years later Hobson met Profumo. Having married Havelock-Allan in 1939, Valerie Hobson soon became pregnant and self-induced an abortion by drinking a bottle of gin, hurling herself from a chair and taking a boiling-hot bath. This is one experience that she shared with Christine Keeler, who once tried to induce an abortion with the aid of drugs and knitting-needles. In 1944, Hobson gave birth to a son, Simon, who was diagnosed as having Down’s syndrome: a physician offered to give the baby a fatal injection of meningococcal meningitis, but she declined. It is indicative of attitudes in 1944 that the Education Act of that year deemed children with Down’s to be ‘ineducable’ and excluded them from schooling. Simon Havelock-Allan spent most of his boyhood in institutions, and did not speak until he was sixteen. It is not surprising that after such lonely sorrows Valerie Hobson was regarded as prickly and aloof in the film world.
Two of her screen successes were playing aristocrats in films about men escaping from their class. She played a chilly beauty, Edith D’Ascoyne, in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the comedy in which a fastidious shop assistant, played by Dennis Price, murdered a succession of his remote cousins in order to escape penury and inherit the dukedom of Chalfont. The murder victims (female as well as male) were all played by Alec Guinness. Edith D’Ascoyne, the widow of the second murder victim (killed in a booby-trapped photographer’s darkroom), unknowingly marries her husband’s killer (most of the deaths are attributed to accidents). ‘A kind of British comedy we hadn’t dared to dream about – urbane, satirical, witty, sophisticated,’ Cyril Ray greeted it. Hobson played Lady Chell in The Card (1952), the film adapted by Eric Ambler from Arnold Bennett’s novel. It again starred Alec Guinness, this time as a wide-boy who rises in the world by impertinence and charm. ‘Miss Valerie Hobson as Lady Chell performs with great spirit the unladylike tasks set before her,’ reported a reviewer. ‘Her ride in a runaway mule-cart gives new life to that moribund and fishy tribe – the film aristocrats.’8
Valerie Hobson, who was attracted by dashing coureurs de femmes, fell for Profumo as swiftly as she had for Havelock-Allan. His vitality was exciting and, as she later wrote, his interests differed from any she had known: ‘politics (above all), girls, horses, parties, holidays in the sun, practical jokes, Society gossip, aeroplanes (which he flew himself) and, above all, fun’.9 She did not want her first foray in adultery to be with him, or to be spoilt by self-conscious guilt, so she first went to bed with another married admirer, probably Whitney Straight, a motor-racing driver and managing director of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation). Shortly after, she and Profumo began their secret affair. The subterfuge of intrigues, he found, intensified the sex.
Hobson became pregnant by Profumo during the summer of 1949. When she told him of the pregnancy as they stood on the battlements of Chenonceaux castle, he reacted lovingly but took it for granted that she would have an abortion. This time, instead of a horrific, self-induced abortion, she underwent the medical procedure known colloquially as a D and C (dilation and curetting) at a nursing-home in Hendon. This second abortion made her suspend the affair. A general election was looming, and her lover could not jeopardise his political prospects by being named in a divorce case involving an actress.
Profumo was elected with a safe majority as Tory MP for the newly created constituency of Stratford-on-Avon in 1950 (his parents’ house, Avon Carrow, lay in the constituency, where his unmarried sister still lived). Two years later he succeeded Reginald Maudling as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Civil Aviation, Alan Lennox-Boyd. In the Civil Aviation ministry he enthused about helicopters, and wanted to foist a heliport on Londoners. Subsequently the Civil Aviation and Transport ministries were merged under a single minister, John Boyd-Carpenter – ‘spring-heeled Jack’ as he was nicknamed. The two parliamentary secretaries of the united department were, Boyd-Carpenter recalled, ‘Hugh Molson, cautious, precise, reliable, a little inflexible on the ground transport side, and John Profumo, lively, quick and adroit – the best company in the world.’10 There are politicians who run on full throttle in their race for power; there are overwrought firebrands obsessed with principle; and breezy types who scoot along on charm. The latter get people to like them, put them at their ease, recognise their faces, mollify their feelings, nod encouragingly at their remarks, and make apt replies. This was Jack Profumo.
Six months after Profumo’s re-election to Parliament, Valerie Hobson went to the opera with Havelock-Allan, let him stay the night and became pregnant. Shortly after her second son was born in April 1951, the couple agreed to divorce – perhaps to facilitate her marriage to a new suitor, the Marquess of Londonderry, a drunkard who swerved between self-pitying submission and ugly aggression. In conformity with the prevalent divorce laws, Havelock-Allan, with his long career of adulteries, had to contrive being caught with a woman in circumstances that seemed to provide proof of adultery, although the woman was a respectable stranger hired for the purpose. After the divorce was accomplished in 1952, Londonderry’s attentions became importunate; but Profumo instead bounded back into play. He and the newly freed Valerie Hobson announced their engagement in October 1954. Profumo, saddled with an Italian surname suggestive of women’s scents, cannot have helped his flighty reputation among the more wooden-headed MPs by marrying an actress.
Profumo insisted that his bride, who was then starring as the lead in the hit musical The King and I, must stop work after she married. She complied reluctantly, though in public she showed a brave front. ‘I am giving up all my stage and film work – everything,’ she told journalists when she married. ‘It is the happiest step I can possibly take, though don’t imagine I have not loved my profession. I know lots of men and their wives mix their careers: I want to be a hundred per cent wife.’11 Similarly, it was unthinkable for Bronwen Pugh, perhaps the highest-paid model in England, to continue her independent working existence after her marriage to Lord Astor in 1960. Both women were obliged by their husbands to uproot a flourishing career; but they were among the luckier women. Choices were far narrower for most others.
Hobson left the stage before the changes in dramatic taste associated with John Whiting’s Marching Song (1954), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1959), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1960). In the early fifties, younger playwrights deplored the theatre’s dependence on plays written by decorous novelists or verse dramas by Eliot and Fry. ‘Well, that marriage broke up,’ John Whiting mused in 1961. ‘Since then the theatre’s been sleeping around with journalism, reportage, propaganda, autobiography and the movies among other things. And the old whore’s produced some very odd offspring.’12 This edgy, ungracious, shop-soiled world was not for Valerie Hobson.
In 1948, Profumo obtained a lease from the Crown Estates of 3 Chester Terrace (telephone: Welbeck 6983), an elegant house designed by Nash overlooking the Regent’s Park. Nash’s terraces kept a battered look for years after the war; and were only restored in the early 1960s. After the Profumos’ marriage their house was revamped with a cool chic that reflected the frosty smartness of their lives. It had a forty-foot drawing room, lit by tall windows, with views of the park beyond. Stéphane Boudin, the Paris interior designer who later advised Jacqueline Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House, imprinted the drawing room with his light version of the Regency style. Side-tables were set on an Aubusson carpet and arrayed with treasures. David Profumo recalled pagodas carved from ivory, an Epstein head, and a bejewelled Fabergé bulldog. It was a special treat for him, when his parents had guests, to hide under the green velvet of one of the side-tables, and nibble rice crackers from a black japanned tin decorated with pink blossom on its lid. Overall, the boy’s upbringing was emotionally chilly.
Smart London did not fully revive after the war until the Season of 1956. ‘For the first time since before the war, the British upper class has got the bit between its teeth’, reported the New Statesman in May of that year. ‘Not since the thirties has it consumed so much bad champagne and dubious caviar, trampled so much glass underfoot. After years of wartime equality, Crippsian austerity, servantless mansions, travel allowances, dividend restraint and triumphant bureaucracy,
