The diary of Christine Keeler – the woman at the heart of the Cold War spy scandal
Dotted among the day-to-day appointments of a girl about town are the names that would electrify the country a year later
Until she died in 2017, aged 75, Christine Keeler always kept one treasured object close to her heart: her green Harrods appointments diary for 1962 – the year before she exploded to fame as the girl who sparked the Profumo Affair.
A year earlier, in 1961, Keeler had met John Profumo, secretary of state for war, at Cliveden, Viscount Astor’s Buckinghamshire seat. Profumo began an affair with Keeler, who also had a fling with Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet naval attaché, which at the height of the Cold War was a clear security risk and a huge indiscretion. The most notorious political scandal of the 20th century, it led to Profumo’s resignation in 1963.
And now that diary, along with her passport and the heartbreaking letters she sent to her mother from prison, are up for sale at Sotheby’s, consigned by Christine Keeler’s son Seymour Platt. Also included in the sale is Keeler’s own set of the famous photographs Lewis Morley took of her, mostly naked, on a chair.
Keeler’s green Harrods appointments diary, which she kept during the year of 1962
Platt tells me, ‘Over the course of my life, there has been a legend surrounding my mother, much of which was created with little basis in the truth. To me, she wasn’t Christine Keeler; she was Chris – an incredibly loving mother. These items were always around our home and never far from my mother’s possession.
‘The diary was particularly important to her, as it was the only object she had from that time and provides a unique snapshot of her life. It’s full of old London telephone numbers, notes, sketches and the odd shopping list – a snapshot of her life at the time. Over the years, every time she moved, items would naturally get lost, but this remained. It was always on her, but she never really showed it to people beyond me and her solicitor, who was a great friend of hers.’
Keeler’s diary is full of the day-to-day appointments of a 20-year-old girl about town: ‘Shoes repaired. Bank – phone. Shopping.’ But then, dotted among those appointments, are the names that would electrify the country a year later, in 1963, when the scandal broke.
On 31 January 1962, the diary reveals, she had an appointment with ‘Dr Ward’ – Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who introduced her to the glittering world that would eventually destroy her life. On 11 February she wrote, ‘Cocktail party – Stephen’.
A list of addresses included at the back of Keeler’s diary - Stephen Ward’s contact is seen top right
At the back of her diary she also wrote two telephone numbers for Ward – WE L 3082 and WEL 6936. That’s WEL for Welbeck Street in Marylebone. Keeler’s London life circled around the smarter parts of central London, particularly Mayfair and, in one entry, the Dorchester Hotel. At the time, she was living in upmarket Dolphin Square, Pimlico.
Also in the telephone numbers section is ‘Mandy’, living in Paddington – that is, Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies. Rice-Davies was the Welsh model who had an affair with Viscount Astor. Famously, when she was told, during the trial of Stephen Ward for living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes, that Astor had denied the affair, she coined the phrase, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
There are no definite references to Profumo in the diary. Although there are mentions of meeting someone called ‘John’, Profumo’s given name, the politician went by the name ‘Jack’ among those close to him. There are, however, several pages ripped out – implying that Keeler found some things too upsetting, or too dangerous, to preserve.
Gabriel Heaton, the Sotheby’s specialist in English literary and historical manuscripts, says, ‘Presumably they were torn out by her. You can’t help thinking there were entries on those dates she was concerned about. You can work out a lot more about her life and movements in 1962, thanks to the diary. Really quite a number of pages have been torn out that do correlate with moments that, later on, she might have thought it better to discard.’
On one surviving page, there is a charming upside-down sketch of a showgirl in a revealing black outfit. And then, on 18 July, written in red (perhaps in lipstick), there are the words ‘Curse back’, meaning her period had returned. Keeler had had an illegal abortion in January. In a memoir, she revealed that she had become pregnant by Profumo and had an abortion. Their affair had finished some time in the second half of 1961.
Keeler was still having a glamorous time in 1962. On 21 May Al Aarons, the trumpeter for the Count Basie Orchestra, writes in her diary, ‘Don’t disappoint me,’ above their meeting place – the Gaumont Palace cinema, Hammersmith.
Keeler, who was modelling at the time, also lists clothes she bought: ‘1 green suit, 1 white suit, white dress…’
Keeler’s passport, which is included in the sale
Also in the Sotheby’s sale is her passport from 1961 to 1966, encompassing the years of the Profumo Affair. Next to her ravishing passport photograph there is a list of her features: 5ft 6in; green eyes; blonde hair (not the colour the photograph suggests); scar on left arm.Stamps in her passport show regular trips to America (which crops up in her 1962 diary), Spain and France.
Platt says of his mother’s papers, ‘A firm of solicitors sent it on to me after she passed away – discovering it in a box, marked “Christine Keeler”. Unopened for years, the box had come from another practice that had since closed down. Her passport is also hugely significant as it helped us date some of the key events in her life, especially with regards to her trial, and when she fled to France to get away from Lucky Gordon.’
That is how the Profumo Affair unravelled. When Profumo’s affair with Keeler emerged, he lied about it to Parliament. The lie led to his resignation. Soon after, in October 1963, Harold Macmillan resigned, on health grounds. The affair contributed to the Conservative Party’s defeat in the 1964 election.
