I like my weirdos glam and clever. Weirdo? A person who manifests her or his organic interior in a fascinating, creative, non-homicidal way. This blog is peopled with natural weirdos - and now that I am back for a while, I've just noticed another one to add to the galère.
Her name is Amanda Eliasch.
She's been under my nose for quite a while. Ages back she said I was her favourite blog (well, you won't confuse this site with anything by Toby Young) and I peeped at her biog and saw she is a photographer, and peripatetic fashion editor of Genlux Magazine in LA. She seems highly proactive. Always white-teeth smiling. And blonde. (Sort of sleb-ish herself - I mean, your average magazine person is pure subfusc with sniffs.) And about 25. Now I read she's 53 (Taurus - luxury lovers). For me, this is perfection. I cannot abide authentic youth. I will not have them in the house - except my new friend Lyndsy Spence (see interview here). There is nothing more vile than a human being in evolutionary transit who's dreaming over your shoulder. Why should I be bothered with this sort of fate-harlot?
But 53 is arrival time. 53 is about right.
Then recently I noticed Nicky Haslam ('Oh God, not him again!') pushing his latest heterosexuality-celebrating album of song, Midnight Matinee. And one of the tracks is called Amanda written by Amanda Eliasch. She assures me on Facebook that it is her voice. She sounds like a heavenly choirboy approaching the cusp of his first wet dream. Here listen (it's track 16 for a sample).
Recently, I noticed something about a movie. It's called The Gun, The Cake and the Butterfly. She wrote it, directed it and stars in it. This is auteurism at its most extreme. Don't call her Orson! She's won an award for it. I've not seen it. But apparently it's about her awfully glitzy, stars-strewn life. I am assured she has never had sex with Boris Johnson. But I believe she may have gone all the way with Sir Tim Rice. Lord Lloyd Webber will be well jel. At some point in her life she baked a cake containing the sperm of two fuckees. Well, that's what it says here.
Oh, here's the film trailer. I have a feeling I may say more about amazing Amanda.
Jude Calvert-Toulmin is one of the UK's top-selling erotica authors. Her novel Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law is trouncing the opposition in Amazon's erotica charts - both kindle and book.
It probably helped that she is also a recent winner of Come Dine With Me, a popular TV series in which a bunch of show-offs display their kitchen culinary skills for a cash prize.
I have a feeling that we shall hear more of Jude. She's also auditioning for the next Big Brother due this summer. Whether she appears or not (and quite frankly the show needs articulate and intelligent housemates of a certain age to pep up the usual mix of troubled tattooed tots), prime your tongue for that twister of a surname.
Madame Arcati caught up with Jude and discussed erotica, recipes and damp knickers.
Q:
Hey, Jude! You little attention-seeker you! You won Come Dine With Me lately -
I have to ask: do you get an allowance to buy the food?
Yes,
£120, however I got the wine from the finest wine merchants in Sheffield
(Mitchells) and the chilli stout from one of Yorkshire’s
finest breweries (Wentworth) gratis in return for blogging/twitter/facebook
publicity, which helped.
Q:
And what was your piece de resistance dish? Recipe please.
Coca
Xira. I discovered this Spanish pie on my honeymoon in the tiny mountain village of Finestrat
in the Costa Blanca; Vincent and Vincenta at Forn de Pa Pastes bakery described
the process and I worked out the recipe by trial and error once I was back in
the UK.
My recipe is the only one on the net for it. The recipe is on the C4 site: click here.
Q:
Perhaps as a result of this victory, you're also now a bestselling erotica
novelist with Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law high in the book charts. Did it zoom up
as you slaved over the cooker?
No, because the show was shot back in October. MILSIL became a best seller in
the Amazon Erotica charts overnight after CDWM was aired in the UK in February.
Q:
And what's the book about? Is it a transgressive tale of hot lust between a
cougar and a hairy cub? What inspired it?
It’s
a love story about a middle-aged, widowed author, Julia, whose selfish slapper
of a daughter, Kate, spends every weekend at a fetish club in London (inspired
by Torture Garden) shagging meeja wanker Colin whilst nagging her lovely rock
climber husband to help mother with the gardening. I loved writing Colin,
pissed my pants in every chapter he features in. He’s every meeja idiot you’ve
ever met rolled into one.
Q:
What effect should erotica have on the reader? Speak plainly, please. Is it
different from porn?
The
difference between Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law and porn is that MILSIL is a warm,
honest love story described explicitly. Porn is cold, deceitful and a love-free
zone.
Q:
And what effect does erotica have on you as you write it? Are you planning to write
more erotica?
When you’re writing, if your own humour doesn’t make you piss your pants and
your own erotica doesn’t moisten your gusset then it needs rewriting.
Maybe after Drowning and Labrats are out later this year I’ll toss off a sequel
as my fans are nagging me to do.
Q:
Aside from your own work, which work is the most erotic ever and why?
Lady
Chatterley’s Lover. It was an erupting volcano whose hot lava flooded the
hyprocrital prejudices of its time. And Mellors is a masterpiece. My husband is
like Mellors. Son of a gas fitter, Yorkshire
born and bred and takes me in the garden on a regular basis.
Q:
I see you're self-published. Did mainstream publishers turn down your work?
The
reverse. I turned several of them down. I didn’t want them having my money.
Q:
I hear that you may be making a TV comeback on Big Brother this summer. Have
you auditioned yet?
No, I’m going to stay in London
with my darling friend Fiona Russell-Powell this weekend and auditioning then.
Q: What do you think you'll bring to the BB house party aside from a bubbly
personality?
