Ward was often criticised for the way he lived his life. After the failure of his marriages, Ward never attempted to settle down again. Knightley and Kennedy’s book says, however, that Ward’s sexuality was hard to define, although nowadays it might be easier to simply accept that he was more fluid than traditional roles allowed. Some people have suggested he was gay, others that was a voyeur or interested in S&M. He seems to have enjoyed spending time with both prostitutes and other ‘waifs and strays’ as much as he did the aristocracy and celebrities. He certainly enjoyed hearing and gossiping about the sex lives of others. It was this lifestyle that led many to believe he was immoral in some way, and ‘wicked’ enough to be due some sort of punishment. Ward, however, didn’t think the way he lived was sinful, merely unconventional, saying that he wasn’t interested in standards that prevented people from being kind.32
In his mind, if not that of others, Ward went from helping the world avert disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 to being framed for pimping in July 1963. What a devastating blow to a man who wanted to be everyone’s friend.
Chapter 5
Mandy Rice-Davies – The Sidekick Who Found Success
‘Most people go through life proving what they are. I go through life proving what I am not,’ said Mandy Rice-Davies in her 1980 autobiography Mandy.1 She was, perhaps, the most successful at rebuilding her life after the Profumo Affair wrecked many others, moving to Israel and enjoying success as an actress and singer, and running nightclubs and restaurants there.
Born Marilyn Rice-Davies in October 1944, the well-known partner in crime of Christine Keeler maintains that she always felt she was living in the wrong place as she grew up in Solihull, Birmingham, which she found dull.2 She lusted after adventure and freedom from the predictability of life in her three-up, two-down semi-detached home in suburbia. In contrast to Keeler, Rice-Davies went to a decent secondary modern school and was the daughter of supportive and settled parents. Her father had gone from boarding school into the police force and later worked for the Dunlop tyre company. Her mother had had a brief stage career and had left her birthplace of Wales to live in the Midlands. Both parents had been married previously, and Rice-Davies lived with her mother and father along with her half-sister Margaret from her mother’s previous marriage, who was sixteen years her senior, and later, her younger brother David. Her father was called up to the Eighth Army, seeing Rice-Davies just once before being posted overseas and returning when his daughter was a toddler.
Rice-Davies found school burdensome but enjoyed games and art and came top in English composition. But her real passion as a young girl was horses and, because of that, hard work. She did everything from cleaning windows to peeling boiled beetroot and paper rounds to earn the money she needed to pay for the keep of her RSPCA-rescued bay pit pony Laddie. Three miles away from her home was a riding stables where Rice-Davies mucked out and exercised the horses over weekends and holidays in return for stabling Laddie.
It was during her time at the local snooty pony club, dressed in a collection of second-hand clothes, that Rice-Davies says she got her first taste of an audience when, during an obstacle event, her pony misbehaved. She played to the crowd and loved it.
With Laddie moved closer to home, Rice-Davies started a Saturday job at fashion store McConvill’s, where she helped dress windows. From there, she moved to Marshall & Snelgove, a department store that was as close to Harrods as anything Birmingham had to offer, starting in the china section. It was here she got her first taste of modelling when the department store held a fashion show to coincide with a movie release. Rice-Davies was picked to walk the catwalk in a gown and fur coat, having her picture taken with the stars of the film too. Then, being spotted on the street, she appeared at the 1960 Motor Show in Earl’s Court, London as ‘Miss Austin’, which was a life-changing opportunity.3
Rice-Davies earned £80 for her week modelling at the Motor Show and made up her mind to return to London. Her parents were horrified, but since she was 16 and legally no one could stop her, she sold her sewing machine to raise some extra money and handed in her notice at the department store. One Monday morning, she waited for her parents to leave for work and her brother for school, and then packed her bags and boarded a train to London, saying goodbye only to Laddie.
