An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ lacked judgement, perseverance and luck. Once he was offered a chance to invest in a new substance for wrapping bread, called Cellophane, but was sure that housewives would never buy it. He dealt in bric-à-brac, opened a South Kensington bridge club and kept his family in precarious gentility at transitory addresses. One of his few successes was to renounce alcohol after years of unseemly tipsiness. He and his wife shifted about with their two daughters, staying in the spare rooms of patient relations, becoming paying guests in the homes of spinster gentlefolk, moving on within a year before their hosts tired of them. His public face was bluff optimism, but at home there was tetchy despondency.

      Valerie Hobson was a plain child with monstrous teeth. But she matured into a beauty, went to RADA, and at the age of sixteen secured her first film part – for which she was paid £20. Three years later, in 1936, while taking part in a Shepperton Studios film called Eunuch, she fell in love with a spruce gallant named Anthony Havelock-Allan. Tony Havelock-Allan, too, had a background of feckless, unsettled indigence. At the time of his birth, his father had been managing director of the Northern Counties Spa Water Company, but losing that post in 1907, had tried to keep a wife and three children on an allowance of £200 a year from his elder brother (a Durham baronet). He tried to raise his income by becoming Master of the West Kent Foxhounds with the intention of running the hunt to his personal profit. Instead, after one hunting season, he went bankrupt in 1914. The second son of a bankrupt second son, Tony Havelock-Allan had to skip university, but studied gemmology at Chelsea Polytechnic after getting his first job with the Regent Street jewellers Garrard’s. He dallied in Weimar Berlin, met Ravel and Stravinsky during his stint as recording manager of a gramophone company, flogged advertising in Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard to estate agents, and hired cabaret acts for Ciro’s nightclub (where the cocktails ‘Sidecar’ and ‘White Lady’ were invented). From Ciro’s, Havelock-Allan was recruited by his chum Richard Norton (afterwards Lord Grantley) to be casting director at the English branch of the Hollywood company Paramount Pictures, for whom he became a film producer in 1935.

      Havelock-Allan was a practised and calculating philanderer. When he met Valerie Hobson, he was engrossed with Enid Walker, wife of Count Cosmo de Bosdari. He was pursuing an affair with the actress Kay Kendall, fresh from the flop film musical London Town, when ten years later Hobson met Profumo. Having married Havelock-Allan in 1939, Valerie Hobson soon became pregnant and self-induced an abortion by drinking a bottle of gin, hurling herself from a chair and taking a boiling-hot bath. This is one experience that she shared with Christine Keeler, who once tried to induce an abortion with the aid of drugs and knitting-needles. In 1944, Hobson gave birth to a son, Simon, who was diagnosed as having Down’s syndrome: a physician offered to give the baby a fatal injection of meningococcal meningitis, but she declined. It is indicative of attitudes in 1944 that the Education Act of that year deemed children with Down’s to be ‘ineducable’ and excluded them from schooling. Simon Havelock-Allan spent most of his boyhood in institutions, and did not speak until he was sixteen. It is not surprising that after such lonely sorrows Valerie Hobson was regarded as prickly and aloof in the film world.

      Two of her screen successes were playing aristocrats in films about men escaping from their class. She played a chilly beauty, Edith D’Ascoyne, in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the comedy in which a fastidious shop assistant, played by Dennis Price, murdered a succession of his remote cousins in order to escape penury and inherit the dukedom of Chalfont. The murder victims (female as well as male) were all played by Alec Guinness. Edith D’Ascoyne, the widow of the second murder victim (killed in a booby-trapped photographer’s darkroom), unknowingly marries her husband’s killer (most of the deaths are attributed to accidents). ‘A kind of British comedy we hadn’t dared to dream about – urbane, satirical, witty, sophisticated,’ Cyril Ray greeted it. Hobson played Lady Chell in The Card (1952), the film adapted by Eric Ambler from Arnold Bennett’s novel. It again starred Alec Guinness, this time as a wide-boy who rises in the world by impertinence and charm. ‘Miss Valerie Hobson as Lady Chell performs with great spirit the unladylike tasks set before her,’ reported a reviewer. ‘Her ride in a runaway mule-cart gives new life to that moribund and fishy tribe – the film aristocrats.’⁸

      Valerie Hobson, who was attracted by dashing coureurs de femmes, fell for Profumo as swiftly as she had for Havelock-Allan. His vitality was exciting and, as she later wrote, his interests differed from any she had known: ‘politics (above all), girls, horses, parties, holidays in the sun, practical jokes, Society gossip, aeroplanes (which he flew himself) and, above all, fun’.⁹ She did not want her first foray in adultery to be with him, or to be spoilt by self-conscious guilt, so she first went to bed with another married admirer, probably Whitney Straight, a motor-racing driver and managing director of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation). Shortly after, she and Profumo began their secret affair. The subterfuge of intrigues, he found, intensified the sex.

      Hobson became pregnant by Profumo during the summer of 1949. When she told him of the pregnancy as they stood on the battlements of Chenonceaux castle, he reacted lovingly but took it for granted that she would have an abortion. This time, instead of a horrific, self-induced abortion, she underwent the medical procedure known colloquially as a D and C (dilation and curetting) at a nursing-home in Hendon. This second abortion made her suspend the affair. A general election was looming, and her lover could not jeopardise his political prospects by being named in a divorce case involving an actress.

      Profumo was elected with a safe majority as Tory MP for the newly created constituency of Stratford-on-Avon in 1950 (his parents’ house, Avon Carrow, lay in the constituency, where his unmarried sister still lived). Two years later he succeeded Reginald Maudling as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Civil Aviation, Alan Lennox-Boyd. In the Civil Aviation ministry he enthused about helicopters, and wanted to foist a heliport on Londoners. Subsequently the Civil Aviation and Transport ministries were merged under a single minister, John Boyd-Carpenter – ‘spring-heeled Jack’ as he was nicknamed. The two parliamentary secretaries of the united department were, Boyd-Carpenter recalled, ‘Hugh Molson, cautious, precise, reliable, a little inflexible on the ground transport side, and John Profumo, lively, quick and adroit – the best company in the world.’¹⁰ There are politicians who run on full throttle in their race for power; there are overwrought firebrands obsessed with principle; and breezy types who scoot along on charm. The latter get people to like them, put them at their ease, recognise their faces, mollify their feelings, nod encouragingly at their remarks, and make apt replies. This was Jack Profumo.

      Six months after Profumo’s re-election to Parliament, Valerie Hobson went to the opera with Havelock-Allan, let him stay the night and became pregnant. Shortly after her second son was born in April 1951, the couple agreed to divorce – perhaps to facilitate her marriage to a new suitor, the Marquess of Londonderry, a drunkard who swerved between self-pitying submission and ugly aggression. In conformity with the prevalent divorce laws, Havelock-Allan, with his long career of adulteries, had to contrive being caught with a woman in circumstances that seemed to provide proof of adultery, although the woman was a respectable stranger hired for the purpose. After the divorce was accomplished in 1952, Londonderry’s attentions became importunate; but Profumo instead bounded back into play. He and the newly freed Valerie Hobson announced their engagement in October 1954. Profumo, saddled with an Italian surname suggestive of women’s scents, cannot have helped his flighty reputation among the more wooden-headed MPs by marrying an actress.

      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.’¹¹ 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 СКАЧАТЬ