I helped Profumo ‘pimp’ kill himself
It’s the twist to the scandal of the century: how a future Labour MP – then just 15 – was sent to pick up Stephen Ward’s suicide pills. Here he gives his verdict on the society fixer who inspired BBC’s hit drama
WHEN Stephen Ward was standing trial at the Old Bailey in 1963 on a charge of living off the proceeds of prostitution, I was 15 years old and acting as his gopher. One of my jobs was to whistle up a taxi at the end of each day’s proceedings.
The trick was to time its arrival so that Stephen, the society osteopath who had shared a flat with Christine Keeler at the time of her affair with War Minister John Profumo, could step from the door of the court straight into the back of the cab.
On the last day of the trial, as we rode back to his borrowed flat in Chelsea, I could tell he was deeply depressed. Before the judge began his brutal summing up, Stephen had been cheerful and chatty. But that had changed and he was now fearful of the jury’s verdict.
He scribbled a prescription on his knee — as an osteopath he could prescribe privately — and asked me to run into the Harrods pharmacy for it.
I came out with a bottle of Nembutal pills, a form of barbiturate then popular with people who suffered from insomnia. What I didn’t know then was that high doses could cause respiratory arrest, and that it was even used to carry out executions in some u.S. states.
Hours later, Stephen used the pills I picked up for him to take his own life. When I heard the news, I was horrified at the thought that I had been instrumental in his suicide.
The guilt haunts me still, even though I know I was just the delivery boy.
To be shunned by society — he had treated Prince Philip and Churchill and had a host of aristocratic and celebrity friends — had hurt him deeply. I think he could have faced prison, but not the obliteration of his reputation.
These memories have come rushing back in recent weeks, thanks to BBC One’s superb six-part drama The Trial Of Christine Keeler, on Sunday evenings — though the truth is that I’ve never forgotten a minute of those experiences.
How could I? I may have been barely aware of the significance of it all at the time, but now I look back and realise history was happening all around me.
The nation was gripped by the revelation that the Secretary of State for War, 46-yearold John Profumo, had had an extramarital affair with Keeler, a 19-year-old girl who had once worked as a dancer in a seedy Soho nightclub, and Ward was the man who had introduced them.
To make matters worse, Profumo was romancing Keeler at a time when she was also allegedly sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy.
It all added up to the scandal of the decade, with allegations of spying, orgies, black magic rituals and much, much more.
Profumo resigned, the Russian went back to Moscow — and Stephen Ward was put on trial by an unforgiving Establishment for being the pimp of Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies.
My own involvement in the Profumo Affair came about via my father, Pelham Pound, who was Stephen’s literary agent.
Dad had been features editor at the News Of The World — exactly the sort of well-connected person Ward liked to court. But, rather to my mother’s alarm, Dad had chucked in the steady office job to go freelance and Ward had become one of his clients.
Like any good agent, my father saw it as his job to protect his clients when they hit a rough patch, so when the Profumo business was at its height and London was too hot for Ward, he came to stay at our home in Hertfordshire.
As Stephen’s arrival coincided with the school holidays, I was around to run all sorts of errands. At the time, I was a pupil at an all-boys grammar school and my experience of girls was practically non-existent.
I remember Ward as the coolest man I’d ever known. He wore RayBan sunglasses, and I couldn’t believe anyone outside Hollywood could do that and carry it off.
He may have been the son of a Torquay vicar but he had a clipped, upper-class accent and people said he’d had ‘ a good war’, serving as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India, where (he liked to claim) one of his patients was Mahatma Gandhi.
He told stories of his years working as an osteopath in America, too, with an offhand air that made him seem so cosmopolitan. To me, he had the effortless charm of Cary Grant.
Many men in his position would not have noticed the teenage son of a friend, let alone treated him with respect. Yet Ward seemed to go further — he let me in on the secret and, every now and then, when he was talking, he’d give me a twinkling sidelong look, as if to say: ‘Isn’t this a great joke? How do I get away with it?’
BUT once the Profumo affair broke, there was nothing Dad could do to save Ward from the wrath of the Establishment and one day, in June 1963, policemen knocked on our door on a mission to arrest him.
While he had once been a soughtafter osteopath, with an illustrious list of clients that included Elizabeth Taylor, all that business had dried up since the Profumo Affair hit the headlines.
So my father stood bail for Stephen, taking a bank loan to cover the cost. His money was later returned but he was still paying off interest on the loan years later.
Ward also needed cash to fund his defence. Lawyers were expensive and he had no savings.
Fortunately, Ward was a wonderful artist, often working in chalk on paper to create portraits with extraordinary deftness and economy of line. Many of his famous clients sat for him, including royals such as Prince Philip; Princess Margaret and her then husband Lord Snowdon; Katharine, Duchess of Kent; and
Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood, the only daughter of George V.
Other sitters included the Hollywood actor and producer Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who was dragged into the scandal when Mandy Rice-Davies claimed he had been one of her lovers when she took the witness stand during Ward’s trial. Mandy herself was another of his subjects — sometimes nude — as was Christine Keeler.
News of Ward’s talent even reached the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who gave him unique permission to draw MPs in session in the House of Commons. And I have a sketch he made of my father, which I treasure to this day.
