Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll
Ethel Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll , née Whigham , divorced Sweeny , (born December 1, 1912 in Newton Mearns , Renfrewshire , Scotland , † July 25, 1993 in London ) was a prominent member of British society. She became known through the process of her divorce from her second husband Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll , in which suggestive photos played an important role.
Childhood and youth
Margaret Whigham was the only daughter of Helen Mann Hannay and George Hay Whigham, a Scottish self-made millionaire who was CEO of Celanese in the UK and North America . She was born in Scotland, but grew up in New York for the first 14 years of her life , where she attended the private Hewitt School . As a child she stuttered easily.
After entering society, Margaret Whigham's striking beauty was soon on everyone's lips. Her first lover is said to have been actor David Niven . Love relationships followed with Prince Aly Khan , the millionaire and pilot Glen Kidston and the publishing heir Sir Max Aitken . In 1930 she was introduced to society at the British royal court in London and was considered the debutante of the year .
Shortly thereafter, she announced her engagement to Charles Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick . However, the wedding did not take place because they are in Charles Sweeny , a US Amateur - golfers had made wealthy family, in love.
In October 1931 the Daily Express reported on Margaret Whigham regarding the consequences of the Great Depression :
“As an example to the girlhood of Britain, the lovely Margaret Whigham has decided, in the interests of economy, to have her hair re-set only once a fortnight in future, and to stop wearing stockings in the evening. On the other hand, to stimulate trade, she has just bought four new evening dresses. "
“As a role model for British girls, the lovely Margaret Whigham decided, in the interests of the economy, to only have her hair done every 14 days and to stop wearing silk stockings in the evening. On the other hand, in order to boost trade, she has just acquired four new evening dresses. "
First marriage
Margaret Whigham and Charles Sweeny married in London in 1933 after she converted to Roman Catholic for him . The public attention for the wedding ceremony at Brompton Oratory and curiosity about her three-and-a-half-meter train wedding dress by Norman Hartnell , worth £ 15,000, which 30 seamstresses had worked on for six weeks, was so great that Knightsbridge traffic for three Was blocked for hours. The Sweeney couple had three children: in 1933 a daughter who was stillborn, in 1937 Frances Helen, who married Charles Manners, 10th Duke of Rutland in 1958 , and in 1940 a son, Brian Charles. The marriage was divorced in 1947, but the former spouses remained on friendly terms. Margaret Sweeny had numerous love affairs as a result, including one with the married George, 1st Duke of Kent .
In 1943 Margaret Sweeny fell into a deep elevator shaft and suffered a fractured skull, which almost cost her her life. After her recovery it turned out that she had not only lost her sense of taste and smell , but had also become sexually insatiable after observing acquaintances, which resulted in a further intensification of her previous love life.
After the end of their first marriage, Margaret Sweeny was briefly engaged to a banker from Texas , Joseph Thomas of Lehman Brothers , but who called the engagement because he had fallen in love with another woman. She had a serious relationship with Theodore Rousseau , the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , whom she later remembered as highly intelligent, witty and self-confident to the point of arrogance . This relationship was discontinued because, according to Margaret Sweeny, Rousseau would not be suitable as a stepfather of her two children if the two continued to meet from time to time.
Second marriage
On March 22, 1951, Margaret Sweeny married Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. It was the third marriage of Campbell, who always married rich heiresses.
Ian Campbell had inherited the Duke title in 1949 from his cousin, along with Inveraray Castle , which was extremely costly to obtain. His first marriage was reported to have taken his wife, Janet, to a Paris brothel on her honeymoon to “train” her. While on a cruise, she discovered that her husband had stolen her jewels to pay off his gambling debts. From 1940 to 1945 he was in German captivity . While he was still married to his second wife, he proposed marriage to Margaret Sweeny ten days after he met her.
Margaret Sweeny first visited Inveraray Castle in June 1950 and was delighted with the building. When her future husband asked for money to renovate the castle, his future father-in-law lent him 250,000 pounds , but had the duke sign papers with which he pawned valuable furnishings of the castle. She herself later stated that she had taken on additional living expenses for her husband, e.g. B. the school fees for his children from the second marriage. Alan Nicol writes that the Duchess, who was used to being cared for by her father, was deeply unsettled by the failure of her first marriage and that her slight stutter intensified after the divorce. In addition, she was unsettled that her predecessor Louise was the mother of two of the duke's sons. Campbell himself evidently took pleasure in reinforcing her insecurity through his behavior, e.g. B. publicly exposed.
The Duchess wrote about this marriage in her memoir
“I had wealth, I had good looks. As a young woman I had been constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired, included in the Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World list, and mentioned by Cole Porter in the words of his hit song You're the Top . The top was what I was supposed to be. I had become a duchess and mistress of an historic castle . My daughter had married a duke. Life was apparently roses all the way. "
“I was rich, I looked good. As a young woman I had ever photographed, you wrote about me, caressed and admired, I was on the list of the ten best-dressed women in the world, and Cole Porter had me in his song You're the Top (dt. You're tip ) sung about. The top , that was me. I had become a duchess and mistress of a historic castle. My daughter had married a duke. Life was obviously rosy. "
However, after a few years this marriage led to numerous hostile incidents and accusations between the spouses. The Duchess accused her husband of drinking, violence and theft of personal property, among other things, while her husband accused her of infidelity from 1954. On the other hand, the Duchess is said to have tried to prove that her husband's sons from his second marriage were not his own. She wanted to adopt a Polish boy who was to inherit her husband; she herself had several miscarriages.
