“In Britain at the start of the 1960s, Victorian values are still mainstream. There is a rich ruling class who are better than everybody else, women are mostly thought of as the property of the men around them and if you are Black, discrimination, IS the culture. I believe the Profumo scandal shone a light on all of that poison and was another step on the road that we are still very much on, to a more equal society. So, I think in some ways the Profumo scandal was a good thing. But for my mother, I am sure she would say, ‘What a price I had to pay!’”– Seymour Platt, ‘My Mother, Christine Keeler’

In March 1963, Britain was slowly thawing after its coldest winter in two centuries. During those bitter months, the Profumo Affair fermented. The shots fired by Johnny Edgecombe outside a London flat in October 1962 propelled its occupants, Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler, into the headlines. In November, Mandy Rice-Davies grieved for Peter Rachman. And just before Christmas, a Labour MP with a grudge against Ward goaded Christine into admitting her affair with a Conservative government official.

Eugene Ivanov was recalled to Moscow in January, leaving another friendship – and Ward’s fleeting hopes of ending the Cold War – in tatters. By March, when the morning frost vanished, Christine had fled to Spain, to avoid being called as a witness in Edgecombe’s trial. Another Labour politician – with the ear of the party leader – asked questions in the House of Commons, prompting John Profumo’s infamous statement that there was “no impropriety” in his relationship with Keeler.

Sixty years later, these catalytic events are still swirling. In the wake of Boris Johnson’s tenure in Downing Street, Profumo’s lies may seem like small beer; and with sexual abuse still rampant in public life, it’s difficult to summon enthusiasm for Ward’s brand of liberation. However, in this time of global division and resurgent oligarchy, perhaps there is yet more to learn from the spring of 1963, when the balance of morality and power shifted within the heart of the establishment.

The death of Christine Keeler in 2017 – just as the MeToo and Time’s Up movements were gaining ground – put the young women enmeshed in the Profumo Affair back in the spotlight. In 2019, an all-women art exhibition, Dear Christine, began a nationwide tour; a BBC drama series followed in 2020; and in 2021, Keeler’s son launched a legal Petition for Mercy regarding her conviction for perjury and subsequent imprisonment.

Artist Fionn Wilson, who curated Dear Christine, followed up with Scandal ‘63 Revisited: Reframing the Profumo Affair via Art and Artefact, at Leicester Gallery from March 3rd until April 15th, 2023. Taking its title from Clive Irving’s Scandal ‘63, one of the first books published about the affair – and an early inspiration to pop artist Pauline Boty – the exhibition was co-curated by Steve Chibnall, Professor of British Cinema at De Montfort University.

While retaining the core focus of Dear Christine, this new exhibition took a broader perspective, featuring other key players like Ward and Rice-Davies, and utilising archival paraphernalia to reassess media coverage of the scandal and its long afterlife in popular culture, including various portrayals in film, theatre and music.

At a time when the ‘Cold War’ has frozen on the battlefields of Ukraine and speculation about Tory sleaze is once again a preoccupation of the press, this exhibition marks the sixtieth anniversary of an infamous scandal that involved politics, espionage, sex, class, race, royalty, and almost any other newsworthy ingredient that could be imagined … As well as kicking over the traces in the form of surviving materials from the participants and the news media, the exhibition features newly-commissioned artwork that interrogates the gendered interpretations that have dominated public understandings of the tumultuous events that ushered in the ‘permissive society’.

The exhibition opens with a timeline of the Profumo Affair, beginning with Keeler’s first meeting with Ward at Murray’s Cabaret Club in the summer of 1959; and ending with Labour’s electoral victory in the spring of 1964, bringing what party leader Harold Wilson memorably described as “thirteen years of Tory misrule” to a standstill.

Artist Natalie d’Arbeloff arrived in London during the winter of 1963, witnessing the moral panic created by the unfolding scandal as “a citizen of anywhere/nowhere and in tune with the alternative spirit of the time: no barriers of class, country, gender, colour, status etc.” Her paintings for this exhibition draw upon the most iconic image associated with the Profumo Affair: a photograph taken at the Soho studio of Lewis Morley in May 1963, with Christine’s semi-nude body wrapped sinuously around the curved back of a plywood chair. Her quizzical expression and Morley’s artful use of shadow convey a darkly erotic atmosphere.

The larger of d’Arbeloff’s two works, ‘The Game’ (2018), presents the men implicated – including Ward, Profumo, and Lord Astor, the ‘respectable’ men brought low; Edgecombe and Lucky Gordon, the younger black immigrants linked to Keeler; Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, who conducted the official enquiry; and Roger Hollis, Director General of MI5. Their likenesses are recreated in pastel, pencil and glitter across a rag paper chess-board in tabloid shades of grey. These eight men surround a nude Christine, straddling her famous chair underneath a lunar orb.

‘Scarlet Woman’ (2018), d’Arbeloff’s other, smaller piece, places Keeler in the same pose with the men’s heads clustered between her legs. The chair has been removed, and Christine is boxed in by a series of bluish painted frames. The red background of this oil painting is echoed in one of three ‘red-top’ newspaper front pages placed next to d’Arbeloff’s works on the gallery wall.

Truth was a tabloid newspaper published weekly in Melbourne, Australia, demonstrating that the scandal’s reach extended to former British colonies. The newspaper logo is red, but its lower-case font contrasts with the bold, block capital headline: ‘EXCLUSIVE! CHRISTINE KEELER TELLS ALL’. Below Truth are two front pages from the News of the World – Britain’s best-selling newspaper at the time – with whom Keeler had signed an exclusive £23,000 deal (worth around half a million today.) Printed on consecutive Sundays in June 1963, these front pages include several other stories, but images of Christine directly under the newspaper logo, paired with tantalising headlines, distinguish her story from the rest. ‘Confessions of Christine: BY THE GIRL WHO IS ROCKING THE GOVERNMENT’ (with the news of Ward’s arrest just below), was followed a week later by a deftly manipulated quote: ‘I’M NO SPY! I Couldn’t Just Ask Jack [Profumo] for Secrets.’

A glass-topped table encases several other newspapers from this period, including another News of the World front page: ‘IVANOV CLEARED.’ The Daily Mirror blasts the ‘utterly unfounded’ rumours about Prince Philip’s connections to Ward, and Lord Astor’s police interview at Cliveden; while the now-defunct Weekly News casts an eye upon ‘MRS PROFUMO: THE WOMAN WHO KEPT SILENT.’ An overwrought Evening Standard headline (‘CHRISTINE’S AMAZING OUTBURST TO JUDGE’) parallels the Evening News revelation: ‘LUCKY GORDON FREED: Christine Case Appeal is Upheld by Judges’.

These front pages are overlaid by a few books, including Scandal ’63 in its original paperback format, with a smiling Christine on the cover; memoirs by Ivanov (The Naked Spy) and Edgecombe (Black Scandal); and a first edition copy of Lord Denning’s Report in plain blue (rather like the blue frames of d’Arbeloff’s ‘Scarlet Woman.’) All 4,000 copies from the first printing were sold within an hour of publication in September 1963. Denning interviewed 160 witnesses but much of their evidence was excluded, and will remain closed to the public until 2048.

