About the official Christine Keeler website
'Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy’
Christine Keeler - 22 February 1942 – 4 December 2017
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This website has been a journey to try and record Christine’s life, her legacy and to do so honestly and as accurately as possible. To start, and to help me understand I wanted to record what we did know to build a timeline of her life to help put a straight line through the complicated story. Using court records, memoirs, newspapers and even speeches in Parliament. I have pulled together, with help, a list of events and I think it tells its own story.
Then there was the cultural impact, the art work, poetry or actors who have played Christine and music about Christine and those events. I did not appreciate how much there was, the legacy. Philip Larkin wrote that sex was invented in 1963, That was about my mother and the Profumo scandal. There was a change in Britain in 1963 that rippled through the decade and the decades since. December 2019 I had just finished a call with Kate Triggs a producer on a BBC drama about my mother that was about to be released. Kate had called to let me know what was happening in the drama as I was family, it was a courtesy call, she had told me they were telling the story right up to my mothers release from prison and the drama would talk about the police advising my mother to lie in her court case, the lie that would see her go to prison for six months. That hit me like a brick, I had never heard that before, Chris had never said that to me. I checked online, I reread her account. For me, I needed to understand the events around her trial against Lucky Gordon and the aftermath of that trial that saw Christine go to prison for six months. Christine had always believed she should never have gone to prison, but she did sometimes struggle to argue her case, it was so complicated there were lots of characters in the story, all with there own agendas and she ended up going to prison. I remember back in 1993 sitting in a studio audience watching Christine on a talk show with Clive Anderson asking the questions and she was saying “I was the first person to go to prison for not stating who was at a scene of a crime when a crime took place” and I remember watching Clive Anderson move on to the next question, It was too complicated. There were so many newspaper articles that weren’t correct, only partially researched and so many conspiracies theories: The police, The government, gangsters, spies and even the Royal Family. The story is an important part of history, so the hope is this website can honestly tell her story. I knew Chris better than most, she could be funny, she could be sad because she was human, but she was also Christine Keeler, an icon from the 1960s. |
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I would like to thank: Desmond Banks: for all his help researching the timeline, The Music of Christine, and for all of his support over the last few years. Fionn Wilson: for the Dear Christine exhibition and all her help with that page and proof reading https://www.fionnwilson.co.uk/ David McCleave: for his advice and suggestions. Douglas Thompson: for his patience with my endless questions. Lorraine Devine: My wife, for her help and continuous support. |
Seymour Platt
Christine’s son
Post Script
When I was ten years old I was diagnosed with dyslexia, it's quite mild and not at all severe. I love reading, it just takes me a little longer to finish a page, I love writing, I just have to concentrate a little harder. You may find the occasional spelling mistake, I have worked as hard as I can correct but I am happy for you to contact me to point out any mistakes I may have missed.
When I was ten years old I was diagnosed with dyslexia, it's quite mild and not at all severe. I love reading, it just takes me a little longer to finish a page, I love writing, I just have to concentrate a little harder. You may find the occasional spelling mistake, I have worked as hard as I can correct but I am happy for you to contact me to point out any mistakes I may have missed.
