The following day, the papers carried news of her retirement. The Astors’ letter to the press, written in the third person, offered Waldorf’s deteriorating health as the reason, stating that ‘he did not at his age feel physically able to go through the strain and stress of another contested election’. ‘Lady Astor and he have fought seven elections together’, the letter continued, ‘and, including the period when he was MP for Plymouth, have supported each other actively in the political arena for 35 years. It would be difficult for Lady Astor to stand again without his help.’21 Outside of the letter, Nancy spoke rather more candidly about her distress, and the real lead-up to her retirement:
Today I have done a thing that has been terrible for me – one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life, but a thing that every man in the world will approve of. I have said that I will not fight the next election because my husband does not want me to. I have had twenty-five years in the House of Commons, and I am bound to obey. Isn’t that a triumph for the men? But whether in or out of the House, I shall always stand for what women stand for.22
Nancy’s speech in Parliament on 14 June 1945, on the subject of fox hunting, marked the end of a 25-year career. It was a loss she never came to terms with. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I never knew that I could ever miss anything as much as the House of Commons,’ she once confessed to her son Michael.23 Her departure affected her as deeply as some of her life-defining personal losses such as the death of her mother, and of Phyllis. Nancy’s final act as a Member of Parliament was to hire a train that would transport the House of Commons staff and their families to Taplow, for a day trip to her country estate. Once again, Cliveden was playing the ‘Big House’ and Nancy the benevolent hostess. It was an anachronistic gesture, but a poignant finale for a woman whose house had nurtured her political career and, latterly, cast a shadow over it.
The same year Nancy resigned her seat, a Gestapo ‘black list’ emerged of 2,300 people who were to be arrested following a German invasion of England. Nancy’s name was on it. ‘It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called “Cliveden Set” was pro-Fascist,’ she declared. Privately, she had received a request from von Ribbentrop, currently in his cell at Nuremberg, to stand as a witness in his trial. She quietly declined. But even while she was trying to bury old controversies, Nancy proved remarkably adept at creating new ones. Soon after the war, she and Waldorf made their first trip to America since the thirties. In Washington, she was invited to address Dunbar High, a school for black pupils, where she explained how she, like many Southerners, had acquired an appreciation for black culture through her ‘black mammy’, Aunt Liza. She then warned against the temptations of drink and drugs in the black urban population of the day, pronouncing: ‘No race can develop beyond its moral character.’24 Nancy’s patronising stance towards African Americans may not have attracted much media attention had it been aired in the 1910s or even the 1920s. But in the 1950s, the press – as well as the pupils – saw it as insulting. The incident recalled Rose Harrison’s judgement on Nancy’s treatment of Mirador’s black staff, who ‘were almost loved, although rather as a pet dog may be loved, in a superior, tolerant, patronising sort of way.’25
Public debates over the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine offered plenty of further opportunities for Nancy to vent her opinions. In the face of growing public awareness of concentration camps and mass extermination, Nancy contended that more Christians had been displaced than Jews and that American money would be better channelled towards helping them. These and other pronouncements led to her being described as a ‘vicious anti-Semite’ by US Representative Emanuel Celler, who called for her not to be granted a visa to the USA in the future. If, as the New York Times claimed at the beginning of her visit to the States, Nancy was an ‘extinct volcano’, she still cast a pretty forbidding shadow over the surrounding country.
