An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Richard Davenport-Hines

her about the primary importance of love. Bronwen Pugh trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama before going to teach at a girl’s school. Only later did she plunge into modelling. Some thought her too tall for the London catwalks; Cecil Beaton refused to do a photographic portrait because he claimed that her nose was too ugly; but her purposive self-possession proved startling at fashion shows.

      In the spring of 1957, Bronwen Pugh went to Paris to model for Balmain. ‘Bronwen takes Paris by Scorn’, was Picture Post’s headline. ‘Some loathed it. Some were entranced. But everybody remembered that scornful, dirt-beneath-my-feet style of modelling.’ Recalling that Pugh has been ‘a schoolmistress’, Picture Post added, ‘the glare that quelled the Lower Fourth has become the stare that sweeps the salons at Balmain’. Katharine Whitehorn, who went to see the Paris fashions, reported: ‘At Balmain this extraordinary girl somehow acquired a manner of showing dresses which put her instantly on a pedestal. It was half-Bournemouth, half-goddess; scornful, aristocratic, insufferable. It staggered Paris.’²⁹

      There was confusion among journalists and the public between ‘model girls’, as Bronwen Pugh and her colleagues were then called, and ‘models’, as young women were euphemistically docketed when they appeared in newspaper reports of divorce or criminal cases. Anne Cumming-Bell led the way for socially ascendant ‘model girls’ by marrying the Duke of Rutland in 1946 (newspapers still calling her ‘a mannequin’ and reporting that she had always insisted on appearing fully-clothed); Norman Hartnell’s ‘model girl’ Jane McNeill married the future Duke of Buccleuch in 1953; Fiona Campbell-Walter married Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1956; Anne Gunning Parker married Sir Anthony Nutting in 1961. Dior’s muse Jean Dawnay married a major in the Welsh Guards, Prince George Galitzine, in 1963. These, however, were the rare, publicised exceptions. Many model girls acquired husbands who earned less than themselves. They were unable to save because of the enormous outlay required in shoes, nylons, hats, bags, gloves, cosmetics and hair-dos.

      Fiona Campbell-Walter met Heini Thyssen on a St Moritz train rather as Astor and Bronwen Pugh met in the same ski resort. Thyssen wooed her with a Ford Thunderbird, and married her post-haste. ‘He had the fastest plane, the best motor car, the most precious paintings,’ she is supposed to have said; ‘of course he had to have the most beautiful woman.’ She was the third of Thyssen’s five wives. Talking about her later, with the smugness of a lifelong womaniser, he said: ‘She wasn’t very intelligent but she would talk endlessly in that wonderful dark brown voice of hers. One day, when we were driving, she asked me a question and I didn’t answer. I said: “You’ve got such a sweet charming voice, you can’t expect me to listen to what you’re saying as well. Just talk to me”.’ Thyssen lusted after Campbell-Walter, although he ungallantly said that she looked better dressed than nude. ‘When it comes to women,’ he philosophised, ‘one should not fall madly in love, travel with them, trust or spoil them. One should, however, show jealousy. Women like that.’³⁰

      Astor was Thyssen’s antithesis as a suitor. Between his first luncheon with Bronwen Pugh, and their next, months later, she underwent an unheralded mystical experience which filled her with joy. She read The Phenomenon of Man, by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, discovered St Theresa of Avila, and felt transformed. Astor’s first words on seeing her again were: ‘You’ve changed, what is it?’ Soon he was head over heels. ‘I got a shock,’ he wrote after watching her on a catwalk, ‘as I had always imagined you at work as lovely and gay, and I was knocked off my emotional perch when you looked cold and aloof.’ Unlike Thyssen, he appreciated his fiancée’s talk. ‘The extraordinary thing about you,’ he explained, ‘is that your mind has survived the chicken chatter of the cabine for so long, remaining lively, enquiring, and deep.’³¹

      They married at Hampstead register office in October 1960. When news of the impending marriage seeped out the night before, her parents were hounded by journalists. On the wedding day reporters crowded a pub opposite the gates of Cliveden buying rounds in the hope that drinkers would help them to concoct a juicy quote. Dorothy Macmillan, aunt of both Bill’s second wife and his first wife’s ex-fiancé, had the impertinence to show her disapproval of an ex-model viscountess when she met Bronwen Astor.