Post-Profumo In June 1963, the Profumo Affair—Britain’s most infamous political sex scandal—exploded. Fifty years later, as Andrew Lloyd Webber preps a musical based on the sordid saga, Cliveden House, the stately home turned hotel where the affair began, has been handsomely spruced up. Just outside London, Cliveden was begun in 1666 by the second Duke of Buckingham and rebuilt following a disastrous fire in 1849 by architect Charles Barry (who also reconstructed the Palace of Westminster) for its then owner, the Duke of Sutherland. Thanks to Barry’s ravishing Italianate designs and Sutherland’s bounteous hospitality, invitations to stay were coveted by the poshest people of the time, including Queen Victoria, who visited eight times during her reign. Cliveden’s position as a glittering social hub was cemented by America’s richest citizen, William Waldorf Astor, who purchased the property in 1893. For the next seven dec­ades he and his family—notably his vivacious, Virginia-born daughter-in-law, Nancy, Britain’s first female M.P.—hosted everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill to F.D.R. and George Bernard Shaw. During a July 1961 house party, a sweltering heat wave drove most of the guests to the recently built swimming pool, including John Profumo, secretary of state for war, and Christine Keeler, a former showgirl. Waves and then sparks passed between them. Two years later, when their affair became known and it emerged that she had also been the mistress of a Soviet spy, the news rocked the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Two dec­ades later, when Macmillan was informed that the estate was to become a luxury hotel, he was unfazed: “My dear boy, it always has been.” Now emerging from a top-to-bottom renovation, Cliveden House is again a choice location to start any affair. (Tip: Ask for the top-of-the-line Lady Astor Suite.) By James Reginato from Vanity Fair..