To the world she was the most celebrated debutante of her age, the girl a whole London season called simply the Wiggum, a name Cole Porter slipped into a song so everyone would understand she stood at the very top. Yet one day inside a locked cupboard in her Mayfair house, her husband found a handful of small square photographs. In one of them, a woman known across the country by her three strands of pearls had been caught with a man whose head was left out of the frame. Her husband would name as many as 88 men, and a judge would call her wholly immoral.
The man in the picture was never named. She carried him to her grave. The question the whole country asked, and she answered to no one, was simply this: who was he? She was born on the 1st of December 1912 in Newton Mearns, a comfortable corner of Renfrewshire in the west of Scotland, the only child of George Wigham, a man who had turned artificial silk into a fortune.
His wealth was new, built on a man-made fiber called Celanese, one of the first synthetic materials to reach the mass market, and he rose to become chairman of the company that manufactured it. The money that shaped his daughter’s life had been spun out of chemistry and ambition rather than acres and ancestors. It was enormous, and it would matter later when the oldest names in the country found a use for it. Margaret spent her first 14 years largely in New York City, educated privately, raised between two continents and two currencies.
She was beautiful, and she knew it early, and she was raised to understand exactly what that beauty was for. Years later she put it with a plainness that is almost painful: she had wealth, she had good looks, and the top was what she was supposed to be. When she was presented at court in 1930, she did not simply take part in the season; she won it. The press named her debutante of the year and then went further, calling her simply the Wigham.
Her coming-out party, held on the 1st of May 1930 at number 6 Audley Square, is reported to have cost £40,000, a sum that could have bought a street of houses in that year, poured into a single evening with the band of Bert Ambrose filling the rooms until the early hours. The party worked. For the rest of the decade, to follow fashionable London was to follow Margaret Wigham. She wore at her throat a rope of three strands of pearls, and she would one day call pearls one of the few essential things in life.
Those pearls would one day be the detail that gave her away, the one thing in a photograph that told the world the woman in it could only be her. By the time she married, she was famous enough that Cole Porter could name her in a lyric and trust the whole room to laugh. In the London version of the song that begins with the words “You are the top,” set beside Mussolini and a ripe French cheese, there she was, named as Mrs. Sweeney.
The Sweeney in the lyric was Charles Sweeney, an American businessman and amateur golfer, and Margaret married him on the 21st of February 1933 at the Brompton Oratory in London. Norman Hartnell, who would later dress queens, designed her gown, and the crowds that gathered to see it were so thick that the traffic in Knightsbridge is said to have stopped for three hours. The gown survives today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But behind the glamour, the marriage carried a private grief.
Children did not come easily. She is reported to have suffered a long series of miscarriages, as many as eight, and a stillborn daughter late in 1933. Two children did survive, a daughter, Frances, born in 1937, and a son, Brian, in 1940, each of them had come at a cost written in the losses before them. Then in 1943 came an accident that some who knew her believed changed her.
She fell down a lift shaft, a drop of some 48 feet, and the fall very nearly killed her. Her fingernails were torn away as she clutched at the walls on the way down, and her head was cracked against the side of the shaft. It is part of the law of her life, though it belongs firmly in the column of things suspected rather than proved, that the blow to her head altered her afterwards, loosened something, made her bolder and more reckless than she had been before. What is certain is that she survived a fall that should have ended her.
She and Charles Sweeney divorced in 1947. The second marriage gave her a title older than almost any in Scotland and a husband who wanted something more ordinary than love. His name was Ian Campbell, and in 1949, on the death of a distant cousin, the 10th Duke, he had become the 11th Duke of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell and master of one of the great seats of the Scottish aristocracy. When Margaret married him on the 22nd of March 1951, she became the Duchess of Argyll.
The seat of the title was Inveraray Castle, rising above the shore of Loch Fyne, a vast and romantic pile that had housed the Dukes of Argyll for generations. But a castle like Inveraray does not keep itself; it devours money. The Duke had inherited the grandeur and the bills in equal measure, and the bills were winning. The most serious charge against Ian Campbell is that he married Margaret for her money, and specifically for the money it would take to keep his castle standing.
It is alleged that before the marriage he arranged a forged deed of sale, a document designed to secure her fortune for the restoration of Inveraray. Margaret was his third wife; he would marry a fourth time after her. He was also, by the plain record, a deeply troubled man, addicted to alcohol, a gambler, dependent on amphetamines and barbiturates. The partnership was a triumph in public.
She moved through the grandest rooms in Britain as though she had been born to them, and in a sense she had, for she had been raised for exactly this. Inside the castle walls, the marriage curdled fast. The two things that had drawn Ian Campbell to Margaret, her fortune and her fame, became the two things he could not forgive her for having. He needed her money and resented needing it, and her fame meant she was always being looked at by other men.
The Duke held advantages she did not. He held the title, and in the Britain of that time, a duke’s word carried a weight a woman’s did not. He began to spy on her. It is alleged that he had her car wiretapped.
He watched her movements. He noted her absences. He was building a case piece by piece, and he had realized that the evidence he wanted was not only in her conversations; it was in the private papers she kept locked away in Mayfair. While she was an ocean away in New York, a locksmith was at work inside her own London house, number 48 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair.
Her father had taken the lease on it in 1934, and it had been hers ever since. The fashionable decorator Syrie Maugham had decorated it in the pale, cool style that was the height of taste in the 1930s, all white on white. With Margaret in America, the Duke engaged a locksmith to force a locked cupboard inside the house and to take what was in it. There was no warrant, no permission, no word to her at all.
