Margaret, Duchess of Argyll

She was born Ethel Margaret Whigham, the only child of Helen Mann Hannay and George Hay Whigham, a Scottish millionaire who was chairman of Celanese Corporation of England, North America, and Canada. After being educated privately in New York City, where she moved one week after her birth and lived until the age of 14, and making her debut in London in 1930, she announced her engagement to the earl of Warwick, but the wedding did not take place. Her head had been turned by Charles Sweeny, an American amateur golfer, and she decided she was not in love with Lord Warwick enough. (She also had youthful romances with playboy Prince Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston, and publishing heir Max Aitken.)

On February 21, 1933, she married Charles Sweeny, with whom she had three children: a daughter, who was stillborn at eight months in late 1933; another daughter, Frances Helen (born 1937, later duchess of Rutland), and a son, Brian Charles (born 1940). The Sweenys divorced in 1947. Briefly, Margaret Sweeny was engaged to a Texas-born banker, Joseph Thomas, of Lehmann Brothers, but he fell in love with another woman and the engagement was broken. Then, on March 22, 1951, she married Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll[?], as his third wife.

"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,' " she wrote later in life. "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."

In 1943, however, Margaret Sweeny had a near fatal fall down an elevator shaft while visiting her chiropodist[?] in Bond Street. "I fell forty feet to the bottom of the lift shaft," she later recalled. "The only thing that saved me was the lift cable, which broke my fall. I must have clutched at it, for it was later found that all my finger nails were torn off. I apparently fell on to my knees and cracked the back of my head against the wall." After her recovery, Sweeny's friends noted that not only had she lost all sense of taste and smell due to nerve damage, she also had become sexually voracious. (As she had had a relationship with the married George, Duke of Kent before her marriage, this may have been a change in degree rather than basic predisposition.)

Introduced into evidence in the 1963 divorce case in which the duke of Argyll accused his wife of infidelity was a series of Polaroid photographs of her wearing her signature three-strand pearl necklace -- and only the necklace. Also included in the photographs with the duchess was a naked man, and though the photographs showed his genitalia and torso, they excluded his face. It was speculated that the "headless man" was Duncan Sandys, the minister of defence, who offered to resign from the cabinet. (Duncan Sandys, later Lord Duncan-Sandys, was a son-in-law of Winston Churchill).

Also introduced to the court was a list of eighty-eight men the duke believed had enjoyed the duchess's favors; the list is said to include two government ministers and three royals. The judge commented that the duchess had indulged in "disgusting sexual activities". Lord Denning was called upon by the government to track down the "headless man". He compared the handwriting of the five leading "suspects" (Duncan-Sandys, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Cohane, an American businessman, Peter Combe, a former press officer at the Savoy, and Sigismund von Braun, brother of German scientist Wernher von Braun) with the captions written on the photographs. It is claimed that this analysis proved that the man in question was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., long married to his second wife, the former Mary Lee Epling Hartford, but this was not made public.

Granting the divorce, Lord Wheatley, the presiding magistrate, said the evidence established that the duchess of Argyll "was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men".

Long afterward, it was claimed that there were at least two "headless men" in the photographs, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Lord Duncan-Sandys - the latter identified on the basis of the duchess's statement that the "only Polaroid camera in the country at that time had been lent to the Ministry of Defence". As for the duke of Argyll, he married in 1963, as his fourth wife, an American, Mathilda (née Mathilde) Coster Mortimer Heller, and died of a stroke in 1973, aged 69.

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, wrote a self-serving, name-dropping, but nonetheless engaging memoir, "Forget Not," which was published by W. H. Allen in 1975, and she also lent her name as author to a guide to entertaining. Her fortune diminished, however, and the free-spending duchess eventually opened her London house, 48 Upper Grosvenor Street, for paid tours, but debts and ill-considered investments left her largely broke by the time she died in a nursing home in 1993. (In the duchess's youth, her father told a friend that he feared what his only child would do once she had her entire inheritance.) She never revealed the identity of the "headless man," and Fairbanks denied the allegation to his grave.

Resoundingly well-dressed and astonishingly coiffed (a reddish-brown, baroque-swirl bouffant was her trademark), the duchess, to no one's surprise, was famously self-involved. She once told the New York Times, "I don't think anybody has real style or class anymore. Everyone's gotten old and fat." More to the point, she described herself as "always vain." To the end of her life, her superficiality remained superbly intact, as evidenced by one exceptionally vapid quote: "Always a poodle, only a poodle! That, and three strands of pearls!" she said. "Together they are absolutely the essential things in life."

"Powder Her Face," a corrosive modern opera about the duchess's last days was written by composer Thomas Adès and librettist Phillip Hensher in 1995, for the Almeida Opera.