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.
Read more about this topic: Mandy Rice-Davies
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, role and/or scandal:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)
“The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)