Keeler, the face of infamous Sixties scandal, dies aged 75
Model at the centre of the Profumo affair whose name was forever associated with the scandal that rocked British politics in the 1960s
‘She earned her place in British history but at a huge personal price. We are all very proud of who she was’
CHRISTINE KEELER was one of the most recognisable figures of the Sixties, a beauty who undermined the Macmillan government amid the notorious Profumo affair, but she died this week in relative penury.
Her son announced the former model’s death at the age of 75 last night on social media, saying she had led an “eventful life” that earned her a place in history “but at a huge personal price”.
The Sixties scandal shook Westminster and eventually contributed to the downfall of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.
Then a young model and dancer, she played a central role in a tale of sex and spying that led to John Profumo, then war secretary, having to resign. Keeler’s liaisons with Profumo and Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet assistant naval attaché in London, had serious security implications. Profumo was forced to admit he had lied to the Commons when he denied any impropriety with Keeler.
Keeler was memorably photographed at the height of the scandal astride a chair, in an image that has become so recognisable that the piece of furniture is now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.
The announcement of her death came almost precisely 54 years since she was jailed for nine months for perjury over the scandal in 1963.
Since September she had been cared for in a nursing home in south London. She had suffered from emphysema for 15 years. She died at the Princess Royal University Hospital, near Farnborough, at about 11.30pm on Monday.
Seymour Platt, 46, her son, told The Daily Telegraph: “She was a very devoted mother, particularly when I was young. She didn’t want men in her life when she was bringing me up – she was so suspicious of men.
“She was always a larger than life character… I was always very proud of her. She had fiery relationships but I think in the end she preferred her own company to anyone else.” On social media he added: “She earned her place in British history but at a huge personal price. We are all very proud of who she was.”
CHRISTINE KEELER, who has died aged 75, became infamous for her brief affair with the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, which she conducted in 1961 while carrying on a relationship with a Soviet agent; bound up as it was with espionage and political intrigue, the “Profumo Affair” resulted in a political crisis and contributed to a climate of opinion that led ultimately to the downfall of the Macmillan government.
The scandal somehow defined a generation. When Philip Larkin wrote that “Sexual Intercourse began in 1963/ Between the Lady Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP”, it was to Christine Keeler and John Profumo that he was assumed to be referring. A devastating, leggy beauty, Christine Keeler became an icon of the times in her own right through a famous (and much parodied) Lewis Morley photograph in which she sits, naked and pouting, astride a Jacobson butterfly chair.
Although by all accounts, Christine Keeler slept with John Profumo no more than four or five times, the circumstances of their affair continued to dominate her life. “It’s been a misery for me, living with Christine Keeler,” she once complained. “Even a criminal has the right to a new life, but they made sure I did not have that. They just didn’t stop calling me a prostitute for ever and ever and ever and ever. I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really.”
Yet while she often complained of media harassment, at the same time she was determined to retain her monopoly on the story as the only person who “really knew” what had happened. Over the next four decades, in addition to vigorous exploitation of the media, she wrote, or rather had written for her, no fewer than four autobiographies, each one more sensational and fantastical than the last.
By her fourth book, The Truth at Last, My Story (2001: marketed as “the never before told true story”) the familiar and tawdry saga of lust, disgrace and cover-up had grown into an elaborate and totally unbelievable tale of international espionage which took in the Bay of Pigs, Anthony Blunt, Lord Astor and the Krays.
Christine Keeler’s books along with her earnings from Michael Caton-jones’s Scandal, a film about the Profumo affair made in 1989, kept her after a fashion, since apart from some charity work she never properly had a job. Yet her purpose in keeping the story alive was motivated by more than a desire for personal gain. Christine Keeler had to believe the Profumo affair was important because her fragile personality would never have coped with the realisation that she had wasted her life for a scandal that was fundamentally completely trivial.
Christine Keeler was born on February 22 1942 in a converted railway carriage on the edge of a gravel pit at Wraysbury, Buckinghamshire. In the absence of her real father, who was away in the Army, her mother took up with a man whom Christine was told to call “Dad”, and who, she later sometimes claimed, molested her.
Dark, slim and precociously beautiful from her early teens, Christine Keeler was soon aware of her effect on the opposite sex. When she was 15 or 16, she became pregnant by a boy she met locally. Sometimes she claimed to have aborted the foetus herself; at other times she claimed the baby was born naturally though prematurely and died later in hospital. Whatever the truth, she left home shortly afterwards, moving first to Slough and then to a flat in St John’s Wood with some reps she had met in a factory where she had worked.
Within a few months of arriving in London, she had been taken on by Murray’s Cabaret Club in Beak Street, Soho, to work as a topless showgirl and hostess. It was there, in 1959, that she met Stephen Ward, a society osteopath noted for introducing beautiful and available young women to his wealthy patients. Ward asked for her number and she eventually moved into his flat in Wimpole Mews, Bayswater.
Christine Keeler always claimed that her relationship with Ward was platonic; his role was mainly to procure lovers for her. Among other clients, he introduced her to Peter Rachman, the property racketeer, who kept her for a time in a flat he owned.
