Scandal

They were an oddly assorted lot: Her Majesty's secretary of state for war, John Profumo; Captain Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché; a pair of tempting teenagers named Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies; a social-climbing osteopath, Stephen Ward, who often acted as procurer for his posh pals; and the gossip-hungry British tabloid press. But by the time the story had unraveled in the fall of 1963, their intertwined relationships had cost Ward his life and the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan its lease on power. Great material for a movie, right? But only now is the story reaching the screen, in "Scandal," starring Bridget Fonda, Joanne Whalley, John Hurt and Britt Ekland. It was written by Michael Thomas, the Australian writer who reported on "The Decline and Fall of Okker Chic" for the March 1987 Playboy; here Thomas reveals how a boyhood obsession with Christine drove him to do it.

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We didn't even have TV. My mother wouldn't hear of it. She inclined to the view, widely held at the tennis club, that technology clashes with the curtains. The only people who had TV in Charles Street in 1963 were the Wilsons up the hill. But what a TV! This wasn't one of those big fat Admirals the size of a fridge. This was some shapely foreign thing, German or Swedish, some brand nobody could pronounce and I never heard of again. It didn't just sit there in the middle of the rug like a fish tank full of soot. It had doors, like a cocktail cabinet. When they shut the doors, you couldn't tell it was a TV at all. But you could tell by the blond-wood veneer and the cunning little latches that it cost a hell of a lot of Arthur Wilson's money. It was on the Wilsons' TV I first saw Christine Keeler at bay on the six-o'clock news and swore to save her from herself. She stepped out of the Old Bailey after another day in the witness box--her eyes brimming, her mascara zigzagging all over the place, her glossy hair tossing as she spun one way and then another in blind Bambilike panic. She was stranded in the midsummer drizzle at the top of the courthouse steps, at the mercy of this mob of bilious old bags, their chops flecked with foam, eyes boiling with hate, a blur of trolls and goblins in cheap raincoats lashing out with their brollies, bashing at her with their handbags, shoving past the police, spitting, throwing things, yelling, "Burn her! Burn her!! Burn her!!!"

Burn her? This phenomenal young girl? This living doll? This pale, frightened teenager with endless legs who, as far as I could tell, had no sign of the Beast branded on her brow? Say what? Lash her to a lamppost, rip up a pile of papers, drop a match and burn her like a village witch, like Joan of Arc? Why? I know now, but back in 1963, I'd never heard of her. I'd never heard of anybody. No good asking me about where I was when John Kennedy was shot; I'd never heard of him, either. All I saw was this painfully beautiful young girl being torn apart by slavering goblins. It reminded me of pictures of the saints.

Up until that night, I'd been promised to Brigitte Bardot. I'd seen And God Created Woman 20 times. La Vérité, which was my personal favorite, I saw three times a day for a week. There was this paperback called The Brigitte Bardot Story, by a man whose name I'll never forget--it was George Carpozi, Jr.--and I read it until it frayed.

You have to make allowances for the temper of the times in Sydney in 1963. Nothing ever happened. Playboy was banned. When Mr. Matthews found out I'd seen High School Confidential, I was caned in front of the entire school just for going to a movie.

But I knew all about Brigitte Bardot. I followed her every move, like a stargazer in love with a distant heavenly body. My only ambition in life was to grow up and fuck her. I knew just how it would happen: I'd drive round the corner in my TR4, and she'd be standing by the road in a sailor top and white pedal pushers, flagging me down. I'd change her tire. I used to practice changing her tire. "I don't know 'ow to zank you," she'd say, and I'd say--I never made up my mind what I'd say: I was always rewriting the dialog--but there'd be no time to waste on words. Brigitte would pluck the smoldering Gauloise from my lips, her arms would snake round my neck, I'd plaster her lips to mine, we'd sink into the roadside grass....

Well, Christine put a stop to all that. Suddenly, Brigitte seemed a bit ... fake. Christine was fake, too, but you couldn't spot it right away. They were both synthetic dreamboats, dreamed up by middle-aged roués to add tits and ass to their ambitions. Roger Vadim conjured up Brigitte Bardot, a sex kitten. Stephen Ward found Christine in the back row of the chorus at Murray's Cabaret Club and reinvented her as a breath-taking parody of glamor, in six-inch heels and something off the shoulder, maybe a simple string of pearls. She sure fooled me.

