Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
– Philip Larkin
1963 was the year of the Profumo Affair. John Profumo, the UK’s Secretary of State for War in the
Macmillan Government, resigned following the exposure of his affair with a 19-year-old model and showgirl, Christine Keeler. What really did for Profumo was Keeler’s revelation that “… the day I met John Profumo was the day I jumped into bed with Eugene Ivanov (a military attaché at the Russian Embassy). Don’t ask me why … we’d drunk a bottle of vodka and got so sloshed.” The Cold War was below freezing point, and Britain’s Labour opposition made it an issue of national security. Two years later, a New Zealand cabinet minister risked his own career and his government for similar reasons.
Sex for information is a trade as old as time, and information is the currency of journalism (and espionage). Whether the scale of journalistic seduction in this story was motivated by political allegiance to one or more security agencies is opaque. Perhaps it was just a spectacular “fuck you” to the shockingly hypocritical double standards of the time regarding men and women’s sexual behaviour.
Tom Shand was Minister of Labour, Minister of Immigration, Minister of Mines and Minister of Electricity in the second National Government. In 1965, Fran Collett became the first female reporter appointed to our parliamentary Press Gallery. Unlike Profumo, Shand fell for a university-educated, professional, attractive woman of great charm and with a promising future. Their affair was an open secret among journalists, politicians and trade unionists and was but one of Collett’s gallery of relationships.
New Zealand’s security service understandably had Collett under surveillance, suspecting she might be involved with Russian intelligence. Her personal file was “destroyed” in 1974. More on that later.
The security service also kept files on Press Gallery journalists. In Collett’s, their source (name redacted) in the gallery told them: “… he had watched her gradually work her way up from the back-benchers on both sides of the House to ministerial level and now she appeared to have a pretty intimate friendship with, on one side Mr Kinsella (then Minister of Education) and Mr Seath (then Minister of Internal Affairs) and on the other side with Dr Martyn Finlay (opposition spokesman for Justice) and one or two of the left-wing Labour members. She was continually boasting about her 2am parties with these people and, as source pointed out, at small parties held by ministers of that level an awful lot is talked about.”
There is the smack of misogyny as well as envy emanating from this report, which is counterbalanced by another informant in her file: “… she is very tight-lipped regarding her sources, which she would never disclose despite considerable probing, and by her complete ruthlessness as regards the gathering of news. He said she was intensely unpopular with older members of the Press Gallery when she first arrived because of her ability to get close to sources of information using charm and good manners. He said he thought there was no question of her employing female wiles to gather information, but she certainly had charm and could adjust her personality to suit the person to whom she was speaking. He knew she was close to Shand, but could not name any other ministers.”
Shaking things up
Collett had arrived here in 1964 with her second husband, British-born Eric Collett, who had been appointed chief engineer for the General Electric Company in this country.
Born Bebe Fran Baxter in November 1936, Collett was a Californian with a degree in journalism from the University of Colorado. Her first husband, Arthur Petersen, was, according to her, a communist. The marriage didn’t last more than a few years.
Fran married Eric Collett in Belgium in 1963. She started working for the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA). She may have lived with her husband on arrival, but before long, they were living apart, he in Māhina Bay and she in various central-city flats.
She arrived here at a time of surging growth, stoked by the post-war baby boom. The population was two million and there was virtually no unemployment. Mother England bought all the meat, butter and wool the country produced. Unions were professionalising and a compulsory arbitration system (a world first) made for relatively smooth sailing from the state’s point of view. The 60s “youthquake” was shaking things up. A diary entry of Collett’s outlines a Press Gallery gag that did the rounds: “How is the Press Gallery responding to free love? Fran-tically.”
Collett became the first female Press Gallery reporter while with NZPA from 1965-67. (Novelist Robin Hyde had reported on Parliament from 1925-32, but from the ladies’ gallery, a separate space from which women could watch parliamentary proceedings and not distract MPs going about their business.)
