An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (37 page)

Radcliffe’s report, published in April 1963, disparaged Vassall as an effeminate weakling (‘a bit of a miss’) who ‘had been addicted to homosexual practices from youth’, but concluded that nothing in his conduct or talk had indicated homosexuality even to astute observers. This conclusion led the
Sunday Mirror
, as King and Cudlipp had recently renamed the
Sunday Pictorial
, to publish an exposé by their former Hollywood correspondent, Lionel Crane, entitled ‘How to Spot a Potential Homo’. The search for tell-tale signs became so silly that an MI5 officer had an unheralded visit from Special Branch, and was interrogated about his sexual habits, because Duncan Sandys, the hard-man of the Macmillan Cabinet, had reported that the officer ‘smoked his cigarettes like a woman’ and was therefore a security risk.
³⁵

On 4 February 1963, the Fleet Street journalists Brendan Mulholland and Reg Foster were sentenced to six months and three months’ imprisonment respectively for contempt after refusing to reveal to the Radcliffe tribunal their sources for stories describing Vassall buying women’s clothes in West End stores and attending sex parties. They went to prison masquerading as martyrs in the sacred cause of press freedom; but the truth is that they did not want to admit that they were liars who had invented their stories. Everyone knew it. But Fleet Street turned them into figures of heroic probity, extolling their moral courage in defending high principles, and went gunning for Macmillan’s government in revenge attacks.

Journalists were ‘seething with anger’ at the jailing of Mulholland and Foster, wrote Paul Johnson in his truculent
New Statesman
column of 22 March. ‘They blame the judges but, above all, they blame Harold Macmillan, who made it quite plain, in outlining the Vassall tribunal’s terms of reference to the Commons, that he was out to get the press. I wonder if Mr Macmillan has quite understood what he has let himself in for. He is about to fight an election in which he will need every friend he has got. At the moment, he has none whatsoever in Fleet Street.’ Everyone there, although Johnson did not say so in print, knew the rumours tying Jack Profumo to a call-girl. The last flying punch in his article was thrown at a target that was obvious despite being unnamed: ‘any Tory minister or MP (or, for that matter, judge or barrister) who gets involved in a scandal during the next year or so, must expect – I regret to say – the full treatment’.
³⁶

PART TWO

Drama

NINE

Acting Up

Living at Cliveden was like inhabiting the stage of an opera house. The landscape resembled a scenic backdrop. People made dramatic entrances. They had different routes from offstage to front stage. There was an incentive to perform. Understudies itched for prominent parts. Non-players scavenged for visitors’ passes to go backstage and catch the actors déshabillé
in their dressing rooms. The Profumo Affair was a drama in which the protagonists converged from varied directions. The theme of the opera was the damage done by unintended consequences.

The fatal convergences began in 1960, when Yevgeny Ivanov arrived as assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. He was less coarse than most communist diplomats, although a rumbustious drinker. In pursuance of his duty to manipulate ‘agents of influence’, he visited the offices of the
Daily Telegraph
, where he met the editor Sir Colin Coote, who was a patient of Stephen Ward’s. Coote, who knew that Ward was keen to visit the Soviet Union, invited him to meet Ivanov over luncheon at the Garrick Club. Ivanov began meeting Ward socially. Like Kuznetsov in the Marshall case, he was under surveillance. He assumed from the outset that Ward, as a conspicuous contact of his, would be approached by MI5.

On 8 June 1961, a MI5 officer named Keith Wagstaffe, who used the alias of Woods, lunched with Ward in a Marylebone restaurant to discuss his friendship with Ivanov. Wagstaffe reported that ‘Ward, who has an attractive personality and who talks well’, was of doubtful reliability. He added that when he took tea with Ward at 17 Wimpole Mews, he was introduced ‘to a young girl, whose name I did not catch, who was obviously sharing the house with him. She was heavily painted and considerably overdressed, and I wonder whether this is corroborating evidence that he has been involved in the call-girl racket.’ Probably Ward agreed at this time to cooperate with MI5 in reporting significant comments from Ivanov, although probably not in a scheme to suborn or entrap him. Whether Ivanov provided misinformation, or sound material that the Soviets wished MI5 to have, Ward was the conduit for it.
¹

