1968 is racing along. The Shadows have split up. London Bridge has been sold to America. Cliff’s got religion – he’s been delivering sermons with Billy Graham. Bobby Kennedy and Tony Hancock are dead. Hell! Mickey from The Monkees has married Samantha Juste of Top of the Pops, and the fans are crying into their colas. And I’m in need of a friend.
These were Monkee days – Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, the English one who had once been in Coronation Street as a kid, and Mickey Dolenz – were the first huge boy band from America, the first ‘manufactured’ pop band ever, brought together, via an advert, for a fun-and-music TV series. Perfect for 13 year olds. Because of them, the magazine offices were besieged with teens and the phone rang off the hook.
I spent many an hour reading the mail begging us to get autographs, arrange meetings and so on. I realised how much better I felt, working in the business rather than being a hopeless fan. However, while they made nice, bop-able pop music singles like ‘I’m a Believer’, I couldn’t get that excited over The Monkees myself.
Apparently I met Davy Jones, who must have made such a great impression on me that I can’t remember a thing about where we met, or indeed anything about him at all except he was very short and quite harmless. Certainly not hearththrob material in my book. And I only know for sure that I met him because I announced, importantly, in my fan club biography under the heading ‘claims to fame’: ‘I have dined with Davy Jones’.
Yes, by this time, Judy Wills didn’t have a real friend, but she had her own official fan club. Because of the huge interest in The Monkees, and because I was sometimes photographed modelling clothes in the pages of Fab, I started to get a lot of letters addressed not to the editor, but to me. Letters that would spell out how wonderful I was, how pretty, how nice, and so on. Being naïve, and with huge potential to be big-headed, I truly believed that the readers thought I was great.
So it was that a couple of girls called Tina and Vivienne from South London started up a fan club for me – I still have a copy of the biography of myself that I sent them listing my fave colours, film stars, food etc. I have no memory at all of ever liking Volvo cars, Julie Christie, or Gilbert and Sullivan – but apparently, I liked them all enough to record the fact in my biography along with my dinner date with the Jones boy.
Not long after the setting up of my fan club, Tina and Vivienne wrote to me again, asking if I knew anyone who would like to be a member. They were obviously having recruitment difficulties and, I believe, the enterprise folded not all that many weeks later.
Now of course, rereading the few letters I’ve saved down the years, I can see that all the readers wanted was to butter me up and get me to get them an autograph or, optimistically, a meeting, with their fave Monkee, or a pair of their dirty underpants.
Still, not many nonentities can boast having once had their own official fan club so I feel quite proud.
Another reader with whom I became friendly was a woman of about 35 called Leni Coster who ran the Richard Chamberlain UK fan club from her home in Cowes, Isle of Wight. Chamberlain had long been one of my heroes – in fact he was the very first person on TV on whom I had a crush as soon as I saw him in the long-running US series Dr Kildare; the first male I ever fancied before Billy Fury came along. I’ve always been a sucker for a good bedside manner and he seemed to have that in spades and was unthreateningly clean cut and good looking with dyed blonde hair, perfect teeth and a square jaw – just the job, all of that, when you’re 11 and 12.
I’d look forward to Dr Kildare every week on BBC, counting down the days and hours until it came on at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. But every week it was a tussle between Richard Hill and me to see who would be triumphant in the sitting room – would I win and be allowed to watch it, or would he win and send me crying to the bedroom?
Mrs Hill had three children still at home – Clive, who was around 20, Veronica, who was about 16, and Richard, who was about 15.
I wish we didn’t have to live here. It’s not our house and all I get is nasty whispered words from all three of her children when they think no-one else can hear. ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’ ‘This is OUR house – what are you doing here?’
Richard hates me the most. He finds ways to upset me. Any way he can. And when it works he grins his horrid grin and I hate him too. Why did I ever let him know I like Dr Kildare? He always wants something on the other channel now.
Last week he put salt in my tea, and salted my supper so much I couldn’t eat it. He sneaks into the room I share with Veronica and hides my stuff or tears the pages of my magazines. The worst thing is, he kicks Christopher Columbus because he knows I love that cat more than even I love Dr Kildare.
By the time I was 13 in August 1962, I was beginning to change from complete tomboy to someone with the first traces of femininity. My mum bought me my first pack of two bras.
My dad, who lived in Banbury and was allowed to have me to stay for a weekend once a month, had bought me a couple of dresses and paid for my first visit to a hairdresser, where I had been given a (truly horrendous) cut and perm, and had also allowed me a tube of pink lipstick and a mascara wand, these last three much to my mum’s disgust. Not that I ever went out anywhere.
Around this time Richard’s manner towards me unexpectedly changed and I’d notice him watching me, watching me.
He’s tall now, he’s very tall. Lately he’s tried to be nice to me and I don’t know why. Where’s Mum? Where’s Mrs Hill even? Why am I here in this house with just Richard bloody Hill?
I’ve come in the sitting room to find the Radio Times and he’s followed me and he’s shut the door. And I want to avoid looking at him but as I aim for the door he grabs my arm.
‘You look nice today!’ he says in his best sarcastic tone.
And he grabs my newly formed left breast encased in its new bra and he squeezes and squeezes until it hurts so much, tears of pain and anger come.
I’m like a rabbit, caught in the headlights of his gloating, taunting, blue steel eyes. I can’t move, I’m frozen, I can’t stop him, I can’t speak. But I can feel, inside, I can feel hate.
Of course I never said a word because I didn’t want to put my mother in the position of deciding whether to tell and get chucked out.
My obsession with Kildare faded a little over the next couple of years as Billy Fury became my No. 1 hero, but only ended when the TV series did in 1966 and Richard Chamberlain disappeared from my small screen forever – or at least until The Thorn Birds came along many years later.
Six or seven years on, Leni and I struck up a correspondence – again we both had something to offer the other – I organised for details of her fan club to appear in Fab, while she took me on a fan club jaunt to meet Richard Chamberlain. Somehow or other she had wangled an invitation to take a few members along to Richard’s debut as a serious Shakespearean actor, playing Hamlet in Birmingham rep. I found the production – and I have to say Chamberlain’s acting – boring as hell and nearly went to sleep but rallied when the call came along the stalls that Richard would meet a few of us backstage after the performance.
