An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (20 page)

English sleaze merchants of the 1950s shot eight-millimetre black-and-white films, lasting two or three minutes, in which women disrobed, but stayed tantalisingly short of full nudity. These films could be bought in Soho or by mail order from firms that advertised in magazines like
Photo Studio
, and watched by men on home projectors. Pamela Green graced some of these. She also starred in
Naked as Nature Intended
, the first ‘sexploitation’ film, directed by Marks, who avoided censorship by persuading the authorities that five girls, scampering naked in a gravel pit at Gerrard’s Cross, lobbing a beachball that during the shoot was constantly blown off by gusts of wind, made a sincere, even idealistic, film about naturism. ‘Hello, do you come here often?’ was the film’s single line of dialogue. In 1964, Green featured in an obscenity trial after a Clackmannanshire schoolboy went to a showing of her nude film
The Window Dresser
, and afterwards confessed to his father: ‘I cannot tell a lie. I am a ruined boy forever.’ In time, she retired to the Isle of Wight, where she became a stalwart of the Women’s Institute.
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This was the Mammary Age, in which the public became obsessed, wrote a commentator in 1957, with ‘the Cult of the Big Top’. Diana Dors was Queen of the Blonde Bombshells. Born in 1931, with the original surname of Fluck, she was the daughter of a Swindon railway clerk. She attended the Rank Charm School but, after appearing in several flop films, Rank let her contract lapse. In 1951 she married Dennis Hamilton, a spiv whose father managed a Luton pub. Hamilton, who hit her and bullied her into abortions, exploited her platinum blonde hair, full lips and curvy figure to promote her as a ‘sex symbol’ – a term coined in the 1950s. ‘Beneath her robust and open-hearted physical allure,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan in 1952, ‘Miss Dors conceals the soul of an ugly duckling, a boisterous and jolly child, eager to be liked. She is an unabashed parodist of desire.’ When Marilyn Monroe became well-known in England in 1953, after her appearance in the films
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
, Hamilton projected Dors as the English Marilyn. Publicity stunts were arranged for press photographers: once, for example, he sent Dors afloat in a Venice gondola wearing a diamond-studded mink bikini. Her appearance as a condemned murderer in the film
Yield to the Night
(1956), inspired by the trial and execution of Ruth Ellis, showed dramatic talent; but Hamilton ensured that her acting was sacrificed to her ‘celebrity’ status.
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The 1950s were the pioneering decade of the sex party in England: the epoch when an insulated lust, which had hitherto been associated with Continental brothels in wartime, began to be indulged behind the curtained windows of private homes. English sex parties fell short of orgies. There were no group antics or polymorphous exchanges. The male performers were anxious not to touch one another, and to keep their bodies – still more their fluids – apart. Hamilton held sex parties at the London flat where he lived with Dors. The comedian Bob Monkhouse recalled going to one at which ‘stag films’ were shown on a noisy home projector. There were wafts of amyl nitrite (a chemical that intensified men’s orgasms) in the room. At intervals, male guests with starlets were ushered by Hamilton to a meagre bedroom with a mirrored ceiling. Monkhouse had fifteen minutes; Hamilton whispered: ‘Make the most of it’.

