An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (22 page)

Ten years after these tense, repressive, joyless ebullitions from the Home Office, so clearly intended to spread guilt and misery, Marjorie Proops was being jubilantly uninhibited in publications that were neither dull nor expensive. As the agony aunt employed by
Mirror
newspapers, she assumed that newly married women would already be sexually experienced, that they could discuss their sex lives, and state their needs – although in the early 1960s sex in bed was still reserved for the married. ‘He started kissing me,’ a young woman said in 1962. ‘He asked if I would like to go to bed with him and I said: “Only married people do that.” When he asked if I wanted intercourse I told him only engaged couples did it.’
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Easter brides of 1963 were regaled with Marje Proops’s advice. ‘Most girls have had some kind of sex experience before marriage,’ she wrote, but in the back seats of cars, dark doorways or ‘swiftly, in the parlour, when THEY’VE gone to bed, with ears fearfully strained in case one of them comes down. The quick fumblings in a not-very-private corner at a crowded party, or the rapid assaults on each other in the back of a Mini Minor, do not add up to the kind of sex you will share after the wedding, when you will be alone and in bed together for the first time.’ Once a couple had a marital bed, Proops hoped they would discover that ‘sex is an art and not a fumble’. Because ‘sex before the wedding is almost always shadowed by fear of pregnancy, guilt, terror of being found out’, it was often anxious, inhibited and flat. ‘Sex after the wedding is very different as you Easter Brides are about to discover. Lucky you!’ She urged brides to ‘tell him what you need and ask him about his needs … you’ll discover the art of sex by experiment, learning as you go. And if you are a bit slow on the uptake – or he is – buy a book.’ Proops insisted that sex was not a dangerous instinct to be repressed but a pleasure to be mastered. ‘Take the myth, so often propounded by those who have very little of it, that sex isn’t everything,’ she wrote in 1963, midway between the Profumo resignation and the Ward trial. Prudes who asserted that sex was unimportant ‘can’t possibly have heard of Freud, who maintained it was the impulse behind everything we do, say, think, feel, dream. Without it (or without the best of it) life is arid, boring, wearying, unenticing, uneventful, uninspiring. With it (or the best of it) life is rewarding, exciting, moving, amusing, exhilarating and splendid.’
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Proops’s cheery outlook was not in evidence when, in November 1962, the Italian proprietors of the Milan, a basement café in St Anne’s Court, Soho, with a secluded corner nicknamed ‘the Grotto’, were prosecuted for permitting disorderly conduct. The police evidence had the tut-tutting prurience that the
News of the World
relished. Police Constable Thomas Jones testified that in one corner ‘two couples were kissing and embracing. In each case the girl was sitting on the man’s lap. One man said something to his girl who replied: “Well, you’re not getting it here”.’ Jones had watched a beatnik girl dancing with a man near the jukebox. ‘The girl was wearing a low-cut blouse and the man put his fingers under her bra at the back and pulled it … Then there was a couple known as David and Ann. As they danced David stroked the girl’s neck and nibbled her ear.’ Sexy backchat, teasing play with bra straps, nibbled ears – all this constituted disorderly conduct, or what the Marylebone magistrate John Phipps denounced as ‘revolting behaviour’.
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Where should Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies be located in this terrain? Somewhere in the hinterland between Pamela Green, Diana Dors and Sabrina, whose ‘sex appeal’ brought fame and fugitive prosperity, and those young women from the industrial provinces who felt they had nothing to offer but sexual relief for the men who found them in the London streets. If Mandy Rice-Davies resembled one of Proops’s modern women, who found that life without sex was arid, Christine Keeler resembled Christine Holford: chaotic, lurching from one escapade to another, sexy-looking but not always enjoying sex; improvising moves, and ill-starred.

Christine Keeler was born in 1942. Her father, Colin, was adopted and took the surname of Keeler from his adoptive family. He married a seventeen-year-old girl from West Ham, Julia Payne, in 1941, but soon deserted his home, and changed surnames again. After a divorce in 1949, he worked as a photographer at Butlin’s holiday camp at Clacton. Keeler acquired a quasi-stepfather, Edward Huish, whom she was told to call ‘Dad’, although her mother did not marry him until 1976. The trio went to live in two converted railway carriages a few yards from the Thames riverbank at Hythe End Road, Wraysbury, a dingy backwater between Staines and Windsor where people lived in bungalows, shacks and caravans surrounded by gravel pits and grime. The carriages had neither running hot water nor electricity until the mid-1950s. There was no privacy: the child soon learnt the sounds and sights of her mother’s sex life. At the age of nine she was sent to a holiday home at Littlehampton after the school health inspector judged her to be malnourished. She was bicycle-mad, tinkered with cars, built a go-cart, climbed trees, threw the javelin. Aged twelve she started a paper-round (earning fourteen shillings a week). This dim, larval phase of her life ended with puberty. As a baby-sitting teenager the fathers would try to catch her alone, to kiss, fondle or rub against her, which she loathed. After an overture from her stepfather, she kept a small knife under her pillow at night. He was jealous and aggressive when she acquired boyfriends.