Bums on seats. The BB format has become stale; the public don’t want to look at
fame-hungry wannabes showing off, bitching and obeying the production team’s
every role-playing dictate, they want real, earthy people with interesting
personalities who are allowed to be themselves. I’ve lost count of the number
of people who’ve said “I don’t watch BB anymore, it’s crap. But I’d watch it
every night if you were on it.”
Q:
Who's your best Big Brother housemate ever? And which celebs would you dearly
love to share the BB house with?
Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, I absolutely adored her.
Celebs…
Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I, Smoking in Bed)
Marco Pierre White
Joanna Lumley
Robin
Gunningham
Shane
Meadows
Jennifer
Saunders
Paddy Considine
David
Lynch
David
Milch (Deadwood)
John
Lydon
Olivia
Coleman
David
Weiner (Mad Men)
We’d have a ball. Q:
What's this about Switzerland?
Last year, a woman I used to discuss BB with on Digital Spy (she was “babycakes”,
I was “moonsparkle”) left a copy of my novel My Adventures in Cyberspace in the
lobby of a hotel in the Sicilian countryside. Weeks later, a Swiss American
woman, intrigued by the cover and jacket blurb, picked it up, read it, fell in
love with it and tracked me down.
The novel gave her the courage to get a divorce from her Swiss banker husband.
After meeting her IRL at a party I held for fans last summer, she’s flown me to
Luzern for the Fassnacht, all expenses paid.
Naturally, she will inspire a character in The Moonbeam, the third of the My
Adventures in Cyberspace trilogy, which is about what happens once “The
Misogynists”, my protagonist Dominique Du Bois’ first novel, becomes
successful.
Q:
What's your star sign?
Leo sun, Sagittarius rising (double fire!) Scorpio moon (ouch) and Libra
midheaven.
Q:
Have you ever seen a ghost?
I can’t see them; I feel them in the trees. The ending of My Adventures in
Cyberspace describes this; my Swiss fan said the final chapter was the cherry
on top of the cake.
Q:
What do your family think of your new TV fame, erotica, etc? Will you
ruthlessly cast them aside as you hurtle into the TV stratosphere?
My
16 y/o son cba. My daughter Jodie was the one who nagged me to go on the show
in the first place. My daughter Hollie wishes she’d been on it. As for my
husband, I’m like a helium balloon. He is the rock which tethers me to earth so
I don’t float out into an oxygen-free, scorching stratosphere.
Madame Arcati debuted (post-Coward rehearsal) as warrior. These days, this site is a salon of the precious talents - a refuge from the tyranny of media criminality and the tiresome reflexes of tenured hacks (I have yet to see one decent media cock-cocker or cunt-cunter at the Leveson inquiry - do you now see the playground prejudices at work? The recycling of stereotypes in real-life real-time?).
But enough of transitory fashion. The passing delusions. One of the talents the Madame Arcati salon adores is actor Susan Penhaligon. I have already showcased her poetry (clickhereto read); and I'm honoured to publish yet another example of her work - I ho hope publishers are paying attention.
The Ashes was written in memory of actor Richard Warwick (1945-1997). Susan tells me: 'He played my husband in A Fine Romance. Tragically he died of Aids. He was one of my best friends.'
The photographs of Francis Bacon's whipping boy, Dan Farson, can ve viewed and bought at Blacks Club at London's 67 Dean Street, W1, until March 12th. Don't miss the Private View on Feb 23, 6.30-8.30pm: at 7.15pm., there will be a brief talk by the artist, writer and Soho DJ (and my fiancée) Molly Parkin, and Soho based bespoke tailor Mark Powell (both pictured below by Benjamin Maggs, a Pisces), who is currently working on an outfit for the modfather himself, Paul Weller. They will talk about their Soho experiences past and present, and their memories of Dan Farson.
The flyer reads: "Through the lens of Dan Farson, Soho scenes and its bohemian habitués of the 1950's come to life. Several of the photographs are featured in the remarkable book by Farson Soho in the Fifties, with an introduction by jazz legend and author the late George Melly."
Apparently Farson was also a gifted writer and broadcaster. The first I heard of him was from the late Robert Tewdwr Moss who met him in a Syrian hotel in the mid-90s. Robert describes the encounters in his travel book Cleopatra's Wedding Present. From memory, Farson - drunken and shambolic by this time - took against him, launching into ferocious, froth-flecked tirades. Robert's crimes appeared to be that he was handsome, gay and sexually active. I can't recall if Robert actually names Farson in the book.
As I write I can't find my copy to check. Perhaps Farson's ghost has hidden it.
The Facebook campaign against Rod Liddle's rumoured appointment-to-be as the next editor of the Independent amuses me. Over 3000 people have signed up to the protest so far - amazing really, considering Liddle's rumoured champion, Alexander Lebedev (the Russian oligarch presently burying alive the London Evening Standard), has yet to buy the paper.
It amuses me for many reasons. For instance, I don't recall a Facebook campaign against the Indy's present editor Roger Alton at the time of his appointment - he'd war-mongered for Blair on the liberal/leftist Observer during the Iraq invasion just because the government paid court to him and one of his ignorant sidekicks.
"Make a stand here for standards in the British press," say the Facebook petitioners. Yet Liddle has made his plastic name writing silly posturing things in The Sunday Times, the Spectator and elsewhere. What standards in the British press?