In 1956, Dors and Hamilton bought a sprawling house called Woodhurst on the Thames at Maidenhead, where a bedroom – so the
Sunday Express
primly described – featured a ‘draped canopy hanging over the bed with an inset circular mirror reflecting the eiderdown’. One of the spare bedrooms at Woodhurst had a two-way mirror through which voyeurs could watch couples performing on the bed. This mirror was later bought by Hamilton’s friend Peter Rachman, installed in Rachman’s love-nest in Bryanston Mews West, smashed there by his girlfriend Mandy Rice-Davies, and was later misleadingly invoked by lawyers, including Lord Denning, intent on blackguarding Stephen Ward. John Bloom, who invested in the El Toro Club in Finchley Road in 1958, recalled Hamilton as ‘the king of this whirlwind world’ of nightclubs: ‘a big tough man with an apparently insatiable desire for girls and parties’. Bloom was abashed by the nude swimmers in the Woodhurst pool, and indeed by the parties: ‘the whole concept of them – a hundred per cent sex’. Hamilton died in 1959 (depleted by wild living, thought Bloom), while Dors was seeking to divorce him.
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Later that year Stafford Somerfield, newly appointed as editor of the circulation-declining
News of the World
, determined to have smashing impact. He paid Dors, who had by then married an American comedian, £36,000 for her confessional memoirs which he ran under the title ‘Swinging Dors’ during January and February 1960. The memoirs supposedly boosted
News of the World
circulation by 100,000 copies. They were celebratory, but with guilty, punitive touches. ‘At sixteen I learned to play a card game called “Strip Jack Naked”,’ Dors wrote. ‘Those who draw Court cards become strippers. The others sit back and watch. If you draw a Jack you let yourself be stripped.’ In adulthood she progressed to naughtier revelry. ‘There were no half measures at my parties. Like flags being struck after a battle, off came the sweaters, bras and panties. In fact, it was a case of off with everything – except the lights … Every night was party night.’
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Out with the bad – in with the good – was the theme of Dors’s confessions. ‘As I look round the new home in Virginia Water in Surrey I now share with my husband Dickie Dawson – with its lovely indoor swimming pool and superb nursery – and savour my new-found domesticity, I shudder to remember what went on in my Chelsea home with Dennis. My cheeks burn to recall the succession of stage-struck girls who were betrayed under my roof – some willingly, others carried away by the unaccustomed attention of “top film people” and the drinks.’ Voyeurism had a special appeal to
News of the World
readers, of course. ‘It was all done by mirrors. But the mirror Dennis used was a very special one.’
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Dors’s memoirs were decried by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Press Council. She grew plumper, her film work receded and in 1967 she was declared bankrupt.

If Dors was the
ersatz
Monroe, then the glamour model ‘Sabrina’ (real name Norma Sykes) was the
ersatz
Dors. Sykes was born at Stockport in 1936, daughter of a factory mechanic and a seamstress who later opened a small hotel at Blackpool. She contracted polio in girlhood, and endured years under medical orders. At the age of sixteen she went to London, where she worked as a waitress and posed nude to decorate the backs of playing cards. She tried to get modelling work from Harrison Marks, but was rejected – perhaps because at that time her waist size matched that of her bust. In 1955 the comedian Arthur Askey noticed her picture in a magazine. He invited her to his office, where he found that she could not sing, dance or act. Her Lancashire accent, too, jarred. But because her measurements were now 41–19–36, Askey put her on his television programme
Before Your Very Eyes
as a ‘dumb blonde’. Viewers were so enthusiastic about her bust that she was moved centre stage for the next episode. Her stage name ‘Sabrina’ was coined.

Soon she was hired to attend shop openings and publicity stunts. In 1957, for example, she graced the launch of the Vauxhall Victor motor car (a four-door saloon with chrome trimming and a touch of Chevrolet swank), and spent a night at Thoresby Hall in Nottinghamshire (newly opened for sightseers in order to pay death duties levied after the recent death of its owner, Lord Manvers). When booked to star in the revue
Plaisirs de Paris
, Sabrina was paid to do nothing but stand with her chest held firm. In Askey’s boisterous comedy-western
Ramsbottom Rides Again
(1956), she appeared alongside Sid James and Frankie Vaughan, but hardly uttered a word. In the film
Blue Murder at St Trinian’s
(1957) she was given star billing after Alastair Sim, above Terry-Thomas, Joyce Grenfell and Terry Scott, but played a swot who stayed in bed with a book, and never spoke. She bobbed in the background behind Dickie Henderson in a 1957 revue at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Every week she signed thousands of pin-up photographs. A young schoolmaster at St Custard’s prep school, in the classic Nigel Molesworth school novel, had one such picture, and daydreamed about her.
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Sabrina’s agent, Joe Matthews, was profiled in the
Spectator
of 1957 as representative of a new generation of self-made men. A cockney with a sharp weather-beaten face, he had discovered his flair for publicity when working as a stage manager. Then he opened a shop (flanked by an undertaker’s and a supplier of jellied eels) selling photographs of American stars at 148E Lambeth Walk. During 1955–58 he operated as Sabrina’s Svengali, managing her celebrity appearances and publicising her charms. Among his stunts, Matthews insured Sabrina’s breasts for £100,000: she was promised compensation of £2,500 for every inch her bust measurement shrank below forty inches. Another device to curry publicity was to spend £2,700 buying a yellow and white Chevrolet for Sabrina, together with the registration number S41 (her bust measurement). Matthews drummed-up press interest in her romance with an American film-star, Steve Cochran: speculation about whether she would meet him on arrival at Heathrow airport relegated mine disasters from front pages. Dancing with Cochran at the Pigalle restaurant in 1957 she let her shoulder strap slip, and paparazzi snapped her in an expression of rapture.

