How Pauline Boty met & painted Christine Keeler
The blonde woman replaced her telephone receiver into the cradle. She stands alone in the sitting room of a rundown studio flat situated in London’s west end. The flat had been recently purchased by her theatrical agent husband for her to use as an artist’s studio. The blonde stood smoking a cigarette reflectively, slowly turning over in her mind the syntax of a recent telephone conversation. It had been an unexpected conversation, and she was left with a tingle of excitement at a meeting now due to take place. The feeling had started to grow during this conversation with her husband and had caused a knot to grow in the pit of her stomach. Now that the conversation was over she was left with the notion of proceeding down a road for which there had no route map.
‘Darling,’ her
husband had said, his smooth educated voice rising slightly with his own sense
of pleasure, ‘I’ve got her to sit for you,’ theatricality adding, ‘I didn’t
really have to work for it, apparently she already knows about you.’
‘Oh really?’
she had found herself asking, ‘I wonder where on earth she could possibly know
me from?’
‘Well,
darling,’ said Clive his voice warming to his favorite subject of the media, ‘apparently
she had heard you on the Public Ear,
who would ever have thought of that?’
The blonde could
not tell whether her husband’s surprise was that this particular woman would
listen to an über BBC Home Service arts programme, with a rather small and very
exclusive audience, or that anybody should have listened at all.
She had found
herself taking the defense about Public
Ear knowing that Clive views regarding what her called the ‘great unwashed’
in modern British society always made her feel uneasy.
‘It does have
a very loyal audience Clive darling,’ her voice had been strained with a flash
of annoyance.’
Despite these comical
comments, Clive had at first been keen on the idea when he had heard they were
looking for a new face for the opening programme. He had persuaded his wife to
take part in that first programme because unusually for the male dominated
television world in the early 1960’s, a female face was being considered to
front the project. She had proved to be so successful that the BBC had asked her
back more than once, although this had later cooled after the more extreme of
her paintings had been exhibited.
The programme had
at first been described as ‘iconoclastic’ by the weightier of the Sunday
papers. Clive, of course, had hooted with laughter at the review, saying it
meant that no bugger actually had listened to it. Now it apparently appeared
that Clive had managed to find at least one person, not in their immediate
circle of friends, who had tuned in, maybe not to the first programme, but at
least at some point. How strange though the Blonde women that it should have
been Christine Keeler of all the women in London. Although she never considered
that this particular women, whom she had wanted to sit for her, would be a fan
of such an arty programme. Pauline wondered if this was due to her own snobbery,
or because she listened to Clive’s family and over educated friends.
The blonde reflecting
that her own family were not exactly doyens of the arts scene, they had even objected
to her attending St. Martins Arts School. Even now, after finding some fame, if
not fortune as Britain’s only female Pop Artist, they were still completely in
the dark as to the importance of her work to the world of Pop Art, still finding
the success of this new genre of art impossible to understand.
‘Yes Pauline
darling, I know all about the audience figures,’ Clive had then said, breaking
into her thought, tetchily adding, ‘The point is darling, that she knows about
your political views and about the art you produce.’
Pauline
wondered what this woman did really think about her art, or even the art scene
as a whole. Perhaps she would want to talk about the arts in general way, not
just making polite conversation, but showing a real knowledge and interest.
Strangely perhaps, this had never crossed her mind earlier, even when the idea
had come to her about using Keeler as a sitter, for the painting she had been
planning about the Profumo Scandal.
‘Mind you,’ Clive had continued, his voice now
trampling over her thoughts again, with a sigh the blonde tuned her husband
back in to her head. At this point the conversation he was adopting his
business tone, ‘she still asked for twenty bloody quid, I call that downright
brassy.’
‘Brassy,’ was
Clive’s favorite word for anything he thought of as common, uneducated, or even
working class, part of the great world of the unwashed, as he liked to say. This
word, Pauline was sure had its deep dark roots in Clive’s public school
education.
‘All sitters
get paid Clive,’ now it had been her turn to get tetchy tone in her voice,
adding, ‘There is no need to negotiate my sitting rates, I can manage my own
rates quite nicely, thank you Clive.’
Pauline had felt
her voice beginning to rise and stretch in her annoyance, why had she felt the
need to defend this woman? Maybe it was a reaction to how she had felt when her
husband, like all the men in her, life felt that they should be able to have
women under their personal control. Like the puppets on that new television
series from America ‘Stingray’ that had been all over the newspapers recently,
all had want to be the one to pull her strings. Even at St Martins, her fellow
students, mainly being an all-male crowd, had liked to act towards her as big
brothers would do to their little sisters. Well, thought the Blonde, she was
her own boss, that she’d made clear from the beginning of her second term.
Pauline Boty, she thought, was a match for any man, painter or otherwise and
that included her own husband.
‘Yes darling,
I do know all about models,’ Clive had answered primly. Pauline wondered how
exactly, he had got to know about them.
