Morley portrait

At the height of the Profumo affair in 1963, Keeler sat for a photographic portrait by Lewis Morley. The photoshoot, at a studio on the first floor of Peter Cook’s Establishment Club, with Morley was to promote a proposed film, The Keeler Affair, that was never released in the United Kingdom. Keeler was reluctant to pose in the nude, but the film producers insisted. Morley persuaded Keeler to sit astride a plywood chair so that, whilst technically nude, the back of the chair would obscure most of her body. Keeler told cartoon historian Tim Benson 2007 that she was not nude and wearing knickers during the photoshoot.

The photo propelled Arne Jacobsen’s Model 3107 chair to prominence, even though the chair used was an imitation of the Model 3107, with a hand-hold aperture crudely cut out of the back to avoid copyright infringement. The chair used is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The differences in the chairs’ designs are readily apparent in a side-by-side photograph.