After Sabrina scored a hit speaking at the Variety Club lunch, Matthews boasted: ‘It was splendid corn – I wrote it.’ The Variety Club was an exuberantly masculine showbiz charity with which he enjoyed cooperating. His reaction was different when Antonella Kerr, the Marchioness of Lothian, invited Sabrina to speak at the Women of the Year luncheon at the Savoy hotel. ‘Tony’ Lothian was a broadcaster who had spent her adolescence in Nazi Germany, voted Labour after the war and was married to one of the Catholic representatives on the Wolfenden committee. Her idea of an annual luncheon for women high-achievers – enabling women to meet one another and develop networks of shared affinities and plans, honouring women for outstanding work that was not headline-grabbing – was initially derided, especially by men who thought that the weaker sex could achieve little without male protection, and should either look like Sabrina or stay at home. Eventually Lady Lothian enlisted the support of Odette Churchill Hallowes, a survivor of polio and a year’s blindness in childhood, who had been parachuted by the Special Operations Executive into Nazi-occupied France, served with the resistance, survived Ravensbrück concentration camp, and was the first woman to receive the George Cross. Lothian, Hallowes and Lady Georgina Coleridge finally launched these enjoyable, estimable luncheons, which also raised funds for blind charities, in 1955.

Matthews, however, liked his women weak and helpless, and revelled in the growing cult of ill-manners and brazen disrespect. When approached by Lady Lothian, he decided the uppity women needed to be toyed with and snubbed. There would be ‘better publicity’, he reckoned, if Sabrina disrupted the luncheon with his gimmicks. ‘When a countess or something asked her to speak at this Savoy lunch I made all sorts of impossible demands like them hiring a special plane to bring her down from Blackpool. Finally they dropped the idea of her speaking. Anyway, she went to the lunch, and after the coffee walked out.’ To the journalists who had been primed by Matthews to follow Sabrina, she claimed to be hurt that she had not been asked to speak, and read some wisecracks that were widely if not respectfully reported.

It was, as Matthews intended, an insult to all the good, strong women who organised and attended the luncheon (Sabrina’s walk-out occurred during a speech by a Pakistani woman who had represented her country at the United Nations – just the sort to threaten Matthews’ sense of male supremacy). With the rodomontade of one man speaking to another about a woman under his control, Matthews ‘wouldn’t like to say whether I think the kid’s got talent … Let’s put it this way, I think the bust attracts ’em and then they realise that she has a beautiful face.’ Matthews said Sabrina was ‘not intellectually inclined. I’ve only known her to write one letter, and that was to me … I’ve got her invitations to parties at which they’ve been dukes and earls, but it wasn’t a success. She would talk to them for a bit, but they never seemed to get real friendly. They didn’t seem to have much in common.’
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Sabrina was not so simple and downtrodden that she did not resent this denigration by her agent. In 1958 she took herself, with her earning-power, out of Matthew’s ambit towards Hollywood. One journalist recalled seeing her at three o’clock in the morning, sitting forlornly at the white baby grand piano in her barely furnished apartment near Sunset Boulevard, picking out the tune ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ with one bejewelled finger. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when I finally do go back to London I’m going back big. You know? I’ll make those people who laughed at me laugh on the other sides of their faces. For a long time I didn’t know what it was I wanted. Now I know … Just a little respect. It goes a long way. Respect.’

Sabrina went first to Australia, where she was swindled by a druggy impresario, toured Venezuela, and had a part in an American film,
Satan in High Heels
, about a burlesque dancer, her junkie husband and a lesbian club owner, which was refused a certificate by the British film censors in 1963. That year she returned to London, aged twenty-six, with English derision of her still rankling, to open beside Arthur Askey at the Saturday night Palladium show on 23 March. One interviewer found her in a Mayfair hotel, wearing shocking-pink tights and a body-hugging sweater. ‘I’ve got eight minks,’ she told him happily. ‘They cost me three years’ work. Not one gift among the lot.’
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