An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (16 page)

In 1939, Ward enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps as a private. Later he transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps, where the refusal of the military authorities to recognise his American medical degree aroused his abiding resentment. He served instead as a stretcher-bearer. After demobilisation he set up an osteopathic practice in Cavendish Square, behind Oxford Street, in 1947. His first important patient, Averell Harriman, was the US ambassador. Harriman’s recommendations, and a spreading reputation, brought rich and eminent patients to Ward’s consulting rooms: the oil multi-millionaires Paul Getty and Nubar Gulbenkian; Winston Churchill, and his politically inexorable son-in-law Duncan Sandys; other politicos, including Eden, Gaitskell, Rab Butler and Selwyn Lloyd; King Peter of Yugoslavia, Prince Christian of Hanover, the Maharajah of Baroda; film-stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye.

Ward was voluble with a rich, resonant voice. He was a sympathetic if inquisitive listener, who combined calculation with impetuosity. At best he seemed charming, kind, plausible, carefree and indiscreet; but he was too sure of his powers of pleasing. One of his patients, an ambassador’s wife, Lady Gladwyn, ‘disliked his jaunty conceited manner’, but acknowledged the efficacy of his techniques. The
Daily Telegraph
editor Sir Colin Coote, whose lumbago was cured by Ward’s ‘healing hands’, found his consultations ‘completely normal’. However, as he informed Downing Street confidentially in June 1963, ‘Ward chattered incessantly during treatment, so much so that I thought his political views, though childish, might be dangerous.’ He consulted David Floyd, the
Telegraph
’s special correspondent on communist affairs, who ‘assured me that MI5 knew all about him and, I gathered, actually received reports from him’.
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Like all show-offs, Ward loathed being alone. There was nothing self-sufficing about him. His working life and off-duty activities were ruled by a need for company that reflected his fear of solitude. He had an overweening need to win people’s esteem. His marriage in 1949 failed after six weeks: his wife, the daughter of a textiles company director, was not typical of his taste in women. Young women with well-educated parents seldom attracted him. Instead he preferred ‘girl-spotting’ in Oxford Street or coffee bars, and picking up slim-hipped, improvident gamine types, whom he called ‘alley cats’.

Vanity, flirting, impudence, fickleness, irresponsibility and indolence were traits that Ward found attractive in women. For some years he lived in a studio flat atop Orme Court near the Notting Hill Gate end of Bayswater Road. It was not, then, a smart address. He let women stay there, without the aim of taking them to bed, because he liked their clutter of underwear, stockings and make-up. Christine Keeler lived with him at Orme Court in a companionate way without sexual activity between them. Their alliance should have been fleeting; but by mischances and indiscretions, their fates became fettered together like those of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. There was an adolescent tinge to Ward’s obsession with sex. Innuendo amused him. With his white Jaguar, his name-dropping and his fantasies of influence, he was a licentious Walter Mitty: Ward might have said, in Gide’s words from
The Immoralist
, ‘the lowest instinct has always seemed to me the most sincere’.

In 1953–54, Ward acquired a lethal enemy called John Lewis, who had inherited control of a business called Rubber Improvement, and was a hard-driven businessman in a hurry to make millions. Lewis had been elected as a Labour MP in the 1945 general election, later declaring himself a supporter of ‘full Socialist planning and control of the world’s resources’. His chief parliamentary interventions concerned industrial research and development and controls on scarce materials such as rubber (although as a steward of the Boxing Board of Control, he promoted television sports); but he came to be shunned in the parliamentary party. He achieved fleeting front-page fame by his road-hog behaviour in a Hyde Park traffic jam, which led to a parliamentary investigation in 1951. After losing his seat some months later, Lewis abandoned politics for money-making. He treated his young wife Joy abusively, and was brazen in his pursuit of starlets: ‘I’ve screwed every pretty girl in London,’ he crowed. One night, after a drunken row, Joy Lewis fled their flat overlooking the Regent’s Park, and took refuge with Stephen Ward. Lewis failed in his attempt to cite Ward in his ferocious divorce, but denounced him to the Inland Revenue, informed the
Daily Express
that he was running a Mayfair call-girl racket, and made anonymous telephone calls to Marylebone police station decrying him as a procurer of women to rich patients. The police found no evidence to support Lewis’s unhinged calumnies, but these accusations lay on file, and were a pointer when the police were instructed to investigate if criminal charges could be brought against Ward in 1963.
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The osteopath’s caprices were invisible to his patients. ‘I had no inkling of the shady side of Stephen Ward,’ wrote Coote. ‘Indeed, if I had been asked whether he had one, I should have guessed that he was not interested in girls.’ William Shepherd MP, meeting him for the first time in 1962, similarly assumed that Ward’s preference was for youths. Ludovic Kennedy, who watched him on trial in 1963, commented: ‘ageing men who look half their years are often fairies; and one wondered whether within this screaming hetero, a homo was not struggling wildly to be let out’. A profile in the
Observer
reported that Ward’s girl-chasing was so showy that several acquaintances suspected that his Casanova complex hid ‘latent homosexuality or impotence’.
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The power and prosperity of Ward’s patients defined his status as a practitioner. The fact that his fees were paid by a deposed Balkan monarch, the American oilman who was reported to be the richest man in the world, by Winston Churchill and Hollywood actors, elevated him. He was what his eminent patients made him. His ill-starred destiny proved to be ruled by one practitioner-patient relationship above all others – that with Lord Astor.

