She came into this world as Stella Capes, the daughter of hard-working salt-of-the-earth single mother.
Yet she grew up to be Mariella Novotny, the infamous international agent provacateur, a femme fatale who bedded John F Kennedy, had a baby with a British double agent and brought down more gangsters and bent coppers than Line of Duty’s AC-12.
She counted Christine Keeler as a friend, and had the great and the good of the 1960s at her mercy - quite literally as a whip-cracking hostess of the notorious Man in The Mask party, the infamous orgy, exposed by the Profumo Inquiry. Naked MPs, judges and socialites gourged on peacock and badger and whipped a mystery aristocrat in a gimp mask.
No one was ever sure who the real Mariella was, and who was pulling her strings. Were her romps with JFK a plot by his enemies? Did controversial osteopath Stephen Ward introduce her to Profumo before Keeler? And was her paternal uncle a Czech president as she once claimed?
These were answers she’d promised in her autobiography, along with the details of Operation Countryman, in which she helped police bring down famed fixer Charles Taylor, an OCG, and corrupt coppers in The Met’s Flying Squad - all with a smile and a flutter of a eyelash.
Sadly that book was never to be written. Aged 59, Mariella - a woman who lived like a real-life Bond girl - dropped dead in her bowl of milk pudding, an end almost as mundane as she had been scandalous.
Now today, after a 10-year project, Charlie Taylor’s crime-writing granddaughter, LILIAN PIZZICHINNI, wants justice. Not for her grandfather, but the woman who destroyed him.
So here she asks: Was Mariella murdered?
To this day the death of the call-girl Mariella Novotny haunts me.
Rumour has it, her death was orchestrated by the British secret services. The rumour persists because shortly after her death, her house was burgled.
When her widower realised that her diaries and the manuscript of the kiss-and-tell memoir she had been threatening to write for years had been taken, he feared the worst.
Her friends, such as the former showgirl Christine Keeler, who had been at the centre of the notorious sex scandal, the Profumo Affair, in the 1960s, said it was murder.
I can see why Keeler said this. Mariella, the most infamous woman of her generation, had the kind of contacts that would make Special Branch certainly keep a close eye on her.
She was also known by the FBI for an entanglement with a former president. But was this enough to kill her? And how did a girl born to a single mother from Grimsby achieve such renown?
Just this week I was approached by a former Grenadier Guard.
He told me about his friend, a chauffeur who had been employed by a man in the highest ranks of British aristocracy – a household name.
This aristocrat, the old soldier told me, was one of Mariella’s clients.
Back in the 1960s, his friend recalled driving his boss, and three other high-ranking members of the Establishment (one of whom was another household name), to an address in London’s Hyde Park Square. This address belonged to S+M dominatrix Mariella, or as the chauffeur heard his boss call her “the Government Chief Whip”.
The men who frequented Mariella were from the top rank of society.
This could be why Mariella never got to tell her own story, and why it was essential that I do it for her.
After all, it wasn’t just political, I had a personal connection with her, too.
On May 6 1978, a week shy of my 14th birthday, my great-aunt came home with the Daily Mirror and some tinned salmon. A story on page seven concerned the imminent downfall of my grandfather, Charlie Taylor. He was a fixer for South London gangsters. At Charlie’s behest, villains and Flying Squad officers would meet at his hotel in Streatham to strike deals. Charlie would get a cut from each side. But he was now facing charges of defrauding the Bank of England of £1million.
The Mirror said Charlie’s co-defendant, conman Lennie Ash, had told the court they were objects of a police sting featuring “Sex party queen Mariella Novotny”.
The photo showed a woman with a confrontational gaze, aggressive eye make-up and a luxurious, Julie Christie bob.
The reporter went on: “the blonde bombshell who hosted the notorious Man in the Mask nude party [central to] the Profumo scandal” was “an undercover Intelligence agent”.
Her mission, Lennie alleged, “was to spy on top Scotland Yard officers”. I later found out that Mariella had seduced Lennie, and agreed to be his fiancee, with the express purpose of getting close to Charlie. She did this so she could pass information to Operation Countryman about Charlie’s dealings with “bent coppers”.
Charlie knew every bent copper in the Flying Squad. Days later, he dropped dead on his way to the Old Bailey.
I was intrigued by the woman who brought him down.
I liked the fact that Mariella had seen through my grandfather’s front as a hard man. It felt like retribution for the time he had conned my Great Aunt Dolly of her life savings.
In later life Mariella Novotny called herself an “agent provocateur”. She was born for this role. She was four foot eight and barely out of her teens when she was hosting orgies for members of parliament and other VIPs.
