But Keeler didn’t need a relationship with Profumo to enjoy her social life. She was known at Murray’s for her unreliability. When she was broke (or ‘skitters’, as Knightley and Kennedy say she called it), she worked, but when she wasn’t, she headed off either for a lazy few days or with a boyfriend.1
Looking for some fun, Keeler caught up with Rice-Davies again, and moved down to a flat share in Bournemouth with her. Rice-Davies was still in a relationship with Peter Rachman, however, and he was not happy with Mandy and his ex enjoying the sea air together, so Keeler headed back to Wimpole Mews. Keeler says Ward suggested they spend an evening at El Rio café, where they inevitably saw Lucky Gordon again. But after this incident and the refusal of one of Ward’s contacts to perform the abortion she needed after falling pregnant by Profumo, a refusal that Keeler believed Ward was behind, Keeler was more determined than ever to move out for good.
Now Rice-Davies was living in Pimlico’s Dolphin Square, having broken up (if only temporarily) with Rachman once again, so Keeler moved in, hoping to get back into modelling and being independent. She arranged to abort the child Profumo had fathered, but on 20 January 1962, ended up in hospital haemorrhaging badly after the at-home procedure she had organised. Still resentful of Ward, she continued to live with Rice-Davies but socialised with Ward and was happy with her new-found resilience and working life, taking jobs in Germany, for Tatler and for artists.
However, it wasn’t long before Keeler wound up back in Soho and with Gordon as a guest at her flat in Dolphin Square. It ended in disaster when Gordon held Keeler and a friend hostage there for two days, and raped Keeler. Only when he headed out for food was Keeler able to call the police, who took Lucky into custody and charged him with grievous bodily harm. But Keeler was convinced to drop the charges by Gordon’s brother, a decision she came to regret when Gordon’s obsession with her continued. She decided to move back in with Ward for protection.
Later Keeler did willingly go to Gordon’s brother’s home, where her ex lived at the time. She stayed there for three days but then decided to leave, telling Gordon she would see him again, even though she had no intention of doing so. Back at Ward’s, Keeler avoided answering Gordon’s calls but became increasingly worried for her safety, arranging to buy a gun for protection.
Feeling vulnerable, by June, Keeler jumped at the chance to head off to America when Rice-Davies suggested it. Keeler asked her current boyfriend Michael Lambton to finance the trip and headed off to New York by the Dutch Nieue Amsterdam liner, hoping Lambton would join her later, having arranged to transfer some of his publishing work there. But the escape was short-lived, with Rice-Davies first reacting badly to a smallpox vaccine and both girls then getting sunburned on a vacation to Fire Island. With rashes and sunburn, they were far from camera ready and fast running out of cash. Just two weeks after arriving, the girls had got Rachman and Lambton to pay for flights home. The FBI would later wonder if the New York trip had any connections to an imaginary call girl ring that involved the president.
Keeler returned to London, and via Ward met Paula Hamilton-Marshall and her tenant Kim Proctor, as well as Johnny Edgecombe, moving into a flat with Proctor and Edgecombe in September. Edgecombe was a former merchant seaman born in Antigua who had worked his passage aboard a British ship carrying sugar to Liverpool. Later, searching for his missing father, he hid on a ship bound for Texas but was caught as a stowaway and sent to prison. After leaving prison, he became involved in petty crime including theft, drug possession and pimping, running a drinking and drugs den in premises rented from Peter Rachman. Keeler and Edgecombe began a relationship.
Edgecombe already held animosity towards Keeler’s stalker Gordon, who had in the past threatened to tip off the police about Edgecombe’s illegal Notting Hill ‘shebeen’. It was perhaps inevitable that the two men would therefore square up to each other over Keeler. Despite moving on with Edgecombe to another address, Keeler still worried about Gordon attacking her and instead hoped to return to Wimpole Mews. She was upset to find by that time Rice-Davies had bagged the spare room with Ward.
Thwarted, on 27 October, Keeler went for a night out with Edgecombe where there was an altercation with Gordon outside a Soho club called the All-Nighter’s. Edgecombe allegedly slashed the other man’s face, with Gordon eventually needing seventeen stitches for the wound. Keeler and Edgecombe left the scene, the latter planning to go into hiding should Gordon call the police. Despite calling Ward, who came to help, and took her things back to his flat, Keeler headed off with Edgecombe, deciding she would find a safe place away from both Gordon and this new violent boyfriend at a later date.