So off I went, bleary-eyed, but still oddly excited to meet my one-time hero. He was standing in the centre of a large communal dressing room, still in his full make-up, talking to a young male companion. As he turned round to greet us, I saw straight into his eyes, which seemed to say, ‘I’ll put up with this but that’s about it,’ and it came to me in that one thunderstruck moment that my teenage crush had been completely wasted on this man. Not just because he was bored and distant (actors who meet and greet fans should always be good enough actors to at least appear to be pleased to be meeting them) but because he was, quite obviously, gay or, as I would have put it in those days, homosexual.
Why had I never realised it before? Why did it matter? I just felt I had spent the first two years of my pubescence lusting after someone who could never have returned the feelings even if I had been ten years older, ten stars more gorgeous and ten times more intelligent. Let’s be honest, I hadn’t been his ‘fan’ because of his acting talent, or his integrity, or his intelligence. I had been a fan because of the sex thing or, at least, the ‘love’ or ‘infatuation’ thing.
I felt disappointed without yet even having spoken to him. I felt sorry for all the millions of fans like me who had wasted hours fancying a guy who could never fancy them back.
We exchanged a few stilted pleasantries, shook hands, then I left the room and got the coach or whatever back to London; I don’t think Leni ever realised how my early teenage dreams had been crushed that night.
In later years I spent several fun evenings with my gay workmate Richard at his club in Victoria, where gay couples of both sexes would dance the night away and I would be upset only because I hadn’t got anyone to dance with. But I didn’t feel any more awkward than I had done when, on several occasions as a young teen in Oxfordshire, I had similarly been a wallflower at hetero dances.
So why was I so disappointed about Chamberlain? I suppose a bit like in the days when George Michael pretended not to be gay because he (or his team) was worried it would affect his fanbase, Richard Chamberlain or his press office had, apparently, concealed his sexual preferences with fabricated stories of which woman he was ‘dating’ planted in the press, and so on, and I felt cheated. I’d rather have known the truth so I could choose whether to stay loyal to him or to give my virgin adoration to someone who might, eventually, have wanted it. Well, stranger things have happened – Gary Numan married a fan, after all.
Work acquaintances aside, I really still didn’t have any proper friends or a boyfriend after Jason disappeared, and was, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, quite lonely.
As I was still babysitting for Hal Carter from time to time, I would bump into Jimmy Campbell, another of Hal’s small stable of music acts. Jimmy, like Billy, came from Liverpool and having been with a band called the Kirkbys was trying to make it on his own. He was a fantastic songwriter, played guitar and had a plaintive little voice. He was the Ed Sheeran of his day, except he never really took off at the time.
Now he is regarded by many as a ‘lost’ talent and has a cult following of his own – just Google him. Anyway, he looked lovely and I went to his home a couple of times when he had parties or friends round, and did what I could to attract his attention (which probably consisted of wearing too much make-up, too few clothes and overlong false eyelashes), but he was completely disinterested in me, though at the time I refused to believe it. I kidded myself he was just very shy (which he probably was too).
After one fruitless all-night get together at his house during which I’d managed to keep myself awake on the off-chance that this would be the night he would realise how fab I was, I sat, dizzy with lack of sleep and disappointment, on a train to my sister’s in Perivale, crying my eyes out – having finally realised it was never going to happen and that I had made a fool of myself. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I daresay he used Hal radar to disappear whenever I might be going up to Stoke Newington.
I wanted to be liked/loved and found attractive, but the men I liked and found attractive didn’t want to know. I just didn’t seem to be able to behave around men in any kind of normal way. I wasn’t capable of analysing the problem at the time, but now I can. I was just too needy and lacking in even minimal confidence, which made me act in various types of non-me way. I would be, either in turn or all at once, distant, superior, fawning all over them, coming on strong, trembling with nerves, talking too loud, telling inappropriate jokes, but never, ever, would I just act like a rational human being. I was the original Miranda Hart, but disguised with long hair and miniskirts. I must have freaked them out.
Despite this, I had my standards about the quality of young man I would be prepared to date, which only made matters worse. My married sister Ann set me up on a couple of evenings with people she knew, but unless they were ‘in the business’ (show business or media) I found them all deadly dull. With a dull man I was fine, I could behave normally, but I could never be bothered to see him a second time. One in particular was called Mick, a well-meaning, tubby guy from Yorkshire, a member of the Ramblers Association. I remember thinking that if ever I listed rambling as a top hobby I would cut my own throat.
Jason Eddie had been the exception to these random dating rules and behaviours of mine – but I can see now, it was because although I had enough reasons to want to be with him for the while we were together, I just wasn’t crazy enough about him to act crazy. So by default he more or less got the actual me.
I no doubt could have done with mindfulness therapy, or chamomile tea, or hot yoga, or reiki, but none of that was easily available/heard of in the late ’60s. So I just had to wait and calm down slowly over time in a vaguely organic, one-step-forward two-steps-back kind of fashion.
So, understandably alone in the evenings for weeks at a time, I would go back to the bedsit to watch Top of the Pops and Jimmy Savile on my black-and-white telly with its fuzzy picture, or catch up on writing, or listen to BBC Radio 1 or Radio Luxembourg on my transistor radio. Being on my own in ‘my own place’ was almost a luxury and I was never bored, but often I would wonder when the ‘happening’ times were really going to happen.
That said, I looked forward to going to the office every single day, and I also realised that if I worked hard at improving my look, this might cancel out the negative effect of my personality bypass. So I grew my hair, spent hours doing and redoing my make-up and read all the features I could find on ‘how to improve your confidence’.
While this didn’t, certainly at first, help me get a guy, it had an unexpected bonus. Fashion editor Heather began asking me to model clothes in the magazine. I flattered myself and dared to hope that it was because of my supreme gorgeousness, but in reality it was mainly because I was dead skinny, my services came free, and agency models were quite expensive.
