The Times Magazine - December 14, 2019

The true story of the BBC’s The Trial of Christine Keeler

It scandalised a nation and broke a prime minister. Now a series about the Profumo affair will be the next must-see drama. Andrew Billen meets its brilliant stars

Sophie Cookson (red jacket), who plays Christine Keeler, with Ellie Bamber (Mandy Rice-Davies), James Norton (Stephen Ward) and Ben Miles, standing, who plays John Profumo 

Andrew Billen, December 14, 2019 

The Trial of Christine Keeler was filmed in Bristol, some of whose citizens turned out to have long, unkind and not necessarily accurate memories of an affair that became Britain’s gold standard for political sex scandals. One morning, Sophie Cookson, who in this new BBC drama plays Keeler, the young woman credited with bringing down a prime minister, overheard a shopper as she passed the shoot. “Oh yes, well, she was the prostitute,” she educated her companion.

“For me,” Cookson says in a photo studio in London a few months later, “it was just like, ‘Gosh, some people are so fixed in their opinion about it and so quick to judge.’ I think as a society we need to be forgiving and understanding and kind to each other. All Christine did was have an affair with a man she found attractive. And yet that led to this whirlwind of chaos, which she lived with throughout her life.”

The man Keeler found attractive was John Profumo, the archaically named secretary of state for war in an exhausted Tory government. An Old Harrovian, decorated war hero and philanderer, Profumo was 46 when he met Keeler, this astoundingly beautiful working-class girl from Berkshire, the product of an unhappy upbringing in a pair of converted railway carriages. The venue for their encounter was, in cinematic contrast, a sunny, champagne-drenched summer party at Cliveden, the country home of Lord Astor, a former Tory MP who had inherited his wealth from Waldorf Astor, his newspaper-proprietor father. Keeler was 19 and naked, having emerged from the viscount’s outdoor swimming pool. Profumo kept looking. Their liaison was brief – a couple of months, perhaps – but at the same party was another guest, Yevgeny Ivanov, assistant navy attaché and spy at the Soviet embassy. Keeler, it was said – and it may even have been true – also slept with him, possibly later that very afternoon.

The Cold War was never hotter than when this supposed love triangle rang out.

The Profumo affair – a double entendre in its very naming – was born. It reached a pause two years later when, on June 5, 1963, buried under an avalanche of press speculation, Profumo resigned, admitting he had lied when he had told parliament ten weeks earlier there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in his “acquaintance with Miss Keeler”. The Times published a leader, “It Is a Moral Issue”, accusing the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, of “debauching” the nation. In October that year, Macmillan quit during the Conservative Party conference, his resignation relayed from the hospital where he was being operated on for a benign tumour on his prostate.

Sophie Cookson and Ellie Bamber
Robert Wilson

The Profumo drama almost immediately recommissioned itself a second season. Six weeks on, Stephen Ward, an osteopath, artist and friend to high society who had introduced Keeler to both the spy and the cabinet minister, went on trial at the Old Bailey accused of procuring and living off immoral earnings. Keeler appeared for the prosecution, claiming Ward had turned her into a prostitute. In what is now seen as a miscarriage of justice and an establishment stitch-up, the scapegoat was found guilty. As the verdict was pronounced, he lay dying of an overdose. A suicide note read that while he was sorry to disappoint the “vultures”, he felt the day was lost, an insouciance in the charmer’s voice remaining to the last.

Like “the Profumo affair”, “the trial of Stephen Ward” became a phrase. Half a century on, The Trial of Christine Keeler subverts both dashes of shorthand. Firmly at the centre of its story is Keeler herself, variously over the years regarded as either a vixen or a victim, but in this clever retelling by the screenwriter Amanda Coe – and thanks to Cookson’s astounding performance – not quite either. Surrounding Cookson in the imbroglio are James Norton as the enigmatic Ward, Ellie Bamber as Keeler’s chipper friend Mandy Rice-Davies and Ben Miles as the lothario Profumo. In a series of interviews, each actor speaks to me with loyalty to the morally ambiguous, now departed figures they stand in for, although none is probably as indignantly faithful as Cookson is to Keeler.

