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LONDON - One of the most notorious prostitutes in British history, and the woman who nearly brought down the Heath Government in 1973, has broken her silence after more than 30 years.
Norma Levy, whose sex sessions with Lord Lambton, then Under-Secretary for Defence, led first to his resignation and then to that of the Leader of the Lords, Lord Jellicoe, has been tracked down to a flat in Toronto, Canada, where she now lives.
Levy, now 59, revealed in an interview with the Daily Mail that a third minister had been using call girls, including a German called "Rocha".
The newspaper, which knows but has not divulged the minister's name, describes him as "today one of Britain's most respected and best-known elder statesmen".
The Irish-born woman claims that her clients included a number of glittering names of the period.
Holiday camp boss Billy Butlin was one, she said, as were shipping owner Stavros Niarchos, the Shah of Iran and the 11th Duke of Devonshire, who would often order up to four girls at a time. "He couldn't really manage them all," she said, "I think his eyes were just bigger than his stomach."
Perhaps her strangest patron was oil magnate John Paul Getty, who would require her to lie down in an open coffin and stay absolutely still for about 50 minutes while he gazed at her wearing only his underpants.
When these sessions were over and she would have to ring her madam, Jean Horn, the billionaire - true to his reputation for stinginess - would make her use the payphone.
At the time, Levy was a sultry, dark-haired young woman, whose clients paid £2500 ($7000) a weekend for her attentions. But this high life exploded in her and Lambton's face when a Sunday newspaper revealed their liaisons.
Just before the scandal broke, she fled the country with her then husband, Colin Levy, and began a series of brushes with the law, periods of riches and bouts of poverty.
With her third husband, Louis Macchione, she ran a large US escort business that gave her wealth, but also, after he died, a final arrest, an 18-month jail sentence and deportation. Lord Lambton died last month, aged 84.
- INDEPENDENT