When Rice-Davies arrived at Paddington, she bought a copy of the Evening Standard. Turning to the situations vacant column, she saw an ad for dancers at Murray’s. Passing the audition, she told Percy Murray she was 18 and was sent to the Strand Palace Hotel until she found accommodation of her own. She was to perform two shows a night and be paid £25 a week. She found the club respectable and run like a stern private school with its list of rules, including the forbidding of romance between clients and staff, to ensure the upper crust clientele were always happy to come back.4
Several weeks after starting work, Rice-Davies happened upon a co-worker who she thought was incredibly beautiful and reminded her of Nefertiti.5 It was Christine Keeler, and while the two girls didn’t get on immediately, they became friends, embarking on fun nights out and romances. While Rice-Davies says Keeler lacked organisation skills and failed to manage any money that came her way, and Keeler saw herself as the older, wiser of the two, Knightley and Kennedy say each girl gave the other something they lacked, and for both girls, the friendship offered comfort and safety.6
Rice-Davies said she recognised in Keeler someone who, like her, enjoyed living for the moment,7 and found her friend introverted, but easy to be around.8 She says Keeler fell in love frequently, had a healthy sex drive but had no interest in money. Rice-Davies also discovered that men were madly attracted to Keeler, and, since she was so disorganised, many hoped to sort out her chaotic lifestyle. Rice-Davies says although she enjoyed Keeler’s company, she knew that she couldn’t rely on her.9 The girls moved into a two-bedroomed flat together in Comeragh Road in Fulham and threw a housewarming party. Keeler oversaw the guest list, which included plump, middle-aged property speculator Peter Rachman and Stephen Ward. The flat would become the regular haunt of Ward, Astor and Tim Vigors, a former pilot.
This is how Rice-Davies met Ward, whom she slept with the first time she stayed at Spring Cottage as his guest, but never again, and then later through Ward, Astor. It was at this event that Rice-Davies also met the man who would go on to ‘keep her’ and eventually land her in prison.
Rice-Davies found she got on well with the notorious Rachman, who she describes as a self-made Jewish immigrant, and was particularly taken by his eyes.10 She noticed that he was immaculately groomed, wearing a silk shirt, cashmere suit and crocodile shoes. Later, Rice-Davies would become Rachman’s mistress; she knew that it was important to her boyfriend to be seen with an attractive woman by his side. Rachman eventually set Rice-Davies up in the flat in Bryanston Mews, which forced her to move away from Keeler, whom he had once dated and since their split didn’t like. Rachman gave Rice-Davies £80 a week to live on and bought his new mistress a white 3.2 Jaguar, giving her the keys and what she thought was a legitimate licence, despite having never applied for one or having taken a test. He also bought Rice-Davies a horse and encouraged her studies and modelling. Rachman moved his own possessions into the flat and saw Rice-Davies every day for lunch.
Keeler was unconcerned at losing her flatmate at this point, as she was spending her time with Manu, a rich Iranian student, in his Victoria rooms. Manu treated Keeler badly, causing her to later head back to Ward for accommodation.
Determined to pursue her modelling career, while at Murray’s, Rice-Davies had signed up with agent, Pat Glover, and was now rebranded as ‘Mandy’, appearing in a well-paid Pepsodent toothpaste commercial. She says she also worked hard at fitting into society, putting her skills in charming older generations to the test, and learning fast.
Keeler and Rice-Davies also hoped to find success in France, heading off to Paris, despite the admin nightmare of first obtaining a passport and realising that at the time you could only take £20 cash out of the country and that traveller’s cheques must be ordered in advance. The two women ended up stealing a hired car from two gullible young Americans, using it to drive, without a map, to what they hoped was the South of France. Of course, the car broke down before they reached their desired destination of Cannes, and they ended up relying on lifts from members of the opposite sex. One obliging suitor even gave Rice-Davies some chips for the casino.
Despite working hard, Rice-Davies recalls that she and Keeler were always hard up, a fact she puts down to the long wait for modelling cheques, which were often slow to arrive.11 This is how, she says, Bill Astor came to lend her £200 when the next quarter’s rent was due.
Once she became his mistress, Rachman made it clear to Rice-Davies he didn’t want her seeing Keeler, but the girls remained friends and met up when they could. On one such visit to London Zoo, Keeler told Rice-Davies she was having an affair with Profumo, although her friend didn’t know who he was or that he was the minister for war. However, Rice-Davies had her own dramas to contend with, quarrelling with Rachman, ‘faking’ a suicide and falling pregnant, then reluctantly having an abortion since Rachman refused to believe the child was his. But when Rachman fell ill just before Christmas 1961, Rice-Davies found herself nursing him, and realised she was in love.
