Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (born Ethel Margaret Whigham, December 1, 1912 - July 25, 1993), was a British society figure best known for her 1963 divorce case against her second husband, the 11th Duke of Argyll, which featured salacious photographs and scandalous stories. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll was known as the "dirty duchess" because of her sexual escapades.

She was the only child of Helen Mann Hannay and George Hay Whigham, a Scottish millionaire who was chairman of the Celanese Corporation of England, North America, and Canada. After being educated privately in New York City, where she moved one week after her birth and lived until the age of 14, and making her debut in London in 1930, she announced her engagement to Charles Guy Fulke Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick, but the wedding did not take place. Her head had been turned by Charles Sweeny, an American amateur golfer, and she decided that she was not sufficiently in love with Lord Warwick. (She also had youthful romances with playboy Prince Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston, car salesman Baron Martin Stillman von Brabus, and publishing heir Max Aitken.)

On February 21, 1933, she married Sweeny, with whom she had three children: a daughter, who was stillborn at eight months in late 1933; another daughter, Frances Helen (born 1937, she married Charles Manners, 10th Duke of Rutland), and a son, Brian Charles (born 1940). The Sweenys divorced in 1947. Before her marriage to Sweeny, she converted to his faith, Roman Catholicism.

In 1943, Margaret Sweeny had a near fatal fall down an elevator shaft while visiting her chiropodist on Bond Street. "I fell forty feet to the bottom of the lift shaft," she later recalled. "The only thing that saved me was the lift cable, which broke my fall. I must have clutched at it, for it was later found that all my finger nails were torn off. I apparently fell on to my knees and cracked the back of my head against the wall."

After her recovery, Sweeny's friends noted that not only had she lost all sense of taste and smell due to nerve damage, she also had become sexually voracious. As she once reportedly said, "Go to bed early and often." (Given her numerous earlier romantic escapades, including an affair with the married George, Duke of Kent in her youth, this may have been a change in degree rather than basic predisposition.)

After the end of her first marriage, Margaret Sweeny briefly was engaged to a Texas-born banker, Joseph Thomas, of Lehman Brothers, but he fell in love with another woman and the engagement was broken. She also had a serious romantic relationship with Theodore Rousseau, a curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who was, she recalled "highly intelligent, witty and self-confident to the point of arrogance." That romance, too, ended without a wedding ring, since the mother of two "feared that Ted was not 'stepfather material'." Still, she noted in her memoirs, "[W]e continued to see each other constantly."

On March 22, 1951, she became the third wife of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll.

"I had wealth, I had good looks. As a young woman I had been constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired, included in the Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World list, and mentioned by Cole Porter in the words of his hit song 'You're the Top'," she wrote later in life. "The top was what I was supposed to be. I had become a duchess and mistress of an historic castle. My daughter had married a duke. Life was apparently roses all the way."

Introduced into evidence in the 1963 divorce case in which the Duke of Argyll accused his wife of infidelity was a series of Polaroid photographs of her wearing her signature three-strand pearl necklace — and only the necklace. Also included were photographs of the bepearled duchess fellating a naked man, and though the photographs showed his genitalia and torso, they excluded his face. It was speculated that the "headless man" was Duncan Sandys, the minister of defence, who offered to resign from the cabinet. (Duncan Sandys, later Lord Duncan-Sandys, was a son-in-law of Winston Churchill.) This claim has been repeated since.

Also introduced to the court was a list of eighty-eight men the duke believed had enjoyed the duchess's favours; the list is said to include two government ministers and three royals. The judge commented that the duchess had indulged in "disgusting sexual activities". Lord Denning was called upon by the government to track down the "headless man". He compared the handwriting of the five leading "suspects" (Duncan-Sandys; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; John Cohane, an American businessman; Peter Combe, a former press officer at the Savoy; and Sigismund von Braun , brother of the German scientist, Wernher von Braun) with the captions written on the photographs. It is claimed that this analysis proved that the man in question was Fairbanks, then long married to his second wife, but this was not made public.

Granting the divorce, Lord Wheatley, the presiding magistrate, said the evidence established that the Duchess of Argyll "was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men". The duchess never revealed the identity of the "headless man," and Fairbanks denied the allegation to his grave.

Long afterward, it was claimed that there were actually two "headless men" in the photographs, Fairbanks and Sandys — the latter identified on the basis of the duchess's statement that the "only Polaroid camera in the country at that time had been lent to the Ministry of Defense". As for the Duke of Argyll, he remarried in 1963, for the fourth time, to an American, Mathilda Coster Mortimer Heller, and died of a stroke in 1973, aged 69.

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, wrote a memoir, Forget Not, which was published by W. H. Allen in 1975 and negatively reviewed for its name dropping and air of entitlement. She also lent her name as author to a guide to entertaining. Her fortune diminished, however, and the free-spending duchess eventually opened her London house—48 Upper Grosvenor Street, which had been decorated for her parents in 1935 by Syrie Maugham—for paid tours, but her extravagant lifestyle and ill-considered investments left her largely penniless by the time she died.

In the duchess's youth, her father told Rosie d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, a close friend of his daughter's, that he feared what his high-living only child would do once she had her entire inheritance. Consequently, Whigham blocked his daughter's access to the principal of her inheritance through various protective legal prohibitions, but after his death, the duchess's lawyers successfully voided most of the safeguards.

In 1978 debts forced the duchess to move from her house to a hotel suite with her maid. Shortly before her death in 1993, which occurred after a bad fall, she found herself unable to pay the hotel bills and her children placed her in a nursing home in Pimlico, London. Here she was photographed by Tatler magazine, for whom she had previously been a columnist, sitting on the edge of her bed in a grim single room.

Resoundingly well-dressed and astonishingly coiffed (a reddish-brown, baroque-swirl bouffant was her trademark), Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, to no one's surprise, was famously self-involved. She once told the New York Times, "I don't think anybody has real style or class any more. Everyone's gotten old and fat." More to the point, she described herself as "always vain." To the end of her life, her superficiality remained superbly intact, as evidenced by one characteristically vapid quote: "Always a poodle, only a poodle! That, and three strands of pearls!" she said. "Together they are absolutely the essential things in life."

The duchess is buried alongside her first husband, Charles Sweeny, in Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.

Powder Her Face, a chamber opera about the duchess's last days was written by composer Thomas Adès and librettist Philip Hensher in 1995, for the Almeida Opera. It received its premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival.

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