‘Anyway she
will be with you around three o’clock today, sorry for the short notice,
darling’, his voice relaxed now again, happy to be in control again, adding,
‘but that was the best I could do,’ adding, ‘Oh, don’t forget to watch out for
the Special Branch,’ finishing the call with a brief ‘Cheery ‘O’ the receiver
gone dead.
Now sitting
alone and smoking another cigarette, this parting remark started to play on her
mind. There had been a piece in the papers about the poor cow still being
followed whenever she went out. There I go again, thought Pauline, why is
Keeler now ‘a poor cow,’ I’m starting to sound like Clive.
***
In a different part of the same London
skyline, another woman, this time with striking red hair, was also considering a
recent telephone conversation. She sat quietly smoking a cigarette watching as
the smoke curled idly towards the living room ceiling. Finishing her smoke, the
women got up and peered out of the front windows of a small mews flat. Outside
was quiet and still, hardly a soul moved. The only sign of life like came from
the two regular plain clothed detectives who were still keeping a not too
inconspicuous eye on the flat.
The ‘Profumo Scandal’
had been over now for some months, and the redhead had spent some of that time
in prison for perjury. Upon her release she had described the experience to her
parents as it being much like school which, she had also hated. Now however the
world had moved on and the busy new Labour government of Harold Wilson had far
more important issues before it, but still the policemen had remained.
Any idea of the
government was quite abstract for the red head, it belonging to a new jumble of
faces and names most of which she could never match up. However brief her
passing fifteen minutes of fame she had still enjoyed for a brief time ‘being
somebody.’ In her life, as far back as this redhead could recall, she always
had wanted to be ‘somebody.’
Turing her
thoughts back to the telephone conversation, she realised that she hadn’t liked
the man who had introduced himself to her as Clive very much. All Home Counties
accent and brought up in a cosy atmosphere of old money and good education.
There hadn’t been much money or education in her background. She had been brought
up in a caravan with a single parent of a hard working mother and a lay-a-bout
of a stepfather. Escaping their misery while was still in her late teens, she
only found another, in the arms of pimps, losing a baby before turning twenty. Consolation
from that experience had come only with her belief that any half cast bastard born
into class conscious Britain would never have had much in life.
Escaping
again, she had found herself in a London still recovering from the Second War.
Working in a series life destroying topless clubs, the redhead soon grew tired
of being pawed at by their drunken clientele. By the time she met Ward her mind
was already resolved to chuck it all in. When Ward had offered her a way out, she
hadn’t thought twice about it, grabbing at this escape ladder with both hands.
Of course, it hadn’t turned out to be the different life she had been searching
for. Ward had turned out to be no more than an upmarket pimp, who was soon busy
introduced her to his upper class wealthy clients. Being embarrassed by her
accent, forced Ward to pay for the redhead to have elocution lesions and
gradually over time she had become a different person. The new Christine had
risen one day, out from the ashes of her former self, even as she had lain dead
beneath her own feet.
Gradually, and
with Ward’s help, Christine had caught brief glimpses of that new person which,
not just he, but the redhead had wanted to become. This experience had left her
wondering why men, no matter what background they came from, had to mould their
woman into an image. The angel, or the a tart, beloved mother figure for their
children, or their slut in bed, men always had to be in control of the lives of
their women. Well now, she had been no angel in her life, but over time Christine
had grown to hate those rich men as much as the low-life’s she had met in the
strip clubs. That’s why Christine hadn’t liked that man who had called himself Clive
she wasn’t going play the tart for anyone not anymore. Sighing, the redhead
stubbed out her cigarette, moving away from the window.
***
The watchers below saw her shape
disappear into the gloom of the flat, turning back to their murmured
conversation, each one inclining his head slightly towards the others, as if in
prayer. Their years spent huddling in back alleys and doorways had left each
with his particular remedy for extreme cold or heat. Almost silently the voices
audible only to each other, they returned to their conversation.
‘I telling you Frank’, the smaller man said
while lighting a cigarette automatically cupping his heavy hands around the
naked flame, ‘She is a right goer, the Sund’y papers said she’s up for
anything’, he was grinning at his taller thinner companion.
***
The sun was getting low in a
washed out wintery sky over her flat in London’s fashionable West End. Pauline
looked around the studio lighting yet another cigarette, two plumbs of smoke
exiting her nose moving up towards the cloud of smoke that hung over her head.
Looking out of her studio window on to the bustling street below, she caught
sight of a man cleaning a car outside one of the Georgian town houses opposite.
Like the building she was look out from it too had been converted into flats
by, what had seem like press-gangs, of Irish labourers. Frowning at the sight
of a car outside a house were see was sure none were owned, Pauline thought of
her husband’s words about policeman and spies. Standing on tip-toe right in
front of the window and turn her head as far as it would go around to the right,
Pauline could get a look down the other end of the street. As she did so her
blonde hair fell over her face covering up one eye. Pushing the hair back she
could see two GPO men setting up a sort of a tent on the pavement.
