Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll

However, the wedding did not take place because she preferred Charles Francis Sweeny (1910-1993), an American businessman and amateur golfer from a wealthy Pennsylvania family.

Her numerous early romances included an affair with Prince George, Duke of Kent.

Ethel Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (née Whigham, formerly Sweeny; 1 December 1912 – 25 July 1993) was a Scottish heiress, socialite, and aristocrat who was most famous for her 1951 marriage and much-publicised 1963 divorce from her second husband, Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll.

Ethel Margaret Whigham was the only child of Helen Mann Hannay and George Hay Whigham.

Her father, the son of Scottish lawyer and cricketer David Dundas Whigham, was chairman of the Celanese Corporation of Britain and North America.

George Hay Whigham was a self-made millionaire: although his family was well-connected, they were not wealthy.

Margaret spent the first fourteen years of her life in New York City, where she was educated privately at the Hewitt School.

Her beauty was much spoken of, and she had youthful romances with Prince Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston and publishing heir Max Aitken, later the second Lord Beaverbrook.

In 1928 the future actor David Niven, then 18, had sex with 15-year-old Margaret during a holiday at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight.

To the fury of her father, she became pregnant as a result.

She was taken into a London nursing home for a secret abortion.

"All hell broke loose," remembered her family cook, Elizabeth Duckworth.

In 1930 Margaret was presented at Court in London and was known as the debutante of that year.

Shortly afterwards, she announced her engagement to Charles Guy Fulke Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick.

On 21 February 1933, following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Margaret married Sweeny at the Brompton Oratory, London.

Such had been the publicity surrounding her Norman Hartnell wedding dress that the traffic in Knightsbridge was blocked for three hours.

For the rest of her life, Margaret was associated with glamour and elegance, being a firm client of Hartnell, Victor Stiebel, and Angele Delanghe in London before and after the Second World War.

She was one of a series of society beauties photographed as classical figures by Madame Yevonde.

She had three children with Sweeny: a daughter, who was stillborn at eight months in late 1933; another daughter, Frances Helen (1937–2024; who married Charles Manners, 10th Duke of Rutland), and a son, Brian Charles (1940–2021).

Before these pregnancies, she suffered eight miscarriages.

In 1943, Margaret had a near-fatal fall down a lift shaft.

"I fell forty feet to the bottom of the lift shaft", she later recalled.

"The only thing that saved me was the lift cable, which broke my fall. I must have clutched at it, for it was later found that all my fingernails were torn off. I apparently fell onto my knees and cracked the back of my head against the wall".

The Sweenys divorced in 1947.

After the end of her first marriage, Margaret was briefly engaged to a Texas-born banker, Joseph Thomas of Lehman Brothers, but he fell in love with another woman and the engagement was broken.

She also had a serious romantic relationship with Theodore Rousseau, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who was, she recalled, "highly intelligent, witty and self-confident to the point of arrogance".

That romance also ended without the couple formalising their liaison, since the mother of two "feared that Ted was not 'stepfather material'".

Still, she observed in her memoirs, "[W]e continued to see each other constantly."

On 22 March 1951, Margaret became the third wife of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll.

She wrote later in life:

I had wealth, I had good looks.

As a young woman I had been constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired, included in the Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World list, and mentioned by Cole Porter in the words of his hit song "You're the Top".

The top was what I was supposed to be.

I had become a duchess and mistress of a historic castle.

My daughter had married a duke.

Life was apparently roses all the way.

In fact, Margaret was not mentioned in Porter's original version of "You're the Top", but in the later anglicised lyrics for the British version of the song by P. G. Wodehouse, who changed two lines from "You're an O'Neill drama / You're Whistler's mama!"

to "You're Mussolini / You're Mrs Sweeny".

Margaret did not mention the episode in her 1975 memoirs, but she continued to adore Niven until the day he died.

She was among the VIP guests at his London memorial service.