf Astor, the first-born son of William Waldorf Astor and Mary Dahlgren Paul. Waldorf had married American divorcee Nancy Shaw that year and Cliveden was their wedding gift. Waldorf Astor entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, and in the following year also took over the Observer newspaper, which his father had also bought. Unfit for trench warfare, Waldorf had to make do with a desk job during the war. When his political career was cut short by his father’s death in 1919, he was forced to move instead to the House of Lords to take up the barony and viscountcy that his father had managed to obtain, which some said was only because he was a generous benefactor to the right charities and political parties.2
Instead, Nancy Astor stood for Waldorf’s office in Plymouth and won, becoming the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons. Although originally thought of as entertaining and intelligent, in 1914 Nancy Astor converted to Christian Science and was also a temperance campaigner. She had six children, her eldest, Bobbie, by her first husband, and then four sons and a daughter from her marriage to Waldorf.
Born in 1907, William Waldorf, known as Bill, was Waldorf and Nancy’s eldest son and due to inherit the Astor family wealth. By all accounts, he was not an indulged child and spent his life trying to appease his difficult mother. According to Knightley and Kennedy, Lady Astor could be a cruel and destructive mother and favoured her son from her first marriage, Bobbie, over Bill. Because of this, Bill Astor was a complex and unhappy person, known to be clumsy, nervous and fidgety.3
Nevertheless, he flourished at Oxford, enjoying polo, hunting and horse racing. In 1932, his father got him the role of personal secretary to Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, who was Chair of the League of Nations’ investigation into Japanese aggression in Manchuria. Japan had invaded the Chinese province in 1931, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, and in February 1932 the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo there. By that October, the Lytton Commission recommended to the League that Manchukuo not be recognised, prompting the Japanese government to withdraw from the League entirely.
This time with Lytton gave Bill Astor an empathy with refugees and displaced persons that lasted a lifetime, says Davenport-Hines.4 He went on to support the Save the Children Fund and the Ockenden Venture, one of the first refugee charities to be set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. He was also personally involved in rescuing refugees in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and fundraising for the cause.
From June 1959 to May 1960, Bill Astor was one of the organisers of the World Refugee Year, an ambitious attempt by the UN, governments and NGOs to increase public awareness of enduring refugee situations and to find solutions such as resettlement or local integration that would improve the lives of refugees around the world, not just in Europe but also in the Middle East, Hong Kong and China. He was also chair of the executive committee of the Standing Conference of British Organisations for Aid to Refugees, which would later merge with the British Council for Aid to Refugees to become today’s Refugee Council.
By 1935, Bill Astor was living in Mayfair and in the Commons as MP for East Fulham. A year later, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the senior Conservative Sir Samuel Hoare, who, like many of the upper classes at the time, was a supporter of ‘appeasement’ towards fascism and the Nazis. Bill Astor also supported the policy, taking his lead from Neville Chamberlain and the previous Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin. It was during this time that the term ‘the Cliveden set’ came into use, which Davenport-Hines says was a derogatory phrase coined by a socialist Sunday newspaper in November 1937 and designed to highlight support for appeasing Hitler.
The next few years were not kind to Bill Astor; his father bequeathed Cliveden and 250 acres of the grounds to the National Trust to avoid death duties (although the family continued to live there) and handed over the editorship of the Observer and 49 per cent of the company’s shares to Bill’s younger brother David. He also lost his seat in Fulham and did not get re-elected until 1951. A year later, his father died, and his political career was over, as he became Lord Astor in his father’s place and moved to the Upper House.
