The stunning Christine Keeler was often compared to supermodel Jean Shrimpton, minus opportunity. Shrimpton came from a relatively posh background; Keeler grew up in a converted railway carriage. She had a predatory stepfather and had to sleep with a knife under her pillow. She had come to London at fifteen in 1957, worked in a dress shop in Soho, got pregnant by a black American GI, and lost the child. Then she took a job as a stripper at Murray’s Cabaret Club, a Soho fleshpot straight out of Expresso Bongo. She was amazed that despite her own horror at the havoc pregnancy had wreaked on her body, men were still dying to ogle her. In her world of buffeted helplessness, that objectification was empowering. Within all the indignity, she found dignity and projected the grand illusion of confidence. At Murray’s, Christine met Mandy Rice-Davies, the bubbly blond daughter of a policeman and an occasional model who worked auto shows at Earl’s Court. Both girls needed money and would do anything to get it.
Opportunity knocked in the presence of the twin serpents in the Eden that was swinging London: two men, one English, one American, who could connect beautiful girls to powerful men who could make their wildest dreams come true. The Englishman was an osteopath/sociopath named Dr. Stephen Ward. The son of a minister, Ward had worked as a carpet salesman before traveling to Missouri to attend a dubious osteopathy school. While the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath is hazy, and neither is an accredited MD, Stephen Ward was undisputedly great with his hands. During World War II, Ward had been court-martialed for treating officers for muscle problems without the proper credentials. He was demoted to being a stretcher-bearer in India but, proving brilliant at networking, ended up treating Mahatma Gandhi for a stiff neck and won his friendship.
Back in London after the war, Ward began working at a clinic. One day he got a call from American ambassador Averell Harriman, looking for the best man in London to cure his aching back. Ward volunteered himself, and a celebrity practice was born. Apparently, credentials were irrelevant. The rich and famous loved Ward’s results. Harriman referred Winston Churchill, who referred Duncan Sandys, who referred his sexual blood brother, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Word got out to Hollywood, and Ava Gardner signed up, as did Mary Martin. But the most eventful of Ward’s celebrated patients was Lord William Astor, the hypochondriac son of the legendary Virginian Lady Nancy Astor and now master of Cliveden, one of the stateliest of England’s stately homes and locus of the prewar Cliveden Set, an upper-class cadre sympathetic to Hitler. Lord Astor got so addicted to Ward’s magic fingers that he gave him a cottage on the Cliveden estate where Ward would spend weekends.
THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT. London call girl Christine Keeler, provocative center of the Profumo scandal that toppled the prime minister, going off to see the judge, 1963. (photo credit 12.4)
Ward had two other great talents. The first was portraiture. Churchill, an amateur painter himself, declared Ward’s genius, and soon Ward was sketching the faces of the same high and mighty whose spines he was manipulating. Among his royal subjects were the Duke of Edinburgh, the Earl of Snowden, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and Churchill himself. Ward became an even more in-demand portraitist than Mark Birley’s famous father, Sir Oswald, and he was very much part of the Birley-Aspinall Clermont set.
Ward’s other great talent was finding the prettiest women in London and creating his own harem. He haunted the Soho clubs, such as Murray’s, where he discovered Christine and Mandy, and he began inviting them out to Cliveden, where Christine caught Bill Astor’s roving eye. Astor was already married to one of England’s top models, Bronwen Pugh, but if you were an Astor, there were never enough top models, and Christine was an undiscovered gem.
It was during a pool party at Cliveden in 1961 that Ward made the fatal introduction of Christine to John Profumo, the dashing secretary of state for war in the Macmillan cabinet and the rising star of his Conservative Party. Profumo was married to British movie star Valerie Hobson, but just as one top model wasn’t enough for his host, Lord Astor, one cinema celebrity wasn’t enough for Profumo. At the same party was Yevgeni Ivanov, an equally dashing naval attaché at London’s Soviet embassy who helped Ward get papers to go to Russia to sketch Khrushchev and other Politburo leaders. Ivanov wasn’t married to anyone. He was on the prowl. London at that lofty level was very sophisticated. There was nothing untoward about mixing capitalists and Communists, as there would have been in the still-Red-scared United States. Profumo and Ivanov were equally smitten with Christine, and there was the rub.