Elsewhere, there’s Mariella Novotny, hostess of the so-called ‘Man in the Mask’ party, and part of a call-girl ring which ensnared President John F. Kennedy. In 1977 she made the cover of Saturday TitBits magazine, begging the question: ‘IS THIS THE MOST SHOCKING GIRL IN THE WORLD?’ The photo was taken several years before, when Mariella published her autobiographical novel, King’s Road  – and her ‘hippie chic’ pose (complete with painted-on, Bibaesque eyelashes) was just one of many guises adopted by Stella Marie Capes, whose peculiar life and shady demise were chronicled in Lilian Pizzichini’s The Novotny Papers (2021.)

Wendy Nelson’s sculpture, ‘Member of the Establishment’ (2017) is a faceless male mannequin with a nose long enough to rival Pinocchio’s. Stuffed ties droop from its shoulders and the body’s lower half is absent. Unseated and legless, the dummy rests on the rolling stand of an absent chair. “My work generally tends to reflect ambivalence about the gender and power relationships of the generation I share with Christine Keeler,” Nelson writes. “This is far from the only suited, male authority figure I’ve made …”

The Profumo Affair also revived English satire, with Private Eye magazine – then in its infancy – publishing several cover stories in that year alone. Cartoonist Timothy Birdsall’s illustration of the decadent court of ‘Emperor [Harold] Macmillan’ was captioned ‘Britain gets wyth itte, 1963’, in the style of Regency satirist James Gillray. Birdsall died just days after Profumo’s resignation in June.

Gerald Scarfe parodied Morley’s Keeler photo, picturing a nude Prime Minister for the prophetically titled ‘Last Days of Harold Macmillan’. The artwork would make the cover of their 1964 annual, with a backdrop of Union Jack colours and the headline, ‘Private Eye’s Romantic England.’ Macmillan’s opponent, Harold Wilson, earned his first solo cover in June, when a press photo showed him with a document resting on his knee, eyes closed and hands clasped as if in prayer. A pipe dangles from Wilson’s mouth, and a thought-bubble reads: ‘Spare Us, O Ward, Thy Further Revelations until just before an October Election.’ Following Ward’s suicide and posthumous conviction in August, Scarfe showed a naked judge giving the victory salute, against a bold-print aphorism: ‘JUSTICE MUST NOT ONLY BE DONE, IT MUST BE SEEN TO BE DONE.’

A Cracked Mask

If Christine Keeler was Ward’s final protegée, the first may have been Vicki Martin, a model who appeared alongside Kay Kendall in It Started in Paradise (1952), described as “the All About Eve of the fashion world.” A close friend of nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis – the last woman hanged in Britain, after murdering her abusive lover – Vicki gained notoriety in her own right for her love affair with the playboy Maharajah of Cooch Behar. She died in a car crash in 1955.

In addition to his pioneering work in osteopathy, Ward was also a fine sketch artist, with many of his patients also sitting for portraits. These diverse pursuits – and the beguiling young women he cultivated – eased his path into high society. The exhibition includes his 1959 portrait of Sue Lloyd, a model and aspiring actress who went on to star opposite Michael Caine in a classic spy thriller, The Ipcress File (1965), and became a television fixture with her role as Barbara Hunter in the long-running soap opera, Crossroads. She wore a tight sweater for Ward’s portrait, and her tousled dark hair was cropped short. The portrait is offset with a background of fiery red strokes, as Lloyd turns to challenge Ward’s gaze, and ours.

Ward made several sketches of Keeler, including one kept in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. Another widely published portrait from 1960–61 shows Christine meeting our eyes with frank, but gentle curiosity. Their relationship, described as “close but platonic,” was surely at its fondest here, before that mutual trust was severed. Although widely reprinted, its current location is unknown.

In July 1963, the Sunday Mirror’s front page featured past sketches by Ward depicting six figures involved in his trial. Mandy Rice-Davies is shown with bouffant hair – according to the editorial, she “added her own touches.” Lord Astor and ‘Ivanov the Russian’ are also present, but Christine’s portrait is omitted, as “her mother has it.” Sally Norie was another girlfriend of Ward’s, also seen in the famous group photos taken at Cliveden, the Astors’ Berkshire estate, on the same weekend when Christine first met Profumo. Sylvia Parker, who lived with Ward after Christine moved out, would testify that fellow witness Vickie Barrett lied about Ward bringing her to his flat for sex with other men. (Barrett retracted her testimony, admitting she had been coerced by police officers; only to retract the retraction. Shortly after the trial’s denouement, she dropped from sight. )

A small print of Stephen’s 1961 sketch of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (and the husband of Queen Elizabeth II), is shown alongside various newspapers in books on another glass-topped table. From the early to mid-1950s, they were members of the men-only ‘Thursday Club’, meeting for long, boozy lunches at a Soho restaurant. Stephen also drew Margaret, the Princess Royal. Unsurprisingly, many of these portraits were reportedly seized at the height of the scandal; although not, as legend would have it, by the Surveyor of Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt – soon to be exposed as a spy himself.

“I remember Stephen Ward as the coolest man I’d ever known,” Stephen Pound told the Daily Mail in 2020. “He wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, and I couldn’t believe anyone outside of Hollywood could do that and carry it off.  He may have been the son of a Torquay vicar but he had a clipped, upper-class accent and people said he’d had ‘a good war’, serving as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India … He told stories of his years working as an osteopath in America, too, with offhand air that made him seem so cosmopolitan. To me, he had the effortless charm of Cary Grant.”

Stephen put up a brave face, but as his trial wore on, that suave demeanour wore thin. Ronna Riccardo, a sex worker who admitted that police officers had coerced her into giving false evidence against Stephen, made the front page of the Evening Standard during his trial. In bold print, an alleged quote – ‘WHAT I DID AT WARD’S FLAT’ – dwarfs the sub-headline, ‘WARD CASE: The Surprise Recall of Miss Riccardo – She Tells of Life With Men.’

‘WARD – DEATH DRAMA OF HIS LETTER,’ reads a Sunday Mirror headline following his fatal overdose, also quoting from one of several suicide notes he sent to friends: ‘More than I can stand – the horror day after day in the streets.’ The accompanying photograph shows him smiling wanly from inside a car with his last girlfriend, singer Julie Gulliver. A comatose Ward languished in hospital for three days, with sister paper the Daily Mirror reporting on the trial’s culmination. ‘GUILTY: Ward Lived on Christine and Mandy – jury clear him of other charges.’ A photo of Stephen being carried from his home on a stretcher is sneeringly captioned, ‘THE SICK MAN.’ Keeler is also pictured, with a nod to her legal troubles: ‘She gets a writ.’

The Profumo Affair was a quintessentially English scandal, intriguing continental reporters. ‘Knowing Too Much is What “Got” Dr. Ward,’ Noir et Blanc speculated after his death, with rather less venom – and greater candour – than its British counterparts. The verdict that Ward lived off immoral earnings is now widely accepted as an historic miscarriage of justice, with Christine and Mandy among those whose reputations suffered from the fallout. In 2013, Geoffrey Robertson KC launched a bid for a posthumous legal pardon, supported by Ward’s nephew. However, the campaign ultimately stalled as the judge’s summing up of the case could not be retrieved.

Fionn Wilson’s dual portrait, ‘Christine and Stephen’ (2023), is new to this exhibition. Using heavy body acrylic paints, here the black-and-white newsprint bleeds onto the canvas, rescuing their humanity from the tabloid milieu, set against a sepia-brown background which suggests the discolouration of aged newspapers. Ward is “tight-lipped … looking away from us,” his thoughts elsewhere. Although impeccably suited and coiffed for his day in court, his flesh is pale and waxy, his eyes dull and strained. “I think at this point he knew it was all over for him,” Fionn writes. 

