Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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had called it her ‘boudoir’. As Bronwen leads the way in, she is halfway through a sentence when she notices a group of hotel guests talking and sipping coffee in there. She pulls up short and turns to leave but one woman calls out in a proprietorial way: ‘Do come back, dear. There’s a wonderful view you should see.’ For a moment Bronwen looks ill at ease. She knows the view only too well. She smiles nervously, as if a fly is about to land on her face. It is the closest she comes to any display of emotion.
Upstairs a footman shows us into her old bedroom – again inherited from her mother-in-law. ‘THE LADY ASTOR ROOM’ the plaque on the door announces. A copy of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of a youthful Nancy on the wall makes plain which Lady Astor is being commemorated. Bronwen Astor, for all the fame that surrounded her when she arrived at Cliveden, does not merit a mention. Her period here, you feel, is regarded as something best forgotten.
Yet on the day of her marriage to Bill a press pack every bit as large and insistent as that which hounded Diana, Princess of Wales, had camped out at the pub that faces the gates of Cliveden in the hope of getting a glimpse of its heart-throb, ‘our Bronwen’, as she married her lord. The previous night, tipped off that a ceremony was in the offing, they had chased her, her mother and father across London in a taxi until the cabbie had somehow given them the slip. It was another of those headline-grabbing matches – supermodel marries one of the richest men in the world, even though he was old enough to be her father.
‘When I arrived here, I didn’t change a thing,’ Bronwen says, walking past the chambermaids, who are making the bed. ‘It was the way Bill wanted it. It was like Rebecca and I was the second Mrs de Winter. I literally didn’t move an ashtray – apart from here and in the boudoir. And even then it was a friend of Bill’s – John Fowler – who helped me.’ She says the name as if I should recognise it. When I stare back blankly, she adds: ‘You know, Colefax and Fowler. Wallpaper.’
I was two when the Profumo scandal that destroyed Bill and Bronwen Astor’s life hit the headlines in July 1963. ‘Steamrollered’ is the word Bill’s younger brother David, celebrated editor and owner of the Observer, uses to describe their experience at the hands of the popular press, society gossips and erstwhile establishment friends. It all began in Cliveden’s swimming pool on a hot weekend in July 1961, when War Secretary Jack Profumo and Soviet official Yevgeny Ivanov frolicked with Christine Keeler, watched by her mentor Stephen Ward. During the Cold War a British minister sharing a girl of ill-repute with a Russian agent had major security implications.
When it leaked out, the sex and spy scandal cost Ward his life, Profumo his career and heralded the end of Harold Macmillan’s government. To the list of victims should also be added Bill and Bronwen Astor. Advised by his lawyers to maintain a dignified silence as allegations of orgies at Cliveden abounded, Bill saw his health was destroyed and he died of a broken heart in March 1966, his reputation in tatters. He is one of the forgotten victims of Profumo. He was labelled a seedy playboy, an adulterer, a coward who abandoned Ward in his hour of need in court, and a fool. He became the symbol, however mistakenly, of a world of lascivious ministers and aristocrats with double standards, who, in the mock-Edwardian Macmillan era, had lectured the public on morals while in private hosting poolside romps and attending sado-masochistic parties.
When Keeler’s sidekick, Mandy Rice-Davies, was told in court during Ward’s trial for living off immoral earnings that Lord Astor denied ever having been sexually involved with her, she chirped up: ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ It earned her immortality and damned him for ever. It has been Bill Astor’s most enduring public legacy, though Rice-Davies’s own detailed account of the assignation soon unravels.
In May 1999 the Independent newspaper, in a profile of one of the ‘accidental heroes of the 20th century’, described Christine Keeler as having been ‘procured for Lord Astor’s Cliveden set’. There was no ‘set’ and Bill Astor was not a man to procure women. Yet the myth is apparently set in stone.
John Profumo redeemed himself by good works among the needy of the East End of London. For Bill Astor, whose philanthropy was on a vast but almost invariably ‘no publicity’ basis and who played a central role in the founding of such inspirational international bodies as the British Refugee Council and the Disasters’ Emergency Committee, there was no such redemption.
Though cleared of any guilt by Lord Denning’s subsequent enquiry into the affair, Bill Astor died feeling himself a social leper. Almost four decades on, it is hard to understand what he and Bronwen were meant to have done wrong, what crime it was that brought such vilification on their heads. The most that can be said about them was that they were too indulgent of Stephen Ward, allowing him to live in a cottage on the Cliveden estate and thereby giving him some kind of respectability. ‘I warned Bill about Stephen,’ Bronwen recalls. ‘From the first time Bill introduced us, I didn’t want him at my dinner table.’ Bill agreed to that but, tragically, did not recognise the deeper unease behind his new wife’s demand and so continued to see Ward elsewhere.
For a man who believed the best of most people, it was a small sin. However, those who had been happy to accept Bill and Bronwen’s lavish hospitality before they heard the rumours of high jinks at Cliveden decided that there was no smoke without fire and shunned them. Bronwen recalls being cut dead at parties and grand gatherings at race tracks, while the writer Maurice Collis, a regular guest at Cliveden, recorded in his diary after a weekend there in 1965: ‘The house was completely empty, the great hall without a soul and nobody coming or going. The silence and emptiness were somehow ominous.’
Unlike most political scandals, the Profumo affair has outlasted the avalanche of headlines, the court case and the ministerial resignations. It has even outlasted most of its principal players. And it lives on in the public imagination as a watershed in the 1960s, the turning point between the stuffy, buttoned-up and sometimes hypocritical post-war world and the more liberated age of the Beatles, the King’s Road and the pill. In 1988 the film Scandal brought the whole business to a younger audience. Visitors to Cliveden today still make for the swimming pool rather than the classical treasures that adorn the house and grounds.
Part of that enduring Profumo myth has been to degrade Bronwen Astor. To the list of victims of the affair should also be added her name, as well as those of Bill Astor’s four children, the youngest just two when her father died.
In the film Bronwen is all pouts and shopping trips funded by Bill, an upmarket version of Keeler. ‘Keeler used to call herself a model,’ Bronwen says, ‘and I think at the time some people, some of our friends even, didn’t know the difference between a model and a model girl. And Stephen [Ward] at the very end, when he was desperate, started telling people that he had introduced Bill to me even though I had never met him until I came to Cliveden.’
It is a slur that still riles Bronwen. In July 1963 Paris Soir published her photograph alongside Keeler’s as one of the women Ward was supposed to have trained to secure rich husbands. Once implanted in the public consciousness that idea has refused to go away, despite the evidence. In Honeytrap, a 1988 best-seller by Anthony Summers weaving a Cold War espionage drama into the Profumo scandal, Bill Astor is described as having been introduced to Bronwen through Ward’s good offices.
After lunch we wander through the grounds. Though it was many years before she could face coming back to the house itself, Bronwen used to return occasionally to see Frank Copcutt, the head gardener who stayed on when first Stanford University and later the hotel took on the lease of Cliveden from the National Trust. And there was her husband’s grave – next to those of his mother, father and grandfather in the Cliveden chapel, an octagonal temple, lavishly decorated with mosaics, set away from the house. ‘I used to come back there regularly on anniversaries, but I don’t feel the need now. Bill’s spirit isn’t there. It’s …’ And she gestures as if to mean everywhere.
‘I think I’d like to be buried in Jerusalem. It’s at the centre.’ Her remark comes out of the blue. Initially I’m not entirely sure what it means but Bronwen Astor, I begin to realise, sometimes moves on a different plane from the rest of us. For one thing she talks unembarrassedly about God in everyday conversation. And then every now and then she throws down a line and you have to seize