The Salina Journal from Salina, Kansas • Page 8

AAandy chose humor, not tears By TERENCE SMITH (C) New York Times TEL AVIV "Most people spend their lives trying to prove to the world who and what they are. With me, it's the opposite. It's a constant battle to prove what I'm not." The voice was soft but direct, the tone matter-of-fact. Mandy Rice- Davies, who along with her friend Christine Keeler played the female lead in the 1963 British political sex scandal known as the Profumo affair, was sitting in her Tel Aviv restaurant talking about her life. She smoked steadily as she talked, exhaling straight up like a steam whistle, occasionally drawing long slender fingers through her shoulder-length, flaxen hair.

The 13 years that have elapsed since the details of the Profumo affair shocked Britain and shook the foundations of the Conservative government have been kind to Mandy. Today, at 32, she still has the long-, legged, blonde, good looks that captivated the British photographers assembled outside Old Bailey courthouse in London as she and Miss Keeler testified about their relations with some of Britain's leading political and social figures. Elizabeth Ray's recent disclosures about her affair with Rep. Wayne Hays seem tame by comparison. Now separated from her Israeli husband, Rafi Shauli, a former El Al airline steward, Miss Rice-Davies divides her time between London and Tel Aviv.

While she admits to a twinge of empathy for Miss Ray's sudden notoriety, she has barely had time to read the details of the case. She is currently starring in a hit Hebrew play on the Tel Aviv stage and has just finished filming a musical comedy, also in Hebrew, entitled "The Rabbi and the Shiksa." Shiksa is a Yiddish word for a gentile girl. An English-language version will be distributed in the United States later this year. Between her film and theater dates, she is busy running The Singing Bamboo, Tel Aviv's most successful Chinese restaurant, which is the latest in a succession of entertainment spots that she and her husband and some Israeli partners have opened here. First there was a discotheque called "Mandy's" which was immensely popular in the late 1960's, then a restaurant, Mandy's Drugstore," and now they are opening a new, informal restaurant, "Mandy's Candystore." Another Chinese restaurant with a small hotel attached is being renovated on the Greek Island of Rhodes.

All of this keeps Mandy running at a hectic pace. She has become a familiar figure here, darting about Tel Aviv's streets, chatting with the fishermen in a waterfront cafe near her restaurant, playing tennis at the Tel Aviv Hilton. But even today, she says, when people hear her name, they think of the Profumo affair. "I can see it in their faces when I'm introduced," she said the other day. "There's that flash of recognition, especially with women.

They become friends or enemies, instantly. They either decide they disapprove of me and show it, or they decide they like me, sometimes just to go against the The experience is' nothing new, of course. "My reputation has always preceded me," she said with a smile. "My problem was learning how to deal with it. There are two things, you can do "when something like that happens to you so early in life.

You can laugh or cry. "I tried to handle the whole thing with humor. It's the best defense mechanism in the world. Christine chose tears." The years in fact have treated the 2 girls vastly differently. In contrast to Mandy's outgoing, cheerful manner, Miss Keeler lives a largely secluded life today in London.

There have been 2 unhappy marriages and a bitter custody fight over a child. "It's sad, really," Miss Rice-Davies said. "Christine has had a very tough time. She's a lovely, sensitive, sweet girl, but she always was attracted to men who treated her badly. I remember when we used to walk into a fancy cocktail party together in London.

Christine could pick the bastard out of a room full of gentlemen. If there was a louse in the crowd, she'd go home with him." Looking back on it now, Miss Rice- Davies thinks the public reaction to their role in the Profumo affair was vastly exaggerated. "What did we do?" "After all, what did we really do?" she asked rhetorically. "Affairs with a few men. Everyone was doing it.

Look what John Kennedy was up to. The press knew about it then, but they didn't breathe a word of it. Only now you read about it. Our bad luck was that the men happened to have famous names." The men were famous and wellplaced: John D. Profumo, then the Secretary of State for War, Lord Astor, Douglas Fairbanks Dr.

Stephen Ward, the society osteopath. The scandal erupted when Profumo first denied in the House of Commons and then admitted he had had an affair with Miss Keeler. He was forced to resign from the government, parliament and the Privy Council. Women Today Y9 The details of their parties at a rented cottage at Clivedon, the Astor estate in Buckinghamshire, were aired publicly during Ward's trial on morals charges. Among the frequent guests was Capt.

Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian naval attache at the London embassy, who had been under surveillance by British intelligence. It was his affair with. Miss Keeler, which went on while she was seeing Profumo, that added the national security element to the case. In the end, there were few legal consequences of the affair. Ward committed suicide in prison during the tiral.

Profumo withdrew into seclusion and later devoted himself quietly to social work in London. He was officially "rehabilitated" last year when he was included on the Queen's honors list for his social work. Ivanov was recalled to the Soviet Union and never heard from again. The first years after the scandal were difficult for Miss Rice-Davies, who was still only 18 when the trial concluded. "I really didn't know who I was, "'5 she recalled.