I have Duncan Fallowell to thank for giving me the biggest laugh of this year. He introduced me to the world of Roger Lewis and his fantastic autobiography Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life As It Is Lived. It reveals a man who deplores Clive James, Simon Cowell, Harold Pinter, et al. Of Andrew Roberts, Lewis likens the historian's "grimace" to that of "a baboon with diarrhoea trying to hold it in." The state of loathing often elevates him to the lyrically comic. If Gore Vidal had a sense of humour he'd be something like Lewis. If Scrooge had a heart (before the visitations), etc etc.
Learned, misanthropic, baroque, supremely dyspeptic: this is a man who reports that his father died in 2004 of “cancer of the bumhole… My sole inheritance is to comprise spare bumper packs of Coloplast Direct Wetwipes”.
"Like most truly funny people, Lewis has a markedly serious side, a bottomless well of melancholy and possibly even a dash of genuine madness," writes Sunday Times reviewer Christopher Hart of 49-year-old Lewis. A journalist and biographer of Anthony Burgess and Peter Sellers, he is a former Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. More to the point, he is also the author of Charles Hawtrey: The Man who was Private Widdle.
Roger Lewis kindly submitted to a Madame Arcati analysis.
Roger Lewis! Hello! Congratulations on your autobiography Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life As It Is Lived. You have given misanthropy a good name. "Roger Lewis is a genius writer, and he knows it," writes Lynn Barber. Do you know it? And what do you think of the demon Barber now she's exiled herself to the Sunday Times?
I must indeed know it -- as how else to account for the fact I live in complete poverty and total obscurity in remote Herefordshire, threatened by bills and bailiffs. I'm like one of those consumptive characters in La Bohème, working under the damp bedclothes because I can't afford to put the heating on. If only I could be mediocre -- oh, for then I might have had a career. I'm too vivid, I fear. I'm not what you might call a safe pair of hands. As for Ms Barber -- she's doing well with that slim tale of her youth. She told it first in Granta. Then again as a little paperback for Penguin. Then as a film. Then as many a feature article. What I'd like to have seen -- Lynn interviewing Lynn by Lynn in her demoniacal mode. As it is, she's allowed herself to slither off the barbed hook.
You come across as a champion hater - weddings, Clive James, bad manners; yet you love Austria and stories featuring wooden legs. Of all the things and persons that appal you, name THE most appalling. And THE thing you most adore.
I don't think I hate things -- I am just exasperated by phoniness and smugness and deliberate amateurishness. I am the Voice of Everyman ! I am the Very Platonic Ideal of Sweet Reasonableness! I have standards! But to answer your question -- the most appalling thing is heterosexual reproduction. There are too many people on the planet. It is verminous. We need a nuclear war or a plague. What I most adore -- finding an old world restaurant with linen tablecloths and doddery waiters.
And Clive James ... he's very nice to his mistresses, and he can read novels in about 57 different languages. Surely that counts for something in these semi-literate times?
I think he is a silly cunt. I mean that in a caring way. If Professor George Steiner decided to be a circus clown -- that's Clive James. And I apologise for insulting circus clowns, as my son Tristan is one with Zippo's. Once you have read Craig Brown's brilliant parodies of Clive's would-be aphoristic style, it is quite impossible to revert to reading the originals.
Was there a precise moment in your early life when you realised you were possessed of a nature of powerful emotions? (Please don't tell me you tortured earwigs in the garden shed).
Do I have powerful emotions? Who do you think I am, Maria Callas? I get it all from my mother, who is just permanently ferocious -- her temper could put Caerphilly Castle into fucking orbit. I never knew calmness at home as a child. So off I slunk to the attics of this huge red brick Edwardian villa we lived in, to play with my Pelham Puppets. There was a laboratory up there too, where Jeremy Lewis' father Morley once conducted medical experiments. I grew up in an atmosphere James Whale put on celluloid.
Do you know your astrological sign and if so are you true to it?
My star sign is Bestial.
Is it true the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre - who has just bought a wonderful property in the Highlands - wilted when he read one proposed serialisation extract from Seasonal Suicide Notes? He must be a wise man really because he ran something in the end.
Ever since he authenticated The Hitler Diaries, I have not been able to take Lord Dacre wholly seriously. But the Mail has a new and enlightened features editor now called Sandra Parsons, with whom I dealt. However, as a result of my appearance in her pages, my sales ranking plummeted on Amazon.
You deplore bad manners - if there's one thing you could magic away or into existence to improve human intercourse, what would it be? And may I have a taste ruling on the increasing use of the word cunt.
I love the word cunt. Most euphonious. I got drunk the other night and the next day I discovered I'd re-written the lyrics of Les Misérables -- Les Cunterables -- inserting the word cunt in every possible place. This had been e-mailed at 4 a.m. to novelist Paul Bailey, who fell over in Turnham Green and did his ankle in. I am now fully expecting that after my next session on the single-malt I'll be giving the world Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Cunt, Annie Get Your Cunt, My Fair Cunt, and A Funny Cunt Happened On The Way To The Forum.
Apropos bad manners -- I was agog when I had luncheon with somebody at St Alban and they kept poking at their Blackberry device with a little cocktail stick thing, like the monkey in Kubrick's 2001 playing with a bone. I felt that was rude. I think being rude to waiters / underlings is unforgivable. If I see anyone doing that in a restaurant I want to punch them in the face -- luckily I do have a vengeful, violent streak. (Welsh, you see.) To improve human intercourse? Well, it would be nice if people replied to letters. These days you write to people and you might as well be chucking the envelope down a well.
In your book you complain of poor financial returns on your Anthony Burgess and Peter Sellers books - would you ever consider writing a biography of a celebrity just for the money - such as Katie Price (aka Jordan), Paris Hilton or cry-baby blogger Perez Hilton? Perhaps you could turn water into wine. Each has a huge following. You could bathe in scented rose petals for the rest of your life.
