EsquireUK-June2018

Esquire — June 2018 111

Flask in Hampstead village, knocking down

the sauce, and always with un mégot poised on

his botom lip.

Anyway, the Astors rather played down

the whole scandalous association during their

suzerainy, and, of course, the entire vast estab-

lishment is now emphatically smoke-free,

although DVDs of the film are on sale at recep-

tion in the house, should anyone need remind-

ing of that innocent era when the only scan-

dalous thing about a middle-aged defence min-

ister shaging a 19-year-old girl was that she

also happened to be shaging a Soviet spook.

Anyway, I setled on Cliveden as the per-

fect seting within which to undergo the rig-

ours of withdrawing from my pernicious

44-year dependency on nicotine, because

I wanted — among many other things — to

finally join the establishment: following Italo

Svevo’s Zeno, this was the sort of strong, per-

fect man I wished to be: one with a five-piece

set of Samsonite hand-tooled leather lug-

gage, and a brand new Land Rover Discovery

to load them into. he sort of strong, perfect

— and let’s face it, rich — man, who cheerfully

regards this astonishing establishment (moto:

“Nothing ordinary ever happened here, nor

could it”) as a species of airport hotel, given its

proximiy to Heathrow.

Yes! Ater years of taty misery, making do

with bide-a-wee-syle bed and breakfasts where

obese landladies serve rancid fry-ups and the

sheets are so synthetic they cling to you like

shrouds, I wanted to experience Prince Charles

levels of personal indulgence. Harold Nicolson,

the celebrated diarist and husband to gardening

geezer-girl Vita Sackville-West, said of Cliveden:

“To live here would be like living on the stage

of the Scala Theatre in Milan.” Well, so be it!

I thought, the night before I set out: bring on the

overweight prima donnas, and may they crush

me to death with their opulent cavorting!

My rehab companion and I entrained from

Paddington to Maidenhead. I’d last visited the

constituency of our Virgin Queen, Mrs May,

to appear on an episode of the BBC’s Question

Time. One of my fellow panellists had been

Nigel Farage, and I’d had the great pleasure of

calling him, on live television, “a grubby litle

drum circle, because back in the day it was

believed that in order to drive out the par-

asitic devil of addiction, you had to kill its

pusillanimous host: the human ego. I remem-

ber my counsellor saying to me: “hey call us

brainwashers here, Will, but we have to wash

your brain, ’cos it’s diry.” My diry brain was

served up to the pummelling of group therapy,

whereby my fellow addicts — in a bizarre rec-

reation of the “criticism sessions” that ypified

Mao’s Cultural Revolution — humiliated me

back into some semblance of cleanliness.

Mens sana in corpore sano and all that Latin

jazz. I managed to stay sano for two or three

years (this was in the late Eighties), but I can’t

help feeling that the seting for my rehabilita-

tion wasn’t altogether conducive to the right

mens sana. I’m talking Tupperware and plastic

stacking chairs; laminate floors and Polysyrene

ceilings — I’m talking a world of self-denial —

including denying that this Self is an impossi-

bly grandiose fellow, who demands the sort of

Wagnerian pomp and bejewelled circumstance

favoured by Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria if

his squalid litle habits are to be curtailed.

enter cliveden house: a stupendously

large and ornate country pile dumped on the

hames braes to the west of London. At var-

ious times the abode of dukes, duennas, and

the odd Prince of Wales, there have been

three houses on the site, the third and present

incumbent being a humungous mash-up of the

Roman Cinquecento and the Palladian, which

was designed by Charles Barry (of Houses of

Parliament fame) and completed in 1852.

Cliveden achieved its greatest notoriety

during the last century, when its then chat-

elaine, Nancy Astor, presided over a  racy

hirties political salon known as “the Cliveden

Set”. She herself was Britain’s first woman

MP, and her personal style ran to divided

skirts and motorcycles; our kind of esquire,

one might say. Guests included everyone

who  was  anyone, from Charlie Chaplin to

Winston Churchill, but it was in the early

Sixties that the gaf reached a sort of crescendo

of posh naughtiness.

At that time, the tenant of Spring Cotage

on the Cliveden Estate was one Stephen

Ward, an osteopath and socialite, whose

kicks consisted in being a sort of amateur

procurer-cum-pimp to the great and the not-

so-good. I’m not going to run over all the ins

and outs of the Profumo affair here: if you

don’t know how the British establishment was

finally draged down into the tabloid mosh pit,

where it’s remained, geting a sound kicking to

this day, then you’re no kind of an esquire at all.

Suffice to say, Ward, the then 19-year-

old Christine Keeler (she of the famous nude

reversed shot on wooden stacking chair), and

her friend Mandy Rice-Davies (aged 16), were

all prety heavy smokers — certainly if Scandal,

the 1989 film about the afair is to be believed.

It could be that dear old John Hurt was ype-

cast for the role of Ward — which is not to sug-

gest that the late, great actor was a pander —

but boy could he puf! I remember seeing him

regularly, during my underage drinking years

in the Seventies, propping up the bar in The

After 44 years, it really is over for me. Why,

if La Divina Nicotina were to appear before

me right now, arrayed in her silkiest and

most intoxicatingly revealing apparel,

I would simply wave her away with these

air-freshening words: ‘I do not know you’

Steve Pyke/Gety Images