Even so, it was great to get out of the office and be photographed by some of the up-and-coming fashion photographers of the day. No, I never got near Bailey or Donovan (Terence, not the folk singer) but it was still fun – and we did get John Swannell, who later became one of the top celeb and fashion photographers around. I still have the first spread of photos of me in Fab titled ‘Groovy Girl’, and on the back of ‘my’ page was a photo of The Beatles! Gave me quite a buzz.
Sometimes wannabe or nearly-there pop stars would come along and model clothes with me. One of these was a tiny blonde girl with pleasant but not devastating looks, bubbly but not at all sure of herself, who was trying to make it as a singer. I didn’t catch her name on the day but when the photos were published complete with captions, it turned out to be Elaine Paige. Once I did a modelling session with Steve Ellis, lead singer of the band Love Affair, who had a massive hit with ‘Everlasting Love’. You can see on the photos that my eyes were swollen and red – that was because I’d just found out Billy Fury had got engaged to his girl Judith. I knew I never stood a chance myself, but it still upset me.
I enjoyed modelling so much that I toyed with the idea of leaving Fab and becoming a model. My biggest coup was appearing on the cover of the young woman’s glossy magazine, Honey – seeing myself on the newspaper stands down Fleet Street was a boost to my ego, for sure, and occasional moonlighting modelling stints for the national press followed. For example, I became one of the Daily Mirror’s Gorgeous Girls. Every day, a ‘gorgeous girl’ – in theory spotted walking around town, but in truth offered a fiver to pose – would appear in the paper, on, I think, page 7. I guess it was the pre-cursor of all the tabloid page threes, except we were all fully clothed. They got my name wrong, which prompted my dad to write to them from his headquarters – a council flat in Oxford – to complain, about which I was very embarrassed. Wills, Wallace? Who cared? Well, I cared a bit, but I wasn’t going to admit it. At least it gave Sally Cork, the new Fab beauty editor, a smile.
She, too, had been photographed for the same feature, but it was my photo they used rather than hers. I never spoke to her about it but she would have been justified in being a bit miffed, especially as she was prettier than me.
Kent Gavin, the photographer on that assignment, took a marginal shine to me, perhaps mistaking my habitual silence in his presence for a Greta Garbo kind of allure, rather than my habitual ‘being terrified’ mode. I thought he was quite good looking and suave in a tabloid-photographer dirty cuffs kind of way. I also liked the attention he gave me as he was one of the first well-known Fleet Street photographers, knew everyone who mattered in the media, was an ‘older man’ (probably in his mid-30s which is ancient when you’re 18 or so), and I felt a bit of his aura of fame and supreme confidence warming me, too. But on one occasion when we were at a party in someone’s house and found ourselves in a bedroom, it was not Mr Gavin who warmed me, but his then girlfriend who arrived breathing fire and had been downstairs all along, unbeknown to me. I mean, I had no idea he even had a girlfriend. And at least I was still fully clothed, if a bit disillusioned, once again.
But one fantastic thing came out of all this modelling work. Because I had been a Gorgeous Girl I was invited to the Gorgeous Girls Gala at the Royal Albert Hall. All Gorgeous Girls who accepted would take part in a stage presentation during the event. Now this really did send me up to the clouds. THE ALBERT HALL. ME! ON STAGE! ONE OF THE PERFORMERS IN THE SHOW! AND BACKSTAGE! Backstage at the Albert Hall …
It’s late 1963. I’m 14, and Mum and I have just moved into a house in Weston-on-the-Green with Dad and I’ve somehow persuaded him to drive me and my village friend Margaret Cox all the way up to London in his little Ford where we are to go to the Albert Hall and see a pop concert.
Playing at this pop concert will be The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and several other bands which will include The Hollies, Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits. The Beatles are big, the Rolling Stones just coming along, having had their first chart hit. We’re not that bothered with The Stones – they look a bit scruffy and they aren’t all that good looking, compared with The Beatles. It’s The Beatles Maggie and I want to see.
Every Saturday for the past few months we have met up in the front room of her parents’ cottage, at 11 a.m. precisely, wearing our best make-up and our best clothes, and we have adorned the walls with our Beatles posters and we have played each and every Beatles track (their first LP has just been released) while dancing The Twist. We’ve even made Beatles badges to wear. Our Beatles Saturday Club only ever consists of Maggie and I (few other kids live in the village anyway).
So we get to the Albert Hall, giggling and nervous. Dad manages to park the car right next to Manfred Mann’s van (big excitement and cue for a photo) and we run round the hall looking for the stage door.
Here! Hundreds of girls already here, some screaming. We wait and then through a large glass wall, inside the building we see five scruffy boys walk down a stairway to the left of the stage door. Someone says it’s the Rolling Stones! And I look as hard as I can, and I see an ugly one with dark hair, a slightly less ugly blonde one and, waving cockily to us, a lippy one. There are two more but they are both boring and are wearing ties, so I take no notice of them at all.
I am not a fan of any of these boys really – but I scream anyway. That’s what you do. You see – or maybe hear – a pop star in real life, and you scream.
Inside the hall you can’t hear anything on stage for the screaming. We are sitting as you face the stage, halfway up from the stalls, halfway back from the stage on the right. Dad’s there too, but he doesn’t scream.
Paul McCartney’s singing but you can’t hear anything except the ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ bit. George, George is my favourite, he looks so sweet.
I think, as I stand there screaming though no sound is coming from my mouth now as I have screamed myself hoarse, there is no place else in the world to be at this minute except here – and here I am. Let me stay in this minute for always, God, please.
Pop music and the pop culture was my main survival method from the first time I saw Billy Fury’s face on the magazine throughout my teens. Yes, there were other things I enjoyed – cats, horse riding, writing poetry, cycling – but if you had asked me what one thing I couldn’t live without, it would have been pop.