I would do anything for money, except live in West Drayton. But I have never heard of the people you mention. I thought they were hotels, like Bromyard Stakis. Water into wine -- ah yes, the Jesus trick. On the other hand, to mix the metaphor, you can't polish a turd.
You do like the high life, you dine at The Ivy, for instance. Is it that you're wealthier than you would have us believe?
I adore the high life. It should be available to all, 24/7. Believing as I do that the only way to waste money is to save it, I always splash out on myself and my loved ones. Then I get back home and there is a summons for Council Tax arrears. My late father was the same -- he'd come back from a gloomy visit to the bank manager and buy a Picasso etching, cashmere coats, a case of vintage sherry from Berry Bros., a dozen hardback books posted from Hatchards, a suit or two from Gieves & Hawkes, and a seaside house in France. He had style. Then he died from cancer of the bumhole.
Now I have heard a rumour you're working on a book that will feature one of my alter egos, Margaret Rutherford. I regard her as the most splendid presence in the English movie, an unsurpassed Miss Marple (the TV versions are pallid). Do you agree? And tell us about the book.
Well, it is not a book about Margaret Rutherford. Margaret Rutherford features in my next opus, Growing Up With Comedians. To be published by Century in the summer of 2010, if I can get my mind back on it. The advance was pitiful -- approximately the equivalent to ten minutes of a lawyer's time. Dedicated to Craig and our late much-lamented chum Hugh Massingberd. Essays and profiles and meditations on my personal favourites, from Alastair Sim and Terry-Thomas up to Johnny Vegas and Malcolm Hardee. It is a feverish book about how comedy deals with sex and death. It is about comedy as tragedy.
Do you shower or bathe? And without looking do you know the price of the brand of bar of soap you use? I hope you don't resent my treating you as a celebrity in OK! magazine ...
I can never be a celebrity. I am so fantastically fat and ugly. You need to be photogenic, like Peter Andre. Not even the great Francesco Guidicini of The Sunday Times could make me look half human. Talk about Phantom of the Fucking Opera. People thought Stratford Johns was still alive.
In my Austrian birdcage I shower. There's also a horrible little shelf in the pan of the bog, for one to examine one's stools -- they are weird these Germanic peoples. It it a digestive / health conscious thing or is to tell fortunes with? Here in the Herefordshire Balkans I sink like a hippo in the tub. I get my toiletries from Penhaligon or Trumpers. I really do. Another reason for being bust. If I unfortunately resemble Stratford Johns taking a mid-morning crap, at least I smell nice.
One reviewer suggested you should see a psychotherapist to analyse your furies. Your thoughts.
My wife is an educational psychologist.
And finally, Roger, if you could be persuaded to host a literary party in London, name five living people you'd invite, and why, and five living people you would bar at the door or kick up the arse, and why.
Those welcome: Barry Humphries (not as Edna or Les but in 1890s mode ), Duncan Fallowell (who is never in anything other than 1890s mode ), Mark Rylance (the greatest living actor -- I've known him since he was Peter Pan), Craig Brown (a very nice Old Etonian), Professor John Bayley (another nice Old Etonian -- and my beloved mentor at Oxford).
Those who can fuck right off: Jonathan Coe (because he was disobliging about me in his Acknowledgements to one of his books and also because his fat wife cut my wife dead at one of my launch parties), Blake Morrison (whose review of my Anthony Burgess masterpiece was homicidal -- I'd love to hear that he has met with a fatal accident), Brian MacArthur (who cut my fee in half when he took over as Lit Ed of the Daily Telegraph -- I'd love to hear that he has met with a fatal accident), sad mother Julie Myerson (who asked me if writing is what I do full time -- yet who'd reviewed my Sellers movie at Cannes and hadn't made the connection), and everybody at HBO (who didn't invite me to the premiere of my own movie at Cannes, because I was "only the author") and whilst we are about it, everyone in my Welsh family (because I don't like being part of anyone else's DNA). That's not five, sorry. That's five hundred.
Roger, you are an angel with talons. Thank you again. And good luck with Seasonal Suicide Notes. It is one of the funniest books I have ever read. x
Apparently it is what Matt Lucas' ex and Stephen Gately were reading when they croaked. The Coroner is going to be after me for murder.
Click here to buy Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life As It Is Lived. It's better than Dignitas.
Has the Daily Mail run the extract from the funniest book of the year yet - Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as It Is Lived by Roger Lewis? I can't be bothered to look, and I'm awfully busy, so please be a duck and check it out. Last I heard, the paper bought the serial rights then got the wally-wobbles. Editor Paul Dacre was horrified by the book's venomous refrains (foreign to him as we know), spiked it, and ran something toothless by Janet Street-Porter. Very foolish. (Yes! The Mail has run the extract, a commenter claims. Now I can't be bothered to rewrite this par. Mr Dacre has proven to be more pliant than legend allows. He also has good taste in property. Longer[er] may he reign!)
While we await news (no longer), have a slurp of Lewis' glorious book from Christopher Hart's great review in the Sunday Times. Lewis, a journalist and biographer of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, reveals himself to be an authentic, wildly comic, splenetic misanthrope: a hater, among many other things and persons, of Clive James (let's start a club on this fraud), bad manners and Andrew Roberts who has the “grimace of a baboon with diarrhoea trying to hold it in." He's also the first writer to allude to the late film critic Alexander Walker's homosexuality: for some reason it's a complete no-go area in some quarters.
