Low life
Joan's advances
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas a little put out last week when a short piece that I wrote for the Daily Mail was spiked. I didn't so much mind my effort ending up in the editor's waste-paper basket but I think that it landed up there because I had been politically incorrect and I'm getting pretty fed up with having to be correct all the time.
Some writers, given an extract from Joan Collins's Random House blockbuster, were invited to write their version of her 200 words about a woman discovering or sud- denly realising that her man is gay. Gay is a word I dislike intensely and my little trans- lation ended up with her saying, 'My God, you're an old poor I am heartily sick of the world holding homosexuals in such esteem and I can't bear the way homosexu- ality has become a cult that we must all defer to. The Americans and particularly Holly- wood celebrities who support Aids charities would be more tolerable if they didn't seek publicity because of it so much and wear those silly lapel badges to boast about it. But of course queers are now extremely valuable in the marketplace since they have plenty of money to spend and really very rarely any dependents. Where their superi- ority complex comes from God only knows. So I take it that we must pussyfoot it and mind our language so carefully as to give them the misnomer of gay.
I think I also lost valuable Brownie points at the beginning of my Joan Collins translation by having the heroine think to herself as she wonders how she could ever have fancied her man in the first place, 'I must have been pissed.' I suppose for a newspaper such a phrase is also unprint- able. But what really surprised me was how seriously the writers whose stuff was print- ed took the whole idea, but then I was for- getting that even hacks, let alone novelists, can be horribly self-important, just as Joan Collins is.
I have to own up to having knocked a publisher myself for an advance and also having been sued for the return of it but that was because I never wrote a word and not because I wrote a scene in my autobi- ography where I suddenly realised that the girl I'm after is a dyke — sorry, lesbian. Actually, I don't have to own up, I just thought I would to keep judgmental col- leagues from jumping the gun. I must say that the advances I have been offered or received from publishers have always been so insultingly small that I have never really been able to feel any of the guilt that I am accustomed to sticking so easily to me.
I am well aware of the fact that nothing I could write is going to sell like the prover- bial hot cakes — on the other hand I would be embarrassed to name the sums of advances I have received. I have another book of collected columns appearing in April and I suppose I should have followed the Daily Mail's example and got hold of better people to translate them into English. Anyway, I'm amazed at Joan Collins's gall and I wonder how she doesn't curl up in the witness box and die of embarrassment.
I'm glad to say that I once managed to put her out considerably. It was in an Ital- ian restaurant, the Meridiana, that I sent her a note via the waiter whom i told not to breathe a word of who had sent it. I sim- ply wrote, 'Although I am only a humble Italian waiter, I think I am desperately in love with you.' Even she lost her cool when she read that and it was extremely difficult for me to keep a straight face and not betray myself. The waiter must have thought it was Christmas. She is a dreadful woman, though, and only the libel laws keep me from telling you some truths although, come to think of it, The Spectator is, as far as size goes, a tabloid.
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