Chapter 12 - Gay Ellen

As I said above I knew Mariella Novotny, I dated her for a short while, telling her I’d be there any time she wanted kids. She told me the identity of the ‘man in the mask’; she used to regularly whip him, handcuffs an’ all!

Stephen Ward once famously said:

“It would be humbug if I did not confess that I looked forward to the sex orgies. I have been to every type of that party — those specialising in certain perversions and those given in an elaborate setting where all the formalities were observed. Many of the people who attend are rich and famous — many faces that are seen in public life and on television. If their public could only see them like this.”

Mariella always called the ‘man in the mask’ party the feast of peacocks after what had been served for dinner.  This was in December 1961 and the party would only later become famous when Mandy revealed that when she arrived the door had been opened by Ward wearing just a pair of socks!

Mariella spent most her time that night in bed wearing a corset, a whip and six men! The rest of the guest list - actors, MP’s and judges – was pure A-list and they were all naked except for a man wearing a mask and a Masonic apron who was tied between two pillars – appropriately - and who was whipped by everybody upon entrance. Numerous names have been bandied about as to the identity of this man and Mariella knew the real story.

Beauty and the Beast – Mariella and Hod

I think her ‘little black book’ got her killed. In 1978 she announced that she had started writing her memoirs and that these would include details of her work for MI5. Later she claimed that her book would include accounts of her time in the US and revelations concerning JFK. The book never appeared. Mariella Novotny was found dead in her bed in February 1983 after, yet another, drug overdose. Shortly after death her home was ‘burgled’ and any and all incriminating evidence disappeared.

Mariella had been married to a guy called Horace ‘Hod’ Dibben who was some 36 years older than she was. Horace was an antiques dealer (as was Mariella; on their wedding day this antique gave her a mansion and a flat in Eaton Place in Belgravia!) and a nightclub owner.

Horrible Horace was the former owner of Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge; a venue which has already played a minor role in our story but which deserves greater consideration.

Popular legend has it that the Kray’s acquired the Barn from Peter Rachman but Esmeralda’s was, in fact, owned by a guy called Stefan de Faye, though Rachman may well have been a shareholder.

More likely is a tale that word had spread east that Rachman had a good thing going on in the Notting Hill slums and that the twins were itching for a slice of the action. Rachman, who already had a steady supply of comedy henchmen, knew that if he started paying protection money he would never stop, so he, and Billy Hill, tipped off the Krays about Esmeralda’s and its success.

For Rachman this may have also helped to clear a debt. There is a story that Rachman had acquired a gambling debt at Esmeralda’s and that Ronnie Kray chased him for it. Rachman gave Ronnie some cash towards it and a cheque for the rest, which bounced. Bad idea.

It then appears that the club, as well as being a casino, became a venue for gay sex and a criminal information network run by David Litvinoff.

Litvinoff, whose legend was built around his plastic gangster status, was another who had accumulated gambling debts at Esmeralda’s; three grand in Litvinoff’s case, and Ronnie Kray used this debt as leverage to acquire the lease on a flat in Ashburn Gardens in Kensington that Litvinoff owned; provided Litvinoff threw in his live-in lover Bobby Buckley as well. This extremely un-holy trinity then apparently occupied the flat in the smart west London neighbourhood for the next 18 months.

Litvinoff would become the link between the criminal fraternity and the society movers and shakers and seems to have been a player in the emerging CIA controlled LSD market.

However, it is back to horrible Horace that we must first return. Hod was a fetishist and did not care in the slightest who knew what about his peccadillos. He had been a regular on the freak scene since the thirties and had helped to establish London’s private orgy circuit.

He was also, like Stephen Ward, a procurer of popsies and it was in this function that he supplied girls for the parties that the actress Diana Dors and her husband Dennis Hamilton would host at their house in Maidenhead. These proceedings would then be filmed, via a two-way mirror installed in the ceiling in a similar manner to the OSS installed system at Ward’s house. These ‘home-movies’ would then be sold by Hamilton to his cronies on the sicko scene in rather the same fashion as Roman Polanski was rumoured to be doing on the sixties Hollywood circuit.

When Diana tired of this licentiousness and split with Hamilton the ever generous Rachman would purchase the two way mirror for installation in one of his own properties, presumably to continue the illicit film-making programme and to broaden the burgeoning blackmail portfolio.

Whilst the Profumo affair was unsurprisingly headline news in the UK, toppling a Tory government no less, the level of attention and scrutiny the case received over the pond was a matter of great concern.

You might think that the Americans would have been relatively unconcerned about the sexual deviancies of their British colleagues, but this was far from the case, and with good reason.

