A topless shot of Christine Keeler sells at auction for triple the price of a bare-chested Kate Moss BY Stephanie Hirschmiller | Photo: Courtesy of Bloomsbury Auctions A revealing photograph of a young Kate Moss - as lensed by famous photographer Patrick Demarchelier - and a topless shot of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley went head to head at auction today. Kate Moss for Playboy: the latest picturesKate Moss joins Vogue as contributing fashion editorKate Moss to resume fashion collaboration with TopshopKate Moss for The Face? However, it was the image of the showgirl at the heart of the Profumo Affair which led to the eventual downfall of the Macmillan government that trumped that of a 19-year-old Moss. The images went under the hammer at a sale by Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions in London this afternoon. The photograph of Kate Moss taken in 1992, went for £4,000 while that of Keeler (admittedly signed by the lady herself) and published at the height of the Profumo Scandal, fetched a hammer price of £11,500 - practically triple the price of the supermodel shot.
Keeler famously posed nude for Morley in 1963 and the photograph, part of a series to promote the planned film The Keeler Affair, prompted debate as to whether she was really completely nude or not. SEE: Kate Moss in 30 covers "I am always asked if I wore knickers for the shot astride the chair. But it had been a battle to keep them on," Keeler revealed in her biography, Secrets and Lies, published this year. "Morley had wanted to photograph me without any clothes on but I used the chair to cover my bust and pulled up my white knickers around my waist." SEE: London Fashion Week: Burberry Prorsum autumn/winter 2013 in pictures Still in fashion after all those years, Keeler also proved Christopher Bailey's inspiration for Burberry's autumn/winter 2013 show: "I wanted this idea of something classic mixed with something sexy," he said, "and I was looking into Christine Keeler. She was this very sexy very sassy woman." A sentiment certainly evinced by Morley's photograph.
Cara Delevingne walks in Burberry's Keeler inspired autumn / winter 2013 showMøbler FurnitureBentwood FurnitureFurniture DetailFurniture SeatingModern FurnitureFurniture DesignChairs Sofas TablesAnt ChairsSeating ChairsForwardTrio of Arne Jacobsen Ant Chairs | Valerie Hobson didn't care for the cut of her husband's trousers. "Surely there must be some way of concealing your penis," she wrote to the secretary of state for war John Profumo. In 1963, the concealment of Profumo's penis – the denial that it was where it was said to be at the times in question – was the premise of the greatest sex scandal of postwar British politics. Profumo was an oddity – a randy politician à la JFK in a dry-balled, homophobic, strait-laced Tory administration. In 1961, he had a brief affair with Christine Keeler, variously described as a topless showgirl or (by high-minded classicists) a hetaera. He didn't know she was also sleeping with drug dealer Johnny Edgecombe and – fatefully – Soviet spy Yevgeni Ivanov.
By 1963, media allegations that Profumo had fallen into a honey trap in which Keeler was manipulated by her osteopath friend Stephen Ward (damned by hacks as a reckless libertine with MI5 and Kremlin contacts) into luring her Tory lover to blab nuclear secrets that were passed on to the Kremlin became so nearly ubiquitous that the minister felt compelled to make a statement to the House. His proto-Clintonesque sex lie – "There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler" – destroyed not only Profumo, but also the government: prime minister Harold Macmillan's ill health was exacerbated by the Profumo affair and he resigned that October. No wonder, then, that Philip Larkin's poem Annus Mirabilis drips with sarcasm about any Pollyannaish perspective on what sex meant in 1963, on the insane idea that in that year what was once ugly and disgusting became sunshine and lollipops. The first three stanzas are worth quoting: (which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP. Up to then there'd only been A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen Then all at once the quarrel sank: A brilliant breaking of the bank, The Pollyanna story goes like this. In 1961, the pill was introduced in the UK (initially for married women only) and its rapid take-up (between 1962 and 1969, the number of UK users rose from approximately 50,000 to one million) changed sex from being a procreative conjugal act into a pleasure, without the irksome consequences. Whatever had been going on between the sheets before 1963 wasn't sexual intercourse. Women – and there's no easy way to say this – might reasonably expect to be pleasured in the marital bed. A nation hitherto hobbled could fulfil its manifest sexual-spiritual destiny. Who knows, perhaps soon the concealed British penises of yesteryear might become proudly erect and engirdled with daisy chains wreathed by ardent lady lovers – just like in the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, the ban on which had been overturned in 1960.
