In today's "Times", article about socially-active aristos, drumming up interest in
- Boxing Day, BBC
- there was a new one on me, Doris Castlerosse...
- another words fail me....
A Very British Scandal, a new TV drama about Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. The duchess, who was inordinately fond of the company of “headless men”, scandalised the country in the Sixties.
- there was a new one on me, Doris Castlerosse...
The last great sexual adventuress — Doris Castlerosse
Doris Castlerosse was the model for Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, that cynical tale of sophisticated love. She was a romantic adventurer, a devourer of husbands. She even bedded Cecil Beaton, who preferred to dance at the other end of the ballroom. It led to the best joke by a cuckold: when told, her husband, the 6th Earl of Kenmare quipped: “I never knew Doris was a lesbian.”
There is debate about whether Churchill had an affair with Castlerosse in the 1930s — Jock Colville, his private secretary, thought so. Such was her skill that Churchill was rumoured to have said: “Doris, you could make a saint come.” Others say that he said she could make a dead man orgasm. This was the era of the “Singapore Grip” and “Shanghai Squeeze”, in which women were supposedly able to bewitch men with certain techniques exported from the Far East — how else could Wallis Simpson, who spent time in China, have bagged a king?
Doris Castlerosse was the model for Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, that cynical tale of sophisticated love. She was a romantic adventurer, a devourer of husbands. She even bedded Cecil Beaton, who preferred to dance at the other end of the ballroom. It led to the best joke by a cuckold: when told, her husband, the 6th Earl of Kenmare quipped: “I never knew Doris was a lesbian.”
There is debate about whether Churchill had an affair with Castlerosse in the 1930s — Jock Colville, his private secretary, thought so. Such was her skill that Churchill was rumoured to have said: “Doris, you could make a saint come.” Others say that he said she could make a dead man orgasm. This was the era of the “Singapore Grip” and “Shanghai Squeeze”, in which women were supposedly able to bewitch men with certain techniques exported from the Far East — how else could Wallis Simpson, who spent time in China, have bagged a king?
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