Scandal
The Truth at Last: My story by Christine Keeler (Pan, 2002)
Bringing the House Down: A family memoir by David Profumo (John Murray, 2006)Scandal
Reviewed by Aleks Sierz, author of In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001) and lecturer in drama at Boston University in London.
RATING: 7
UK, 1989
Director Michael Caton-Jones
Screenwriter Michael Thomas
Cinematographer Mike Molloy
Production designer Simon Holland
Music Carl Davis
Cast John Hurt (Stephen Ward), Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (Christine Keeler), Ian McKellen (John Profumo), Bridget Fonda (Mandy Rice-Davies), Leslie Phillips (Lord Astor), Britt Ekland (Mariella Novotny), Jeroen Krabbe (Yevgeny Ivanov), Leon Herbert (Lucky Gordon), Roland Gift (Johnnie Edgecombe)
Philip Larkin’s 1967 poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ has the classic opening verse:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
He might also have mentioned that this was the year of the Profumo affair, one of Britain’s biggest postwar scandals.
The Conservative minister for war, John Profumo, had an affair with Christine Keeler, a call girl who also had a relationship with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval officer. After he was found out, Profumo resigned, and the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, subsequently held an official inquiry into the affair. His report became a bestseller, with 100,000 copies sold within three days of publication. Today the scandal is symbolised by the iconic photograph of Keeler, naked, astride a chair.
‘Utterly immoral’
Scandal, Michael Caton-Jones’s film version of these events, focuses on Keeler (Whalley-Kilmer) and the society osteopath Stephen Ward (Hurt), who was described by Denning as ‘utterly immoral’. Ward befriends Keeler while she is working in a Soho nightclub and persuades her to share his flat. He introduces her to other young women, such as Mandy Rice-Davies (Fonda) and Mariella Novotny (Ekland), and to high society, notably at Lord Astor’s country house at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire. Encouraged by Ward to participate in orgies and have sex with rich, powerful and older men, Keeler meets – and beds – both Profumo (a curiously folliclely challenged McKellen) and Ivanov (Krabbe).
Later on, she also falls for Lucky Gordon (Herbert) and Johnnie Edgecombe (Gift), two streetwise West Indians. A jealous argument between these two leads to Edgecombe firing a gun at Keeler and the police being called. Cold-shouldered by Ward, Keeler sells her story to the newspapers. About two years after Profumo’s affair with Keeler ended, the truth comes out, he resigns and Ward, arrested and tried for living off immoral earnings, commits suicide.
Rose-tinted romance
Although the film’s narrative is generally accurate, its focus on Ward and Keeler turns a sordid episode into a rose-tinted romance, and in the process, certain facts are underplayed. At the time of the scandal, Ward was 51, exactly 30 years older than Keeler. Having left home at 16, she had worked as a model and a showgirl in a cabaret club before meeting Ward and embarking on a career as a call girl. Although Keeler and Ward’s platonic relationship had actually been stormy and, while sharing his flat, she had often walked out on him, the film shows them living in harmony.
You never see Keeler’s string of affairs, her mercenary deals, her backstreet abortions
The squalid side – Ward playing the pimp and the young Keeler having sex with much older men for money – is concealed by soft-focus photography, and the film’s idea of sex as basically a funny, Carry On-style romp. Ward’s hedonistic belief that anything goes ‘just as long as no one gets hurt’ is never confronted by reality: you never see Keeler’s string of affairs, her mercenary deals, her backstreet abortions.
The politics of the scandal
More crucially, the personal relationship between Ward and Keeler also conceals the politics of the scandal, which happened at the height of the Cold War.
The fact that Ward was a Communist sympathiser is not mentioned. Nor is the fact that Ivanov, who was clearly working for Soviet intelligence, asked Ward – probably at the Cliveden weekend when Profumo first met Keeler – to find out exactly when the United States would be arming Western Germany with nuclear weapons. When the scandal broke, it was alleged that Ward had asked Keeler to get this information from Profumo. Keeler, of course, never did this – she was no Mata Hari and Ward was too canny to ask her to be one.
British intelligence
Nor does the film mention – apart from a brief name-check for James Bond and one scene in which British intelligence ask Ward to keep an eye on Ivanov – the crucial role of the British security services.
At the time, Profumo was condemned because it was widely, if erroneously, believed that Keeler was having sex with him while at the same time selling her services to Ivanov. This scenario suggested that Profumo’s pillow talk was being leaked to the Soviet enemy, or that Ivanov knew about Profumo’s affair and could use it to blackmail the minister and obtain national secrets.
In fact, as the film accurately shows, Keeler spent only one night with the Soviet. What it doesn’t show, however, was that, in August 1961, the secretary of the Cabinet Sir Norman Brook – prompted by British intelligence – had had a word with Profumo about the security risks of getting too close to Ward, who was Ivanov’s friend. Soon afterwards, Profumo ended his affair with Keeler, which had actually lasted only a few weeks.
The Cuban missile crisis
The Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict in October 1962. According to Lord Denning’s report, Ward tried to play a ‘very active part’ in international affairs by offering to liaise between Ivanov, on behalf of the Soviet Union, and the British Foreign Office. His argument was that only the UK could broker a deal between East and West. But, after several attempts, and various meetings between British officials and Ivanov, nothing came of these attempts, and the crisis was resolved without British help.
This episode is not covered by the film. Nor is the fact that, from that time, both American and British intelligence began keeping extensive files on Ward and women such as Keeler and Rice-Davies.
Sexual frolics
Apparently, Michael Thomas, who wrote Scandal, saw it initially as a mini-series of four or five hours’ duration, a good length for a historically sound docudrama of a very complex affair. At less than two hours, the film does well to give a broadly accurate account of events, but it prefers sexual frolics to political conspiracy.
And while it gives a good impression of one of the Britain’s first media-fuelled celebrity scandals, it fails to adequately convey the politics of the time. In her autobiography The Truth at Last, Keeler says: ‘I’m sorry, but that film is just a snapshot of what really went on.’ She would say that, wouldn’t she? – but she’s got a point.