Thanks to Lewis' poor health “I’ve been coughing so much I sucked my trousers up my arse.” And when his father died in 2004 of “cancer of the bumhole… My sole inheritance is to comprise spare bumper packs of Coloplast Direct Wetwipes”. Oh yes, please. Buy now.
Click pic for large version. My thanks to Duncan Fallowell for this photo of the Roger Lewis book launch at Zippo's Circus on Hampstead Heath last week - Roger's son Tristan is a clown and juggler with Zippo's. Duncan Fallowell is in the white trousers and Beryl Bainbridge is offering him money - he can't remember what for. Paul Bailey is in the background (my apologies for trying to kiss you once, Paul ...)
My fiancee Molly Parkin has sent me a letter. She is off to Croatia this summer to exhibit a collection of her new paintings many of which take the cock as subject. I hope this isn't Madame Arcati's influence. She also waxes on recent cock posts here. Anyhow, here's her letter to me ....
You said to let you know re: Croatian gallery girls. Utterly charming, completely bowled over by the paintings. They chose 11 of the very biggest ones, one 6ft by 5ft abstract, which I only painted yesterday, Sophie's Summer Wedding. And another one, an orgy scene, full of cocks of all nationalities entering every sort of orifice. Also another full of cocks, one black one actually piercing the pussy of the white girl. And another belonging to a pale teenage rentboy, being manhandled by a sophisticated divorcee, awaiting her false mammaries.
Hello Rudolph Nureyev. How's Dame Margot? "She's fine. I'm bigger than Sam Leith, dah?" (Photo by Richard Avedon)
The Croatians proclaimed them "very powerful indeed", full of wisdom, and not as "sweet" as they expected (they didn't add "from an old lady").
When I offered to paint out the cocks before the exhibition, in case of giving offence to the Croatian nation (thinking of the mealy-mouthed turds' response to your penis parade), they exploded with vehemence at the very thought. More our cup of tea, then, the Croatians!!
Adore all this cock business on Madame Arcati you've been up to, and the way you actually voice it, so clever, so naughty, so titillating; arousing, too. Brings a rush to the brain... er, um, yes, and there!
Oscar Wilde would have loved it. And Joe Orton. And Mae West. And Vincent Price. And Coral Browne. And Noel Coward. Others must too. Can't we see more of the jiggling sportsmen stuff? Or even Ronaldo in and out of trunks? Moving around, or prone.
Perhaps some political figures such as Profumo, who's weighty down below, I am told. Or is libel the trouble? It's all very well to tell tales on cock size but we hunger for the illustrations. Put it to your public. I can vouch for senior citizens, female, judging by my 80-year-old sister's avid interest. None of us is interested in Page Three girls.
Long before 68-year-old opera singer Anne Howells' recent kiss 'n' tell in The Oldie about her affair with "Clyde" - the widely suspected nom d'amour for married Clive James (he denies) - the former Australian TV entertainer, poet, polymath and pal of Martin Amis enjoyed a five-month relationship with the writer and former ABC band member Fiona Russell Powell between 1987 and 1988.
The first the public got to hear about it was courtesy of a News of the World splash. “He had this thing about my breasts, he liked to look at them. He was very fond of turning all the lights off when the moon was out and getting me to sit on the sofa to the strains of Bizet," she told the tabloid. He loved soaping her tits in the bath and she revealed he was desperate for a knighthood: he's still waiting. Perhaps, like Christopher Lee, he'll have to wait till he's 87.
The paper also reported that Fiona, then 34, was threatening to sue James, then 57, for libel over a "blonde nutter" lead character called Jane Austen in his novel Brrm! Brrm! She claimed Austen was plainly modelled on herself. Nothing happened thereafter. James only admitted that his literary character had the same hair, wrists and slash marks as Fiona.
So I caught up with Fiona - who used to write for The Face, I-D and Blitz - to talk about what had mystified me all along: why she'd gone to the paper in the first place.
Darling, always a pleasure to talk with you. Clive James is back in the news and you've been mentioned. Again!
There was a big piece in the Sunday Telegraph the other week on his latest "alleged" infidelity with the opera singer that was taken from an account she wrote for The Oldie. The journalist covering it for the Sun. Tel. had a paragraph about me, that's all.
What are your thoughts on Howells?
I would like to add a couple of things. First of all, I'm not surprised to hear about the opera singer because I remember Clive telling me that he still saw old girlfriends. He said whenever he went back to Australia, he would sleep with a girlfriend he had gone out with in the late 50s, ages before he met his wife, and he's kept it going throughout his marriage.
When I wrinkled up my nose at the thought of him shagging an old bird (I was young, remember!), he said he loved women of all ages. He was quite flattering because he said I was the sort of woman who would always be fanciable, even when I got older. He also said he had girlfriends in many cities all over the world, who he saw whenever he was in their country.
By the way, I'm not the first young woman to have been bedded by Clive to appear in one of his books although he gave me the dubious honour of making me a lead character. In a book he wrote called The Remake, he told me a young blonde features in it who is based on a literary graduate he knew.
His sexual charisma is something else, and not immediately apparent I must say. But Fiona, why did you tell-all to the News of the World in the first place? Isn't it all a bit tacky?
The thing I want to point out about the NOTW story is that it wasn't me who kissed and told, it was Clive who kissed and wrote first. When I finally read the book (Brrm! Brrm!) I realised he had stolen my life lock, stock and barrel - so that I was totally recognisable to anyone who knew me; but he also had used it as an opportunity to put me down. Someone read it recently for the first time and emailed me to say that, in their opinion, it's very nasty and that I must have really got under the old boy's skin.
