Downfall of a beauty who had it all

age of 80, described as a frail and unhappy woman.

For all her attributes and glamorous life, she is best remembered for

the scandal of her divorce case in 1963, which would have remained the

sensational news story of the period had it not been overtaken in the

same year by the Profumo scandal and the assassination of President

Kennedy.

Nevertheless, at that early stage of the Swinging Sixties, it still

shocked the public when Ian Douglas Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll

(father of the present clan chief) sued for divorce -- and the whole

salacious story unfolded before Lord Wheatley.

It was a tale of diaries and Polaroid photographs of the duchess,

wearing only a string of pearls, allegedly in a sex act with another

man.

The photographs didn't show the lover's face and the nation hung on

every word of what came to be known as the incident of the ''Headless

Man''. Candidates for the role included Tory Cabinet Minister Duncan

Sandys and legendary Hollywood film star Douglas Fairbanks Jnr.

The divorce action was the costliest and one of the most sensational

of the century.

The Duke of Argyll had been married twice before. His first wife was a

daughter of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, by whom he had a

daughter, Jeanne Campbell, herself a well-known journalist who later

married American novelist Norman Mailer.

It was revealed in Lord Wheatley's judgment that the duke and his

daughter had made raids on the duchess's house at 48 Upper Grosvenor

Street, London, and taken diaries, love letters and photographs.

The two men at first named in the divorce petition were John Cohane,

an Irish-American advertising man in Manhattan, and Baron Sigismund Von

Braun, German ambassador to the United Nations in New York whose brother

Werner masterminded the V2 rocket which caused havoc in the London area

during the Second World War.

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, had begun life as Ethel Margaret Whigham,

daughter of a Glasgow man who built a multi-million textile fortune.

In 1931 she was the much sought-after Debutante of the Year, feted on

the social scene around the world and figuring in those original lyrics

of Cole Porter's song.

At 20, she broke her engagement to the Earl of Warwick to marry the

American amateur golfer Charles Sweeny. Two thousand women fought their

way into the Brompton Oratory Church in West London to see her come down

the aisle in her Hartnell wedding gown with its 28ft train.

That marriage ended in 1947 and in 1951 she married the Duke of

Argyll, who she had met on a train from Paris to London. They had four

happy years before their estrangement became public and the duke

obtained a court order banning his wife from the family seat of

Inveraray Castle.

He began his divorce action in 1959 and it was finally granted in

1963, when Lord Wheatley called the duchess ''a completely promiscuous

woman''.

In his 50,000-word judgment, he said: ''Her sexual appetite could only

be satisfied with a number of men. Her attitude to the sanctity of

marriage was what moderns would call enlightened but which in plain

language was wholly immoral.''

The duke didn't escape criticism either. The Judge said he seemed to

be ''a queer mixture of reliability and unreliability. When he was

giving his evidence in relation to condonation, he was most unconvincing

and I made a personal note that he was hedging when giving evidence.''

No sooner had the furore died down than the ''Headless Man''

photographs were resurrected a few months later in the Christine

Keeler-John Profumo scandal which rocked the Tory Government -- Profumo

had been a Government Minister -- and intrigued the nation.

Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, leading a security inquiry into

rumours about leading politicians, examined the duchess's diaries and

records of the divorce action.

Society osteopath Dr Stelphen Ward, a central figure in the Profumo

case, was said to have obtained copies of the notorious pictures.

Lord Denning ordered a medical examination of Duncan Sandys which

proved that Winston Churchill's son-in-law was not the mystery man in

the pornographic print.

The Judge also interviewed the duchess and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who

had been friends since the 1930s.

The duchess never quite forgot Lord Wheatley's remarks and, in her old

age, hit back by saying: ''I thought he was such a bastard. I mean, I

told the truth.''

In time she was reduced to opening up her Upper Grosvenor Street house

to the public.

In 1978 the house was sold and her possessions reduced to fit into a

penthouse apartment at the Grosvenor House Hotel, from which you would

see her walking her dog in Hyde Park.

Latterly existing on the charity of the hotel proprietor, Lord Forte,

she was finally ousted from her apartment three years ago. She moved to

two small rooms in a block of service flats.

It was a tragic end to one of the great society figures of a bygone

age. She had glamour and wealth and the whole world at her feet. And yet

in the end, her life was a sad and pathetic shambles.