Christine keeler

Thursday

Lynn Barber

The sexploits of Mariella Novotny

Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any credible way. Searching for facts in the foetid gloop of Pizzichini’s prose feels like bog-snorkelling. The subject, Mariella Novotny, was a ‘party girl’, or prostitute, who turns up like Zelig in many 1960s scandals. She claimed to have had sex with John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby when she was only 20, and she was on the scene when Christine Keeler was having her affairs with Profumo and the Russian spy Ivanov. She featured in several News of the World exposés, and later contributed an autobiographical serial to the

Friday

Seymour Platt

My battle to clear Christine Keeler’s name

This July will mark 60 years since the beginning of the chapter in our nation’s history known as the ‘Profumo scandal.’ It was this unhappy episode in which my mother Christine Sloane, formerly Christine Keeler, had a starring role, and is credited with the fall of Harold Macmillan’s government. The story of that affair is well known: Chris met John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, at a summer pool party at Cliveden. She found herself the focus of the world’s press attention two years later when her relationship with the Tory MP became public knowledge. She had also briefly been with a Soviet called Yevgeny Ivanov, prompting feverish claims that