I gave Clive a chance. I called him and confronted him about the book and it was his response that made me decide to go to the papers. Bear in mind that when I rang him, it had been several years since the book had been published or since we had been in touch. He recognised my voice immediately, saying: "I wondered when I would hear from you. You took your time." Obviously he had been expecting me to contact him about it. He was very relaxed about it and still called me darling.
But what did he say about "your" character in his novel?
When I talked about the book, he denied it, and I asked him how he could do that, who was he kidding? I told him that I was considering legal action and it was his reply that told me just what an utter cunt the man is. He said, "Darling, the girl in the book takes drugs, is an alcoholic and a suicidal nut. Are you prepared to take the stand and admit that you used to be a junkie, drank like a fish and had psychiatric problems?"
To which I bravely replied, "If it's relevant, I'm not afraid to tell the truth." He said, "I think you will find, darling, that you won't be a credible witness. They won't take you seriously." I thought, "So, you stole my life without asking because it makes good material for your book but when I object, you're quite prepared to turn around and use it against me."
That's when my mind was made up. I would do to him what he had done to me: expose him publicly. I knew he would hate that more than anything because, although in those days his profile was high and he seemed to be everywhere, in fact, he is an intensely private man who likes to control his image very carefully and hates anything about his private life being revealed.
Can you believe it (so sure was he of himself) that at the end of that phone call, he actually had the cheek to say he missed me and invited me round to his flat? By the way, I called his publisher and they were very rude to me too, which wasn't very clever on their part.
So what did you do next?
As soon as I got off the phone, I called Max Clifford. However, I still think Clive got off lightly. Although they had the answering machine messages on tape, the NOTW lawyer said that, because he only mentioned love, but not sex, and considering Clive would probably sue, it was best to err on the safe side. That's why they didn't run the original story in the end but went with the fact that I had served a writ on him.
Why didn't you sue him?
Simply because I couldn't afford it. As you know, in this great country of ours, unless you are rich, you don't have a reputation worth defending. It cost £5,000 just to serve a writ on him. I was advised that, though I would probably win the case, Clive could afford the best lawyers who would do everything to got to delay the case until I ran out of money.
Max took his cut - I even got screwed there; he's supposed to take 20% and I got £20,000 from the NOTW. However, when I received my cheque from Max, it was for £15,000 so he'd actually taken 25%. I asked for the grand he owed me but never got it. Watching the way Max works is an education in itself but I'm not sure it was worth a quarter of my fee.
Incidentally, years later, when Clive thought it safe to do so, he more or less admitted to it, first in an interview in the Evening Standard, about four years ago, when he said something along the lines of I had "good reason" to complain. He also talked about me in an interview Ginny Dougary (is that her name?) did with him in The Times about 18 months ago. I've got it somewhere if you want me to dig it out.
Thanks Fiona. Let's talk again soon - about current work projects, life and, oh, anything really.
PS The Ginny Dougary interview in The Times for May 12, 2007: the relevant passage starts - after mention of Brrm! Brrm! - with James saying: “I’m sorry about her [Fiona]… she was a talented young girl.” Since there is something elegiac about his tone, I ask him whether she’s still alive. “I have no idea,” he says (she is). “She had some very...” Drug problems? “Yesss. I regretted that. The occasional busy journalist, especially in Australia, likes to run an article when they hear about this, saying that Clive’s marriage is on the rocks, and I have to point out, if I get the chance, that my marriage has been on the rocks for 40 years.” Click here to read the piece in its entirety.
A certain incorrigible person of the world writes to Madame Arcati about her encounters of the celebrity cock kind. Adult content, poppets...
Dear Madame,
Given your obsession with cocks - you old size queen! - I should tell you that Clive James has quite a reasonable cock. I would put him at a quite broad 6 and a half inches to a seven.
David Lee Roth is a Princess Tinymeat, as is George Michael, as we all know, thanks to Brad Branson.
Steven Berkoff's is short but very very thick and Mickey Rourke couldn't get it up because he'd injected so much liquid valium.
***** ******** tells girls his cock is tiny as part of his chat up technique. When a man tells you his dick is small, naturally, you don't believe him. Well, he wasn't lying. I've already horrified you, no doubt, by telling you I've got a tiny cunt [in a section edited out, alas] but *****'s cock is so minute that I couldn't even tell when it was in me or not. He was very straight sexually. Thought I was a pervert when I suggested rimming and a bit of hanky spanky.
But he kept pestering me to have sex with another guy while he watched. When I told him ***** called that "homosexuality by proxy" he went mad!
Grace Jones tried to seduce me but I wouldn't go further than massage skin cream all over her. She used to lie in the bath for hours, full to the brim with bubbles. She was horny as fuck with anything that moved.
I've never slept with Keith Allen despite several attempts on his part. I can tell you more if you want to know. My mind is always in the gutter, looking up the stars skirts.
Your Friend Forever x
Dear Darling,
That'll be enough for now. Save the rest for your memoirs.
Farah Damji's memoirs Try Me - published on July 6 - are the stuff of scandal. How's that for a hook? A writer and cultural commentator, a former editor, a former jailbird and now an ethical fashion designer who has blinged Madonna and Mary J, she is an "Indian woman who has lived, loved, fucked and fucked-up in spectacular fashion," according to Liz Jones' ex and newspaper columnist Nirpal Dhaliwal.
