The original femme fatale who paid dearly
Following Christine Keeler’s death, Douglas Thompson – one of only a few people she trusted – lays bare a life besieged by scandal
AChristmas card will be missing this year – the one without tinsel embellishment, the envelope addressed in round and illformed handwriting, with no hint of the sender, a precaution to prevent the postman discovering who penned it. Inside, on the no-nonsense animal charity card, in the same childlike handwriting would be my name and that of my wife and daughter. It would be signed C M Sloane. That was what Christine Margaret Keeler, who history refused to let go, legally changed her name to – part of her lifetime of vain subterfuge to avoid attention. Yet she was an endless source of fascination, which has been renewed following her death this week aged 75.
As always, she would have hated the attention – she desperately tried, but could never escape, being Christine Keeler. Her affairs with John Profumo, then secretary of state for war, and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian military attaché, were blamed for bringing down Harold Macmillan’s government; for almost six decades she would shrink from view, bundling herself in a duffel coat, hood up, walking with her arms protectively around herself.
She tried to start a new life in a remote part of Wales where no one knew her, but she loathed it, trying again in the West Country, but always finding herself back in London. The world, she believed, was after her.
I was one of very few people to become close to Christine, having spent the last two decades of her life collaborating with her on two books and magazine articles after being introduced by a publisher who thought we would get on well – we did, and she became a family friend. When we met, she was already reclusive and living quietly in north London; a fiercely independent woman who could never shake her fear of others. It took years before she could trust me with her innermost thoughts – because everyone wanted something from her, a photograph, a quote, an endorsement. I even wrote a sex advice column for her for a BBC magazine, as part of their condition to give her version of the Profumo Affair, after she laughed: “You know more about it than I do.” But why write books if she was terrified of attention?
It was to tell her story. It was never about sex or sensationalism; she told me she couldn’t even clearly recall the sex with Profumo, astonishing given that the affair changed the course of history. Britain, socially, was never the same after Profumo, but Christine, like some cursed survivor, carried the burden of “the scandal”.
Catherine Coon, an artist she had met in the Sixties, recalled Christine as being “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen; she took your breath away. Every man who met her wanted her, and those who couldn’t wanted to punish her.”
Christine was 17 years old when she began work at Murray’s Nightclub in London and entered a world of predatory men (Profumo was 27 years her senior). She was haunted by the fallout that ensued, her eyes always full of sadness, as if she were living a penance and couldn’t permit herself a happy life.
“Is what she did really so awful?” Coon adds. “She was 19, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. [The men] knew what they were doing, and yet Profumo is now regarded as some kind of saint.”
Fair to the point of self-harm, her life’s work was to show how the Establishment had turned her existence, and that of so many around her, into a mess of innuendo, of secrets and lies. Secrets and Lies would become the title of our book together in 2001, which Christine felt able to update after Profumo’s death in 2006. It was no cash-in. In the hours after his passing at the age of 91, she was offered huge sums of money, enough to pay off many mortgages. She refused, saying it would not be “appropriate” as his family would be grieving. It was six years before we began the follow-up.
The laughs we had often concerned her driving – she’d aim her battered, second-hand whateverwas-the-cheapest-at-the-moment at Hyde Park Corner and hope for the best. That she would roll a cigarette at the same time was somewhat disconcerting. When she came to our farmhouse to film a documentary, she sat at the kitchen table making her cigarettes – I finally helped get her to stop smoking, but by then the emphysema was as much a deterrent as nagging. And she would never stay the night in any of the spare rooms: she had to get back to London and her beloved stray cat.
At times, when her story would make the headlines again, she’d cut off contact, working herself up and wrongly believing I’d betrayed our trust. Then, always at the dentist or in the middle of something, she’d be back on the phone as if we’d been talking a moment earlier. She’d regularly call on a Sunday afternoon and call back again to talk about politics or some story in the weekend newspapers.
She was interested in everything, trying to escape herself, but never could for, no matter what, we’d always return to what had brought us together in the first place. Still, her trust could be obtained by very, very few – I think she changed her telephone number 27 times while I knew her and, later, her email switched from one account to another. At her home in Kent, where she spent her final years, she had a tiny kitchen where she made me lunch. I had to have three courses and she stood over me as I ate. The cat took over the place, and Christine’s television had to be moved to allow him a comfortable spot to view it from. Christine Keeler, the sex
‘As a sexual scalp, I was a trophy to boast about, not take home to Mummy’
bomb, was by then living the life of a spinster. Men, an item she was notorious for indulging in, were all but taboo, as she told me: “I wanted people close around me, close to me. The problem was what attracted these men. They wanted me, wanted Christine Keeler. They didn’t want to be involved with me in a romantic relationship. As a sexual scalp, I was a trophy to boast to the boys about, not take home to Mummy.”
For Christine, life was a wheel of ill-fortune, spinning endlessly. Jeremy Hutchinson, Baron Hutchinson of Lullington QC, the late barrister who once represented Christine in her 1963 perjury trial that followed the scandal, described her voice as holding “no emotion, tired, defeated”.
But I found the opposite in the final years of her life. She was defiant, adamant that the Establishment wouldn’t get away with the trouble they had brought down on her. Things, seemingly irrelevant, became of major importance to her. Yet, by then she had no vanity – it was if she felt her looks had been the cause of it all. Her weight ballooned due to emphysema medication, but she would just buy a bigger anorak from Marks & Spencer.
Sometimes, I think she had a guilty conscience, scarred and angry about it all. On a re-screened television interview she repeats three times that she wasn’t “bitter”. But she was, and entitled to be. It was what others did that set Christine Keeler’s life on such an astonishing trajectory, yet she never gave up. I count her among the most honest people I’ve met. She believed her truth, and stuck with it to the very end.
Secrets and Lies by Christine Keeler with Douglas Thompson is published by John Blake (£7.99). To order for £6.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk