An Education (8 page)

But when we left Stockwell we needed more money to live on, so David had to get a proper job. An Oxford friend, Paddy Scannell, was helping to set up a brand-new course, media studies, at the Regent Street Polytechnic and said he could get David a few hours a week teaching ‘general studies’. David was soon fascinated by the course, and switched from teaching general studies to the history of television, which he thought had been seriously neglected. He and Paddy wrote a book on the early years of the BBC. And, as the course expanded, so did David's responsibilities, until at one point he was head of department. He loved those early years at the Polytechnic, when they were still mapping out the territory of media studies and working to get it accepted as a degree subject.

(I still get furious with people – including, alas, many of my journalist colleagues – who knock media studies as a somehow worthless or frivolous pursuit. I know that the calibre of teaching is not always great, but I don't see how anyone can fault media studies as a
subject
, given that we live in such a media-dominated age. Isn't it important to give young people some idea of how the media works? Can anyone seriously maintain that Latin is more relevant?)

After Stockwell, we had a peripatetic few months, scrounging rooms off friends – one of the advantages of David having been to Eton was that he had plenty of rich friends with spare rooms. We stayed for a while in Oakwood Court, Kensington, one of those grand mansion blocks populated by spies and retired civil servants, and then briefly in Mayfair, in the caretaker's flat in the attic of a beautiful Georgian house. It was a wonderful address and a sweet flat – but unfortunately designed for dwarves. There was only a small patch in the middle of the sitting room where we could stand upright and the double bed was smaller than most children's bunks – we could only make love in the position called ‘spoons’. Mayfair, it turned out, was a hopeless place to live. It had no food shops or tobacconists, still less launderettes, and the only place where we could afford to eat was a ‘drop-in centre’ run by a cult called The Process. We learned to eat very quickly before the sparkly-eyed loonies started asking if we'd found the meaning of life. ‘Yep, yep,’ we'd say, ‘pass the ketchup,’ and gulp a few more forkfuls before bolting for the door.

Eventually David ran into a schoolfriend, S, who asked if we wanted to take over his flat in Haverstock Hill, Belsize Park. It was a fabulous bargain –
£8
a week for a well-furnished, three-bedroom garden flat overlooking an absolutely glorious half-acre garden. In theory the garden was our responsibility but luckily Mrs Franks upstairs asked if she could sit in it sometimes in return for her tending it. This proved to be an excellent deal because she was a brilliant gardener and responded well to my occasional orders – ‘More sweet peas’, ‘No marigolds.’ She only put her foot down once when I said we wanted to grow vegetables and she said in her strong German accent, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. I cannot allow.’ For once in my life, I had the sense not to argue.

Belsize Park was still in those days a markedly Jewish area with some good delicatessens that closed on Saturdays, opened on Sundays. We lived there for seven years – the only slight mystery was why David's friend S had surrendered this miraculously cheap flat. Eventually Mrs Franks upstairs enlightened us: the man who shared the flat with S had committed suicide one weekend and S came back to find the body. After that, he was unable to live there. Years later, when we left the flat, this had an odd postscript. The landlady asked if we would like to sell her all our carpets, curtains and furniture so that she could let the flat as furnished. We had always assumed that it
was
furnished, by her, but it turned out that all the stuff in the flat belonged to the man who committed suicide. David got in touch with S to ask if he wanted it – he didn't – so David and I acquired this useful legacy of beds and bedding, carpets and armchairs, saucepans and casseroles from a dead man we never met. David would occasionally say, morbidly, ‘We're eating off a dead man's plates’ and I would say cheerily, ‘Yes – aren't they nice!’ I still have some of the plates now – it was a strange present from beyond the grave.

