Oh Mandy. Mandy Rice-Davies Passes Away at 70

 

It was 1963, and as schoolboys we were still recovering from the loss of Marilyn Monroe to suicide. So, in 1963, when Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler got the world's attention for doing what comes naturally, we couldn't get enough of them. They were a more famous pair than Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.

It doesn't matter who you thought was prettier. These were Miss Rheingold's with a story that we liked to read about. And if you think publicity is out of control now, it was no less out of control then, and without Twitter, without Facebook, and without YouTube. Newspapers were good enough. And in black and white, no less.

Think Monica Lewinsky with overtones of missile secrets being passed as pillow talk. The minister who was involved with Christine Keeler was John Profumo, who was the Secretary of State for War, and the common bunkmate between he and Christine was Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet defense attaché. Almost like a episodes from 'The Americans,' if you've been paying attention.

Mandy only shared an apartment with Christine, and did not make the triad a quartet. The scandal rocked the Harold Macmillan government. The joke amongst us was that the British were lousy carpenters: a few screws and the cabinet falls apart.

Now Mandy has passed away at 70, and we all feel a little bit older. As she got older and entered  into entertainment, writing and restaurant ventures, she liked to say she spent a long "descent into respectability." Christine is still with us, but recent photos show her to be completely unrecognizable to the girl of the 60s.

You have to love the British and their way of telling describing Mandy: "Mandy was by a long chalk the more resilient and streetwise." This is a horse racing metaphor telling us she was the favorite. And by the read of her obituary, she lead quite a life, unapologetic for the past, using it for the future.

Perhaps because of Mandy's sly reply in the witness box about Lord Astor's denial of sleeping with her, "Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” we compared her response to every response that appeared in the paper when someone was caught at what comes naturally. Like when the scandal broke in New York City that women, were sleeping in the firehouses and the bunkmates calmly pointed out that they "were just friends" we couldn't pass a firehouse with an open door without wondering who was upstairs above the poles.

It was a great era.

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