The only person to run her close in her affection for Keeler is Amanda Coe, who reads the affair as a “Sixties origins story” and (for younger viewers) “the British Monica Lewinsky scandal but with great clothes”. She did not talk to Keeler but, before the latter died in 2017, met her legal representative, who made his client aware that the show was being made. (Her reaction was “a kind of weary, ‘Oh God, not that again.’ ”) Coe has, she says, been as true as she can be to the known facts, of which there are so many that her job was “boiling an elephant down to make a stock cube”. The show is fun but, to Coe’s credit, the fun is not at the expense of any of the characters, Keeler least of all.

Ward was kind to them. But there was something monstrous about him. He was grooming these girls

As a title, The Trial of Christine Keeler carries metaphorical weight, but Keeler did have her turn in the dock, pleading guilty to a perjury she had committed in yet another trial, that of Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon, a Jamaican jazz singer and one of several Keeler exes, a violent stalker in today’s parlance. She had accused him of hitting her and he was duly sentenced to three years in prison, but quickly released when conflicting statements from Keeler exonerated him. Keeler’s trial, in December 1963, was, and is here, the drama’s finale. Thanks to an extraordinarily long and effective plea of mitigation by her lawyer, Jeremy Hutchinson, she received nine months in jail rather than the two years she expected.

I ask Cookson how she thinks Keeler took imprisonment. “I think for her those months in prison were almost a respite. She received death threats and had a pretty bleak time in there, but the harassment and level of attention she was receiving outside prison were simply unsustainable.

“The thing about her that I found so moving, and is so evident in Amanda’s writing, is that she never seems to have lost hope. She always seems to have had this indomitable spirit, so strong-willed and courageous.”

Profumo’s remorse was confined to lying to the Commons, and in a few years he had very likely repeated his infidelity

Cookson, best known for playing Roxy in the Kingsman spy movies, is 29 but looks so much younger that when we meet, before I see any of the series, I almost doubt whether she has pulled off the part of sophisticated seductress. Now I have seen a couple of episodes, I know she is seduction personified. She tells me to wait and see when I ask if she poses for Keeler’s famous naked portrait astride a (fake) Arne Jacobsen chair, but millions will feel cheated if the answer is no. Yet Cookson’s looks do emphasise Keeler’s youth, which is a theme of the piece. She was 17 when, after giving birth to a son who died days later (the drama implies she was raped by her stepfather), she got a job in a nudey Soho nightclub called Murray’s. It was there that Ward, who would become her landlord, introduced himself.

“She was a child when it happened to her and she herself said she wished she had been older when it all occurred. She was naive. Cripplingly naive,” Cookson says.

As the Fifties swung into the Sixties, at first London was thrilling, a huge release from her controlling mother and stepfather. “It was this world of glitter and girls and real camaraderie that she’d never experienced before, which is how she ends up striking up a friendship with Mandy Rice-Davis and meeting men like Stephen Ward – men who seemed to be living this incredibly privileged lifestyle. She was blinded by the glamour of it all,” Cookson adds.

In the show, Ward tells Keeler, who is slightly puzzled that he never asks to sleep with her, that they are like twins. I suggest to Cookson that these twins appear to us now as modern figures, prototypes for a society unbothered by class, race and Victorian notions of sex.

“I think that’s one of the things that I fell in love with her for. She’s so open to everything and so nonjudgmental, which is why it just seems so deeply sad that she was judged most harshly out of everyone, and not just by men but women as well. You see images of her in the car coming back from the trial and people throwing eggs at her. And the things they shouted: ‘You disgusting whore’; ‘You don’t wash’. Yet she still held her head high. I think what Amanda so brilliantly conveys is that [Keeler] was so determined not to be seen as the victim.”

Later, on the phone, I talk victimhood with Coe, some of whose previous TV outings, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story and Life in Squares, about the Bloomsbury set, also monitored evolving sexual mores. Hers is an overtly feminist treatment of Keeler’s life – the series is produced by Rebecca Ferguson and directed by Andrea Harkin and Leanne Welham – and victimhood is a feminist issue.