At the height of her fame, in May 1963, Keeler was photographed by Lewis Morley in his studio over the Establishment Club in Greek Street. The picture of her naked, sitting on a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair, bought at Heal’s, became an iconic 1960s image. The photographs in the Sotheby’s sale (estimate £15,000-£20,000) have notes on the back by Morley, confirming they are Keeler’s own contact sheets.
Lewis Morley’s 1963 photographs of Christine Keeler, taken in his Greek Street studio
In December 1963 Keeler was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison after pleading guilty to obstructing the course of justice and perjury in the trial of Lucky Gordon, a violent stalker who claimed to have an affair with Keeler and was convicted of attacking her.
Seymour Platt is now seeking a pardon for his mother’s conviction. He says, ‘In offering these items, I feel I am sharing a little of the person that I knew, whilst also raising awareness for the campaign to overturn her conviction. My hope is that the sale of these items will help people understand my mother was at the same time a wonderful, vivacious character, but also undeniably a victim of history.’
The most poignant items in the Sotheby’s sale are Keeler’s letters from jail to her mother and stepfather. She was estranged from her father, Colin Keeler, although he did send her a telegram, also in the Sotheby’s sale, at the start of her October 1963 perjury trial, saying, ‘Good luck darling’.
In a 1964 prison letter to her mother and stepfather, Keeler writes, in her clear, well-formed hand, ‘Mind you, I am 22 and you should know by now that I can take care of myself. Now is the time that I really want to work… I’ve got so many jobs and business things that I am desperately wanting to get into, and work hard at and learn everything about them that I just can’t wait.’
Keeler was longing for her release from jail. She writes, ‘I bet the garden looks lovely, one of the first things I am going to do is go up on that hill (or should I say run up).’
In another prison letter, in May 1964, she movingly writes, ‘We have at last changed into summer dresses here and they feel a lot better.’
But, beneath the optimism, there is a melancholy note, as Keeler writes to her mother and stepfather, ‘Don’t take any notice about what they say in the papers… I have to expect the press and their silly ways… Most probably it’s because they are getting impatient about me coming out.’
Though estranged, Keeler’s father, Colin, sent her a telegram at the beginning of her 1963 perjury trial
The diary, passport and letters are being auctioned as a single lot, with an estimate of £8,000-£12,000. Heaton explains, ‘The diary’s very hard to value. It’s a very glamorous, sexy story. People will be fascinated by it and the market will be strong. The diary is exceptional – what other object takes you right back to that extraordinary moment? She would always keep it safely with her. In hospital, at the end of her life, she wanted it with her.
‘Political scandals can fade. But the Profumo Affair changed the culture. It led to a collapse of deference and a changing attitude towards sex and race. There was such an attempt to cordon it off – to not tell the truth. It only stoked it all up.’
Few Profumo Affair documents survive: the principal figures didn’t want to record what they were up to. As Heaton says, ‘In terms of the Profumo Affair, there’s nothing else like this.’
The nearest comparable item was the copy of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover used by the judge at the 1960 obscene publications trial. The Penguin paperback went for £50,000.
The diary tells a poignant story of a naive, achingly beautiful, kind girl who was cast, unawares, into the eye of a political storm. Heaton says, ‘The Profumo Affair cast a really long shadow. I find it pretty painful. Think about how young she was, slightly off the rails. Leaving aside the politics, she’s a 20-year-old girl with the level of judgment anyone would have at that age. In the diary, there’s no sign of any secret code; of an awareness of how remarkable it all was. But the affair shaped the rest of her life.’
The Profumo Affair scarred most of its protagonists. In 1963 Stephen Ward took a fatal overdose of barbiturates, aged 50, hours before he was convicted for living off the proceeds of prostitution. Writers including critic Kenneth Tynan and playwright John Osborne sent a wreath to his funeral with the message, ‘To Stephen Ward, victim of hypocrisy’.
After resigning, Profumo dedicated himself to volunteering at Toynbee Hall, a charity that battles East End poverty. He died in 2006, aged 91.
Only Mandy Rice-Davies (1944-2014) prospered, marrying an Israeli businessman and opening nightclubs in Tel Aviv – called Mandy’s, Mandy’s Candies and Mandy’s Singing Bamboo. She wittily described her life as ‘one slow descent into respectability’.
After her release from prison in 1964, Keeler did not prosper. She married twice and had two children (her first child, the son of an American airman, had died at six days old in 1959). Occasionally she made money from newspaper articles and memoirs, but much of it went to lawyers. In the 1970s, she said, ‘I was not living – I was surviving.’
After she died in 2017, from pulmonary disease, she was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, west London. By kind permission of Seymour Platt, I was allowed to attend the funeral for The Sunday Telegraph.
What a dignified occasion it was. On a freezing December morning, her coffin was taken up Ladbroke Grove to the cemetery in a Victorian hearse, drawn by two black-plumed, blinkered black horses. Forty friends and family members were there.
Seymour Platt recalled his mother’s intense laugh and great commitment to fairness. Keeler’s granddaughter, Daisy Devine-Platt, read a prayer. Father Gerard Skinner explained how seriously she took her Catholic faith.
There were few references to the Profumo Affair in the service. But, as the curtains fell around her coffin, the Skatalites’ 1967 ska song Christine Keeler was played, as 55 years on, the tumultuous events that are etched into that small, green diary still echoed through her life story.
All images courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Auction opens for bidding 26 June-11 July (sothebys.com).
Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Penguin, £12.99)
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