In 1949 Bill Astor injured his back in a fall while hunting with the Whaddon Chase. He consulted Ward, who alleviated the pain and persuaded him that he would feel better for an osteopathic massage after every outing in the hunting field. When Ward later cured a bout of neuritis, he was brought into the train of Astor’s largesse. Ward was careless about money, and started borrowing from Astor – £1,250 in 1952, for example. It would be harsh to characterise him as a sponger, but fair to call him a presumptuous charmer. Astor introduced Ward to his half-brother Bobbie Shaw, whose joy of life as a young man had been wrecked by guilt, ostracism and imprisonment because of his homosexuality, and who by the 1950s was a miserable drunkard. Shaw’s gratitude to Ward took a submissive form. Once, when Ward was tending Shaw for a poisoned arm, David Astor felt that his half-brother needed pharmaceuticals, not osteopathy. Shaw was chary of annoying Ward, who required his patients to trust him without demur, but agreed to consult a physician if Astor telephoned Ward to explain. Ward’s reaction was thorny when Astor broke the news: he was always aggrieved when his relations with patients were disrupted by outsiders.

Friendship, Hugh Trevor-Roper noted in 1945, differed between the classes in England. In the lower classes it was expressed by doing helpful kindnesses for each other; in the middle classes it was founded on mutual respect; ‘in the world of fashion they simply adore men and women whom one would not dream of trusting round the corner’. Stephen Ward’s popularity was a prime case. Like many untrustworthy people, he had the gift of inspiring confidence. As Astor’s second marriage unravelled during 1956, he apparently used Ward as an intermediary seeking reconciliation with Philippa Astor. Perhaps in gratitude, Ward was allowed to occupy Spring Cottage, the half-timbered pseudo-Tyrolean hideaway – quaint or ugly depending on one’s taste – on the banks of the Thames at Cliveden. Cynthia Gladwyn recalled that on her sole visit, Spring Cottage was ‘dusty, untidy and rather sordid’, and that she was handed sherry in ‘a grubby glass’. Once Ward started using this riverside nook at weekends, he was more than ever in Bill Astor’s life. He became the Cliveden jack-in-a-box, always popping up and down from Spring Cottage. He would stroll to the main house, after luncheon at the weekends, massage his landlord’s back and give osteopathic manipulation to any guests who wished. Occasionally he was invited to dine. In April 1960, for example, he joined a party including Sir John Wolfenden, the university vice-chancellor who had chaired the official inquiry into prostitution and homosexuality. In reporting this dinner, Maurice Collis, who was another guest, described Ward (who had attended classes at the Slade School of Art) as ‘Bill’s great friend, and a most charming friendly man who, besides being a Harley Street specialist, is an amateur artist of talent’.
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Pamela Cooper, who took a course of treatment with Ward in London, found him amusing and ingratiating. ‘However,’ she recalled, ‘there was something not quite right about Stephen. He could not rest content as a good artist and excellent osteopath, and he presumed on Bill’s generosity. Many of Bill’s friends did the same – except that Stephen wasn’t really a friend.’ Her son, Grey Gowrie, enjoyed picnics at Spring Cottage as an Oxford undergraduate. ‘They were jolly, not orgiastic. There was a bit of innocent malarkey, swimming in the Thames, but nothing more.’ Jack Profumo, who had known Astor since they canvassed together for Conservative votes in Fulham in the 1930s, recalled in old age that after an introduction to Ward by Astor in the early 1950s, he had attended one of Ward’s cocktail parties, where he found several starlets. Profumo, who found the osteopath ‘charismatic’, described Ward’s role at Cliveden as ‘partly a Court jester, but also a go-getter of girls’.