Cookson wears Dior playsuit, dior.com, Kingsman blazer (mrporter.com), and shoes, charlotteolympia.com. Norton wears sweater, johnstonsofelgin.com, trousers, jilsanders.com, and shoes, dunhill.com
Robert Wilson

“It’s a complicated one. In one way I do think she was a victim. It verged on persecution. There was certainly vilification for what had happened in a way that now seems fairly incredible, but she didn’t want to be portrayed as a victim because there’s something about that word that robs somebody of agency. Yes, she was at the centre of events over which she had very little control, but that doesn’t mean that she was passive. The thing about Christine was she hated being told what to do – and it caused massive problems because the world wasn’t ready for that.”

Although in popular imagination Mandy Rice-Davies was the bubbly blonde to Keeler’s brunette femme fatale, the former had a better idea how the world worked. “Oh, Mandy had this incredible resilience,” Coe says, “and she was really smart as well, which always helps.”

If Cookson as Keeler plays young, the stage actress and BBC Les Mis star Ellie Bamber is, at 22, much nearer Rice-Davies’ age in the middle of 1963, which was 18 going on 35. Bamber’s great-grandparents, she tells me, ran a pub in the East End of London in the early Sixties and knew the circles Rice-Davies and Keeler moved in. Over a family dinner, her grandmother told Bamber what she had heard about them from her parents. “And it was really interesting for me to say, ‘Well, actually, I don’t think that they were prostitutes.’ ”

So she was defending Rice-Davies? “One hundred per cent. It’s not that my grandparents were labelling her as such, but they were kind of giving me the take of the time. I think the whole scandal changed the way that sex was viewed for women. At the time, you know, women weren’t really allowed to sleep around without being called prostitutes or whores, the two names that Mandy and Christine were called. I think what they did challenged that and said, ‘Why can’t we have fun too? Men do it. Why can’t we sleep around?’ ”

During the Ward trial, Rice-Davies was told by Ward’s defence counsel that Viscount Astor, the host of Cliveden, had denied sleeping with her. Her reply became famous: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

I wonder if it was her sense of humour that made her the saga’s great survivor.

“Yes. I call her a hoot and a half, because I think she is really funny. She has this propensity to see the light in any situation, however dark, which I really like to do anyway.”

She even laughed when one of Keeler’s lovers, Johnny Edgecombe, a small-time crook originally from Antigua, arrived armed at Ward’s Wimpole Mews flat to flush Keeler out. Lied to by Rice-Davies, who told him Keeler was at the hairdresser’s, he fired five shots. Ward called the police and Edgecombe was arrested, leading to the first of the saga’s trials and the press’s invitation to a scandal that had everything: pretty girls, powerful politicians, the landed aristocracy, Windrush-era immigrants, sex and violence.

“She said she just couldn’t help but laugh at the whole thing, which I really enjoy. She had this attitude. She was really young when she ran away from her family home. She just said, ‘I really want to make something of myself.’ ”

Not everything is funny, however. Like Keeler, Rice-Davies perjured herself in the Ward trial by claiming that Ward had been her pimp. Bamber believes they were both forced to lie by the police, who were intent on a conviction that would shut Ward up. Rice-Davies was frightened that if she did not comply she would end up back in prison, where not long before she had spent ten days waiting to be sentenced for renting a car with a forged licence given to her by her boyfriend Peter Rachman, the notorious racketeer landlord (and another Keeler lover).

“Her immediate reaction was, ‘Absolutely no way. I’m not going back in there.’ There was nowhere else for her to turn. She and Christine obviously spoke about it, but what could they do? They were young, they were women, and they weren’t being heard, essentially. No one would listen.”

The one man who did listen, apart from the gentlemen of the press, was Ward, a ladies’ man mainly in the sense that he liked talking to women – and watching them have sex. He may have condescended to Keeler and Rice-Davies, but he was also sympathetic. For Coe, Ward was the hardest of the characters to understand. She compares him to types she first encountered at university: people who like to make things happen socially.

