Sunday, March 21, 2010

The big picture / Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963

Christine Keeler on the beach in Cannes, May 1963. Photograph: Popperfoto

The big picture: Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963

It's high nooon on the beach at Cannes for the woman who made a Tory government totter with a film about her notorious affair

Peter Conrad
Sunday 21 March 2010

On the beach is where you wait for the world to end, or watch a continent crumbling into powder that washes away with every wave that thuds on the shore. It's a laboratory for studying erosion: the hill beyond the Cannes waterfront may have been covered with Italianate villas made of stone quarried from local mountains, but down here in the foreground there are only granules of dirt, churned up by the child in the sun hat. The beach is where earth sifts away like sand trickling through an hour glass.

The woman with the hooded eyes, long nose and unkempt hair is walking across the beach towards oblivion; in the shorter term, she is on her way to jail. Christine Keeler had supposedly endangered national security by sleeping with both Harold Macmillan's secretary of state for war and a Russian naval attaché. At home she was notorious but in this paradise of cooking flesh she looks quaintly prim: the former topless showgirl from a Soho cabaret has chosen to wear a prudish one-piece bathing suit. The few men whose gazes stray towards her were probably wondering why anyone would bother to take her photograph. If the palms along the corniche are too exotic for Cannes, she's not exotic enough.

Her walk was a stunt to publicise a tacky film about her affair with Profumo, made in Denmark and never licensed in the UK. Keeler recited the credit titles at the end, beginning with her admission that "I was played by Yvonne Buckingham": she wasn't even allowed to be the heroine of her own life story. The film disappeared like a footprint in dry sand, leaving behind only an image from another publicity campaign – Lewis Morley's nude portrait of Keeler astride a curvy biomorphic copy of a chair designed by Arne Jacobsen. Morley photographed her in a studio, with her white limbs and the blond wood of the chair eerily radiant in the darkness. Outdoors, in the unsparing sunlight, she looks ordinary, despoiled of aura. Was this the face that made a Tory government totter?

What gives the image interest is two passages of abstract form that have nothing to do with its documentary content. One is the pattern on Keeler's bathing suit, as much a relic of Sixties design as a Jacobsen chair: zoom in on those stripes and you'll find yourself inside a piece of op art by Bridget Riley. The other is her shadow etched on the sand, foreshortened because the sun is so high overhead at noon: it looks like a frisky dog, leashed to her ankle. This spirit animal was only there for a fortuitous instant, and vanished before Keeler did. Photographs, like beaches, are lessons in ephemerality.

THE GUARDIAN