An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (10 page)

Profumo insisted that his bride, who was then starring as the lead in the hit musical
The King and I
, must stop work after she married. She complied reluctantly, though in public she showed a brave front. ‘I am giving up all my stage and film work – everything,’ she told journalists when she married. ‘It is the happiest step I can possibly take, though don’t imagine I have not loved my profession. I know lots of men and their wives mix their careers: I want to be a hundred per cent wife.’
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Similarly, it was unthinkable for Bronwen Pugh, perhaps the highest-paid model in England, to continue her independent working existence after her marriage to Lord Astor in 1960. Both women were obliged by their husbands to uproot a flourishing career; but they were among the luckier women. Choices were far narrower for most others.

Hobson left the stage before the changes in dramatic taste associated with John Whiting’s
Marching Song
(1954), John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
(1956), Shelagh Delaney’s
A Taste of Honey
(1958), Arnold Wesker’s
The Kitchen
(1959), Harold Pinter’s
The Caretaker
(1960) and Keith Waterhouse’s
Billy Liar
(1960). In the early fifties, younger playwrights deplored the theatre’s dependence on plays written by decorous novelists or verse dramas by Eliot and Fry. ‘Well, that marriage broke up,’ John Whiting mused in 1961. ‘Since then the theatre’s been sleeping around with journalism, reportage, propaganda, autobiography and the movies among other things. And the old whore’s produced some very odd offspring.’
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This edgy, ungracious, shop-soiled world was not for Valerie Hobson.

In 1948, Profumo obtained a lease from the Crown Estates of 3 Chester Terrace (telephone: Welbeck 6983), an elegant house designed by Nash overlooking the Regent’s Park. Nash’s terraces kept a battered look for years after the war; and were only restored in the early 1960s. After the Profumos’ marriage their house was revamped with a cool chic that reflected the frosty smartness of their lives. It had a forty-foot drawing room, lit by tall windows, with views of the park beyond. Stéphane Boudin, the Paris interior designer who later advised Jacqueline Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House, imprinted the drawing room with his light version of the Regency style. Side-tables were set on an Aubusson carpet and arrayed with treasures. David Profumo recalled pagodas carved from ivory, an Epstein head, and a bejewelled Fabergé bulldog. It was a special treat for him, when his parents had guests, to hide under the green velvet of one of the side-tables, and nibble rice crackers from a black japanned tin decorated with pink blossom on its lid. Overall, the boy’s upbringing was emotionally chilly.

Smart London did not fully revive after the war until the Season of 1956. ‘For the first time since before the war, the British upper class has got the bit between its teeth’, reported the
New Statesman
in May of that year. ‘Not since the thirties has it consumed so much bad champagne and dubious caviar, trampled so much glass underfoot. After years of wartime equality, Crippsian austerity, servantless mansions, travel allowances, dividend restraint and triumphant bureaucracy, the Butler Boom is beginning to take effect: Society is scrambling shakily to its feet again and cocking a tentative snoot at the masses.’ It was revealing of the postwar pusillanimity that rich people enjoying good parties were thought provocative. Rich people should apologise for their wealth, the
New Statesman
averred, and should not be seen having fun. ‘The upper-class spending spree – of which the 1956 Season is the apotheosis – is a form of collective hallucination, a desperate attempt on the part of Britain’s financial and social élite to persuade itself that nothing has changed. Every all-night party, every case of champagne, every hamper of
pâté de foie gras
is one more proof … that the Labour Government was just a transitory nightmare, that equality is … receding into the remote distance.’ In the authentic tone of an envious killjoy, the magazine closed with a whiny question: ‘Is it too much to ask, just once, that the people at the top should set something other than the worst possible example?’
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The
New Statesman
prig disapproved of what he called ‘the leisured class’, and was tormented by the thought that somewhere people might be enjoying themselves. For the prim and pinch-lipped frowners, who often in these years seemed to constitute the majority, the only pleasure was in foiling other people’s enjoyment. ‘The workaday flavour of England today,’ wrote James Morris in 1962, ‘is dictated by the middle-aged, born out of the slough of war and depression, and empty of exuberance. Whose heart has not sunk, to see the elderly, grumpy, sweaty English porter crossly awaiting him at London Airport? Who has not heard the deputy assistant regional manager, with a gleam of his dentures and a hitch of his spectacles, reiterating his unshakeable conviction that it can’t be done? Who has not been testily reminded by a frumpish crosspatch in a frilly apron that coffee is only served in the lounge? Who has not felt the deadweight of that worn-out, disillusioned, smug, astigmatic, half-educated generation, weighing lumpishly upon the nation’s shoulders?’ This was the England against which the Profumos of Chester Terrace were in glamorous rebellion.
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In January 1959, Macmillan appointed Profumo as his Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. This promotion was resented by the Tory old guard, who mistrusted the ‘
Eye-tie
’ surname, thought him ‘a jumped-up opportunist’, and nicknamed him ‘the Head Waiter’. One venerable editor judged him an agreeable young man, whose ‘advance to ministerial rank had been rapid’ for such ‘a lightweight’. It is likely that Macmillan, who ranked most men by their attitude to appeasement, favoured Profumo as the youngest and bravest of the thirty-three rebels who had fatally wounded the Chamberlain government in the historic Norway vote of 1940. It is an irony of history that without the fall of Chamberlain, there would have been no Profumo Affair.
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As a Foreign Office couple the Profumos began a life of canapés and circuses. They attended official entertainments for foreign ambassadors and envoys at Lancaster House, state dinners and banquets for visiting heads of state at Buckingham Palace, tea with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Apart from official duties, Valerie Profumo had a busy round of clothes fittings, appointments with hairdressers, and smart lunches. She preferred Italian couture, had an awesome array of stiletto-heeled shoes, and owned a skirt made from python skin. In the reshuffle of July 1960, Macmillan appointed Profumo as Secretary of State for War. The valiant anti-appeaser became one of three service ministers – Peter Carrington (Navy) and Hugh Fraser (RAF) were the others – under the Minister of Defence, Peter Thorneycroft. He proved a vigorous minister, who was a terrier in urging military needs in the interminable contentions over the allocation of expenditure between the three fighting departments.