In most ways I was a very ordinary teenage girl, getting through school and life as best we all could. But my boredom threshold was, perhaps, lower than many other of my schoolmates. And I often felt extremely sad and lonely. I needed to dream, I needed to plot and plan for a more exciting life, and for a world full of colour and light and laughter and people. Pop, as well as giving me a regular injection of excitement, gave me something to aspire to – for right from the age of 13 I knew that all I wanted to do was listen to pop music, and that later on, I wanted to write about the celebrities, and be part of their world. I played the piano up to grade 3 but it was never playing the music that interested me – it was all the rest.
I didn’t go to a pop concert until The Pop Prom at the Albert Hall, and after that I didn’t go to another one until Gene Pitney came to Oxford when I was about 15, and then not to another one until I went to see Billy Fury sing live for the first time at Leighton Buzzard a few months later. Much as I loved these concerts it wasn’t totally necessary to go to them to enjoy all the excitement and fun of that world. The BBC’s Top of the Pops and ITV’s Ready Steady Go! every week brought it all right into our sitting room at home; Fabulous gave me titbits of news, and Radio Luxembourg provided a long-distance air of part-mystery, part-sharing.
Why was it so important to me? Why is it important in almost the same way to the teens of the twenty-first century? In many respects nothing has changed in fifty years. Pop was the light, pop was fun, pop demanded nothing of me but my time and devotion. Pop was slightly impersonal – you could stay uninvolved if you so wished, Billy Fury or The Beatles on the Dansette wouldn’t ask you to kiss them if you didn’t want to. You could worship from afar and everything would be fine.
Then if you felt like it, you could dash round after them like an innocent groupie and try to steal an autograph, a smile, a moment or two, even a hug or a peck on the cheek and you could feel special because some of the stardust was yours.
All this depended, also, upon the pop stars having – or at least making a show of having – a glamorous, desirable lifestyle. So you wanted to see the cars, the pretty girlfriends, the expensive guitars, the swish apartment, or at least to know they existed. And you wanted to know that underneath all this there was also an element of ‘just like you’. So it was good to read that Billy Fury loved birdwatching and was shy or that George Harrison had lived in a grotty area of Liverpool. It made you like them all the more. And it made you think, ‘Well if he did it from there, I can make something of myself too.’
And of course there was the music. In the first ten years of my life the only music I listened to was the music my family chose to listen to, either on the BBC radio or on the old gramophone. Brother Robert liked Perry Como, my sister liked Pat Boone, and my mother liked Frank Sinatra. I don’t know who my Dad liked, he never said (until many years later, he announced he was a fan of Susan Maughan singing ‘Bobby’s Girl’, but I think that must have been a single aberration). All this was pleasant but unmoving to my ears. Unimportant background to a life of horse riding and cycling. As I neared 10, you could sometimes here occasional snatches of more interesting music on the radio (it was probably early Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley) but my parents always turned the sound down as soon as they started.
I remember clearly the first time I heard a song I truly loved on the radio. It was The Everly Brothers singing ‘Cathy’s Clown’. It was beautiful, it was immediate gratification, it was easy, it was pop. I was 10 years old. Shortly after that my parents split up.
Pop gave my teens brightness and excitement, and hope and oomph. Without it my life would have been dull, dull, dull, sad, sad, sad. Years later I still remember that buzz and when I see today’s youngsters and teens screaming, just like I did, but at One Direction or Justin Bieber, or some other twenty-first-century equivalent of my teen heroes, I see pop is still a crucial part of life at that age.
Even now, I can’t drive past the Royal Albert Hall without giving it an imaginary salute. OK, even if some of it was 100 per cent naff, I can think of worse memories to have than watching The Beatles and The Stones on the same bill at the Albert Hall.
Classical music, opera, jazz – I like some of all of those very much indeed but for me pop is king. One of the best autobiographies I’ve read in recent years was that by the Rolling Stone man himself, Keith Richards. In his book Life he told in detail of his young life and how much music meant to him, how a new life began for him when he first heard tracks by the old blues men of the USA. He may have been the ugly one with dark hair back in the day at the Albert Hall, but my goodness, if you want to know what popular music meant to us in the ’50s and ’60s – you’ll never get a better insight than his. And he’d grown into his looks quite considerably by the next time I saw him, when I was about 22.
So you see why the Albert Hall was always a place of mystery, excitement beyond expectation, almost iconic to me. The Gorgeous Girls ball had to be one of the highlights of my year. I went to a boutique near Barkers in Kensington High Street, long since disappeared, and bought my dress – a short straight crocheted red dress and a flesh-coloured petticoat to go underneath it. A similar style of dress is right back in fashion now, but without the petticoat. I made myself up with shaking hands (it was a happy day when I finally stopped shaking enough before I went out to put my make-up on properly) and The Daily Mirror sent a car for me.
And I went in the stage door. That was the proudest moment of my life up until this point with the possible exception of getting the job at Fab. I’d imagined it all a hundred times and it wasn’t much different – miles of curving corridors, wide and low, few windows, peeks through the curtains to the stage, hospitality room, chatting with some of the other Gorgeous Girls.
Looking back at the photos, I have to say the title ‘Gorgeous Girl’ was no great accolade, nor very accurate, as most of us were little more than ok-looking. No doubt the Mirror photographers had arrived at high streets all over the country on wet Saturdays looking for Gorgeous Girls to photograph. Cold, wet and wanting to get back to their women or their pubs, they’d photographed the first girl they had seen who possessed two legs, a bust, long hair and a short skirt.
Never mind, I got to meet Tom Jones. He was quite famous by this time so we all gathered round him for the photo call and after an audience was in place (who? how had they billed the event? – I have no idea, I guess Tom Jones could fill the hall though) and after a few drinks and as far as I recall no rehearsal, we were all called onstage to be announced as the Gorgeous Girl winners. We each felt like Miss World, which at the time wasn’t actually a bad thing.
Not long after this, the photographer Beverley Goodway (later the most famous page-3 photographer of all time) rang the office and asked Unity if I could go and have my photo taken for the News of the World who were running a competition looking for Britain’s Sexiest Girl and wanted me to model as an example of the kind of girl they were looking for. No doubt Beverley had chatted to his friend Kent Gavin on the Mirror who had passed on his old list of Gorgeous Girls, but even so, I allowed myself to be flattered.