The Duchess eventually claimed that her secretary, Yvonne MacPherson, widow of one of the Duke's regimental comrades, was spying on her and providing the press with details about her personal life. Mrs. MacPherson therefore sued her for defamation; she was awarded £ 7,000 in damages. The Duchess didn't cut a good figure in the process: she tried to convince friends to lie for them and appeared arrogant. At the same time she fell out with her daughter, the Duchess of Rutland, because she wanted to raise her children not Catholic but Anglican .
The divorce
In 1959, the Duke of Argyll filed for divorce, and in 1963 a high-profile divorce case that lasted eleven days and was publicly pursued by the British nation, which had just been shocked by the Profumo affair . The Duke of Argyll submitted 13 Polaroid photos to the court , which were hand-lettered and showed the Duchess naked, but with her typical three-strand pearl necklace. His daughter had stolen these photos from her apartment in London along with the diaries of the Duchess in her absence. Among them was a photo of the pearl-wearing duchess practicing fellatio on a naked man whose face could not be seen. The headless man was believed to be Secretary of Defense Duncan Sandys , the son-in-law of Winston Churchill . Therefore, Lord Denning , who had also investigated the Profumo affair, was commissioned by the government to identify the headless man . Sandys denied being that man, but resigned from his position as Secretary of Defense, but was reappointed to a ministerial office three years later. The Duke presented the court with a list of 88 men who were supposedly lovers of his wife, including two members of the government and three members of the royal family. Bob Hope , Maurice Chevalier , men from the neighboring village of the castle were named, and she is also said to have seduced young men who could have been her sons.
According to the judge, the Duchess indulged in "disgusting sexual practices". Lord Denning compared the handwriting used on the photos with that of five men, Duncan Sandys, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. , John Cohane, an American businessman, Peter Combe, a former employee of the Savoy Hotel , and that of Sigismund von Braun , a brother of the German scientist Wernher von Braun . Long married to his second wife, Fairbanks was believed to have done the captions, but the result was not made public. The Duchess, in turn, stated that her husband had a sexual relationship with her stepmother, her father's second wife, who was a year younger than herself.
In his verdict, the presiding judge Lord Wheatley said that the evidence had shown that the Duchess of Argyll was “a thoroughly promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied by several men” (“was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men "). It took four hours to read the divorce decree and it was 50,000 words long, making it the longest in Scottish legal history. In the tabloids, the Duchess has now been dubbed the Dirty Duchess .
In 2000, Channel 4 aired a documentary allegedly showing that Sandys was the headless man while Fairbanks was capturing the photos. The Duchess herself gave the hint with her testimony that there was only one Polairod camera in the country at the time and that it belonged to the Ministry of Defense.
Later years
Margaret Campbell wrote her memoir, Forget Not , which was published in 1975 and received poor reviews. A review read: "Her father may have been able to give her some fine ear-rings but nothing to put between them" (Eng. "May be that her father was able to give her beautiful earrings, but there is nothing in between ”). In 1979 she took over a gossip column in the Tatler , but failed after a short time because she misspelled the names of those involved and their stories were boring.
Her fortunes had declined and the Duchess eventually opened her apartment at 48 Upper Grosvenor Street, which had been furnished for her parents in 1935 by the renowned interior designer and former wife of William Somerset Maugham , Syrie Maugham , to paying visitors . Even so, at the time of her death, she was impoverished due to her extravagant lifestyle, although her first husband Charles Sweeny had also taken on and paid debts from her.
The duchess's father had secured his fortune in such a way at an early age that his daughter could not get hold of the money easily. After his death, however, their lawyers were able to obtain access to the property. Even so, in 1978 her debts were so high that she had to move out of her house and into the Grosvenor House Hotel , first in a five-room suite, then gradually into smaller rooms. Despite the lack of money, she always employed servants because, it was said, she was not even able to boil water. Shortly before her death, she could no longer pay the hotel bills either, and her children were placed in a nursing home in Pimlico .
In April 1988, the evening after the Grand National horse race , she appeared on Channel 4's After Dark discussion show , which aired around midnight. She said she wanted to take the horse's point of view, but left the show in the middle because, as she said, she was very tired.
Margaret Campbell died in 1993 after a serious fall in the old people's home where she had spent her final years. She was buried - against her expressed will - next to her first husband Charles Sweeny, the father of her children, in Brookwood Cemetery in Woking . She herself had wished to be buried near Inveraray Castle.
