Books, Arts & Manners: Scanted Scandal

A couple of reviewers having already quoted Philip Larkin’s verses on the significance of the 1963 Profumo scandal for Britain’s sexual mores, I shall have to forgo the pleasures of verse in dealing with the English film Scandal.

Too bad, because Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” is ever so nice. In plain prose, however, the dalliance of John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, with Christine Keeler, an 18-year-old showgirl turned good-time girl, eventually toppled the Macmillan cabinet, and conservatism, in more ways than one, was out. At the storm’s not so calm center was, besides Christine, Stephen Ward, the vicar’s son and society osteopath, who also acted as unpaid pimp to the nobility. He groomed girls like Christine as “escorts” to the high and mighty, and enjoyed in exchange such privileges as the cottage on the estate of Cliveden, which Lord Astor rented him for a pound a year. It turned out, in the end, to be more like a pound of flesh.

JS

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John Simon

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A couple of reviewers having already quoted Philip Larkin’s verses on the significance of the 1963 Profumo scandal for Britain’s sexual mores, I shall have to forgo the pleasures of verse in dealing with the English film Scandal.

Too bad, because Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” is ever so nice. In plain prose, however, the dalliance of John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, with Christine Keeler, an 18-year-old showgirl turned good-time girl, eventually toppled the Macmillan cabinet, and conservatism, in more ways than one, was out. At the storm’s not so calm center was, besides Christine, Stephen Ward, the vicar’s son and society osteopath, who also acted as unpaid pimp to the nobility. He groomed girls like Christine as “escorts” to the high and mighty, and enjoyed in exchange such privileges as the cottage on the estate of Cliveden, which Lord Astor rented him for a pound a year. It turned out, in the end, to be more like a pound of flesh.