The Press Gallery was run like an old boys’ club, and in her conditions of employment, she had to agree “not to take advantage of the gallery’s bar privileges” – privileges that her colleagues and MPs enthusiastically embraced. “There was an awful lot of drink around Parliament and the result was … less than savoury,” recalls Colin James, a gallery journalist a few years after Collett. She was not one to respect strictures and she quickly adopted the practice of meeting ministers and MPs in their offices and having a drink with them while they were conversing. This, inevitably, led to wild speculation about her methods of extracting information.
Cultured bohemianism
A quote about 1960s Wellington, attributed to visiting British MP Kenneth Baker, said it could “make an English Sunday look like a Bacchanalian revel”. Evidently, his hosts didn’t know Fran Collett. She was a player.
Journalist Rosemary McLeod was a friend, colleague and, eventually, flatmate. Collett suggested McLeod come and live in her large apartment when McLeod’s mother was dying, and she needed support: “She was empathetic without being mushy.” McLeod describes her friend as “… tall, blonde, fashionable, nice legs – which she showed off – upbeat, a big smoker and drinker”.
Along with these physical assets was a cultured bohemianism. McLeod admired Collett’s style: “She had a good eye, great taste. She wore a Navajo coat, which was unusual for that time, had Navajo beaded objects and a collection of Japanese ceramics in beautiful colours.”
Collett loved opera, particularly Richard Strauss, and soon began collecting contemporary New Zealand art. “Fran had a gift for mixing people in social situations,” says McLeod. “She had great parties, a salon really, with cabinet ministers, trade unionists, artists – all very convivial.”
McLeod recalls Collett being very keen on Ken Findlay, the fiery, independent Marxist leader of the Freezing Workers’ Union. The security service notes on her include the observation of her and Findlay exchanging “very affectionate greetings” at Wellington Airport.
According to McLeod, Findlay was more interested in hearing about her affairs than becoming one of them. He was close enough to Collett to be named as executor of her will and in 2005 deposited a collection of her letters and papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library, some 42 years after the Profumo Affair. In doing so, he placed a ticking time bomb that he knew would one day explode. It is an incendiary record of her multiple relationships with cabinet ministers, MPs, trade unionists and journalists.
McLeod at 20 was working at the Sunday Times newspaper. “The editor, Frank Haden, had a huge poster of a nude woman on a motorbike on his wall. He would sexually harass me two or three times a day. When I complained to Fran, she suggested I fuck him just to calm him down a bit.”
Collett’s own sexual freedoms were aided by the arrival in New Zealand of reliable contraception. The oral contraceptive pill, introduced in 1961, was initially prescribed to married women only, a move endorsed by the New Zealand Medical Council. Collett, technically still married, would have had no problems being prescribed the pill. Another young Dominion journalist at the time, Allison Webber, recalls: ‘I was flatting with girlfriends, and we tried to share a packet of pills between us! Just stupid. There were only a few doctors in Auckland who’d prescribe the pill to unmarried women, and you had to travel miles to see them.”
So, there was the pill and booze. “The year I started [in journalism] was the year 6 o’clock closing changed to 10 o’clock and that was very significant,” says Webber. “I was there during 6 o’clock closing and at 4 o’clock everyone was very busy beating the hell out of their typewriters – huge noise – then suddenly everybody evacuated. I thought, where have they gone?
They all went over to the Britannia and drank as much as they could in the one hour before the pub closed and then brought home the alcohol for that night’s drinking. There was invariably a party with people from the Dom, Evening Post, maybe some Radio New Zealand and TV people. Almost everyone was pissed to beat the band.”
Webber has vivid memories of Collett. “She was electric with gossip at this stage. What I remember is the beehive hairdo, short fur coats, and wacko handbags. She looked every bit her age, had a lot of makeup on, and she smoked, which didn’t do her skin any favours. She had an apartment with [journalist] Nevil Gibson in Cuba St, and what was memorable was on one wall there was a huge Andy Warhol-type portrait of Tom Shand. Bright purple across one half on the diagonal and bright orange across the other half. I remember thinking, ‘Well, we’re not exactly covering up this affair, are we?’
