Less Than a Pound

"Ward is dead," pleaded Barrister Jeremy Hutchinson last week. "Profumo is disgraced. And now I know your lordship will resist the temptation to take what I might call society's pound of flesh." It was no Antonio in the prisoner's dock at the Old Bailey, but cool, green-suited Christine Keeler (130 Ibs.), and the quality of mercy was not strained. Noting that she had been "under pressure, under fear and under domination," Judge Sir Anthony Hawke sentenced Christine to nine months in jail for perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice (maximum possible sentence for perjury alone: seven years).

With her roommate, Paula Hamilton-Marshall, and their housekeeper, dark-haired Olive Brooker, Defendant Keeler had pleaded guilty to framing Jamaican Jazz Singer Aloysius ("Lucky") Gordon, a jilted lover of Christine's; he was first convicted, on her own sober testimony, of beating her and later released on the basis of her drunken tape-recorded confession that she had lied. Thus, as she was led from the half-empty courtroom with tears starting from her eyes, ended what Defense Counsel Hutchin son probably prematurely termed "the last chapter in this long saga that has been called the Keeler affair."

After she has served her sentence, Christine will presumably return to the $39,000 Georgian house she bought recently from her journalistic earnings. Then, said she, "all I want is for everyone to let me be a normal girl again."

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