A month later, on the weekend of 8–9 July 1961, Ward organised a party at Spring Cottage. His Saturday guests included the law student Noel Howard-Jones, Keeler, and a pretty young hitchhiker picked up near Slough. The group resembled a microcosm of King’s Road swingers (a scene that had been flourishing since 1958) until on Sunday morning they were joined by Ivanov.
²

A more formal party was held at the big house. Its hostess, Bronwen Astor, was five months pregnant. The President of Pakistan, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, on his way to Washington to confer with the Kennedy administration, was guest of honour. Profumo, as Secretary of State for War, was invited for the whole weekend with his wife for their first Cliveden visit. For Saturday luncheon the Astors had Lord Mountbatten, his daughter and son-in-law Pamela and David Hicks; both Dalkeiths (Jane McNeill had been a fellow model of Bronwen Pugh’s before she married the Duke of Buccleuch’s son); Bill Astor’s aunt Pauline Spender-Clay; Sophie Moss (the former Polish Countess Zofia Tarnowska, who had been an SOE camp-follower in Cairo during the war and was afterwards involved in refugee work); and two creative bachelors, the interior decorator Derek Patmore, and Felix Kelly, who designed nostalgic stage sets and painted portraits of domestic architecture and romantic country-house interiors. Some luncheon guests were replaced by fresh dinner guests on Saturday’s hot summer evening: Sir Osbert Lancaster, the architectural writer and creator of the immortal Maudie Littlehampton in his front-page
Daily Express
cartoons, and Sir Roy Harrod, Macmillan’s economic adviser from Oxford, together with their wives. Billa and Roy Harrod were regular visitors to Cliveden where they enjoyed the luxurious hospitality while thinking that the opulence had a comic element.

Bill and Bronwen Astor took their guests for a stroll after dinner on Saturday to admire a newly installed statue of their son riding a dolphin. Near the house there was a walled garden containing a tennis court abutting a stone-flagged swimming pool with cupola-domed changing cubicles at one end: the expanse was more spacious and elegant than the electric blue plastic pools that in Macmillan’s England were becoming a suburban status symbol. Astor and Profumo sauntered ahead of the others, opened the gate in the high wall, and found Ward and three Spring Cottage visitors frolicking. One of them was Keeler, who had just lost her swimsuit or the bra part of her bikini in a prank, and had swathed herself in a towel. Forty years later, and not reliably, Profumo recalled that Astor slapped her backside playfully and said, ‘Jack, this is Christine Keeler.’
³

With the exception of Roy Harrod, who stayed sitting in the main house, the guests ambled to the poolside closely behind Bill Astor. A few of them found costumes in the pool house, and swam.
News of the World
journalists later paid Keeler to say that Astor and Profumo chased her naked round the pool. Other money-making inventions had Bronwen Astor arriving at the pool in a tiara, and Ward turning on the floodlights so that everyone could watch Keeler emerging naked from the water. Keeler’s vivid tale that she and another woman had clambered onto the shoulders of Astor and Ayub Khan in the pool later aroused Anglo-Pakistani diplomatic ructions. Afterwards, Ward’s group was invited to the main house for drinks. Lady Harrod had brisk intelligence, unflagging energy and unquenchable zest: her meeting with the farouche Keeler must have been enjoyable for connoisseurs of human comedy. There seemed to the Harrods nothing exceptional about this Cliveden visit – Keeler and the other young woman from Spring Cottage seemed part of a beautiful background – and it was nearly two years later before they realised that they had been present at a historic conjunction.
⁴

Profumo had been introduced to Ward by Astor about ten years earlier, but had not met him for years. Earlier that Saturday, Astor asked Profumo if he remembered Ward, whom he brought to the Profumos’ bedroom, where the osteopath gave Valerie Profumo a neck massage. She found him ‘creepy’, she said later, and evaded his efforts to give her a second massage on the Sunday. Many accounts of this weekend and its sequel – even from responsible sources – are inaccurate. Richard Lamb, whose history
The Macmillan Years
is of first-class reliability, drops his standards in the welter of confusing stories about the scandal. The Profumos were never ‘on very friendly terms with Ward’, as Lamb states; they did not ‘discreetly but rigorously cut’ him after August 1961; Keeler was not
‘the mistress of Stephen Ward’; ‘Keeler’s known liaison with Ivanov’ probably never happened.
⁵

