The night David Bowie fled from Mandy Rice-Davies’ boxer fiance
IT WOULD have been the extraordinary affair between a future rock superstar and the showgirl at the heart of the Profumo scandal.
But the romance between a teenage David Bowie and Mandy Rice-Davies ended before it even really got started when he fled in terror from her boxer boyfriend.
The revelation comes in a new memoir by Bowie’s ex-bandmate, Phil Lancaster, exclusively previewed in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today. Lancaster, the drummer in Bowie’s group The Lower Third in the 1960s, recalls meeting Ms RiceDavies at the Gioconda cafe with the rest of the band on Denmark Street in London’s West End. It was in 1966, three years after Rice-Davies’s key role in the scandal that almost brought down the government but before Bowie won fame.
Lancaster recalls how Rice-Davies ‘like most of the girls… had the hots for David’. He recalls: ‘Mandy came to the door and ushered us in as her guests.’
But any mutual attraction was quickly snuffed out when her boyfriend arrived just as she and Bowie were dancing together. Lancaster writes in The Birth Of Bowie, out next month: ‘Her fiance not only looked like a champion boxer, he actually was one, and he seemed like a guy you wouldn’t want to mess with.
‘One of the boys spotted the pair, dancing much closer than would have been advisable for Dave’s long-term survival. He had just time to scamper into the shadows.’
The pair were reunited in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners, in which Bowie starred and Rice-Davies played the young hero Colin’s mother.
Don’t miss the Bowie special in today’s Event.