I turned up at the studio, round the back from the offices, in black skinny-rib jumper, black hotpants and a belt, with long Biba suede boots, hair well ironed, and full warpaint (as Dad used to call it) in place. This was the first time I had done a proper studio shoot on my own with people other than the Fab team around so I felt nervous, but Beverley cracked some jokes and clicked away at the right moments and all thanks to him, the photo which eventually appeared made me look quite nice, considering there was no airbrushing in those days. I have a memory of him asking if I wanted to take my top off but as far as I can recall I didn’t – I would have died of shame. These were (just) the days before page 3.
I also did a shoot for the Sunday Mirror. Again, Unity got the call from one of her cronies there asking her to send along a couple of Fab girls for a shoot. I went with Sue, the office junior, and up at the Mirror we found about six other girls in the studio and a tall, dark-haired guy whose autograph I knew I had to get. For it was Engelbert Humperdinck, my mother’s idol and the top singing sensation of the day.
What we had to do was sit at his feet screaming while the pics were taken, to illustrate the idea that he was the latest heartthrob. ‘Enge’ was a complete flirt and obviously in his element but he wasn’t my type, nor me his. I believe that one of the girls who was eventually edited out of the published photo, ended up being the lucky one, or it was certainly shaping up that way when I left the session. The photo was published on the front cover of the Sunday Mirror and my mum was, I think, quite impressed even though her beloved daughter looked absolutely ridiculous.
Around this time I went to a press party for Billy Fury, up at Larry Parnes’ apartment on the Cromwell Road in South Kensington. I believe it was Fury’s engagement party (to Judith Hall) but I could be wrong. Larry had been Billy’s manager for years, while Hal Carter was, at first, his road manager, then later he took on Billy’s proper personal management. At this party was a guy called Bertie Green, who was about 60, and owned a nightclub in Mayfair.
‘You must be a model,’ he said disingenuously.
‘No’ I said but went on to explain that I had done modelling for free as a sideline.
‘Well you should be paid … why don’t you come along to my office and we’ll talk about it … I could get you plenty of modelling work. I could make you famous like Twiggy.’
Did I fancy myself as a model? It sounded like fun and glamour and money, and I fancied seeing what it was like to be famous. I spent a couple of days and nights wondering if I should give up my ‘career’ on Fab; agonising, in fact – it seemed like a tough decision at the time. Eventually I decided to just go with the flow and see what happened and off I raced to this guy’s club by Berkeley Square after work one day, full of hope and ambition; it never crossing my mind to wonder how a night club owner could get me top work as a photographic model.
The club was in darkness but, as instructed, I let myself in a large windowless side door and down some stairs where Green stood, cigar in hand, fat belly (nothing else at this stage) protruding from his trousers. I realised I didn’t like him, one bit, but I still followed him into his office. There seemed to be no one about at all except him but, I reasoned, it was early for clubs – not yet 7 p.m.
‘So you want to do modelling. What kind of modelling do you want to do, Judy?’ Green asked.
‘Err – in the magazines I suppose. I don’t know. What sort of modelling do you think I should do?’
‘I think we should take some photos and then decide. Just leave it all to me. Look, here’s a contract. You just have to sign it and I will be your manager and do the deals for you. I will make you a star. You could earn thousands of pounds a year.’ To someone on less than £10 a week, that sounded rather cool.
Handing me a sheet or two of typed A4 paper he poured himself a brandy. I glanced at the paper and after a few moments the door opened and a dark-haired girl came in, dressed in sequinned bra and G-string. She was probably about 22.
‘This is Simone. She is one of my dancers here. I think you two will get on,’ said Green. To which I didn’t know what I was expected to say, so I said nothing.
‘I would like it if you two would get on. You do like girls don’t you, Judy?’
‘Well yes of course,’ I said. ‘I do like girls.’
You have to remember this was 1968 and I hardly knew that lesbians existed, least of all lipstick lesbians. My lesbian experience to date had been discussing some butch tweed-trouser-wearing women in a pub once with my sister and trying to work out why, if they didn’t like blokes, they all wanted to be blokes.
So I thought Green meant, did I like girls. As friends. Full stop.
Simone shimmied her way towards me, put her arms around me and made to give me a snog. At which point I found a dexterity of foot unknown to me since winning the girls’ under-12 80yd dash at Witney Grammar School in 1961, untangled myself and scarpered still holding the contract.
I shook all the way home and told no one. I vowed never to speak to Bertie Green again, but next day the phone rang at Fab.
‘Bertie here, dear – you were late for an appointment were you, last night?’ he said sarcastically. I couldn’t think what to say. ‘You weren’t upset, were you?’ he continued.
‘Er – no, no.’
‘Well that’s good. You said you liked girls, but maybe you don’t. You don’t need to worry. You just be honest with Bertie. You come back to the club tonight and we’ll be alright this time, okay?’
‘Okay.’
So I went back – no Simone, good.
Bertie’s willy hanging out – not so good.
This time he asked me to pleasure him as he stood there, in the centre of his office floor. ‘There is no-one here today, Judy, except me. And I have locked the door.’ His voice was menacing. I could hardly believe that my recently acquired lovely, poppy, light life full of fun and good dreams had evaporated in a second because of this man.
OK, I was probably not going to get killed. It was only a willy. And he wasn’t going to rape me with it, that much was obvious, he just wanted what would now be called a blowjob. It seemed easiest to just get on with it, which is what I did. Not how I would have liked my fellatio career to begin, but there you are, one can’t always make these choices.
And it didn’t take long once I put my mouth to it. Not my mind – my mind was away somewhere else where the sun was out and The Herd were playing in the background. Keep him even tempered and get out of here. Which he was and I did. I didn’t even cry – once he unlocked the door, I just wanted to breathe the London air, get far away and pretend it had never happened. I would not let him spoil my life, I would not.
