An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (23 page)

Jack Profumo seems to have been better satisfied by the sex: perhaps he did not notice if women were dull in bed; perhaps Keeler found him more exciting than Howard-Jones. Still, he too was dismissive of her conversation. ‘All she knew was about make-up and her hair, and about gramophone records and a little about nightclubs,’ he said later. These disobliging views come from sexual partners who picked her up and dropped her. Another man, who met her relaxing with women friends such as Paula Hamilton-Marshall and knew her only socially, found her quick, witty and good fun.
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‘She is a very, very pretty girl,’ Sybille Bedford wrote of Keeler in 1963. ‘All the curves and lines are as good as they can be, the head has charm and grace, and there is a faint oriental touch about the face: the pure smoothness, the hint of high cheekbone, the slant of eyes, oh yes, no doubt that she could be devastatingly sexually attractive. But there are other things, and they are frightening. Not only the mean little voice is a giveaway, the look on the face is avid, stubborn, closed.’ Bedford watched her testifying at Stephen Ward’s trial. ‘For all the sleekness, the sexiness, there is a lack of life, as if the sex were pre-fabricated sex, deep-freeze sex, displayed like the dish of fruit in a colour photograph.’ She sensed ‘a blank absence of spirit, a fundamental inpenetrability of the kind one associates only with the hardest kind of poverty’.
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Life was always less hard and battering for Marilyn (‘Mandy’) Rice-Davies. Born in 1944, she was the daughter an ex-policeman who worked for the Dunlop tyre company. At home in a three-up-two-down semi in Blenheim Road, Shirley, Solihull, she experienced what Penelope Fitzgerald called ‘the inexhaustible fund of tranquil pessimism peculiar to the English Midlands’. Frustration was the ruling emotion of her childhood. She saw life as a tedious ordeal: ‘If it was sausages and mash for tea, it had to be Monday.’ She was an intractable, wilful girl, who seemed more knowing than her parents, and got what she wanted – including a pony called Laddie. The routines at Sherman’s Cross Secondary Modern School were burdensome: she was racked with yearning for showy freedom and eager for the confidences of her classmates who had plunged into sexual affairs by the age of fifteen. She felt superior to them, though, when on evening visits to Laddie, she saw them dolled up in ‘baggy mohair sweaters, dirndl skirts over multicoloured nylon net petticoats and white ankle socks all set up for an evening’s chatting up on street corners or hanging around the juke-box in the over-lit coffee bar’.
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When she was sixteen, working in the china department of Marshall & Snelgrove’s Birmingham store, the shop staged a fashion show to coincide with the Birmingham première of a topical comedy film about the crime wave,
Make Mine Mink
. Mandy Rice-Davies was picked as a Marshall & Snelgrove catwalk star. Wearing a dress from the model gown department, with mink coat from the fur room and festooned in jewellery, her hair lacquered into a bouffant extravaganza, she posed for photographs with the film’s stars, Terry-Thomas and Hattie Jacques. Primed by this success, she went to London to appear as ‘Miss Austin’ at the Motor Show of 1960. Soon she passed an audition at Murray’s cabaret club. There she met Christine Keeler, who taught her about cosmetics and false eyelashes. After two months, she and Keeler left Murray’s, took a flat together in Comeragh Road, Barons Court, and called themselves models. They starved all day, because they had no money for food and knew little about kitchens, waiting for men whom they knew from Murray’s to ring with invitations to supper.

One distinction between them was their taste in men. Ever since her pubescent involvement with airbase Americans, Keeler had been susceptible to black men. Public opinion was so ignorant and backward in the 1960s that inter-racial sexual activity was anathematised: in the 1980s Lord Denning still worried about the risks of mixed-race juries. Keeler’s involvement with black men was thought shocking and shameful. In June 1963, at the height of the Profumo Affair, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who hankered for the imposition of sexual apartheid
between blacks and whites, became fixated on Keeler’s attraction to ‘coloured men’, and this solidified his conviction that British sexual and security looseness was a menace to the United States. His agents scoured London before corralling three US airmen, who were repatriated to an air base in Washington DC, where they were interrogated for days and subjected to lie-detector tests. ‘The three Negroes had met Keeler in low-class nightclubs, generally frequented by non-Caucasian elements in London,’ an FBI dossier noted. ‘The investigation is designed to determine whether Keeler had attempted to pump them for intelligence data which they might have in connection with their Air Force assignments.’
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By contrast, Rice-Davies was drawn to Jewish men. She was squired by, among others, the property developer Walter Flack. Eventually she married an Israeli, opened clubs in Tel Aviv and converted to Judaism. One evening she and Keeler were invited to the Savoy restaurant by two Americans. There Keeler gave a shriek of recognition directed at a plump bald man with diamond cufflinks and handstitched crocodile shoes. His name was Perec Rachman. She had first met him when she and Ward were flat-hunting together, and inspected a flat in Bryanston Mews West which, it transpired, belonged to Rachman (whom neither of them had previously met). Subsequently Keeler had left Ward’s protection and been kept, briefly, by Rachman. The Americans now discovered that the two girls’ mix of artful backchat and trilling laughter could swiftly curdle. They were ditched after supper by their dates, who returned to Comeragh Road, where Rachman joined them. He arrived in the clutches of a possessive blonde who tried to boss the girls, and strafed the room with verbal crossfire.

Rachman eventually left after fixing a date with Rice-Davies for the following evening. He arrived in his Rolls, took her for supper and to bed, and when she had passed his probationary period, established her in his Bryanston Mews West flat. She loved its rose-pink carpet, green and gold upholstery and gilded Welsh harp in the corner. He forbade her to bring German-made products into the house. She said he tried to teach her French and Hebrew. He was so fond of vocabulary, she suggested, that he would be pleased that he was responsible for a new word in the
Oxford English Dictionary
: Rachmanism, defined as the extortion or exploitation by a landlord of tenants of dilapidated or slum property.

