the government. Harold Macmillan, who spoke at the final rally in the Royal Albert Hall, felt that the campaign ‘touched the imagination of the country’.25 In Britain, over £9 million was raised out of a global total exceeding £35 million. There were few precedents to such fundraising fifty years ago.
Astor’s greatest moment of public self-revelation came in a tribute, which was published in The Times, to his friend Prince Aly Khan, who had been killed in a car smash while returning from Longchamps races in 1960. It was a cryptic self-portrait, which showed Astor’s sense of the discrepancies between public perceptions of heavily publicised individuals and their private characters. ‘If only one knew Aly Khan by repute it was easy to preconceive a dislike towards him. When one met him, it was impossible not to be stimulated and attracted by his charm, his perfect manners, his vitality, his gaiety and sense of fun. But if you were fortunate enough to know him really well, and have him as a friend, you acquired a friendship which was incomparable – generous, imaginative, enduring and almost passionately warm.’ Like Astor, Aly Khan had suffered a privileged but lonely childhood. Just as Astor had been relegated in the inheritance of Cliveden and the Observer, Aly Khan had been elided from the succession of the leadership of the Ismaili Muslim community, which his father conferred on Aly Khan’s son, Karim. Astor admired Aly Khan as ‘the most sportsmanlike of losers’, who loyally accepted this adversity. This blow was softened by the Pakistan government naming Aly Khan as its ambassador to the United Nations. This appointment ‘produced the most useful, rewarding and happiest days of his life’, Astor judged, thinking, too, of his own efforts for refugees. ‘Both his staff and the press viewed his arrival at the UN with some doubt. He was a complete success, showing unexpected caution, seriousness and conscientiousness, as well as his usual intelligence and charm.’
Recalling perhaps his loneliness when his marriages failed, Astor affirmed that ‘when a friend was going through a bad patch … Aly was at his best. He would telephone you from the other side of the world; his houses were at your disposal for as long as you wanted, his sympathy, intuition and imaginative kindness were rocks you could rely on. He was curiously defensive towards the world, and intensely sensitive to real or imagined slights, but if he was sure of your friendship he returned it a hundredfold.’ Astor’s last sight of his friend ‘was an untidy gay figure bustling through London Airport, leaving a trail of laughter by a cheery and courteous word to each person he came into contact with, and each of whom he treated as a human being he was glad to see’. This was how Astor, in 1960, hoped to be remembered.26
Bill Astor was one-third playboy, one-third idealist and one-third magnate. Reacting against his finicky upbringing, he was not discriminating in his friendships. He needed to be liked: he was the sort of man who would pay for a friend’s honeymoon. ‘I always think of Bill as more vulnerable and childish than over-sexed, a man of pillow fights and romping, not some kind of sex maniac,’ said Grey Gowrie twenty years after Astor’s death.27 Before the Life Peerages Act of 1958, Astor supported the admission of women to the House of Lords. He was a founder member of the parliamentary committee for British entry into the Common Market, sponsored legislation to introduce lie-detectors into police work, and supported reform of laws covering abortion and divorce. He also had one deadly enemy to whom he had never done a jot of harm. In 1949 his brother David published a profile in the Observer of Lord Beaverbrook, describing him as ‘a golliwog itching with vitality’ and whose editorial policies were ‘political baby-talk’. In 1931, the Astors’ half-brother, Bobbie Shaw, had been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment on a charge of homosexuality. Nancy Astor asked Beaverbrook to use his influence to suppress the story in the Daily Express and other newspapers. ‘I am deeply grateful to you for the trouble you have taken to keep my name out of the papers,’ she later wrote to him. ‘Nothing matters very much about me – but I felt I should like to spare the other children.’ After the Observer profile, Beaverbrook fulminated that the Astors were sanctimonious and ungrateful. His underlings retrieved Bobbie Shaw’s dossier, and primed themselves to serve their paymaster’s spiteful rage. In 1958, for example, John Gordon, the Sunday Express editor, whose virulence about homosexuality was fit for an ayatollah, wrote a vindictive revelation of the Shaw case, which at the last moment was held back. Beaverbrook’s staff continued his relentless vendetta against the Astors, which reached its crescendo with the Profumo Affair.28
At New Year 1958 in St Moritz, Bill Astor met a twenty-seven-year-old ‘model girl’ called Bronwen Pugh. She was the Garboesque muse of the couturier Pierre Balmain, standing nearly six feet tall, with piercing blue-green eyes and an all-encompassing instinctive elegance. Her father was a barrister specialising in Welsh coal-mining cases who eventually became a county court judge. Her unusual aura derived, possibly, from a series of mystical experiences which began at the age of seven, when she believed she heard the voice of God speaking to 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
