The Fran and Jay show
Julie Burchill
LANDESMANIA by Philip Trevena Tiger of the Stripe, 50 Albert Road, Richmond, Surrey TW 10 6 DP, Tel: 0208 940 8087, email:peter@rigerofthestripe.co.uk, www.tigerofthestnpe.co.uk, £18.99+£2.50 p&p, pp.168, ISBN 190479906X Ivhen I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his 'calf country', I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn't even so much as a teashop in the high street.
The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can't help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I'd be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, 'Didn't you used to be taller?' — a sure sign that the rose-coloured spectacles handed out free with every romance had fallen off good and proper. Anyway, after four years of total devotion on my part the poor guy figured he could trust me and took me to London, to a book launch at the Turf Club. And you know what, it turned out that he'd been totally right about Sin City, because the first sexy man I spoke to, I ran off with. Moral: if you want to keep your wife, move to Billericay and stay there!
Anyway, this character I eloped with was Cosmo Landesman, and the very first words I spoke to him were, 'Ohl You must be the son of that marriage!'
Even ten years on I could remember reading about the Landesmans and their Open Marriage in a sneakily purloined Cosmopolitan, and didn't it make my prudish, provincial eyes grow big! Sex-obsessed, adolescent virgin that I was, even I felt that Open Marriage was somehow Absolutely Vile — if you don't want to think of your parents having sex with each other, you certainly don't want to think of them having sex with every Dom, Mick and Barry who wanders in off the Boulevard of Broken
Dreams. Teenagers didn't say 'Like, ewww, gross!' in those days, but my thoughts were definitely along those lines.
Well, Cosmo and I got married and went to live with the in-laws, and I quickly learned that there was a lot more to them than That Marriage. (My new husband's only half-humorous definition of open marriage was 'Two slags, soon to be divorced') I grew to love, in my fashion, talented Fran and stylish Jay — Scott and Zelda crossed with Ma and Pa Kettle — and drove my poor spouse mad with Monkey-fromPortnoy's-Complaint-type ravings about their Jewish 'warmth', outrageousness and artiness. He, poor fellow, having grown up with it, had had a gutful of outlandishness, and was conversely never happier than in my parents' straightforward, working-class, West Country home, comatose in front of ITV with my mum fetching him another hunk of Black Forest Gateau, with the promise of one of my dad's fry-ups in the morning.
One of the many vanguards which Jay and Fran had hitched an eventful ride from St Louis, Missouri to Swinging London in
— apart from Beat, psychedelia and free love — was that of macrobioticism, or, as Cosmo called it, `macro-psychoticism'. It was around this period of their life that many of the most entertaining stories about them — `Landesmania' — originated. Like the only time Jay had ever threatened to divorce Fran — when he found her eating an ice-lolly. Or the time when younger son Miles's juvenile brush with the police was blamed on his liking for sausages. Meanwhile household standards of hygiene had deteriorated so far that Jay's sister, visiting from the US, tried to have her nephews taken into care — a state of affairs which had barely changed even by the time I lived there, when I once found a loaf of bread with a beard.
It may be true that Fran and Jay 'started it all' (Norman Mailer) or were at least crucial to the 'invention of contemporary America' (Robert Stone). I have no way of knowing. But what I do know is that in the early Sixties Fran and Jay were simply the most handsome married couple in America — they made John and Jackie look like Richard and Judy — and more fun than a wagonload of monkeys. And they lived a life which, as my own late mother once put it, 'makes me and your dad look like Peter Pan and Wendy!' Though just as being Peter Pan and Wendy was probably a lot more scintillating than my mother believed, sometimes you can't help thinking that the Landesmans are proudest of the least interesting aspects of their lives. For instance, the great humour endemic in them — both intentional and otherwise — is missing here; there is too much prattle of 'intellectual journeys' and other such clumpy psychobabble. The prose tends to scuttle from the sleazy (The granddaughters of his first conquests were still not safe from that roaming eye' — memories of how Cosmo,
in a Steptoe Junior voice, would often exclaim, 'You dirty old man!', only half-joking) to the cheesy (There may be yet another project lurking in the depths of the good vessel, but it is time to wave goodbye as the good ship Landesmania sails on' — what is this, Captain Pugwash with Jay as Seaman Staynes?) with precious few pit-stops for perspective. But it's a story so sweet, in a sour sort of way, that it takes more than a flat-footed cheerleader to bring it down.
I was reading this book in bed when my fiancé, the young cynic, grabbed it from me, looked at it closely and declared it to be a vanity project. I'd like to think it wasn't, because for all their faults (too much bearded bread, too many tears before bedtime) the Landesmans are genuinely — Fran especially — original and accomplished people, and far more worthy of a proper professional biography than 75 per cent of the jokers who are the subject of such studies. However, looking on the bright side, I can honestly say that I like the name so much that, though divorced, I often use it, usually when booking restauraunts — not so that I can get a good table, it must be said, but so that I can go about my business anonymously. I feel that Jay, whose lifelong boast has been that he would rather be an interesting failure than a boring success, will appreciate the irony of this.
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