“A lot of people wouldn’t recall that because they were so pissed. I mean they were just pouring drinks and falling all over each other and snogging and fucking. Oh god, it was just shocking.”
Passionate affair
Shand was widely thought of as one of National’s most able politicians and had many attributes of a Kiwi hero to boot: a rugby player, a wartime pilot, a farmer, with a deserved reputation for getting things done. In 1945, he was placed on reserve as a pilot for high-tone deafness. Tone deafness is one way to describe his intensely passionate affair with Collett.
Press Gallery journalists do not specialise in portfolios, but Collett had a particular interest in the industrial round, then the white-hot crucible of Kiwi politics. Shand was Minister of Labour. “Her access was the envy of many, including myself, but I didn’t want to emulate her tactics,” says Ian Templeton, retired veteran gallery journalist. Again, innuendo.
One example of that access is in her security service file, which reads: “Source said that the other day, when the Director-General NZBC’s [New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation] salary was being discussed, Collett was asked to find out why this salary was now being paid from the Consolidated Fund and not by NZBC direct. She immediately rang Shand and was given the answer. This was done without reference to any of the Secretaries normally on the ladder before contacting a Minister direct.”
Another file note states: “[Source] said she has been boasting around the boys that she now has access to all the documents for eight of the Cabinet Ministers.”
In 1965, Shand, as Minister of Immigration, had to consider giving Mandy Rice-Davies an entry visa to undertake a cabaret tour. Rice-Davies had a bit part in the Profumo drama as a friend and co-worker of Christine Keeler. Following the publicity generated by her role, an enterprising young impresario, Andrew Flowers, proposed a cabaret tour by Rice-Davies of various countries, including New Zealand.
A regiment of the virtuous women of Taranaki rose up in outrage at the prospect, soon joined in outrage by the Women’s Catholic Welfare League, the Waikato League of Mothers, the Women’s Christian Temperance League, the Methodist Women’s Fellowship, the Central Baptist Women’s Fellowship, the Fairfield Baptist Women’s Fellowship, the Girls’ Life Brigade, and some ministers of religion.
This coalition of concerned citizens created a petition to Parliament seeking its intervention to exclude Rice-Davies from the country on moral grounds. (Writing in 1967’s Grog’s Own Country: The Story of Liquor Licensing in New Zealand, Conrad Bollinger described such coalitions as “… the blue-nosed censorious, fanatical movement with strong strains of perverted asceticism in it, which had existed from time immemorial and has always tried self-righteously to impose its twisted standard on the rest of society”.)
Heart of the scandal
Shand, regarded as a member of the more liberal wing of cabinet, was on a sticky wicket. He advised the cabinet, “If she is permitted to come to NZ … it will undoubtedly revive interest in the whole sordid business of the Profumo case.” A cabinet minister having an extra-marital affair was at the heart of the scandal. And the similarities of age difference were close to home – Profumo was 27 years older than Keeler, Shand was 25 years older than Collett.
From his point of view, if he denied Rice-Davies entry, he risked a brief period of possible embarrassment. If he granted her entry, her presence risked exposure of his affair with Collett by the accompanying international media, if not the more quiescent local one.
He exercised a novel statute-based discretion to deny Rice-Davies entry. By doing so, he consolidated his reputation of being a fiery loner and was abandoned by his cabinet colleagues in a dilemma they may have seen as his own creation.
He was politically ambitious, and his affair with Collett made him vulnerable. He was seen as a high-flyer, “a potential National Party leader in waiting” should Holyoake retire. His decision, uncomfortable though it may have been, limited the risk to all that ambition. But it also smacks of profound hypocrisy for a man who was widely regarded as a good guy: lively, brash and non-conformist for a National Party politician.
