Saturday, 28 November 2015
Monday, 23 November 2015
Sandy Powell masterpiece . Carol's Wardrobe. Coming Soon.
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Sandy Powell OBE
(born 7 April 1960) is a British costume designer. She has won the
Academy Award for Costume Design for Shakespeare in Love (1998), The
Aviator (2004), and The Young Victoria (2009). She has also received
nine BAFTA Award nominations, winning for Velvet Goldmine and The
Young Victoria. She won numerous other awards in costume design for
the latter film. She is frequently associated with Martin Scorsese,
having designed the costumes for six of his films.
Powell attended
Saint Martin's School of Art in London, before completing her degree,
due to offers of work from, amongst others, Derek Jarman. She was
appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the
2011 New Year Honours for services to the film industry.
Powell is a cousin
of the equally successful costume designer, Anthony Powell.
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Costume designer Sandy Powell on dressing Carol
Cate Blanchett’s
character in Carol speaks more through couture than what she says.
Karen Krizanovich talks to costume legend Sandy Powell about dressing
a movie into life
Director Todd
Haynes’ new film Carol – a vivid, swooning love story between two
people whom society wants to keep apart – is being heralded for its
costumes as much as its Oscar-worthy performances.
The stunning looks
were created by costume legend Sandy Powell OBE, a masterful
storyteller in her own right. Inspired by street and fashion
photography of New York City in the early Fifties, the multiple
Oscar-winner created accurate period clothing that could tell this
lyrical love story almost by fashion alone.
In 1952, New York
City looked more like an old European capital recovering from the
Second World War than a booming metropolis. Faithful to history,
Powell’s colour choices are both vivid and muted, sometimes
distressed and sour, as if upset at being trapped in the decade
before.
While Carol’s look
could have stepped directly from the pages of early Fifties Vogue,
both director Todd Haynes and Powell drew inspiration from street
photographers such as Ruth Orkin and Vivian Maier, while the overall
look was influenced by the expressionistic, almost abstract street
photography of Saul Leiter.
Carol
is particularly interesting because it is 1952, and 1952 is not the
Fifties people think of because it still looks like the Forties. It
is a transitional period
Sandy Powell
Powell and the
film’s star Cate Blanchett were determined to keep Carol as true to
1952 New York as possible. “I get excited by every period I work in
because you always learn something new,” Powell has said.
“Carol is a
particularly interesting one because it is 1952, and 1952 is not the
Fifties people think of because it still looks like the Forties. It
is a transitional period, so the silhouette was going from the
wide-shouldered look of the Forties to the more streamlined look of
the Fifties, so it was really really exciting to do.”
Blanchett adds: “The
silhouettes that were available, the new look, the Fifties versus, I
guess, the more Chanel silhouettes… These were aesthetic choices
that Sandy and I talked about a lot.”
Powell gives Carol
the wardrobe of a wealthy woman: gloves worn for formal daytime,
sailor necklines and dresses made with the “wandering” waistline
so popular in 1952 – in effect, a “sack dress” which was the
attractive yet comfy alternative to the snug fit of Dior’s frocks.
There are the
popular fitted Hattie Carnegie-styled suits, which have become
sought-after collectors’ items. One of the first creators of both
couture and ready-to-wear, Carnegie provided women of the Fifties
with one boutique supplying everything they needed from “head to
hem”. These looks are so of the moment that only a few years later
they would look overly formal and prim.
Blanchett and Powell
also discussed ways of unlocking the character of Carol through
physicality, deciding what to reveal. “We asked, ‘What is the
most erotic part of the body?’” reveals Blanchett. “We kept
saying that wrists are really erotic. The neck. The ankles.
“The way Highsmith
writes, she’s got this exquisite observation of detail that most
people would miss, but a lover’s eye never would. We talked a lot
about erogenous zones.”
For Carol, Powell’s
costumes needed to be distinctive but factual. Without them as a
guide, even a superb performer like Blanchett or her co-star Rooney
Mara could find it hard to create a believable character.
