Girl Trouble (19 page)

It was against this rich background of unease that the Profumo affair erupted in the early 1960s. John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, had a short affair with attractive young model and showgirl Christine Keeler. Scandal blew up when it was rumoured that Keeler had at the same time been sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. This had threatening implications for national security in the era of the Cold War. Profumo himself made things worse, first by lying to Parliament, then admitting that he had lied and resigning.

There were all manner of ramifications. Christine Keeler's
relationships with two West Indian lovers, Johnny Edgecombe and the jazz musician Aloysius ‘Lucky' Gordon, led to episodes of jealousy and violence which received plenty of coverage in the press. It was these events, the arrests, and the subsequent trial of Johnny Edgecombe, which originally brought Profumo's relationship with Keeler into the public domain. Keeler and another young woman, Marilyn (Mandy) Rice-Davies were both friends and to some extent protégées of Stephen Ward. Ward, a society osteopath (whose patients had included Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner and Gandhi), was a complex figure with both aristocratic connections and interests in London's underworld. He was to prove the most obvious victim of the affair. Charged with living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Rice-Davies, Ward committed suicide.
28

Many aspects of the affair shocked the public. Most obviously, it exposed the muddy morals of persons in what was then known as the Establishment. The image of London as a city of vice was also reinforced. It now appeared that there were murky networks linking Notting Hill jazz musicians, West Indian immigrants, drugs and sex with aristocrats and politicians. Lively reports of call girls playing around in privileged haunts such as Lord Astor's property in Cliveden disturbed and assuredly titillated the readers of the weekend papers.
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No small part of the discomfiture of some of those caught up in the affair stemmed from the parts played by Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Their behaviour confounded conventional categories. Neither could easily be dismissed as wholly innocent or as wholly wicked, and both insisted on telling their own stories. Both Keeler and Rice-Davies strenuously contested descriptions of themselves as call girls or prostitutes. Rice-Davies objected that ‘I have been branded a cheap prostitute. That is not
so. I am an expensive courtesan, if you like, but never a prostitute.'
30
Keeler's determination to solicit media attention and to speak up for herself it seems took John Profumo by surprise. He had underestimated her, assuming her to be uneducated and only interested in make-up and hairstyles.
31
Both girls had come to London at the age of fifteen, independently, to seek their fortunes. Keeler's background was working class: she had been brought up in a converted railway carriage in Buckinghamshire. She was twenty-one when the scandal broke in 1963. Rice-Davies's family was more middle class: she had grown up in Shirley, outside Birmingham. Both had done stints of modelling and worked as ‘showgirls' in Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho. Both girls were extremely resourceful. Keeler was tough-minded: she had survived a number of personal setbacks. Rice-Davies was
shrewd, sexy and quick-witted. Under questioning at the trial of Stephen Ward, the prosecuting counsel challenged Rice-Davies by insisting that Lord Astor denied ever having met her, let alone having an affair with her. ‘Well, he would, wouldn't he?' replied Rice-Davies sweetly, a retort which was immortalised in the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
.

5.2
Mandy Rice-Davies unperturbed about the public impact of her revelations (© Express/Stringer/Getty Images).

Both Keeler and Rice-Davies showed a flair for publicity and a keen eye for profiting from ‘exposures'. Keeler tried to sell her story to the highest newspaper bidder. Rice-Davies published
The Mandy Report
. She warned her readers gleefully that she was about to tell ‘a wicked, wicked story':

the sorry tale of a young girl, barely more than a child, baited with mink and diamonds until trapped in a web of complete moral depravity …
32

This silken promise of a goodnight story may well have caused some of her acquaintances to writhe sleeplessly, uneasy in their beds and consciences. Mandy would reveal the truth at last, she promised, spilling the beans ‘about the millionaires who buy women as casually as they order champagne', and about ‘the snake-pit masquerading under the title of High Society'. Then there were the details of the sex parties, which she claimed had shocked both her and her friend Christine, as far ‘too “kinky” for us'. The press didn't know how to deal with these girls. As has often been the case in more recent scandals and kiss-and-tell stories, such as Monica Lewinsky's relationship with President Bill Clinton, it was difficult to decide who was the exploiter and who was the victim. The historian Frank Mort has shown how Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were variously represented as naïve ingénues, modest young women, sexual victims or wanton seductresses.
33
The
Sunday Mirror
denounced both
girls as shameless tarts, and Rice-Davies as a ‘pert slut'.
34
But both were capable of standing up for themselves, and refused to be silenced.

