Grinning men would pose for photos beside the boarding sign for a Scottish boat that shared her name: “Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll.” When the initial outrage faded, the duchess remained the subject of snickering innuendos for decades. And it paved the way for later media depictions of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Markle - “that viciousness and anger that is directed at women in the public eye,” she said.
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Sarah Phelps, who wrote the script for “A Very British Scandal,” said that the duchess’s case and the media furor around it represented “the end of an era.” It was “the birth of a different kind of journalism, and a way of writing about sex and scandal in a very, very prurient way,” she said. The first hymn at her funeral, in 1993, began, “Dear Lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.”
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The duchess died in penury, at 80, in a London retirement home. Her personal relations didn’t fare much better: She fell out with a daughter from her first marriage, and many of her friends.
#Marg of arg headless man photo series#
Over the rest of her life, she frittered away the fortune she inherited from her father on a series of unsuccessful law suits and dubious investments. Margaret the glittering socialite became Margaret “the dirty duchess.” Ruling in the duke’s favor to grant the divorce in 1963, the judge said the duchess was a “completely promiscuous woman” who had indulged “in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” The details of the “headless man” photos were gleefully written up in British newspapers, which raked over the case for months. “This is the Duchess of Argyll the world knows.”)ĭuring the trial, the duke submitted a list of 88 men he said the duchess had slept with during their marriage, as well as Polaroids he had stolen from her that showed the duchess performing oral sex on an unknown man whose head was not in the frame. (“Beautiful! Rich! Distinguished!” read a teaser for a 1961 Daily Mirror splash. And she realized early on she could make money from what we would now call her “personal brand,” taking cash from tabloid newspapers to appear in fawning articles. After a string of high-profile relationships and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she became the Duchess of Argyll in 1951 when she married the duke, Ian Campbell (played by Paul Bettany in the show), whose family had been part of the Scottish aristocracy since the 1400s.Ī glamorous A-lister who counted society columnists as her friends, the duchess cultivated a chic media image. Back in Britain, she became a much-photographed debutante with a fancy trans-Atlantic sheen, and a fixture of newspaper society pages. Her father, a self-made textiles millionaire, moved the family to New York when she was a child, and she lived there until she was 14. She was born Margaret Whigham, in Scotland, in 1912. But stories about the duchess’s sex life, she says, “are dragging us down so we look just like them.”įoy’s character was never one of “the little people,” but she wasn’t always an aristocrat, either. “The little people in their grubby pits look up to us, because we are not them,” says the friend, played by Julia Davis. In the show’s final episode, one of the duchess’s aristocratic friends bemoans the British public’s desire to know what the upper classes are up to. “Anything that happens behind closed doors, we’re all completely obsessed with. “Deep down, all British people love it: We love gossip and love the titillating things other people are getting up to,” she added. These stories, Foy said in a recent interview, appealed to elements of Britain’s national character.
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The show is a companion to “ A Very English Scandal,” another hugely popular Amazon-BBC coproduction in which Hugh Grant played an upper-crust politician who suffered a similar fate. When the BBC aired “A Very British Scandal” this past December, nearly 7 million people tuned in. In “A Very British Scandal,” a three-part series streaming on Prime Video from April 22, Claire Foy plays the Duchess of Argyll, a real-life aristocrat whose sex life was pored over in a 1960s court case that created a media frenzy and riveted the nation. The great and the good brought down in disgrace: That’s a story people want to hear.
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LONDON - Everybody loves a sex scandal, and a posh one is even better.