In Collett’s papers is a typewritten, mock advertisement:
“THE TITELIP STANDOVER
AND BLACKMAIL SERVICE”
We extract THE MOST from –
Incriminating letters
Embarrassing correspondence
TOP SPOT PRICES for intemperate – ill-judged – hasty – reckless memoranda
REPUTATIONS, BODIES, EVIDENCE – Disposed of with discretion.
FORGERIES A SPECIALITY.
It’s dated 1966. Jokey, of course, but it points to the content of Collett’s collection of letters and diaries in the Turnbull Library and could be seen as an instance of hiding in plain sight.
In a diary entry, she recounts an evening spent with Labour MP Martyn Finlay and their conversation. It’s evening, and they’re walking in Katherine Mansfield Park, between Hobson and Molesworth streets. They sit down. Finlay: “My hands are warm now; I’ve warmed them with you … I would like to undress you and kiss you …” Collett: “Goodnight, Martyn”, “Goodnight, dear.”
Next day, the diary reads: “… saw M ten to 2: [he says] ‘What time did you get in here this morning …? I’ve been spending my time making amends for last night. You’re the only person I’m honest with; I tell so many white lies.’ Collett: “That gives me power over you.” Finlay: “You could blackmail me for years …”
Wrecking ball of power
The sheer volume of letters, notes on parliamentary messenger paper, invitations and diary entries testify to Collett being either an astoundingly thorough personal archivist or having another motivation, or multiple motivations. Rosemary McLeod says in retrospect, it is clear to her that Collett had a drinking problem. “Practically everyone had a drinking problem then.”
There are several other possibilities worth considering for her keeping such as extensive archive. Was she doggedly pursuing stories for her own professional glory? Gallery journalists at that time didn’t have bylines attached to their work, so kudos gained for breaking stories was limited to her peers in the gallery, media circles and her own personal satisfaction. Or was she developing relationships to advance her considerable cache of intelligence, with evidence regarding people of power and influence?
Collett went on to cover industrial relations for the NZBC before joining the Dominion as a sub-editor, transferring to the Sunday Times in 1970.
The security service’s gallery file shows it was interested in acquiring Collett’s services: “[Source] was asked ‘whether he would give me an assessment of someone we could approach’ … his opinion was that she was someone whom we could safely approach.” What they didn’t know, but speculated about, was whether she may be spying “for the Americans or ‘Communists’”.
Collett herself had told the security service source in the gallery that “… certain Trade Union leaders had accused her of working for the CIA. She had been very upset and the source had told her that if the accusations continued, she would have to stop work on the industrial round. She said the reports were nonsense.” To parrot Mandy Rice-Davies on the stand in London: “[she] would say that, wouldn’t she?”
The security service notes conclude that its source in the gallery had “a fairly close association” with Collett, and, although he may be considered a reliable source on matters unconnected with her, “we should assume his relationship with her is so close that anything we say concerning her is likely to go back to her …” Snookered.
The acronym used for the attributes that contribute to the recruitment of agents by intelligence agencies is MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. Collett’s cache of letters amounts to a potential wrecking ball of coercive power against the letter writers. Margaret Hayward was Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s private secretary and author of Diary of the Kirk Years. She wonders as to Collett’s motivation and just why so many men put pen to paper.
“Why would they write to her? Incredible. She was very clever to be able to carry all this off. I would be very suspicious of anyone who got these people so worked up they wrote to her. She got all this evidence. It doesn’t make sense.”
Hayward also recalls Keith Holyoake saying he didn’t want there to be any women working in Parliament other than typists – because Fran Collett caused him so much trouble.
Declarations of love
If she was manipulating these men for political or professional purposes, she was good at it. The letters from all of them, most on parliamentary letterhead, are declarations of love. From Douglas Carter, who became Minister of Agriculture in 1969: “… one of the great joys of modern times has been to meet you and be with you” and (on paper delivered by a parliamentary messenger): “… You look happy, you look lovely, I am glad, I love you.” Carter also signs off one missive “Love, strictly temporary Puppy Dog”.
