How my friend Mandy survived the sex scandal that changed Britain ... in wicked style
Well, she would, wouldn’t she!
WE HADN’T seen each other for nearly half a century. But when she knocked on my front door last year and gave me a huge hug, it was the Mandy I knew back in 1963, except for a few lines on her face.
Same haircut, same sort of clothes — a sharp red suit — same wicked grin, lovely long legs. Yes, here was Mandy Rice-Davies, still looking sexy at 70, although I don’t think, and never did, that she was quite the randy good-time girl we all painted her to be 50 years ago.
But the image suited us — I was then a reporter on the Daily Express, in those days a strong broadsheet — and, for a time, it suited her.
‘I slept with less than ten men over two years,’ she told me, as we remembered those days over coffee. ‘By today’s standards that’s monastic.’
Yet it will always be sex and scandal for which she is remembered by the public.
Mandy’s role in the Profumo affair was in fact a minor one. She was simply a friend and flatmate of Christine Keeler, the striking 19year- old who slept with the Conservative Secretary of State for War John Profumo while at the same time bedding the Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov. It was a scandal that nearly brought down Harold Macmillan’s government, and reached the highest levels of British aristocracy.
Mandy never even met Profumo. But she was called to give evidence in a court case involving society osteopath Stephen Ward, who was accused of living off Mandy and Keeler’s ‘immoral earnings’ — which implied they were call girls. It was Ward who had introduced Keeler to the disgraced minister.
While Keeler was always the more beautiful, Mandy easily stole the show at the Old Bailey. She claimed that one of her lovers had been Viscount ‘Bill’ Astor, whose Cliveden estate in Berkshire was where Profumo met Keeler.
When it was put to Rice-Davies that Astor denied her allegation, she retorted with a remark that has entered our lexicon and earned her a place in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’.
Rice-Davies mesmerised the court room. The writer Ludovic Kennedy described her tour de
force in the witness box: ‘ Astride her golden head sat a little rose-petalled hat, such as debutantes wear at garden parties . . . Her simple, grey, sleeveless dress accentuated the impression of modesty . . . until one looked at it closely. Then one saw that the slit down the front was only held together by a loose knot — when she walked one could see quite a long way up her leg . . .’
It was a performance that had profound sociological significance, capturing how a centuriesold social order was coming to an end. In Viscount Astor, the public saw an Establishment figure lying to cover up his affair with a workingclass girl who, alone in the trial, came over as impertinent and honest enough to nail his shiftiness.
The age of deference had another decade to run, but the first cracks in the edifice of a rigid class system had begun to show — and Mandy would play a major role in opening them up.
For me, the scandal was the biggest assignment of my career. I came to know the main characters well, and hours before the verdict was due in his trial, I visited Ward at his house in Wimpole Mews in London only to find him writing suicide notes.
I told him not to do ‘anything stupid’. But soon after I left he took a fatal overdose, in despair over the ruin of his life.
The scandal and subsequent tragedy might have ruined many — indeed Christine Keeler has never recovered and even today appears broken because of it, living the life of a recluse in sheltered accommodation in South London. Mandy, in contrast, was a born survivor. She was a true good-time girl, not in the sexual sense — but in the literal sense.
She was a policeman’s daughter brought up in the provinces — Solihull, in her case. ‘I dropped out of school just before my 16th birthday, and went to work in Marshall & Snellgrove, Birmingham’s closest equivalent to Harrods,’ she said. ‘ I was soon seconded as a model, dressed to the nines by the couture department.’
Mandy longed for glamour and for a capital city just beginning to explode with light, colour, sound and music, so asked her father if she could leave for London. ‘He said no, so I plotted my escape and went anyway.’
She was still only 16 when she ended up a dancer at Murray’s Cabaret Club in the West End. ‘There I met a show-
An Earl proposed, but she fell for a slum landlord
girl called Christine Keeler,’ she said. ‘It was dislike at first sight. Within days she tried to sabotage me by stealing the top to my stage costume.
‘The following night, I threw talcum powder into her dressing table fan. She went on stage looking like a snow queen. We then fell about and became firm friends.’
Like Mandy, Keeler was short of money, so Mandy smuggled her into her l i ttle studio flat where ‘ we survived on beans on toast’.
The two of them flirted with customers in the club — many of them blue-bloods. By 17, Mandy had had her first offer of marriage, from the Earl of Dudley. ‘I could have been a dowager duchess by the time I was 22,’ she said.
Then one day Christine introduced her to Ward. ‘Stephen was an osteopath who treated the rich and famous,’ she said, ‘He was erudite, witty and with an easy charm. He loved the company of women and took not a blind bit of notice of the prevailing moral code.
‘He took me to a small cottage on the huge Cliveden estate. I did not wish to bed him but, of course, the inevitable happened. A few weeks later he asked me to marry him, and I declined.’
It was, as we know, at Lord Astor’s Cliveden that his friend Profumo first set eyes on Keeler — she too was staying at Ward’s cottage on the estate.
Astor and Profumo came across her as she was climbing naked from the swimming pool at Cliveden. Christine was trying to grab a towel, which the two men attempted to snatch away. Before long, Keeler was in bed with Profumo.
Ward became so worried about what he realised could become a scandal that he asked another guest — Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet naval attache — to take her away from Profumo and back to London.
By the end of the evening, Keeler was in Ivanov’s bed.