“It’s a deeper,
more formative process for actors than people often may know,” says
Blanchett. “Even the girdles and the underpinnings and the
stockings and the heels affect the way you move, the way your body
feels in space.”
Because Carol is a
love story about looking, its most powerful moments are often
wordless. This puts more emphasis on movement, glances and
hesitations. “The way the gestures that become possible within
those constraints help inform the actor’s process of finding the
characters.”
“My job was to
create the characters and make them believable to each other and
audiences,” Powell says. “I wanted Carol to be fashionable but
understated, somebody a character like [Rooney’s] Therese would
look up to and be impressed by as well.”
Powell, who says if
she had a signature element it would be the use of colour – “I
don’t think I’ve ever done beige” – dressed Carol in rich
reds, warm furs and gave her the strong, figure-shaped suits and
dresses.
Carol is a woman of
privilege and wealth who impresses Therese by leaving a pair of
luxurious if conservative leather gloves on the department store
counter where the younger woman works. As love blooms, the types and
colours of the characters’ clothes change, reflecting their
evolving emotions.
Powell’s costumes
tell you everything about Carol: rich, confident and discreet.
Therese’s wardrobe reflects her youth and uncertainty: we feel
sorry for her when she’s forced to wear a fluffy elf hat at work
during the holiday season.
“There’s a
reference in the film to the fact that Therese is a photographer but
she’s uncomfortable taking pictures of people [until] she starts to
take pictures of Carol,” says Blanchett. “I think the clothes
play a foundational role in that process.”
• Carol, directed
by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, is
released in UK cinemas on 27 November. Find out more at
carolfilm.co.uk
IN 'CAROL,' COSTUME
PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN CATE BLANCHETT'S SEDUCTION OF ROONEY MARA
Oscar-winning
designer Sandy Powell discusses the film's '50s-era look and
plot-enhancing pieces.
FAWNIA SOO HOO NOV
18, 2015
Cate Blanchett is
absolutely mesmerizing in Todd Haynes's latest movie, "Carol,"
based on the Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt."
She is, after all, the beautiful, supreme, Oscar-winning Cate
Blanchett, but the stunning period costumes by the triple Academy
Award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell can surely take some
credit for that 'mesmerizing' factor.
In the film,
Blanchett plays a wealthy New Jersey wife and mother, Carol Aird, who
is challenged by the societal limitations of the 1950s and her
buttoned-up, country-club-loving husband, Harge (played by the
ever-versatile Kyle Chandler). While Christmas shopping for her young
daughter, Carol meets and embarks on a slow-burning love affair with
a 20-something shopgirl, Therese (Rooney Mara), who's on her own path
to self-discovery. Powell — who most recently dressed Blanchett for
her role as the stepmother in "Cinderella" — skillfully
helps tell each woman's story through a series of striking,
period-specific costumes.
The costume designer
took a break from filming her latest period piece (more on that
below) to chat with Fashionista about finding inspiration from
vintage Vogue issues, sourcing Carol's spectacular jewelry sets and
dressing Blanchett in a body-hugging '50s silhouette as opposed to
Dior's New Look, which was given considerable treatment in the
recently released movie "Brooklyn."
Where did you look
for inspiration for both Carol's [Cate Blanchett's] and Therese’s
[Rooney Mara's] costumes?
For Carol, I looked
at a lot of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar,
from the period exactly from the months that we were shooting — the
winter months in 1952 going into 1953 — and that pretty much that
gave me all the shapes, all the color tones, everything that I
needed. For Therese, I looked a little bit at fashion, but she’s
not very fashionable. [I tried] to find pictures of real people, real
young women, students and arty types in the street.
And then next, I
looked at a lot of actual vintage clothing. We’d go to the actual
costume rental companies and start pulling and looking at the real
clothing of the period and that really is the best thing to see the
real stuff and then I tried them on the actors.
For women
especially, the '50s was a period of restraint. Watching the movie,
you can feel how Carol is so stifled and how much she wants to break
free. How did you express that through what she’s wearing?