Rachman and Rice-Davies’s eighteen-month relationship continued to be tumultuous. Towards the end of their affair, Rice-Davies says she found Rachman depressing to live with because he was extremely bad tempered due to constant dieting. On one occasion, having been abandoned for business on a holiday in Bournemouth, Rice-Davies invited Keeler down to the coast to keep her company instead. Rice-Davies decided to split up with Rachman and planned to stay down in Bournemouth. It didn’t last, but by November 1961, Rice-Davies and Keeler teamed up again to run off and live in Paris, and in early 1962, the two women even headed off to the States to work, which also ended in relative disaster.
Perhaps Keeler and Rice-Davies’s ultimate downfall, however, happened when Rice-Davies wasn’t even present, when Profumo first clapped eyes on a naked Keeler larking around at the Cliveden pool on the first Saturday of July 1961. Rice-Davies says she heard all about the weekend’s antics from Ward, and that since Profumo had made it obvious to Keeler that he fancied her, it wasn’t surprising that their affair started when Profumo telephoned Keeler immediately after the weekend. Rice-Davies says Profumo took Keeler out for dinner, country drives and to his house when his wife was away, but that he didn’t give her money or expensive presents, preferring instead to send notes and keep in constant contact by phone. Rice-Davies says the easily impressed Keeler was very fond of Profumo, who was not just rich and good-looking but important too.
As Keeler’s confidant, Rice-Davies also says that Ivanov did ask Keeler to find out from Profumo the date for delivery of nuclear warheads to West Germany but that Keeler was clear she wouldn’t betray her country. She also says that Ivanov never attempted to sleep with Keeler after the first time, and that her friend continued to come and go in the lives of both her and Ward and that during one of these absences, Keeler became entangled with Johnny Edgecombe. Edgecombe’s nickname, Kennedy and Knightley remind us, was ‘Johnny Shit’ because he sold marijuana.12 He certainly lived up to that moniker for Keeler.
Rice-Davies finally left Rachman in October 1962, moving in with Ward for what she expected to be under a fortnight. She had plenty of company in Keeler and Ivanov, and carried on socialising, eventually heading over to Paris with an American she had met and clicked with. But by the time Rice-Davies returned from her trip, Rachman had died in hospital after suffering a heart attack, and she’d been unable to say goodbye. She had further bad news, learning that her beloved pony Laddie had died in a car accident on the same day as Rachman had passed.
Rachman’s death and her absence at the time pushed Rice-Davies into depression and she took an overdose of thirty sleeping pills.13 It was Keeler, who had dropped by spontaneously with Paula Hamilton-Marshall, who saved Rice-Davies’s life, calling an ambulance when she saw her friend’s face was turning black.
After recovering in hospital, Rice-Davies returned to Ward’s flat. Her parents were invited to stay too and she agreed to pay £6 a week rent, and a half share towards food, electricity and the telephone. Later this arrangement would be used against Ward as evidence of his alleged ‘pimping’. Rice-Davies also says that around this time, Ward suggested a marriage of convenience to her. Perhaps he saw a fellow lonely soul and thought they could team up together? Or perhaps Ward wanted to ensure Rice-Davies couldn’t testify against him at some point in the future?
Instead, Rice-Davies and Keeler found a flat together again, this time in Great Cumberland Place, with Keeler promising she would cut her ties to the black community. It was at the Great Cumberland Place that Bill Astor visited one day, after Rice-Davies had been drinking. On this occasion, they ended up having sex,14 although it was never talked about or to happen again. Rice-Davies did tell Keeler about the incident, however, which she later regretted.