Whereas Ward’s mask has cracked, Keeler is luminescent. Her portrait is based on photographs taken during a press call at the Cannes Film Festival, where her manager was touting a biopic. “Originally, I started painting Christine and Stephen together on one canvas, but it didn’t feel right,” Fionn explains. “It felt as if they had to be painted separately, with their own boundaries.” Christine meets our gaze, startled but unbowed.

By 1963 they were barely on speaking terms, but she was devastated by Stephen’s death. He was old enough to have been her father, and their ‘complicated relationship’ has been characterised by some as ‘abusive and manipulative’, with Ward exploiting Keeler to further his own ‘shadowy agenda.’ Nonetheless, she understood their shared place in history.

Showgirl Extraordinaire

Wilson’s latest portrait is followed by one of her first, from 2014. Inspired by another image captured during the Cannes trip, ‘Christine 1963’ shows Keeler relaxed and laughing, brandishing a cigarette – in a carefree moment which encapsulates part of her legacy: not the ‘scarlet woman’, but a countercultural poster girl. However, these moments were rare as she braved a tide of moral censure and criminal punishment. “I painted this portrait very quickly with the resulting expressiveness of brush strokes,” Fionn writes. “I wanted to portray her as brazen and devil-may-care in the face of chaos. In reality, watching Christine in film footage from the time, there are moments where she appears to rebel against the judgement she faced, but mostly she seems meek and possesses a poise way beyond her years.”

The Keeler section proceeds with three paintings on an adjacent wall, each portraying her at different ages. Wilson’s ‘Christine Mesmerises’ (2017) uses a favourite close-up by Lewis Morley, adding pastel rings to the nocturnal palette. This painting is also featured on the cover of Pearl & Bone (2022), the debut collection by Welsh poet Mari Ellis Dunning, including ‘Flash,’ originally composed for Dear Christine, recalling the photo shoot at the Comedy Club in Soho.

If ‘Christine Mesmerises’ represents her magnetic beauty, then ‘Christine Keeler with her Cat’ (2017), shows her maternal side. Wilson’s final painting in this exhibition is based on a 1980 photograph, taken in the council flat on the World’s End estate in West London where Keeler lived as a single parent for most of that decade. “This was a time of real hardship for her and she hated living there,” Fionn comments. Christine is sitting in a loose-fitting dress, within a domestic space far removed from the nightclubs and courtrooms of 1963. And yet the dark, shoulder-length bob and winged eyeliner remind us of Morley’s model, with the cat on her lap mirroring her wary glance.

In-between Wilson’s smaller, intimate portraits is Sadie Lee’s ‘Scandalous’ (2018), a larger, confrontational work recreating the chair pose with Keeler in her final years. Drawing upon intrusive tabloid photographs, Lee shows a fully mature, indomitable woman peering skeptically through hooded eyes. While reporters invariably noted her physical decline – her legs are heavier, and dark hairs are visible on her plump arms – these ‘unflattering’ details evince the knowledge and strength acquired over time. Despite the artful illusion Morley created, the younger Christine refused to pose fully nude; and in Lee’s painting, her feet are clad in well-worn sandals. 

‘Christine Speaks’ (2017), is a series of three pencil drawings by Catherine Edmunds, displayed vertically. Keeler’s hair is cropped short, and her features are animated as she talks about her past, having left the monolithic Morley image behind. Chronologically, these portraits build a milestone between Wilson’s ‘Christine Keeler and Her Cat’ and Lee’s ‘Scandalous’. Edmunds based her drawings on screenshots from an interview Christine gave as part of the 1989 Channel 4 documentary, The Scandal Story, recounting “the struggle to make a TV programme of the events surrounding the Profumo Affair— frustrated and obstructed by, amongst others, the Independent Broadcasting Authority …”

In the public memory, however, Keeler was forever the vixen of 1963. Displayed horizontally – as if impeding her progress – Marguerite Horner’s 2017 series of oil paintings recreate the greyscale of press photographs and newsreel footage, with Christine shielding herself in dark glasses. ‘Police’ and ‘Paparazzi’ show her crowded between the social forces propelling her towards a quasi-biblical judgement, and in ‘Casting the First Stone’, she stands alone.

In Stella Vine’s acrylic painting, ‘Christine, burn, baby, burn’ (2012), she shelters in the darkness of a car, but the whiteness of her dress lures the baying hordes outside. A besuited man and bespectacled lady utter the titular curse in speech bubbles, while another woman stands dumbstruck between them. (‘Burn Baby Burn,’ a poem composed by Marvin X following the 1965 Los Angeles race riots, is a phrase commonly used in popular culture, and especially music.)

Caroline Coon is an artist, journalist and political activist who was personally acquainted with both Keeler and Pauline Boty. Her 2018 oil painting, ‘Christine Keeler: Anger, Blame, Shame, Ruin, Grief’ is inspired by both women. She pays homage to Boty’s prescient recognition of the Morley pose’s iconicity in ‘Scandal ’63,’ and recreates its grey panel of male players, set against a carnivalesque backdrop steeped in pagan Goddess mythology. Coon also devised and performed in a video installation, ‘I AM WHORE’ (2018), directed by Charlotte Metcalfe. The film begins with “an apologia to Christine Keeler who definitely did not want to be called a whore and who, like Everywoman, might have rejected being even obliquely associated with whores,” Caroline has explained. “Instead, I embody myself in the flesh and blood of whoredom. I take the viewer through the divisive socialisation imposed on women from childhood to old age …”

Cathy Lomax’s oil painting, ‘Welcome to the Sixties’ (2017), presents a fresh-faced Keeler, as if looking to the future while Profumo, Ward and others recede into the past. She is presented within a cameo, set against “a background of nostalgic post-war domesticity,” directing us towards two new portraits of Christine and her friend Mandy. Both came to London as teenagers, working side-by-side as showgirls at Murray’s Cabaret Club. Lomax’s paintings lead us into a dressing room or boudoir where the glamourous façade is created.

Another stage they performed on – Cliveden, where the girls often stayed in Stephen Ward’s guest cottage – is also hinted at obliquely. “Both canvases are underpainted with images of stately home interiors,” Lomax explains. “Although mostly obliterated by Keeler and Rice-Davies, small sections of the ornate decoration are still visible.” The vertically striped wallpaper of ‘Welcome to the Sixties’ turns horizontal as she contemplates herself in a gold-framed mirror. Her full face is visible in reflection, while we also see a more detailed view of her long brown hair from the back of her head. By contrast, Mandy is brisk and wary, her blonde hair piled high and viewed in a three-way mirror as she applies lipstick. Her image is a work in progress, monitored carefully through her own sharp eyes.

The paintings are named after two films of the British New Wave. Mandy’s portrait takes its name from John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving, a ‘kitchen sink drama’ based on the 1960 novel by Stan Barstow, and released in 1962, a year before the Profumo Affair erupted. Mandy bears a passing resemblance to the pretty blonde actress June Ritchie, who played a young woman forced into early marriage by an unplanned pregnancy. The film highlights “the restrictive nature of British society,” with the two protagonists reluctantly settling for less than the romantic ideal. Mandy, however, defied those expectations; in her case, the title heralds a new sexual frankness.