"Long before she went to prison for perverting the course of justice and theft, Farah Damji was making waves by being a coloured woman, living an anti-coloured woman's life," opens the press release for her book. The story she tells, which starts in Africa and then shifts to India, embraces the New York worlds of fashion, design and the city's glittery lowlife, always edged by celebrity, and her social, professional and sexual encounters with British media and literary figures. Her revelations, indiscretions, anecdotes and conclusions will upset and infuriate many of her subjects and their lap dogs.
If Farah sought reconciliation or redemption in writing this book she may find herself disappointed. On the other hand, her brutal X-ray honesty - which does not even begin at self-exculpation - is matched by a vivid and brilliant prose style which stands as some kind of virtue in itself.I have always been a sucker for elegant clarity. As the writer and filmmaker Farrukh Dhondy says of Try Me: "At last an immigrant autobiography that doesn't have a mission to complain."
Farah agreed to an email interview
Farah Damji! Before we get to the matter in hand - your upcoming memoirs Try Me - tell me your star sign and whether you think you're true or untrue to it. And while we're being mystical - you make many references to Hinduism in your book - have you ever consulted a psychic (if so, what was said?)
Sun sign in Libra but Scorpio everywhere else with a little light sprinkling of Leo. Librans are meant to be artistic and balanced and not temperamental. So one out of three is a fail grade. Psychics told me I would be married with the white picket fence by the time I was thirty. That fortune is a little late in the telling.
So, why did you write Try Me? It is fiercely honest and won't endear you to your critics.
I didn't write it to endear me to anyone. I am not particularly endearing. I wanted to tell my story in my own words.
How hard did you have to sell the proposition for Try Me? Was it hard going or a walk over?
Sold it three times. Once to a Big Book Publisher who then decided they were going to change MY life story after I had signed in blood on the dotted line and spent the advance. Sold it then to a teeny weeny (un)publisher who turned out to be a neo-Ghandian, post-nuclear proto-feminist who wanted to use my book to push hers and her brother's and then I landed, in the midst of drowning and not waving, like the little animals two-by-two, in the safe sanctuary of The Ark Press.
It was an easy sell because people thought they could re-package it so the story became a facsimile of itself. A popular genre at the time (2007) was Indobrit Chic-lit, it was a bit like looking in a watery reflection, in a murky lake. They didn't realise that I wasn't motivated by anything else than the need to tell MY story in my words so it was easy to walk away when things became contrary to commissioning pillow talk. I think most commissioning editors and literary agents are spawned from the devil's own seed.
Darling, now look. There's no nice way of saying this, but you've been baaaaaaad. Jailed in the US, imprisoned for perverting the course of justice in the UK, working for underworld kingpins in New York, meeting Mafia bosses, writing the kiss 'n' tell about your affair with the married travel writer William Dalrymple and having another affair with a married man, Allan Jenkins of the Observer, and more. What's the worst thing you've done of which you are ashamed?
The thing which I am most ashamed about are the years I have wasted by being absent in my children's lives. That can never be replaced and they are the ones I value the most. Shame is a waste of time. Who is going to get anything from it? I feel bad about you making me feel bad and that negativity erodes my sense of worth and success so the desire to be a "good" person is worn down. But these are all other people's ego-based value judgements. I did crime, lots of it, I was sentenced by a Judge, I did my time. People need to learn to get on with it. I certainly have. I contacted everyone ( I could find) when I came out prison and I wrote to them and apologised for being such a shit. Most were incredibly kind and gracious, one or two (mostly Asian media wannabes) were vile and cold. What to do?
How do you think the wives of these men will feel about certain intimate revelations in your book?
Oh Madame Arcati. I don't know and I don't care. These wives' husbands were sniffing around like dogs sniff bitches on heat. If a man cheats once and a woman puts up with it, she has created a vacuum where there used to be trust and commitment. If you marry a rake, be prepared to be muck-raked. Both these men are serial adulterers, I wasn't the first and I certainly wasn't the last in either case. These wives stayed, whereas I wouldn't, so I can't say what they might feel, I feel differently.
I take it Allan was better in bed than William ....?
Couldn't possibly say but now that you mention it....
How do you think your family will react to private revelations about certain matters?
My parents are stuck like adolescent narcissists. I am sure they think they were perfect parents who provided every material comfort that money could buy. Indeed they did. But they were and continue to be lousy parents. I don't judge them, I just don't want them in my life, they do the best that they can and it isn't ever going to be enough so the best thing is to stop having the expectation that they will change and find that lost love elsewhere. TV or chocolate are good substitutes. Besides, who cares? I have been disinherited by my daddy decades ago...
You write in Try Me: "I’ve lived like a lost butterfly that flutters this way and that, seeking warmth and nourishment. I sought shelter from the sun that burnt my wings, yet I craved her warmth. I wanted the light." Outside metaphor, define light and warmth. And if there's one person I could promise you would never have to meet again, who would he or she be?
Light and warmth are unconditional love and acceptance, from your god, your children, your lover. It's what I sought outside myself my whole life, but never found. Light to me means God-sense in my life. I have that now. There isn't one person, I would like to never set eyes on again, there is a whole village, we'll swap names later...
I see you know The New York Post's gossip writer Richard Johnson. What's he like?
Nasty little piece of work. He doesn't really do anything anymore, he's so ******* by noon that his sidekick the scary Paula Froelich does it. Paula used to be a sweet thing, worked as the receptionist at the Holmes Place on Fulham Road but is now a little caught up in her own reflected glory. Last I heard she'd written a book of scraps and tidbits, leftovers they couldn't use on Page Six.