It was also through Ward that she met John Profumo. They met on Saturday June 8 1961 at Lord Astor’s house at Cliveden, where Ward was entertaining the Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov and Christine Keeler at a cottage he rented in the grounds.
Profumo first set eyes on Keeler when she emerged naked from Lord Astor’s swimming pool, her costume having been snatched off her by Ward. Although he was then accompanied by his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, Profumo was obviously fascinated by the 19-year-old Keeler and before he left Cliveden, asked Ward for her telephone number.
That Sunday, though, Christine Keeler went home with Yevgeny Ivanov, with whom she was being encouraged by Ward to have an affair. According to some theories, Ward was a minor gofer for MI5, supplying girls for intelligence operations, and saw the liaison as a way of discovering information about Ivanov’s activities.
In her later versions of her story, though, Christine Keeler presented Ward (who committed suicide in 1963, on the eve of his conviction for living off immoral earnings) as a Soviet spy, alleging he had conducted meetings with the likes of Anthony Blunt and Sir Roger Hollis (the Director General of MI5 once suspected though later exonerated of working for the Russians) in his consulting rooms.
According to Keeler, Ward’s espionage target was not his fellow Soviet agent, Ivanov, but Profumo. Ward’s aim, she claimed, was for her to find out from Profumo through “pillow talk” when nuclear warheads were being moved to Germany.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Christine Keeler soon added John Profumo to her lengthening list of conquests. Their affair lasted a few weeks before it was broken off by Profumo after he had apparently been warned by MI5 that she was also seeing Ivanov. When in 2001 in The Truth at Last, she claimed to have been made pregnant by Profumo and to have paid £25 to have an abortion, the allegation was generally ridiculed.
In 1962, rumours about their affair began to circulate at Westminster after Christine Keeler leaked the story to the press. The next March, Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his involvement with her, but by that time, the police had begun investigating Ward in connection with offences of living on immoral earnings, and the truth of the affair came out.
The scandal was devastating for the Conservative government, which was already suffering the consequences of having been in power for 12 years. Profumo was forced to resign; Lord Denning wrote a report on the matter in which he concluded that Profumo’s affair with a call girl had posed no threat to national security; The Times published a leader blaming the materialism of the Conservative government for the breakdown in public morals. The next year, the Macmillan government fell.
In her later accounts of the events of 1963, Christine Keeler portrayed herself as a woman victimised by an establishment which had closed ranks at a time when spies were embarrassing Britain in the eyes of its American allies. In 2001, she alleged that during his inquiry into the affair, Lord Denning had ignored her evidence of espionage and threatened her with prison in his attempt to present the Profumo case as a sexual scandal rather than as an espionage story. Conveniently, Lord Denning had died shortly before she made these allegations.
Meanwhile, in 1963 Christine Keeler had other problems to contend with. One of the lovers introduced to her by Ward was a West Indian café owner by the name of Lucky Gordon. In the course of police investigations into Ward, she had claimed that Gordon had assaulted her.
Gordon was convicted in 1963 and sentenced to three years imprisonment; but Christine Keeler later confessed on tape that she had helped the police to frame him. In December of that year she was tried for lying under oath, found guilty, and sentenced to nine months in prison. This, too, she came to see as part of the establishment plot against her: “I had to be got rid of,” she explained. “That’s why they put me in Holloway because I knew about the underwater cameras in the Channel.”
Life after the Profumo scandal was not kind to Christine Keeler. After she came out of prison she married twice, but both marriages were disastrous. Her first marriage, in 1965, to James Levermore, a builder, lasted 12 weeks. Her second, in 1971, to Anthony Platt, the director of a metal company, ended after 18 months when Platt fled abroad as his business crumbled, leaving her penniless.
She had sons by both marriages. Her eldest was brought up by Christine Keeler’s mother and as the two women were not on speaking terms, she lost touch with him. Her younger son she brought up herself, first in a caravan park in Wokingham, Berkshire, before moving back to London and he seems to have been the one bright spot in her life.
Christine Keeler’s first two ghosted autobiographies, written in 1968 and 1983 did not, by her account, yield much in the way of ready cash and by the late 1980s she had been reduced to living on social security in a run-down 11th floor council flat at World’s End, Chelsea. Care-worn and nervous, she had lost all interest in her looks and, seemingly, in life, her main occupations being chain smoking, watching television and writing complaining letters to the DSS.
In 1989, however, with the success of the film Scandal and her book of the same name, she relaunched herself on the world, bought herself a new £180,000 flat in Kensington, hired a public relations consultant and even had her own perfume, Scandal, marketed by the Sun newspaper. But the good times did not last and by the mid-1990s she was back on the dole. She tried to work in various jobs under an assumed name but none of them came to anything so she decided to sell her story yet again.
By the time The Truth at Last: My Story (written with Douglas Thompson) was serialised in the Mail on Sunday in 2001, the bizarre stories of sex, high living and international espionage had become so heavily embroidered that even the most credulous conspiracy theorist would have had difficulty believing them. She continued to portray herself as the chief victim of the Profumo affair, and in this at least, though not for the reasons she gave, she was probably right.
She is survived by her sons.
Christine Keeler, born February 22 1942, died December 4 2017