By the end of October, Keeler had left Edgecombe and was spending a few days at Wimpole Mews. Then Ward was able to help Keeler find another flatshare well away from Edgecombe and Gordon, this time in Great Cumberland Place with Rosemary Wells. But on 18 December 1962, Keeler was at Ward’s, comforting Rice-Davies after the death of Peter Rachman, when Edgecombe telephoned, and on hearing Keeler’s voice in the background headed over immediately.
When he was refused entry to the flat, Edgecombe started shooting the locked front door and then at the window Rice-Davies had spoken through to try to convince Edgecombe that Keeler had left for the hairdressers already. Keeler dialled 999 and although Edgecombe was gone by the time they arrived, he was later caught. Edgecombe was charged with both the shooting and his earlier assault on Gordon.
With the police and press all over Wimpole Mews, Ward told Keeler he wanted Rice-Davies out and Keeler says she realised Ward would set her up to take the fall2 and so she determined to make sure Ward was also implicated,3 telling the police and others what she knew about Ward’s meetings with Hollis, Blunt, and the sexual antics and blackmail that had gone on in his social circle too. Keeler says Ward was friendly with Blunt, who she said the security services were aware was a spy as early as 1951.4
For Keeler, this is the point from which she knew she was in trouble that she couldn’t get out of,5 although the potential security issues seemed not to interest the police, with the authorities instead clearly wanting to make Ward a scapegoat by labelling him a pimp.
The press was interested, however, and leapt upon the salacious story, hoping perhaps that even bigger headlines would soon follow. The press also knew that as witness in the trial, if Keeler had mentioned her affair with Profumo during the Edgecombe prosecution, newspapers reporting on the case would have been free to report anything she had said without risking a libel case.
With Edgecombe’s trial set for early 1963, Keeler was terrified of what she might be asked as a witness, particularly if she had slept with Edgecombe, as interracial relationships were still very much frowned upon. After the shooting, Keeler had quickly contacted a patient and friend of Ward’s, Michael Eddowes, who was a London lawyer, and he had questioned her about the gun she had bought but Edgecombe had then used. Keeler also told Eddowes that Ward had asked her to ask Profumo when the Germans would receive the bomb; Keeler thought the talk of espionage seemed to interest him a great deal. Eddowes was interested in tales of Russian espionage. He would go on to write a book entitled The Oswald File that disclosed a complex conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy that originated in the Soviet Union under the direct orders of Khruschev and to encourage the exhuming of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Knightley and Kennedy say that Keeler was quickly bored with the story she told Eddowes, however, and that when the lawyer asked her what information she had actually managed to get out of Profumo, she’d admitted not much at all, but the relationship between Ward, Ivanov and Profumo still interested him.6
Keeler also sought support from Lord Astor, thinking he might be convinced to help her, particularly as he might want to keep certain details from public knowledge. But in the end, neither man offered practical help and with Gordon still on her scent, Keeler was more worried than ever.
It was then that she happened upon former Labour MP John Lewis at a friend’s party on 23 December. He knew and disliked Ward and was only too pleased to have information about Profumo to pass to Colonel George Wigg, Profumo’s opposite number in the Commons.
Former Tank Corps officer Colonel George Wigg was elected as a Labour MP in 1945 and had originally got along with Profumo, since they were both ex-army. However, in 1962, the two had clashed over British troop landings in Kuwait in the previous July. Wigg believed that troops had been poorly equipped and wanted the War Office to admit to the failings serving soldiers had told Wigg about. These included poor medical supplies and a lack of drinking water. Wigg discussed his case with Profumo, who he regarded as a friend with a common interest in military conditions. But when Wigg came to debate the issue in the House, he realised Profumo had used what Wigg had told him to his own ends, instead manipulating parliamentary procedure, and putting an end to the debate.7
Wigg had felt betrayed, and the chance to catch Profumo out now was the ultimate revenge. Wigg began to dig deeper and to collate a dossier about the dubious goings on. Of course, there was plenty of material.