At the age of fifteen, in 1957, Keeler got a job stock-taking in a London gown showroom. She tried modelling there, but the manager kept cornering her for a sexual tussle, so she left. Next she worked as a waitress in a Greek restaurant. She had some modelling pictures taken by a photographer in his studio: ‘I was quite frightened of him because he was queer and I had never met one before.’
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A photograph of her was printed in
Tit-bits
magazine in 1958. In addition to Wraysbury youths, she was involved with a Ghanian cleaner at the gown showroom, and a black American airman from an encampment at Staines. At the age of seventeen, after gruesome attempts to induce an abortion, she gave premature birth, in April 1959, to a son, Peter, who died six days later in a Windsor hospital. The episode must have been fearsome, lonely and numbing. She left the Wraysbury gravel-pit carriages shortly afterwards.

Newspapers and magazines became obsessed with modelling during the 1950s. ‘If a scandal or divorce is reported, more often than not a model seems to be involved,’ Dior’s muse Jean Dawnay observed in 1956. ‘Most of the girls mentioned just call themselves models for want of a better name. The fact that they have done one photograph at some time makes them a model in their own eyes.’ Keeler lacked the discipline and perseverance for haute couture modelling: she was too quickly bored. ‘There comes a day,’ Dawnay wrote of the genuine model, ‘usually after about five years, when she is sick to death of everything connected with fashion and would like to go round in a pudding cloth. She is fed up with the continual round of posing with vacuous expressions or artificial smiles, the endless making-up and hair-doing, the tiring fittings, the tedious showing to a continual sea of anonymous faces, the empty, empty words about new lines, cuts, colours.’ It would have taken three days, not five years, for this life to pall for Keeler. ‘In an age when time is all-important,’ Dawnay thought, ‘everyone seems to be looking for shortcuts in life and getting something for nothing with the least effort involved.’ Keeler and Rice-Davies became quintessential short-cut, low-effort girls.
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At school Keeler acquired the nickname ‘Sabrina’ once her breasts developed: she aspired, perhaps, to be a Sabrina who did not have to work. Like other ‘models’, she found a job in a nightclub, where her haziness suited the amorphous clientele who hoped to smudge their nights and blot out memories of their days. Anthony Powell wrote in 1957 of ‘that anonymous, indistinct race of nightclub frequenters, as undifferentiated and lacking in individuality as the congregation at a funeral’.
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Nightclubs were also high roads into big money for their owners. As a boy of sixteen, Geoffrey Quinn sold wartime scarcities such as shoelaces, hair nets, perfume and nail varnish from market stalls in the Lancashire mill towns of Rochdale and Oldham. Conscripted into a colliery on Lord Manvers’s land in Yorkshire, he absconded in 1943 to Soho, where he became a ‘pavement pusher’ or ‘kerb boy’ dealing in petrol and clothing coupons. He grew the pencil moustache that was the identifying mark of a spiv. After the war, he worked as a variety artiste specialising in mind-reading and psychic healing. In 1952, after changing his name, he started the Paul Raymond Variety Agency, based in attics above a coffee bar in Charing Cross Road. He staged such shows as
Folies Parisienne
, advertised as including ‘The Banned Reefer Dance, performed by the Dangerous Girl with the Low Neckline’. The programme for his Burlesque of 1955 boasted that glamorous nudes would stand in poses imitated from ‘stars of sex-appeal’ including Sabrina’s ‘nationally publicised Nude Photograph pose’. Printed at the bottom of the programme, for those punters who were queasy, was a hygienic assurance: ‘In the interest of Public Health, this Theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeyes Fluid.’
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Strippers had to remain as static as Dresden china shepherdesses, not moving a muscle, to conform to the Lord Chamberlain’s regulations on theatrical censorship (the official from the Lord Chamberlain’s department charged with monitoring stripshows was called Sir George Titman). A striptease show in King’s Lynn had to be shortened in 1957 because of freezing cold weather. ‘If we shiver and move any part of our body during a pose, we would lose our licence,’ explained a young woman whose act was to stand naked and unflinching while her brother threw axes at her. Her name, reported the
Sunday Pictorial
, was Margaret Shufflebottom.
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Raymond’s Revuebar, which opened in 1958, engorged him with money (he bought the club’s freehold for £14,000 in 1960 with a suitcase of damp, musty banknotes). It was a negligible setback in 1961 when he was fined £5,000 at London Sessions, where the chairman told him: ‘Your establishment and others have been vying with each other to see what degrees of disgustingness they can introduce to attract members of all classes who are only too ready, out of curiosity or lust, to see the filth portrayed in this establishment.’
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Secure in the Big Time, Paul Raymond bought a yacht, which he named
Veste Demite
, a Latinist nun’s translation of ‘Get ’Em Orf’. Raymond was the King Spiv: his Revuebar was the frontline of the new Soho. Keeler, however, got her break at an older-established outfit, Murray’s Club, where there was no need for Jeyes Fluid.

