The night he killed himself, I sat opposite Stephen Ward in the flat in Mallord St, Chelsea. I watched him writing his suicide notes. “Here,” he handed some to me. “Post them for me, would you, there’s a good chap. Oh, and there’s one for you, too.”
It was 9.05 pm, July 30 1963. The Keeler/Profumo Scandal was about to reach its tragic climax.
I was covering the story for a national newspaper. The months of long days and over-long night shifts had brought my marriage to the brink. My wife’s two yellow cards were in my pocket that night. “Home for dinner or we’re through,” she warned, not without justification. Stephen Ward telephoned me at 8.15pm as I was leaving the newsroom. “You must stop by,” he insisted. “I need a favour.”
Ward was alone in the living room. The notes were on the table around him. I guessed what was going on; I think I could have stopped him, but my marriage was on a precipice. The assignment of my career was turning my life into a nightmare.
Just two years earlier, on July 8 1961, at Cliveden, the country estate of Lord Astor, Ward, his live-in platonic girlfriend, a working-class 18-year-old from Berkshire called Christine Keeler, the Minister for War, John Profumo, and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval-intelligence officer, all met and frolicked by the swimming pool. Keeler and Profumo were eventually to finish up in bed; Ivanov allegedly took Keeler to bed as well; Ward, a so-called “society osteopath” and unabashed swinger of the Sixties, was the man who introduced everyone to everyone else.
When the scandal erupted some 18 months later, Britain – and much of the rest of the world – seemed trapped with fascination and horror in the headlights of a train carrying all the freight of the future crashing through the barriers of the post-war past.
Profumo lied to the House of Commons, was caught out, and resigned in honourable disgrace. Ivanov scuttled back to Moscow and drank himself to death. And Dr Stephen Ward, the louche, gabby and largely innocent orchestrator of many of the events, was deliberately chosen by a deeply rattled Establishment to be tied firmly to the rails as the train approached. Scapegoat.
Vulnerable witnesses were found and coaxed into giving evidence against Ward. He was charged with several serious vice offences, including living off the immoral earnings of his friends. Keeler testified against him, his many society friends deserted him, his role as an MI5 informant was ignored – and at the Old Bailey, he faced a deeply conservative judge who expressed ill-coded hostile views about his lifestyle. Ward, quite simply, had been set up.
Like most good state conspiracies, there were no hushed conversations in smoke-filled rooms, just the unspoken understandings of powerful men knowing instinctively how to fulfil their duty to rule.
Some two months earlier, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had asked the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, to conduct a judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading to the resignation of Profumo. Denning’s right-hand man and secretary to the inquiry was a senior Home Office civil servant, Thomas Critchley. The Denning Report was to be published in September 1963. Its main function, intended or not, was to publicly crucify Stephen Ward, while effectively exonerating the Minister for War for a foolish peccadillo.
Ward discovered, too late, that he had been set up. He knew what verdict the jury would return the next day at the Old Bailey, and had no doubt what a hostile judge would do to him. His last hours on earth that night were reasonably calm and philosophical. I think he had found peace.
“My lawyers say there is little hope left,” he told me. “Tomorrow I’m going to be nailed… it’s not a pleasant thought. Tom, I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do time for these offences. It’s not prison that worries me, it’s taking the blame, being the victim of a witch-hunt. And my friends, not one of them stood by me… how could every one of them let me down?”
Suddenly the phone went. Ward answered it. “My dear chap, how kind of you to call… oh, thank you so much… what a welcome surprise… I really do appreciate the trouble you are taking… yes, yes of course, I’ll be totally discreet about this. Thank you again.”
Ward turned to me, and for the first time that evening he was smiling and almost happy. “Christ, you won’t believe this – that was Tom Critchley, Denning’s private secretary. He wished me luck for tomorrow. What an extraordinary man, and what a generous thing to do. Please, Tom, not a word about it.”
I kept my word. Until today.
Ward, wearing a white, open-necked shirt, chain-smoked as he wrote those notes in between our conversation, and then became restless and started wandering round the room. “I suppose everyone likes a lynching,” he said, morose now; the uplift from Critchley’s generous call had dissipated.
I made the wrong decision to try to save my marriage. I should have tried to save Ward’s life. He asked me to post the suicide notes. I refused, but took the one he had written to me. “Don’t do anything stupid,” was my banal farewell to him. It was 11.35pm.
At home, no sleep; about 5.30am the phone went. It was the night news editor. “Get up, sunshine. Your mate Stephen’s tried to top himself, he’s at St Stephen’s Hospital in the Fulham Rd.” Ward died three days later, on August 3. Overdose of sleeping pills.
The early Sixties – for those of us who had lived through the war years and the equally miserable and colourless periods of austerity, freezing winters, joylessness and penury of the late Forties and early Fifties – had begun to hold out some hope.
