IN 1963, BRITONS were gripped by Beatlemania – and titillated by the Profumo Affair, a scandal that brought down Harold McMillan’s government. The woman at the centre of the affair, Christine Keeler, became Britain’s most notorious bad girl, a symbol of the new permissiveness of the 1960s.
Almost 50 years after the Profumo Affair, Keeler has just published her autobiography, Secrets and Lies. Now 70, twice-divorced Keeler lives alone with her cat, and shuns relationships.
But what of the other famous woman whose name is also forever linked with the Profumo affair, Mandy Rice-Davies? Ask Keeler about her one-time companion-in- cavorting, and her replies will be invariably unprintable. In recent interviews, Keeler described her former friend as a “vindictive” girl who just wanted to marry a millionaire.
Marilyn Rice-Davies was just 16 when she left her home town in Wales to seek fame and fortune in London. She got a job as a showgirl in Soho, and met Keeler, who introduced her to osteopath Stephen Ward, who introduced both girls to his high-up friends, including one Viscount Astor. Were they call-girls, and Ward their pimp? Or was Ward a spymaster using the girls as honeytraps to extract state secrets from government ministers, including John Profumo? Either way, both Keeler and Rice-Davies were painted as good-time girls who got in over their heads. When Rice-Davies was called as a witness in the trial of Ward, and informed that Lord Astor denied ever meeting her, she made her now-famous and oft-quoted remark, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Rice-Davies wasted no time making the most of her new-found celebrity status. She released a string of pop singles, hoping to become the next Petula Clark or Dusty Springfield, but they sank without trace. She had better luck with her nightclub chain, Mandy’s, which she opened in Tel Aviv, after marrying an Israeli businessman.
In 1980, she published her autobiography, and tried her hand at thriller-writing, with the novel, The Scarlet Thread. She also acted in No Sex Please, We're Britishand Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen, and appeared briefly in the movie Absolute Beginners.She also had a cameo in Absolutely Fabulous.
Now 67, Rice-Davies and her third husband, businessman Ken Foreman, divide their time between Miami and London. Meanwhile her daughter Dana, from her first marriage, runs a modelling agency, Girl Management, and has been romantically linked with EasyJet tycoon Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou and City banker Sebastian Piggott.
Kevin Courtney
