Soho in the Sixties: All about Eve

The funeral of Helen O'Brien takes place in southern France today. But many of those attending may be unaware of her intriguing role in the London club scene and British political scandal. By Terry Kirby

It's late at night, in a small, dimly lit basement off Regent Street, sometime in the 1960s. In one plushly upholstered corner there's a government minister deep in conversation with a Hollywood star and a pair of property millionaires; at the table with them are several glamorous young women, drinking champagne.

At another table, there are a couple of peers of the realm, a judge and a senior Communist diplomat. They are paying close attention to the stage show taking place on an illuminated glass floor and featuring more attractive young women, this time half-naked, in extravagant feathered headdresses. Oh yes, and in the other corner, there's a chap from MI5, trying to pretend to be an anonymous businessman, and keeping a beady eye on everything.

Welcome to the Eve Club, which for more than three decades created a stylish combination of sexual and political intrigue that today's nightclubs can only dream about. This is a place where Frank Sinatra and Errol Flynn came to relax when in town, where a rising young Conservative MP called John Profumo held his stag night and where the then Bishop of Southwell courted, and later married, one of its hostesses. A judge once described it as "a sub-division of the Foreign Office".

Robin Day, the great television interviewer, once asked a Czech defector where spies met when they were in London; he replied: "At the Eve Club." If it had not existed, Graham Greene would surely have had to create it.

And presiding over this heady mix, sitting at Table One, as it was known, there would be the eagle-eyed, blonde-haired, diminutive figure of Helen O'Brien, a black, gold-tipped Balkan Sobranie often in her hand. O'Brien owned the Eve Club with her husband, Jimmy. Their reign ran from its grand opening in 1953 to its eventual closure in 1992, by which time it had become an almost forgotten anachronism.

This morning, in a small Romanian Orthodox Church in the town of Valbonne in southern France, a small group of family and friends will gather to bid farewell to Mrs O'Brien. Her death at the age of 79, at her retirement villa last Friday, brought to an end the extraordinary life of a woman who was in turns a refugee, dancer, cigarette girl, choreographer, wife and mother, author, nightclub owner and spy for the British intelligence services.

Her daughter Marina, 50, told The Independent yesterday: "My mother was an extraordinary woman, who created the kind of place you simply will never see the like of again." Clive Entwistle, a former Fleet Street journalist who knew her well, summed her up thus: "She probably lived the equivalent of 20 lives of other people in her one," he said.

Helen O'Brien's real name was Elena Constaninescu and she was born in 1925 to a well-off family of Romanian landowners. In 1947, as the Communists tightened their grip on post-war eastern Europe, she fled to London, where she eventually found work as a dancer and cigarette girl at a cabaret club, Murray's, in Beak Street. Its general manager was Jimmy O'Brien; they began a relationship and married in 1955.

By this time, they were already a professional partnership. Mr O'Brien had been keen for some time to open his own club, catering for a London which had now finally begun to recover from the doldrums of the postwar years. The couple found premises in Regent Street and opened on Valentine's Night in 1953; the illuminated floor was the first of its kind. The club would offer fine dining in the European tradition and, more importantly, sex and glamour.

Helen O'Brien recruited what were reputed to be the most beautiful showgirls in London to work in routines modelled on those of the Folies Bergère and the clubs of Pigalle in Paris. Under the strict rules of the day, full nudity was not allowed and movement on stage, at least in the early days, was severely restricted. Additionally, there were equally attractive "hostesses" employed to keep the lonely businessmen, diplomats and MPs company, while encouraging them to spend freely at the bar.

"It wasn't a strip club like Stringfellows; there's nothing really comparable today. And it was run along very, very strict lines by Helen," said Mr Entwistle.

The convention was that men would buy drinks for the girls and perhaps offer a tip - £5 or £10 - tucked discreetly into a handbag or packet of cigarettes. But unlike some similar premises, there was no ban on the girls mingling with the customers afterwards. Mrs O'Brien told an interviewer last year: "Of course there was sex, but not on the premises. We were not a whorehouse. If a girl and a client wanted to begin a relationship beyond the club, we knew nothing about it." A 1962 brochure, describing one of the club's star performers, said: "Her attractions are stunning, her talent is extraordinary and her telephone number, sir, is none of your business."