Enter the American serpent in the garden, Tom Corbally, who was a more ruggedly masculine version of Stephen Ward and who shared overlapping harems. Corbally was arguably the most connected American in the entire Jet Set. He knew all the same power hitters as Ward, and he was more ruthless in that knowledge and in his manipulation of his enviable address book. Furthermore, he was truly the playboy of the Western world. Unlike Ward, who was a “friend” and confidant to his girls, Tom Corbally never met a beautiful woman he didn’t sleep with. How could they resist? He looked like Jason Robards, dressed like the Duke of Windsor, and sounded like Johnny Cash minus the twang. His was the voice of America, deep, powerful, certain. A good friend of Ian Fleming, he was later known as “the American James Bond.”
Nobody knew what Tom Corbally did. He lived in splendor in Mayfair, near the Duchess of Argyll. He wasn’t on the list of eighty-eight, though that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have been. He had been linked to Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, among other heiresses. Heiresses loved him, as did call girls. They all did. He just didn’t appear on lists or in little black books. He didn’t have an office. Some thought he was in advertising, some thought business of the vaguest sort. Everyone just assumed he was a spy. It was a good assumption, though what Tom Corbally was, was a master fixer. He supposedly fixed things for President Roosevelt, who had assigned him as an aide to General MacArthur to report back on the “old soldier” so the president could stay a step ahead. Of course, this, like almost everything about Corbally, was off the record.
On the record, he had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, at its inception in World War II. In 1956, he had briefly married the tennis champion “Gorgeous” Gussie Moran, she of the shocking lace panties. He had beaten out Eddie Gilbert for her favors but stayed close to Gilbert far longer than he did to his wife. Corbally had come from a line of cloak-and-dagger men. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1921. His grandfather, an Irish potato famine–era immigrant, had been a police inspector who then founded a detective agency. His father worked for the Newark municipality. Naturally, Corbally knew his Hoboken neighbor Frank Sinatra, whose mother, Dolly, was active in local politics.
An early bloomer, Corbally learned to wear a tux, cross the Hudson, and hang out with the debs at the Stork Club starting at age fifteen. He quickly concluded that the world was bifurcated between the girls you slept with and took to the relatively downmarket Copacabana and the girls you kept your hands off, bought orchids for, and took to the august Stork. Corbally was a college man, but not much of one. He attended the Catholic school Seton Hall for two years, until mid-1941, before Pearl Harbor forced America into the war. Itching to fight, he quit school and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, flying Spitfires over Germany. He went on the ground in Germany after the war to do intelligence work, then he began his secret shuttle diplomacy between New York and Europe.
In New York, he was closely allied to Gotham’s master lawyer-fixer, Roy Cohn, the judge’s son who became the pet of J. Edgar Hoover and the scourge of American Communism as the terrifying right hand of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In London, Corbally was close to everyone who mattered. The hottest ticket in the empire was to one of his fabled Mayfair sex parties, his flat having become a kind of advance Playboy Club long before Victor Lownes ever got to town. After one of these orgies, Corbally injured his knee. At a subsequent, more decorous event, Stephen Ward noticed Corbally’s limp, introduced himself, and went to work. In mo
ments, Corbally’s pain had vanished, and a friendship was forged. What they mainly had in common were passions for famous people and striking women, though the two showed their love in very different ways.
Ward had been married once, in 1949, to a fashion model. That union was briefer than Corbally’s with Gussie Moran. Ward’s wife left him after six weeks. Ward had many other public liaisons with high-profile beauties, usually models, such as one with Eunice Bailey, the top Christian Dior mannequin of the fifties, but the romances were reported to be all show and no go. Ward had Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies move in to his Wimpole Mews flat soon after they met. He was one of the few men on earth who could be that close to the sex kittens and not give in to lustful thoughts. Meanwhile, Tom Corbally, introduced to the girls by Ward, did everything with them that Ward did not.
