The "Dirty Duchess" Who Rocked High Society

Margaret Campbell The Duchess of argil had a secret locked drawer in her home when her husband finally broke into it the contents shocked him and the world Margaret wiggum's Young Life set her up for her rockus adulthood born to a Scottish millionaire she grew up in New York City and attended some of the most exclusive private schools in the country alongside some of the best brightest and wealthiest heirs and heiresses of her day but she was seemingly drawn to scandal from a young age by the time Margaret was 15 years old men were already going crazy for her striking Beauty must have been those Scottish jeans and she soon came to enjoy all the attention in the summer of 1928 Margaret caught the eye of an older boy the 18-year-old David Nevan who later became Hollywood actor David Nevan and speaking of Hollywood what these two got up to was worthy of a dramatic screenplay David Nan met Margaret while the two of them were on holiday on the aisle of white it was the perfect recipe for disaster with their parents and chaperon otherwise occupied with their own vacation the teenagers managed to find ample time to explore their personal Landscapes although Margaret's experience with Nan were her first time with a man one time in her case was very much enough she got supremely unlucky and months later discovered she was pregnant 1928 was a terrifying time to be an unwed mother so Margaret took drastic action she told her parents all about her liaison with Nevan and the pregnancy as one maid who worked for the family put it all hell broke loose at at that point her father in particular was beside himself with rage but as soon as they were over the initial shock Margaret's parents knew exactly what they had to do her family was eminently respectable and they couldn't have a whisper of their daughter's so-called disgrace accordingly they packed her up and sent her to a London nursing home where attendants performed a very hush hush operation to terminate the pregnancy it was so secret that Margaret didn't even mention it in her memoirs published nearly 50 years later just 2 years after this episode Margaret pulled a fast one on society in 1930 her parents presented her at court as a debutant which was basically their way of saying she was ready to mingle with men and get married Margaret had only grown more beautiful as the years passed and by the end of the season the court named her there debutant of the year and she had her peck of sutors unfortunately when it came to Margaret having so many romantic options was always going to mean trouble around this time Margaret's Behavior behind the scenes sent tongues wagging namely although she was ostensibly looking for marriage and stability she sure wasn't acting like it the beautiful girl entertained flirtations and more from high-powered men like Prince Ali KH and daring Aviator Glenn Kidston although Prince alian loved to shower Margaret with affection and Gifts it was Kidston who really took her fancy even though he was the most dangerous of all after all the Fly Boy was already married and had a young toddler at home still Margaret doen head first anyway solidifying her reputation as something of a Helen of Troy however before this affair could do reparable damage to kon's Family Life disaster came knocking in the spring of 1931 Margaret's Carefree life came to an abrupt halt that may she got word that her lover Glenn Kidston had perished in a horrific plane crash he'd been flying through a dust storm when his entire plane broke apart beneath him Margaret was utterly devastated but she didn't deal with her grief in the best of ways rebounding from a breakup is always risky and Margaret was rebounding from a full-blown tragedy following kon's death she got hastily engaged to Charles grevel the uber wealthy Earl of Warick and accepted the proposal of another man the publishing Heir Max Ain near simultaneously and that wasn't even the most scandalous part instead of going for either grevel or achen she dumped them both and went with another man entirely the businessman and Avid golfer Charles what she got was a nightmare as a teenager Margaret had gotten pregnant all too easily but when she tried to have children with Sweeney it resulted in a heartbreaking eight miscarriages and when she did finally become pregnant for more than a few months it somehow got worse in late 1933 Margaret was 8 months pregnant and readying herself to give birth at last but it wasn't meant to be tragically her baby girl was still born despite this Devastation Margaret tried again eventually having two children with Sweeney by 1940 but her difficulties left lasting psychological scars then in 19403 everything changed once more when she was in her late 20s Margaret was visiting her doctor on Bond Street when she fell a whopping 40 ft down an elevator shaft in a freak accident from that point on nothing would be the same again when the dust cleared luck prevailed Rescuers located Margaret and miraculously she was still alive but there were disturbing indications of what really happened as Margaret recalled doctors thought she must have grabbed onto the elevator cable this is what likely saved her life because her fingernails were torn and