"I lost myself in 5 image of Mandy Rice-Davies. It was like playing a character on the stage or looking at yourself in a mirror. The trouble was that I knew it wasn't me and you can't go through a mirror without cutting yourself. "After a while I became holier than the pope," she continued. "I lived quietly, watched how I dressed, who I was with, what I said or did.

I was creating a new person. That didn't work either, of course, so I finally settled on me as 1 am now." After a 2-year stint as a cabaret sing- er in clubs around Europe, Miss Rice- Davies tried her hand at the stage. "I never had any formal training, "she said with a grin, "but 1 must be believable. "Once I played a 16-year-old virgin and no one in the audience Sister Evangeline plans new career Lifestyles Iranian designer carries out his 'mission' Sister Evangeline Thomas, Marymount college director of college relations and special projects, will complete her i duties at Marymount June 30, ending a career that has spanned 4 decades. And then she will begin a new, exciting career.

Her future duties will be concerned with 5 major projects and will include the leadership of a national project of religious women in America. She also will be a consultant to Marymount on a part-time basis. Beginning July 6, Sister Evangeline will be at the Center for Christian Concern, LaGrange, 111., where she will be one of 6 American Sisters of St. Joseph from thoughout the U.S. who will work as a team of archivists-historians with the Rev.

Marius Nepper, French Jesuit. Fr. Nepper has discovered documents on the founding of the Sisters of St. Joseph in LePuy, France, in 1650. Sister Evangeline said the documents were considered lost during the French Revolution.

During the past 8 years, French scholars among the Sisters of St. Joseph have worked with Fr. Nepper in translating the documents. Among these Sisters was Sister Francis Ellen Riordan, Maryrnount foreign language department chairman. Sister Evangeline will be a full-time historian for the Sisters of St.

Joseph of Concordia, and her work with Fr. Nepper will provide her with data to update her book, "Footprints on the the history of the Concordia order. In the course of the year. Sister Evangline will spend a month in Brazil getting material for a chapter in her book on the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia in Brazil.

The order established a mission in Teresina, Brazil, in 1963. It also has established a native congregation of Sisters there. In addition to her work with Fr. Nepper and her Brazilian research, on Sister Evangeline Thomas Sept. 1 Sister Evangeline will spearhead a national project for the Leadership Conference of Women in the United States.

This project will involve archival material in some 650 Motherhouses of all religious congregations of women in the country. These historical documents date back to the establihment of each congregation in the late colonial and early national period of America's history. Sister Evangeline said that, hitherto, this vast resource for the social historian has not been available. She said the proposed publication will furnish a rich resource on the influence and impact of these women in educational, charitable and other works in the country. Sister Evangeline will organize the national project, write the proposal for foundation funding and secure the funding during the coming year.

The data uncovered in this proposal will be computerized so it can be added to 3 projects on American women underway at the University of Minnesota, Smith college and Radcliffe college. A fourth endeavor for Sister Evangeline will be her assignment as a resource specialist on long-range planning for the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York and Washington, D.C. This will involve working with designated colleges in their palnning efforts. Sister Evangeline will continue to live in Salina at 116 S. 9th, and will have her office at Medaille center, 148 N.

Oakdale. TEHRAN Keyvan Khosrovani, the 37-year-old ex-architect turned fashion designer, is a tiny dark man sitting in a cluttered all-red apartment talking about the leading woman in his life, Empress Farah Diba, Iran's elegant queen, for whom he creates the "official" wardrobe. "You see," Khosrovani whispers, as if somebody is listening, "the creative people in Iran don't get much recognition. Their names are buried. But the empress, who's a kindly soul, encourages us.

We do our best to please her." Ten years ago Khosrovani, who has a master's degree in architecture from Tehran university, went to Paris for further studies. "I spent more time following the plays and sketching the costumes in the dark." He laughs. "Then I got more interested in the couture-showings than my architecture classes." Khosrovani's fashion designs, pen-and- ink works of art, eventually were displayed in a one-man show at the International House gallery, a part of Paris' City university. The empress, who heard about the showing, sasv the exhibit but was silent. At the time of Khosrovani's showing, she was buying couture from the top French fashion houses.

Panned by critics Eventually Khosrovani was commissioned to create a government-owned inn in Naiin, a Tehran suburb. He houses of ancient Persia. He was excited by the architecture. His critics created the exterior to be a facsimile of the centuries-old mud-constructed were not. "I was told," he says sadly, "that the building was too humble.

"I was advised it didn't relate to the grandeur of modern and future Iran." The empress, who has known Khosro- vani's family since both were teenagers, she, too, briefly studied architecture in Paris summoned him to the palace. She had followed the ups and downs of his career and was- "mis- sioning" him then and there to become her official fashion designer. Khosrovani was being "compelled" by his queen to quit architecture. "She told me'that she wanted to be dressed by an Iranian designer. She wanted Iranian-made batiks, brocades and silks used for her clothes.