By now, of course, I realised that my modelling career wasn’t going to take off via this route at least – but Mr Green didn’t give up easily. He began making what would now be called nuisance phone calls to me at the office. Luckily I hadn’t given him my home address, never having filled out the contract he had shown me. Every day I would dread the phone ringing – him asking me to go round and see him, me making excuses, not wanting to say ‘sod off you dirty old man’ in case it angered him more.
Ring ring. ‘Bertie here, my dear. Will you come round today? We can be good for each other.’
Never having been very quick-witted verbally I found it hard to think of excuses that would sound convincing enough, but I soon made sure to think some up every day just in case he rang.
He would always sign off by saying, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone’ – thus planting in my mind the idea that of course if I didn’t comply he WOULD tell. By now I was imagining that he had a gang of heavies to send round to get me and/or to make sure I never worked in this town again. (I’d probably been watching too many Westerns and gangster movies on TV.)
I’m not sure how far from the truth my imaginings were, but I felt trapped, stupid, dirty and indignant all at once. I didn’t feel I could tell anyone about it because I felt it was all my own fault for being naïve. I felt ashamed, and guilty.
After a couple of weeks and a last sleepless night wondering how to get myself out of what seemed an impossible situation, I made a decision about what I would do next time he rang. When he did, I was so frightened my voice wobbled and shook and my hand was shaking so much I dropped the receiver. I had written down on a piece of paper my ‘script’ and I read it out to him, word for word.
‘Look, Mr Green. It has been very kind of you to take an interest in me and to try to help me in my career, but I have decided I don’t want to be a model. It’s not for me. I want to be a journalist. I also have a new boyfriend who would prefer I don’t come to see you again so I would very much appreciate it if you would not ring me any more.’
‘Oh, I see, my love, I see. Well I think you’re being very silly. I think you will regret it. Let me know if you change your mind.’
He disappeared, I put the phone down, ran to the toilets and threw up.
At the best of times, I was not very good on the phone – yet another of my secretarial attributes that didn’t really work well for me. People would call and I couldn’t hear what they said their names were, so I’d buzz through to Unity and say:
‘There’s a phone call for you.’
‘Who is it, dear?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well didn’t they say?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t hear.’
‘Well why didn’t you ask them again?’
‘I did but I still couldn’t hear and I didn’t like to ask any more. Can’t you just speak to them?’
So she would. If she was out or unavailable, people whose names I couldn’t hear would leave messages for her to ring them, so Lord knows how many calls from superstars or agents with scoops she missed because of me.
And after that Green conversation, I didn’t answer the phone at all for two weeks in case it was him ringing back. Every time it rang I would go to the loo. Eventually I began answering it again but if the voice at the other end sounded at all like him I’d put the phone down. One day after I’d slammed the phone down in just such a panic, it rang again and this guy said, ‘WAIT WOMAN! Why did you just put the phone down on me? It’s Owen. Why on earth Unity employed you I’ll never know …’
So Green nearly cost me my job but I never did hear from him again. I think he just decided I wasn’t worth the bother – there must have been plenty more girls who would give him what he wanted in return for promises of modelling or dancing work. I somehow felt I’d had a hugely lucky escape – and couldn’t wait to erase the worst memories of those few weeks from my mind. I’d escaped from a poor man’s casting couch, and I would never make that mistake again, never.
And of course my wonderful modelling future was no more. Not that I cared. I realised that models have a short shelf life whereas hacks can go on a long, long time – and, from what I know about it, they can have much more fun – certainly if they are showbiz hacks, anyway.
My sister was shortly to leave Honey and Fleetway, where all the excitement and shallow living was getting too much for her, and move to the quieter, more earnest backwaters of the Oxfam organisation, but towards the end of my first year I would still sometimes wander through the maze of corridors and meet her at Honey to pop over to the Hoop and Grapes for a half of cider at lunchtime – which, over a period of months, transmogrified into several scotch and cokes, the trendy drink of the era.
One day as I hovered outside Ann’s office waiting for her to finish talking to the editor, Audrey Slaughter, I heard the voice first – very very loud and very very cockney with almost a hint of Lloyd Grossman to it (though of course he hadn’t been invented in those days).
I couldn’t help but turn around to see from where this noise came. I first saw the mini-mouse legs – extremely long, extremely thin and very shapeless – beneath the hem of a miniskirt, striding towards me. The legs and the skirt were the only ‘mini’ things about this very giant of a person. My gaze went up – and up, and up – to find in a most shocking, revelatory, fascinating way, one of the most unattractive top halves I’d ever seen in my life. Short, mousy flat lank and greasy hair, large what looked like NHS specs and the most ginormous set of front teeth you ever did see. I couldn’t find one speck of beauty in all of it but what amazed me most was the cutting edge teen fashion she wore, as if Twiggy would give up the ghost and go and work in Woolworths immediately if this person were to happen to want to take her place; as if to say ‘Look at me – aren’t I the best thing you’ve ever seen! Aren’t I fab!’
She had the confidence of a female Robert Maxwell (the boss of the huge Mirror organisation) and the same kind of ‘look at me’ aura. I saw him once at the Daily Mirror building in Holborn, sweeping through reception to his private lift. Truly larger than life in every way so that you shuddered slightly as he walked past, were glad he’d gone but feeling the empty space left behind. Horrifying – but kind of fantastic. The original shock and awe.
Maxwell’s female clone walked on by … and my sister came from her office.
I pointed down the corridor at the disappearing back of the giant.
‘Do you know who that is?’
‘Oh, yes, she works on Petticoat (Honey’s sister magazine for teens). I think she’s in the fashion department. Her name’s Janet Street-Porter.’
A completely wonderful example of how to get on in life with the sheer strength of your own self-belief. An asset that, it appears, has in the intervening years, never deserted her. Not that I’m saying she wasn’t brilliantly clever and supremely talented as well – no doubt she was. Either way, though I saw her around a lot I was never to become a friend. In fact, I don’t think she ever said one word directly to me, once, ever. And soon Janet left us mere mortals all behind on her path to greater, deserved things.
