Mandy Rice-Davies

Mandy Rice-Davies (born 21 October 1944), is a Welsh former model and showgirl best known for her role in the Profumo affair and her association with Christine Keeler, which discredited the Conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963.

Early life

She was born Marilyn Rice-Davies in Pontyates near Llanelli, Wales, and moved to Shirley in Solihull, England. As a teenager, she appeared older than her age and at 15 got a job as a clothes model at Marshall & Snelgrove, a department store in Birmingham. At 16 she came to London and appeared as 'Miss Austin' at the Earls Court Motor Show.^[1]

Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler

Still in London, Rice-Davies then got a job as a dancer at Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho where she met Christine Keeler who introduced her to her friend, the well-connected osteopath Stephen Ward, and to an ex-lover, the slum landlord Peter Rachman.^[2] Rice-Davies became Rachman's mistress and was set up in the same house where he had previously kept Keeler, 1 Bryanston Mews West, Marylebone.

Rice-Davies often visited Keeler at the house she shared with Ward at Wimpole Mews, Marylebone, and, after Keeler had moved elsewhere, lived there herself, between September and December 1962. On 14 December 1962 while Keeler was visiting Rice-Davies at Wimpole Mews, one of Keeler's boyfriends, Johnny Edgecombe, attempted to enter and fired several times at the door with a gun.^[3] His trial brought attention to the girls' involvement with Ward's social set, and intimacy with many powerful people, including the then Viscount Astor at whose stately home of Cliveden Keeler met the War Minister John Profumo. Profumo's brief relationship with Keeler was at the centre of the affair that caused him to resign from the government in June 1963. The so-called "Profumo affair" catapulted Rice-Davies to fame, though she never met him.^[4]

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?" and later celebrity

While giving evidence at the trial of Stephen Ward, charged with living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Rice-Davies, the latter made a famous riposte. When the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied an affair or having even met her, she replied, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" (often misquoted as "Well he would say that, wouldn't he?").^[5] By 1979, this phrase had entered the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

She traded on the notoriety the trial brought her, comparing herself to Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton.^[6] She converted to Judaism^[7] and married an Israeli businessman, Rafi Shauli, opening nightclubs and restaurants in Tel Aviv. They were called Mandy's, Mandy's Candies and Mandy's Singing Bamboo. Rice-Davies made a series of unsuccessful pop singles for the Ember label in the mid-1960s, including "Close Your Eyes" and "You Got What It Takes".

A famous Private Eye cover at the time of Profumo had a photograph of "the lovely" Rice-Davies with the caption (without any headline or other identification), "Do you mind? If it wasn't for me – you couldn't have cared less about Rachman".^[8]

In 1980, with Shirley Flack, she wrote her autobiography, Mandy. In 1989, she wrote a novel titled The Scarlet Thread. A bizarre follow up to the former was that journalist Libby Purves, who had met Rice-Davies when Mandy was published, invited her to join a female recreation on the River Thames of Jerome K. Jerome's comic novel Three Men in a Boat. This expedition was commissioned by Alan Coren for the magazine Punch, the other members of the party being cartoonist Merrily Harpur and a toy Alsatian to represent Montmorency, the dog in the original story. Purves has recounted how she "immediately spotted that this [Rice-Davies] was a woman to go up the Amazon with" and, among other things, that "only Mandy's foxy charm saved us from being evicted from a lock for being drunk on pink Champagne."^[9]

In the 1989 film about the Profumo affair titled Scandal, actress Bridget Fonda portrayed Rice-Davies, alongside Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler. Rice-Davies has appeared in a number of television and film productions^[10] including Absolutely Fabulous and episode 6 of the first series of Chance in a Million.

She once described her life as "one slow descent into respectability".^{[citation needed]}

"I want Mandi"

At the height of the Profumo scandal, the first prime minister of independent Malaya (now Malaysia) Tunku Abdul Rahman arrived in London for a visit. At a reception at Heathrow Airport when asked what he wanted to do first, he replied "I want Mandi" which shocked the reception party because they did not know that "Mandi" means "take a bath" in Malay.^[11]

References

1. ^ Shirley Green (1979) Rachman. London, Michael Joseph: 157
2. ^ Shirley Green (1979) Rachman. London, Michael Joseph: 159-9^{[clarification needed]}
3. ^ Ludovic Kennedy (1964) The Trial of Stephen Ward: 10
4. ^ David Profumo (2006) Bringing the House Down
5. ^ This has become a popular phrase among politicians in Britain. Examples of this phrase:
   • Scottish Parliament committee news release 22 February 2001 "So perhaps there is a slight Mandy Rice Davies feel to this backing with a hint of 'well he would, wouldn't he?'."
   • Lords Hansard text for 6 Feb 2002 "I pause to anticipate the interjection—'He would say that, wouldn't he?'" spoken by Lord McIntosh of Haringey.
   • Well he would say that, wouldn't he? by Bronwen Maddox in The Times January 11, 2006
6. ^ The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations (J. M. & M. J. Cohen, 1971) 190:69
7. ^ Rice-Davies, Mandy (2008-07-13). "Relative Values: Mandy Rice-Davies and her daughter, Dana". The Sunday Times. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article4301482.ece. Retrieved 2008-07-13. 
8. ^ Private Eye, 26 July 1963; The Life and Times of Private Eye (ed. Richard Ingrams, 1971), page 85. A reference to "the lovely Mandy Rice-Davies" in the 1971 Life and Times compilation echoed the late 1960s catchphrase of "the lovely Aimi Macdonald" on TV's At Last the 1948 Show.
9. ^ Libby Purves in Country Life, 17 November 2010
10. ^ Mandy Rice-Davies at the Internet Movie Database
11. ^ Jennifer Gomez, All Tunku wanted was ‘to mandi’, not Mandy, the New Straits Times online, 17 September 2007

External links

• Mandy Rice-Davies at the Internet Movie Database

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Name	Rice-Davies, Mandy
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Date of birth	21 October 1944
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