Rice-Davies had met Lucky Gordon when he had come to Ward’s flat looking for Keeler but found only her instead. He had dropped into Rice-Davies’s hands the stitches he’d had taken out of his face after Edgecombe had assaulted him and asked her to give them to Keeler with his regards. Rice-Davies was also to meet Edgecombe when he arrived at Wimpole Mews also looking for Keeler and ended up shooting first at the window and then at the front door. With the press and the police, who clearly already knew her name, now involved, Rice-Davies says she knew that it was the point of no return.15
Looking for an escape route, however, Rice-Davies and Keeler hoped to leave the country. Of course, they needed money to do so, and decided to ask Profumo, letting him know that the Mirror had offered her money to sell her story. But Rice-Davies thought Keeler had mismanaged the whole thing as Profumo’s lawyers advised against handing over any cash to the girls. With no one else willing to help, the women instead moved out of their flat to Park West. However, when Rice-Davies came home one evening to find Keeler in semi-darkness with West Indian friends, she told her to leave. Rice-Davies says it was then that Keeler took the money the Mirror was offering and left the country.16
One of the main pieces of evidence against Ward was Rice-Davies’s relationship with Emil Savundra, who was referred to in court as ‘the Indian doctor’. Rice-Davies met the Sri Lankan through his friendship with Ward. Savundra was revealed later to be a con man who had committed bribery and fraud on an international scale. The collapse of his Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance Company left about 400,000 motorists in the United Kingdom without cover. At the time, however, Rice-Davies found him kind and entertaining when she initially lunched with him and Ward and agreed with Ward to let Savundra to pay her rent so that he could use her room when she wasn’t there to entertain other women. After agreeing to this, Savundra then began to romance Rice-Davies with flowers and picnics and the two dated. Savundra also offered to pay for Rice-Davies’s acting lessons, and so left £25 in Ward’s flat for her. The prosecuting counsel would of course go on to claim this was Ward arranging a money-for-sex deal between Rice-Davies and Savundra, and that Rice-Davies would then pay some of the £25 she received to Ward.
The last thing Rice-Davies ever did for Ward was to attend an exhibition of his drawings that opened the same day as his trial started. Any money made was to go towards his legal costs, and Ward hoped Rice-Davies coming along would create a buzz and increase sales. Rice-Davies says that Ward’s royal paintings were left unsold until an elderly man in a bowler hat appeared to pay £5,000 in cash for them. Rice-Davies believes the portraits were bought on behalf of the royal family.
After the trial, Rice-Davies found her notoriety a hindrance, and claims in her book that since the Profumo Affair, lots of inaccuracies have been written about her. She received sacks of mail when she was in the headlines and many of the letters were obscene. She was also conned by a publishing company that arranged for her memoirs, entitled The Mandy Report, to coincide with the release of the Denning Report. She never saw a penny of profit for them. It took the Great Train Robbery to push her off the front pages, she says.
Eventually, Rice-Davies worked in cabaret and toured the world performing. She set up home in Israel and set up a chain of clubs and a restaurant in her adopted country. She married and in 1968 had a daughter. She helped the government by promoting tourism, and during the periods of war in Israel, entertained the troops, worked for various charities and raised funds.
Rice-Davies puts her success down to how she has been treated and vilified, as it made her desperate not to fail, and for people to see that and comment on it. Surprisingly, she was probably one of the only individuals associated with the Profumo Affair who didn’t fail. However, the fact that she is known colloquially as ‘Randy Mice-Davies’ perhaps shows the misogyny involved at the time still very much exists.
Rice-Davies was one of the many witnesses in the Ward case who found that if she refused to testify in a way that suited the police, she’d be risking her own liberty. Having refused to give a statement about Ward, Rice-Davies was intercepted at Heathrow as she tried to board a flight to Madrid. The police charged her with possessing a forged driving licence and invalid insurance and was sent to Holloway for a night, highly unusual for such minor charges. With an unusually high bail set, and the police insisting they would find a reason to re-arrest her even if she paid it, she relented and helped with inquiries.
Rice-Davies went to court over her driving charges and was fined £42. She finally headed off to Spain but was arrested again upon her return. This time it was for the alleged ‘theft’ of a TV set she had rented for her Bryanston Mews flat, which she had been unable to enter since Rachman’s death. After she testified against Ward on 28 June, the theft charge was dropped.
Post scandal, Rice-Davies played Maddie Gotobed in Tom Stoppard’s farce Dirty Linen in Oxford. The Oxford Times’s critic Frank Dibb said of her performance: ‘In the pivotal role of the nubile panties-shedding secretary, Mandy Rice-Davies gives a neat, briskly projected and lively performance.’17
Chapter 6
Bill Astor – Destined for Disappointment
Bill Astor’s forefather was a Spanish butcher who settled in Germany in the eighteenth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century, after failing to win as a candidate for the state assembly of New York, a rich descendant, William Waldorf Astor, decided to settle in Britain instead. Three years later, one William Waldorf bought Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster. An Italianate palace, it was set within 400 acres or so of wooded land, perched above a bend on the River Thames.