The "ornaments" mostly silk embroidery borders were to come direcly from Persian carpets, tiles or the designs on the domes of mosques. "It was strange that I was not upset by the suggestion. My acceptance was immediate and without regret. I accepted my mission with elation." Khosrovani, whose "mission" is to design Iranian fashions with a recognizable signature, has been the Empress's official dressmaker for nearly a decade. It is Khosrovani's clothes, fre- quently lauded in the Paris press, that she wears on state visits around the world.

"The empress is in perfect shape," he says about her athletic figure. "She wears the same dresses and gowns season after season. Actually she has one favorite A-line gown with stand-up collar and bell sleeves that she has worn for 6 years." Although face veils were outlawed in Iran by the Shah, the vast majority of women, young and old, wear dark, dreary, drab veils that disguise their bodies under a swath of material. The annual per-capita income of the average Iranian is $1500 and the uniform veil becomes one of life's necessary practicalities. However, Khosrovani says, the empress has set herself up as a fashion example to Iranian women.

"Every time the empress appears in public wearing Iranian clothes," he says, "she is giving off a million vibes. But the women don't always receive her message. Although she doesn't condemn the old ways of the veil, the empress's appearance suggests an alternate way of dressing. She shows that Iranian women should be neat, colorful and wear modern Iranian clothes." When the empress goes on a state visit, a legion of maids packs at least 20 Iranian outfits, always more than she needs for a 4-day stay in a foreign country. "Actually," says Khosrovani, "she takes extra outfits to offset possible emergencies like zippers that don't zip and servants who apply a too-hot iron to batiks and brocades." Apparently the empress shuns wearing the elaborate, eye-boggling jewels that are part of the Crown's collection.

International royal protocol requires that queens wear state jewels when formally greeting each other," says Khosrovani. "When the Empress has to wear Iran's crown jewels, she thinks of them only as a symbol of her office." Khosrovani does all fittings at the imperial palace. The empress, a disciplined woman, stands "for hours being fitted for gowns which are impeccably executed. "She never complains that her feet hurt or her back is tired" says Khosrovani. "When sne is very fatigued, she quietly asks for a tea break." "The simple life" The empress, who plays tennis daily, leads what Khosrovani calls "the simple life." It is, of course, a gross understatement because the empress's life is a round of official duties, parties and public appearances.

"But," insists Khosrovani, "when she and the Shah have lunch together every day at 1 2 o'clock, they sit at a little round table and have salad and steak. She doesn't eat cavair and drink champagne." Khosrovani's clothes are cut and sewn at the home of a 40-year-old seamstress, Pari Zolfaghiari, who cuts patterns on her dining room table and sews on a small machine in her bedroom. "One day," dreams Khosrovani, "there will be top Iranian fashion salons in Tehran. Salons like Paris." Cab driver relys on hands for analysis of character By RALPH BLUMENTHAL (C) New York Times NEW YORK When Erika Hoernig stepped into Bernard Korman's taxi outside the Hotel here the other morning, the cabbie took a long look at her hands. "You're fastidious, I can see that," he began, easing his cab through the thick midtown traffic.

"Well-groomed fingernails, but not 3-inch spikes, either." As Mrs. Hoernig, a textile mill representative from Montreal in a beige suit, stared with astonishment and amusement, the balding, fast-talking cabbie proceeded with his analysis of her character. "Your open-handed gesture indicates an honest personality like, 'sure, this is Korman said, aping her spread- hands movement. "Hmm, good vein structure. Very expressive hands.

Prober's finger. Even the way you're holding your glasses conveys thought, pensiveness, concentration. The left hand is the one you're born with. The right hand Is what you make your life. With left-handed people this is reversed." Then Korman pulled a Polaroid cam- era from his seat, turned around and, with his passenger's permission, snapped a photograph of her hands.

He would add it, he explained, to his collection of thousands of pictures of hands that he uses to make drawings of hands. "I've always been interested in hands," said Korman, a smooth-faced 48-year-old former 'commercial artist from Brooklyn who turned to hacking "when things got slow" in 1952 and who soon found he could combine vocations. "Perfect portraits" "Hands make perfect portraits -you are the only one with your hands." he said. Inspired particularly, he said, by Michelangelo's creation of the Adam scene in the Sistine Chapel and Albrecht Durer's praying hands, he made an intensive study of the hand, even to the point of taking a 2-year course in palmistry taught by an expert from India. "Driving a cab gives me all the hands I could want," he said, displaying photographs and drawings of the hands of some of the dozens of celebrities who have hailed his cab over the years.

Friends together Learning to enjoy the outdoor life is part of the training at the day camp sponsored by the Central Kansas Council of Girl Scouts, Inc. Here, several Salina area Brownies from the Libertv Belles unit vote during a business meeting. Their leaders were Shirley Train and Nora Frazer. Activi- ties ended Friday at Camp Sacajawea. (Journal Photo by Dennis Lundgren).