bloody after 33 stitches to her head and days spent recovering doctors allowed Margaret to go home to her family but according to her husband the woman who returned was not the wife he had known before instead Margaret had become erratic and impulsive with nyphomaniac Tendencies looking back this may have been the point it all began to unravel to achieve among her conquests was a broken engagement with the Texan Banker Joseph Thomas as well as a diance with the curator for the Met Theodore rouso but these boys were just practice for the man she was about to meet soon after untangling herself from these Brief Encounters Margaret met the man who would ruin her life Ian Duncan Campbell The Dashing Scottish peer known as the Duke of ARG Sure Fit the part with a forbidding face and a brusk manner Campbell seemed every bit a byonic hero and Margaret fell head over heels Campbell even had a crumbling Abode in verer Castle to match his moodiness while Margaret had been married once before when she met the Duke he had already gone through two wives and his track record was far from reassuring uring he was a troubled man traumatized from his time spent as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II as a result he was a notorious Drinker and gambler and was hooked on prescription medications to boot more than that both of his previous wives claimed he had mistreated them in short Margaret should have run away instead she ran right towards him Margaret married Ian Campbell in March of 195 won and became the Duchess of our guile in the process on the surface it looked like she was on top of the world she was the bell of yet another Society wedding she had a title and a powerful husband and people still considered her one of the best dressed women in the world but behind the scenes she was already living a Horror Story marrying Ian Campbell was like signing a deal with the devil and the Duke made sure Margaret knew it before the an their marriage contract was even dry in a move he had Lely pulled before Campbell began siphoning off the money that Margaret brought into the Union to restore his ancestral seat at inverary Castle to him she was just a bank account then again right around this time Margaret went off the deep end herself traumatic elevator accident or not Margaret's personality had always been odd even her friends thought she completely lacked a sense of humor and she called herself a bird brain as someone who self-identified as always was vain Margaret always cared much more about her beauty than anything else within just a few months of marrying the Duke Margaret had already realized she'd made a mistake she may have been one of the most beautiful women of her generation but to the Duke she was just another wife he could intimidate push around and demean on top of that Margaret was having further difficulty giving him a child which didn't help matters at the end of her rope she came up with a diabolical plan reportedly The Duchess began taking aim at the Duke's sons from his previous marriage even going so far as to forge letters that claimed the boys were illegitimate it was a failed ploy to safeguard her own power Margaret learned the hard way that money can't buy you happiness but in some cases it can buy you a child and that's apparently what she tried to do her plan she was going to take the child in and somehow pass him off as her own therefore making him the true legitimate heir of the Duke nope doesn't make any sense to me either but then I've never fell 40 ft down An Elevator Shaft the dukee of AR guil had always been suspicious that his wife had a roaming eye but he'd never quite been able to prove it so when Margaret started staying out extra late and getting more distant the Duke committed a creepy breach of trust he had Margaret's car wire tapped so he could know where she was all the time still that wasn't quite enough for him his next idea would be the couple's downfall starting in the late 1950s the dukee of AR guil had enough of waiting for his wife to get home plus there was another disconcerting sign Mar had a locked drawer in their home and his dark fantasies about its contents drove him mad so one day while she was away in New York and he had ample time to sit and get more paranoid he called a locksmith and asked him to break into it years ago if you'll remember Margaret's first husband Charles Sweeney claimed that her fall down An Elevator Shaft had fundamentally changed her personality and turned her into a nymphomaniac the contents of of her locked cupboard revealed the whole sorted truth and it among other things was a set of extremely damning and risque Polaroid photographs to describe these Polaroids in a video like this which is supposed to be educational and not salacious is a Herculean task after all some of the photographs depicted intensely intimate positions with Margaret completely undressed and although her face was usually obscured the dukee could recognize her by one Telltale sign her favorite necklace made up of three strings of pearls in the photographs The Duchess of argil was very much not alone indeed she was seen to be performing acts on men who were very much not the Duke of argal frustratingly enough and key to everything that followed the