The press
No sex, please...
Paul Johnson
The joke in Fleet Street may be 'What on earth do we put in the paper when the Falklands crisis is over?', but look what they're driven to put in while it's still on. I can't be the only person who doesn't want to read about pop stars. Moreover their amours and antics aren't all that spec- tacular once you get below the headlines. The News of the World series on Rod Stewart by Tony Toon, described as his Personal assistant', kicks off implausibly: The question I'm most often asked... is how do hotel rooms end up getting destroy- ed by bands?' Surely it was answered definitively in a famous Raymond Chandler story, and was not worth asking in the first Place, as Toon's lacklustre account makes clear: 'The jet of cold water soaked me, so I fought back'. What happened to `the beautiful suite'? Why, it was 'transformed into a soaking, broken shambles', of course. And what was the band doing? Why, 'laughing like a bunch of naughty schoolboys'. That sort of thing. Toon fared no better with the birds. 'Rod had fancied her from a distance'. Yes, 1,°011, go on. 'But when Debbie turned up she was looking less than her best, and Rod Went off the idea'. Toon says that when he entered Stewart's bedroom in the morning there was usually a pretty blonde face lying on the pillow next to him'. But instead of hearing about the blond, we are told how lind liked his 'morning cuppa', which had to be 'piping hot'. In the Sunday People, cLisc jockey Pete Murray, telling all about my Fourteen Years of Wild, Wild Loving' (headline), starts: 'One of my girlfriends turned out to be a raving nymphomaniac'. id of story. Then there was Michelle, French and very attractive'. But 'when she met me at the airport she smelled to high heaven of garlic'. Then there was Valerie: ont I don't want to go into our relation- ship too heavily because she gets rather upset about it She doesn't like it to be talk- ed about, which I respect'. Then there was Pat: 'I never counted that as one of my more successful romances'. And Mary: 'Died in a car crash... very sad'. And Jessie: 'With Jessie my conversation improved. So did my confidence. She's dead now'. Pete's problem, he admits, is that he may be 'a bit puritanical'. He says he 'never made a pass at a woman a second time if I failed to get an initial response'. Since 'women like to be wooed', it meant 'I missed out a lot'. Oh well.
Lynsey de Paul, recounting her show-biz romances in the Sunday Mirror, is not much better. True, her wrecking bits were rather more impressive than Toon's: 'I mar- ched into the bathroom and picked up my big jar of cold cream. Our bathroom walls were lined with mirrors. Taking careful aim I hurled the cold cream jar right at them'. Miss de Paul, described as 'singer and songwriter', also has homely wisdom: 'Her name was Mary Jane and I thought anyone over the age of 13 who still called herself Mary Jane was not to be trusted'. True enough, because within two hours 'she and James decided to go into the jacuzzi'. But that's the end of story too. And what about Miss de Paul's affair with Ringo Starr? 'My romance with Ringo Starr was a very lovely lunch for both of us. But it wasn't a gourmet meal'. And the one with James Coburn? 'I shall never forget James shouting at me for giving him soya oil margarine'.
The trouble, of course, is that life among the famous is not really so exciting as the headline-subs would wish. Perhaps that's why the Sunday Express has always stuck to the memoirs of world war two RAF aces at least those fellows actually dropped a bomb or two. The Sunday Telegraph is serialising a biography of Princess Diana which cannot, I fear, raise anyone's temperature. Diana's favourite shops, it seems, were 'Harrods and the other big Knightsbridge department store, Harvey Nichols'. The 'girls in the flat' she shared `all borrowed each other's things'. They `tended not to drink or smoke'. Diana and her friends were 'clean-cut and wholesome'. It's true they 'had plenty of boy-friends and attracted more'. But 'they were always chummy rather than flir- tatious, and preferred to go out in a group rather than on individual dates'. Sounds like Pete Murray country to me.
Even the Sunday Times story of Myra Hindley (`The Women Who Cannot Face the Truth') lacks edge. Her 'most striking' letters from jail, it seems, were written to Lord Longford, and described her `clandestine friendship with the prison of- ficer Pat Cairns'. Cairns had been a Carmelite nun for five years and Hindley described their 'deep spiritual affinity' and claimed 'she has done so much for me spiritually' Later, Hindley's 'futile escape plot' with Cairns was discovered. Lord Longford wrote 'anxiously' to Hindley, in- quiring whether she and Cairns had 'broken the Christian rules' — an interesting way of putting it. But the Sunday Times team reported: 'He was greatly relieved to receive the answer: "No".'
On the whole the Observer comes off best with Simon Raven's memoirs. The first episode dealt with how awful William Rees- Mogg was at school. Last week it was prig- gish James Prior in the army. Fairly damp, then as now, he warned Raven against for- nication: 'No sex with native women, if on- ly because they stink'. As for half-castes, `they probably have the pox and they cer- tainly have native mothers who chew betel nut'. No homosexuality: 'even at Bangalore they'll draw the line at that'. As for mem- sahibs, they were 'idle, conceited, pampered and promoted far above their proper class'. Prior concluded: 'Repeat after me, Simon: "No sex".'
But even Mrs Thatcher, if she cares to read such things, must have been struck by Raven's description of Prior partaking in a heavily-backed bet as to who could drink the most whisky without puking. 'Great glistering pools gathered beneath his eyes, then cascaded down either side of his nose, along the clefts between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, therfover his chin and onto his tunic...' Both contestants threw up at the same time but Prior won by being sick outside the mess: 'James hurtled through the door, opened his lips and squirted 13 double whiskies and twelve tumblers of water in a proud and graceful arc, high over the balustrade of the verandah and on to the massed soldiery below'. Rod Stewart country, I think; and in the land of the wets the saturated man is king.
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