On Sunday morning, 9 July, while Astor took Ayub Khan to inspect the Cliveden stud, some of his guests mingled with Ward’s group at the swimming pool. Ivanov had a swimming race with Profumo. When Profumo asked Keeler for her telephone number, she directed him to Ward. The osteopath, who seemed pleased by the approach, said his number was in the telephone directory. Later that morning two multi-millionaires, Nubar Gulbenkian and Sir Isaac Wolfson, arrived with their wives at the main house as luncheon guests to replace the Harrods and Lancasters.

During Sunday afternoon, Ivanov began a drunken binge which continued after he had driven Keeler back to Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews. This evening became crucial eighteen months later, in January 1963, when Keeler was being paid for her sexual reminiscences about Profumo. Encouraged by journalists who were offering £1,000 for a sensational story, she then began to say that she and Ivanov had gone to bed together that night at Wimpole Mews. It is striking that, although sexual discretion was not her métier, no one could recall her mentioning her night with Ivanov before January 1963, when journalists first saw their chance to run stories pretending that official secrets had been jeopardised by her multiple affairs. The value of her account of coupling with Ivanov, as it was finally published in the
News of the World
on 16 June 1963, after all legal inhibitions had been broken by Profumo’s resignation, can be easily judged:

Here was my perfect specimen of a man. And he wanted me. He couldn’t have stopped now anyway. We crashed across the room. A little table went flying. He pinioned me in a corner by the door. I relaxed. Because he was just kissing me with all the power of a man in a frenzy of passion.

I made a last attempt to get away. But he caught hold of me. Our very impetus carried us through the door, and we half fell into my bedroom. There was my little bed, with its blue coverlet, and the little pink dressing-table. From that second I too threw all reserve to the winds. But … I was afraid he would hate me afterwards … But he was like a god … Clumsy perhaps, but only because he wanted me …

But later came the grim shadows, when he was lying beside me. I could sense his sadness; the deep black gloom that I am told all Russians feel after they have done something they feel they shouldn’t have done … What had happened between us was something as old as time …

I never dreamed I might be the girl who rocked the Government. I know nothing of high affairs … All I know is that when I allowed Eugene to love me I was young and free.
⁶

There is every reason to discount Keeler’s memory, which profited newspapers by enabling them to run scare stories that the Secretary of State for War and a Russian spy had both been lovers, around the same time, of the same ‘good-time girl’. The
News of the World
story also reinforced its view that aroused men could not be expected to stop themselves; that men despised women who yielded to them; and that sexual clumsiness in men was an admirable sign of passion rather than evidence of their selfish incompetence.

Reverting to a chronological account of the sequel to the Cliveden weekend, on Monday 10 July, Ward telephoned his MI5 handler Wagstaffe (‘Woods’) to arrange a meeting. Two days later he reported that Ivanov and Profumo had met at Cliveden; that Ivanov and Keeler had been binge-drinking together; and that Ivanov had asked him to elicit when the United States was going to arm West Germany with nuclear weapons
.
Astor, on that same Monday, according to his secretary, telephoned to rebuke Ward for bringing the girls and Ivanov to the pool, on the Sunday morning, when he had a house party including the President of Pakistan and the Secretary of War. ‘You damned fool,’ he is supposed to have said. This tale is doubtful. Young women from Spring Cottage were often found at the Cliveden swimming pool when the Astors had house parties, as shown by the draft of the evidence that Profumo later submitted to Lord Denning: ‘All the girls were very young, and very pretty, and very common, and I remember that subsequently my sister, Lady Balfour of Inchrye, who was there with her husband a week or so before, had said that she and her husband were absolutely scandalised that Bill should allow this man Ward to go up to the pool with all these common tarts.’
⁷