What was Christine Keeler guilty of? ‘Being 19 and attractive and in possession of a vagina’

“They’re often quite empty people. They want to be at the centre of things that they’re not at the centre of themselves, and I think Stephen was a bit like that. Yet there was also, as the girls themselves said, his kindness to them in the day-to-day, which obviously is problematic because in other ways you think, ‘There was something quite monstrous about him.’ He was grooming these girls; not pimping them, but it was this kind of morally ambiguous, transactional stuff.”

James Norton, the 34-year-old Happy Valley, War & Peace and Grantchester star, says to play Ward he relied heavily on one short piece of news footage in which his character dismissed the allegations against him as absurd.

“You can hear the beginning of desperation in his voice and you can sense the pain he’s going through, but there was something pursed about his lips that made him look mischievous, a sort of twinkle in his eyes even when he’s at his most stressed. I would use that image of the smile often before going into scenes,” he says.

Norton is also wokefully aware that there is no ignoring the fact that Ward in a sense groomed these young women and, indeed, slept with Rice-Davies when she was 17.

“In the #MeToo era there’s the argument, ‘Well, it was a different time, different standards, different expectations.’ But the fact remains Ward used these young women as his ticket to high society. The complicated thing is that at the same time he also was empowering them. You know, often he would pick these women off the street. Take them home. Sometimes sleep with them. I think he also called himself a Pygmalion character: he’d polish them up and introduce them to some very wealthy man and they would be kept. We talked a lot about that, but I was very keen not to forget that, while we acknowledge all that, ultimately, he played the highest price of anyone involved.”

Whether the disgraced Profumo would dispute that claim, we cannot know. He never wrote about the scandal or gave an interview. In 2006, his son, David, wrote a memoir in which he said his father’s remorse was confined to lying to the Commons, and in a few years he had not only “forgiven himself for his sexual infidelity”, but had very likely gone on to repeat it.

Ben Miles, an actor quite often chosen to play establishment figures – he was Princess Margaret’s lover Peter Townsend in The Crown – believes the man he portrays in The Trial of Christine Keeler would probably have kept his career had the scandal broken in a later age.

“I’m not sure there’d even be the drive to rehabilitate,” says Miles, who when we meet has grown a beard and no longer rocks Profumo’s receding hairline. “I’m not sure the culpability would be as great. I’m not sure the backlash would be as vehement. I think someone like our current prime minister would brush it off … It is a different world.”

What – beyond the obvious – drew Profumo to Keeler? “I read he was drawn to mischief as a child,” says Miles, who studies widely around his subjects. “He was very close to his sister. They used to get up to all kinds of mischief on holidays. His academic years weren’t the most productive, but he was great fun socially. He was very able as a war minister and had a very distinguished military career; he rose to the rank of major. He was in charge of logistics for the Italian invasion from north Africa. So he was high up, but a fun chap to be with socially. Being a bon viveur doesn’t mean he was in any way a sort of fool, but his sense of danger and mischief, I think, was very much a draw for his affair with Christine Keeler.”

And he had conducted affairs before? “Yes. His marriage to Valerie [played by Emilia Fox] began as an extramarital affair. She was married to an actor. They met at a fancy-dress ball at the Royal Albert Hall. He was dressed as a policeman, they danced and so began an affair.

“They were a very close couple. They had a successful marriage, and it’s great testament to their determination that they continued their marriage well after the affair and unto death.”

I am too young to remember the original hysteria, I say, but as I grew up and other political sex scandals came and went, Profumo’s name began to gain another meaning – an emblem of rehabilitation and redemption. After his departure from Westminster, Profumo took a job at Toynbee Hall, a charity that tackles poverty in east London and advocates for social reform, usually glossed, in Profumo’s case, as “doing good works in the East End”. He died in 2006, a Commander of the British Empire.

“ ‘The East End’ sounds like, ‘Here be dragons,’ ” scoffs Coe. “And this idea that he was cleaning toilets for 14 years … He was mainly raising money. He was a fundraiser, wearing a suit, although there’s no doubt he did a lot of good. He never wrote about what happened, or spoke about it, and preserved this kind of dignity. When he did make public appearances, it was seen as a form of redemption.”