men's faces were often out of frame making them impossible to identify upon finding this evidence the Duke of argal turned right around and started divorce proceedings against Margaret in his court papers the Duke accused Margaret of sleeping with no fewer than 88 men over the course of their marriage with this the floodgates opened in light of her husband's allegations and jaw-dropping evidence Margaret couldn't just sit back and take it instead she accused him of a heinous act in a countersuit she claimed that the dukee had had been unfaithful too but not with just anyone she claimed he had slept with her own stepmother Jane Corby Wiggum Margaret seemed poised to take the dukee down with her but on the very day of her hearing about his infidelity she couldn't find a witness and had to drop her case over the four years that Margaret and her Juke were facing off against each other in court the Press speculated wildly about all of Margaret's sins dubbing her the dirty duchess because Margaret's private stash of photos was now public evidence newspapers of the day got a full view of the single most infamous snap in Margaret's collection one where she was kneeling down in front of a headless man now he wasn't actually headless just the photo cropped his head out incredibly his identity was still a mystery after all this time and journalists tried to guess who he might be in doing so they du up even more dirt on The [Music] Duchess with 88 possible lovers to choose from the Press had a field day hunting down the man in the picture one man who kept popping up in Margaret's history was the minister of defense for Britain Duncan sandies who would also go on to become Winston Churchill's son-in-law whether or not sandies was the headless man he was certainly a lover of Margaret's and offered his resignation with when the Scandal broke there's still much speculation about who exactly the headless man was but some historians believe we can put the answer to bed according to them the man is almost certainly Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr a married man at the time although the higher ups managed to keep his identity Hush Hush Fairbanks handwriting reportedly matches the writing found on the photograph Margaret wasn't about to drag anyone else into the spotlight with her and she stayed silent and never identified any of the men in the photos unfortunately for The Duchess of argal Britain at the time was nowhere near Progressive and she'd landed a particularly conservative judge in Lord Wheatley who presided over the case so when Wheatley eventually granted the divorce he did it with biting cruelty sneering that she was a completely promiscuous woman and wholly immoral it was the last nail in the coffin of Margaret's respectability she was now a free woman but her name was officially mud sure Margaret never divulged the names of the headless man or her other lovers but she sure did try to cash in on her own Scandal and the way she did it was cringeworthy she started giving paid tours of her home at 48 upper groer Street aka the home where her ex-husband had first found those Infamous photographs oh Peggy but there was more hope to lose somehow Margaret simply couldn't make her bank account match her extravagant tastes and she eventually had to move out of her notorious home swapping it first for the groer House Hotel and then at the urging of her children and her first husband Charles Sweeney a meager apartment building her last shred of dignity was circling the drain in the late late ' 80s the dirty Duchess found a new way to make some quick cash she began appearing on television programs making a cameo appearance on the talk show after dark to discuss horse racing Midway through the after dark broadcast Margaret had to bail out of her commitment and walk off stage because as she claimed she was so very sleepy although the former Duchess of our guil was well into her 70s at this point and might be excused for an early bedtime it did point to an overall decline in her health by the early '90s Margaret was no longer able to take care of herself and her children placed her in a nursing home and here there would be one final tragedy for her to endure while in the nursing home bathroom one day Margaret had a severe fall that broke her neck unlike the elevator accident this time Margaret was far too frail to survive she died on July 25th 1993 and was buried alongside her first husband Charles Sweeney who had died just 4 months earlier her Legacy nonetheless lives on and she remains an object of Fascination in 2022 Amazon produced a very British Scandal based on her electrifying Court battle with her husband one can only assume that the dirty Duchess would be loving the Hollywood treatment for all that her name is synonymous with Scandal Margaret Campbell obsessed over class and often held Court about the proper way to display yourself to the world as she once put it always a poodle only a poodle that and three strands of pearls together they are absolutely the essential things in life well quite if you enjoyed this video please give it a like And subscribe for more videos

Channel: Factinate

Views: 1,563,273

Keywords:

Id: i6kSzmaImVk

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024