The politics of the Observer continued to provide an irresistible target, as well as a paranoiac springboard into her other hatreds: at the annual Cliveden office party in 1950, she described the paper as ‘written by Germans for Blacks’. On another occasion, she accused an Observer staff member who was an anti-apartheid activist of ‘turning the Observer into the Coon gazette’. Clearly her views on race were not just ‘outdated’: they were virulent. It upset her friends and family, and Bob Brand, whose charity towards Nancy apparently knew no bounds, ended up reaching out to David Astor on Nancy’s behalf: ‘Your Ma yesterday begged me to urge you to see more of her. She longs to see you but I fear might relapse into criticism of the Observer. Nevertheless she must not.’26
Her interventions into the lives of Bill and Jakie were often no more judicious or enlightened. Most of Jakie’s affection for his mother had been lost in 1944 when he married an Argentinian woman – Ana, who bore the distinction of being both Latin and Catholic – and Nancy refused to attend the wedding. In reply to this insult, Jakie assured his mother that he would not be attending her funeral.27 In 1950, Jakie stood as the Conservative candidate for Nancy’s old Plymouth constituency; during the selection process he had promised to fight the seat without his mother’s help, and once the campaign began the Plymouth Conservatives ensured that he stuck to that promise, warning him that Nancy’s involvement would alienate those Conservatives who already opposed his selection as candidate. Jakie lost the 1950 contest, but subsequently held his mother’s old seat from 1951 to 1959. The Conservative Association in Surrey East, Michael Astor’s seat from 1945–51, was more relaxed about Nancy making a cameo appearance, and in 1950 Michael was encouraged by Waldorf to visit his mother at her new house at 35 Hill Street, Mayfair, and discuss what sort of speech she might make in his support. After reassuring Michael that she knew ‘just how to handle an audience’, she announced: ‘I’m going to make a speech about you… I’ll tell them you’re just a lothario, an artist, and not a very good husband.’ In fact, the speech was one of the more successful and moderate interventions she made during her later life. ‘She was more demure than usual,’ Michael wrote. ‘And I was moved to see how proud she was to be appearing on my platform.’ Not that there was any risk of her becoming soft in her old age: ‘Now you just shut up,’ she told an 18-year-old heckler.28
By the late 1940s, Nancy and Waldorf’s marriage had broken down. She increasingly spent her time between Rest Harrow, Plymouth and their new London house, while Waldorf operated out of Cliveden. His asthma caused him breathing difficulties, and his mobility was limited. Nancy visited Cliveden only when her and Waldorf’s joint presence was required. She certainly saw less of Waldorf than she saw of Bob Brand, who took a room at 35 Hill Street after returning from a period working in America. Although appalled by the intolerant lurch of her post-war politics, Brand maintained a sentimental affection for Nancy, believing that her growing extremism was, to some extent, a manifestation of stifled grief from the twin losses of Phyllis and Kerr.
One person who had reason to be glad at Nancy’s absence from Cliveden was James Lees-Milne, who during 1946 and 1947 was still rushing around the country in the National Trust’s battered old Austin, negotiating the donation of further houses, and trying to put the Trust’s current portfolio in order. In large part, this meant installing attendants and guides – an ‘inefficient lot’, in his opinion.29 At Cliveden his task involved preparing the grounds and a selection of the rooms for public viewing while Waldorf was still in residence. During one visit he examined the furniture that Lord Astor was giving to the Trust, or at least ‘what we could find of it for it was so badly described’. Lees-Milne was not able to escape Nancy entirely – in September 1947, she summoned him to Hill Street to dispense advice on the upkeep not of Cliveden but of Blickling Hall. Once he was captive, she offered him some confessional advice too. ‘As she advanced into the room she said: “Why are you a convert to that awful Catholicism. Do you not regret it?” I replied, “Not in the very least.” She said, “My greatest fear and horror is Communism. Roman Catholicism bree
ds it.” I replied, “Roman Catholicism is the only hope left in the world of combating Communism, which I too abominate.” She said, “It is only Catholic countries that go Communist because of the poverty and discontent fostered by the priests. No Protestant countries become dictatorships.’” In spite of this tirade, Lees-Milne was warming to this grande dame of British society with her ‘white hair, healthy complexion and vital movements’, concluding: ‘She has dignity and deportment, in spite of her vulgarisms.’30