The Profumo affair effectively undermined the credibility of Macmillan's government. It discredited the male establishment, and suggested that young women from working-class backgrounds might not always be amenable to patriarchal control. Girls were getting somewhat uppity, it seemed. And the wages of sin (as columnist Marjorie Proops observed in the
Sunday Mirror
) might be anything but deadly.
35
It was getting hard to tell the difference between ‘whores' and ‘liberated' – or enterprising – young women-about-town.

The colourful adventures of Christine and Mandy in the vice haunts of the metropolis may have appalled and enthralled observers in the rest of Britain, but the experience of most fifteen- to twenty-year-old girls was obviously very different. Anxiety over the influence of clubs, coffee bars and basement jazz, however, spread. The historian Louise Jackson has shown how Manchester City Police mounted an attack on what they saw as the ‘Coffee Club Menace' in the early 1960s.
36
In Manchester, clubs such as the Jungfrau in Cathedral Street, Beat City, the Cavern Club or the Twisted Wheel were important meeting places for young people. They were ‘members only' clubs, which meant they were outside the licensing laws and that the police had no automatic right to enter them. There was concern over drugs, especially cannabis and ‘purple hearts' (Drinamyl). Like the clubs in Stepney, these places were suspected of being a magnet for girls who had run away from difficult family situations, or from approved schools. These girls were regarded as being ‘in moral danger'.

The press published lurid stories. In 1964 the
Daily Mail
reported that Manchester's Heaven and Hell club, with its dark,
gothic interior, was associated with the ‘dangerous teenage immorality lurking in the basements of Britain's big cities'. The
News of the World
trumped this a year later by reviving stories of white slavery, this time centring on Manchester's coffee bars and beat clubs.
37
Two pretty young girls who had been ‘dossing' in the clubs were said to have been abducted and delivered for auction among Pakistani men in Bradford. This pressed all the old alarm bells about race, immigration and sexual danger, even though it turned out that the girls in question were both over seventeen and that the real story was very different.
38

In Manchester, police raids on the clubs brought a relatively small number of minor prosecutions. Most of the young people attending these venues were simply there to have a good time. But suspicions persisted. Part of the reason was simply unease about youth culture. The year 1964 was one which brought outbreaks of violence between Mods and Rockers on the south coast of England, particularly in the seaside resorts of Clacton, Margate and Brighton. In Brighton, the council had been concerned since the late 1950s about overcrowding, criminal networks and stolen goods in relation to the town's myriad clubs and coffee bars. What went on at the Mogambo, or the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, certainly worried parents, although to this day people record on local websites their happy memories of teenage dances in such places.
39

In Stepney, the Reverend Williamson had denounced jukeboxes as ‘pagan altars'.
40
They had become the symbols of a new teenage culture. In 1945 there were fewer than 100 jukeboxes in Britain, by 1958 it has been estimated that there were probably over 15,000.
41
Jukeboxes purveyed the new rock 'n' roll in clubs and cafés all over the country and were interpreted by even the most law-abiding teenagers as something of a challenge to convention. Lorna Sage, growing up in the rural environs of
Whitchurch, Shropshire, records the impact of Bill Haley and his Comets.
42
She became a teenager just as music separated the generations and young people became ‘a tribe apart'. Lorna remembered a delight in Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and the bad boys of rock 'n' roll; their heavy sensuality, the ‘insidious bump and grind'. On a family trip to Southport, she and her friend Gail rushed from one jukebox to another, intent on drowning out the music of Pat Boone with Elvis's ‘All Shook Up' at maximum volume. They were shrieking with glee at this, ‘like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus'.
43
The behaviour was harmless enough, but probably not quite what was expected of young ladies at Whitchurch High School.

Class, like ethnicity, was an important consideration. In the mid-1950s, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson's short documentary film
Momma Don't Allow
featured young people jiving in a north London jazz club.
44
The working-class youngsters (especially the
Teddy boys) are fashionably dressed, confident and relaxed, until a middle-class contingent arrives and class tensions threaten disruption. Rock 'n' roll, like youth culture generally in the early 1960s, was seen as emanating from the working class. Jazz clubs, coffee bars and beat cellars attracted a mixed clientele, and many parents, particularly of daughters, were uneasy about this. Sociologist Brian Jackson, investigating communities in Huddersfield in the mid-1960s, found that teenage girls attending the local grammar school were uneasy about going into coffee bars, let alone jazz clubs.
45
They saw them as attracting ‘Teddy boy' types, or girls who hadn't been well brought up. But outside the bigger towns and cities, the majority of teenagers probably enjoyed rock 'n' roll in parentally approved environments: youth clubs in church halls, at sixth-form dances, or even (given the growing importance of television sets and portable record players) in the family home.

5.3
Trendy teenagers enjoying the sounds at Brad's Club, London, early 1960s (© Terry Fincher/Stringer/Getty Images).