Lindsay Anderson’s If …. (1968), “a satirical drama set in a public school,” was a later product of British cinema’s New Wave. Christine’s ‘If’ portrait evokes her collision with the misbehaving upper classes. She even had a namesake of sorts in the film: Christine Noonan, playing a waitress known only as ‘The Girl.’ Her hair was longer and darker than Keeler’s, and she appears in a graphic sex scene with schoolboy Mick (Malcolm McDowell) before taking their shared rebellion to its nihilistic conclusion.

One of Keeler’s first newspaper front pages was for the Sunday Pictorial, in February 1963, with her smiling face illustrating a story on the Edgecombe trial (‘Model in ‘shoot to kill’ case’.) A month later, she sat on a sofa sipping tea in a pussy-bow blouse for a photo accompanying a Pictorial interview with Stephen (‘THE MODEL, M.I.5, THE RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT AND ME.’) By June, she was making headlines of her own: ‘WHAT CHRISTINE KEELER TOLD US ABOUT THAT NUCLEAR QUESTION’, the Sunday Mirror blasts. As in her February story for the Pictorial, she wears a turtle-neck sweater; but her smile is gone, and as in the Morley pose, her head rests on her hand.

Photos of Christine in Cannes covered magazines across Europe that summer, including Italy’s Cronaca. Her white sheath dress – also seen in Stella Vine’s painting – accentuates her porcelain complexion. For Noir et Blanc, ‘La Scandaleuse Christine’ sits coyly in a deckchair, with a sub-headline paraphrasing a song by Edith Piaf: ‘Laissez-Vous Faire … Milord.’ In November, as Keeler prepared for her perjury trial, a lookalike posed for Town magazine with Private Eye‘s ‘Britannia’ on her T-shirt, worn over blue jeans. The unidentified model’s expression is hidden behind dark glasses, but her provocative smirk is a far cry from the real Christine’s plight as 1963 drew to a close.

In 2018, Sadie Hennessy imprinted Keeler’s face onto three plates for her ‘Peach Lustre’ series, named after a pressed glass dinnerware range popular in the 1960s. The images show a nine-year-old, pig-tailed Christine, squinting in the sun; the aspiring teenage model, gazing dreamily upwards; and a close-up from the Morley pose, with hands clasped defensively against her cheeks. These ‘three ages’ span her early life.

For her ‘Synecdoche (Christine Keeler Cake)’ series, Hennessy decorated a cake with an image of Christine on the beach, which she laid on a gingham tablecloth; conjuring the staid, yet gossipy milieu of an English tearoom. She photographed the cake being cut up, with pieces of the image of Christine being served to guests, and the resulting Polaroids are displayed here. In contrast to the plate cameos, which hark back to a younger, more innocent Christine away from the spotlight, these images expose her body for public display, with knives provided to further dissect her. ‘Synecdoche’ is a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole, and Hennessy suggests that Keeler has been dehumanised, like a cake sliced for consumption. The series was inspired by a line from Christine’s 2001 memoir, The Truth at Last: “Everyone, even multimillionaires, wanted a piece of me, a piece of the action.”

‘Peach Lustre’ and ‘Synecdoche’ are displayed with items of ephemera and artistic tributes dating from the 1960s onwards. In August 1963, Fool Britannia – a satirical show starring Peter Sellers, Anthony Newley, and Joan Collins – was recorded live in New York, and later released on vinyl. A 2019 CD reissue includes bonus selections from ITV’s That Was the Week That Was; and ‘My Name is Christine,’ a novelty record which earned a BBC ban. This was followed in 1964 by another comedy album, That Affair, with Barry Fantoni’s cover art showing Keeler lying on a four-poster bed, with a judge’s wig hanging on a nearby chair. On the album sleeve, Fantoni’s drawing of Stephen in an artist’s smock is captioned ‘Hall of Fame.’

A founder member of seminal New York rock band The Fugs, Naphtali ‘Tuli’ Kupferberg also self-published underground comics during this period. The Christine Keeler Colouring Book (1964) parades the Profumos, Mandy, Macmillan, and Wilson; and other world figures, like President Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khruschev. In mimicry of the ‘yellow press’, the pamphlet is subtitled ‘…a Cautionary Tale,’ with a photo of Christine in her cabaret costume on the back cover captioned ‘Keeler for Queen.’

In 1986, the Brazilian post-punk band Divergência Socialista released an album, Christine Keeler, with an alternate pose from the Lewis Morley shoot. (The same image had been invoked by the art collective, Situationist International, in 1964, as a political statement on Denmark’s royal family.)

Lead singer Silma Bijoux O’Hara explained how Christine inspired the album:

The title of the tape Christine Keeler is due to Marcelo Dolabela’s passion for Christine’s rare beauty. Marcelo was Divergência Socialista’s leader. Christine Keeler was his all-time muse. Since Marcelo was a communist, he was enchanted by Christine’s involvement with Eugene Ivanov, a Russian military attaché, during the cold war, which caused the end of her relationship with Profumo. Marcelo was fascinated by the plot of intrigues and mystery involving her life.

‘Christine Keeler’ is also the title of a 1994 single by English pop-punk band Senseless Things, and the first track from their final album, Taking Care of Business. A blue-toned press photo of Christine graces the cover, with her name scrawled in ink. “I know I’ll see you later/Wearing high heeled shoes,” the song begins. “Can I take that hairpin/And some uppers and blues …” In the chorus, the band alludes to Keeler’s vilification (“Beat me ‘til I’m blue and black/Giving me the flak”), and fuses her name with the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, who murdered thirteen women during the late 1970s (“Puritans are coming back/Try another tack/Christian killer’s coming back …”)

During the 1960s, the Havana brand produced a series of wooden cigar boxes, with labels illustrating famous (and infamous) women from history. These figures ranged from the biblical Eve and Cleopatra to Lucretia Borgia and Eva Peron. One label shows Keeler with newly fringed hair and a mischievous grin, based on press photos taken after her first marriage in 1965. (Ironically, she was then living as an ordinary housewife in Middlesex with her husband, an engineer, and their baby son Jimmy.)

A more recent example of how Christine’s image continues to pervade everyday life comes in a set of two hand-painted figurines, part of a limited-edition series from Peggy Davies Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent, ‘the heart of the potteries.’ Although based on the risqué Morley photograph, these nostalgic likenesses would not seem out of place on a suburban mantelpiece, alongside Toby jugs and Lladro shepherdesses.

Keeler has also inspired tributes from fashion designers, and the Morley picture is reprinted in Warholesque multiples on a pink hooded sweater, labelled ‘Legless Horse by Hope and Glory.’ The colour pink is associated with traditional femininity, but has also been favoured by punk icons and the feminist movement (particularly in this bold neon shade of ‘shocking pink’.)

One of the most piquant items of Sixties ephemera is a girl’s doll with red hair and a Keeler-esque style, homemade from a U.S. publication, Mary Maxim Teenage Doll Book. The doll on the cover sports a Chanel-style suit and a helmet bob similar to Jacqueline Kennedy’s. Christine made great efforts in her appearance at court, resembling a slightly racier version of America’s First Lady. The sheepskin jacket she wore frequently at this time has been recreated for the doll in a shiny, black fabric with a fluffy white trim – rather like the PVC raincoats popularised by British designer Mary Quant and seen on young women on every high street. It is worn over a belted teal chemise dress. All that’s missing are Christine’s stiletto heels, leaving the doll barefoot like singer Sandie Shaw, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967 with ‘Puppet on a String’.