Truly in this dawn it was bliss to be alive with functioning fun bumps – and to be young was very heaven (poor Larkin: he was too old, his poem implied, to be part of the swinging 60s). The conjugal terror of 1962 anatomised in Ian McEwan's Chesil Beach and/or glum procreation. Fulfilment without shame, sex without tears, wedding vows underwritten by promises of regular orgasms for both parties both in and outside marriage. But not everyone felt the same, or looked to DH Lawrence's unbanned book as a guide to sexual bliss. In 1957, the Wolfenden report had recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, but this was rejected by the Conservative government. And even in 1967, when Leo Abse's Sexual Offences Act legalised gay sex in England and Wales (Scotland followed only in 1981, Northern Ireland 1982), the age of consent was higher than for heterosexuals, and privacy judged very narrowly. In 1963 if you were gay, it was better to be in Prague or Budapest than in ostensibly swinging London: the Czech and Hungarian governments had decriminalised sodomy two years earlier.
Britain wasn't quite the 1963 Wyoming depicted in Brokeback Mountain, but it, too, contained its stories of sex thwarted, love irredeemably lost and lives made grey by unfeeling law. Equally, sex was a class issue in 1963. In the early 60s, 35,000 women a year were being treated by the NHS for botched abortions, while richer women might be among those 10,000 a year who had terminations in Harley Street or other West End clinics for large sums of money. Until 1967, abortion was illegal in the UK. For many, perhaps most, sex was hardly then a quite unlosable game – as Larkin fully realised. Richard Davenport-Hines in his recently published An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo writes that 1963 was the year when "the soapy scum flowed after the sluices of self-righteous scurrility were opened". By scum, he surely means the press who deluded, flattered and sexually stimulated readers with scurrilous lies about the Profumo affair using privacy-infringing methods that make one realise those excoriated by Lord Leveson had their predecessors.
But let's not let non-hacks off the hook. Journalists knew that their hypocritical, sex-fixated readers wanted the impossible: to have their faces pushed into someone else's dirty laundry and then come up smelling of roses. Sex sells, certainly, but selling sex to self-righteous hypocrites terrified and turned on by seeming sexual liberalisation sold particularly well in 1963.The emblematic loser in the game of sex in 1963 was not Profumo but Ward, demonised as a malevolent mischief-making cesspit dweller by – did they not spot the irony? – the News of the World. In July 1963 this broken, weak man appeared in court to face trumped-up sexual charges, including living off the earnings of prostitutes. The affair's most haunting image, especially if you are a media worker, is of Ward being borne from his flat on a stretcher while dying of a barbiturates overdose on the last day of his trial, to be papped and flashed by snappers. It's hard to resist the thought that Ward was the projection of British fears about sex, the scapegoat who was sacrificed at the start of the low, libidinous decade.
Behind the lie told in court that Ward had a two-way mirror in his flat, the better to indulge his voyeurism (it actually belonged to slum landlord Peter Rachman) was another mirror. His distorted image presented in court reflected what some of his accusers were, and what others took to be a premonition of the fall that was coming now that sex, like an Edenic apple, had been tasted for the first time in all its polymorphous perversity.Writing of the effects of liberalising legislation on abortion, gay sex and the reduction of censorship in the 60s, Andrew Marr in A History of Modern Britain stresses this lapsarian image: "A fair verdict is that the changes allowed the British to be more openly themselves, and that while the results are not pretty, the apple of self-knowledge cannot be uneaten again and returned to the tree." So 1963 was a year of lenses and mirrors, concealing and revealing a perverse dis-ease about what sex was becoming. The novelist and journalist Sybille Bedford wrote of Christine Keeler: "For all the sleekness, the sexiness, there is a lack of life, as if the sex were prefabricated sex, deep-freeze sex, displayed like the dish of fruit in a colour photograph."