One Crowded Hour

Like few men or women who wind up in the prisoner's dock at the Old Bailey, Stephen Ward was educated, charming and gifted. What destroyed him, and turned a merely sordid morals case into the trial of the decade, was none of the conventional or even unconventional deadly sins. It was a compulsive, consuming snobbery.

To hobnob with the rich and famous and sprinkle his conversation with first names of peers, maharajahs and Cabinet ministers, the suave, artistic osteopath would go to any lengths, or depths. A man of unbounded vanity himself, he flattered others' egos with facile pencil portraits, with a gleeful flow of gossip, and a magical ability to cure the aches and pains of famous friends' famous friends.

For coveted acquaintances, versatile Stephen Ward held out the key to an exotic demimonde of teen-age trollops and rarefied sexual rites that seemed more in keeping with Lautrec's Montmartre than tidy Thamesside. The second son of a country clergyman, he had a lifelong talent for spotting, seducing and sophisticating pliable provincial lasses. "I suppose," said he, "that I have been one of the most successful men with girls in London since the war." He used this gift unremittingly for his friends, who rewarded him with a social acceptance that meant far more to him than the financial proceeds of procuring.

Revenge Trial. In return for favors past, Stephen Ward remained jauntily confident that Top People would come to his rescue when he was arrested last June and charged with living on prostitutes' earnings. At his trial, all Britain waited expectantly for the celebrated "surprise witnesses" he had promised. It was not until the seventh day that the crumpling reality finally caught up with him. It came midway in Mr. Justice Marshall's remorseless, five-hour summing-up of the evidence. "There may be many reasons why he has been abandoned in his extremity," declared the red-robed judge. "One thing is clear: if Stephen Ward was telling the truth in the witness box, there are in this city many witnesses of high estate and low who could have come and testified in support of his evidence."

Some did--but not one nob. That night, the dejected Ward summoned a Daily Express reporter to a friend's apartment and poured out his bitterness. "This," said he, "has been a political revenge trial. Someone had to be sacrificed, and it was me. One or two people can still vindicate me, but when the Establishment wants blood, you can't wriggle out."

Stephen Ward did wriggle out. Ninety minutes before he was to appear in court for the last day of his trial, he was found purple-faced and unconscious in the Chelsea apartment where he had been staying with a friend. On a table beside him were scattered a dozen letters to friends and acquaintances. On the floor lay an empty vial that had contained 100 Nembutal tablets--a drug very different from the kind he had long been taking for pleasure. While doctors worked to save his flickering life at St. Stephen's Hospital, the judge continued his summing-up and sent the case to the jury. That evening, after deliberating only 4 1/2 hours, the jurors found Stephen Thomas Ward guilty on two counts of living in part on the immoral earnings of prostitutes.

Fed & Fanned. Though the jury acquitted him on three other counts, it found that in two cases he "knowingly aided prostitutes in the plying of their trade" and "received payment for such assistance out of their earnings." Thus the jurors had also decided that, by definition, leggy, red-maned Christine Keeler, 21, and blonde, baby-faced Mandy Rice-Davies, 18, were prostitutes.* If either was dismayed at being formally branded a whore, neither showed it. At the London premiere of Cleopatra and an otherwise exclusive buffet supper afterward, Mandy in a brief blue gown that was designed by herself (and looked it) stole the limelight.

And the two dubious heroines were rolling in money from the sale of newspaper confessions that proved far more profitable than the venery they described. Christine, who had earned around $70,000 or more, proved her heart of gold by buying her mother and stepfather a "rambling" house in the country. Mandy to date has made about half as much, was keeping her good deeds a secret. Both seemed intent on living to the limit the roles that the judge limned in his summing up: "The widespread and exaggerated publicity surrounding this case has brought these girls to pinnacles of notoriety which feed and fan their vanity." Quoting Sir Walter Scott, he added sardonically:

One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.

Word from Bill. As Ward's own crowded hour came to an end, many Englishmen began to feel a twinge of compassion for the talented, if twisted, master of the revels. As the osteopath lay unconscious, red-haired Julie Gulliver, a 23-year-old singer who had been his last, most loyal girl friend, burst out: "There's a whole crowd of people right now praying for Stephen to die so that their names won't be mentioned. I'm going to see that they are."

In a guarded room at the hospital, Stephen Ward died at week's end without knowing that he had been convicted. A suicide note written four days earlier explained: "It's a wish not to let them get me. I'd rather get myself." Every Englishman had his own obituary for the man who was written off on the court docket as "defendant deceased." Stephen's friend "Bill," Viscount Astor, a somewhat belated witness of high estate, allowed piously: "His readiness to help anyone in pain is the memory many will treasure." In one way or another, the ghost of Stephen Ward seemed likely to haunt many Top Britons as assiduously as the dashing doctor ever courted them in his life.

*Since the legal definition of a prostitute was under judicial review in Britain, the judge directed the jury to limit it to "a woman who offers her body indiscriminately for an act of normal sexual intercourse with a man for profit." Thus the judge ruled that Vickie Barrett, a convicted streetwalker who testified that she whipped men for $2.80 a stroke in Ward's apartment, was not to be considered a prostitute except on occasions when she had normal intercourse with men. In Britain, where upper-class children are commonly chastised by governesses, school prefects and masters, Havelock Ellis reported 50 years ago, sexual flagellation among adults "is the most frequent of all perversions," and the situation does not seem to have changed since.

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