Indeed, the end captions of the BBC’s drama will be entitled to claim quite a few redemptions and tolerably happy endings.

Despite his departure from Downing Street for “health reasons”, Macmillan enjoyed a long afterlife, using his seat in the Lords to become a scourge of Margaret Thatcher. He died 23 years after his resignation, aged 92. Associated reports of the imminent death of the ruling elite also turned out to be exaggerated. The Tories, led incredibly enough by its third Old Etonian in a row, lost the 1964 election but by a very narrow margin. This decade has produced two more Old Etonian prime ministers, bringing the school’s tally to 20.

Rice-Davies exploited her fame by becoming a nightclub singer and, later, owner. She married three times, wrote an autobiography and a novel, made a cameo in Absolutely Fabulous and six years ago collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical Stephen Ward. With her usual flair for phrase-making, she described her post-Profumo life as “one slow descent into respectability”. She died in 2014 of lung cancer.

Keeler’s lover Johnny Edgecombe moved into the jazz business and lived until 2010.

In the scandal’s deficit column languishes Edgecombe’s rival, the misnamed Lucky Gordon, who died in 2017, having lived a life pockmarked by petty crime, gambling and maudlin assertions of his love for Keeler. Astor, the great party-giver, was totally broken by the scandal, so spooked by it that he had Cliveden, now a five-star hotel, exorcised by a Catholic priest. He died in 1966.

And then there is Ward, whose by then friendless and traduced life ended at the age of 50. Posthumously, however, his reputation has consistently risen thanks to Ludovic Kennedy’s outraged account of the trial published in 1964, two exposés written by the late Phillip Knightley and most recently the Lloyd Webber musical. When the actor John Hurt died in 2017, some obituarists declared his compassionate portrayal of Ward in the 1989 film Scandal among his finest two hours.

This leaves Keeler, who died 2 years ago at 75 from chronic lung disease. Hers was not a happy life. She emerged from jail with only a fifth of her savings left thanks to her lawyer’s efforts. She had an affair with a Kray, and married first a labourer and then a businessman. Despite producing two children, the marriages were brief. For much of her years she was alone in a council tower block in Chelsea, where she lived on welfare and her diminishing social-sexual capital exploited in a series of increasingly outlandish memoirs of the affair.

James Norton wears blazer, Kingsman (mrporter.com), sweater, johnstonsofelgin.com, trouser, jilsanders.com, and shoes, Saint Laurent (ysl.com)
Robert Wilson 

I ask Cookson if she feels a responsibility to rehabilitate Keeler. “I do,” she says. “I think it’s a massive responsibility when you get asked to play a real-life person anyway, but we’re at a very interesting time in history where we are re-evaluating lots of stories that have typically been told through the male gaze. Seeing it through female eyes is incredibly important.”

“You say Christine didn’t redeem herself,” Coe challenges me when I raise her drama’s corrective mission. “Well, what did she need to redeem herself for, really? She wasn’t the one who lied in parliament. She wasn’t married. She wasn’t unfaithful to somebody.”

Her main crime, I suggest, was being 19.

“Well, quite,” she says. “Being 19 and attractive and in possession of a vagina.”

Fifty-six years after the trial of Christine Keeler, she was, on those counts, indeed guilty as charged. And that was enough for 1963 – the year, you may recall, sexual intercourse began.

The Trial of Christine Keeler begins on BBC One on Sunday, December 29

Shoot credits

Styling Prue White. Hair Charley McEwan at Frank Agency using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up Lyz Marsden at Caren using Les Ornements de Chanel and Chanel Sublimage Cleansers. Grooming for Ben Miles Julia Wren at Carol Hayes Management using Clarins Men. Main image Miles wears shirt, Séfr (mrporter.com); Cookson wears jacket, tomford.co.uk; shoes, charlotteolympia.com; Norton wears clothes and shoes, prada.com; Bamber wears jacket, chanel.com, shoes, gianvitorossi.com, veil, emily-london.com