The clothing in
itself does have an air of restraint. That is actually what was
fashionable at the time, but I could have given her the other very
fashionable look of the period. The Dior New Look, which was much
fuller skirts, had just come in. [The style] does give a bit more of
an air of extravagance and freedom, even though it's got the tiny
cinched-in waist and uncomfortable underwear. So I decided against
that and gave her this streamlined silhouette instead.
The silhouettes on
Cate Blanchett are so beautiful and fit her so well. What were your
style reference points?
I looked at the
specific fashion photographers like Gordon Parks, Clifford Coffin and
Cecil Beaton, and if you pick up any magazine from 1952, that is the
silhouette you will see. In order to create that silhouette, I had to
start with the undergarments. That's not Cate’s natural silhouette
— she doesn't have pointed bosoms [laughs]. Believe it or not, a
lot of the jacket shapes are actually padded over the hips to give
that hip shape and the small waist and the bras provide that shape of
the bosom. So you create the silhouette from the foundation garments
and build the clothing over the top.
When you see the
Carol and Therese first meet in the toy section of the department
store where Therese works, it's almost love at first sight. What went
into choosing the wardrobe pieces for that important moment?
For Carol, I wanted
very specifically to have [her wear] something that would stand out
from everybody else [in the department store] without looking like
she wandered into the wrong shop. The fur coat was completely normal
for the period and that's one of the things that came directly from
the book. In the script, she's seen wearing the fur. But the color of
the fur to me was really crucial in that I wanted a fur that was a
slightly unusual color. It's pale, it's not a normal darker brown,
and I think there's something rather luxurious and sophisticated
about a pale color fur and [it also goes] with [Blanchett's] blonde
coloring. Then I used the coral color for the scarf and the hat to be
seen against that fur from the other side of the room.
The leather gloves
that Carol leaves at the department store counter for Therese to
return leads to their developing relationship. The gloves are a
pivotal plot point...
Yeah, the gloves are
a key, key feature. And the gloves are tonally the same color as the
taupe dress Carol wears underneath [the fur]. She does have a pair of
coral gloves that she wears later and I was toying with the idea of
using those, but then I thought that would be too obvious. I don't
know why. Maybe I should have used the coral, but we used the taupe,
which were just expensive-looking gloves.
Carol looks so put
together and her jewelry and accessories are so impeccably matched.
Where did you find those pieces?
I made the scarves
and the hats. The scarves I dyed because I wanted that specific coral
color and then they matched [Carol's] nails and lipstick. Her jewelry
was loaned from various estate jewelry [collections, plus] Fred
Leighton and Van Cleef & Arpels lent us pieces. All her shoes are
made by Ferragamo based on their original 1950s and 1940s shapes and
original patterns. I bought vintage bags from the period as well.
And what are you
working on now?
I'm working on a
film in London called "How to Talk to Girls at Parties,"
which is directed by John Cameron Mitchell and it's set in 1977
against a punk music background. But with an added twist of visiting
aliens.
"Carol"
premieres in U.S. theaters on Friday, Nov. 20.
This interview has
been edited and condensed for clarity.
BY FAWNIA SOO HOO
Carol
review – Cate Blanchett superb in a five-star tale of forbidden
love
5 / 5 stars
Todd Haynes’s
50s-set drama in which Blanchett’s divorcing woman falls for Rooney
Mara’s doe-eyed shop assistant is an intoxicating triumph
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thursday 26 November
2015 15.30 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/26/carol-film-review-cate-blanchett-todd-haynes-rooney-mara
The cigarette that
bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next
apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and delicious film Carol is in
love with this kind of detail: the story of a forbidden love affair
that makes no apology for always offering up exquisitely observed
minutiae from the early 1950s. It is almost as if the transgression,
secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged
rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The movie finds
something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, the
furnishing and of course the cigarettes. It revives the lost art of
smoking at lunch, smoking with gloves, and the exotic moue of
exhaling smoke sideways, out of consideration for the person in front
of you.