As part of a day-long symposium for Scandal ’63 Revisited – held at Leicester Gallery on April 14, 2023 – historian Melanie Williams charted Christine and Mandy’s sartorial impact, breaking down the barriers between aspirational elegance and an emerging, youth-driven street style.

As British women’s fashion underwent a significant transition to a new silhouette and style in the 1960s, the highly publicised and abundantly photographed Profumo trials offered a very visible platform for showcasing this emergent style of female dress, worn by Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. In this small but significant aspect of the ‘affair’, young women were able to exercise a modicum of agency and control over their public image, and in turn act as ambivalent fashion icons of their era, imitated and admired from the 1960s to this day.

Also prominent among those collected keepsakes is a scrapbook of unknown provenance, with Keeler’s outline carefully cut out from 1960s magazine photos, and pasted onto blue matte paper. Her very first appearance in print was clipped from the March 22, 1958 issue of TitBits; the same family-friendly, if slightly risqué weekly that later put Mariella Novotny on its cover. At sweet sixteen, this ‘Girl of the Week’ sits smiling in a cumbersome black bikini. ‘HER PET HOBBY: Cat-Sitting,’ the caption reads. Her love of animals endured: in the final years of her life, she volunteered for the Cats’ Protection League.

At the back of the gallery’s central space is another small room, nicknamed the ‘inner sanctum.’ And here, a headdress worn by Keeler at Murray’s Cabaret Club takes pride of place. Designed for the nightly revue, ‘Arabian Rhapsody,’ the headdress consists of a fan-like silver framework encrusted with paste jewellery in blue and red. “There is Pathé footage from 1961 of the girls dancing this routine, dressed as harem inmates and Sultans,” Benjamin Levy writes in Murray’s Cabaret Club: Discovering Soho’s Secret (2019.) “If you squint at the grainy footage, a girl resembling Christine Keeler […] dances in the back row.”

“Working at Murray’s left you in an unreal world,” Christine remembered. “At night-time you entered this fantasy place, where the rich and famous queued for your attention; the days were an endless series of dinner and party invitations, and the social life was truly amazing. It was only after I left Murray’s and returned to the real world that I realised the strange underground fantasy life I had been leading.” She was photographed in costume by Kenneth Bandy, and the image inspired Dameon Priestly’s painting, ‘Ode on a Murray’s Headdress: An illustrated poem’ (2023.) The ensemble included a bejewelled cape and thong, and three original sketches by designer Michael Bronze are also featured in this exhibition.

In Bandy’s photograph, Keeler’s arms were draped in bracelets and folded across her chest, her legs closed together. In Priestly’s painting, however, she stands with hands on hips and her head defiantly raised. She poses in front of a splash of red paint, and the silvery glow of her flesh blends with the costume. To her left is the plaque outside the Beak Street nightclub, under which the phrase ‘TIMES WERE ONCE GOOD’ is typed (the last line from Stephen’s suicide note.) On the right is a white tablecloth strewn with glass rings, and fragments of verse scrawled onto club cards. “My intention was to capture the adulation of Christine experienced by an audience member,” Priestly explains, adding that he painted her in black and white “to reinforce the suggestion of it being a memory.”

The five stanzas are taken from a 2021 poem by Steve Chibnall, ‘Ode on a Murray’s Headdress (with apologies to John Keats).’ A parody of the Romantic poet’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), it also evokes William Hogarth’s sketches of 18^th century London in all its squalor and splendour.

Thou ravished bride of tabloid history
Thou foster-child of men’s estate
Can this exotic relic solve the mystery
Of what brought the wearer to her fate?

Elsewhere in Christine’s inner sanctum is a small print of the Lewis Morley photograph, signed in her own hand, clear and neat as a schoolgirl’s. And in the corner of the room is an original Arne Jacobsen chair (the one in Morley’s studio was a cheaper imitation.) More personal items are displayed on a glass-topped table, including a driving licence registered on the auspicious date of November 5^th 1963, with her given address of 30 Linhope Street, NW1. She also bought a home for her mother with the News of the World payout. A 1971 passport shows her name handwritten as ‘Christine Margaret Platt’ (her legal name during her second marriage), but the face on the passport photo is unmistakably Keeler’s.

The most intimate artefacts, however, are the handwritten letters Christine sent to her mother and stepfather from Holloway Prison. “Don’t worry, I’m fine, in fact it’s just like being back at school, and there is a girl I went to school with,” she reassured them in December 1963.  “I am only young and should start on a career of some sort seeing my name is well known,” she added, ahead of her release in March 1964. “I might as well carry on with it and make us lots of money ha! ha!”

Introducing Mandy

If Keeler was the face (and body) of the Profumo Affair, Mandy Rice-Davies was its mouthpiece. This “bubbly party girl,” as Steve Chibnall characterises her, was only nineteen years old in 1963 (Christine was twenty-one.) Who can forget the precise moment when, in the witness box at the Old Bailey, Mandy responded to Lord Astor’s denial that he had slept with her: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

This immortal aphorism is typed in a retro-style Courier font on the right side of Dameon Priestly’s eponymous 2016 painting. As with his ‘Ode on a Murray’s Headdress,’ it’s painted in black and white, rather like the wire photos telegraphed by agencies to the press, with its vintage indicated by splashes of muddy colour seeping through this ‘memory painting.’

Point and shoot 35mm SLR cameras became more widely used in the late 50s early 60s by reporters. Their results captured the immediacy and speed of change of the time. Fleeting fame was captured at higher speeds afforded by those cameras …We see black borders as in a negative frame, we see high contrast in the black and white style of the subjects. There is colour bleed caused by accidents in developing and lens flare colour changes in seemingly random but abstracted ways. The typewriter fonts remind us that not everything was moving so fast and that various scandals were all and only to be found in the newspapers of the day.

Mandy is shown in profile with a blonde updo, swigging champagne from the bottle. At the nadir of Stephen Ward’s trial, she attended the opening night of his Bloomsbury exhibition. In Priestly’s painting, her youthful insouciance forms a protective ring around Ward. It was originally commissioned as part of Priestly’s ‘Reel to Reel’ collection, depicting “certain ‘luminaries’ … all swimming round and round in the same stagnant pool … [during] the heady summer of 1963 – which saw the Krays being acquitted, the Great Train Robbery and of course – the Profumo Affair … [and] the government’s attempts to retain a semblance of order in the face of upheaval and in the full view of the public witnessing an entertaining chaos.”

The first of three new paintings by Sal Jones, ‘l’Irresistible’ (2022), takes its name from the French release of Mandy’s musical debut. Her name is spelled out in shades of lilac, green and pink, while stage lights turn her hair to candyfloss. One of four titles on this 1964 E.P. – ‘a good man is hard to find’ – appears below, and the use of lower-case lettering emphasises her buoyant charm. Jones has inscribed the initials ‘MRDA’ onto Mandy’s choker. The phrase ‘Mandy Rice-Davies Applies’ refers to her famous words in court (also noted in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations), and “is used to this day … to imply someone is lying to protect their own interests.”

“The media filmed an interview with Mandy in the airport lounge when she returned to the U.K. after a singing and cabaret tour of Germany in February 1964,” Sal writes. “‘Arrival’ (2023) captures her mid sentence, emphasises the distortion of the film footage and uses an invented colour palette.” A murky blend of green, brown and yellow casts an unearthly glow around the open-mouthed Mandy, as the ticker-tape news caption scatters at the edges of the screen. By using a screen-grab, Jones captures something more than a pretty face; and yet Mandy’s words are lost to us.