‘That devil of a girl could seduce anybody,’ Ivanov said l ater. ‘ We devoured each other like animals. She looked very sexy that night . . . she had both the firm lithe body of a slender woman, and a provocative ripeness. She behaved like a cat . . . beholden to no one.’
Mandy was also having affairs. She met and lived with the repellent Peter Rachman, the slum landlord of West London — but insisted this was not a relationship of convenience with a rich sugar daddy. ‘I really loved him,’ she told me. ‘ I was completely
besotted by him and cannot, even now after 50 years, make an excuse for living with him.’
After Rachman died unexpectedly, there was a handful of encounters, of which the most famous was Lord Astor, a one-night stand. Still more colourful tales emerged over the years.
There was the infamous sex orgy organised by a portly antique dealer called Horace ‘Hod’ Dibben and his beautiful blonde wife, Mariella Novotny at his house in 13 Hyde Park Gate.
Ward had invited Mandy and Christine Keeler to come over.
Hod Dibben organised orgies frequently, and Ward was a regular. But this one, which became known as The Man In The Mask Party — because a Cabinet minister was said to be present wearing a mask — was infamous. Swingers were served by a ‘butler’ dressed only in a mask and an apron, and with a sign around his neck saying: ‘If my services do not please, whip me.’
‘Christine and I were called to Hyde Park Gate by Stephen,’ Mandy told me. ‘We knocked and he answered the door with only his socks on, and I thought it was a joke. So we started to giggle and go inside and there were people lying around half-clothed.
‘Stephen told me about the man in the mask and said he had also worn a bow tie. He told me it was a Cabinet minister.’
The word in Fleet Street was that this man was Transport Minister Ernest Marples. But that was never true. ‘It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been to a sex orgy and actually when Christine and I arrived it was all over anyway,’ Mandy told me.
Were the rumours true that roast peacock had been served, I asked her. ‘No,’ she told me, ‘but I did see the dismembered remains of a swan . . . ugh.’
At the time, as our paths crossed regularly while I covered the story, I came to regard her as the one figure to emerge from the whole scandal with her sense of humour and self-respect left intact. And the Mandy I caught up with last year — I’d got in touch over a radio programme I was making to mark 50 years since the Profumo affair — was unchanged. She remained irrepressibly gay, pert, a wicked gossip, and above all, she never took herself seriously. We got on so
‘My life was one long descent into respectability’
well that Mandy, who spent much of the year in Miami, invited me and my wife to meet up with her and her husband Ken Foreman, a British businessman, when we visited Florida on holiday.
On our night out, she had us in stitches recalling her life after the Profumo affair ended. The only time she became serious was when she recalled how she had been forced to appear as a witness against her friend Stephen Ward.
But, mostly, life had treated her well. After the trial, she accepted an offer to sing i n a German cabaret, and took up with a halfFrench, half-Italian baron named Pierre Cevello.
Later she moved on to Israel, still si nging, and married I sraeli businessman Rafael Shaul.
The pair ran a string of businesses and had a daughter, Dana, before they divorced. She then married a Frenchman called Jean Charles — briefly — and soon afterwards she met her third husband, Ken.
Her home in the English stockbroker belt — which she had only recently sold — was a huge and luxurious townhouse. On the walls were some of the pre-Raphaelite paintings she adored, together with a Picasso. Not bad for the girl who, when she was nine, had lived in a flat above some shops and washed windows for two pence a time.
She even tried her hand at novelwriting. Her first effort told a rather familiar tale of a beautiful young girl who gets mixed up in a sexual affair with a politician and a secret service agent.
She became very friendly with Andrew Lloyd Webber and worked closely wi t h him for his Stephen Ward musical earlier this year. On the show’s first night, Mandy was the celebrity who was most photographed.
What a difference from Keeler, who hit a brick wall after the notoriety of the Sixties, writing — or giving her name to — various books, each one of which seemed to have a new and dafter account of the scandal.
The most recent photograph of her in the Press shows a very
sad-looking old woman, wheeling a shopping trolley near her home in South London.
‘Christine was never really able to adapt in the way I did,’ Mandy once said. ‘Her raison d’être is simply 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.’
As she put it: ‘My life has been one long descent into respectability.’
Still, nothing in Mandy’s background was off-limits when we spoke again recently.
She just groaned when I asked her whether she had really provided Stephen Ward with ‘immoral earnings’ as the prosecution in his trial tried to prove — casting her and Keeler as call girls. She knew perfectly well (as did I) that Ward never had two pennies to rub together.
Mandy’s sexual encounters were never specifically for money — though nor would she pretend they were all for love. She received money from men because back then she was almost permanently broke, and had to pay Ward £9-a-week rent (Ward had ended up providing accommodation for them).
Sometimes, she received small gifts but, as she told me: ‘Christine and I were never, ever prostitutes . . . we were young, we were naive, but we never had sex for cash. End of.’
Her sudden death now leaves only Keeler as the last major player in the Profumo affair. It has robbed us, far too soon, of a lively, honest, wickedly amusing girl who had a great ability to turn events to her advantage.
She was the one figure caught in the scandal whose natural character showed the establishment that truth and humour might just overcome conspiracy and lies.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it at all,’ she told me. ‘It was a great time. I learned a lot, I grew up fast, I made mistakes, but I never quite tripped up or fell down.’