It is one of life’s true coincidences that on the very day that Fleet Street should be devouring the circumstances of the death of Michael Holliday; an earlier vignette along our time-travelling explorations, that it should also feature a front-page picture of ‘Gay’ Ellen Rometsch.

Now there’s a name with which to conjure.

It is testament to the great many changes of the past half century that ‘Gay Ellen’ did not mean that Ellen was gay: no, that would really have caused some conservative American consternation. ‘Gay Ellen’ then, meant that Ellen was gay; i.e. she liked a gay time; or, in other words that she was a whore, only they couldn’t say she was a whore due to the nature of her whoring which involved being balled by a Kennedy. Oh, and she was East German; which nowadays means that you are just another citizen of the fourth Reich, sorry, European Union, but back then that made you a communist, in American eyes anyway, and, therefore, a spy.

So, in the public perception, not only was ‘Gay Ellen’ a foreign, red, slag but she was also receiving pillow-talk from the President himself.

J. Edgar Hoover must have been shitting his pants!

Worse yet, ‘Gay Ellen’ was not the only foreign, red, slag that was receiving special Presidential attention; a girl called Suzy Chang was also being mentioned in dispatches as was my friend Mariella Novotny! Happy birthday Mr President indeed!

Oh, and Bobby Kennedy was knobbing them both as well; but then he was well used to sloppy seconds!

And therein lay the root of the great American fear; had Ward’s girls penetrated defences on both sides of the Atlantic? Did their legs spread so wide that they could consume an engorged ocean?

Certainly Ward’s girls were operating the same tricks for him as they were for Bobby Baker and his harlot’s harem of quim at the Quorum Club on Capitol Hill (Gosh, that’s a mouthful said the actress to the Bishop!).

The Quorum Club was another place that was used to acquire information about politicians that could later be used for blackmail, as was the house that Baker bought, ostensibly for his secretary, but from where he ran sex parties. This was a particularly useful asset for Lyndon B. Johnson who found it fairly easy to get politicians to do whatever he wanted should they have previously attended one of Baker’s pervy parties.

Bobby Baker was asked if he would arrange a meeting between Ellen Rometsch and John F. Kennedy. Baker later said that:

“He (Kennedy) sent back word it was the best time he ever had in his life. That was not the only time. She saw him on other occasions. It went on for a while.”

Baker then told LBJ and Hoover about Kennedy’s relationship with Ellen Rometsch. In July 1963 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents questioned Romesch about her past. They came to the conclusion that she was probably a Soviet spy.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13 - The hand of Hod

Let us have a closer look at Mariella Novotny. Mariella often claimed that she was related to the former president of Czechoslovakia, Antonin Novotny, and I believe her father was indeed Czech, however, according to Christine Keeler’s autobiography her real name was the far more plain Stella Capes and that seems to be borne out by this birth record from 1941. 

Bizarrely a further records check does seem to show that she married old Hod using the names Marie S and Stella M Capes. Don’t ask me how that works? All I know is that I always knew her as Mariella, though I always called her Marie.

It was via the hand of Hod that Mariella first encountered one Harry Alan Towers. Dibben knew Stephen Ward and Ward introduced Mariella to Towers at a party. Towers of London was a film producer and another who lived in the febrile west London streets around Marylebone; Hallam Street in Towers case. Towers was also another well-known face at Murray’s Cabaret Club.

Despite the supposedly genuine nature of their marriage Hod was not shy about whoring Mariella out and it was in this fashion that she travelled to the USA in 1960, ostensibly on the pretext of gaining modelling work. Within a matter of weeks she was meeting the actor Peter Lawford for lunch who, in turn, arranged for her to attend a party frequented by his brother-in-law John F Kennedy.

Marie being Marie she wasted no time before banging the President’s brains out, although perhaps in light of later events I should rephrase that! On one subsequent occasion she and fellow prostitute Suzy Chang were asked to dress in uniform so that they could play Doctors and Nurses with JFK! However, despite Mariella’s apparent willingness to do whatever it took the good times did not last long.

By March 1961 Mariella had been nicked by the FBI who followed up that stunning piece of detective work by arresting Towers three days later. The FBI claimed that Towers was running a call-girl service and that he had shipped Mariella over from the UK specifically to service his clients. Given that Towers would have had a plethora of home-grown US broads to choose from it is clear that Mariella had been brought over for far more than just her blow-job technique!

In her statement for the FBI she claimed that Towers was a Soviet agent who “provided the Russians with information for the purposes of compromising certain prominent individuals”.