Many years later I shared a first-class carriage from Yorkshire to London with her, no one else in the compartment at all. And she still didn’t speak to me. Nor I to her, so I can’t really complain. I did think about saying, ‘Oy, you – I remember you when you worked on Petticoat magazine!’ But she had an invisible ‘do not disturb’ sign around her neck and I couldn’t really think where the conversation would lead anyway, so silence ruled for two hours and remembering the voice, it was probably just as well.
My Yorkshire rambling friend ‘fat Mick’ worshipped the ground she walked on in later years – and, as president of the Ramblers Association for some long time, walked on a lot of ground she did. I’ve recently become a real fan of Janet because of her TV walking programmes and her superb opinionated journalism. And she’s grown into her looks, no doubt about it. You see – I’m a fan again. I’d give anything to be her friend …
Anyway, back at Fleetway and a few drinks later in the pub, Janet was temporarily forgotten. It could well have been that day that I had a few too many ciders/scotches and fell down in the lift on the way back up to Honey. Ann had to pick me up and get me out in full view of her colleagues, and I sometimes wonder if her main reason for leaving Honey was to get away from me. If so, it was a wise decision as very many drunken performances by me in and around the office would follow in the next year or two. In those days, drinking too much was considered quite glamorous and, on Fleet Street, a badge of honour, not a sign of impending alcoholism.
And all this time, I was still searching and hoping for a best friend.
One girl who worked on another of the ‘teen’ magazines – Valentine, I think – in the same building seemed to want to be just that. Trish began visiting my office every day and I found her very friendly and easy to get on with. Down to earth, nothing special to look at with shoulder length mousey-coloured hair and little make-up, but attractive enough and great company. She made me feel good. We began sharing a lunch together sometimes in the Fleetway canteen – a dark and miserable place in the bowels of the building – and she would occasionally go for a quick drink after work before making her way on the buses down to where she lived with her parents in South London. Trish seemed very wordly wise although she was only a year or so older than me.
I was highly flattered and touched when one day she arrived at my desk bearing a gift – a little dolphin brooch in blue. It was very pretty.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘If you’d like to come down home with me one evening and have something to eat?’
Well that sounded just great to me who hadn’t seen the inside of anyone’s house as a guest in what seemed like forever. So after work one day we took the long journey down to her place via various buses.
Once outside my familiar territory I found myself getting tongue tied with her and strangely apprehensive. But she plugged away and kept the chat going and eventually we arrived at her house, which was all in darkness.
‘Oh sorry, forgot to tell you – my parents are away!’ she explained brightly, letting us in. The idea of food seemed to have been forgotten as Trish put on the gas heater in their sitting room and invited me to sit on a cushion next to it. She then sat in front of me, unzipped my suede boots and took them off. At this point I began to feel seriously, uncomfortably, that all was not what it seemed but I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
She put on some music and got us some alcohol. And there I sat, getting hotter and hotter and hotter and realising with complete dismay that my feet were smelly. And gradually she moved her cushion closer and closer and closer. And I moved my feet further and further away from her but the smell still pervaded the air in the room.
And then she invited me to take my top off ‘As you must be very hot …’
Now while I knew all about gay men, up until that point I had had little experience of lesbians apart from Simone, the lipstick lesbian, and the butch tweedy women in the pub. But even in my naivety I realised with horrible clarity that Trish was making a move on me. And I didn’t like it one bit.
I have no idea what I said to her but within seconds I was up, boots back on, coat on, and off out of that door like a longdog. I have no idea how I got home, I don’t remember. Why had it taken me so long to suss it out? Well I just had so wanted a friend, a proper friend.
Trish stopped coming round to the office after that and another potential friendship had melted away. Why was life so damned complicated? What was wrong with me?
Over the months I slowly enjoyed a kind of metamorphosis from country bumpkin into slightly more of a Fab person both outwardly and inwardly. As my hair grew very long, I began straightening it using my ironing board and iron (I would crouch over the board, spread my hair on it and iron it until I could smell burning). I also began to enjoy shopping. Not least, because, at last, my prayers had been answered. I had begun to relax a bit into my London life, had given up worrying about my friendless (and boyfriendless) state, and so I had found a friend. Or, to be more truthful, she found me.
Julie Webb came to work at Fab as a feature writer doing pop, and for some reason decided to take me under her wing. I still don’t know why, as she had plenty of contacts, plenty of friends and guys always after her, and though she lived in Watford, she knew her way around London, the club scene and the media. She had the savvy of Trish and the looks of Simone, but no way was this girl after me in that way. How did I know? Well, easy – she liked men.
What I gave to Julie in return, I have no idea unless it was a well-deserved sense of superiority, but the fact is that she began inviting me for lunch, out for a drink – and after a few weeks of this I woke up one morning and realised that I HAD A FRIEND. Boy, it felt good. I hadn’t realised quite how lonely I’d been. And just as importantly, her own fab self-confidence began rubbing off on me.
Julie initiated me into the delights of shopping in the lunch ‘hour’ which often stretched a bit into two or three. As the shops around Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street were sparse, mostly off-licences for the Fleet Street imbibers, and Carnaby Street was beginning to feel a bit naff, she took me to Kensington.
Isn’t it strange how you do things that seem quite ordinary, normal, nothing to think about later that day, and years later you think WOW, I really did that. I bought stuff at the old Biba shop on the north side of High Street Kensington. You’d shove your way in past beautiful young women making their way out, Biba bags laden, and there was this fantastic, low-lit, full to brimming shop with clothes in colours never seen before – dusty pinks, plums, dove greys, lots of feather boas, floppy hats, velvet, felt. And the boots – knee-length suede to die for. This was heaven. And the make-up. Again, dusty, smudgy, deep colours. And the music …
The assistants were all gorgeous and beautifully dressed – this was the first shop I had ever been in where you felt jealous of the staff and slightly intimidated by their attitude. It really was the first time I’d been surrounded by cool on that level.