Most of his pictures had been drawn with no thought of selling them. But now he needed money, and quickly.
He arranged with a man called Bobby Katz to stage an exhibition of his work. Katz was revolting, a pornographic book-seller with truly unpleasant habits, but Ward could no longer afford to be choosy about his friends. Most people who pretended to respectability had abandoned him: my father was one of the few who were loyal.
KATZ arranged for the drawings to go on show at a gallery in Museum Street, opposite the British Museum. To be shown, the drawings had to be signed, and it was my job each day to go over to Bloomsbury and collect a sheaf of pictures from the repulsive Katz.
Then I went to the Old Bailey, where chief defence lawyer James Burge would accompany me down to the cells where Ward was kept during the lunchtime recess. He would sign each one and I’d rush back to Museum Street in a taxi.
The plan was for the pictures to go on display and, with luck, be sold piecemeal to collectors and curious members of the public. In the event, however, a gentleman in a raincoat, who was introduced as someone ‘from the Royal Household’, asked to see the drawings in a back room. They were bought for cash, and there was no exhibition.
It seemed Ward still had at least one friend in a high place, even if they were obliged to remain anonymous. That, or someone at the Palace didn’t want any art on the market that linked the royals to such a controversial figure.
This is the line taken by The Crown, Netflix’s blockbuster series about the Royal Family. In the first episode of season three, when Prince Philip tries to castigate Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a defrocked Soviet spy, for betraying his country, Blunt turns the tables on Philip by threatening to release evidence of his connection to the Profumo Affair.
The implication is that it was Blunt who had arranged for the drawings to be bought, to protect the reputations of the royals.
During the trial, one of my jobs was to sit in an Italian cafe opposite the Old Bailey and fetch espressos for Christine, Mandy and a group of other girls. The coffee was served in glass cups and saucers, the fashion at the time. I thought this was terribly sophisticated.
Christine Keeler was heartstoppingly gorgeous. With her flawless profile and wide-open eyes brimming with naivety and mischief, she was an absolutely staggering beauty at the time.
Christine and the girls knew the effect they were having on me, of course, and teased me remorselessly. ‘How much pocket money do you get, then?’ one asked, and I went white, thinking I was being propositioned. It was all I could do to stop myself ‘ goldfishing’ — staring with my mouth agape.
Ward asked me once what I thought of Christine. ‘God,’ I burst out, ‘she’s so beautiful.’
He nodded and pulled a wry face. ‘Isn’t she?’ he agreed. ‘ But I don’t
think she understands how beautiful she really is.’
Looking back, I can see he was right. She always seemed convinced she would end up on the losing side. I think she even considered that I, with my ordinary middle- class background and accent, had been dealt a far superior hand by fate.
‘I was born in Wraysbury,’ she once complained to me, ‘ and brought up near Staines. What f*****g chance did I have?’
To see actress Sophie Cookson’s portrayal is fascinating. TV can never replicate the electric effect such a sexually attractive woman as Christine has on the air around her, but the screenplay is right to stress the toxic relationship between her and her mother, Julie Payne (played by Amanda Drew).
Even to a 15-year- old, it was obvious that Ward had been thrown to the wolves. The girls in the cafe certainly viewed him as a scapegoat. They could do nothing to help him — indeed, one of them,
Ronna Ricardo, was a witness for the prosecution. The police gave her no option: if she failed to testify, they said, her little sister would be taken into care.
Part of the reason the affair is still shrouded in controversy more than 50 years later is that two key sources of information that could help clear up lingering questions are still under wraps.
The judge ordered that the transcript of Ward’s trial be sealed for 90 years, and the tr transcripts of the interviews ca carried out by Lord Denning in the course of his 1963 Pr Profumo inquiry are to remain co confidential until 2048. S Stephen was in a coma for thr three days after taking his overdose dos and, as he lay dying, the jud judge — Sir Archie Marshall — insi insisted that the jury return a ver verdict. They found him guilty of l living off the immoral earnings ings of Keeler and Rice-Davies but I don’t believe he was a pim pimp. I think he was just a man who loved the company of beau beautiful women. He sent several suicide notes, one of f them to my father. ‘If there’s any money left,’ he said, ‘make sure it goes to the girls.’ The note was handed to the police, I believe, and we didn’t get it back. A photocopy turned up, however, in one of Christine Keeler’s books. There are two curious codas to this story. In the mid-Eighties, I was a housing officer in Hammersmith and one day I went out to a West Kensington estate to talk to a council tenant who was about to move to Brighton. She was Christine Keeler, now 25 years older and looking very drawn, tired and thin. The devastating beauty of her youth was gone, but her conviction that she was born to lose had not. She chain-smoked without pause during our interview.
I didn’t tell her who I was. I wanted to, but I bottled it.
My memory of her was always fresh, however, and, when in 2001 she published her autobiography, The Truth At Last, I read it eagerly. To my amazement, I discovered she remembered me too. ‘I always wondered what happened to Stephen Pound,’ she wrote. ‘It turns out he’s a New Labour MP!’
My decision to go into politics was, in no small part, down to the way she and Stephen were treated.
People talk as if the ‘powers that be’ are something vague and vaporous but I realised that summer they are real. That was the beginning of my interest in Left-wing politics, and it put me on the path to becoming an MP.