Cate Blanchett plays
Carol, an unhappy, divorcing woman who falls instantly in love with
department store assistant Therese, played by Rooney Mara, who is
selling Carol a toy train as a Christmas present for her daughter. A
counterintuitive present for the 50s, of course, but the point is
that it’s large, so it has to be delivered; Carol must therefore
give Therese her address and then, accidentally on purpose, she
leaves her gloves behind on the counter.
Blanchett’s
performance is utterly right, her hauteur and elegance matched with
fear and self-doubt. When I first saw Carol at Cannes this year, she
reminded me of a predatory animal suddenly struck with a
tranquilliser dart. On watching it again, what I noticed was
Blanchett continually touching her face and stroking her hair as she
speaks to Therese: a “poker tell” of desire. Rooney Mara is
doe-eyed and callow, submissive yet watchful (she is a would-be
photographer), her faintly dysfunctional fringe often schoolgirlishly
framed in a sweet pom-pommed beret.
Screenwriter Phyllis
Nagy has superbly adapted Patricia Highsmith’s original 1952 novel
The Price of Salt, a bestseller at the time under the pen name Claire
Morgan. Nagy’s version brings out both the drama and the swoony,
ambient mood; Haynes’s direction and Affonso Gonçalves’s editing
take her script at a cool andante. The screenplay slims down the
novel’s tendency to oblique talkiness; it cuts down on use of the
phrase “I love you”; and interestingly it does not hint at
Carol’s rather Hellenic suggestion in the original that gay love is
a higher form than straight, a more balanced relationship.
How Patricia
Highsmith's Carol became a film: 'Lesbianism is not an issue. It's a
state of normal'
Read more
There is a shrewd
homage to Brief Encounter, and the film also allows you to see the
lineaments of classic Highsmith crime. The two women’s discontent
casts light on a structural homoeroticism in Highsmith’s Strangers
on a Train, famously filmed by Hitchcock: two men collude in a
transgression to be rid of their respective encumbrances. Carol takes
this through the gender looking glass, although here the
transgression is a matter of love and free will. Therese is no
Ripley: she is not manipulative or parasitical in the way she might
be in another sort of story – the sort, in fact, that might want to
insist on an unhappy ending for gay love – but the two lovers take
off together, on the lam almost. There is the Nabokovian flourish of
a revolver.
Sarah Paulson gives
a smart supporting performance as Carol’s easygoing confidante and
former lover Abby. Kyle Chandler is superb as her furious husband
Harge – short for Hargess, but here suggesting an unsexy
combination of “hard” and “large”. He is angry and unhappy,
boorishly hating himself for not having punished Carol more for her
previous infidelity. His contribution amplifies the complex dynamic
of this new love affair: she is in revolt against his domestic
mastery and he is on the point of taking Carol’s infant daughter
away from her in a custody battle. Therese is not merely to be
Carol’s lover but quasi-daughter, someone who will come under her
protection.
The film shows us
the corsetry and mystery with which gay people in the 1950s could
manage their lives with dignity, but it also inhales the clouds of
depression and self-control into which Carol has had to retreat and
from which she is now defiantly emerging, a prototypical version of
Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique, announced a decade after this.
The writing and
performances are superb, the production design and costumes by Judy
Becker and Sandy Powell tremendous. And the effect is intoxicating.
Friday, 20 November 2015
Tuesday, 17 November 2015
Margaret, Duchess of Argyll / The Duchess who dared ...
Margaret was the
only child of Helen Mann Hannay and George Hay Whigham, a Scottish
millionaire who was chairman of the Celanese Corporation of Britain
and North America. She spent the first 14 years of her life in New
York City, where she was educated privately at the Hewitt School. Her
beauty was much spoken of, and she had youthful romances with playboy
Prince Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston, car salesman Baron
Martin Stillman von Brabus, and publishing heir Max Aitken.
In 1928, David Niven
seduced the 15-year-old Margaret Whigham, during a holiday at
Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. To the fury of her father, she became
pregnant as a result. Margaret was rushed into a London nursing home
for a secret termination. "All hell broke loose,"
remembered her family cook, Elizabeth Duckworth. Margaret didn’t
mention the episode in her 1975 memoirs, but she continued to adore
Niven until the day he died. She was among the VIP guests at his
London memorial service.