“The painting composition of ‘No Regrets’ (2023) is a montage of images taken from TV news coverage of Mandy’s death from cancer in 2014,” Sal explains. These images are mounted on a black screen with a pause button and a red line showing the clip ending its runtime, the grainy archival frames digitally reset. At top left we see one of the final images of Mandy Rice-Davies, smart and sober, yet still recognisably the blonde of 1963. The text running along the top is mostly obscured, except for the word ‘model’ and a tabloid-style logo in red and white. Set below this older, wiser woman is her younger self, in a feathered hat; and to the right is a screen-capture of her in a turtle-necked dress, with lips puckered as she entertains hidden reporters. The central image shows Mandy gazing upwards serenely as flashbulbs pop around her. Her dates of birth and death (1944-2014) are typed below.

In April 1963, Mandy had planned to join Christine in Spain; she was arrested at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of forging a driving licence. The magistrate set bail at an exorbitant £2,000, and Mandy was held in Holloway Prison, and grilled by detectives investigating Stephen Ward. Although she initially refused to co-operate, nine days of grim isolation wore her down. She was freed with a £42 fine and flew to Majorca, hoping to join Christine. Returning a few days later under threat of extradition, she was arrested again on the trumped-up charge of stealing a television set, which was dropped after she reluctantly agreed to testify against Ward.

Police coercion was one of many pressures endured by Mandy, Christine and the other women implicated in the Profumo Affair. They also had to fend off tabloid scrutiny and public attacks. On July 2^nd, the Daily Mirror juxtaposed a more serious spy story (‘“THIRD MAN” PHILBY – A NEW MI5 SHOCK’), with yet another update on Mandy’s travel plans. Wearing a pink straw hat and clutching a cuddly toy lion, she entertained the press at Heathrow, refusing to comment on reports that she had snubbed Lord Denning’s request for an interview. Instead, she regaled them with a tongue-in-cheek quip: “I am notorious. I will go down in history as another Lady Hamilton.”

The editors of Private Eye were among those who appreciated Mandy’s wicked wit, and she was pictured on the cover of their July 26^th issue. A smiling Mandy is shown at the glass outer door of her parents’ Solihull home, with a typed speech bubble poking fun at public indignation: ‘Do you mind? If it wasn’t for me – you couldn’t have cared less about Rachman.’ Her deceased boyfriend was a notorious slum landlord in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, where riots had erupted in 1958 after the murder of a Caribbean man at the hands of a racist white mob.

In August, Cronaca put Mandy on their cover, with the caption ‘THE LATEST PHOTO FROM MANDY.’ While readers drooled over Mandy in her baby-doll nightdress, the editors pontificated: “While Mr. Ward’s trial is in progress and all of London is blushing over the ‘Profumo Scandal’”, they sniffed, this latest photograph of Mandy Rice-Davies – taken in the last few days – shows that even the judges can no longer instil fear. ʻOnce you’ve made it,’ the beautiful Mandy seems to say, ‘Who cares how you got there?’ And her costume is one more sign of decadent morals.” On the back page, it’s noted that the girls were pelted with eggs when arriving at court, but Christine “still found time to bare her legs for photographers.”

Clearly, sexual hypocrisy was as rampant in Rome as in London. But by early 1964, Mandy was leveraging notoriety into a career. Photographed by Terence Donovan for Town magazine’s March issue, she posed in a sumptuous Georgian gown as the lusty heroine of Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Following Penguin Books’ recent victory in the Lady Chatterley trial, an uncensored version of John Cleland’s erotic novel (banned for over 200 years) had resurfaced. The publishers lost their case, but after a landmark 1966 Supreme Court decision in the U.S., Fanny Hill would soon be liberated.

Vague plans to cast Mandy in a big-screen adaptation fell flat, but the magazine layout shows her preparing her disguise in a dressing-room, and riding in a horse and carriage. This latter image reminds me of the opening chapter from Vanity Fair (1848), when Becky Sharp tossed her old school Bible from a carriage window. Like William Thackeray’s anti-heroine, Mandy was more pragmatic than libidinous, writing in her eponymous 1980 memoir: “My life has been one long descent into respectability.”

The U.K. version of her 1964 EP, Introducing Mandy, was released on the Ember Records label, with a dreamy outtake from L’Irresistible on the sleeve. Its most memorable track was a cover of Dinah Washington’s 1959 hit, ‘You’ve Got What it Takes’, with Mandy’s slight but peppy vocal burnished by Arthur Greenslade’s lounge orchestration. The perfect soundtrack for a night at Murray’s, Introducing Mandy was soon forgotten amid the clamour of the Beatles and the Stones.

While pop stardom eluded her, Mandy had already proved herself a canny survivor. Her musical venture was shadowed by a mini-memoir, The Mandy Report. This title –  poking fun at Lord Denning’s drier tome – appears in bold print over an orange background, and is stamped ‘EXCLUSIVE.’ Mandy sits cross-legged on a bed in a black lace corset and heels, flanked by her own panel of famous faces (including rumoured celebrity conquests Robert Mitchum and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr.) The U.S. release, My Life and Lovers, showed Mandy in a black cocktail dress.

Vice Girls, Ltd.

The Christine Keeler Affair – also known as The Christine Keeler Story, or simply The Keeler Affair – was cooked up in the spring of 1963, and was originally to star Keeler herself. After the actor’s union Equity denied her membership, the part was recast with another British actress, Yvonne Buckingham, best-known for Sapphire (1959), in which she had briefly appeared as the eponymous model whose murder exposes racial tensions, in a London-set crime story.

A fair likeness for Christine – as shown in an Austrian promotional still, captioned Ich, Christine Keeler – Buckingham’s promising career stalled after censors denied The Keeler Affair a U.K. release. Nonetheless, the film would open in Washington D.C. in November 1963, with the European rollout launched in Copenhagen a month later. The blackboard-style poster art showed Yvonne recreating Lewis Morley’s chair pose, with a quote from Christine endorsing ‘The True Story of My Life,’ as verified by her facsimile signature. (She also appeared as herself in an introductory sequence.)

A set of Italian lobby cards (or ‘fotobuste’) depicts scenes in black and white against a shocking pink background. In these images, Buckingham interacts with co-stars Alicia Brandet (as Mandy) and John Drew Barrymore – a minor scion of Hollywood royalty – as Stephen. A racy still of Buckingham wearing a dog collar on its front page made the front page of a French newspaper, Paris Jour, and then reappeared in a U.S. promotional pull-out, inviting moviegoers to watch ‘the film banned in England!’ Some twenty years later, a VHS edition replaced Buckingham’s version of the Morley pose with Christine’s original.

In his lecture for the Scandal ’63 Revisited symposium – entitled ‘The Profumo Affair in Popular Culture’, based on a 2016 essay for the academic journal, Contemporary British History – film historian Richard Farmer discussed The Keeler Affair in depth. He has also written about the film’s ‘political censorship’ for the Journal of British Cinema and Television.

Whilst it would be an exaggeration to suggest that The Keeler Affair was central to the turbulent events of 1963, the film does work to neatly concretise some of the more contentious elements of the affair, most importantly in terms of the media’s insistent coverage of the story, the ways in which cultural entrepreneurs sought to exploit the scandal and some of its protagonists for financial gain, and the supposed moral implications of Keeler gaining fame and fortune from her role in the scandal and her involvement with the film.