Valerie Hobson had enjoyed the hectic glamour of Profumo’s Foreign Office job. The War Office was equally busy, but less smart, and the incessant official receptions began to become tiresome . Notoriously, the demands of ministerial office, parliamentary attendance and constituency duties made domestic absentees of politicians. ‘Goodbye Daddy, we hope you lose,’ shouted the three sons of Alan Lennox-Boyd as he left to fight the 1955 election campaign in Mid-Bedfordshire. Some MPs stayed working late at the House. Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, alone in his Commons room, beavered at legal papers until three in the morning, when other MPs had gone to bed. Profumo, however, may have been among the minority who used late-night sittings to provide alibis for their amorous adventuring. Although quite short in stature and with receding hair, he was an eager flirt who enjoyed the ruses that occurred in the amatory dusk of brief affairs. David Profumo suspects that, while Minister of War, his father had an intrigue with a woman in his own social set, although he was seldom drawn by intelligent, assertive women, preferring ‘the painted and, if not exactly the semi-professional, then the obviously fun-loving
amateur
’.
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Stanley Baldwin is said to have insisted, in contradistinction to Macmillan’s hero Lloyd George, on forming ‘a Cabinet of faithful husbands’. He also declared that he wanted his Cabinet to have more old Harrovians than any other administration in history – two aims that were surely incompatible. Other premiers were indifferent to their Cabinet’s marital fidelity. There was ready acceptance of extra-matrimonial adventures – so long as the men did not get caught. One way to avoid jeopardising careers was to follow the Duke of Edinburgh’s advice: never to have an affair with someone who has less to lose by being found out. Men proved that they were real men by covering for one another. When Eden’s health broke after Suez, and he was ordered abroad by Sir Horace Evans, he chose to recuperate at a villa in Jamaica belonging to Ian Fleming. The approach to Fleming was made by Lennox-Boyd who, in order to preserve secrecy, asked if he might borrow the house for a holiday. Fleming concurred, and suggested that their wives should get in touch about the details. ‘Oh, you mustn’t tell Patsy,’ Lennox-Boyd insisted. ‘I quite understand, old boy,’ replied Fleming, who doubtless never knew that Lennox-Boyd was involved at the time with a male shop assistant at the Army & Navy Stores.
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It was divorce that mattered. When Nigel Fisher, MP for Hitchin, was sued for divorce by his wife in 1952, his resignation of the candidature was accepted by his local Conservative Association because Hitchin was a marginal constituency where a candidate who was the ‘guilty party’ might lose crucial votes. Instead, Fisher was adopted at Surbiton, where the Tories had a safe majority and the anti-divorce vote could be discounted. Eden proved that a divorced man might become Prime Minister; but survivors of the divorce courts were still not nominated as either Aldermen or Lords Mayor of London. Macmillan thought that Eden took ‘a risk’ in appointing Oliver Poole as chairman of the Conservative Party in 1955 (‘like most Conservative leaders nowadays he is a divorcé’) although on becoming Prime Minister he replaced Poole with another divorcé, Hailsham. As late as 1957, he felt that Profumo’s brother-in-law, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, was precluded from a colonial governorship because he had been divorced.
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After six years there was sparring as well as glamour in the Profumo marriage. Valerie Profumo compiled a list of reproaches which suggest how tedious her husband’s roaming eye had become. She resented his assumption that all pretty women, or preferably ‘girls’, were ‘fair game’ for him. ‘You will stretch any manners, at any time, to do this – not quietly and discreetly, but laughing and showing off and behaving like an adolescent,’ she complained. ‘The way you kiss women you hardly know “goodbye”’ was another irritation. So, too, was the tailoring of his trousers (‘surely there must be
