38656356325923

his studio in Brick Street, Mayfair, was an annual event – and was always surrounded
by beautiful women. It was a world in which aristocrats met showgirls, a peculiarly
1950s London phenomenon, which ended with the Profumo scandal in 1963 (Stephen
Ward was one of Baron’s friends and made a drawing of him). Baron and his brother
were ‘passports to all sorts of people in London… they were lively lads at a very lively
time’.
The Thursday Club did not confine itself to lunches. According to Larry Adler, a
founder member with Baron, they gave Philip a Bachelor Night party at Baron’s flat in
the mews of Bruton Place – ‘Boy, was he nervous… his face was white with fear’ 2 – and
there would be an annual dinner for Philip at Mike Parker’s flat. There were a lot of
schoolboyish high jinks – at a pre-wedding lunch for Guy Middleton, Philip and Milford
Haven bet Baron that he couldn’t take a photograph of the cuckoo coming out of the
clock. Baron had his camera all set up when, just before the hour, Philip and Milford
Haven threw smoke bombs into the fireplace and the room filled with smoke.
Everybody’s faces were black, the police were called, but it was hushed up. Pranks were
one thing, sexual scandal quite another.
The Palace was not amused when gossip columnists linked Philip with Baron’s
girlfriend, the beautiful musical star Pat Kirkwood, whose legs Kenneth Tynan once
described as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. Their first meeting took place in October
1948, when Elizabeth was heavily pregnant with Charles. According to Pat Kirkwood
some forty years later, they met when Baron came to pick her up at the Hippodrome
Theatre near Leicester Square, where she was playing in the musical Starlight Roof,
bringing with him Philip and a naval equerry named ‘Basher’ Watkins. They had dinner
at Les Ambassadeurs, an ultra-fashionable Mayfair restaurant and gambling club which
frequently featured in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and then went to the Milroy
night-club, where Philip asked Pat Kirkwood to dance. Several couples, described by
Kirkwood as ‘courtiers’, looked shocked. Philip pulled faces at them, but they reported
back to the Palace. The King was outraged and Baron put in the royal doghouse. 3 Pat
Kirkwood has always denied that she and Philip had an affair. Baron himself in his
memoirs certainly gave the impression that his own feelings for Pat Kirkwood were
unrequited: ‘Several years of my life were wasted in blind devotion to the beautiful and
glamorous Pat Kirkwood,’ he wrote in Baron by Baron, published posthumously in 1957.
There were rumours too of Philip’s relations before his marriage with Hélène Cordet,
who in the late 1950s ran a night-club called The Saddle Room in Hamilton Place, but
the Duke’s authorized biographer, Tim Heald, insists that the two of them were just
childhood friends.
Philip’s defence, then and always, against allegations of infidelity is the impossibility
of escaping from his detectives. At a party with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,
husband of Queen Juliana, he once got down on his knees and salaamed to him –
‘You’re a lucky guy,’ he told him. ‘Nobody recognizes you – you can have as many
girlfriends as you like. I have six security men behind me all the time…’ Prince
Bernhard, according to a witness, was not amused. The Duke’s four-month absence and