In 1930, she was
presented at Court in London and was known as deb (or debutante) of
that year. Shortly afterwards, she announced her engagement to
Charles Guy Fulke Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick. However, the wedding
did not take place, for her head had been turned by Charles Sweeny,
an American amateur golfer from a wealthy Pennsylvania family.
On 21 February 1933,
and after converting to his Roman Catholic faith, Margaret married
Charles Sweeny at the Brompton Oratory, London. Their wedding party
comprised eight adult bridesmaids (Pamela Nicholl, Molly Vaughan,
Angela Brett, The Hon. Sheila Berry, Baba Beaton, Dawn Gold, Jeanne
Stourton, and Lady Bridgett Paulett) and the groom's brother, Robert
Sweeny, as best man. Such had been the publicity surrounding her
Norman Hartnell wedding dress, that the traffic in Knightsbridge was
blocked for three hours. For the rest of her life, she was associated
with glamour and elegance, being a firm client of both Hartnell and
Victor Stiebel in London before and after the war. She had three
children with Charles Sweeny: a daughter, who was stillborn at eight
months in late 1933; another daughter, Frances Helen (born 1937, she
married Charles Manners, 10th Duke of Rutland), and a son, Brian
Charles (born 1940). The Sweenys divorced in 1947.
In 1943, Margaret
Sweeny had a near fatal fall down a lift shaft while visiting her
chiropodist on 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 once
reportedly said, "Go to bed early and often". Given her
numerous earlier romantic escapades, including an affair with the
married George, Duke of Kent in her youth, this may have been a
change in degree rather than basic predisposition.
After the end of her
first marriage, Margaret was briefly engaged to a Texas-born banker,
Joseph Thomas, of Lehman Brothers, but he fell in love with another
woman and the engagement was broken. She also had a serious romantic
relationship with Theodore Rousseau, curator of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art who was, she recalled "highly intelligent, witty
and self-confident to the point of arrogance". That romance also
ended without the couple formalising their liaison, since the mother
of two "feared that Ted was not 'stepfather material'".
Still, she noted in her memoirs, "We continued to see each other
constantly." She also allegedly had an affair with Joseph
Slatton, who was married to Jacqueline Kennedy's cousin. This
occurred during a time when Slatton had access to the White House,
and led to his resignation from his Washington post in 1962.
On 22 March 1951,
Margaret became the third wife of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of
Argyll. She wrote later in life -
“ 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. ”
(She was not
mentioned in the original version of the song. P. G. Wodehouse
anglicised it for the British version of Anything Goes, changing two
lines from "You’re an O’Neill drama / You’re Whistler’s
mama!" to "You’re Mussolini / You’re Mrs Sweeny")
Within a few years,
the marriage was falling apart. The Duke suspected his wife of
infidelity, and while she was in New York, he employed a locksmith to
break open a cupboard at their Mayfair pied-à-terre, 48 Upper
Grosvenor Street. The evidence discovered resulted in the infamous
1963 divorce case, in which the Duke of Argyll accused his wife of
infidelity, and included a set of Polaroid photographs of the Duchess
nude, save for her signature three-strand pearl necklace, in the
company of another man. There were also photographs of the bepearled
Duchess fellating a naked man whose face was not shown. It was
speculated that the "headless man" was the Minister of
Defence Duncan Sandys (later Lord Duncan-Sandys, son-in-law of
Winston Churchill), who offered to resign from the cabinet.
Also introduced to
the court was a list of as many as eighty-eight men with whom the
Duke believed his wife had consorted; the list is said to include two
government ministers and three members of the British royal family.
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 Hotel;
and Sigismund von Braun, brother of the 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 Fairbanks,
then long married to his second wife, but this was not made
public.[10] Granting the divorce, Lord Wheatley, the presiding judge,
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".
The Duchess never
revealed the identity of the "headless man", and Fairbanks
denied the allegation to his grave. Long afterwards, it was claimed
that there were actually two "headless men" in the
photographs, Fairbanks and 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".
