Bronwen Astor, Her Life and Times
Peter Stanford
HarperCollins £19.99, pp365
Buy it at BOL
'He would, wouldn't he?' is among the most devastating sentences uttered in the English language in the last half century. This chirpy retort fully deserves its place in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. The mocking courtroom laughter that accompanied Mandy Rice-Davies's celebrated response to the suggestion that William Waldorf, 3rd Viscount Astor, had denied their sexual relationship was the moment that Macmillan's careful reconstruction of pre-war social certainties was finally exposed as utterly fraudulent.
It was also for Bill Astor's wife, Bronwen, the moment her marriage became irrevocably trapped in the spotlight of British newspaper scrutiny, the moment that, in the words of David Astor, the distinguished former editor and proprietor of The Observer, she and her husband became 'steamrollered'.
For a generation and more, the surviving protagonists in this fascinating drama have kept silent. Now Bronwen Astor has taken the understandable but, I think, misguided decision to 'set the record straight' and has enlisted the sympathies of Peter Stanford, a Roman Catholic journalist, to help her in an almost impossible task.
The political face of the Profumo affair has been examined in various unflattering lights by any number of self-appointed social diagnosticians from Christopher Booker (in The Neophiliacs) to Ludovic Kennedy (in The Trial of Stephen Ward) to quasi-fictional potboilers (such as Anthony Summers's Honeytrap). However, the private pain endured by those trapped on the deck of the stricken liner, the SS Cliveden (the phrase is Joyce Grenfell's), has not, hitherto, been much exposed. The life story of Bronwen, Viscountess Astor, shows that the hurt of Profumo goes very deep, all the more so because the affair exposed personal vulnerabilities that money, class and social status were supposed to conceal.
She was born Bronwen Pugh, the fourth child of middle-class Welsh parents in 1930. Her father, Alun, was a successful barrister. When David, his only son, died of cancer in his early thirties, it was upon Bronwen that the full weight of parental ambition descended. The results were spectacular. In an astonishingly short space of time in the early 1950s, she became first a celebrated BBC TV presenter, then a successful model, and finally, in Paris, as the favourite of the couturier Balmain, one of the 'mannequins mondial'. The British tabloids styled her 'our Bronwen'; a New York fashion correspondent described her as a 'husky Welsh mannequin' who 'drags a coat down a runway as if she had just killed it and were taking it to her mate'.
To Bronwen, life on the catwalk was just 'a game of dressing up'. What really occupied her imagination was a 'spiritual journey' for personal enlightenment, inspired by Gurdjieff and later Teilhard de Chardin. As Stanford puts it, in a typical passage: 'At the same time as she was setting her sights on the flimsy, fun and throwaway world of model girls... she embarked on a lonely and often painful journey to understand her own psyche and soul.'
The erotic dimension of Bronwen's mysticism became explicit when, at about the time she first met Bill Astor, she encountered the Almighty through sexual self-expression: 'It was God. I knew it was God. And every cell of my body went into orgasm.'
In France, models and prostitutes inhabit the same twilight world. In late Fifties Britain, 'the jolly-hockey-sticks Bronwen' at first refused Bill Astor's invitation to Cliveden on grounds of propriety: 'I couldn't come, because we hadn't been introduced.' Not for long. Bronwen, who describes herself as 'not very amusing... but very lighthearted', soon overcame her scruples.
William Waldorf Astor was exactly the kind of man who might appeal to the public and private sides of her character. On paper, he was the supremely well-connected heir to the Astor fortune. In reality, he was a 52-year-old, twice-divorced 'little boy lost' in need of spiritual and psychological rescue, the perfect prey for the socially ambitious, religiously turned-on model. It was a match made for disaster, as Nancy Astor, who publicly disparaged her new daughter-in-law, possibly guessed.
As Stanford tells it, Bill Astor was a weak, spoilt man, dominated by his possessive and formidable mother, who never quite cut himself loose from the questionable pleasures of Mayfair and Belgravia. It was possibly this side of his character that had persuaded his father, the equally formidable Waldorf Astor, to pass over his eldest son and hand The Observer to the younger, but more scrupulous, David who, as editor-in-chief, presided over some of The Observer' s finest days.
The stage was set for catastrophe. Just as, in the sinking of the Titanic, those who witnessed the first impact initially believed that disaster had been averted, so those who met by the Cliveden poolside on the sultry evening of 8 July 1961would always protest that nothing scandalous had occurred.
The truth was otherwise. The good ship Cliveden had been holed and was taking on water fast. Although Bronwen might not much like it, at this point, Stanford, her apologist, has no choice but to rehearse the familiar sequence of events from the drip-drip of metropolitan innuendo and the first references to Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies to the resignation of John Profumo, the Minister of War, to the arrest, trial and suicide of society osteopath Stephen Ward and the utter disgrace and premature death of Bill.
Stanford certainly tries hard to make the best case for the Astors, but although the dispassionate reader can feel some sympathy for Bronwen, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that her husband behaved shabbily towards Ward and never satisfactorily answered the charge that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Stanford does not much help his case with his partisan snobbery towards the 'new aristocracy' of 'pop singers, photographers, artists, decorators'. Throughout, the reader is left in no doubt that 'the Cliveden set' was the undeserving victim of 'the new, brutal and classless world of the 1960s'.
It would be wrong to dwell too long on the Profumo affair, because Stanford himself has other ecclesiastical fish to fry.
In a book of nearly 400 pages, the 'affair' occupies only pages 219-290. No doubt to the dismay of the publishers, Stanford devotes an important part of his text to a detailed examination of the Teilhard de Chardin-inspired rehabilitation of his subject.
Stanford identifies strongly with Bronwen, and punctuates his text with embarrassing, quasi-confessional passages ('When I was a child I used to have a recurrent nightmare...'). This rather undermines his credibility as a detached observer. Stanford says, at the outset, that this is 'not a ghosted autobiography', but then, he would, wouldn't he?