In 1950, Waldorf suffered a stroke that further impaired his mobility. He moved into the ground floor of Cliveden. To ease his breathing, the temperature was kept low and the windows left open. Nancy, fanatical about fresh air and still, in her seventies, partial to a cold bath in the morning, did not object. Her visits to Cliveden were becoming more frequent. As Waldorf approached his final days, the chill and distant relationship of the past decade appeared to be thawing. Waldorf suggested that they read and listen to music on the radio, ‘because we could do this together’.31 Finally, in the last months of her husband’s life, Nancy was able to express some affection towards him. As Rose Harrison noted: ‘By this time my lady’s heart had relented towards him and she was able to be a deal of comfort to him until his death.’32 Bill made frequent trips to Cliveden during Waldorf’s illness, and was there in the September of 1952 when his father died. Waldorf’s last words to his son were: ‘Look after your mother.’33 A letter from Nancy, written after Waldorf had passed away, captures something of their latter-day understanding, and of her sadness that rapprochement could only be induced by impending death: ‘Glad he was like himself in the last ten days,’ Nancy wrote, ‘and oh how it makes me grieve of the years wasted… I just want to look back not forward, and thank God I had such a long and happy life and that Waldorf is now safe … No two people ever worked happier than we did.’34 She subsequently confessed to a neighbour: ‘You know, he was no good without me, and alas, I am no good without Waldorf.’35
Before his death, Waldorf had made clear to Nancy that if she wished to remain at Cliveden, she could run it for as long as she wanted. But unlike Harriet, Nancy did not wish to spend her widowhood at Cliveden, and departed after a few months, leaving the house to Bill. She loved Cliveden intensely, but in a rare moment of self-awareness, knew that her reign as queen of the house had run its course. The most irascible, uncompromising and fearless of Cliveden’s mistresses, Nancy had redefined conceptions of female power for the 20th century and beyond. She had arrived at the house as pushy outsider, breathing life into its weary walls, reviving its mournful rooms and pioneering her own brand of hospitality before taking the halls of Westminster by storm. It was at Cliveden that she had evolved from Nancy Shaw, the Virginian divorcee, into the phenomenon that was Nancy Astor. In Nancy’s interwar heyday, before the Cliveden Set story broke, Lord Curzon had described Cliveden in her absence as ‘a church without a chancel, a nosegay without a flower, a wedding without a bride’.36 Now that old age had eroded her splendour and grief had blunted her once-incisive mind, Nancy’s departure seemed not only natural, but necessary. Over the coming years friends, family and household staff would go to great lengths to protect her fond memories of the house from desecration by a new, unprecedented scandal.
Chapter 12
SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL
BILL ASTOR SHOULD have listened to his mother: Nancy had steadfastly refused her children’s pleas for an outdoor pool at Cliveden, encouraging them instead to swim in the Thames. ‘No, no it’s disgustin’ I don’t trust people in pools,’ she cautioned.1 But in 1953, when Bill’s horse Ambiguity won the Oaks, he used the prize money to build an elegant stone-flagged pool in the walled garden next to the house.2 This innocuous feat of home improvement was to have catastrophic ramifications for both Cliveden and the Astor family. Bill had unwittingly created the stage upon which one of the most salacious sex scandals in British political history would play out.
Three years after building the pool, Bill began renting Spring Cottage to osteopath Stephen Ward. He had met Ward in 1949, when Bobbie Shaw recommended him to treat a back injury Bill had sustained while out riding, and subsequently the two had become friends. By the 1950s, the course of the natural springs had moved and Harriet’s riverside house was run-down, but Bill offered it to Ward for a nominal monthly rent; access to the swimming pool came as part of the package. Ward accepted. Socially ambitious, charming and urbane, Ward had a penchant for courting the company of his rich and famous clients, as well as that of less well-known young women, whom he often drove to Cliveden from his studio flat in Notting Hill Gate. And so it was that he and Christine Keeler ended up in the pool on the night of 8 July, and Profumo saw Keeler climbing naked from the water, and the affair between minister and ‘good time girl’ began.