A traditional hierarchical and class-ridden society held together by honourable men who had fought a war to maintain their values and their duty – not their right – to rule, began to crumble in the face of a social revolution. Tradition and deference began to weaken as a subdued nation explored a new moral landscape: rock music; mini-cars and micro-dresses; Indian hemp (as they called dope in those days); black men; women who slept around a bit; the Pill. What was Britain coming to?
Sex ignited the Profumo/Keeler affair and turned it from a bonfire into a blaze. Sex fuelled every aspect of it, and the heat from the scandal died only with Ward’s demise.
When the Denning Report was published in September 1963, its frank sexual content made it a bit of a top-shelf read. Ostensibly an inquiry into security matters surrounding the scandal, its impact from the very first page was to destroy Ward and establish him as the manipulator-in-chief.
How’s this for the opening page of an “impartial” judicial report on the security aspects of the scandal. On Dr Stephen Ward: “He was … utterly immoral… he used to pick up pretty girls of the age of 16 or 17… and induce them to come and stay with him at his house… He also procured them to be mistresses for his influential friends… There is evidence that he was ready to arrange for whipping and other sadistic performances… ” and so on, and so on.
It wasn’t even half-true.
Ward was no angel. He had charm, was kind, was a free spirit in tune with the changing sexual mores of the time, but he also displayed immaturity, selfishness, he was manipulative and loved exercising power over young girls who had been hypnotised by the new life in the Big Smoke. He talked posh but liked to pretend he blurred class distinctions. He was a compulsive talker and name-dropper who sought glamour and influence and, for all his easiness, took himself rather seriously.
Denning’s picture of him was not only false and cruel, it was also wholly unnecessary unless the hatchet job was required to explain why Mr Profumo was unable to keep his pants up while in a grand and sensitive office of state. Much of Denning’s basic investigative work remains under lock and key, possibly for ever. We now know there were not the slightest infringements or threats to Britain’s national security. There is as much evidence that Keeler never slept with Ivanov as there is that she did.
No one has ever succeeded in peeping through the shuttered windows of the Denning inquiry itself to spy on the thinking and atmosphere inside. But I have managed to obtain the private notes of none other than Tom Critchley, the deeply honourable senior civil servant and Denning’s secretary for the inquiry, and the man who, for all Ward’s perceived Mephistophelean awfulness, had such sympathy for his plight that he took the huge risk of personally telephoning him to wish him good luck for his last day in court.
These notes reveal just how febrile the atmosphere was in the Denning camp, and the tensions between the prurience of naive middle-aged men struck by their first encounter with the Runyonesque sexual underworld of London, and the obligation to drill for the real truth behind the scandal.
The two main players – Ward and Denning – might have been born on different planets. Denning, 64, son of a Hampshire shopkeeper, grammar school, Magdalen College, first-class scholar, active service in the First World War, returned to Oxford to read law and took a First in jurisprudence. He became the youngest judge on the High Court bench, was knighted and became Master of the Rolls. He had the strictest views on the sanctity of marriage, and was a deeply committed Christian, describing religion as “perhaps the chiefest influence on me of all”.
One of Denning’s major tasks was to investigate one of the more notorious rumours surrounding the scandal. Who, for instance, was The Man in the Mask – famously the centre-stage figure in a legendary sex orgy organised by two of London’s most infamous swingers, Hod Dibben and Mariella Novotny. Was it really, as was widely rumoured, Ernest Marples, then Minister for Transport? Was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet out of control?
Dibben and Novotny were only too well known to us in Fleet Street as prolific swingers. Their carefully orchestrated sex orgies with the accent on sadomasochism were musts for those that way inclined. It was at one of these sessions that The Man in the Mask appeared – he was naked apart from a Masonic apron and a mask, and a sign bearing the legend: “If my services don’t please – whip me”.
Critchley’s unpublished diaries reveal an obsession in the Denning camp with Dibben and Novotny. He wrote: “After two days of the inquiry, I was totally absorbed in it. Names and especially that of Hod Dibben visited me in nightmares. Dibben was allegedly a man of fathomless depravity with cunning in whose hands Ward was clay. Mariella was a beautiful blonde… of Czech origin… she had grown up witness to the horrors of the turbulent post-war years in central Europe, and experience of rape and torture that twisted her nature into something vile and deformed.”
Sadly, the truth about them was pedestrian. Dibben was simply a middle-aged, rather overweight antiques dealer and enthusiastic group-sex organiser.
The Critchley diaries reveal that Mandy Rice-Davies, Keeler’s friend and a girl who attended the party, actually named the transport minister. Marples became so distressed about the rumours that he gained Cabinet authority to install a secret microphone at 33 Eccleston Square, where he lived, presumably assuming his taped private conversations would prove his innocence.
But, the diaries reveal, even after listening to Marples’ evidence in all its detail, Denning remained unconvinced and said to Critchley, “Methinks he doth protest too much”.
