Mandy Rice-Davies
BORN LLANELLI, WALES, OCTOBER 21, 1944. DIED LONDON, DECEMBER 18, 2014, AGED 70
SHE WON fame and notoriety as the outspoken showgirl in the 1960s Profumo affair, but later Mandy Rice-Davies adopted Judaism and launched a string of nightclubs in Israel.
The pixie-faced teenager in a petal hat stunned a courtroom after Viscount Astor denied his affair with her – by retorting: “Well he would, wouldn’t he”. She and Christine Keeler had attended parties at Astor’s Cliveden home, and the ensuing sex and spy scandal brought down Harold Macmillan’s Tory government in 1964. RiceDavies’ remark survived to enter the Oxford Dictionary Book of Quotations.
It was a story with legs to run and run. It caused the resignation of War Minister John Profumo who had lied over his affair with Keeler – simultaneously involved with a Soviet defence attaché. It contributed to the suicide of society osteopath Stephen Ward, who organised the parties and was charged with living off immoral earnings.
Describing herself as a conventional girl, Rice-Davies came to London in search of “a new liberal element” which she sensed “creeping into society.” Her affairs were indiscriminate: from aristocrats to fraudsters like Emil Savundra and the slum landlord Peter Rachman with whom she lived at the age of 16 for two years, unaware he was married. It was a tale of tarnished innocence blended with aspiration.
Rice-Davies was the daughter of a police officer turned technologist, and an actress. The family moved to the prosperous Solihull where she sang in the church choir and did paper rounds to raise money to feed her Welsh mountain pony. Educated at Sharmans Cross Secondary Modern School, she was inspired by life of Albert Schweitzer to become a missionary, but instead modelled at a Birmingham store before moving to London where she met Keeler and Ward while working as a dancer in Soho.
Keeler was the more fragile of the two girls, while Davies proved a true survivor, trading on her glamour and her reputation. She went to Israel in 1966, where she met her first husband, Israeli businssman and former El Al steward Rafi at the “Caliph” nightclub in Jaffa. Shauli thought her singing “mediocre”, but she studied Hebrew and converted to Judaism. They had a daughter Dana.
Several Tel Aviv nightclubs and restaurants followed, and she released a record in 1964, Introducing Mandy. She and Shauli launched Mandy’s Discotheque, attracting Tel Aviv’s bohemians. In the 1970s she helped him
Mandy Rice-Davies: petal hat girl who helped bring down a government launch Israel’s first glossy magazine. But ten years later their marriage ended. Retaining her business interests in Israel, she moved to Spain and in 1978 briefly married Jean Charles Lefevre. Her friend, Uri Avneri, former editor of the Israeli news magazine HaOlam HaZeh described her as “the queen of nightlife”, while Israeli fashion designer Yuval Kaspin, considered her a “huge star” who drew people to British culture.
Rice-Davies appeared in several Israeli films on her return to Britain in the 80s. She had minor roles in several TV and film productions, appeared in a touring production of Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen, and in the long-running No Sex Please, We’re British. In 1987 she married Ken Foreman and her novel, The Scarlet Thread followed in 1989.
Andrew Lloyd Webber attempted to revive interest in the Profumo affair with his recent musical on Stephen Ward’s life, which closed after a brief Londonrun.Butthecomposerwaswon over by “this life enhancing woman”. Far from the mythic good-time girl, he considered her enormously well read and intelligent conversant with such subjects as Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries and Stanley Spencer’s artistic influence on Lucian Freud. She is survived by her husband Ken Foreman and Dana.