Indobrit - which you edited - was launched in 2002, a quarterly magazine for British Asians living in the UK. You wrote in the New Statesman of your father who left the UK and returned to Africa: "He had had enough of the British, his bastard bank manager and all the things that reminded him that, despite owning the best bespoke suits and a sizeable chunk of Soho, he was still regarded as un-British." Is this one reason why you think multi-culturalism is a con?
I think it is a con because there's no such thing. We aren't meant to be this great big melting pot society at all. We're "meant" to redefine our own versions of who we are all the time, we are all works in progress. Besides, more and more people are mixed race, live in more than one place, don't necessarily conform to the norms of their birth culture. We need to achieve transculturalism, wherein we look "above" a person's culture or creed into what that person is inside.
Are the Brits inherently racist?
I think Lord McCauley sums it up better than I ever could, in 1835 in his speech to Parliament, about India. The British are inherently fearful, that they are not good enough or that they will be "found out." Of course not all of them, but an unpleasant BNP backing minority. "I do not think we would ever conquer this country ... for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation”
Where are you with Toby Young? He described you as a "a nasty little Indian" which he denies. Then I read Geordie Greig of the London Evening Standard was offering his services as a peace-maker. What's going on?
I awe Toby Young. What a strange thing to call me when he could have called me so much else? We are spectacularly fine. As long as he stays on his side of the bed / planet / universe and I stay on mine, we will have no more friction. It was all due to Mercury in Retrograde, bad communication and all that. Didn't the Americans cook him and eat him on Celebrity Carnivore?
Have you changed? Could you resist major temptations again? How do you know when you've changed?
Yes. I think I make better choices. I think you know when you have changed by the people who are in your life. It's a reflection of what is going on inside, in a way. So no more gangsters, criminals, hookers, journalists, lawyers, j/k. Some very solid good old friends have always stuck through sick and sin but some talented and lovely new people have entered my life too. To stay.
If there's one thing you could change about jail, it would be ....
The horribly itchy polyester sheets. I missed my Pratesi, darling. No seriously, the entire Criminal Justice system needs to be completely overhauled. Thankfully we have been relieved of that god-awful Jacquie Smith [as Home Secretary] but the prison estate is too huge and unwieldy for any effective change to take place.
I am involved in a Prison Project which teaches accountability and responsibility. I think criminals change when we as a society start to realise that we are all part of the problem and that crime doesn't exist outside of determining factors such as class, background, economics and race.
We need a much more reformative, restorative system not just one that exists only to punish. Big stick no carrot can't work. Not everyone can write a book in prison and it's a human shame that so much talent, time and potential isn't put to better use. And I don't mean making number plates, I mean teaching people in the prison system real life skills so they can go out and live valuable lives, not repeat old crimes and go back into the cycle.
Finally tell us something about your life now. Would you edit another magazine if you could?
Ethical fashion, working on a big presentation for a big high street chain, who are not too well-known for their current stand on ethics in fashion. You can't use organic cotton and then chain some sub-continental kid to his sewing machine for fourteen hours a day and pay him £1 and call it an ethical garment. There has to be complete transparency all the way down the chain, from how the textile crop is grown, dyed, manufactured, stitched, finished and to how the final item is packaged, marketed, paid for and transported. It's more than just soothing our Guardian-singed consciences because we feel we "should" do something or support a movement.
No more magazines for me, been asked but Dead Tree Media is endangered and it's a soulless life, I wouldn't want to go back to it. I love writing and am formulating a plot for my second book. My life provides fertile ground for stories! Watch this space...
Farah, I wish you all the best with your fascinating and brilliantly written book.
To think, George Michael tried to out himself to Julie Burchill many years before his cop cock-cocking loo encounter. And she didn't notice!
"My first interview when I left NME was with George Michael," she tells Platform. "It was ten years before he came out as gay and was just about to break up Wham! Our chat was this big deal for The Times where he was hoping to re-introduce himself as a singer songwriter.
"I met him again after he was busted in the toilet and revealed he was gay. He said, 'Did you not understand what I was trying to do in that interview? I really wanted to come out and I thought that was the opportunity to do it, but you just didn’t notice.' I asked him what it was I 'hadn’t noticed' and he said, 'Do you remember that I stood there with one hand on my hip? And when the tea arrived I said, "Shall I be mother?” Did you not think that added up to something?'
"I thought he was just being friendly. He said he was camping around and I was totally oblivious. He’s adorable."
Can't be bothered to think today so I happen on Fiona Russell Powell's site which is a sort of museum of her sleb interviews. I once accused her of asking Andy Warhol whether he was gay and she denied it. So I re-read The Face interview with the Holy Terror ....
FRP: And you've been working on a set of prints called Queens . AW: Yes, I've been doing that. FRP: Are you one of them? AW: Er, er, oh well, everybody knows that I'm a queen . . . but the prints are of royal ones and stuff. There are just four queens; I did an African queen and she's great.
Did she ask him playfully or did he misunderstand playfully? Like I said, I can't think.
Then I read her long vicious piece on her ex-lover Clive James. She writes of the period before they started cock-cunting:
"While we sat and pattered, Rupert Everett kept ringing from location in Yugoslavia threatening never to speak to me again "if you let him get in your knickers!" Clive smiled indulgently while I apologised for the interruptions." Later, when things had turned sour and he had failed to give her an orgasm, she recalls: "He had grown possessive, refusing to believe that my friendship with Rupert Everett was purely platonic ... "
I think I may have to interview Fiona, once described by Boy George as a "good-time ghoul". Here's her site. Some great Q&As and a horrible bitch piece on my darling Julie Burchill.