Rice-Davies was sharp and wary: she always wanted the gilded cage. Keeler, whose later fortunes were bleaker and whose divagations seemed unhappier, resented Rice-Davies’s subsequent success as a businesswoman, wife and social figure. ‘Mandy handed out quotes as readily as her sexual services. I hope the sex was better value.’ She mocked Rice-Davies’s single-mindedness: ‘Everything about her said “I Want to Marry a Millionaire”; she might as well have carried a placard.’
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Rice-Davies, at least, lived by the
Sunday Pictorial
precepts of ‘How to Get a Husband’.

SIX

Landlords

‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in London were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.’
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Muriel Spark’s evocation of the damage, dejection and deadly drabness of London could have been applied to the capital for a dozen years after 1945. It was a period when to pinch and scrape suggested respectability. Only head waiters and car dealers fawned on the nouveau riche. But when Spark recalled those years – she wrote in 1963 – the war ruins and shabbiness seemed historic. So, too, did the accompanying beliefs that discomfort was virtuous, mortifications were character-building and that millionaires ought to be quietly ashamed.

After 1957, Londoners had made a dash for modernity. Property developers like Charles Clore and Jack Cotton transformed the centre of the capital with a brutal phallic modernity that provided both the aesthetic and the ecology of the Profumo Affair. Cotton lived on the new arterial dual carriageway, Park Lane, with its onrush of traffic like lancers riding pell-mell into battle. Clore had a house in the parallel Park Street, a narrow one-way thoroughfare in which cars idled and edged forward, like infantrymen fidgety in their trenches, then advanced in tense rushes when the traffic lights at the corner with Oxford Street turned green, as if hurtling across no-man’s land while being raked by machine-gun fire.

Mayfair, Marylebone, Soho and Notting Hill provided the terrain of the Profumo Affair. Its protagonists were Londoners. Lord Astor lived in Upper Grosvenor Street, two minutes’ walk from Clore and three from Cotton; Stephen Ward and Perec Rachman lived a few minutes apart in nearby Marylebone mews; Jack Profumo lived by the Regent’s Park; Christine Keeler shifted between Notting Hill and Marble Arch. Both Keeler and Rice-Davies had come to London to find money, excitement and the main chance, and to discard poverty, monotony and futility. The nebulous sexual market in which they were players had its counterparts in the London property market, and the rough new world of contested takeovers. ‘The lasting damage to British society,’ recalled a beatnik who became a hippy, ‘was not committed by the hairy evangelists of permissiveness, but was the work of the property developers.’
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Isabel Quigly saw the film
The Seventh Veil
twice – once in London, and then a hundred miles away in the country. In one sequence the heroine was urged by a dissolute painter to elope with him to Italy. ‘Do you mean to get married?’ she asked. ‘Oh,’ replied the artist, ‘I never thought of that!’ The London audience heard this dialogue without a snigger, Quigly recalled, but in the country it provoked ‘a long gasp, followed by such a cackle of outrage, mixed with a sort of whistling admiration at the sheer metropolitan coolness of it, as drowned the dialogue for the next five minutes’. England, overall, had a morbid fear of London. The dominance of London in national anxiety about morality intensified during the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation year of 1953. Purity campaigners insisted that landmark London required special protection from unruly or dangerous sexualities, namely street prostitution and male homosexuality. Sunday newspapers warned that ‘immorality’ in the capital incited misbehaviour across the country. London’s supposedly expansive, invasive turpitude dominated successive moral panics and press stunts about vice. The report in 1957 of the Wolfenden committee devised the basis of nationwide legislation on prostitution solely from the experience of central London streets and backstreets.
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During 1943–44, Patrick Abercrombie, Professor of Town Planning at London University, devised detailed plans for the systematic redevelopment of the capital to repair the effects of wartime bombing, to obliterate mouldering slums and to deter the jumbled sprawl associated with speculative profiteering. These comprehensive plans expressed both progressive hopes and social anxiety: planners wanted to regulate, control and repress the burgeoning, undisciplined development of London and keep it on clean lines; they believed that rebuilt, sanitised townscapes, with tight planning regulations, would create paragons of clean living. Spurred by Abercrombie, Westminster City Council proposed in 1946 to demolish 130 acres of Soho, rebuild and rezone it to meet the needs of impatient motorists, disperse its denizens, and concentrate the remnants of its population in salubrious, purpose-built blocks of flats. This plan envisaged the demolition of the Royal Opera House in contaminated Covent Garden, and its relocation in the hygienic purlieus of Belgravia.
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Planning was enshrined in statute by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. This was the brainchild of Lewis Silkin, the first Minister of Town and Country Planning to hold Cabinet rank. He had been born in Poplar, a few months after Jack the Ripper’s murders in nearby Whitechapel, the son of a Lithuanian-born shopkeeper who taught Hebrew. Though he won a mathematical scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, his headmaster decided that the son of East End Jews was unsuitable for university education, and kiboshed his chance. Instead, Silkin went to work in the East India Docks before mustering the funds for a year at London University. Music and country rambles were his abiding loves in youth: he used to stride through the countryside singing aloud with joy of life. He became a solicitor’s clerk, and then a solicitor. As chairman of the London County Council’s housing committee in the inter-war years, propelling schemes for the rebuilding of slums, he loathed the way that individuals made money out of property development. His aim was to remove the profit motive, and to bestow the ownership of development rights on local communities, rather than landowners or companies.