But, as we already know from Mariella’s reaction to the Soviet Ivanov, she hated the Reds so why would she so willingly go along with Towers blackmail operation? Something is clearly amiss.

Towers would, somewhat conveniently, skip bail before his trial and resume his film-making career abroad whilst Mariella would return to London, the orgy scene and Hod’s loving embrace, but this does go some way to demonstrate the already extraordinary interest taken in Stephen Ward and his extortion network by the FBI some two years before the shit hit the fan in the UK.

Ward had reportedly said to Christine Keeler and Ivanov that:

“A man like John Kennedy will not be allowed to stay in such an important position of power in the world, I assure you of that.”

So, was this mere political foresight or did Ward have inside knowledge of future events? Certainly by the end of 1963, and post Ward’s own demise, Prime Minister Macmillan had resigned and Kennedy was dead. Effectively, someone had organised political coups in two of the world’s leading governments but, just who was it?

What we can say with some assurance is that a programme of systematic sexual blackmail was in full swing. Girls from various backgrounds were being lured into taking part in honeytrap operations so that someone, somewhere, could compile a dirty dossier of establishment filth. The girls, having successfully completed their leg-spreading duties, would then wind up conveniently dead or discredited. Either way nobody was going to take seriously any accusations that they may make.

Mariella Novotny, my lovely Marie, would make a brief cameo appearance in the spotlight once more in 1977 when she was taken to court over the rightful ownership of a flat in London. Bizarrely Hod took to the stand and claimed that the woman in the dock was not Mariella, but his illegitimate, and previously unknown, daughter Henrietta Chapman who was some thirteen years his wife’s junior. The ever reliable Daily Mail then dug up Hod’s old back-street-abortionist mate, Teddy Sugden, who promptly informed the world that Henrietta was indeed Mariella.

As I mentioned earlier Mariella had a little black book and had been busily writing her memoirs when she died in 1983. Nobody knows where that little black book went.

So, what, if any, proof do we have?

At the time of the Profumo affair the US Ambassador to the UK was a former OSS* guy called David Bruce. David Bruce was the ex-husband of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, whose father Andrew had also been US Ambassador to the UK, and she was, by virtue of her family’s voluminous business interests, one of the world’s richest people. Bruce was becoming increasingly uneasy about the allegations he was hearing in regards to Profumo and decided he needed to get to the bottom of it.

*The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was a wartime intelligence agency, and a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

To this end Ambassador Bruce sent his nephew William (Billy) Mellon Hitchcock and Thomas J Corbally, who already knew Stephen Ward, to a meeting with him to get to the heart of the matter. Apparently Corbally and Hitchcock left this meeting convinced that the allegations surrounding Profumo were true.

Presumably Bruce then told the Conservative MP and MI5 man William Shepherd who then told the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

How did Corbally know Ward? Well Corbally first met him at a party where Ward noticed the American was struggling with a knee complaint. One touch from the all-powerful healing hands of Ward was all it took to cure Corbally’s ailment and the pair became lifelong friends.

According to the book The Hustlers by Douglas Thompson, Corbally had as impeccable Mafia connections as he did CIA ones. Additionally a contemporaneous FBI report, declassified in 1987, characterized Mr Corbally as an American businessman “who reportedly ran sex orgies in his London flat”; something which would clearly appeal to Stephen Ward.

Apparently Corbally shared this flat with Ambassador Bruce’s nephew, William ‘Billy’ Hitchcock, despite Corbally being over fifty at the time and Hitchcock being a young man in his twenties. Hitchcock was a member of the extremely wealthy Hitchcock/Mellon dynasty: his grandfather having founded Gulf Oil and his uncle, Andrew Mellon, who had acquired a wealth valued in billions of dollars by the 1920s. The flat that Corbally and Hitchcock shared was in Duke Street in Mayfair a few minutes from where our friends from The Process: Church of the Final Judgement had acquired an HQ in Balfour Place. Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies all visited this flat; presumably to attend one of Corbally’s orgies?

Indeed, rather conveniently, when Peter Rachman, who was Mandy’s lover at the time, faked his death we find Mandy holed-up in Paris with a relative of Hitchcock’s – Senta Hitchcock.

William Hitchcock was also heavily involved in the CIA fronted Castle Bank and Trust which was based in the Bahamas and which was involved in tax evasion, as well as covertly funnelling funds for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Coincidentally, I’m sure, when the fun-loving, Alsatian-toting, black-caped Processean’s decided to decamp from London for pastures new the first stop on their world tour was also in the Bahamas.

