Personal Life
According to his biographer, Rachman was an intelligent man with a genial personality. Though not blessed with conventional good looks, being short, balding and dumpy, he had the power to charm women and mixed with all classes of society from prostitutes to the aristocracy. Rachman displayed his wealth flamboyantly, driving a Rolls Royce, chewing on a cigar and sporting dark sunglasses.
Although generally a happy individual, he was somewhat conflicted between his Jewish and Polish heritage. This confusion of identity was made worse by the fact that his home town of Lvov was transferred from Poland to the Soviet Union after World War Two, and, being denied British citizenship, he was stateless. Lvov is now a major city in western Ukraine and is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of the country.
Rachman married his long-standing girlfriend Audrey O'Donnell in 1960, but remained a compulsive womaniser, maintaining Mandy Rice-Davies as his mistress at 1 Bryanston Mews West, W1, where he had previously installed Christine Keeler. After suffering two heart attacks, Peter Rachman died in Edgware General Hospital on 29 November 1962, at the age of forty-two. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery at Bushey, Hertfordshire.
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“Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)