We married in 1971, while we were at Haverstock Hill, not because we were particularly hooked on marriage but because in those days you had to be married to get a joint mortgage and we decided we had to buy a house. But we wanted to get married with minimum fuss, in Hampstead Registry Office just over the road. I bought a lovely red Gini Fratini dress, and David wore his best Carnaby Street suit. I said, Do we
have
to ask our parents? And David said yes, we did. So it was wedding with parents at the Registry Office, followed by lunch at the flat and then a party in the evening for all our friends, once our parents had gone. I dreaded our parents meeting I knew I would squirm with embarrassment – and on the morning of our wedding day I woke up with the most obvious psychosomatic illness of my life: I was literally struck dumb, unable to speak. I managed to croak ‘Thank you’ when Leonora presented me with a beautiful emerald and diamond ring that had been her grandmother's, and ‘I do’ in the Registry Office, but when we went back to the flat for lunch with our parents, I spoke not a word. Even when our friends came in the evening, I was still unable to speak, but next day my voice was perfectly normal.

We left Haverstock Hill eventually because it was the Seventies and everyone said you had to get on ‘the housing ladder’ and buy a house, though we were heartbroken to leave our lovely flat and move from the border of Hampstead Heath to the unknown badlands of Finsbury Park. We arrived at Finsbury Park by the simple process of moving eastwards till we found a house we could afford. Like Stockwell, Finsbury Park was considered way beyond the pale, but we managed to find a very pretty four-bedroom Victorian terraced house with all its original fireplaces and cornices for £14,500 and although, as with Stockwell, everyone said ‘You'll be raped and mugged all the time’, we weren't even burgled in the ten years we lived there. We were so house-proud, we picked out all the cornices with toothpicks and lovingly sanded and polished the floorboards – the only downside was that huge brown slugs came up through the gaps in the floorboards every night until eventually I insisted on carpets.

I had no decorating taste whatsoever at this stage, but luckily David had more than enough for both of us and, over the years, I learned from him. We made the house really exquisite, though the garden never attained our Haverstock Hill heights. And then, when the house was ready, I stopped taking the pill and waited to get pregnant. David had always been very clear that the whole point of marriage was to start a family – he
longed
to have children. I wasn't sure I did – I seemed to lack any maternal instinct, never played with dolls as a child and never cooed over babies. But David was reassuring: he said if I found I didn't like looking after children, he would do it. I am eternally grateful. If I had married a man who was iffy, who said ‘Oh well, you have children if you want to, but on your head be it’, I might well be childless today. Thank God David was so sure.

But then I didn't get pregnant for a whole year. It was probably good for me – once I started thinking I couldn't have children then I wanted them badly. And I was haunted by thoughts of the abortion I'd had at Oxford. I'd fallen pregnant almost the first time I slept with an undergraduate, but his brother arranged an abortion at a Harley Street clinic, and I'd had it very quickly and easily and gone to a party the same night. I felt no tremor of guilt or doubt at the time, or for ten years afterwards, but during the months I was failing to get pregnant with David, this blood-spattered baby would come to me in my dreams and say, ‘You
could
have had me, you had your chance.’ We were actually booked for fertility tests, when we went on holiday to Portugal and bingo!, came back pregnant. Much to my surprise, I loved being pregnant, loved having Rosie, loved breastfeeding, and was very happy to do it all again two years later with Theo. I always wish I'd had more children but we ran out of money and I had to go back to work.

Marrying David was the best, most sensible and ‘right’ thing I ever did. I believe that to some extent his goodness was catching and that he made me a better person, and certainly a better parent, than I would otherwise have been. I was and still am profoundly selfish, probably as a result of being a spoilt only child, but at least with David around I had some notion of what selflessness looked like. He was very indignant when one of our friends called him a ‘saint’ – especially as the clear implication was that he was a saint for putting up with me! – and I don't think I would have enjoyed being married to a saint, but I am grateful that I had the sense to marry a good man.

It was an unconventional marriage in some ways. When we first got together in the Sixties, it was extremely unusual for the man to do the cooking, and even our friends often made jokes about it. David's mother was outraged. She was always trying to teach me ‘easy’ recipes. I resisted. David loved cooking, I hated it; he was good at it, I was bad. Ergo, why mess up an arrangement that suited us both fine just to fulfil his mother's idea of what wives were supposed to do? Similarly, it was unusual back then for the wife to be the higher earner, as I was for most of our marriage, but it never bothered
us
– it was just a fact of life that journalism paid more than painting or teaching. I think people who try to run their marriages according to other people's expectations are insane. It is quite hard enough to keep a marriage together till death do you part – which I think should be the aim, even if it can't always succeed – without trying to do it to please other people. A good marriage is whatever suits the participants, and our marriage suited us fine.