While Ward would have liked to Pygmalionize the girls, Corbally preferred to accentuate the negatives and keep them as kinky Eliza Doolittles. He gave them top billing on his orgy list and began stirring the pot of temptation with both Profumo and Ivanov. As a spymaster, Corbally knew the girls could obtain secret pillow talk from Ivanov that Corbally’s top Washington contacts surely could utilize. What he wanted them to obtain from Profumo was less clear. Did Washington want to compromise him in some way that could destabilize the Macmillan Conservative government? Who could know? It was always unwise to try to second-guess the inscrutable Tom Corbally.
FETE ACCOMPLI. CIA key man in Europe Tom Corbally (standing center, left) and restaurateur Claude Terrail (standing center, right) partying at Paris nightclub Scheherazade with rich American friends, 1960. (photo credit 12.5)
The plot thickened thanks to the new 707. Two girls from the Ward-Corbally London orgy circuit were also plying their oldest profession in New York, and both had been linked to President Kennedy. The two were Suzy Chang, a Chinese playgirl often seen at the bar at 21; and Mariella Novotny, a Czechoslovakian former Soho stripper, like Christine and Mandy. The Czech stunner had married a Soho underworld character named Hod Dibben who owned the notorious Black Sheep Club, a hangout of the Kray twin gangsters.
Dibben installed his new bride, four decades his junior, in a stately home in Sussex and a stately flat in Eaton Place. Given a long leash by her husband, Novotny loved the new 707s and was soon flying back and forth between London and New York, running an international call-girl ring and attempting to rival that in Paris masterminded by Tom Corbally’s close friend, the celebrated sex agent Madame Claude. Mariella’s man on the ground in Manhattan was the prominent television producer Harry Alan Towers, whose prestigious British TV movies were partially financed by his friend Huntington Hartford, that insatiable devourer of models. Towers was also a good friend of JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, who was making his own mark on TV as the Thin Man.
Lawford, in turn, was John Kennedy’s chief procurer. He reportedly had Chang and Novotny dress as nurses and attend to the president’s always ailing back. Whether Kennedy ever enlisted the redoubtable aid of Stephen Ward in this regard is not known but not unlikely, especially since Ward was treating JFK’s Rat Pack buddy Frank Sinatra during this period. Sinatra often sent his valet George Jacobs to massage Kennedy; if the chairman had been pleased with Ward’s handiwork, he probably would have bestowed him on the president. Not to mention all the fringe benefits of Ward’s harem. This was when Mariella Novotny was at the height of her reputation as a sexual hostess. She organized a famous orgy in London that Keeler, Ward, and Corbally all attended, known as the Feast of the Peacocks, where she cooked rare peacock for dinner, then donned a corset and brandished a whip for the just dessert of all the submissives. One of these pain-seekers was the distinguished film director Anthony Asquith (Pygmalion), whose father had been prime minister. Under Novotny’s orders, Asquith served guests cocktails wearing only a maid’s apron and a black leather mask.
Chang and Novotny also worked the Washington, D.C., sex circuit, their assignations arranged by LBJ aide and Mr. Fixit Bobby Baker, the Texas lobbyist. Suffice it to say that J. Edgar Hoover, the ultimate voyeur, was on top of the whole situation. The knowledge of presidential peccadilloes gave Hoover immense power as well as thrills. In March 1961, New York police raided Towers’s Fifty-fifth Street apartment and arrested him and Novotny on international white slavery charges that involved as clients seemingly half the diplomats at the United Nations. Novotny absconded and smuggled herself aboard the England-bound Queen Mary, where it was far easier to get lost than on Pan Am’s Clipper to London. Lawford was able to use his influence to get the charges against Towers dropped.
Chastened by her brush with the law, Mariella Novotny stayed put in London, where she had known both Profumo and Ivanov, all part of the Ward-Corbally movable feast. But both men were too obsessed with Christine Keeler to be distracted by Novotny. J. Edgar Hoover was not amused by the New York sex bust. The New York cops thought they were just doing their job; Hoover wanted to keep the honey trap going, for all the dirt it provided him. With Novotny out of action, Corbally in July 1962 helped dispatch Christine and Mandy to New York for fun and profit and possibly the delectation of the head of the FBI, giving them all the right numbers to call. It was widely rumored that one of their to-do items during the two weeks in the Big Apple was to spend some time with President Kennedy.
