Frigging in the changes

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.       — Brian Aldiss, Hothouse

Philip Larkin once said, “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three.” To which Christine Keeler, ever more knowing in such matters, would retort: “Nonsense.”

In her autobiography, The Truth At Last, which is not only her telling of her life leading up to the events that erupted into not only the most salacious headline of early ‘60s London just as it was about to swing and brought the ruling Conservative government to its knees (arguably, not literally for the first time), but also the terrible human damage it left in its wake.

Not even 20 years old, Keeler had embarked on an affair with a Moscow agent and John Profumo, Britain’s War Minister, both in the same week just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was about to erupt and the Berlin Wall was about to go up. She was already deeply embroiled in a seedy underworld of debauched aristocrats who would dine with a huge plastic penis as a set piece in their stately homes, of double agents even at the highest levels of British intelligence and gangsters who held their turf with not only guns and goons, but knives and axes. Needless to say, it was a highly volatile time; a period that seemed to run riot towards oblivion, but instead only accelerated England’s evolution towards the change in the latter half of the decade with the Beatles, the sexual revolution and the Summer of Love. 

“It was in this atmosphere — hemlines going up, inhibitions coming down, promiscuity being promoted as mandatory rather optional — that I innocently wandered into a den of spooks and spies, of men and women on both sides of the Iron Curtain who were operating as much for their own self-interest as for that of the mandarins in Moscow, Washington and London,” writes Keeler.

So, the times they were a-changing. But it was, as she points out, taking place even before Dylan sang those words, but from within the manors of the privileged, the powerful and the famous — its apotheosis being the Oval Office itself. She of course was not innocent, which she herself admits in the book several times. Foolish, yes, maybe; but certainly not innocent — at least not in sexual matters.

“I think I was one of the most moral women of that particular, frenzied decade,” writes Keeler. “I enjoyed sex and I indulged in it when I fancied the men, but I was no hypocrite. It was the others who were disguising their peccadilloes in dinner jackets, diamonds and evening dresses, indulging in weird fantasies. Public probity was just another mask worn by many in the Establishment.”

Her entry into this world was via a charismatic, older man named Stephen Ward, an osteopath whose clientele included many important names in British politics and society. He was also a gifted artist who sketched portraits of the Royal Family. Apparently, he was also a spy for the Kremlin, running a complicated operation, which included other well-known double agents such as Anthony Blunt and, allegedly, the head of MI5 itself, Roger Hollis. (The latter would also be implicated by esteemed journalist Chapman Pincher in his book Their Trade Is Treachery, whose publication impelled even Margaret Thatcher to say, of his guilt, that “it was impossible to prove the negative.”)

Although her life has been made into a movie (Scandal, 1989) and the photograph of her sitting naked in that chair has become as iconic of that period as perhaps any of Twiggy’s fashion spreads or Richard Lester’s film A Hard Day’s Night, there is undoubtedly still much in her book to shock even the most jaded of 21st-century palates, such as the photographic pursuits of a Hollywood movie star (with Keeler and company, or even a duchess) that would make even Hayden Kho blush. Or of an unnamed aristocrat who wore only a mask and a tiny apron and asked to be whipped if the other guests were not pleased with his “services.” (According to one source Keeler cites in the book, “He liked being humiliated in front of people he considered his equals.”)

But, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, it’s not necessarily the prose, which at times is merely serviceable, that is the book’s chief virtue but rather it’s evocation of a bygone era. It’s especially enthralling in its vivid evocation of a London both in its squalidness and decadence: its glamorous gentleman’s clubs and the downtrodden cafes, the opulent country estates and the back-alley abortion clinics. It might not have the fog that congested Sir Conan Doyle’s accounts of his famous detective but it certainly has the same moral ambiguities and uncertainties that marked life at the height of the Cold War. All told by someone who was really there, in the thick of it.

It’s a titillating read, for sure. Even though it’s a cautionary tale, it’s almost celebratory in that Keeler manages to not only survive but you suspect that, despite everything, she had a lotta fun as well. If anything, she did it her way — and so many times, too.

The Truth At Last is available in paperback at Fully Booked. (P559)