William Waldorf found acceptance into English society difficult; he had argued with Cliveden’s previous owner, giving the duke cause to talk him down to the Prince of Wales. William Waldorf, however, instead determined to buy his popularity, purchasing horses from the royal stud, and winning the prince over enough to encourage him to visit Cliveden. Later he bought the Pall Mall Gazette to ensure his position, encouraging the writing of ‘society paragraphs’, but compiling a list of exactly who not to include, so they might think better of his powerful discretion.1 Instead of ingratiating himself with the right people by the power of his publication, however, after ordering Sir Berkeley Milne out of a concert he was hosting, and thus upsetting the royal family (Sir Berkeley was in command of the royal yacht), William Waldorf was very much not a welcome member of high society.
In 1906, the house was passed to Waldorf Astor, the first-born son of William Waldorf Astor and Mary Dahlgren Paul. Waldorf had married American divorcee Nancy Shaw that year and Cliveden was their wedding gift. Waldorf Astor entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, and in the following year also took over the Observer newspaper, which his father had also bought. Unfit for trench warfare, Waldorf had to make do with a desk job during the war. When his political career was cut short by his father’s death in 1919, he was forced to move instead to the House of Lords to take up the barony and viscountcy that his father had managed to obtain, which some said was only because he was a generous benefactor to the right charities and political parties.2
Instead, Nancy Astor stood for Waldorf’s office in Plymouth and won, becoming the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons. Although originally thought of as entertaining and intelligent, in 1914 Nancy Astor converted to Christian Science and was also a temperance campaigner. She had six children, her eldest, Bobbie, by her first husband, and then four sons and a daughter from her marriage to Waldorf.
Born in 1907, William Waldorf, known as Bill, was Waldorf and Nancy’s eldest son and due to inherit the Astor family wealth. By all accounts, he was not an indulged child and spent his life trying to appease his difficult mother. According to Knightley and Kennedy, Lady Astor could be a cruel and destructive mother and favoured her son from her first marriage, Bobbie, over Bill. Because of this, Bill Astor was a complex and unhappy person, known to be clumsy, nervous and fidgety.3
Nevertheless, he flourished at Oxford, enjoying polo, hunting and horse racing. In 1932, his father got him the role of personal secretary to Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, who was Chair of the League of Nations’ investigation into Japanese aggression in Manchuria. Japan had invaded the Chinese province in 1931, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, and in February 1932 the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo there. By that October, the Lytton Commission recommended to the League that Manchukuo not be recognised, prompting the Japanese government to withdraw from the League entirely.
This time with Lytton gave Bill Astor an empathy with refugees and displaced persons that lasted a lifetime, says Davenport-Hines.4 He went on to support the Save the Children Fund and the Ockenden Venture, one of the first refugee charities to be set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. He was also personally involved in rescuing refugees in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and fundraising for the cause.
From June 1959 to May 1960, Bill Astor was one of the organisers of the World Refugee Year, an ambitious attempt by the UN, governments and NGOs to increase public awareness of enduring refugee situations and to find solutions such as resettlement or local integration that would improve the lives of refugees around the world, not just in Europe but also in the Middle East, Hong Kong and China. He was also chair of the executive committee of the Standing Conference of British Organisations for Aid to Refugees, which would later merge with the British Council for Aid to Refugees to become today’s Refugee Council.
By 1935, Bill Astor was living in Mayfair and in the Commons as MP for East Fulham. A year later, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the senior Conservative Sir Samuel Hoare, who, like many of the upper classes at the time, was a supporter of ‘appeasement’ towards fascism and the Nazis. Bill Astor also supported the policy, taking his lead from Neville Chamberlain and the previous Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin. It was during this time that the term ‘the Cliveden set’ came into use, which Davenport-Hines says was a derogatory phrase coined by a socialist Sunday newspaper in November 1937 and designed to highlight support for appeasing Hitler.
The next few years were not kind to Bill Astor; his father bequeathed Cliveden and 250 acres of the grounds to the National Trust to avoid death duties (although the family continued to live there) and handed over the editorship of the Observer and 49 per cent of the company’s shares to Bill’s younger brother David. He also lost his seat in Fulham and did not get re-elected until 1951. A year later, his father died, and his political career was over, as he became Lord Astor in his father’s place and moved to the Upper House.