Many of the girls, it was said, made "good" marriages to men they met in the club. And Mrs O'Brien could certainly spot the dangerous ones. Christine Keeler, whose relationship with John Profumo ended his career as War Minister and became one of the defining scandals of the Sixties, was rejected. "She wasn't suitable. I felt she was an easily led girl," recalled Mrs O'Brien.

Ditto Norma Levy, the call girl whose relationship with Lord Lambton, then RAF Minister, led to his resignation in 1973 and whose tenure at the club lasted only a couple of days. "Hard and mercenary," recorded Mrs O'Brien at the time.

Helen O'Brien herself would later play another part in the scandal. Lord Lambton was not a member of Eve's, but Earl Jellicoe, then Conservative leader of the House of Lords, was a regular. According to Mrs O'Brien, he would bring in his red boxes and drink only half-bottles of champagne. Tipped off by a friendly police officer that Lambton's affair was putting him in danger, she arranged a meeting through contacts with James Prior, who was the Conservative Leader of the House of Commons. He was accompanied by the later ennobled Robert Armstrong, private secretary to Edward Heath, the Prime Minister.

Although she claims to have warned them that both ministers should resign in advance of exposure, nothing happened - possibly because the establishment was already fully aware of their activities - until their affairs were revealed to a gleeful public in the pages of the News of the World.

She recounted last year that at that meeting, Armstrong had asked her: "Are you an MI5 agent?" She refused to comment, but in fact she had been working for both the Security Service and MI6 for many years. The approach had come from MI5 towards the end of the 1950s after it became apparent that the Eve Club had become a haunt not only for British politicians and civil servants but also for an increasing number of diplomats from Communist countries, who found London's nightlife simply too hard to resist.

Mrs O'Brien, whose exile from her home country had made her a fervent anti-Communist, was anxious to help and in the intoxicating atmosphere of the Eve Club, the Eastern Bloc diplomats found themselves passing over more than just fivers to the hostesses, closely observed by MI5 agents and, it was rumoured, those of the KGB as well.

Mrs O'Brien would, in her turn, discreetly ask her girls what gossip they had learnt, information which she passed to her intelligence handlers at a safe house in Hampstead. She was also involved, albeit tangentially, in the scandal which led to the downfall of senior Scotland Yard officer, Commander Ken Drury, who had become close to the Soho porn baron Derek Humphries.

But it was not all spies, sleaze and intrigue. The Eve Club was a venue for the glamorous celebrities of the day, who were confident that journalists and photographers would not be admitted and that there would be no paparazzi waiting for them outside. Shirley Bassey performed there and Errol Flynn took his 12-year-old son Sean to see the dancing girls. Judy Garland, Barbara Cartland and the King of Nepal were all members.

Not everyone found favour with Mrs O'Brien. The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis was, she told an interviewer, "a hairy, uncultured oaf" while she threw out the son of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for groping the hostesses, adding a Romanian oath for good measure. She spoke several languages.

Clive Entwistle remembers the club fondly: "I got to know Helen because I was taken there by a police officer I knew. It was rare for journalists to be allowed in, but I became a good friend of hers. It was slightly past its best then - this was the mid-1970s - but it was still a great place to get a late drink. And it had that glamour, redolent of a different type of society, when everyone dressed up to go out in dinner jackets and bow ties."

But by the beginning of the 1990s the world had moved on. The Cold War had ended, the cult of celebrity was growing and the strip clubs of Soho made the Eve Club look tame. Its owners tried to change the image and bring in visiting acts, but it didn't work.

Eventually, as Mr O'Brien's health deteriorated, the couple decided to sell up and move to the South of France. Their daughters, Marina, a web designer, and Ileana, followed. Mr O'Brien died in 1994.

In recent years, Mrs O'Brien spent a lot of her time and energy negotiating the return of some of the land her family had owned in Romania. When she visited her old family estates in 1990, after the downfall of Communism, she was greeted by many faithful retainers. She was only partially successful, but some land was returned to her.

Mrs O'Brien spent her later years gardening, walking her dogs and taking life easy among local people who knew little or nothing of her past life. And she wrote her biography, The Queen of Clubs, which was published in her home country; her family are now seeking a British publisher.

She always treated visitors to a bottle of champagne, although she gave up the Balkan Sobranies a while ago. "I last saw her in France about a year ago," said Mr Entwistle, who is now a television producer. "And she called for the champagne like she always did. Helen had the most wonderful, old-fashioned manners. She was an incredible lady."