Back in London, as the clock ticked down to the Cuban missile crisis that October, and relations between East and West grew increasingly tense, Christine Keeler was in the heat of her own East-West ménage à trois of sexual politics with Profumo and Ivanov. The previous year, she’d had an abortion. She said it was Profumo’s child, but it also could have been Ivanov’s. Or someone else’s, specifically that of Johnny Edgecombe, her jealous Jamaican drug-dealer boyfriend who followed her to Stephen Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews and fired a gun at her. This was the shot heard ’round the world, and its echo broke the scandal wide open.
Despite her involvement with the upper strata, Christine Keeler seemed to feel more at home in the depths. She had a thing for Jamaicans. She had fallen for her marijuana dealer, an ex-con named Lucky Gordon, right after she and Mandy had returned from their glamorous trip to Manhattan. And then she two-timed him with his fellow miscreant Johnny Edgecombe. The two Jamaicans had been involved in a knife fight over her at a Soho club called the All-Nighter. That had scared Christine into breaking with both men, inciting Edgecombe’s pistol attack. The shots brought the police to Ward’s flat, and Edgecombe was arrested and charged. Both Christine and Mandy were there, and while the shooting might not otherwise have achieved much traction, the combination of a black man, two white goddesses, and the house of the most famous healer in England was the stuff of dreams for tabloid reporters.
The siren call of Fleet Street, with its checkbook journalism, was music to the ears of Christine, who, despite her wealthy call-girl clients, never seemed to have any money. For a thousand pounds, she told her story to the Sunday Pictorial. What started out as the tale of an innocent country girl in the big city, torn between the high society of Stephen Ward and the low society of the Jamaicans, quickly stepped up to become a nail-biting saga of international intrigue, wherein Christine embellished herself as a Mata Hari being used by Ivanov to extract secrets about nuclear warheads from Profumo.
Ivanov had never asked for any such thing from Christine. This, to him, was strictly man’s work. He had asked his friend Ward to get the warhead information from Profumo, and Ward had shared his conflict over the cloak-and-dagger request with Christine. But now, to make a good story great, she lied and recast herself as the fulcrum of the tale, the woman between. She hated both Ivanov and Profumo for using her without commitment. Now she would have a hooker’s revenge and become famous to boot.
The Cuban missile crisis tensions had resulted in the recall of Ivanov to Moscow. John Profumo was left alone in England to face the music. The Americans, with all their connections to the matter, were getting nervous as well. After Christine Keeler’s tabloid confe
ssions hit the newsstands, the American ambassador, David Bruce—incidentally, Juan Trippe’s cousin by marriage—turned to Tom Corbally, the man who knew everything, for an explanation if not an exegesis. Corbally had previously introduced one of Bruce’s Mellon in-laws to Mandy Rice-Davies, whom Mellon had taken to Paris for a wild weekend. They were all in this, very deep. Responding to the ambassador’s request, which, notwithstanding his friendship with Profumo, Corbally could not refuse, he arranged a lunch for himself, Ward, and Bruce in the café of Simpson’s in Piccadilly, a midrange department store where none of them was likely to be recognized. Wanting to dodge the bullets in what promised to be an endless fusillade, the Nijinsky-like Corbally danced out of harm’s way by throwing his ostensible pal Profumo under the double-decker London bus.
Once Corbally, with Ward’s aid, had told the ambassador the full and awful truth about the erotic triangle of Profumo, Ivanov, and Keeler, Bruce came clean by passing the information to Harold Macmillan. The Labour Party, smelling blood, called on Profumo to defend himself. In March 1963, the secretary of state for war responded to Labour’s summons. Speaking eloquently, as was his wont, on the floor of the House of Commons, he denied everything. He conceded that he had a nodding acquaintance with Christine Keeler through Ward, but nothing more. He declared, fatally, that there was “no impropriety” in their relationship. The prime minister, knowing full well from Ambassador Bruce that Profumo was lying, nonetheless stood behind the prevarications of his minister, a loyalty that would lead to his own downfall.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 30