Penthouse

Marriage first, career second – that was certainly my order of priorities on leaving Oxford, but on the other hand I did need to find
some
sort of employment, and it was by the purest fluke of luck that I stumbled into
Penthouse
magazine. My original plan – to become a film star/billionaire/femme fatale – had not made any progress and when I went to the Oxford careers office the only suggestion they came up with was that I should join the prison service and hope to be fast-tracked into becoming a prison governor one day. What a prospect – especially when I'd put so much hard work into becoming a hedonist! However, it did have the effect of making me think I should apply for some jobs or traineeships, if only to avoid prison.

Like everyone else, I tried for a BBC traineeship but I knew the interview was going badly when they asked what political issues I was interested in, and I scratched my head for a bit and eventually said, ‘Er… abortion?’ – the rejection letter came the next day. I had one secure sellable skill, shorthand-typing, but on the other hand I'd done enough of it to know I didn't want to do any more. The only other thing I knew I could earn money from was journalism, because I'd written a column for the
Richmond and Twickenham Times
while still at school, and kept my hand in at Oxford by writing occasional features for
Isis
and
Cherwell
. But the trouble with journalism in those days was that it was tightly controlled by the NUJ and in order to join any national newspaper you had to go on one of their far-flung training schemes which meant spending two years in the provinces. No way could I do that when I'd just met David, and was in hot pursuit. Anyway, as a lifetime Londoner, Oxford was as far into the sticks as I was ever prepared to go.

So then I started applying to magazines. But they too were largely controlled by unions and also, like the BBC, had this infuriating scam whereby, if you were a woman, they encouraged you to join the organisation as a secretary and ‘work your way up’. I didn't fancy two years typing for the editor of
Practical Knitting
while aspiring to the giddy heights of deputy sub-editor. So then I went to see the formidable Beatrix Miller, editor of
Vogue
, who asked what I was interested in. Someone had advised me not to say fashion because that's what everyone said so, bizarrely and quite untruthfully, I said travel (I'd been overland to India in one of my Oxford vacations), and she offered me a job as assistant to the assistant travel editor at £14 a week. I was still mulling this over when I got a better offer from
Penthouse
.

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione, a gravel-voiced, Sicilian-American cartoonist and dry-cleaning manager, had launched
Penthouse
in 1965 while I was still at Oxford and caused a great flurry on the high tables by sending out a mailshot to all the senior Oxford dons. Many of them complained about this filth arriving in their pigeonholes so I was despatched by, I think,
Cherwell
, to interview Guccione and ask why he'd done it. I can't remember anything about our meeting except that it was in a glamorous flat in London and Guccione made me laugh a lot and right at the end he said, ‘If you ever want a job, honey, come to me.’ I giggled merrily and returned to Oxford but after that I used to say to friends, ‘Oh well, I can always go and work for
Penthouse
.’

So, all other avenues having failed, that's what I did. I wrote to Bob Guccione, reminding him of our meeting, and told him I was now a graduate with some experience in journalism and did he have a job on his magazine? I had a letter back from Harry Fieldhouse – Bob didn't really do letters – saying come and see him. Harry was the editor whereas Bob was the ‘editor in chief’, and he was the one I would be working for.

Everything about
Penthouse
was a surprise. I had imagined that it would be in, well, a penthouse, or at any rate a glamorous West End office, but it was in a tiny terraced house in Ifield Road, off the Fulham Road, looking out on Brompton Cemetery at the back. The front room contained a dolly bird receptionist called Maureen and piles and piles of cardboard boxes – these I was to learn were the tiresome Penteez Panties – with another room housing the Penthouse Book Club at the back. Upstairs, the back bedroom was Bob and Kathy's office, and the front was ‘editorial’ – a largish room containing the art director Joe Brooks with a very small cubbyhole containing Harry Fieldhouse.

Harry again was a surprise. He seemed very old (I suppose he was about forty) and far too gentlemanly and donnish to be a journalist, let alone editor of
Penthouse
. But there was a dry humour I liked. His first question was, ‘Can you spell?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I read English at Oxford.’

