The strange thing about the Man in the Mask Party was that it did happen at a time in English history when the ruling classes collaborated in maintaining a fiction that this sort of thing did not happen at all, and that if and when it did happen, it was out of the ordinary, deeply regrettable and entirely wicked. This fiction was necessary because a morbid fear of sex still pertained. All this despite the judgment made on 2nd November 1960 when twelve jurors acquitted Lady Chatterley's Lover of corrupting morals or causing offence. In the Guardian, Young alleged: "Lawrence reared up from his grave, sheltered goodness, truth and beauty, and annihilated prosecutors, judges, guardians of taste, fusspots, sadists and all the runners of grey lust with the single cautery of clean English prose."

For generations desire had been twisted into strange, unbidden shapes. Furtive conniving ensured that consummation remained hidden, unspoken and ultimately condemned. Mariella understood this enigma very well and made a living out of it. One year after the famous ruling, she hosted a party that was to fuel a controversy that has lasted over fifty years. Controversy such as this thrives on the ingredients Mariella so thoughtfully combined: illicit sex, secrecy and high-profile, politically sensitive members of a self-serving elite section of society. Her principal guests remain officially unidentified to this day. This is despite the fact that just two years later, a Law Lord was commissioned to investigate the night in question as a potential threat to national security. He drew a veil over Mariella's party. It can only be assumed that the truth he uncovered was too suggestive of a split in the social fabric. Certainly, if the truth involved the son of a prime minister who was a prominent figure in British cultural life, it was best to allow the fuss to die down. 

But women like Novotny do not go quietly. She only had one recourse left to her and that was to put pen to paper. Her record of that night and of her life in general has been lost in yet more contentious circumstances.

But remnants remain and can be pieced together. "I was determined to be the best hostess of my age," she confided to her diary. So, on her return from America in early 1961, "Naughty Novotny" as the scandal sheets had dubbed her, started to give lavish dinner parties in London. Her guests flocked to meet the 20-year-old woman who had had such an impact on the most powerful man in the world, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The address she gave was her husband's address, 13 Hyde Park Square, W2. It was more of a pied-a-terre than an apartment in a mansion block that was starkly modern in its severity. However, there was a covered patio entrance, a porter in the lobby and a goods lift. Hod and Mariella had a basement flat. Above them were eight floors of brown brick looking onto a classic Victorian square with wrought-iron railings, hydrangeas and plinths.

At number 15, Mariella's neighbours provided some showbiz glitz. Fenella Fielding and Albert Finney were flatmates and young theatrical stars making names for themselves on stage and screen. Finney had just triumphed in "the landmark British film of the Angry Young Man", Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He was set for stardom. Fielding, apart from delivering husky double entendres in Carry On films, found more scope for her talents in the theatre. At the time of Mariella's soirée, Fenella Fielding was starring in a satire on theatrical vanity called So Much to Remember: The Life Story of a Very Great Lady. She had written it herself, and was said to keep a copy of Plato's Republic next to her bed. Fenella had a take on life that was sceptical, and she worked with new dramatists like Harold Pinter and revue artists like Peter Cook. Despite these promising beginnings, however, she never quite emerged from the low farce of Carry On. Perhaps she was too ambivalent for success on Finney's scale in that she found Plato's objections to mimetic arts too persuasive. Or perhaps it was her deep cleavage and come-hither voice that betrayed her wit and subtlety.