During this period, Keeler believes Ward was in contact with the CIA8 and trying to discredit her as being so in love with Ivanov she was willing to supply him with secrets she had extracted from Profumo. Knightley and Kennedy said the two friends had by this time fallen out with each other over an argument on New Year’s Eve, because Ward had left Keeler and a friend at the side of the road in the cold to get a taxi, while he drove off in his sports car. Ward was also growing tired of Keeler’s chaotic lifestyle, with the Edgecombe shooting risking his professional reputation. It was now, the authors suggest, that Keeler, without the usual support of Ward, needed to fund her own lifestyle. She also wanted to move her mother out of Wraysbury, since there had been visits by West Indians there, and perhaps thought another trip to try her luck in America might free her from the ever-present Gordon. To do this, she was keen to sell her memoirs.9
Meanwhile, the press was camped outside Keeler’s flat, desperate for an exclusive. But details of her relationship with Edgecombe would have to wait until after his trial. Likewise mentioning her lovers in an article might mean those named might sue for libel.
With her modelling work affected by the scandal, friends, including Paul Mann and freelance writer Nina Gadd, encouraged Keeler to sell her story where she could. Keeler and Rice-Davies visited the offices of the Sunday Pictorial, which offered to pay her £1,000 for the right to publish the ‘Darling’ letter Profumo had sent Keeler, promising £200 immediately and the balance on publication.
Hoping to get a better deal, Knightley and Kennedy say she then headed to the News of the World, but crime reporter Peter Earle refused to up the offer.10 Thus, she returned to the Pictorial where Davenport-Hines says she was introduced to two reporters who would help her write her story,11 steering her towards the potentially more sensational aspects of her love life. It would take her two days to recall all she could that might be of interest to the reporters and ultimately the newspaper readers.
Having missed out on the opportunity to secure Keeler’s exclusive, Davenport-Hines says Peter Earle of the News of The World instead approached Ward for his version of the events. Ward immediately telephoned Astor12 to discuss the situation, fearing Keeler might name him, Astor and Profumo in her piece. He also considered that she might use the Edgecombe trial as an opportunity to give a taster of her memoirs. Astor in turn spoke to barrister and Tory MP William Rees-Davies, and to Profumo himself, looking at ways to prevent Keeler from running her story.
It was now that Rees-Davies saw Solicitor-General Sir Peter Rawlinson, who then informed Attorney-General Sir John Hobson about the matter. There followed a meeting between Profumo and MI5, from which Profumo hoped that the Pictorial might be asked to drop the article for the sake of national security; after all, Ivanov was involved. Profumo also called Hobson, whom he had been friendly with at Harrow, Oxford and in the army, later that day. Accepting Profumo’s protestations of innocence, he suggested the minister contact Derek Clogg, a senior partner at Theodore Goddard and Company, solicitors well-versed in libel cases.
Barrister Rees-Davies attempted to broker a deal with Keeler, which would see her renege on her Pictorial deal. Keeler’s solicitor Gerald Black reportedly requested a £5,000 fee to do so. It would cover the initial loss of money from the deal (£1,000), enough so she could turn down any other larger speculative offers, plus costs she might then incur as a result of withdrawing, and other costs such as the need to stay in accommodation during the Edgecombe trial, or perhaps to ensure she could keep a low profile thereafter. However, it seems that there was some misunderstanding, and Keeler was offered £500, which Rees-Davis apparently thought was the sum she had requested (despite the payment from the press being double that).
According to Knightley and Kennedy, Profumo’s solicitor Clogg had understood the deal to be £5,000 but had regarded the fee as extortionate and had thought Keeler should be instead charged with extortion. The Director of Public Prosecutions advised against this.13 Profumo’s son David, however, believes Clogg did offer Keeler the £5,000 on the condition that she withdrew from the Pictorial deal.14 The negotiations became a moot point, however.
The Sunday Pictorial didn’t publish its story immediately and the News of the World was the first national to run with a piece on Keeler being shot at. This may have been because Ward had his own solution to stopping the story in its tracks. Davenport-Hines says Ward telephoned the Sunday Pictorial himself, claiming Keeler’s story would open the title to legal action by him, Astor and Profumo. This threat seemed to work, and the paper held the story.15 Instead, the Pictorial later ran an interview with Ward entitled ‘The Real Christine Keeler’ that David Profumo says the title had then approached Ward for.16 The chance for Keeler to make £5,000 from her story evaporated, leaving her effectively out of pocket.
