The sexploits of Mariella Novotny

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. ‘But whether that trauma took place in Germany or Grimsby we will probably never know,’ breezes Pizzichini, which tells you all you need to know about her attitude to facts.

By 1960 Stella Marie Capes had moved to London, and was officially a dancer, though actually a highly paid prostitute whose speciality was whipping her clients with a cat o’ nine tails. She was a blonde pocket Venus (only 4ft 7in) who used a lorgnette because she refused to wear glasses. On 29 January 1960 she married one Hod Dibben. He was 54 and described as a ‘dealer in historic houses’ and she as a Windmill dancer.