In addition to the three-row pearl necklace, small poodles were her “trademark”. Most of them were black, all named Louis, and they were numbered. As her life motto, the saying “Always a poodle, only a poodle! That, and three strands of pearls! Together they are absolutely the essential things in life "(Eng." Always a poodle, just a poodle! That and three rows of pearls! Together they make up the essence of life ").
Powder Her Face
In February 2013, 50 years after the sensational divorce process, the journalist David Randall wrote in the Independent : "Why no one has ever made a film of this woman's eventful life is one of the great mysteries of British cinema."
However, in 1995 the chamber opera Powder Her Face premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival ; the music was by Thomas Adès and the libretto by Philip Hensher . It is about the last days of the Duchess' life and it was the first time a blow job was performed on an opera stage.
literature
- Charles Castle: The Duchess who Dared: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll . Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994, ISBN 0-283-06224-X .
- Allan M. Nicol: Three Strand Pearl Necklace; The Divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll Edinburgh 1963 (Four Scots Trials) . Amazon Kindle Edition
Web links
- (Ethel) Margaret Campbell (née Whigham), Duchess of Argyll (1912–1993), 3rd wife of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll on npg.org.uk
- Photos of the Duchess of Argyll
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Allan Nicol: "Part II of The Argyll Divorce, Edinburgh 1963: The Three Stranded Pearl Necklace" on firmmagazine.com v. July 30, 2013 ( Memento of October 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b c d The scarlet Duchess of Argyll: Much more than just a Highland fling on independent.co.uk v. 17th February 2013
- ^ A b c d e Margaret Campbell: Forget Not: The Autobiography of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll . WH Allen, 1975, ISBN 0-491-01825-8 . Margaret Sweeny was not mentioned in the original version of the song. PG Wodehouse rewrote the lyrics for the UK version of the musical Anything Goes and changed two lines from You're an O'Neill drama / You're Whistler's mama! in You're Mussolini / You're Mrs Sweeny
- ↑ Charles Sweeny on cgim.org
- ↑ a b c d e Allan Nicol: "Part I of The Argyll Divorce, Edinburgh 1963: The Three Stranded Pearl Necklace" on firmmagazine.com v. July 22, 2013 ( Memento of October 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ The dress is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum : Wedding dress on collections.vam.ac.uk In 2013, the wedding dress was the focus of an exhibition in Singapore. See: The wedding dress that stopped traffic on youtube.com .
- ↑ a b Stephen McGinty: The Duchess of Argyll showed that Scots could lead the way when it comes to pornographic pictures making a regular appearance in court on scotsman.com v. March 23, 2012
- ↑ a b Michael Thornton: How I lost my virginity to the VERY racy real life chatelaine of Downton's Scottish castle on dailymail.co.uk v. December 29, 2012
- ↑ Mayfair, the Duchess of Argyll and the Headless Man polaroids
- ^ Warren Hoge London Journal; A Sex Scandal of the 60's, Doubly Scandalous Now New York Times August 16, 2000.
- ↑ A completely promiscuous woman ', said Lord Wheatley ( Memento of January 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Daily Record , August 16, 2008 on martinfrost.ws
- ^ A b c Allan Nicol: “Part III of The Argyll Divorce, Edinburgh 1963: The Three Stranded Pearl Necklace” on firmmagazine.com v. August 11, 2013 ( Memento from September 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b Sarah Hall: 'Headless men' in sex scandal finally named | UK news | The Guardian. The Guardian London, August 10, 2000, accessed September 11, 2013 .
- ^ Warren Hoge, "London Journal: A Sex Scandal of the 60's, Doubly Scandalous Now," The New York Times , August 16, 2000.
- ^ A b Margaret Duchess of Argyll . Obituary on telegraph.co.uk v. July 28, 1993
- ↑ Sarah Hall: 'Headless men' in sex scandal finally named from August 10, 2000 on martinfrost.ws ( Memento from January 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b c Obituary: Margaret Duchess of Argyll v, July 28, 1993
- ↑ Terry Kirby: For sale: London residence where Duchess scandalized society - This Britain, UK - The Independent. Independent.co.uk, February 6, 2004, archived from the original on September 3, 2010 ; Retrieved September 11, 2013 .
- ↑ True Celebrity Tales: Margaret, Duchess of Argyll on youtube.com
- ↑ Sebastian Cody: Tony Wilson - 'Britain's finest live presenter' | Media | MediaGuardian. MediaGuardian London, August 14, 2007, accessed September 11, 2013 .
- ↑ Penniless duchess buried to frail echoes of a dazzling era on independent.co.uk v. 4th August 1993
- ↑ Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, 1913-1993 (wife of the 11th Duke of Argyll) at nationalgalleries.org
- ↑ Thomas Adès: Powder Her Face on youtube.com
- ↑ Smut and loathing in Powder Her Face on standard.co.uk v. April 27, 2010 ( Memento from June 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Campbell, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Whigham, Margaret (maiden name); Sweeny, Margaret (name in first marriage) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British society lady |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 1, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Newton Mearns , Renfrewshire , Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 25, 1993 |
| Place of death | London |