In December 2013 her ex-daughter-in-law Lady Colin Campbell claimed
that she had been told by the Duchess herself that the headless man
was William H. "Bill" Lyons, then sales director of Pan
American World Airways.
The Duke of Argyll
married an American, Mathilda Coster Mortimer Heller in 1963, and
died of a stroke in 1973, aged 69.
Margaret wrote a
memoir, Forget Not, which was published by W. H. Allen Ltd in 1975
and negatively reviewed for its name dropping and air of entitlement.
She also lent her name as author to a guide to entertaining. Her
fortune diminished, however, and she eventually opened her London
house — 48 Upper Grosvenor Street, which had been decorated for her
parents in 1935 by Syrie Maugham — for paid tours. Even so, her
extravagant lifestyle and ill-considered investments left her largely
penniless by the time she died.
In her youth,
Margaret's father had told Rosie d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, a close friend
of hers, that he feared for what his high-living only child would do
once she had her entire inheritance. Consequently, Whigham blocked
his daughter's access to the principal of her inheritance through
various protective legal prohibitions. However, after his death,
Margaret's lawyers successfully voided most of the safeguards. In
1978, her debts forced Margaret to move from her Belgravia house and
relocate with her maid to a suite at the Grosvenor Hotel.
In April 1988, on
the evening after the Grand National, she appeared on a Channel 4
After Dark discussion about horseracing "so she said, to put the
point of view of the horse", later walking out of the programme
"because she was so very sleepy".
In 1990, unable to
pay the hotel bills, she was evicted, and with the support of friends
and her first husband moved to an apartment. Her children later
placed her in a nursing home in Pimlico, London. Here she was
photographed by Tatler magazine, for which she had previously been a
columnist, sitting on the edge of her bed in a grim single room.
Margaret died in penury in 1993 after a bad fall in the nursing home.
She was buried alongside her first husband, Charles Sweeny, in
Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.
She once told the
New York Times, "I don't think anybody has real style or class
any more. Everyone's gotten old and fat." More to the point, she
described herself as "always vain". Another quote gives an
insight into her personality: "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
chamber opera based on major events in the Duchess's life, received
its premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 1995. The English
composer Thomas Adès wrote the music, and novelist Philip Hensher
contributed the libretto; the Festival, along with the Almeida Opera,
commissioned the piece. Performed in dozens of productions since, the
opera has prompted sharply polarized, if mostly positive, comment
from critics on the question of its depiction of Margaret.
The opera's Duchess
character, an image of the real woman refracted through an astringent
Camp sensibility, invites both sympathy and contempt for her by
design. In the fourth of the opera's eight scenes, the soprano
who plays the Duchess must recreate one of the notorious "headless
man" photographs with a hotel waiter, simulating fellatio as she
hums a brief, ecstatic passage; the opera owes some of its fame to
this wordless aria.
Lady
Colin Campbell, stepdaughter-in-law of the Duchess of Argyll, said
she had long known the true identity of the 'headless man' Photo:
GEOFF PUGH
'Headless
man' in Duchess of Argyll sex scandal was US airline executive Bill
Lyons
Lady Colin Campbell claims that mystery man pictured with Duchess of
Argyll in sensational photo produced at her 1963 divorce trial was a
PanAm executive that Duchess regarded as her 'third husband'
By Emily
Gosden6:38PM GMT 29 Dec 2013
The ‘headless man’
who was subject of a 1963 sex scandal with Margaret, Duchess of
Argyll has been named as an American airline executive, William
“Bill” H Lyons.
The claim over the
true identity was made by Lady Colin Campbell, the late Duchess’s
stepdaughter-in-law.
The Duchess’s
husband, Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, produced
sexually-explicit Polaroid photos found in his wife’s possession as
evidence at their divorce trial.
One photo showed the
Duchess performing a sex act on a man, whose face is not visible in
the photo.
The scandal caused
widespread shock, only being overshadowed by the Profumo affair the
same year.
Speculation has been
rife ever since over the identity of the so-called ‘headless man’.
The Duchess, who died in 1993 aged 80, never disclosed his identity.
