The picture is iconic. A naked Christine Keeler, open-legged, is photographed straddling a back-to-front chair so that the camera captured only her profound sexuality bursting forth like a smoldering volcano.
It was all suggestive.
Back when television was black and white, and Cold War espionage was in full swing, Christine Keeler and her party-girl sidekick, Mandy Rice-Davies, were the epicentre of a sex scandal that rocked Great Britain, and discredited the Conservative government of Howard MacMillan.
Keeler was only 19 when she had her notorious affair in the early 1960s with a married Macmillan cabinet minister, the 46-year-old John Profumo, while simultaneously sharing a bed with a Soviet diplomat and presumed spy, Yevgeny Ivanov.
Before Profumo was outed as lying to Parliament, he testified he knew nothing about the two young women in the middle of the scandal.
This file picture taken in the 1960’s of former British War State Secretary John Profumo and his wife Valerie Hobson at the time when he was at the centre of a Cold War sex and spying scandal that cost him his political career.
When told by the Crown prosecutor that Profumo had denied knowing them, Rice-Davies’ response was beautifully understated.
“Well, he would (say that), wouldn’t he?”
Mandy Rice Davies was 70 when she died in of cancer in December of 2014 in London, survived by her third husband and a daughter.
Keeler was 75 when she died last week in London, having lived alone for most of the ensuring decades, suffering during her final years from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Her life had no uphill.
Mandy Rice-Davies sits in a car with Christine Keeler after the first day’s hearing at the Old Bailey in the trial of Stephen Ward. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
In 1989, when I was based in London as Sun Media’s European bureau chief, the movie, Scandal, premiered to largely rave reviews, thereby resurrecting the Profumo Affair. The picture of Keeler straddling that chair, played by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, was used as a promotional poster.
Scandal was the topping grossing film that year in Great Britain and, to no surprise now, its American release was represented by Harvey Weinstein.
It was following the movie’s release that I tried to track down Christine Keeler. Vague clues to her whereabouts were found in many of Britain’s tabloid newspapers who were having a field day dredging up the past.
It had everything, of course. Sex, Russian-UK espionage, famous locales, like Cliveden House (then the home of Lady Astor), drugs, lots of booze and plenty of House of Commons drama.
I eventually found her in a down-and-out pub at the far western end of King’s Road in a part of London called World’s End.
The irony did not escape.
Christine Keeler, one of the call-girls involved in the Profumo affair, opens a car door while surrounded by police on October 29, 1963. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)
She was sitting alone, chain smoking, her face devoid of makeup, and sipping on an iceless glass of gin and tonic.
She did not want to talk, and politely asked me to leave her be.
I persisted, pulled up a chair at her table, and tried to convince her a few words would suffice, but she persisted in her silence.
She allowed me to buy her a drink before I left, however, and I watched as the publican poured out a healthy dose of gin, with a splash of tonic.
No ice, no lime.
Canada was not without its own sex scandal during the Cold War, of course, as the Munsinger Affairs will attest. Gerda Munsinger, an East German prostitute and alleged spy for the Soviets, had trysts in Ottawa with a number of high-ranking government officials, most notably John Diefenbaker cabinet ministers George Hees and Pierre Sevigny.
U.S. President sits with Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in Ottawa on May 17, 1961. THE CANADIAN PRESS/FILE
By the time the CIA tipped Canada to her activities, Munsinger was safely back in Germany.
When her relationships finally became public, which was at the same time the Profumo Scandal in Britain was in full blossom, Canada’s Justice Minister Lucien Cardin quipped that the simultaneous combination of the two scandals had “thrust Parliaments into a state of suspended degradation.”
Gerda Munsinger died in 1998 in Munich at age 69.