The knife wielding thug who raped Christine Keeler – and triggered the Profumo Affair
As a pivotal figure in the Sixties scandal dies at 85 ...
S HouLD any one face be said to exemplify the more sinister underworld of the Swinging Sixties, it was that of Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, who has died at the age of 85.
Lucky, who I ran into often during my misspent youth in some of the seedier dives of London’s Soho and Notting Hill Gate, allegedly got his nickname because on the day he was born in Kingston, Jamaica — July 5, 1931 — his parents won a lottery prize.
He liked to describe himself as a blues singer and cosied up to me when he discovered that I lived next door to Mick Jagger. In reality he was a small-time drug pusher with a long history of violence, assault and rape at knifepoint.
Small and slight with a charming smile, he didn’t look in the least like a dangerous thug. But the facade hid a volcanic temper and a paranoid insecurity arising from his belief that people looked down on him because he was black.
In the words of Christine Keeler, whose relationship with him led to the greatest political scandal of the 20th century: ‘He had no control. He could go berserk in a moment for any little reason. He liked to dress in black: leather jacket, a roll-neck jumper and beret.
‘It was a menacing uniform that matched his background: a long list of arrests and convictions for assault and battery. Lucky was a bad man.’
He left Jamaica in 1948, aged 17, and came to Britain. He soon had a police record for assault and shop-breaking.
It was in the fateful year of 1962 that Lucky met the strikingly beautiful 19year-old cabaret dancer Christine Keeler, who was living under the protection of the society osteopath Dr Stephen Ward.
Largely to enhance his own social and political connections, Ward had introduced Christine in July 1961 to the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and the senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy, Captain Eugene Ivanov, who was a KGB agent.
The situation was a political powder keg because Keeler was sharing her favours with both men.
But how did Lucky Gordon fit into all of this? Ward took a writer friend, Lord de Laszlo, to the El Rio Cafe in Notting Hill Gate to impress him with his alleged knowledge of the West Indian drug scene in London.
Keeler later said of this place: ‘It was a dive, an extraordinary example of just how squalid a place could be.’
There she met 31-year-old Lucky, from whom, on Ward’s instructions, she bought drugs outside the toilets for ten shillings.
Of THIS fateful encounter, Keeler later said: ‘It was that silly little moment when the foundations of the tragedy that was to follow were laid.
‘Stephen, in his search for kicks and information, his determination to impress his friends, was the architect of his own downfall.’
Lucky instantly had the hots for Keeler and tried to persuade her to go home with him.
She pointed out that Ward and de Laszlo were waiting for her in the car outside, so he let her go, but began bombarding her with calls and invitations.
In the end, she unwisely met him at a cafe in Notting Hill’s Westbourne Park Road where, allegedly, he wanted her to look at some jewellery he had stolen.
Even more unwisely, she agreed to go to his flat to look at the jewellery, and found herself forced into his bedroom with Lucky standing against the closed door with a knife in his hand.
He flicked open the knife, held it at her throat and made her strip. forcing her back on the bed, with the knife still in one hand, he raped her and then imprisoned her naked for 24 hours during which he continued to rape her at knifepoint.
Insisting that Ward would call the police if she did not return home, she persuaded Lucky to let her leave, but his campaign of violence against her continued.
Soon afterwards, he threatened her with an axe, dragging her to the bedroom.
‘I’ll kill you this time! Kill, kill, kill!’ he screamed, waving the axe round his head. ‘Get your clothes off.’
He hurled the axe at Keeler, narrowly missing her head. He kept her naked and imprisoned for two days, raping and beating her, and wielding the axe.
‘He never let up punching and slapping me until I was bruised and covered in fiery red sores,’ she recalled later.
When at last he went out to buy food and cigarettes, Keeler called the police.
Lucky was charged with grievous bodily harm and sentenced to three years. His brother pleaded with Keeler to change her story and, to the fury of the police, Lucky was released on appeal.
In the meantime, Keeler had taken up with another handsome, drug-addicted black lover, Johnny Edgecombe, born in Antigua.
The two men came face to face at Soho’s flamingo Club. There was a fight, tables were overturned and Edgecombe slashed Lucky’s face with a knife, causing a wound that needed 17 stitches.
Lucky went to the police, but Edgecombe fled with Keeler to Brentford, West London.
Meanwhile, Lucky sent the 17 stitches from his face wound to Ward’s home in Wimpole Mews, Marylebone, promising Keeler she would get two stitches for every one of his.
KEELER left Edgecombe, believing he had taken up with another woman, and later explained: ‘I had gone from one maniac to another.’
The political powder keg, so long smouldering, finally exploded on December 14, 1962, when Edgecombe, armed with a Luger pistol, turned up at Wimpole Mews while Keeler and her friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, were in the house.
They refused to let him in, but both came to the upstairs window. Keeler threw down a £1 note, supposedly to pay for the taxi Edgecombe had kept waiting.
After trying to kick in the front door, Edgecombe fired five shots at the lock and a further shot into the wall of the house. The police were called and Edgecombe was taken into custody pending a trial at which he was sent to prison for seven years.
When Keeler failed to appear as a witness, the media — already flooded with rumours about her association with Profumo and Ivanov — jumped to the conclusion that someone influential had paid to have her taken abroad.
The rumours grew. And on March 22, 1963, Profumo — allegedly after his film star wife Valerie Hobson had threatened to leave him if he was guilty of infidelity — made a statement in the House to try to end the gossip: ‘There has been no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintance with Miss Keeler.’
The lie put an end to Profumo’s political career.
Two months later, he was forced to admit his statement was untrue and he resigned as a minister and an MP.
In July 1963, Stephen Ward, charged with living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, died after taking an overdose.
The official inquiry into the scandal, conducted by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, helped to bring about the downfall of the Tory Party in the 1964 election, ushering in the Labour government of Harold Wilson.
The fallout continued to haunt Lucky Gordon, even in the obscurity of middle age, when he worked as a driver, gofer and part-time cook for a recording company.
He was portrayed by Leon Herbert in the 1989 film, Scandal, and Ricardo Coke-Thomas in one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rare flops, Stephen Ward: The Musical, which closed in 2014 after only three months.
Lucky did not welcome his notoriety. ‘We were all victims of the scandal,’ he said shortly before his death. ‘I wish the whole affair had never happened . . . It ruined my life at times . . . If I met up with Christine Keeler in the road, I would possibly strangle her.’