Another place we used to go was the old first Laura Ashley shop just round the corner from South Ken tube station. We often used to borrow clothes from there for fashion or beauty photo sessions and I remember going there with the photographer Roger Brown and picking piles of what I considered quite trendy tiny-floral pattern cotton dresses, floor-length with gathered waists and lace around the collars and neckline. What we fancied buying we got at huge discount – within months Laura Ashley was huge and within a year, had gone global.
By late summer 1968, I’d been at Fab over a year, and thanks mostly to Julie my social life had at last begun to exist. I hardly ever saw the inside of my bedsit in Avonmore Road, except to sleep and recuperate.
Nigel Hunter became a mate. Nigel had worked on the ‘legitimate’ side of the music press for several years but had been made redundant when something folded. Using his many contacts in the media and music world, one of whom was Unity Hall, he finally landed freelance work doing concert and record reviews – and writing a column for Fab. Undaunted by the fact that he was heading for 40, Nigel incongruously wrote the fictional diary of a teenage boy called Ross, managing to garner a large following of Ross-loving Fab readers over the next year or two.
Divorced as he was, he began squiring me, in the most gentlemanly fashion, to various press parties and fab events all over the capital. We were never ‘an item’, and so for the first time in my life I had a great non-threatening, non-sexual, friendship with a hetero man AND a great non-threatening, non-sexual friendship with a hetero woman.
Weekends were often still a quiet time for me. I’d sometimes head to Buckingham to visit my mother, and very occasionally I would go to Littlemore in Oxford to see my dad, where he lived with his new wife, Audrey – but those visits came to a halt when I realised I was causing a rift between them. I was in bed one morning when I heard her give him a list of things that were wrong with me, from the appalling length of my skirts (too short) and hair (too long), to my false eyelashes, my panstick make-up and my taste in music. She was an ex-schoolteacher and more of a Betty Hale (the assistant editor) type than a Judy Wills type, for sure. So I left dad and her in peace for a few years until my skirts grew longer and she could take me along to bingo with them without any embarrassment.
Nigel lived only ten minutes’ walk from me in a flat off the Holland Park Road so at weekends, when work jaunts were thin on the ground, we would meet up and have a meal or a drink. Sometimes we’d go to visit friends of his in the home counties, or get together for Sunday lunch with his mates like Rodney Burbeck, who was editor of Music Business Weekly, in pubs in Kensington or the West End. Then I’d have a quiet Sunday evening at the bedsit in preparation for the round of drinking thrashes in the week ahead.
I truly believe that press parties were the major cause of my almost-downfall and almost-sacking at Fab not long afterwards. God, there were so many of them – you could go to a pre-lunch drinks party for a new record label, a lunch launch for a new theatre show or pop band, a 6 p.m. film screening with free champagne throughout, and around 8 p.m., there would always be a band playing at some club such as the Marquee who would want Nigel, or Julie, along to get a review. Even when I was still a secretary and not a writer, no one ever minded if gatecrashers arrived, and often, anyway, the invites were for two people.
It is the truth to say that a lot of the music press (mainly composed of young male chancers) would literally have starved and been teetotal but for these thrashes. You could have easily eaten and drunk well all week on these freebies. And I can admit that I don’t remember ever cooking for myself at the Avonmore Road bedsit – perhaps I’d make a sandwich or heat up a can of Heinz Tomato Soup but that was it. After two years living on my own I still could cook nothing except fish pie with hard-boiled egg – for some very peculiar reason, the only dish my mother ever taught me.
Towards the end of my first year at Fleetway, just as I was beginning to feel relaxed and comfortable with my work, the team at the magazine, my surroundings and my ability to handle myself, editor Unity announced that she was leaving to work on the News of the World. I was horrified. I had found her easy to work for; once you got over her quite stern expression she was a pussycat. She’d also taken to writing trashy novels in office time, which she used to get me to type out clean for her, so we had a nice reciprocal thing going – she let me do what I wanted as long as I kept on typing.
Worse! Ass Ed was getting the job. Ass Ed was the formidable assistant editor, Betty, who had spent the past months staring disapprovingly across the corridor at me from the open door of her office which looked directly onto me at Ed’s Sec desk. She had undoubtedly witnessed, and probably made notes about, every one of my mistakes and indiscretions, late arrivals, long disappearances, and drunken returns after lunch.
We were diametrically opposed kinds of people. I was 19 or so, she was about 40. I had long ironed hair and miniskirts, she had short permed hair and tailored suits from Austin Reed. I wore tons of make up, she didn’t wear much. I was late into the office more than was good, she was never late. I drank scotch and coke, or cider, every day; she drank wait wain (as she pronounced white wine) occasionally, with food. I lived in a tacky bedsit in West London; she lived in Radlett, Hertfordshire – spiritual home of the middle-aged and what would now be called Middle England.
I liked boys and flirting. Betty was married to Eric, her long-standing husband who disapproved, I believe, of the frivolous nature of Fab, its staff, its readers and its whole raison d’être. Well if he didn’t he always looked as if he did. He was a fair bit older than her, with glasses, suits, grey hair. As you can imagine, he, too, disapproved of me, or always looked as if he did. What Betty was actually doing working for Fab, no-one was ever too sure. But there she was.
So to know she was going to be editor put fear into me, as well it might. Things were going to change around here – if she didn’t say it, she might as well have done.
About the time Betty was promoted, I seemed to be appearing in the papers but was not a huge way down the road to my ambition of being a writer. I would do tiny bits for the news page and I was responsible for the Readers Write section (the letters page), and also gave Betty a couple of rather strange Patience Strong rip-off poems I’d written. She decided to use them as captions to go with large dreamy photos of a couple of celebrities. I think the first words I ever had published in Fab were a short, corny poem to accompany a fey picture of Donovan, Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan. Not sure what the Fab readers made of that but I expect my mother liked it. Apart from that, my writing career wasn’t exactly taking off.
Amazingly, not long after Betty was promoted to editor, she promoted me to beauty editor. It was only later that I found out why, but that’s another story.
Now beauty editor may not sound like much to you – but it was a start.