Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any credible way. Searching for facts in the foetid gloop of Pizzichini’s prose feels like bog-snorkelling. The subject, Mariella Novotny, was a ‘party girl’, or prostitute, who turns up like Zelig in many 1960s scandals. She claimed to have had sex with John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby when she was only 20, and she was on the scene when Christine Keeler was having her affairs with Profumo and the Russian spy Ivanov. She featured in several News of the World exposés, and later contributed an autobiographical serial to the porn magazine Club International.
She was born Stella Marie Capes in 1942 in Sheffield. Her mother, Constance Capes, was a shorthand typist in Grimsby (though Keeler said she was a tart). No father is listed on her birth certificate but Mariella always claimed he was a high-up in the Czech government and that she spent her early childhood in a Czech palace and then in a German refugee camp where she witnessed a child being raped.
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