some
way of concealing your penis’). He seldom stopped scoping the room, she protested, even when they were dancing together.
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Despite his flirting at parties and buoyancy at the despatch box, Profumo did not sparkle as a public speaker. The conventionality of his opinions was evident in his respectably prosaic speech at his adoption meeting at the Hippodrome in Stratford before the 1959 general election. Perhaps he judged his constituents aright. The local newspaper allotted more space to reporting that the Marquess of Hertford had served hot-dogs in the grounds of Ragley during a barbecue, at which a hundred accordionists played around a camp fire near the lake, than to reporting the speeches of Lords Mills and Balfour of Inchrye at Profumo’s campaign meetings. ‘Election? What election?’ the
Stratford-upon-Avon Herald
editorialised. ‘Hardly a poster seems to raise its head on the hoardings; in villages one or two can be seen, but it seems as if the Indian Summer’s soporific spell has bewitched elector and candidate alike, for hardly a voice can be heard raised in anger, let alone politics.’ The Conservatives made their headquarters in an Edwardian villa called the Firs. There a band of volunteers worked more quietly than a hive of bees, answering enquiries, addressing envelopes, and despatching posters. The Labour Party’s nerve centre in Central Chambers was even quieter, for the candidate and his agent went to solicit votes at factory gates as constituents arrived for work in the early morning, toured villages during the day, and addressed meetings at night. ‘Both sides have adopted the “whistle-stop” technique, but their loudspeaker vans seem to have a muted sound, as if they are loth to disturb the householders from “Emergency Ward Ten” or “The Archers”. Sundays, by tradition, are rest days (one wonders if they vary much from other days).’
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All this typified Profumo’s constituency, with its prosperous villages stretching south towards Oxfordshire. Avon Carrow, the Profumo house, lay in the parish of Avon Dassett, near Kineton, midway between the spa town of Leamington and the market town of Banbury. Strong support for Profumo burst from the Banbury hinterland when crisis overwhelmed him in 1963. Banbury was a town which, more than Stratford, reflected the weakening traditions and eroded identity that accompanied provincial England’s rising prosperity in the 1950s.

The changes had begun when an aluminium factory started production there in 1933. A corset factory, employing hundreds of women, followed. Soon the cattle, sheep and horse markets, which had been held in the cobbled streets for seven centuries, were resettled across the river under a roof. The marketplace was given a tarmac surface on which cinema-goers could park their cars. A zebra crossing with Belisha beacons was sited by the historic Eleanor Cross, where previously children had played marbles. Long-haul lorries, vans, cars, coaches and motorcycles resembled barbarian warriors as they stormed past the Cross on the north-south road between London and the Midlands conurbation. This road, flanked by stone houses where professional people had once lived in pleasant intimacy, was now a fraught wasteland of dehumanising traffic, where spacious homes were shoddily converted into offices and boarding houses. In the High Street, the Red Lion inn had been demolished for a Woolworths, and the farmers who had done business at its bar had yielded to young mothers with prams. W. H. Smith stood on the site of the Fox, where the fights had once been bloody and blasphemous. A few family concerns survived, but most shops were branches of national chains, and run by managers: Montague Burton the tailor, Dewhurst the butcher, Charles Clore’s shoe retailers Freeman, Hardy and Willis were all there.
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