‘Ecstasy,’ he said.

‘Well yes, it was very enjoyable.’

‘I meant, spell it.’

I resisted the smart-arse answer (i, t) and spelt out e, c, s, t, a, s, y.

‘Good. Very few people can spell that word and we use it a lot in
Penthouse
. Pulchritude is another – can you spell it?’

Yes, I said, doing so.

Accommodation, minuscule, predilection, diarrhoea, haemorrhage – he reeled off a list of words and nodded as I spelled them correctly. Then he gave me a short article and told me to underline anything I thought was wrong. There were a few spelling mistakes and I marked them.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can pay you £16 a week. The hours are ten to six. Can you start on Monday?’

Yes!

David was waiting for me on the corner and I went running down the street, shouting ‘Hooray! Sixteen pounds a week! Starting Monday!’ He was as pleased as I was, but asked what the job entailed and of course I had no idea. It didn't matter though. I liked Harry Fieldhouse, I liked the little house in Ifield Road, I knew I would enjoy working for
Penthouse
magazine. And indeed I did, for the next seven years.

On Monday Harry gave me a list of proofreading marks and told me to learn them. My job would be to check all copy that went into the magazine and correct it. The division of labour at
Penthouse
in those early days was very simple: Harry was responsible for all the words in the magazine, Bob for all the pictures; Joe Brooks did the layouts; Kathy Keeton, Bob's girlfriend, was in charge of advertising – but in those days we didn't have any advertising so the magazine was subsidised by its mail-order Penteez Panties and Book Club, run by Maureen and Sylvie downstairs. In theory, the magazine came out monthly; in practice, it came out when Bob had assembled enough money to pay the printers – maybe ten times that first year.

My first weeks on the magazine were leisurely, and I spent many happy mornings arguing with Harry Fieldhouse about the nuances of punctuation and spelling. He had a passionate aversion to ‘widows’ – odd words at the end of paragraphs that took up a whole line – ‘waste of space’. He was very keen on dashes, which I disapproved of in those days (I don't now) and also on
z
spellings – he preferred realize to realise, organize to organise, utilize to utilise. He thought
z
spellings were ‘modern’ because they were American and he loved anything American which is why (improbably) he adored Bob. He drove a big American car – his Lincoln Townhouse and Bob's Cadillac took up most of Ifield Road. Despite his rather old-fashioned manner, he was an absolute sucker for anything new, innovative – he was what would now be called ‘an early adopter’. He was always giving me gadgets that he said would change my life (I could never make them work) and bought himself a sun-tanning bed, imported from America, long before such things were heard of in England. Most disastrously, he had one of the first-ever hair transplants, which resulted in an unfortunate black dotted line across his forehead and a few tufts like lettuce seedlings on his crown. He said they would join up but they never did. I always liked taking strangers into Harry's office and watching their incredulous reaction when they got their first glimpse of his pate.

Bob and Kathy rarely appeared before late afternoon (he suffered from terrible insomnia and if/when he finally got to sleep no one was allowed to wake him), so generally Harry, Joe and I worked quietly in the mornings until Kathy came barking orders in the afternoon. I always loved Bob, for his sardonic wit and gravelly Brooklyn accent, but Kathy Keeton was simply terrifying. She had grown up on a farm in South Africa, trained as a ballet dancer, and become Strip Queen of Bulawayo. In that capacity, she came to London to star at the Pigalle, where Bob spotted her. He found her in her dressing room surrounded by economics books and reading the
Financial Times
. He said he was setting up a magazine and wanted her to model for it – she said no, but she'd come and work for him on the business side. She was earning
£
1 50 a week as a stripper. He said he'd pay her £10 a week to sell advertising and she said done. Thus began a partnership as formidable as Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Dido and Aeneas, Marks and Spencer. He was a good Catholic and stayed married to Muriel, the mother of his four children, until the children were grown up, but Kathy was
maîtresse en titre
and dominatrix of
Penthouse
. She strode around on five-inch stilettos, tossing her mane of tawny hair, her dresses unbuttoned to her waist to show her (somewhat bony) cleavage, barking orders and calling everyone darling, which with her strong South African accent came out as ‘dollink’. We called her Miss Whiplash or Princess of Pain – but never to her face because we were all (including Bob, I think) terrified of her.

