Mandy Rice-Davies – who has died at the age of 70 – always maintained that she had never seen Scandal, the film that introduced the Profumo affair to generations too young to remember her role in the events that nearly toppled the 1963 British government.
But paying tribute to her Friday, the film’s producer, Stephen Woolley, revealed how clandestine meetings were arranged between Rice-Davies and Bridget Fonda to help the American actor capture her personality as well as put Rice-Davies’s mind to rest about her portrayal.
“She wasn’t too sure that her husband would have approved her involvement in the film so we had to have little secret meetings – I think the first one was at the National Portrait Gallery in London,” recalled Woolley, who cast Rice-Davies three years earlier in Absolute Beginners. “She wanted to act at the time, in the mid-80s. By the time we had got to make Scandal she had remarried and was sort of moving in different circles, but she couldn’t resist the limelight and so we had these little secret meetings so that Bridget could imitate her walk and accent and so on.”
Rice-Davies, who died on Thursday as a result of cancer, had been a nightclub dancer at the time of the Profumo affair. Her friend Christine Keeler had an affair with the then war secretary, John Profumo, and also with the Soviet naval attache in London, who was a spy. There were concerns that the relationships created the risk of a security breach at the highest levels of government during the cold war.
Keeler, a showgirl from a modest background, met the cabinet minister via a mutual friend, Stephen Ward, a West End osteopath. The first encounter took place at the country mansion of Lord Astor.
As rumours of the affair swirled, Profumo addressed the House of Commons, telling his fellow MPs that there was “no impropriety whatever” in his relationship with Keeler. It was a fatal mistake. A little more than a week later, he would be back before his peers to announce that he had misled them and, consequently, would be resigning.
But it was Ward who was put on trial, charged with living off the immoral earnings of Rice-Davies and Keeler. During that trial at the Old Bailey, Rice-Davies uttered her most famous words. Asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her, she said: “He would, wouldn’t he?” As he faced conviction, Ward took his own life.
“If I could live my life over, I would wish 1963 had not existed,” she said later. “The only reason I still want to talk about it is that I have to fight the misconception that I was a prostitute. I don’t want that to be passed on to my grandchildren. There is still a stigma.”
She also insisted she had no secrets to take to the grave. “Everything is out. That is why I have no concerns whatsoever about anything.”
Many of the tributes paid to Rice-Davies dwelled on her wit. “To me, Mandy’s line ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ was on a par with the quips of John Lennon or lyrics like The Who’s ‘Hope I die before I get old’. It symbolised the ethos of teenagers, a new generation,” said Woolley.
“That’s kind of what I love about making Scandal – it was Mandy and her ability not to take things too seriously. Christine of course was more of a sensitive soul and became quite terrified, but Mandy just loved the journey, the excitment and the whole world.”
“She and Christine Keeler were two teenagers who really were instrumental in focusing on the hypocrisy of [the Profumo affair], the sort of message which was being fed that there was one rule for the rich and another for the poor.”
Rice-Davies emerged back into the spotlight last year as an adviser on the musical Stephen Ward by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and remained defiant, accusing the government of scapegoating Ward.
Lloyd Webber said: “Mandy was enormously well read and intelligent. I will always remember discussing with her over dinner subjects as varied as Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries and the influence of the artist Stanley Spencer on Lucian Freud. With a different throw of the dice, Mandy might have been head of the Royal Academy or even running the country.”
Born in Wales in 1944, Rice-Davies later said that at school she won so many prizes that she had to give some of them back to give the other children a chance. She said her twin loves when she was young were her Welsh mountain pony, Laddie, and the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. “I wanted to hug lepers, hug trees and to join him if I could. But then I did some research and changed my mind.”
She left school without qualifications and took a job in the china department at Marshall & Snelgrove in Birmingham, modelling at the store during teatime. She then moved to London, where she got a job as a dancer at Murray’s cabaret club in Soho, and began mixing with the rich and famous.
She also began her association with Keeler, a fellow dancer, and with Ward, leading to high society parties, particularly at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion of the Astors. The Earl of Dudley, one of Murray’s oldest clients, took a shine to Rice-Davies, who by 17 had had her first offer of marriage. “I could have been a dowager duchess by the time I was 22,” she said.
She said later: “As soon as I realised that the whole thing was about to blow up, I went and told my parents absolutely everything that could possibly come out, and they were very supportive. Looking back on it, I was remarkably naive.”