Mariella had moved from her home up north to London aged 16. By 18, she was topless dancing at Soho’s Windmill Theatre and married to nightclub owner Horace “Hod” Dibben, then 56, and a major player in the London orgy scene.
Hod was close to society osteopath and portraitist Stephen Ward. Alongside Ward and Keeler, Mariella became a key player in the 1961 scandal that saw the War Minister Profumo disgraced, and, in turn, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan fatally compromised.
She was still only 20 years old.
Before then, Mariella had been involved in another scandal when she bagged the most powerful man in the world, the then President-Elect, John F. Kennedy.
In 1960 she flew to New York with British TV producer Harry Alan Towers. He had promised to make her a proverbial star. But it turned out she would “entertain” some of his friends. She hung out in a club in Washington, run by an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s former rival turned vice-president elect.
There, Mariella met actor Peter Lawford, brother-in-law of the Kennedys, who decided Jack would like her and took her to a party hosted by Italian-American crooner, Vic Damone. Kennedy did indeed like the British girl with the cut-glass accent and a whip in her handbag. He took Mariella into a bedroom where they discussed the political scene whilst undressing.
Mariella continued to see Kennedy, meeting in a room at the UN HQ. Once she allegedly dressed as a nurse alongside another girl, Suzy Chang. The fact Mariella claimed to be the niece of the Czech communist president, Antonin Novotny, and Suzy was Chinese had FBI Director J Edgar Hoover frothing at the mouth. Towers was soon arrested for white-slave trafficking; and Mariella shipped back home.
The more I found out about this International Woman of Mystery, the more I wanted to know. For starters how did a girl born Stella Marie Capes, in the north of England, 1941, to a shorthand typist, get an upper-class accent and the style to match?
Mariella’s paternal origins are uncertain; she claimed to have a Czech father, but all that’s confirmed is she arrived in London in 1958, met Hod at his nightclub, The Black Sheep, and married in Caxton Hall in 1960 (David Bailey took photographs).
They entertained on a lavish scale, including the Man in the Mask Party at 13 Hyde Park Square in December 1961, the party at which the aristocratic gentleman with the talkative chauffeur stood naked but for a mask while other guests took turns in whipping him.
The event’s since been the centre of speculations regarding Mariella’s death. She refused to identify the Man in the Mask - maybe she feared the repercussions.
In 1963, with President Kennedy assassinated and Ward dead from suicide, Mariella embarked on an affair with “Mr Gelignite” aka Agent Zigzag, England’s most successful criminal-turned-wartime double agent.
Former safecracker Eddie Chapman was so successful as a “German spy”, Adolf Hitler awarded him the Iron Cross, while he was actually working for MI5. Eddie lived in a castle on the outskirts of Rome with Mariella and[ital] Hod, and in 1964, she had his child. When a French journalist interviewed the threesome, he asked Mariella what she had left behind in England. Her answer was “Hypocrisy.”
This girl had some chutzpah.
In the Seventies, Mariella fictionalised her exploits with her much-maligned novel, King’s Road. Then she went underground.
In an interview with LWT in 1979, she revealed she’d been working with Operation Countryman.
My grandfather was just one of her targets. There was also a gang of international fraudsters called The Hungarian Circle.
By now Mariella was approaching her forties. Michael Eddowes, who championed victims of injustice, tried to ghost-write her autobiography. Two men broke into his home and beat him up. He burnt the manuscript. Mariella then claimed the brakes on her car had been tampered with. Her mental health was increasingly erratic.
In 1980 Harry Alan Towers finally surrendered to the US police. He was let off with a small fine that reporters found suspicious.
Mariella picked herself up and revealed that she was writing a memoir about her top-ranking clients and a “plot to discredit Jack Kennedy”. She told the London Programme, “I kept a diary of all my appointments in the UN building. Believe me, it’s dynamite.”
Someone was keeping tabs on her. Or maybe it was just an accident. At any rate, on May 9, 1983, Mariella made herself a bowl of milk pudding. Several hours later she was found face down in it. The official version is she died of a Temazepam overdose.
“Very hard to die of an overdose,” said a friend of hers whom I interviewed, “When she’d been taking them for 20 years.”
No one investigated her death.
The girl from Grimsby, who bedded some of the most powerful men in the world, who had them at her mercy because they relied on her silence, was dead. I cannot say if she was murdered because she was about to blow the whistle on the misconduct of men in power.
But I do know she was calling Time’s Up before there was such a thing.
- The Novotny Papers: ‘A bit Vulture, A bit Eagle’ by Lilian Pizzichini, by Amberley Publishing is out now. Visit amberley-books.com/the-novotny-papers.html for more information.