Dibben and Novotny continued to dominate both Critchley’s and Denning’s minds. Critchley notes: “My curiosity to meet them was immense.” He wrote of Dibben: “In addition to his interests in black magic he had a tremendous appetite for sex so long as it was perverted enough.”
Novotny had “a character as hard as nails and taste in sexual matters that by this time, and she was only 23, had degenerated into extreme forms of depravity”.
Yet, when the couple from the Devil’s Pit finally met the two devout Christians, the encounter was anticlimactic. Dibben openly admitted the party had taken place, there had been a man in a mask, it was a bit of a prank, but no, the man in the mask was not Marples. No fire or brimstone followed his quiet testimony and he left, notes Critchley, “portly, dignified and a little perplexed at being asked these questions”.
Marples was indeed innocent. Stephen Ward and I once discussed the identity of the Man in the Mask in my car while stuck in a traffic jam. Ward, who had also attended the infamous party, winked at me, smiled and said: “Let’s say it was that bloody Ernest Marples. Publish that…” He told Keeler and Rice-Davies the same lie. Within days, most of London “knew” that the transport minister was a masochistic sex fiend. Ward’s practical joke was in bad taste and hurtful. The truth is the real Man in the Mask was a mildly famous gay film director. Dibben gave his name to Denning.
Critchley’s notes reveal that Denning’s encounter with John Profumo had a different texture altogether. Here was one of their own, brought down by an unfortunate blunder into the Ward-dominated underworld of depravity. “To me the experience [of interviewing Profumo] was extremely painful, and I felt that I didn’t want to listen to his story of ruin unfolding with all the inevitability of a French drama… Afterwards I shook hands with him and went home distressed.”
By the time Ward appeared in Critchley’s diaries, he had already grown horns and cloven feet. “Osteopath, artist, demon, socialite, pervert” was how Critchley described him. And yet: “I thought him highly intelligent, desperately anxious to please and be liked, extrovert, gay, even now with a streak of cruelty in his look and manner… However, there was much about him that was appealing.”
Critchley’s notes reveal the prejudices of an Establishment, hard of artery, defending its values. Ward had merely joined the vanguard of change. He was a swinger, he was a little dissolute, half of him was ahead of the times; he was selfish and self-regarding, but he was not a bad man.
When a perplexed and defensive Establishment sought someone responsible for Profumo’s downfall, it picked a soft target in Ward. So a police operation, sanctioned at the highest political level, was mounted not to solve a crime – none had been committed – but to find a crime that could be hung on Ward.
In the last months, Ward had begun dictating his life story on tape for an eventual autobiography. The tapes have since been lost, but a full manuscript typed from the recordings has come into my possession. Reading it for the first time is like hearing Ward talking from the grave.
On Keeler: “She is really a very simple, shy and innocent creature whose only fault is that she is perhaps too easily led.” And on sex parties: “It would be humbug if I did not confess that I looked forward to them. I have been to every type of sex orgy… Many of the people who attend are rich and famous. If their public could only see them like this.”
As the determined police operation to find crimes for Ward to have committed rolled forward, vulnerable “witnesses” were persuaded to give evidence against him – and Ward slowly realised that an innocent man really could be hounded into prison. “Now the full horror of [my] situation comes home to me and I start to feel hunted,” he wrote. “I’m just not aware before this that a thing of this sort could happen in England. I hope it never does again. I know now the ultimate denouement is inevitable.”
The detectives on his case had approached a prostitute known as Miss Whiplash, or Ronna Ricardo. When Ward was finally arraigned on eight vice charges [he was charged with eight violations of the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, including brothel-keeping, procuring, living off the earnings of prostitutes, and abortion offences] at Marylebone magistrates’ court on Friday June 28, Ricardo’s evidence for the prosecution formed an important part of the case against him.
I spent some time with Ricardo on the instructions of a shrewd news editor who sensed there was more to her story. One evening, and without warning, she turned to me and confessed: “Everything I have said about Stephen is a complete lie. The detectives threatened me… [one of them] told me he would send my younger sister to a remand home and take my baby away from me. He also told me I would be arrested every time I walked the streets. I had no choice.”
I have never reported Stephen’s suicide note to me. It now seems a fitting pay-off and I publish it in memory of a man who, 50 years after taking his life, reminds us that in the battles that accompany profound social change, there are real casualties, not heroes but just people who get in the way.
“Dear Tom, Thank you for everything.
"I despaired of everything after I heard the judge’s summing up – my case which rested almost entirely on my word was hardly put at all. I have never taken a penny which I knew to come from immoral earnings, this you must believe…
“Anyway times were once good.”
* Tom Mangold reports in and presents ‘Profumo Confidential’, a one-hour documentary made by Whistledown Productions for BBC Radio 4, at 8pm on Saturday May 25