Thomas J. Corbally was a CIA informant. As was the wheelchair bound movie writer and producer Earl Felton. Felton met Christine Keeler at a New Year’s party, after which he kept in touch. According to Chrissie’s autobiography The Truth at Last:

‘Stephen had been telling him lies, feeding him false information and indicating that I was spying for the Russians because of my love for Eugene (Ivanov). The message was to leave the country, say nothing about anything I might have seen or heard.’

In 1962 an FBI memo written by J. Edgar Hoover stated that Felton had taken part in sex orgies that involved Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Mariella Novotny, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lord Astor, Eugene Ivanov, John Profumo and Stephen Ward.

Felton is yet another of our stellar cast that would land up suffering death by suicide.

William Hitchcock is also extremely intriguing because not long after he returned to the US from England it was he who would help to fund the legendary LSD guru Timothy Leary and even bequeath him use of one of the family properties as a centre for psychedelic experiments, redolent in the extreme of the Marquess of Tavistock. This is relevant because in 1962 one Mary Pinchot Meyer made contact with Leary who, reportedly, supplied LSD to her for use with John F. Kennedy. Leary also claimed that Mary helped influence Kennedy’s views on nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Cuba. It was later discovered that the FBI was keeping a file on Mary.

Why, apart from the fact that she was sleeping with and supplying narcotics to JFK, would the FBI be interested in Mary Pinchot Meyer? Mary was married to Cord Meyer who aside from being a proponent of one-world-government – presumably on the presumption that this one-world-government would be run from Washington DC rather than Moscow or Beijing – was a prominent CIA official. So prominent, in fact, that he had been the CIA Chief of Station in London and was a major player in the delightful Operation Mockingbird.

Mockingbird, according to Wikipedia was a secret campaign by the CIA to influence the media: 

‘The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA.’

The plan worked thusly:

‘The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American big business and anti-Soviet views.’

Essentially you plant a bogus story with a pet journalist and then sit back and watch it gain validity with each subsequent retelling. It is a classical political trick still in use to this day; if you repeat a lie often enough people will accept it as the truth.

Eventually the FBI; or more specifically, J Edgar Hoover became jealous of the power that the CIA wielded and so Hoover briefed Senator Joseph McCarthy who, in turn, began accusing Meyer and others of being communists. This would lead to President Eisenhower appointing an official to write a damning report on the CIA and its covert operations. This report was written by one David Bruce who, as you will recall, was by 1963 the US Ambassador to the UK and was arranging for his nephew to meet Stephen Ward to get the lowdown on the Profumo affair.

As an aside, when, in 1965, the broadcaster Alastair Cooke discovered that two of his daughters had fallen into the clutches of The Process: Church of the Final Judgement it was to Ambassador Bruce that Cooke appealed for assistance. This action, therefore, presumes that Bruce had some prior knowledge of the organisation and its workings.

This Anglo / American approach to turning on the world to LSD was reciprocated by the UK via the presence stateside of Michael Hollingshead who would merrily go around involuntarily dosing foreign leaders through his job at the United Nations.

Hollingshead claimed that in 1961 he was involved with the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange; which appears to have been a Rockefeller funded CIA front for its MK-Ultra programme.

Once Kennedy got into power he made a powerful enemy of the CIA through his actions in Cuba and via his brother Robert’s own efforts to eradicate organised crime in the US. If one views this scenario through the eyes of Cord Meyer who perceived the Kennedys’ as representing a threat then it becomes clear why such a fine, upstanding and not at all self-serving lackey like Meyer may be prepared to whore out his ex-missus to the President.

One of the chief beneficiaries, if that is the right word, of the Operation Mockingbird disclosures was Philip Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, who, in January 1963, disclosed to a meeting of newspaper editors that John F. Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer.

Philip Graham

Which is odd on two counts; firstly, his colleagues decided not to report on this highly salacious and, one would have thought, newsworthy piece of information and, secondly, because Graham had been a long-time ally of the Kennedys’, and Lyndon Johnson, and would often ghost-write their speeches.

So, what could have prompted this change of allegiance? Someone had clearly gotten to him. Someone was spinning the spin doctor.

Shortly after making his allegations of Presidential infidelity Graham suffered some sort of nervous breakdown and found himself sedated, bound in a straitjacket and being flown back to Washington on-board Air Force One where he was committed for five days to a psychiatric hospital.

It will, therefore, come as absolutely no surprise to you to learn that by August of 1963 Phillip Graham had added his name to the long list of characters in this tale whose lives where seemingly ended by their own hands, in this case at the business end of a 28-gauge shotgun.

Chapter 14