Smart showgirl turned Cold War scandal to advantage
Mandy Rice-Davies, model, restaurateur and actress: b Pontyates, Wales, October 24, 1944; m Rafael Shauli (diss); Charles LeFevre (diss); Ken Foreman; 1d; d London, England, December 18, 2014, aged 70.
ALTHOUGH she was not directly involved in Britain’s Profumo affair that shook Harold Macmillan’s government in 1963, the name of Mandy Rice-Davies is inseparable from the events of that year in which Cold War intrigue collided with the demi-monde lifestyle of her on-off boyfriend Stephen Ward, an osteopath whose ability to procure pretty women made him popular in high society.
Characterised as the ‘‘Solihull showgirl’’ pitted against the establishment, Rice-Davies never actually met the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, whose affair with her flatmate Christine Keeler triggered a security scandal after it emerged that Keeler had also slept with a Soviet diplomat. However, her vivacious personality, especially as it came through in remarks reported in newspapers – not to mention her long legs, blue eyes and figurehugging suits in court – somehow managed to propel her from the periphery of events to the centre of them.
Of an affair with an older man, she would remark with characteristic sauciness: ‘‘I was an enthusiastic participant in what struck me as a perfectly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.’’ Or she might say, ‘‘I was certainly game, but I wasn’t on it.’’
Although she was two years younger than Keeler, she proved herself more astute than her fellow showgirl. Unlike Keeler she avoided jail, traded on her notoriety and then, when her days in the sun were up, she left the country and married a wealthy businessman. In fact her life was, she said, ‘‘one slow descent into respectability’’ from a London bedsit and sex parties to running restaurants in Israel, writing several books and – ever immaculately coiffed and suntanned – flying between her homes in Surrey, Florida and the Bahamas. However, in interviews (for which she remained in demand) she could still happily narrate a store of amorous tales from her youth.
Mandy Rice-Davies was born Marilyn Rice-Davies, probably in Pontyates, near Llanelli, in 1944, although her birthplace in the 1964 magazine-style autobiography The Mandy Report was given as Mere, Wiltshire. Certainly she is remembered for trying to conceal a Welsh accent.
She moved with her parents (her father was a policeman; her mother a part-time worker in a badge factory) to Solihull, near Birmingham.
By 15 she was working parttime as a model When the chance came to model at a London motor show she moved there and found herself a bedsit and a job as a topless waitress and showgirl at Murray’s Cabaret. At Murray’s she befriended Keeler and the pair shared a flat. They lived on baked beans but had plenty of admirers and shopped in Mary Quant.
Rice-Davies said she went to bed with the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr – ‘‘I had no hesitation’’ and, like Keeler, she was at one time a mistress of the slum landlord Peter Rachman.
She soon had a proposal of marriage from the ageing Lord Dudley, a regular at the club. ‘‘I could have been a Dowager Duchess by the time I was 22,’’ she later said.
KEEN to escape her straitened circumstances, she was recruited to a team of attractive young women employed by Ward to ingratiate himself with the great and good of British society and politics. Exactly who attended his ‘‘sex parties’’ – stories abounded of naked poolside cavorting and men clad only in masks – is still a matter of conjecture, as is the question of whether Ward was helping MI5 to get close to the Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov.
Ivanov’s sexual liaison with Keeler had begun just before she met Profumo.
Ward was actually much closer to Rice-Davies than to Keeler or any of the other girls, living with her, and once asking her to marry him. Once Profumo admitted to his misdeeds, attention and acrimony turned on Ward who, in panic, darkly let it be known what ‘‘damage’’ he could do if cornered, and on television told Desmond Wilcox that he had been worried by the Keeler-Profumo affair.
The charge of living on immoral earnings, which led to Ward’s suicide just before he was found guilty at trial, appears to have been the result of the need to silence him.
During the hearing, the 18-yearold was every photographer’s dream. ‘‘I dressed up every day because I thought it was like a wedding or funeral: you ought to wear a hat,’’ she later said.
Intermittently, Rice-Davies attempted a career as a pop singer, and there were also acting jobs in TV commercials.
After the trial she met and married the Israeli businessman Rafi Shauli and moved to Tel Aviv. Here she learnt Hebrew, converted to Judaism and gave birth to her daughter, Dana. She opened nightclubs and a restaurant, The Singing Bamboo, which in 1973 was a favourite haunt of reporters covering the Yom Kippur War.
After separating from her husband she turned her hand to a clothes business and returned to London with her daughter. There was a shortlived marriage to a French restaurant owner, JeanCharles Lefevre.
Any apprehension about her continuing notoriety in Britain was quashed when she appeared in a Tom Stoppard play, Dirty Linen, about a sex scandal in the House of Commons.
At a dinner party in Surrey she met waste disposal entrepreneur Ken Foreman and the pair were married.She wrote her autobiography, Mandy, in 1980 and published a novel, The Scarlet Thread.
In 2013 she revealed that she had not spoken to Keeler for three decades. ‘‘Christine was never really able to adapt in the same way I did,’’ she remarked. ‘‘Her raison d’etre is being Christine Keeler, whereas mine is wherever the next challenge takes me. And as far as I’m concerned, the Profumo affair was just a pimple.’’