Christine dressed like my mother, in tailored suits. She probably had a slinky little silver fox in the closet. There were plenty of photos of her with nothing on. There was that famous shot of her draped all over a designer chair, there were swimsuit pictures; but whereas Brigitte always looked overheated no matter what she wore, Christine always seemed cool, demure, almost ... virtuous. That was the illusion. It was stagy, it was skin-deep--but so's TV. She had the cheekbones of a Cherokee. She was a whore, they never stopped saying that, but she walked like a Derby winner. She wasn't like any kind of whore I was used to. Not like the girls down Chapel Lane.

Chapel Lane was off Palmer Street in Surrey Hills. The girls used to stand in the doorways, backlit by the spill of pink light from within. The punters would hang around under the lampposts, trying to pluck up the courage to walk those six paces into the pool of light and ask how much. Once you'd taken those six steps, the rest was easy. All you had to do was get it up. But it took untold balls to step into the pool of light and risk a dose or, worse, risk her laughing in your face in front of the whole street. A lot of us never made it.

But I ached for those girls. I'd end up in Palmer Street at two in the morning, crippled with lover's balls after an hour in the back of the Falcon trying to get some girl called Jenny to go all the way, swearing blind I'd never tell, I'd still respect her in the morning.... I prowled those lanes like Jack the Ripper on a slow burn, or like Stephen Ward, the connoisseur of sin, in love with sin itself.

If Christine Keeler was a whore, she was a whore made in heaven. Rebecca West, who covered the Ward trial, said she looked like the Virgin Mary. That's putting it a bit strong, but what she was born with, what Stephen Ward never taught her, what drove men mad was something unconscious, a fatal, indiscriminate allure, an utter negligence that left her defenseless. To this day, after all she has been through, the mystery of Christine Keeler is her utter lack of guile.

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Ward cheated; he took a big serve of Nembutal on the last day of his trial on charges of living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. They found him guilty as he lay dying, but it was too late: He denied them their revenge. Mandy did the smart thing and took the next plane out. Christine took the punishment: She did six months in Holloway on a perjury charge. And she has spent the past 25 years condemned to be Christine Keeler, condemned to jokes like: What did the doctor say to Christine Keeler when she had a cold? "A couple of days on your feet and we'll soon have you back in bed." Twenty-five years branded as the most famous whore in British history, the girl who brought the government down, the girl everybody wanted to fuck.

Which was never that hard to do. I've met dozens of blokes who've fucked her. It's hard to find anyone who was on the spot in the Sixties who didn't fuck her--or at least reckons he did--and Christine lost count years ago. My mate Dino fucked her in a Ferrari at ten o'clock in the morning outside the Scotch of St. James in Mason's Yard. When my mate Butch was working on a building site in Birmingham, he got a call from a mate of his, caught a train down to Southampton and fucked her in a deck chair on the QE2. "The girl can't help it; / She was born to please."

That's what drove 'em mad. That's why Profumo threw it all away, why Ivanov broke every rule in the book, why Johnnie Edgecombe went after Lucky Gordon with a shiny knife. When she was yours, she was yours till the Thames ran dry. The moment the door closed, she was someone else's. You had to have her again, no matter what it cost. No risk was too big, no price too high, no fall too far. No matter if the cabinet secretary dropped by for a friendly word, as Norman Brook did when he went to see Jack Profumo in his office at the Ministry of War and told him more or less off the record to steer clear--Jack still went back for more, full speed ahead into chaos. You could have her, but you couldn't keep her. Take John Lewis, the man I miss most in Scandal.

Lewis was a Labor MP who had lost his seat and never got over it. In the winter of 1962, when word of the Profumo affair was spreading fast and every paper in Fleet Street was lining up to rip the scab off and Christine was running around rudderless, she met Lewis at a party. He promised her legal advice and offered her a big fat shoulder to lean on; she trusted him because he looked the part. She had no way of knowing the man was a paranoiac with 100 percent vitriol running through his veins. Back at the house, he had a roomful of files and tapes and photos and letters, a whole arsenal of filth on all the people he hated--which was just about everybody and especially Stephen Ward, who had testified at his divorce. Lewis got Christine back to the house, and it all came tumbling out: Profumo, Ivanov, the man in the mask, the whole lurid lasagna.

For a man in John Lewis' position, this was the goods. You could smell the headlines: "The Minister, The Model and the Russian Spy!" With stuff like this, he could crack Ward's nuts and claw his way back into the good offices of the Labor Party, maybe win back his seat in Parliament. It was a dream come true, and he had it all on tape. So what did he do? He offered Christine 20 quid for a blow job. When you'd think all he wanted to do was shove her into a cab and get on the phone to his party chief, Harold Wilson, all he wanted to do was fuck her! She fled into his office and locked the door. She started trashing his files. Lewis got a gun. She looked through the keyhole and saw that he wasn't kidding: He had a .38 and he was threatening to shoot.