Had it not also been for Keeler’s encounter with Ivanov – which probably amounted to no more than a one-night stand – Profumo’s secret would probably have been kept safe or, at most, relegated to a few lines in the gossip columns. But this was 1961, the height of Cold War paranoia, and MI5 were keeping close tabs on the movements of Ivanov. On 9 August, Profumo was informed of the liaison between Keeler and the Russian intelligence officer. Aware of the potentially explosive and embarrassing situation, Profumo dispatched a note to Keeler calling off all future contact. All was quiet until the following December when Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies hit the headlines after a scuffle at Ward’s flat with Johnny Edgecombe, one of Keeler’s former lovers. So far there had only been limited rumours of the brief affair between Keeler and Profumo and an oblique reference in the society magazine Queen, but in the aftermath of Edgecombe’s arrest, Keeler sold her story, and the letter from Profumo ending their relationship, to the Sunday Pictorial for £1,000. Fearful of legal action, the Pictorial initially held back from publication.3
The consensus among Profumo’s masters in the Conservative Party was that he should wait until an allegation emerged concerning his relationship with Keeler, and then sue for libel. It wasn’t long before Westminster Confidential, an influential newsletter with a small but powerful readership, broke the news. On 8 March 1963 they ran the headline: ‘THAT WAS THE GOVERNMENT THAT WAS!’ The article explained how Profumo and ‘the Soviet military attaché’ Ivanov were having an affair with the same ‘call girl’ at the same time. ‘Who was using the call-girl to milk whom of information – the War Secretary or the Soviet military attaché – ran in the minds of those primarily interested in security,’ wrote the paper.4 The article confidently predicted that Profumo’s foolish bedroom antics would bring down the government. Whether this turned out to be the case would be decided by the response of the mainstream press to the revelations, and in this respect, the augury of Westminster Confidential looked highly plausible. Prurience and sensationalism were not new to the press of the early 1960s, but with the advent of television news, they had become more prevalent. In a ferociously competitive market, editors were pressing their journalists to uncover titillating stories that could be illustrated by attention-grabbing photographs. If there was any hope at all that the press would not pounce on the allegations, the Astors had one inveterate antagonist at hand who was determined to turn the story into a scandal.
Waldorf’s relationship with Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express group of newspapers, had never been particularly warm, but at the time of Bobbie’s imprisonment in the early thirties, the two proprietors had been on sufficiently cordial terms that Beaverbrook was persuaded to withhold reporting on the court case. After David Astor assumed the editorship of the Observer, driving the politics of the paper to the left, the old Astor–Beaverbrook rivalry had erupted into something like open war. In 1949 the Observer had published a withering profile of Beaverbrook in which his editorial policies were dismissed as ‘political baby-talk’, and during the 1950s, Beaverbrook’s staff had dug back into Bobbie Shaw’s case with the intention of serving revenge on the Astor family. In 1958 the editor of the Sunday Express, the arch-homop
hobe John Gordon, had gone as far as drafting a malicious revelation on Bobbie’s sex life, but the article was held back at the last moment. In the Profumo allegations, Beaverbrook had found a story that was salacious enough to damage the Astors as well as being eminently justifiable in terms of public interest. While a revelation on Bobbie – who was currently affecting a ‘working-class’ life off the Fulham Road, smoking cheap cigarettes and speaking with a mild cockney accent – might have alienated readers through its sheer vindictiveness, revelations about misbehaving politicians ran no such risk.
On 15 March, a week after the Westminster Confidential story, Beaverbrook fired a warning shot at the Astors. His Daily Express ran the headline: ‘WAR MINISTER SHOCK – Profumo: He asks to resign for personal reasons and Macmillan asks him to stay on’, and next to it a story on Christine Keeler’s disappearance during Edgecombe’s trial, ‘VANISHED – Old Bailey Witness’. The juxtaposition was, of course, deliberate, though only the cognoscenti would have recognised this. The same day, Bill and Bronwen Astor’s London house in Upper Grosvenor Street was burgled, and a file of letters taken; their 11-year-old son’s school locker was also broken into, and on 21 March Spring Cottage was ransacked. The intruders may have been working for the Daily Mirror or the Daily Express; a News of the World journalist admitted to having entered Spring Cottage once the door and window had been broken by someone else. By this point, knowledge of the Keeler-Profumo connection had spread, and when Profumo’s wife Valerie returned home on 21 March she found her house in Chester Terrace surrounded by a crowd of journalists. At three in the morning, Profumo was summoned to the chief whip’s room in the Commons. Drowsy from the sedatives he had taken to help him sleep through the journalistic racket outside his home, Profumo denied the allegations. The following morning he read a statement to the Commons, in which he admitted knowing both Ward and Ivanov and recalled having met Keeler ‘on about half a dozen occasions’, but denied anything further. ‘Miss Keeler and I were on friendly terms,’ he said. ‘There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler.’ He ended with a warning: ‘I shall not hesitate to issue writs for libel and slander if scandalous allegations are made or repeated outside this House.’5
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