Keeler says she told the police everything on 26 January when Detective Sergeant John Burrows visited her. This included the fact she’d handed over the letter to the newspapers. Rice-Davies also spoke to them about Ward. The girls mentioned what a bad influence Ward was, and that he was sexually perverted and arranged young girls for Cliveden sex orgies. The resulting summary of both women’s accounts produced by Burrows for his superiors accused Ward of procuring ladies for gentlemen in high places, taking women to Cliveden for this purpose, asking Keeler to discover atomic secrets and introducing her to Ivanov. But Keeler said in her book that plenty of information she relayed to the policeman was missing from the write-up, including just how much information Ward had already passed to the Russians and his association with Anthony Blunt and Roger Hollis. This was done, she believed, to save face, and to cover up another spy scandal that would displease the important American allies.
Burrows’s superior office reportedly dismissed the sexual activities of Ward, Profumo and Keeler within the report as of no interest to them, but sent on the information concerning Ivanov and atomic secrets to Special Branch, the executive arm of MI5.17 In turn, Special Branch planned to interview Keeler at an appointment made for 1 February. The meeting was later cancelled by the commander of the unit, the reasoning being that with the press watching Keeler, the arrival of Special Branch at her door would lead to rabid speculation in the papers. However, Knightley and Kennedy suspect Special Branch would have first checked with MI5 before proceeding and, for some reason, was told not to persist.18
When Ward did face charges, all five related to the assumption that he was a pimp, despite the police initially deciding it was not worth investigating Keeler and Rice-Davies’s claims about his sex life. None of the charges mentioned so much as a hint of national security or espionage.
Chapter 10
Keeler, the Missing Model
Keeler was still making the headlines. On 3 February, the News of the World ran a picture of her in a story related to the Edgecombe shooting case. Far from enjoying her celebrity, however, she was beginning to feel overwhelmed by events and had received a threatening phone call from someone with an American accent. She was also all too aware that Gordon knew where she was living again. And so, despite knowing she would be called as a witness in the Edgecombe trial on 14 March, she left in a car for Spain via France with Paul Mann on 8 March.
Cynics might say that, absent from the witness box, Keeler’s story remained untold, and was therefore still for sale by the likes of Paul Mann, and perhaps even more valuable. But it’s not out of character for Keeler to want to get away from the frightening situation she found herself in and simply go ahead and do it without fully thinking through the consequences. She was still, after all, a young girl.
On the same day, the Westminster Confidential newsletter was circulated to its several hundred private subscribers made up of MPs, journalists and embassy staff. The contents alluded to Profumo’s affair with Keeler by mentioning details such as official stationery, a famous actress wife and a Soviet military attaché. Profumo’s position began to look less secure but still he refused to admit his dalliance, even to his closest friends.1
At his trial, Edgecombe was convicted of possessing a firearm and sentenced to seven years but cleared of all other charges because of the failure to produce Keeler as the key witness for the Crown. Unsurprisingly, Keeler made the headlines the next day exactly because of her court absence. The Daily Express took the opportunity to use clever tabloid trickery to link Profumo to her by running a large picture of Keeler the ‘Vanished Old Bailey Witness’ alongside another story about Profumo titled ‘War Minister Shock’ that suggested the war minister had asked to resign for personal reasons. Was the hope that readers would make the connection and link the couple? And would that lead to further questions?
Later, when asked about the front page by Lord Denning, the Daily Express editors maintained the placement was coincidental. But from then on, the investigation into the shooting became tangled up with the morals of the establishment and a potential spy ring thanks in part to press speculation and gossip.
Now it was Rice-Davies’s opportunity to grab some media attention. She sold a story about life with Keeler and Ward, which ran on 16 March, to the Daily Sketch. Profumo was still the name that could not be mentioned for fear of libel, but since Ivanov had fled back to Russia, it was safe to mention the spy in her account alongside her account of the gifts Keeler received from boyfriends. Rice-Davies’s story had now firmly introduced the espionage element of the saga to the public.
