In 1963, Britain was already convulsed by the Profumo affair, a scandal involving sex, secrets, and the powerful that threatened to bring down the government. Into that feverish atmosphere dropped the divorce case of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, a story so sensational it eclipsed everything around it.
At the center was Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, once the most celebrated debutante of her age. Her husband, the Duke, had broken into her London home, stolen her private diaries and photographs, and was now using them to destroy her in open court. The most damaging piece of evidence was a Polaroid photograph of the Duchess with a man whose head was not in the frame. The press dubbed him "the headless man," and his identity became the obsession of the nation.
Margaret was born Margaret Whigham on December 1, 1912, in Renfrewshire, Scotland. Her father, George Whigham, was a self-made industrialist who had built a fortune manufacturing artificial silk. The money was new, but it was enormous, and it bought his daughter a life of transatlantic glamour, split between New York and London.
She was presented at court in 1930 and won the London season outright. The press named her debutante of the year, calling her simply "the Whigham," a definite article that signaled she was the standard against which all other girls were measured. Her coming-out party at 6 Audley Square reportedly cost £40,000, a sum that could have bought a street of houses in 1930.
Her fame was such that Cole Porter wrote her into a lyric for "You're the Top," naming her as Mrs. Sweeney, a reference to her first husband, American businessman Charles Sweeney. She married Sweeney in 1933 in a wedding that stopped traffic in Knightsbridge for three hours, her Norman Hartnell gown so famous it now resides in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The marriage brought private grief that the public never saw. She suffered a long series of miscarriages, as many as eight, and a stillborn daughter in 1933. Two children survived, a daughter Frances and a son Brian. In 1943, she survived a fall down a lift shaft, a drop of some 48 feet, an accident that some believed changed her, making her bolder and more reckless.
She divorced Sweeney in 1947. Her second marriage, in 1951, was to Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell and master of Inveraray Castle. The title was ancient and grand, but the castle was a trap, devouring money faster than the estates could provide it.
The most serious charge against the Duke was that he married Margaret for her fortune, allegedly arranging a forged deed of sale to secure her money for the castle's restoration before she understood what she had agreed to. He was her third wife's third husband, a man with a great house, a thin purse, and a talent for marrying women who could fill it. He was also addicted to alcohol, gambled heavily, and depended on amphetamines and barbiturates.
The marriage curdled fast. The Duke resented needing her money and could not bear her fame. He began to spy on her, allegedly wiretapping her car and tracking her movements. He was building a case, waiting for his moment. While Margaret was in New York, he engaged a locksmith to break into a locked cupboard in her Mayfair house at 48 Upper Grosvenor Street.
There was no warrant, no permission. It was a deliberate, planned intrusion. He stole her diaries, her private papers, her letters, and a handful of small square Polaroid photographs. In the most infamous of them, the woman was identifiable at a glance because she wore the three strands of pearls that were her signature. The man beside her had no head in the frame.
The Duke did not bring one accusation to court. He brought a list of as many as 88 men he alleged were his wife's lovers, a figure that reached, it was claimed, into the government and the royal family. It was an accusation assembled by the most hostile witness imaginable, built to shock.
Lord Wheatley, the judge, delivered a verdict that ran to some 50,000 words. He called Margaret "a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men." He wrote that her attitude to the sanctity of marriage was "wholly immoral." The judgment was a moral condemnation dressed in the robes of law.
Margaret could have named the man in the photograph. She could have dragged him into the pit beside her. She said nothing. Part of her silence was forced by the law of the time, as some of the associations the Duke held against her could not be explained in court without exposing other people to criminal prosecution for homosexual acts, which were still illegal in Britain until 1967.
But her silence was also a choice. The name was the last thing she owned outright, and she kept it. The state wanted the name as badly as the newspapers did. An inquiry led by Lord Denning compared handwriting on the photographs against samples taken from suspects. A handful of names circulated, including a government minister who was a son-in-law of Winston Churchill and an American film actor. No one was ever named in public.
The government sealed the records, pushing the disclosure date far beyond the lifetime of anyone living. The secret was not solved. It was buried. The one person on earth who knew the truth for certain had chosen silence over every reward that naming him might have brought.
The money went the way of the marriage. She wrote a memoir, "Forget Not," and sold tickets to guided tours of her own house. In 1978, the debts forced her out of Upper Grosvenor Street. She moved into a suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel, then was evicted in 1990. At the end, she depended on the kindness of friends.
Among those who helped her was Charles Sweeney, her first husband, the man whose name Cole Porter had borrowed for a song. She died on July 25, 1993, aged 80, in a nursing home in Pimlico, in poverty. She was buried at Brookwood Cemetery, laid to rest beside Charles Sweeney, who had died only four months before her.
History has been kinder to her than Lord Wheatley was. A later age saw a wife whose house had been burgled by her own husband, whose private photograph had been paraded through a courtroom, and who had been condemned for doing in private what powerful men had always done without reproach. It saw the asymmetry captured in that one photograph: the woman named and ruined, the man faceless and safe.
She had been raised to be looked at, taught that her value was her surface. The same machinery that built her up as a spectacle tore her down. Late in life, she said she had wealth, she had good looks, and that the top was what she was supposed to be. She reached the top exactly as she had been instructed, and the top turned out to be the most dangerous place a woman of her time could stand.
The headless man kept his secret because she chose to let him keep it. The world kept her name because she could never take it back. She was the one they could see, so she was the one they destroyed.