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Ward’s preponderant extra-curricular activity was interfering in other people’s lives. He acted the part of a wizard casting sexual spells. ‘He was full of life, enthusiastic about everything,’ Christine Keeler recalled. ‘Stephen would always fill an awkward silence with a funny remark, would never put you down for telling a flat joke. He wanted everyone to be as carefree as he was, and was genuinely upset by drooping shoulders.’ His thick brown hair, strong jaw and well-toned body were, she thought, attractive: ‘when he smiled the whole of his face lit up, and he had the most mesmerising voice that I had ever heard which he used to make you feel important’. She accompanied him when, in June 1961, he moved from Orme Court into a first-floor flat in an unprepossessing little building at 17 Wimpole Mews, Marylebone. Wimpole Mews was a minute’s stroll from Ward’s consulting rooms at 38 Devonshire Street. It had the further attraction of a public house, where the publican had a special line in attracting pretty young women.
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The best summary of Ward was published in David Astor’s
Observer
a few days after Ward’s criminal trial for living on immoral earnings in 1963. ‘He was a compulsive exhibitionist who depended upon audiences to provide him with stimulus and confidence,’ the paper averred. ‘He was massively indiscreet, and loved showing off right up to the end. He liked to exercise his power over girls, and it may have been this, as much as sexual desire, that impelled him.’ Despite his financial and domestic disorderliness, he seemed sure of his professional competence and social influence. He fancied himself as an amateur psychotherapist who understood human foibles and could repair damaged psyches. He prized himself, too, as a subversive, who blurred class distinctions, brought unlikely people together, and introduced poor girls to rich men. Ward was not avaricious: he sought glamour and influence – not money. ‘It was this that made much of the prosecution’s case seem inherently implausible. To depict him as a straightforward ponce, using his flat as a commercial brothel, seemed out of keeping with Ward’s basic ambitions and the peculiar nature of his self-respect.’
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A new phase of Ward’s career began with a gallery exhibition of his sketches of patients in 1960. He supplied the
Illustrated London News
and then the
Daily Telegraph
with further celebrity sketches. His sitters were as varied as Princess Margaret, the Dukes of Edinburgh and Gloucester, the Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios, the hire-purchase washing machine tycoon John Bloom, John Betjeman and the comedian Terry-Thomas. Colin Coote commissioned Ward to draw ink sketches for the
Daily Telegraph
of protagonists at Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Subsequently Ward complained to Coote that his scheme to sketch the Soviet Politburo had been baffled because he could not get a visa to visit Russia. In the hope of expediting the visa, Coote introduced him at luncheon at the Garrick Club to Yevgeny (‘Eugene’) Ivanov, the assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy. David Floyd, the
Telegraph
expert on the Soviet bloc, also attended the lunch. ‘Though I only saw Ivanoff once again,’ Coote wrote, ‘Ward talked a lot about him – so much so that I thought he (Ward) might well be a homosexual. This impression was confirmed at a return lunch to which Ward invited me in a Mayfair restaurant and where Ivanoff was also a guest. As I do not like these gentry, I never went to Ward again for lumbago.’
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Ward’s hobnobbing at Cliveden was less easy after Astor’s re-marriage in October 1960. ‘I warned Bill about Stephen,’ Bronwen Astor told Peter Stanford. ‘From the first time Bill introduced us, I didn’t want him at my dinner table.’ In fact, he dined there only twice after she became Cliveden’s chateleine: for Boxing Day of 1960; and on 30 December 1961. On the first occasion, he was invited to dinner at short notice, because the Astors needed a single man to balance the sexes at the table, and charmed his hostess. Subsequently, at her husband’s prompting, she had one Ward treatment: the experience aroused her distaste. ‘His conversation was very intrusive,’ she thought. ‘He asked very personal questions.’ She decided not to repeat the experience.
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