Friday, May. 17, 1963

Remember Mrs. Sweeny?

You're the top, You're Mussolini, You're Mrs. Sweeny, You're Camembert. Back in 1935, when Cole Porter's Anything Goes was the hottest ticket in town, Margaret Whigham Sweeny was more Top than Mickey Mouse or a Coolidge dollar. Chic, beautiful and rich in her own right, the 21-year-old English beauty was married to Gentleman Golfer Charles Sweeny, for whom, the gossip columnists insisted, she had jilted the young Earl of Warwick. That same year Ian Campbell made headlines by taking as his second wife Louise Vanneck. daughter of U.S. Sculptor Henry Clews. (His first: Janet Aitken. Lord Beaverbrook's daughter.) Though unmentioned in the song, Campbell was even more Top than Mrs. Sweeny. In 1949 he became Duke of Argyll (family motto: "Forget Not"), Chief of Clan Campbell, Hereditary Master of the King's Household in Scotland, Admiral of the Western Coasts and Isles. Hereditary Sheriff of Argyll, Keeper of Dunstaffnage, Carrick, Tarbert and Dunoon Castles, and heir to a Burke's dozen earldoms, viscountcies, marquisates and baronetcies. Favored Four. In 1951, two weeks after a lurid divorce from Louise, the duke married Mrs. Sweeny. Last week in Edinburgh, the Toppers too were divorced. Their decree. 65.000 words long, took the judge. Lord Wheatley, 4 1/2 hours to read through. It was no Cole Porter lyric. On the basis of the evidence, declared the judge, the duchess, now 49, "was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied by a number of men." He named four specific adulterers: John Cohane, 50, a U.S. businessman living in Ireland whom the court described as a "self-confessed wolf" with "the morals of a tomcat"; Harvey Combe, 37. onetime press officer at London's Savoy Hotel; Baron Sigismund von Braun. 52, brother of Rocket Scientist Wernher, who was counselor of West Germany's London embassy until 1958, and is now his government's U.N. observer in New York; and an unidentified partner who had been photographed in the nude with the duchess. The judge did not spare the duke, who, he said, admitted that he had shown "pornographic photographs" to "a mixed gathering in New York and seemed to treat it as a joke." Added the judge: "I do not commend his standard of taste and habits." Home with Harvey. Though Argyll had already discovered suspicious letters to his wife and a diary inscribed with "cryptic" signals, he "succumbed to her charms," as the court put it. Thus, the duke, said Judge Wheatley, had "condoned" his wife's adultery with Von Braun by resuming marital relations with her in Paris. The divorce was granted on the grounds of her adultery in 1960 with Harvey Combe at the Argylls' London house in Upper Grosvenor Street. The Argylls' litigation, which had dragged on for 3 1/2 years, was the longest, most expensive (estimated cost: $140,000) and most sensational in Scottish history. And it may not be over, since the duchess has said that she plans to appeal the court's verdict. In any case, she still faces charges of libel and conspiracy to sustain a malicious charge of adultery, stemming from her own divorce petition against the duke, which she dropped last May. In that suit, she accused her husband of committing adultery with her stepmother.

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