Both Duncan Sandys,
the son-in-law of Winston Churchill and a Cabinet minister, and the
actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr, had been widely linked to the photos.
But Lady Colin said
that the Duchess herself had told her the true identity of the man in
the photo was Bill Lyons.
Lyons was sales
director of Pan American Airlines and “scion of a wealthy family”
and was the Duchess’s lover for six years, she wrote in the Mail on
Sunday.
Lady Colin – known
for her revelatory biography of Princess Diana – said she had now
chosen to reveal the Duchess of Argyll’s secret as an opera about
her, Thomas Ades’ Powder Her Face, meant the Duchess was being
“immortalised on stage in an obscene pose” as a “lady of loose
morals”.
This “bore little
or no resemblance” to the Duchess she knew, she wrote.
“The mystery of
The Headless Man distorted Margaret’s life while she was alive, and
it threatens to distort her memory in death … It is to restore some
small measure of justice that I have decided to end the mystery and
reveal who it was in the picture with her, and why. I know the answer
for a fact because, in the course of our long friendship, it was
Margaret who told me.”
Polaroid cameras
were a very new technology at the time, a fact that had been used to
attempt to narrow down the identity of the man. But Lady Colin wrote:
“Margaret was a genuine neophyte. If it was new, she had to have
it…
"It should,
therefore, come as no surprise she managed to own one of the first
Polaroids in England.
“And she used it,
in all innocence, to record a loving encounter with the man who
replaced Big Ian in her affections after he began divorce proceedings
against her.
“Or, to be more
accurate, the man rigged up the timer and they recorded a memento of
their love for each other.”
She said that the
Duchess’s family had known the identity for 50 years but it had
been “a secret shared only within the family”. “To those of us
who were close to her, it was hardly a surprise – Bill was her
lover after all.”
She said that the
secret may have been kept too long because in doing so it
“perpetuated the mystery, and in so doing we have done Margaret’s
reputation no favours”.
The Duke was her
second husband and Lady Colin said that the Duchess referred to Lyons
as her “third husband” and that they were widely accepted as a
couple.
“He was
sophisticated, debonair, dapper, well-bred, charming and handsome,”
Lady Colin said.
His father was a
lawyer, enabling him to give the Duchess guidance as the divorce case
progressed.
But Lady Colin said
that Lyons was already married to a woman who threatened to kill
herself each time Lyons attempted to leave her for the Duchess, a
factor that eventually brought the relationship with the Duchess to
an end.
At the divorce
trial, the Duke of Argyll – who had been married twice previously –
claimed that his third wife, the Duchess, had as many as 88 lovers.
Lady Colin alleges
that the Duke and his daughter Jeanne broke into the Duchess’s
house to find evidence of the infidelity and found the photos in his
wife's writing desk which showed her naked, wearing only a
three-strand pearl necklace.
They also found the
Duchess’s appointments diaries. The men listed in the diaries had
been widely interpreted as her lovers.
The divorce trial
judge Lord Wheatley, in his judgment on the case, said: "There
is enough in her own admissions and proven facts to establish that,
by 1960, she was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite
could only be satisfied with a number of men."
But Lady Colin says
that the most of the men who were listed in the appointments diaries
were friends who were gay and “would have fled at the sight of a
naked woman” – a fact that the Duchess could not reveal while
homosexuality was illegal at the time.
Lady Colin wrote:
“Margaret might have been coquettish, but she was most certainly no
cocotte. And the only way to do her justice is to identify the
Headless Man,” she wrote.
“Then, and only
then, will everyone be able to appreciate that what she was doing in
those photographs was not so very terrible. She was simply a woman in
love – who was unfortunate enough to have a memento of something
happy stolen from her.
'Headless
men' in sex scandal finally named
Unidentified
lover in Duchess of Argyll divorce case exposed as not one but two
men - a cabinet minister and a swashbuckling movie star
Sarah Hall
Thursday 10 August
2000 01.05 BST
It was a scandal
that rocked the nation: an aristocratic beauty was photographed
performing fellatio on a lover, while shots of another man gratifying
himself were unearthed in her boudoir.