You can see why I missed this scene when we had to cut it from the movie: The door opens slowly, they're face to face, the gun's at her throat ... and Lewis gives her the gun! "Either you fuck me," he says, "or you kill me." He's ready to die for it. Christine, to her credit, pulled the trigger. It wasn't loaded, of course, but that's not the point. The point is, what was going through this man's mind? John Lewis had just tripped over the hottest story in the history of sex, politics and espionage, one that made all his bitter, twisted, vengeful dreams realized, and the only thing he could think of was this girl.

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"Burn her!" they cried, but by then, it was too late. Profumo was disgraced, Ivanov was in the loony bin, Ward was 48 hours from suicide, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, was staggering round the golf course, clawing at his jowls, and Harold Wilson was sharpening his knives for the final blood bath that would sweep him to power a few months later. But the mob outside the Old Bailey wanted to string Christine up; they wanted to burn her. Not because she was a whore--the truth is, she wasn't a whore at all. She accepted gifts, cab fare, 20 quid to buy her mum a new hat, a lighter from Asprey's. She was a 19-year-old from nowhere who'd run away to London and been blinded by the lights. She didn't care about Profumo or Ivanov. When Ward said, "Why don't you ask Jack when the Americans are going to give the Germans the bomb?" it went in one ear and out the other. All she cared about was high heels, hemlines and staying up all night smoking dope and falling in love with every other man she met.

They hated her because they were afraid of her, and they were afraid of her because she broke all the rules and made it look easy. She climbed out of Profumo's bed in Regent's Park or Lord Astor's pool at Cliveden and took a taxi down to some sweaty shebeen in Westbourne Grove, full of wild, bloodshot eyes and flashing teeth and the sweet smell of ganja, where she'd dance all night to the beat of the jungle with bad boys like Lucky Gordon. She'd wake up at Lucky's place, drag a comb through her hair and turn up late for lunch at the Savoy. That night, she'd pick up Mandy and they'd drop in at the 21 Club in Mayfair for a ham sandwich with old Mr. Monkeyglands himself, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. She broke the first rule of the British way of life: Keep your place.

All over England, parents locked up their daughters. They took one look at Christine straddling that designer chair or climbing out of a navy-blue Roller with white leather upholstery and they took fright in a big way. Word got round about the parties full of naked peers, all the fantastic details--like the night Mariella Novotny somehow fastened a little jar full of randy bees to her husband's bollocks and sprayed them with Chanel No. 5, which probably isn't true; there is no evidence I know of that suggests bees go mad for Chanel No. 5 ... but that doesn't matter. What mattered was that these things went on, and Christine was there.

The message was clear. If this tart were allowed to go unpunished, there'd be chaos. You'd have debs running off with their hairdressers, common little nobodies in skirts up to here calling the tune; you'd have well-brought-up young girls called Camilla going around in white panstick and lip gloss, ironing their hair and riding up and down the Ml at 100 miles per hour on the back of a Norton in skintight black leather and a tattoo, calling themselves ... Candy! The BBC would be overrun by ghastly vowel sounds and glottal stops--you'd have classlessness!! The whole moldy tweed would unravel, the very pillars of society would come tumbling down. Not just the decrepit Macmillan government; it went further than that. What was at stake was nothing less than civilization itself.

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The day Christine Keeler stepped out of the Old Bailey and into my dreams, Mary Quant came out with miniskirts and the Beatles had their first numberone song--Please Please Me. The rest is history. And the moral is: It was Christine Keeler who pulled the plug.

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We finally met in Chelsea. Twenty-five years is a long time to wait, but it was worth it. She was late. She didn't have far to come; the restaurant was only a couple of hundred yards from the gloomy tower blocks of World's End, where she lives alone with the mirror on the 14th floor. She wore black. She ate little, smoked a lot. Twenty-five years is a long time in the glare. It gets tiring and it shows. She could have done with a manicure. But she tilted her head for the waiter to light her cigarette, with all the languor of a movie queen, and the light striped her face, and the tears shone in her eyes--and you could hear the violins, you could see the ghost of Christine Keeler: that fatal negligence that made her such a danger to herself and such a disaster to know. I didn't want to fling her onto the rug anymore. I wanted to make it up to her. People who were around in 1963, the friends of Stephen Ward who jumped on the next plane to Bullamakanka or somewhere when he needed them most, will tell you Scandal is a little soft on Christine. All I can say is, "You should've seen the first draft."

"What drove men mad was something unconscious, a fatal, indiscriminate allure."