Keeler greeted latest TV drama ‘with resignation’
A new BBC drama shows the real victim of the Profumo Affair, says Keeler’s biographer and friend Douglas Thompson
Christine Keeler is said to have reacted to hearing of another TV drama about her part in the 1963 political scandal by saying: “Oh, not another bloody thing about the Profumo affair!”
Her lawyer was in contact with the makers of The Trial of Christine Keeler, which starts tomorrow on BBC One, before her death at 75 in 2017.
Amanda Coe, the series’ writer, told the Radio Times: “I think her attitude was resignation. ‘Oh, not another bloody thing about the Profumo affair!’ She didn’t want to be seen as a victim, which we took as our mantra.”
Philip Larkin famously maintained that sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was rather late for Christine Keeler. Her close encounters with Britain’s minister of war began in the summer of 1961, but it was two years before the Profumo Affair went public and enthralled the nation.
Now it is set to do so again, with six-part BBC drama The Trial of
Christine Keeler, in which my late friend is played by Sophie Cookson.
I knew the real Christine for more than 25 years, having spent the past two decades of her life collaborating with her on two books. We were introduced by a publisher who thought we would get on – we did, and she became a close family friend until her death in 2017, aged 75.
Over the years, I have spoken to several actresses who have played her: Joanne Whalley (in the 1989 film
Scandal), Alice Coulthard and Sarah Armstrong (in the play Keeler in 2011 and 2013) and Charlotte Spencer in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2013 West End production, Stephen Ward.
They all tackled Christine well, but the truth of how a teenager’s sex life brought about the collapse of Harold Macmillan’s government has eluded dramatisations of her story, until now. Six hours of television certainly helps and Cookson has the advantage of looking very like Christine; at times she is the spitting image of the previously unseen 1962 passport photo published here. The biggest compliment is that Christine would have approved of this Christine Keeler – as much for the accuracy and attitude as for Cookson herself. She “gets” the spirit of a girl who found herself captive and captivating in a world without Metoo, when powerful middle-aged men hitting on young women was, like smoking, not flagged with a health warning.
Portrayals of Christine have, for too long, failed to understand this, and the unfolding sequence of events and powerful people that overwhelmed this socially naive young woman from a humble and difficult background.
Christine was 17 when she began working as a showgirl at Murray’s nightclub in London and entered a world of wolfish men; meeting and moving in with society osteopath Stephen Ward, who was noted for introducing beautiful young women to wealthy patients. Two years later, she had the affair with John Profumo, and sex with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian military attaché, resulting in a political crisis after Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his involvement with her. When it went public, a sinister metamorphosis overtook those once enchanted by Christine; she spent her lifetime taking the blame.
She often talked of herself in the
Portrayals of her have always failed to understand this socially naive girl
third person, as if in a past life. “It’s been a misery for me, living with Christine Keeler,” she once said. “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 forever… I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really.”
In this new drama, the focus is on Christine as a victim of the hypocrisy of the Establishment who wanted to have their frolics, then sweep them under the bed. She would have liked that and it’s sad that she’s not here to see her story finally told with empathy.
Cookson is intense but calm, just like Christine, as she tries not to get engulfed by the scandal. There were rarely theatricals. Yet, the series acknowledges that her impulsiveness could cause problems; I was talking to her son, Seymour Platt, – from the second of her two brief marriages – the other day, and we agreed she could be a wrecking ball. Not for nothing has Cookson described Christine as “wilful, vibrant, irrational, petulant and yet totally lovable”.
Christine would have recognised Cookson’s portrayal: the strong stare, the don’t-mess-with-me attitude, the walk that knows many eyes are following. Weighing up her thoughts as she fingers a stray lock of hair. On screen, her glossy Sixties mane is brushed back with a shake of the head and Christine never lost that habit.
I once asked about the power and curse of her beauty and she was sharp with me: “I’m not proud of how I looked. It’s who I was and what I felt that mattered, but no one ever mentioned that.”
There is one scene in the second episode when Cookson, wrapped in a sheepskin coat and sitting in a car, dips her head to light a cigarette. It sent chills down my spine; I could have been in the passenger seat with the real Christine. Cookson lights up and there’s that familiar throaty chuckle. The cigarettes were a constant prop for Christine, until a combination of emphysema and my nagging finally made her stop. She used them like a classroom pointer. As we worked on her book, she was like a teacher, telling her story to me.
She had a phenomenal mind for detail. There would be the jawdropping mentions of famous names and their surprising peccadilloes, from bullwhips to feather dusters: we see Cookson tiptoeing through a room of naked entangled bodies in the opening episodes, which is much as Christine described it to me.
We also see the men who haunted her life. Profumo (played by Ben Miles) is on heat. A man who wants to be prime minister embarrassingly frothing over someone 27 years his junior. She once told me she couldn’t clearly recall the sex with him – astonishing for an affair that changed the course of history. There is Peter Rachman, the property racketeer. Then there’s musician “Lucky” Gordon, with whom Christine had a fearful relationship during which he raped her at knifepoint. He was convicted of another assault on her, but that was overturned and Christine, tricked by police into giving false evidence, was sent to Holloway for six months for perjury. Platt says his mother should never have been convicted, and the TV series argues this, too.
Christine encountered them all through Ward, who was her protector and tormentor. It was he who introduced her to Profumo and Ivanov. For that, he has long been seen as the Establishment’s “fall guy” – ending up in court charged with living off immoral earnings, deserted by his society friends and taking a fatal overdose of sleeping pills on the eve of the verdict, which was almost certain to be guilty. The BBC drama has been described as a rehabilitation for him. But really it is Christine’s story. It’s her day in court.
That perjury conviction was like a noose around her neck and the start of the circus she spent her life trying to escape. For six decades, she tried to shrink from view. She attempted to start a new life in Wales and the West Country but hated it, coming back to London. She would never even spend the night in our spare room, fleeing back to her flat and beloved stray cat. The world, she thought, was after her.
It’s why she changed her name, signing her Christmas cards to me “CM Sloane” and giving no hint of the sender on the envelope, lest the postman discover who had sent it.
We might have moved on, but my friend Christine never could.