Bill Astor married his first wife Sarah Norton in 1945. After three miscarriages, the couple had a son they named William in 1951. Sarah Norton, however, left her husband for a younger man in 1952, when it appears she was suffering from post-natal depression. A year later, the Astors divorced but continued to co-parent William amicably. After the divorce, Bill Astor moved back to Cliveden, hoping to recreate its glory days as a political, cultural and social hub. He seemed to succeed; monarchs, premiers, ministers and ambassadors were said to flock to the house. According to Ivanov, General Anatoly Georgiyevich Pavlov told him that anything discussed and agreed upon at Cliveden would quickly become Tory policy.5
By 1955, Bill Astor, aged 47, married again, this time to Philippa Hunloke, aged 24, who was Harold Macmillan’s goddaughter. The couple fell pregnant on their honeymoon but had already grown apart by their return. Their daughter was born in 1956 and named Emily. They were finally divorced in June 1960, although Bill had asked his wife to leave Cliveden as early as 1956. It’s thought that the unwelcome interference of a destructive mother-in-law in the form of Nancy Astor was one contributing factor to the end of the union.6
In 1958, Bill Astor met the model and Balmain muse Janet ‘Bronwen’ Pugh while passing New Year in St Moritz. Raised in Hampstead, the third, and last, wife of Bill Astor was the daughter of a Welsh county court judge, Sir Alun Pugh, who had been a successful barrister, and his wife, Kathleen. Bronwen boarded at a school in north Wales, then trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD) as a teacher. The middle-class Bronwen was exceptionally tall and imposing, and given to self-discovery and mystical experiences, later training as a psychotherapist and spiritual advisor, and converting to the Catholic church. Bronwen was also no doubt affected by the deaths of both Erica Pickard, her best friend at CSSD, and her brother David, who was in his thirties when he died.
She had also been a BBC television announcer in 1954, covering the maternity leave of Sylvia Peters, who was famed for her part in the coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Astor and Pugh, who had a twenty-three-year age difference, were married in Hampstead registry office in October 1960. Their first daughter, Janet Elizabeth Astor, was born in December 1961 (Bronwen was pregnant when Keeler caught Profumo’s eye), and their second, Pauline Marian Astor, in March 1964, when the scandal of the Profumo Affair was still raw.
Bill Astor was equal parts playboy, dreamer and businessman, and was desperate to be liked, says Davenport-Hines.7 His association with Stephen Ward, John Profumo, Christine Keeler and, perhaps in particular, Mandy Rice-Davies, afforded him this façade for a while but ultimately put an end to his popularity, however.
Knightley and Kennedy say that Ward thought of Astor as his best friend, which was unsurprising given the two men likely saw each other most weekends and during the week. For Ward, this friendship with a member of the aristocracy meant entry into the London society he admired (and possibly hated in equal measure). In return, when he spent time with Ward, Astor found himself in the titillating world of coffee bars, drinking clubs, bottle parties, stimulating conversation and attractive women not restricted in their behaviour by their place in society.8
Astor met Rice-Davies when she was visiting Spring Cottage with Ward. She says she liked him immediately because he was a kind and generous man, easy to get along with and not at all haughty.9 He did, of course, go on to sleep with her and lend her money! Nevertheless, Rice-Davies said that Bill Astor had inherited the best qualities of each of his parents, including the sense of humour and people skills of his mother. It seems it was this promise of a warm welcome and generous hospitality that meant Cliveden was always crowded, with a constant stream of changing guests. Rice-Davies categorically states it was not the location for orgies, however, since Nancy Astor herself was still in residence and nothing escaped her beady matriarchal eyes.10
Bill and Bronwen were in America when the Profumo scandal first began to break and when the investigation into Ward started. Returning on 12 April, Bill Astor found himself at a police interview with Detective Chief Inspector Herbert and Detective Sergeant Burrows the next day. He was questioned in line with the idea that Ward was procuring girls for him, and accordingly asked if he’d had sex with, and given money to, any partners he’d met through Ward. He told the police he’d given Keeler and Rice-Davies a cheque to cover their Baron’s Court rent, potentially implicating himself in a charge of keeping a brothel, since the girls were, not surprisingly, sexually active in their flat. After this brush with the law, Astor reportedly asked Ward to vacate Spring Cottage immediately.
This must have been a tremendous blow to Ward, who Knightley and Kennedy said was waiting for his friend to return from America in the mistaken belief that Astor would be able to stop the investigation in its tracks.11 As a parting gift to his friend, Astor offered Ward £5,000 to cover his legal fees.
Astor died in 1966, following a heart attack. Many feel he never recovered from the fallout of the Profumo Affair. Many felt he deserted his friend Ward by not speaking up for him at the Ward trial. Rice-Davies, however, said that Astor did offer to speak as a character witness, but that Ward asked his friends not to because he didn’t want to involve them unnecessarily.12 Perhaps it would have been nice if his friends had taken the initiative themselves, regardless of whether Ward asked or not?