Just in that
moment, as she was trying to connect these images to the thought of something
sinister that had buried itself in her memory earlier, her telephone rang. In
the still silence of her studio the shrill noise made her jump, and the
cigarette fell from her hand that had been supporting her weight against the
wall. Ordinarily this would not be an issue except on occasion the cigarette
fell onto her new cream rug, ‘Shit’, she exclaimed grabbing the telephone
receiver and the cigarette end at the same time managing to both speak into the
ear piece and burn her thumb on the still lit cigarette.
Turning the
receiver around the correct way, and stubbing out the offending cigarette
Pauline heard the ‘pips’ of a call box then as the money was excepted came the
words, ‘Hello, Hello!, can you hear me?’ It was a female voice which, she
failed to recognise.
‘Yes,
hello’, bellowed Pauline down the line, anxious now to know who this strange
voice belonged too.
‘Alright
you don’t need to shout for god’s sake, I’m down the road from your flat, not in
Outer…,’ was the rather grumpy reply. ‘Hello is that Pauline?’ said the voice
adding, ‘it’s Christine’.
Instinct now took
over in Pauline and years of a good middle class upbringing and education took
hold, even without her realising this at the time.
‘Oh, hello
Christine’, she answered without a clue who this women was, but not wishing to
give offence.
‘Look, can you
tell me your address again please, when I took it down from your husband the
other morning he said it so quickly, that I afraid I just sort of scribbled it
down without really bothering looking at it’, the middle class accent was
fighting with an underlying Northern burr, but as yet had not quite gained the
upper hand
For Pauline
recognition had final dawned, ‘Yes of course Christine, I’m so very sorry, he
really is the limit isn’t he?’ Not waiting for an answer she rushed on with her
address.
‘OK, pet…um, I
mean, yes…thank you Pauline, very much I’ll be with you presently,’ Christine
said quickly replacing the receiver, hoping to gloss over her nearly calling a
famous artist ‘pet.’
Something
about the telephone conversation hid away in Pauline’s brain, waiting to raise
its head, the funny little clicking after Christine had hung up.
Pauline absently
wondered were Christine had picked up a phrase like presently, the word came
from her Father’s generation, not their own. Then looking again at the burn hole in the new
rug she quickly discontinued from that train of thought. Imagining Clive’s
reaction was not hard, Pauline knew he would not be at all happy about her
burning a hole in one of his High Street Ken’ boutique purchases. Bugger she
thought, you are a clumsy cow, wondering if she could just paint it white to
blend the hole in?
Lighting yet another
cigarette she blow a smoke ring which gave her such a childish pleasure she
thought of Peter Blake and how had taught her how to blow smoke rings when they
were student’s together at St Martins. Pauline was still close to Blake,
looking upon him as the founder of the Pop Art movement in Britain which, she
herself now belonged.
Laughing to
herself, out loud she said, ‘Oh bugger you Clive and your ridiculously
expensive rug, what’s it doing in my studio anyway?’
She
supposed it was Clive’s idea that an artist should be surrounded by beautiful
and expensive things in their studio, providing inspiration no doubt. Well,
bugger him, and bugger all the bossy men in her life for that matter too, she
would do just as she pleased. Blowing another satisfactory big smoke ring, she then
padded off to find some white paint.
***
Sometime later, Pauline was
uncertain exactly about the time as she had lost herself in a fight with the
expensive rug, the bell went down stairs. Collecting her winkle-picker shoes
she slipped each one in turn on as hopping toward the mirror to check her
make-up. Here Pauline found that somehow, during the fight with the rug some white
paint had got itself attached in her hair. Still picking the paint of stains of
her blonde hair she opened the front door to be confronted by a slightly built
woman wearing a head-scarf and dark glasses. The women stood quite still taking
in the sight of Pauline, with her hands still raised to strands of hair. The
idly wondered if the blonde facing her had nits. After both taking each other
in, without a word Pauline stood to one side and the other women still wearing
her scarf and dark glasses moved slowly past her into the rather ramshackle old
hall. They walked back up the creaking stairs into the studio together without breaking
their mutual silence. Once inside the flat Christine took off the head scarf, glasses
and removed the cigarette from her mouth. Shaking the flaming red hair she was
rightly infamous for with one hand, she offered the other out for a formal
handshake saying, ‘Pauline Boty I presume?’
‘Christine
Keeler I suppose’, said Pauline they awkwardly shook hands each not used to
such displays of formality. Both women stepped towards each other the ice
having been broken and exchanging kisses on each cheek just like the French. Laughing
at their shared joke the women immediately became friends with each other.
Pauline grabbing two wine glasses pouring into each a generous splash of last night’s
house plonk from Oddbins, and started the story about an expensive rug, a
cigarette burn and a tin of white paint.
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