as one of the women Ward was supposed to have trained to secure rich husbands. Once implanted in the public consciousness that idea has refused to go away, despite the evidence. In Honeytrap, a 1988 best-seller by Anthony Summers weaving a Cold War espionage drama into the Profumo scandal, Bill Astor is described as having been introduced to Bronwen through Ward’s good offices.
After lunch we wander through the grounds. Though it was many years before she could face coming back to the house itself, Bronwen used to return occasionally to see Frank Copcutt, the head gardener who stayed on when first Stanford University and later the hotel took on the lease of Cliveden from the National Trust. And there was her husband’s grave – next to those of his mother, father and grandfather in the Cliveden chapel, an octagonal temple, lavishly decorated with mosaics, set away from the house. ‘I used to come back there regularly on anniversaries, but I don’t feel the need now. Bill’s spirit isn’t there. It’s …’ And she gestures as if to mean everywhere.
‘I think I’d like to be buried in Jerusalem. It’s at the centre.’ Her remark comes out of the blue. Initially I’m not entirely sure what it means but Bronwen Astor, I begin to realise, sometimes moves on a different plane from the rest of us. For one thing she talks unembarrassedly about God in everyday conversation. And then every now and then she throws down a line and you have to seize it. I struggle to take my chance – Jerusalem is more a state of mind than a city. For 5,000 years the Old City has had a legitimate claim to be at the centre of the world. The Islamic Dome of the Rock sits on the spot where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, where Muhammad ascended to heaven on a white horse, where the Jews built their Temple, and where Christ died and rose from the dead.
Bronwen has made me think, stretched me. I like that, her capacity to say startling things, her involvement in exploring the frontiers between body, mind and spirit. She is an adventurer who attracts others on to her treks. She has come a long way since her days at Balmain.
After Bill’s death she moved with her two young daughters to a eleventh-century manor house in what feels like a hidden valley outside Godalming. It has not been a conventional widowhood. Free to live her life on her own terms, she converted to Catholicism in 1970 – ‘it was an odd thing for an Astor to do because my mother-in-law hated Catholics’. For four years she ran a charismatic Christian community at her home, open to all comers. Few of her friends and acquaintances had realised that while working as a model or welcoming friends to Cliveden she had been on a secret spiritual journey – ‘most people would look puzzled if you mentioned God’ – so they were horrified to discover that Bronwen had suddenly ‘got God’. They tried to warn her and feared that, in her grief, she was being sucked into what to them had all the signs of a cult.
The community had its crazier moments, she now realises, and its collapse perhaps saved her from further exploitation. Her fellow members had wanted her to give up the remaining trappings of her former life – like the chauffeur or the housekeeper. ‘They meant nothing to me, but I was determined that I was going to bring my girls up as Bill would have wanted, as Astors.’ The spiritual and material once again clashed.
Yet for Bronwen the whole community experience was a great liberation, the first of several subsequent attempts which ultimately gave her life a coherence. After the community was wound down, her spiritual exploration became less public – though she did, in one grand theatrical gesture, hire the Royal Albert Hall in 1983 for a prayer meeting.
Later she trained as a psychotherapist and has achieved a distinction in her chosen field that has attracted eminent academic institutions like the Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford University. Her appointment as chairman of its support body emphasises how far she has travelled since her days on the Paris catwalk.
Her own spiritual life is now at the heart of each and every day. She prays for half an hour in her private chapel, reads the scriptures and attends communion as often as possible. She is permanently aware of the presence of God, feels close to Him and guided by Him, and she carries with her a spiritual air. She is shy of the word usually employed to describe such people – mystics. In the Christian tradition mystics are the great and the good of the church – John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich. Bronwen is not in their league. In secular terms the word ‘mystic’ carries with it overtones of ‘Mystic Meg’, stargazers and fraudulent eccentrics on Brighton Pier.
If mysticism is stripped of its trappings and seen as something unusual but not unheard of in everyday Christians, the mark of those who have had some direct revelation from God, then she is undeniably a mystic. No priest or religious who has come into contact with her has ever doubted her sincerity.
Yet in spite of these spiritual blessings, that sense of injustice, for herself and for her late husband and his children, has never gone away. With her daughters married, she has finally decided to talk about her own part in the scandal of the century in a final effort to set the record straight.
Our walk round the garden at Cliveden is almost over. The door to the swimming pool hasn’t changed, she remarks as we go through. The pool, however, is smaller than it was on that fateful weekend in July 1961 when Profumo, Ivanov and Keeler met. The reduction is somehow appropriate since the pivotal event of the Profumo scandal was scarcely, for any of the participants, of earth-shattering importance. Only later was it blown out of all proportion as a result, Bronwen now believes, of a complex and profoundly evil conspiracy.
Her own memories of the weekend are mundane. ‘It was very hot and we came over from the house on the Saturday night with the guests and found Stephen Ward and some of his friends here. It was nothing. And then on the Sunday, some of the other guests – Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, was here and Lord Mountbatten – wanted to go down to the stud and I remember looking in on the pool, seeing Jack and Bill and thinking, “Oh well, they’re all enjoying themselves, that’s fine, I can go.”’
Two years later this ‘weekend took on serious political implications. The papers were alleging that all manner of odd and perverse activities were going on, while the Astors’ friends took care to avoid the pool and Cliveden itself. Teams of photographers in helicopters were flying over the house at all times of the day to try and snatch that visual shot that would prove that Bronwen was running a house of ill-repute. Trapped inside with her child and her ailing husband, she was under siege.
‘You only have to look to see it couldn’t have been true,’ Bronwen says, a note of indignation in her voice as she points to a row of windows overlooking the pool. ‘Taylor the groom and Washington the butler lived there with their families. Nothing could have gone on with them so close.’ Her tone is one of bemusement. After all these years she is still puzzled as to how the whole affair got so out of hand.
We head back to her car. When she lived here, a chauffeur was forever at her beck and call. Guests’ vehicles would be taken off to Cliveden’s own garage, valeted, polished and filled with petrol, ready for the journey back to London. Bill’s fortune and generosity with it meant that Cliveden operated in a style and on a scale that had not been seen in other grand country houses in England since 1939. With his disgrace that life came to an end. Bronwen’s Cliveden was almost the last in the line of the great stately homes.
She is suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by an air of sadness as she prepares to leave, but I sense it’s not for the house or the lifestyle. After so long, it is not even to do with the unhappy memories attached to the second half of her period here. It is for the things she lost in those years – her husband, her reputation. ‘It seems like another life now,’ she sighs, adding, almost with relief, ‘finally.’ And with that Lady Astor takes her leave.
There