She couldn't see the point of me at all, but Bob told her I had ‘class’ – he was impressed by the fact I'd been to Oxford – and she would occasionally stride up to my desk and twirl round, showing off whatever new atrocity she was wearing – a pink vinyl cat-suit maybe, or a leather miniskirt split to the crotch, and ask ‘What do you think, dollink?’ And I learned to say obediently, ‘It's lovely, Kathy.’ ‘Classy, dollink?’ ‘
Very
classy.’ And she would go back to Bob and say, ‘It's fine.’ She always worried, not without reason, about looking like a hooker.

As I said, the early months were leisurely but our little office soon got busier and busier. The circulation kept increasing, which meant we could afford to pay the printers and publish an issue every month. And the issues got fatter and fatter when Kathy started selling more advertisements. This meant that Harry and I no longer had time for long discussions about semicolons as we were both suddenly worked off our feet. Even Kathy started using me – she made me ‘fashion stylist’, which meant going round shops begging to borrow bits of clothing – feather boas, cowboy boots, chaps, waspie corsets – for the Pet shoots. Once Kathy came to me and said ‘Dollink, go to Lillywhites and borrow a black diving suit.’ I went to Lillywhites and said I was doing a feature on diving. ‘What depth will you be diving to?’ they asked. ‘Erm – ten miles?’ Then, seeing their faces, no, no, I meant ten feet, no, well not very deep – with a harpoon, and a zip down the front. They produced some nightmare orange number. No, no, it has to be black. By this time I had a whole crowd of assistants gawping at me. It was only fear of Kathy that stopped me fleeing from the shop. But finally one of the assistants took pity and said, ‘Are we talking a sort of James Bond look?’ and produced the zippered black wetsuit I'd been wanting all along. I also had to attend some of the Pet shoots, not with Bob, but with an American photographer called Philip O. Stearns. My duties at the shoots included putting music on the stereo, squirting scent round the room, and powdering the girls' bottoms. In between, I did the
Times
crossword.

Back in the office, I was put in charge of the
Penthouse Forum
, which was Bob's ‘classy’ title for readers' letters. Friends always assumed I made the letters up but actually I never needed to – the
readers
made them up, densely written twenty-page sagas of how they'd been imprisoned by jack-booted wardresses and subjected to appalling forms of torture and humiliation. My job as
Forum
editor was to try to ensure variety and balance and to prevent the corporal punishment brigade with their endless memories of school beatings taking over the whole section. I was always grateful for a bit of oddity – a foot fetishist now and then, or maybe an aficionado of amputees. But I remember one day I got a letter from Lytham St Annes saying that at the golf club they all put their house keys with an address label in a big pile and you had to draw a key and go to the address and ‘pleasure’ whatever woman you found there. I said the whole idea was so preposterous we couldn't possibly publish it – it was too obviously made up. Soon afterwards, the
News of the World
ran a great splash on the wife-swapping parties of the Lytham St Annes golf club.

I did some of my first-ever interviews for an interminable series called ‘Parameters of Sexuality’ about people with odd sexual tastes – a shoe fetishist, countless transvestites and rubber enthusiasts – and I once flew to The Hague to interview a famous old dominatrix who was supposed to lash half the leading politicians in Europe. She was very grand, very funny, and told me that if I ever needed a job she could probably find a role for me in her dungeon. Interviewing these people was a complete doddle because they were always so eager, even grateful, to talk – all I had to do was look interested while they rabbited on. I think I probably developed my interviewing style through those early
Penthouse
confessionals, where the whole trick was not to look embarrassed, not to interrupt or impede their flow, basically just to be a sympathetic ear. I notice that sometimes, even nowadays, when interviewing, say, an Eddie Izzard or a Grayson Perry, I find myself slipping into ‘Parameters of Sexuality’ mode and asking
only
about their transvestism. Just last year, interviewing Antony Gormley, I got so hooked on asking what it felt like to cover oneself in clingfilm and plaster, and whether he had any related kinks (rubber-wear? diving suits?), I temporarily forgot that I was interviewing a famous sculptor.