Treading a thin line between artsy pretension and tabloid exposé, The Keeler Affair retains a certain curiosity value. The same cannot be said for Vice Girls, Ltd., an obscure American B-movie which beat it to the punch in September 1964. Penned by the prolific ‘sexploitation’ producer Jerry Gross, the film starred Linda Bennett as Christine and Milton Carlyle as Ivanoff. The other characters were given pseudonyms, with Mandy renamed ‘Jackie’ and Stephen as ‘Nolan,’ played by the brother of film star Montgomery Clift.

Whereas The Keeler Affair emphasised the story’s newsworthiness – hailing it as ‘The Scandal of the Century’ – Vice Girls, Ltd. went for the jugular (‘The Scandal That Rocked Britain!’) The film’s poster art befits the tagline: ‘Like the sweet sting of a muted whip, it will leave you limp and wanting more!’ The pressbook shows another bedroom scene, with a scantily-clad blonde clutching a rose, while a masked man leans over her. (This sequence may have been inspired by one of Mariella Novotny’s infamous sex parties.) On the next page is a collage of U.S. headlines at the height of the scandal –‘V-Girl Tells of Sex Whippings in Dr. Weird’s Apartment,’ reads one.

The film proved less memorable than its garish publicity, as critic Hal Erickson observed on the AllMovie website.

An early-‘60s skin flick, Vice Girls Ltd. has only minimal entertainment value when seen today. Brooks Clift plays a nasty pimp who lords it over a harem of call girls. Should one of the ladies complain about her treatment, she ends up seriously dead, or at least battered and bruised. Worse still, the pimp is ‘untouchable’ so far as the cops are concerned: that’s because he’s running a lucrative blackmail racket involving several of the local pillars of society. The production company responsible for this one was called Artscope: who were they kidding?

A quarter of a century had passed, and Britain was once again under Tory rule, when the most successful cinematic recreation of the Profumo Affair emerged. Initially conceived as a television series, Scandal (1989) was partly funded by Robert Maxwell, a former Labour MP turned proprietor of the Daily Mirror, who would die by drowning in 1991, whilst embroiled in a tangled web of political and financial scandals. At the heart of the film was the rise and fall of Stephen Ward, memorably played by John Hurt. A Noirish quad poster shows him in a trenchcoat, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and a neon-lit Piccadilly Circus in the background. His sultry cohorts are shown via insets, with the tagline, ‘In 1960 Christine Keeler met Mandy Rice-Davies. Three years later they brought down the British government.’

The North American rights to Scandal were purchased by Miramax, an upcoming independent company headed by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Joanne Whalley-Kilmer recalls being pressurised by Harvey to appear fully nude in the scene recreating Keeler’s first meeting with Profumo by the swimming pool at Cliveden. She stood her ground, and a body double was ultimately used. The film’s international popularity triggered the rise of Miramax, continuing until 2017, when when the fury over his arrest on multiple charges of sexual abuse, assault and rape ignited the #MeToo movement. (The disgraced producer is now serving a 39-year prison sentence in the U.S.)

In an echo of The Keeler Affair, Joanne recreated Christine’s Morley pose for the film’s most recognisable artwork. The full-colour illustration is shown on a small cardboard cutout, with a quote from The Sun’s review: ‘IT WOULD BE A SCANDAL TO MISS IT.’ A large standee, displayed in cinema foyers, shows Keeler herself. Scandal’s soundtrack album – featuring Dusty Springfield’s ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’ – was released in various editions, with some showing the original photo, and others the homage. Colour lobby cards suggest Christine’s double life as she rides in a car with Profumo (Ian McKellen), and in a different scene, smokes a joint at a Notting Hill blues party. Another lobby card, in black and white, shows Mandy (Bridget Fonda) posing among Stephen’s portraits. An alternate poster highlights one of the film’s most iconic sequences – when the dynamic duo apply make-up (or warpaint) to the beat of The Shadows’ ‘Apache,’ in preparation for a wild night out – set against a crimson background.

Following the publication of Christine’s autobiography in 2001, playwright Gill Adams was commissioned to adapt it for the stage. Keeler first opened at the Gatehouse in Highgate, North London, in 2007, and toured regional venues across the UK for four years before being relaunched at the Charing Cross Theatre in 2013. The play’s title implies that Christine’s last name alone could carry the show. In a poster for the revival the lead actress replicates the Morley pose, but her face is overlaid by the title. Christine was initially played by Alice Coulthard, with Sarah Armstrong joining the second run. However, Keeler’s real star – who also produced and directed the show – was Paul Nicholas (best-known for his role in the 1980s TV sitcom Just Good Friends), playing Stephen Ward.

Christine’s former mentor inspired Stephen Ward, a £2.5 million West End extravaganza, which opened at the Aldwych Theatre in December 2013. Conceived by musical impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber, with a script by Christopher Hampton, its credentials were further boosted when Mandy Rice-Davies was hired as a consultant adviser. (Sadly, she would pass away in 2014, aged 70, after a short battle with cancer.)

Lloyd-Webber, himself a Tory peer, even backed the campaign to pardon Stephen. There is some irony in his belated acceptance by the new establishment, some fifty years after his suicide. Nonetheless, the show opened to mixed reviews and folded after just four months. Chiefly remembered as a minor note in Lloyd-Webber’s illustrious career, its central focus on Ward failed to resonate with contemporary audiences.

Nonetheless, the libretto and cast recording have both been released commercially, thus preserving Stephen Ward: The Musical for posterity. Artwork for the production showed the lead actors in black-and-white text against a red background, set off with bold-print text. Charlotte Spencer, who played Christine, looks out defiantly with hands on hip, with Alexander Hanson peering from behind Ward’s Ray-Bans, and a steely-eyed Charlotte Blackledge (as Mandy) bringing up the rear in a white mini-dress and blonde bouffant.

The scandal was tentatively explored in ‘Mystery Man,’ a 2017 episode of the Netflix drama series, The Crown. In addition to the figures of Profumo and Keeler, the show reimagined the Queen’s discovery of her husband’s acquaintance with Ward, and the fall of Macmillan’s government. And that October – a month after the Weinstein scandal broke, and less than two months before Christine died, aged 75 – the BBC announced plans for a six-part series, The Trial of Christine Keeler.

Six years in the making, Amanda Coe’s drama prioritises the women of the Profumo Affair: Keeler (Sophie Cookson); Mandy (Ellie Bamber); and Valerie Profumo (Emilia Fox.) Its title harks back to Ludovic Kennedy’s well-regarded 1964 book, The Trial of Stephen Ward – in which, by contrast, women were mere bit players – and with six hour-long episodes, the show examines its subject at greater length than any prior production. As before, though, Ward overshadows Christine. James Norton’s performance is winningly abject; but although the injustice of Stephen’s ordeal is rightly emphasised, the darker aspect of his nature – and, crucially, his manipulation of young women – fail to register.

However, scenes exploring Christine’s fraught relationship with her mother (Amanda Drew) and a belated reconciliation with her estranged father (Neil Morrissey) enable Cookson to add more depth to Keeler’s backstory. Crucially, the drama does not end with Ward’s suicide; but instead, in its last episode, explores Christine’s subsequent trial, imprisonment and release. Her photo session with Lewis Morley (Thomas Nelstrop) is also reconstructed, and in a brilliant final scene, Keeler returns to the nightlife of London’s West End amid the rock ‘n’ roll explosion of 1964, shedding her sheepskin jacket and dancing alone to The Kinks’ breakthrough hit, ‘You Really Got Me.’