After Bill Astor’s death, the family decided they no longer wished to live at Cliveden.
Chapter 7
Harold Macmillan – The Man in Charge, or Not
After his death in December 1986, the British media overflowed with favourable tributes to former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. His official biographer Alistair Horne said, in his second volume detailing the life of the 1st Earl of Stockton, that when he died, the coverage of Macmillan rivalled that of Winston Churchill, with the effusive eulogies coming from as far as France and the US.1 The Independent called Macmillan a ‘Giant of post-war politics’ and the Daily Mail referred to him as ‘Supermac… the Super Statesman’. But at the time of the Profumo Affair, the press wasn’t as kind.
Harold Macmillan was born in 1894 in Cadogan Place, London. His father Maurice was part of the Macmillan publishing house, his mother the daughter of an American doctor. He attended Eton, where he was elected a King’s Scholar, and was an Oxford undergraduate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his family business, he was literary-minded and very well read. Writing in 1989, Alistair Horne describes him as perhaps the most intelligent PM that Britain has ever had, and the cleverest of the twentieth century. He lists Macmillan’s chief characteristics as religious faith, patriotism, humanity, humour, intelligence, mental toughness and courage.2
Macmillan had volunteered for service in the First World War, just twenty months into his student days. Davenport-Hines says understanding the younger Macmillan’s war experiences is essential to understanding the man he became, where his courage was proved but his nerves were left in pieces.3 Like anyone witnessing war, he was profoundly affected emotionally, and he was also left with physical reminders, specifically intermittent pain, a walk that was more of a shuffle and a weak right hand that affected his handshake and writing.4 But being seriously wounded during the war may have helped Macmillan command a certain respect among voters. And it was a badge of honour only Macmillan and one other Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, could claim in three centuries.5
By 1924, Macmillan was the MP for Stockton-on-Tees and was said to be horrified at the unemployment and privation of north-east England, forming a group of Tory MPs lobbying for the region. He was considered progressive and rebellious, resigning the party whip when Baldwin’s government lifted sanctions on Mussolini’s Italy after its invasion of Abyssinia. Macmillan then re-joined the party when Chamberlain took the reins in 1937. He continued to be outspoken and wrote a treatise that criticised Conservative economics, calling them ‘callous and complacent’, instead arguing for a more consensual, corporatist and expansive approach.6
When he became PM in 1940, Churchill chose Macmillan for the role of Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Supply. Macmillan was now 46 years old and apparently already felt he’d left it late to rise much higher in politics. Nevertheless, two years later he took on the role of Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters in Algiers and towards the end of the war headed the Allied Control Commission in Italy. Despite his ultimate success in his later years, illness, mortality and death seem to have deeply affected Macmillan. Horne says Macmillan was shocked by the appearance of Pope John XXIII, who had terminal cancer, when he had an audience with him in February 1963. He was also so moved by the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, who died aged 56 from complications of a lupus flare-up, that he moved the adjournment of the House of Commons out of respect.
Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish in a Westminster church in 1920. He was seven years her senior and they had met while Macmillan was serving as aide-de-camp for her father, the Duke of Devonshire. They had a house in London’s Chester Square and later a Sussex residence. They had four children, one son and three daughters. However, their marriage was not a strong one, and by 1929, Dorothy was involved in an ongoing affair with MP Robert Boothby. Dorothy had hoped to provoke her husband into agreeing to end the marriage by declaring her youngest daughter was in fact fathered by Boothby. But divorce was not an option for Macmillan, who believed it would prevent him from ever entering the Cabinet. Instead, the Macmillans remained married, and Dorothy continued her affair with Boothby until her death in 1966.
In an interesting coincidence, Nancy Astor became involved in the Macmillan marriage in 1932, after Boothby gave Dorothy an ultimatum that they must be married or end their affair. Boothby visited Cliveden for support while Nancy Astor offered Dorothy the use of a property in Kent during the crisis. With her husband refusing to instigate divorce, and Boothby in no position to ruin his political career and financial security by eloping with her, Dorothy was forced to negotiate a compromise agreement with the two men in her life. Macmillan accepted the continuation of the affair, and the lovers would continue, knowing they would never live life as a married couple. Thirty years later, Macmillan would not be in any mood to throw a lifeline to the friends of the son of the very house that had offered support to his wife and her lover.
