Molly Parkin: Sex abuse, and smarmy Cameron

Molly next to her own painting of the sexual encounter she had with a 23-year-old surfer boy two years ago at age 73. All photos by Tommy Candler

















Part 2 of my interview with Molly Parkin - in which she reflects lyrically on her childhood sexual abuse, smarmy David Cameron and why girls should be encouraged to have babies young. Scroll down for part 1 ...

Hi Moll again, on dark matters, the sexual abuse you suffered as a child from your father – I guess silence is the twin evil of the offence?

My reply is a poem ....

PROSE POEM BY MOLLY PARKIN. ESPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR MADAME ARCATI. APRIL 2007

THE PAEDOPHILE'S DAUGHTER

THE WORST THING ABOUT CHILDHOOD SEX WITH MY FATHER
WAS THAT I COULDN'T TELL MY MOTHER OR ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD
WITH THE THREAT OF MORE BEATINGS IF I EVER OPENED MY MOUTH

ABOUT WHAT WENT ON IN MY BEDROOM WHEN I WAS IN MY PYJAMAS
OR IN THE SWIMMING POOL WHEN I WAS IN MY SWIMSUIT
OR ON MY BYCYCLE WHEN I WAS IN MY COTTON SHORTS
OR RIDING HIGH ON HIS SHOULDERS IN MY SUMMER FROCK
SKINNY LEGS DANGLING EACH SIDE OF HIS NECK
AS HE NUZZLED MY INNER THIGHS HIGHER AND HIGHER
THERE IN THE EMPTY PARK.

I KEPT THE PROMISE I'D MADE ON HIS LEATHER BIBLE
NOT OPENING MY MOUTH UNTIL LONG AFTER HIS DEATH
WHEN MY OLDER SISTER ASKED WHY I WAS ALWAYS
SO HOSTILE TO OUR HANDSOME FATHER
"YOU LOOKED AT HIM WITH SUCH CONTEMPT".

SO I TOLD HER THE SECRET I HAD KEPT FOR 65 YEARS.
SHE REMEMBERED SOBBING WITH OUR MOTHER
OUTSIDE THE LOCKED BEDROOM, HEARING MY SCREAMS
AS I WAS FIRST BEATEN THEN FONDLED IN THE FOLLOWING SILENCE.

BUT NEITHER WAS THERE IN THE EMPTY PARK
OF MY CHILDHOOD. NOBODY WAS EVER THERE.

END



Part of your legend are the nine fiancés! Some might say that’s greedy!

Nine fiances, that now seems a ridiculously conservative estimate. I certainly received many, many more proposals of marriage than that, especially when I appeared on television so often, entertaining the nation, publishing my comic-erotic tomes back in my youth, tantalising cleavage on show after the moral watershed, of course.

For many programmes I was over-zealously X-rated, so not always "suitable".
But I eventually learned to clean up my act (Anglo-Saxon vocab), enough to do plenty of daytime telly (hungover!) ie Richard and Judy, atc. But blotted that copybook when I appeared drunk as a glamorous skunk on a family viewing programme, Pebble Mill, spouting sexual exploits!!!! Caused a big hoo-ha in the press.
Then the daytime work dried up, but the night-time stuff for adult viewing doubled ... backed up by a sex diary for the raunchy mag Forum. And regular, bloatedly renumerative, scribblings for the likes of Men Only.

It has always puzzled me, that anyone would consider me as wife material. My basic urge has always been to evade marriage, rather than pursue it. I value my independence as a free spirit, an artist, and an educated member of society, but I emerged in an age where women were pressured to become wives rather than decay in the then despised state of spinsterhood. I come from a Welsh Valley, puritanical background of teachers, preachers and miners. I was the first in my family to divorce. Some aunts refused to speak to me until they died. Others kept their distance when I became an art student and "drew naked men and women".

Unlike David Cameron, I do not honour the antediluvian institution of marriage, nor the demeaning limitations it places on womanhood. Monogamy is not a natural state for homo sapiens, hence the escalating divorce rate.

Cameron will certainly have forfeited female votes in his smarmy quest for political leadership with his ill-considered blatherings. We women need to forge forward, not slip back into the dark ages.

Single motherhood should be supported with adequate funding from the State, instead of being vilified as the cause of juvenile disillusion and disintegrating social values. The births of every and any baby, future citizens, should be celebrated as miracles. Their teenage mothers, the younger and healthier the more magnificent (as Mother Nature intended) deserve to be treated as the heroines of a burgeoning society.

For once the Royals are more in tune with their subjects than the politican. We would welcome the views of our divorced future king, Prince Charles, alongside his similarly divorced brother and sister.

In hindsight, I consider that both my marriages would have been better as glorious, tumultuous affairs conducted outside the four walls of home. And indeed on both occasions, on the eve of my weddings, I did try to wriggle out of it.

I would always choose to earn my own income and live on my own, rather than with a partner. I value the solitude and am devoted to my own company, and Art is a demanding mistress. Which is not to say that I didn't hugely relish running my households full of my children, step-children, friends and visiting family. I am a natural organiser of massive gatherings and am unstinting in my hospitality. My personal charisma has always stood me in good stead, as a catalyst, and have never, nor will ever know what it is to be lonely. Other humans have always been drawn to me as if by a magnet. But I would be just as content as a hermit, a recluse on top of my Welsh mountain back home.

My reputation is that of a femme fatale, enslaving with a sideways glance of green eyes, tossing raven locks, quick with a ready quip and a swift kick in the balls, reducing the opposite sex to whimpering wrecks.

I was an art student from the ages of 17 to 22, remaining a virgin throughout, despite my 3 engagements to fellow students, the final being the most serious. But I was a pious, chapel girl, passionate about my painting, sensitive to poetry and comfortable as such beneath the sultry facade.

I was a faithful wife for over 20 years, with my first husband and second, both sensitive, highly intelligent intellectuals. And this was what I was drawn to then rather than brawny sex-symbols. I juggled 3 constant lovers for the 5 years between my marriages and sampled anything else that was passing my way. Well, it was the 60s and everyone was at it, rampant sex was thrumming in the ether around Soho and Chelsea, my two stamping grounds. But when I ceased to be a wife anymore after the second time, I developed an appetite as a voracious man-eater and enjoyed every possible permutation of age, race, and creed.

I became a hugely successful writer of comic erotica, claiming my exploits as a source of literary research. I'm a roving Celt with Romany blood. Romantic curiosity goes with the territory.

Sadly, I have already buried the very, very, best of my friends, that I had been so close to for over 50 years.

That is one of the drawback of lengthy survival, the outliving of others so close to you. But BARBARA HULANICKI has survived her husband Fitz, and she and I have been the closest of chums for over 40 years.

I supplied her with hats for the hallowed emporium, BIBA, before becoming celebrated as a fashion icon, myself.

We have weathered many storms together. Like the closure of BIBA on Kensington High Street, though I was based in Manhattan at the time so not on hand to lend a shoulder to cry on. And when Fitz died, also my close friend, they were living in Florida, but I had visited just a few months before.

They had both borne the worst of my drinking, yet now, as others do too, Barbara claims that those decades were the greatest fun and that we were all at it. Certainly my parties were memorable events, held in the house of The Rolling Stones, on Cheyne Walk. But Barbara and Fitz's were too, at the height of BIBA chic, up on the theatrical Roof Garden, with Flamingo Sculptures by my other close pal, Andrew Logan. And the original NEW YORK DOLLS onstage.

London will never see the like again!

Many thanks, Moll. You have been incredibly generous.