When it was done, he had in his possession her diaries written in her own hand, her private papers, her letters, and the photographs. Among the papers were a few small square pictures taken with a camera that was still a novelty, a Polaroid, which developed its own pictures on the spot in a minute or two, with no roll of film to send away and no shop assistant to see what had been photographed. It was a technology made almost by accident for secrets. The photographs the Duke had seized were intimate pictures of Margaret with a man.
In the most infamous of them, the woman could be identified at a glance because she was wearing the three strands of pearls that were as much her signature as her own face. The man could not be identified at all because his head was simply not in the frame. When the story broke, the British press gave him the name that has outlived every other detail of the case: the headless man. A writer looking back on the whole affair described Margaret as the victim of something a modern eye recognizes at once: a private life hacked open and spread before the public, celebrity hacking before the phrase existed.
The instrument of her freedom had become in her husband’s hands the instrument of her ruin. When the case came, the Duke did not bring one accusation. He brought a list of as many as 88 men named or numbered, whom he alleged to have been his wife’s lovers. The list, it was said, did not stop at private gentlemen; it was claimed to reach into the government and into the royal family itself.
88 is the Duke’s figure, the claim of a husband who had broken into his wife’s house, stolen her diaries, tapped her telephone, and set out with cold patience to ruin her. It was never a proven tally; it was a weapon forged for a courtroom. The setting for the accusation was a Scottish divorce court, and in 1963 that court became the stage for one of the most sensational legal cases the country had ever followed. The proceedings did exactly what the Duke had wanted them to do.
The diaries were read. The photographs were described. The headless man became a national obsession. It was a country already convulsed by another scandal, the Profumo affair, in which a government minister’s involvement with a young woman had shaken the establishment to its roots and would help bring down a prime minister before the year was out.
Into that feverish air dropped the Argyll divorce with its stolen photographs, its list of 88 men, and its headless stranger. Lord Wheatley took the measure of her in a judgment that ran to some 50,000 words, and almost none of them were kind. He called her, in words that were printed in newspapers around the world, a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men. He wrote that her attitude to the sanctity of marriage was what moderns would call enlightened, but which in plain language was wholly immoral.
The same conduct in a man of his own class would have drawn a knowing smile across a clubroom, not 50,000 words of disgust from the bench. She did not go down without a fight. She had brought her own petition in reply, making her own allegations against the Duke, including a claim that he had committed adultery, but that part of her case collapsed for want of a witness who would stand up and testify to it. She was left carrying the full weight of the judgment on her shoulders and a crushing burden of legal costs on top of it.
She could have named the headless man, and the whole weight might have shifted onto a man instead. She never did. Through the divorce, through the judgment, through the long years of poverty and social exile that followed, she kept the name entirely to herself. Part of her silence was forced upon her by the law.
It has been said that some of the associations the Duke held against her could not be explained in open court because to explain them honestly would have exposed other people to criminal prosecution. In the Britain of the 1960s, acts between men were still crimes; male homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom until 1967. If some of the men on that list of 88 were not lovers at all, if some of her closest friendships were with men whose private lives the law itself made dangerous to describe, then Margaret was caught in a silence that protected others at the direct price of her own condemnation. But it would be too simple to say her silence was only fear or only the law.
In the very middle of all that taking, there was one thing that remained entirely hers, to give or to withhold, and she withheld it. The name was the last thing she owned outright, and she kept it. The state wanted the man’s name as badly as the newspapers did. An inquiry was held, led by one of the most senior judges in the entire country, Lord Denning, and part of its quiet purpose was to establish whether the man in the picture was who some in power most feared he might be.
It is reported that the handwriting on the photographs was compared against samples taken from the suspects. A handful of names circulated as candidates over the years, among them a government minister who was also a son-in-law of Winston Churchill and a famous American film actor with close ties to British society. Whatever conclusion Lord Denning reached in private, he did not name the man in public. Then the records were sealed, locked away for decades, and when the original seal threatened to lapse, it was extended further still.
The secret was not solved; it was buried with the full authority of the state. The money went the way of the marriage. She wrote a memoir published in 1975 under the title Forget Not, and she opened the doors of number 48 Upper Grosvenor Street to paying visitors, selling guided tours of the very rooms where she had once received the most glittering company in London. In 1978, the debts forced her out of the house altogether.
She moved into a suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel, keeping a maid, keeping up the outward forms of grandeur on a foundation that was quietly crumbling away. In 1990, she was evicted, unable any longer to pay the bills. Among those who helped her at the very end was Charles Sweeney, her first husband, the man whose borrowed name Cole Porter had set into a song more than half a century before. More than 40 years after their divorce, when she had nothing left, he was there helping.
She died on the 25th of July 1993, aged 80, of complications following a bad fall in a nursing home in Pimlico. She died in poverty. Her requiem mass was held at a church in Mayfair, a short walk from the grand house she had lost, and she was buried at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, laid to rest beside Charles Sweeney, who had died only four months before her. History has been slower to judge her than Lord Wheatley was, and a great deal kinder.
In the years after her death, the story refused to fade. A later age looked at the Argyll divorce and no longer saw a wicked woman brought at last to justice. It saw a wife whose house had been burgled by her own husband, whose diaries had been stolen, whose private photograph had been paraded through a courtroom, and who had then been condemned in savage language for doing in private the very kind of thing powerful men had always done without a whisper of reproach. And it saw the silence differently, too.
Where 1963 had heard only guilt in her refusal to name the headless man, a later and wiser age heard something much closer to dignity, even to courage. Late in her life she looked back on the whole of it and said simply that she had had wealth, that she had had good looks, and that the top was what she was supposed to be. She had reached the top exactly as she had been instructed to every step of the way, and the top, it turned out, was the most dangerous place a woman of her time could possibly stand. The headless man kept his secret because she chose to let him keep it.
The world kept her name because she could never take it back from them. She was the one they could see, so she was the one they destroyed.