From Martyn Finlay: “As you know, Caucus is for 3 & 4 February, and I may now be down the previous day. Are you still on alternate shifts? (If you wear them). How’s about leaving a note of the schedule on Wed 2nd … all the rest, the consequential, the flummery, the je ne sais quoi … Ever your … Playboy.”
And “Fran Dear, A throaty, husky thank you for a most welcome celebration. I’m paying for it a bit today and it’s a pity reason and discretion were a little unseated. But we mustn’t let that recur. Anyway, a great time was had by all. Love, M.”
It is difficult to tell how much overlap or simultaneous engagement was occurring with these relationships. Given she was only two years in the gallery, there may well have been some. Perhaps Collett was like Christine Keeler, who, according to one of her lovers, was “… just so willing, so much absolutely yours. And then the door closed, and she was absolutely someone else’s. It made her narcotically attractive.”
Warwick Johnston, an independent historian, was a friend of unionist Ken Findlay and soon learnt of the material deposited in the Turnbull Library.
“What was meant to be a straightforward research assignment for me into the first female reporter in the NZ parliamentary Press Gallery led me into the dark, convoluted corridors of politics, journalism, sex and national security,” he says.
The security service file referred to above is from a file kept on the Press Gallery. Johnston discovered Collett’s own personal file had been destroyed in 1974. “At that time, the authority to dispose of such files rested with the chief archivist, then Judith A Hornabrook. The chief archivist was responsible to the Minister of Internal Affairs and the authorisation for the destruction of Collett’s file might have come from a very high political source. Looks like political risk management to me.”
Johnston was told by the SIS, which succeeded the security service in 1969, that records are no longer destroyed on that basis. But the gallery file arguably shines more than enough light. In As You Like It, Shakespeare wrote, “Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.”
For Tom Shand, his recklessness was indeed caused by his love for Collett. His eloquent, moving, leaving letter to her deserves to be read as the testimony of an honest man, undone by passion:
Dearest Fran,
It is about midnight. I have just come in from a meeting. But I must try to say what I want to say before I go to sleep.
Far from wanting to be cruel I have wanted only to cherish you and to make you happy. I wish I had the insight and ability to do so to the end of my days. But I knew from the beginning when I was being honest with myself that there was no future for us. I lived from day to day torn between joy and despair. When you are unhappy, I want nothing but to put my arms around you and comfort you. When you are happy, I am happy too. This will be true as along as we live.
I am so proud that you should have loved me and prouder still that if you can still think of me with some affection after I have failed you so badly. I did not set out to be cruel unless to myself. I did not know what would happen when we met. I wanted C [his wife] to know that you were a nice person, that what had happened was my fault, not yours. She too is a nice person proud and possessive as you are. I am not worthy of either of you and I love you both.
Do you remember when our candle went out? We could not light it again, but we lit another one that burnt with a quieter, gentler flame? I hope that is the friendship we shall always have. Please don’t be ashamed of having loved me. I can’t bear that you should do that. I am both proud and humble because it was so.
Collett and Shand did continue to meet after their relationship ended. A smoker, he died of lung cancer on December 11,1969, just 12 days after being returned to his seat in that year’s general election.
Collett’s blazing comet of a career burnt out when she died on June 30, 1972, of acute respiratory failure in an ambulance on its way to Wellington Hospital. She was 35. Her well-attended funeral was held at Old St Paul’s. Ken Findlay officiated and the pallbearers included the chief editor of NZPA Les Verry, Nevil Gibson and Frank Haden.
Rosemary McLeod chose the music. Collett’s coffin was brought into the church to the opening overture of La Traviata. She exited to the suitably dramatic final duet of Der Rosenkavalier.
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