Murray’s was prosperous but fading under its elderly proprietor, Oswald Murray, called Percy by men friends, but ‘Pops’ by his girls. Sometimes he was said to be a wounded major from the Kaiser’s war. In the 1920s he had kept a café at La Zoute in Belgium, until his wife (a local soubrette) abandoned him and their children. He ran a nightclub in Brussels before opening Murray’s Club in Beak Street, Soho during the 1930s. To avoid the strict licensing laws, which prohibited the drinking of alcohol after eleven at night, Murray’s was run on the ‘bottle party’ system. Customers pretended to be there by prior invitation and drank alcohol which they had supposedly ordered earlier. During Hitler’s war it was an ‘officers only’ establishment from which other ranks were barred. Murray’s Club looked tawdry by daylight, but ritzy enough by night. Murray’s son David, who had served with the Special Operations Executive during the war, installed a revolving stage and a spotlight system which – skimping and improvisation providing keynotes for the 1950s – he cobbled together from car headlamp bulbs and tin cans.
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As dancers cavorted at the front of Murray’s cabaret, the real draw stood in the background: beautiful, bare-breasted, motionless showgirls. The girls were beckoned during the intervals between shows to join customers at their tables, where they earned commission on drinks orders. Murray expected them to sip fruit-cup while they coaxed the customers to order over-priced champagne: the tally of drinks they got ordered were called ‘scalps’. He made a show of insisting that his low-paid girls did not meet customers outside the club after shows, but this was unenforceable, and just a ploy to enforce discretion. Some of Murray’s girls sold sex for money: others gave men a ‘good time’, and received presents in return. Probably a few were set up in flats in Marylebone or Maida Vale.

Keeler was one of the near-naked girls who stood immovably in the background during Murray’s cabaret. Twenty years later, the journalists Philip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy interviewed people who knew her when she worked there: ‘She spoke quietly and with effort, as if always trying to remember lessons. She moved very sensuously, and let men know that she was aware of the effect that this had on them.’ The key to her attraction, Knightley and Kennedy suggested, was that she resembled ‘a sexually aware twelve-year-old girl who has dressed up in her mother’s clothes, put on her mother’s make-up and is prepared to play at being a woman’. Their depiction suggests a teenager whose manner was both compliant and evasive, like a bullied child.
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It was at Murray’s that Keeler met Ward. She went to live in his Bayswater Road flat, but did not become his mistress. He took her to parties: she had affairs, casual sex, and was set on course to be enticed and abandoned. A young law student called Noel Howard-Jones met her in Ward’s flat in 1960. ‘I was a randy twenty-year-old and here was this pretty girl who seemed available,’ he recalled two decades later. ‘I couldn’t take her to my room, so we’d go to bed in Stephen’s flat when he was at his consulting rooms. Sometimes I’d pick her up on a Saturday, and we’d buy a couple of bottles of wine and some food and I’d take her down to Stephen’s cottage on the back of my motor scooter.’ After a few months, the affair ‘fizzled out’, Howard-Jones said. ‘I didn’t drop her. She didn’t drop me. We just dropped each other. She was disappointingly dull in bed, and after a while it was a struggle to make conversation with her. Once you got beyond clothes and gossip there was nothing left.’
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