Pulp International - Vintage cover of The national Insider from November 1964

Nov 15 2012

Did she turn into a freak or was she always that way?

The National Insider was a second tier tabloid, but even it sometimes got the facts correct. The headline on this cover is true—Diana Dors did have a two-way mirror in the bedroom ceiling of her house in Maidenhead, just outside London. Insider didn’t break the story. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had done that six years earlier and had shared all the tawdry details with British readers in a heavy breathing 12-week serial. But a good sex story can always be reprised, so Insider decided to dredge the details up again for American readers today in 1964.

At age nineteen Diana Dors had married a man named Dennis Hamilton, who turned out to be a paranoid, violent, and domineering louse who smacked her around and took over the management of her career. Professionally, he steered her away from serious drama into fluff cinema, while privately he initiated her into a life of sex parties and voyeurism. In addition to the two-way mirror in the bedroom ceiling, there were also assorted 8mm motion picture cameras scattered around the house so they could film their bacchanals and later review the action in their leisure time.

While all this partying was going on, a young American actress named Marilyn Monroe was becoming a star. Largely because of Hamilton’s career strategy, Dors would forever be considered Monroe lite, or, as she was often called, "The British Marilyn Monroe." This despite starting in movies a year earlier than Monroe.

Things weren’t going well in the marriage either. Hamilton’s violent and drunken tendencies were more and more often on public display. Make-up artists gossiped about the bruises they had to mask before Dors could shoot a scene. Hamilton punched out a photographer. And in one ugly incident, he brought two reporters home at midnight, dragged a sleepy Dors out of bed, and when she protested, smacked her so hard she tumbled down the stairs. She landed at the reporters’ feet, naked save for a dressing gown that had come open during the fall. Hamilton shouted to the reporters: “Now fucking interview her!”

Hamilton, who you see with Dors at bottom on their wedding day, died in 1959. An autopsy revealed that he had been suffering from tertiary syphilis. This terrrible affliction may have contributed to his erratic behavior, but it’s equally possible that his type of bad simply came straight from the core, and his need to hurt and control was a character trait, not a symptom. In any case, The National Insider replayed all the tawdry details of the marriage, and the issue must have simply flown off the newsstands, because the paper ran with the story again the very next week, at right. The interest is understandable. Dors was glamorous and very beautiful, and tabloid readers love nothing more than seeing a goddess in the muck.

What is most interesting about all this, to us at least, is that Dors did not curtail her raunchy activities after Hamilton exited the scene. Even two husbands later she was up to the same tricks. Her son Jason described life with Dors and her third husband Alan Lake this way: “There were no taboos in our house. I was only seven but I was free to wander in and out of my mum’s parties, no matter how hot they got. I would walk around in my pajamas chatting to John Lennon and Keith Moon. Mum would wander around serving cups of tea and trying to get people up into the bedrooms. She loved having friends round to watch the porn films made at the parties. They would sit around giggling as couples groped each other and made love on the bed. Most of them didn't even know they had been filmed.”

So there you have it. Whether Dennis Hamilton unleashed something in Diana Dors or she was always a voyeur party animal we don’t know. Or maybe it was a little of both, exacerbated by her reaching the height of fame as the prim fifties gave way to the swinging sixties. Interestingly, most of the information about the wild parties came from Dors herself at first. It wasn’t until after she died of cancer at age 52 that other people spoke up. But they were often kind with respect to Dors. That could be for many reasons, but we like to think of it this way: they must have had an awfully good time at those parties.

Britain, London, Maidenhead, The National Insider, News of the World, Diana Dors, Dennis Hamilton, Rupert Murdoch, John Lennon, Keith Moon, tabloid