Mandy Rice-Davies - Early Life and Role in Profumo Scandal

Early Life and Role in Profumo Scandal

She was born Marilyn Rice-Davies in Pontyates near Llanelli, Wales, and moved to Shirley in Solihull, England, where her father was a policeman. 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.

She 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. 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, John Edgecombe, attempted to enter and fired several times at the door with a gun. 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, though Rice-Davies, herself, never met him.