From Keeler to #metoo EYE CULTURE
The name of Christine Keeler, who died earlier this week at age 75, is unlikely to resonate with women in the thick of the #metoo campaign around the world and especially in the US where politicians, journalists and movie moguls are paying the price for decades of entrenched bigotry. They should spare a thought for a woman who, at just 19 years, played a leading role in the Profumo Scandal, which eventually brought down Harold Macmillan’s government in 1963.
Notoriety has stalked the strikingly beautiful Keeler ever since. A black and white photo of her modelling nude against a chairback is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the compelling symbols of a promiscuous era that followed the straitlaced 1950s — you know, Carnaby Street, Flower Power, Peace, LSD and all that. The famous Danish-made chair on which she modelled is also on display and is occasionally lent to other museums. Movies were made of the scandal pruriently focusing on Keeler’s lifestyle. One 1989 version baldly titled Scandal almost acquired an X rating.
The kinder obituaries describe Keeler as a model and exotic dancer. In fact, she was also a call girl, a profession she openly acknowledged. The source of her fame was to have provided sexual services to John Profumo, then secretary of state for war in Macmillan’s government, a rising Conservative Party star and a married man.
These facts, even in London at the start of the Swinging Sixties, were sensational in themselves. They emerged, as these things often do, from a common case of affray involving Keeler and her boyfriend at the time. In an attempt to salvage his career Profumo told the House of Commons that there had been no impropriety in his relationship (does “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” ring any bell?).
Unlike Alabama politician Roy Moore, sex with a teenaged girl was the least of the middle-aged Profumo’s problems. He had lied to Parliament and the fib turned out to be far more serious than Bill Clinton’s whopper to Congress three decades later. In developments that still put plots by every best-selling novelist in the shade, evidence soon emerged that Keeler had also slept with the Soviet attache in London.
Suddenly, pillow talk, state secrets, MI5 and security risks at the height of the Cold War came into play.
Profumo resigned but not before a sensational court case exposed in the crudest terms possible the British upper class male establishment’s rampant indulgence in all manner of sexual shenanigans. Keeler, it turned out, had met Profumo at the country retreat of another Conservative politician, Viscount Astor, who was sleeping with Keeler’s good friend Mandy Rice-Davies. (Rice-Davies earned her own fame in this scandal for capturing the hypocrisy of the times. Told that Astor had denied sleeping with her she sardonically replied: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”)
The link between Keeler, Profumo, the Soviet attache, Astor and Rice-Davies was Stephen Ward, a society doctor who was also a pimp for Keeler, Rice-Davies and several other women. In the welter of tawdry revelations, Ward, who was accused of living off “immoral earnings”, committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Musical director Andrew Lloyd Weber was one of the rare artistes to make Ward the protagonist of his musical on the scandal.
As the reverberations from the court case died down, Profumo stepped into the shadows. In the time-honoured practice, his wife, an actor, stood by him and he was given charitable obituaries when he died in 2006. There are, however, no museum displays of him or his “pucca” cronies and their duplicities.
The point about Keeler was that she refused to play the victim. In her memoir, she defiantly insisted she had enjoyed every minute of her “party girl” life. But her attempt to shape her story failed signally under the weight of social prejudice. By her own admission, she got along by “surviving” after the scandal. Like Monica Lewinsky 32 years later, she never managed to divest herself of the label of the Temptress turned Fallen Woman. In the court of public opinion, Profumo was the hapless dupe. This much is evident in her son’s defensive statement after her death: “She earned her place in history but at a huge personal price. We are all very proud of who she was.”
Keeler’s career as a topless dancer and call girl may well have been the lifestyle choice she insists it was in her memoirs. From a 21st century lens, it is possible to wonder whether her career choice was dictated by the innate sexism of those years. Contrary to her femme fatale public persona, Keeler’s backstory was one of serial wretchedness: Born poor, abandoned by her father, stalked by her stepfather, undernourished, barely educated, she jumped from one babysitting job to another as fathers attempted to assault her. Once raped by a client, she was forced to retract her accusations and spent 18 months in prison for perjury.
Keeler’s decision to live off predatory men may appear unscrupulous, but it is worth remembering the limited career choices for even educated women half a century ago. Sexual harassment in the workplace was an unknown concept. Keeler, like most women of her time, took male chauvinism as they found it.
#metoo would never have been her style. But the campaign owes something to the audacious precedent she set and her son's acknowledgement of it.