Christine Keeler

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Christine Keeler, an English model and showgirl, appeared in The Economist in the summer of 1963 beneath the headline "The Prime Minister's Crisis". The magazine printed her picture and added no further explanation. A young woman had become the face of a political emergency. How did a showgirl come to stand at the centre of a British government's troubles? What did a shooting incident have to do with national security at the height of the Cold War? And why has the trial of the society osteopath who befriended her since been judged a miscarriage of justice? The answers run through Soho nightclubs, a country-house pool party, two courtrooms and one famous studio portrait.

  49511

• 2. From Wraysbury to Soho

  ›

  Keeler was born on the 22nd of February 1942 in Uxbridge, Middlesex. Her father, Colin Sean Keeler, who later called himself Colin King, abandoned the family in 1945. Her mother, Julie Ellen, raised her with a stepfather, Edward Huish, in a house made from two converted railway carriages in the Berkshire village of Wraysbury.

  In 1951, at the age of 9, she was sent to a holiday home in Littlehampton. The school health inspector had decided she was suffering from malnutrition. As a teenager she was sexually abused by her stepfather and by his friends, whose children she babysat.

  At 15 she found work as a model at a dress shop in London's Soho. At 17 she had a son after an affair with a sergeant in the United States Air Force. The boy was born prematurely on the 17th of April 1959 and lived only six days.

  That summer she left Wraysbury and stayed briefly with a friend in Slough before heading for London. Her first job there was waiting tables at a restaurant on Baker Street. A colleague at another venue, Maureen O'Connor of Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho, took her to meet the club's owner, Percy Murray. He hired her almost at once as a topless showgirl.

  At Murray's she met Stephen Ward, who worked as both an osteopath and an artist. His practice and his drawings brought him social success and a wide circle of influential friends. Keeler soon lived with him in what looked like a couple's household. By her account the relationship was platonic.

  In her autobiography Keeler went further. She maintained that Ward was a double agent, in contact with senior figures in MI5 and with the KGB, and that he passed British state secrets to the Soviets. Ward's own portrait of her was bought by the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1984.

  49440542

• 3. Cliveden

  ›

  The weekend of the 8th and the 9th of July 1961 found Keeler at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion owned by the 3rd Viscount Astor. Ward had brought her to a pool party there. Among the guests was John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, to whom Ward introduced her.

  Profumo and Keeler began a brief affair, and its exact length is disputed. One account says it ended in August 1961, after the security services warned Profumo about the dangers of mixing with Ward's circle. Another says it dwindled on until December 1961.

  Ward's friends also included Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché and an officer of the GRU. Profumo met him only briefly. Keeler said that she and Ivanov had a short sexual relationship of their own. A British cabinet minister and a Soviet intelligence officer were now linked through one young woman.

  Keeler later published several accounts of her life. In one she claimed that she became pregnant by Profumo and then had an abortion.

  424945481

• 4. Shots at Wimpole Mews

  ›

  On the 27th of October 1962, a quarrel between two of Keeler's lovers ended with a knife. Johnny Edgecombe, an Antiguan jazz promoter, slashed the face of Lucky Gordon, a Jamaican jazz singer. Jealousy between the two men had been building for some time.

  Keeler ended things with Edgecombe in December 1962. On the 14th of December he went to Ward's house in Wimpole Mews, where she was staying temporarily for refuge, and fired five shots at the building. His arrest and trial put Keeler in front of the public and gave a national scandal its starting push.

  Profumo faced questions in the House of Commons. He first denied any improper conduct with her. He later confessed that he had lied, and he resigned from both the government and Parliament. His colleagues, who had backed his denial, were badly embarrassed.

  The fallout discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963. It became known as the Profumo affair. Keeler herself was alleged to be a prostitute, which was not a criminal offence.

  4245494350

• 5. The Chair

  ›

  A studio on the first floor of Peter Cook's Establishment Club was the setting for the most reproduced image of Keeler. In 1963, at the height of the scandal, she sat for the photographer Lewis Morley. The session was meant to promote a proposed film, The Keeler Affair, which was never released in the United Kingdom.

  Keeler was reluctant to pose nude, but the film's producers insisted. Morley found a compromise. He had her sit astride a plywood chair, so that she was technically nude while the back of the chair hid most of her body.

  The picture made a design celebrity of the chair, a model by Arne Jacobsen known as the 3107. Yet the chair in the studio was an imitation. Its makers had crudely cut a hand-hold into the back, apparently to avoid infringing copyright. A side-by-side photograph shows how the two designs differ.

  The imitation chair from the shoot now belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  814157

• 6. Courtrooms

  ›

  Keeler was attacked at a friend's home on the 18th of April 1963, and she accused Lucky Gordon. His trial opened on the 5th of June. He insisted that two witnesses would prove his innocence, but police told the court they could not be found. On the 7th of June, mainly on Keeler's evidence, he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison.

  By then Ward was facing vice charges, and Keeler was again a main prosecution witness. His trial ran from the 22nd to the 31st of July 1963. It has been described as an act of political revenge for the embarrassment the scandal caused the government.

  Ward was accused of living off immoral earnings supplied by Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. The money in question was small contributions to household costs and loan repayments, while Ward's own work as an osteopath brought in a substantial £5,500 a year. After a hostile summing-up from the judge, Ward took an overdose of barbiturates. He died before the jury returned its verdict and before sentence could be passed. The record nonetheless describes him as found guilty of being her pimp. The trial has since been seen as a miscarriage of justice and as a charade staged by the establishment to protect itself.

  In the closing days of that trial, the Court of Appeal overturned Gordon's conviction. His missing witnesses had been found, and they testified that Keeler's evidence had been substantially false. In December 1963 Keeler pleaded guilty to perjury before Sir Anthony Hawke, the Recorder of London. She was sentenced to nine months and served six.

  In prison her cellmate was Elizabeth Crowley, wife of the East End bank robber William Crowley. The couple were the maternal grandparents of the Labour MP Wes Streeting.

  474542916

• 7. Surviving

  ›

  Keeler left prison in 1964 and married twice in quick succession. Her first husband was James Edward Levermore, whom she wed on the 22nd of October 1965 and divorced in 1966. Her second was Anthony Sydney Platt, married on the 18th of February 1971, separated in 1972 and divorced on the 27th of May 1977. Each marriage produced a child, and her mother, Julie, took on most of the raising of the elder.

  For the last couple of decades of her life Keeler mostly lived alone. She earned a considerable sum from newspaper stories, but lawyers consumed most of it. Of the 1970s she said, "I was not living, I was surviving".

  In June 1988 she made an extended appearance on the Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark.

  Keeler died aged 75 on the 4th of December 2017 at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Farnborough, London. She had been ill for some months with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her funeral was held on the 16th of December at the West London Crematorium in Kensal Green Cemetery.

  495111210

• 8. Echoes in Culture

  ›

  A pop single called "Christine" reached No. 37 in the UK Singles Chart in the summer of 1963. Joyce Blair recorded it under the pseudonym "Miss X", and it parodied Keeler's involvement with Profumo. The BBC banned it from airplay because of its subject, and so did Radio Luxembourg.

  The same year, a film variously titled The Christine Keeler Story, The Keeler Affair and The Christine Keeler Affair cast Yvonne Buckingham in the lead. Keeler introduced it herself in the opening sequence and read the cast list in voiceover at the end.

  The Skatalites put "Christine Keeler" on their 1964 album Ska Authentic. The post-punk band Glaxo Babies released a 7-inch single of the same name in 1979. Al Stewart referred to her in "Post World War Two Blues" on his 1973 album Past, Present and Future. Billy Joel nodded to the affair as "British politician sex" in "We Didn't Start the Fire", from the 1989 album Storm Front.

  In 1988 Keeler appeared with Mandy Rice-Davies in Bryan Ferry's video for "Kiss and Tell". The single came from his 1987 album Bete Noire, and the video was meant to draw attention to the song's theme.

  The 1989 film Scandal gave Joanne Whalley the role of Keeler. Pet Shop Boys wrote "Nothing Has Been Proved" for it, with lyrics that trace the scandal's main events. Charlotte Spencer played her in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Stephen Ward at the Aldwych Theatre in 2013. Gala Gordon appeared as Keeler in the second season of Netflix's The Crown in 2017. Sophie Cookson took the lead in The Trial of Christine Keeler, a six-part series shown on BBC One from 2019 to 2020.

  The touring exhibition Dear Christine opened in Newcastle upon Tyne in June 2019. It reached Swansea in October 2019 and closed at Arthouse1 in London in February 2020. The artist and curator Fionn Wilson spent four years on the project, which gathers work from twenty women artists. Its aim was "to put a female perspective on a narrative that has mostly been led by men". Wilson said of Keeler: "I have great sympathy for Christine Keeler."

  The exhibition catalogue includes a contribution from Keeler's son, Seymour Platt.

  3115171819