The sexually
explicit Polaroid snaps proved central in the 1963 divorce of the
Duke and Duchess of Argyll, and became part of a government
investigation.
The duchess's
reputation was ruined, but her lover escaped blameless, his identity
preserved for almost 40 years by the camera cutting him off at the
neck.
Tonight, the mystery
of the "headless man" - or rather headless men - is
resolved for the first time, with new evidence identifying not one,
but two, lovers.
The man in the more
notorious shot is unveiled as Duncan Sandys, then a cabinet minister,
and his masturbating rival as Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the Hollywood
legend who dallied with Marlene Dietrich and married Joan Crawford.
The two men's
identities are revealed in a Channel 4 documentary to be shown
tonight, Secret History: The Duchess and the Headless Man, which
draws on the memories of the duchess's confidante, who identifies
Sandys, and previously unpublished evidence gathered by the nation's
then most senior law lord, Lord Denning. This formed part of his
inquiry into security risks following the resignation of the then
secretary of state for war, John Profumo.
Sandys's identity is
"conclusively proved", the documentary makers believe, by
the duchess's claim that the only Polaroid camera in the country at
the time had been lent to the Ministry of Defence, where Sandys was a
minister. Fairbanks is nailed by his handwriting.
The Argyll case,
heard in March 1963 - the same month John Profumo lied to the Commons
about his relationship Christine Keeler - was the longest and most
sensational divorce to occur in Britain.
Margaret Argyll, the
only child of a self-made Scottish millionaire, was a society beauty
who her husband alleged had slept with 88 men, including two cabinet
ministers and three royals.
Profumo resigned in
early June but, before the month was out, the precarious Macmillan
government was rocked by another threat, and looked in danger of
being toppled.
At a stormy cabinet
meeting on June 20, Sandys, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill,
confessed he was rumoured to be the person in the erotic shots,
which, at that time, were presumed to be of one man.
He offered to resign
but Macmillan managed to dissuade him by ensuring Lord Denning, who
had been commissioned to investigate the Profumo scandal, also
investigated the identity of the headless lover.
For this Denning,
the master of the rolls, had a plan. On the four shots of the man in
different states of arousal were handwritten captions: "before",
"thinking of you", "during - oh", and "finished".
If he could match the handwriting, he would find his man.
He invited the five
key suspects - Sandys, Fairbanks, American businessman John Cohane,
Peter Combe, an ex-press officer at the Savoy, and Sigismund von
Braun, the diplomat brother of the Nazi scientist Werner von Braun -
to the Treasury and asked for their help in a "very delicate
matter".
As they arrived,
each signed the visitor's register. Their handwriting was analysed by
a graphologist, and the results proved conclusive. As the broadcaster
Peter Jay, then a young Treasury official, tells the documentary:
"The headless man identified by the handwriting expert and
therefore identified by Lord Denning, though he didn't write this
down in his report, was, in fact, the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr."
Duncan Sandys, who
in 1974 was given a peerage, appeared to be in the clear - a fact
confirmed by a Harley Street doctor who concluded his pubic hair did
not correspond with that in the masturbation photos.
But tonight's
documentary confirms the other photograph clearly showed a different
man whose identity the duchess hinted at to her close friend Paul
Vaughan just before her death.
"She did say to
me quite clearly that, 'Of course, sweetie, the only Polaroid camera
in the country at this time had been lent to the Ministry of
Defence,'" recalls Mr Vaughan. "If that wasn't running a
flag up the flag pole, I don't know what was. She wanted someone to
know." Analysis of the film suggests the photo was taken in
1957, at which stage Sandys held his defence post.
"We believe
it's pretty definitive," said Dan Corn, the programme's
producer. "It's ironic because he effectively got away with it
by being cleared by Denning."
The duchess died in
a Pimlico nursing home in July 1993, without even hinting at the
identity of her other lover. But despite this discretion, she never
recovered from her reputation being so besmirched during her divorce.
Summing up, the
judge, Lord Wheatley, said: "She was a highly sexed woman who
had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to
indulge in disgusting sexual activities."
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