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:
“To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Whatever we’re doing, whoever we are, it isn’t enough. . . . Little wonder we have trouble finding role models to guide us through these shoals. No one less than God Herself could be all the things we’d like to be to all the people we’d like to feel approval from.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“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)