Love for sale
Harriet Waugh
An English Madam Paul Bailey
In the last few years literary 'ghosts' k have been coming out of their closets by having their names firmly placed on the title been of books that previously would have ueen 'sold as the autobiography of the Celebrity in question. Now, it is a moot question to whom the book belongs, the Writer or the person whose life is described. Cynthia Payne in an interview has referred 1,13 An English Madam as 'my book'. Paul 'alleY might well consider it his. I would imagine that Miss Payne takes a larger share of the royalty but that Paul Bailey will quite nicely. He has done an excellent Job of giving a rounded, vernacular picture of what it is like to be 'Cynthia Payne. The Publicity surrounding the launching the book has ignored the content of it, and continues to present Miss Payne in the
same Way as the newspapers did in 1978 after
„, her house wa raided by the police. The Police found 53s elderly men, in various Stiages of undress, lined up on the stairs iciutching luncheon vouchers entitling them ,..csex with any one of 16 women. Mean- while their hostess, Cynthia Payne, was rusY in the kitchen poaching eggs to .eplenish her 'guests' spent energies after they were done. This homely scene caught ,""le imagination of the nation and she rapid- IdY attained heroine status when she was sent t°'41 for six months for keeping a brothel. 'en the Spectator felt moved to protest !Ind wrote an indignant editorial entitled p he HYPocrisy of the Law'. When Cynthia aYne left Holloway it was in a Rolls Royce by a friendly client, and she was melding a large bouquet given by a female ernber of the press seeking an interview. The impression then and now is of a VirnP, jolly woman in a low cut black ':celebratory glass of champers. An obvious- thoro tten. t: ughlY good sort who gave motherly ion to a motley crew of elderly gents City suits, sending them on their way in better order' o when they arrived, or, as The would put it, 'thoroughly de-spunked'. :the truth as portrayed by Paul Bailey, does not invalidate this picture of her but it i',°es remove the Tatter gloss. How Miss anadYne became a 'good sort' is a miserable, bl;,,tawdry story only lightened by her "I', good humour. d. From the age of ten, when her mother unhappy- life was muddled and ed-HaPPY- Her father, a hairdresser, rebuff-
' affection and was a martinet. Cynthia rebelled by running wild with gangs of boys and becoming a compulsive swearer. At 17 she cast in her lot with a much older ne'er- do-well married man. When this liaison broke up she lived hand-to-mouth, at one time starving in a filthy basement belonging to a crazed collector of young girls. She worked erratically in restaurants, attracted by the- meals provided. In those days she saw the offer of a meal as the tenderest declaration of affection and would give sex as a desperate attempt to hold on to the man's good will. She never much enjoyed sex. During the next few years she moved through a succession of dud men with little joy; there was an illegitimate child that she kept and fostered out, a still born baby, another child that was adopted, and three backstreet abortions: one well performed, one a horror story and one about middling bad. She had one major love in her life which ended with the last abortion.
She was rescued from this unhappy flail- ing about by an elderly sugar daddy who set her up in a flat, dressed her, fed her and taught her manners. He had little wish for sex. Probably without realising it, it was this incident that set Cynthia Payne on her future career and led her to become a brothel keeper for the elderly. Old men were nice, sexually undemanding and grateful. Even her relationship with her father improved once he had joined her clientele (this part opens up huge vistas of
uneasy speculation not satisfied by her comic assessment of her motive that she was simply doing him a good turn in return for some bad ones). Around herself she gathered a group of personal admirers who were satisfied by doing her housework starkers, dressing up in women's clothes, licking her shoes and being punished for in- subordination, in one case by having the contents of the vacuum cleaner thrown over his greased body. For these unfortunates she has a warm affection. Possibly it is the only way she can now feel affection for men. In contrast to their dependent aberra- tions she is able to feel strong, pulled together and in control. They fit in, hardly more strange to each other than other families in Streatham.
Martin O'Brien in his travel book, All the Girls, describing his adventuring among the prostitutes of the world, looks at the business from a male point of view. On the whole he favours fairly conventional forms of sex, only once going in for a bit of cor- rective training from a professional in Paris. This consisted of being manacled, blindfolded, attached to a lead and then soundly whacked. Apparently if you do all this you experience a sense of levitation. Very nice. However, I doubt if he would have been eligible to come under Miss Payne's whip or to have been admitted to her establishment in Streatham. Not only does he look, going by the rather unhealthy photograph on the back of his book, too young, but Cynthia Payne had a strong dislike of virile customers who considered themselves sufficiently good at the activity that they believed they had something
beyond money to offer her girls. Miss Payne did not enjoy her brief experience of being on the game.
Mr O'Brien, on the other hand, who has almost as much experience on the subject as Miss Payne, confiders that by and large prostitutes have a pretty good time, earning vast sums of money and the choice of retir- ing into respectable marriage or being in- dependent. There are descriptions or elderly toothless women still plying their trade but these are in the minority. He is at his best when describing weird situations or odd characters among the prostitutes, and at his least good when waxing sentimental about some bar girl. Then the girl immediately loses all identity and becomes a plastic win- dow model with pouting 'bee-stung lips' et- cetera.
One of the difficulties about being a woman reading such a book is that it is completely unerotic, describing the man's sensations rather than conveying any mutal titillation However, I lent the book to a happily-married Somerset farmer who reported that it was 'a good, bachelor, ran- dy read.'
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