Attention is also paid to minor players like Ronna Riccardo (Charlene Boyd), whose integrity shines through in a court scene; and a House of Commons intervention by the Labour MP Barbara Castle (Buffy Davis.) Anthony Welsh and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett bring nuance to their roles as Lucky Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, eschewing tired racial stereotypes.

Costume designer Pam Downes recreates Christine and Mandy’s fashions adeptly, as seen in a sequence based on well-known photographs of the pair in a car during Ward’s trial. Ellie Bamber captures Mandy’s quick wit, and the growing gulf with Keeler is also enacted. In a reversal of their actual fates, however, Christine’s redemption comes at Mandy’s expense; after a strong start, Bamber’s role is reduced to familiar tropes of a shallow, gold-digging ‘dumb blonde’.

As the show premiered in December 2019 – bridging the end of a decade with the dawning of the next – a Radio Times cover story showed Cookson and Norton posing wanly together against a backdrop of newspaper front pages. Cookson’s red, sleeveless sheath dress recalls Charlotte Spencer’s in posters for Stephen Ward: The Musical, and Cookson is seen wearing the same dress in the cover art for the DVD release.

Screenwriter Amanda Coe discussed the challenge of reclaiming the story’s female perspective in ‘Christine Keeler Speaks,’ a 2018 essay for a book accompanying the Dear Christine exhibition (reprinted in the catalogue for Scandal ’63 Revisited.)

One of the most exciting moments in all my research came when I finally read the transcript of a taped interview with Christine from 1963. The transcript exists because it was used as evidence in the perjury trial that sent Christine to prison, for lying in a previous trial that was engineered to pressure her into lying at the trial of Stephen Ward. (You certainly couldn’t make it up, even if Christine sometimes did). By her own admission, she was worse for wear as the microphone listened. The voice that comes off the typewritten pages is unfiltered, working class, teenage and chaotic. Most poignantly and emblematically, Christine makes this boast: ‘I’m photogenic. I look much better in pictures than what I look in real life.’

Vulnerable Memory

Scandal ’63 Revisited closed on April 15th, but a 96-pp softcover catalogue is available from the gift shop at Leicester Gallery. Three months later, the 60th anniversary of the Profumo scandal is still making headlines, from the pages of nostalgia magazine Yours Retro to the U.S. online newsletter, Airmail, where Calder Walton compared Ivanov’s attempted ‘honeytrap’ to Vladmir Putin’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election, quoting an archive report compiled by U.K. secret services investigating Ward et al. And in A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-1965 – the fifth volume of his acclaimed series, ‘A New Jerusalem’ – the British historian David Kynaston considered the human cost of the affair.

Over half a century on, and whatever one’s take on moral decline or otherwise, it is hard to make out a revisionist case for the Profumo scandal as an uplifting passage in our island story. A minister who lied to colleagues, then to Parliament, before getting off quite lightly; the popular press on a prurient, sensationalist, conscience-free rampage; a young woman exploited and trashed; a scapegoat identified and trapped; a show trial at the Old Bailey; a life ended early; the whitewash of a report.

British author Vanessa Holburn, whose previous subjects include the Amritsar Massacre to the Holocaust, will publish a new book, The Profumo Affair, in early 2024. Perhaps the closest in spirit to Scandal ’63 Revisited – and an indicator of its enduring European flavour – is Une Romance Anglaise (2022), a graphic novel by French author Jean-Luc Fromental and American ex-pat illustrator Miles Hyman. The cover art shows Christine with Stephen and Mandy amid the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus. This cosmopolitan image exudes nostalgia for the myths of Swinging London.

“Sixty years may have passed, but remarkably, the Profumo Affair has not lost its dangerous edge and many of its secrets remain locked away from public scrutiny,” co-curator Steve Chibnall writes in ‘Paint, Power and Peccadillos,’ an essay for the catalogue accompanying Scandal ’63 Revisited (available from Leicester Gallery.) Citing the “reimagining of Christine Keeler as feminist icon” and the new artworks it has produced – as well as a legal campaign to clear her name – Chibnall argues that beyond recording these historic events, the exhibition also demonstrates how “the cultural reaction to an historical event is able to track changes in contemporary gender relationships.”

Art, secrecy, and revelation have been essential ingredients in the Profumo Affair … Scandal ’63 Revisited emphasises revelation and gives visitors the opportunity to trace the relationship between the historical event … and the practice of cultural production … Visitors are also invited to consider how the meaning of history is contested over time, is subject to prevailing worldviews and power structures, the role that art can play in supporting or subverting dominant understandings, and the enduring aura of the original artefact in an age of digital reproduction.

Hugo Worthy, Arts Curator at Leicester Gallery, explores the challenges of this dualistic approach in his own essay, ‘Vulnerable Memory.’

Exhibiting archival material and contemporary portraits together, to thread out new narratives around Keeler and her history, is a balancing act for the curators … Wilson and Chibnall are acutely aware that a project of this kind adds additional layers to the existing mythologies around Christine. The exhibition is built as a portrait in itself, and perhaps its subject matter is as much the impossibility of showing a ‘real’ Keeler, the Christine that her son Seymour knew, and the pathos of the exhibition is that, in its attempts to share or talk to the lived experience of this iconic woman, it knowingly falls short. It creates a better, more sympathetic reading of Keeler, richer in understanding and empathy, but as with all portraits, there is always a distance between subject and image. It becomes the fundamental unknowability of Christine, despite the interpretations that bring us closer than before, that provides the power of the exhibition.

The death of Stephen Ward on August 3, 1963, brought his ordeal to a tragic climax, but for the other main players – and especially Christine Keeler – their trials were just beginning. Published in June 2023, the memoir of Labour MP Wes Streeting – One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up – reveals a family connection to Keeler, as Streeting’s grandmother Libby Crowley befriended her in prison.

Nan was so ashamed that she never discussed her conviction, but my understanding is that because she refused to cooperate with the police and their inquiries about Grandad, they pinned a stolen radio on her and it landed her a custodial sentence.

This version of events is supported by the account of the woman with whom Nan shared her cell in Holloway prison. For a time, Christine Keeler had been one of the most famous women in the world, having found herself at the centre of the Profumo affair, a scandal that rocked the British establishment. She had received a nine-month sentence for perjury in December 1963, and her memoir refers to her time in prison with Nan, ‘a good friend … in for helping her burglar husband’.

Nan was not only doing time on account of Grandad, but was also pregnant and would give birth to her third child ‘inside’. That daughter was my mother, Corrina Anne Crowley, born in 1964 at the Whittington hospital in Islington.

Streeting’s story touches upon the burden of shame carried by women in prison, and how relationships often led them into criminality. In a recent blog post, ‘Prisoner number 7904 Keeler’, Seymour Platt updated supporters on the campaign to clear his mother’s name. “I am hopeful that this journey to prove that my mother should not have gone to prison is nearing its end,” he writes, quoting from his most recent email to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) regarding the lasting trauma his mother suffered.

As I grew up my mother would tell me, and particularly the people around me, like my friends, my wife… that she should never had gone to prison but she found it so hard to articulate why, to her it was so complex with so many characters but what we now see in the material we have provided is that it was simple – she pleaded guilty when she was not guilty, and she deserves to be exonerated. In her will she asked me to tell the truth about her life. I know that she was once famous and involved in a great scandal, but she told that story herself. She wanted somebody to tell this story of her innocence. I hope you will agree.