by Tim Moore
By hallowed tabloid tradition, Blick had forewarned Gunvor of their destructive revelations, offering to soft-pedal on the more lurid details should she oblige them with a quote or two. The singer later recalled tearfully begging the paper to hold fire until after Eurovision, and the ‘responsibility to their readers’ that they regretfully explained made this impossible. So it was that the story came embellished with the self-flagellatory whimperings of its victim: ‘I needed dresses for my appearances, and there was a new home to furnish … I made some big mistakes, but I now want to pay back all my debts.’ Ralf Egli, fighting the first of many rearguard actions, told Blick that his client had signed an agreement with a civic-appointed auditor, handing over responsibility for her finances. The story was rounded off with a quote from the defiant May Gun: ‘I will always stand by my daughter.’
It’s tempting to imagine a Swiss citizen could suffer no shame greater than that of ruin through financial imprudence, but Gunvor set off for Birmingham grimly aware that worse – a lot worse – was still to come. The details Blick had withheld under the deal brokered to secure her craven co-operation would emerge sooner or later, and with Gunvor’s participation in the world’s most widely watched cultural event now just days away, it was always going to be sooner.
‘“When Gunvor let her blouse slip open,” said erotic photographer Juerg Wyss, 59, “all inhibitions disappeared!”’ Thus read the caption below one of the many sanitised ‘hot sex photos’ with which Blick illustrated its sensational 3 May lead, one whose lavish prurience would teach me the German for crotch-less knickers. The events Wyss described had taken place over eighteen months previously, yet being Swiss, the raddled pornographer was able to confirm that he had taken precisely 1,878 photographs of Gunvor, then an unknown secretary. ‘She said she wanted to be a model in case the music didn’t work out,’ read a slack-jawed nation as its muesli congealed. ‘Gunvor had definite erotic talent – and after it was over she sang for me.’
Blick had evidently been sitting on this story for months; it’s likely that the profoundly odious Wyss had approached them straight after Gunvor’s triumph at the qualifiers. All the inane at-home puff-pieces they’d run had successfully established the singer as the nation’s lilywhite sweetheart; their association with her followed the classic build-them-up, knock-them-down tabloid parabola.
So shocking were the revelations that some feared Switzerland would be expelled from Eurovision. One worried paper contacted the EBU, securing an assurance that an artist’s private life was of no bureaucratic concern. ‘As long as the song is less than three minutes long,’ said an EBU spokeswoman, ‘we don’t care who sings it.’ No doubt she’d said as much to the rather larger number of journalists keen to establish the official position on Israeli entrant Dana International, the extravagantly cleavaged transsexual whose presence – and subsequent victory – would confine the Gunvor-gate fall-out to Switzerland’s well-guarded borders.
The day after, Blick carried Gunvor’s account of her evening in Herr Wyss’s glamorous studio (his garage). ‘I met this man at a bar,’ she said. ‘He said he was a friend of Claudia Schiffer, and that I would be perfect for a jeans advertisement he had been commissioned to photograph. At the studio he said he would need to see my back for the advert, and then … well, Adam and Eve also came naked into the world.’
On the morning of the final, after months of careful scene-setting and ground preparation, Blick triumphantly let loose the devastating final salvo of Operation Gunvor. The headline: ‘Our Euro girl – lady of pleasure in uptown brothel!’ It was the most appalling work of Eurovision sabotage since an Oslo gentleman’s outfitter rummaged through his braces drawer muttering, ‘Well, if it’s a really stretchy pair you’re after, Mr Teigen …’
In the mere act of taking to the National Indoor Arena stage that evening, Gunvor proved herself a woman of extraordinary mettle. In a quiet year, perhaps it would have been too much to ask; mercifully, the 1998 contest had needed no help from her to prove itself the most controversial Eurovision in decades. Dana International arrived in Birmingham with death threats from Israel’s outraged ultra-orthodox fanatics ringing in her neatly sculpted ears; she was installed in the city’s only bulletproof hotel room, and outside it was chaperoned by armed guards. The speculation around this dainty creation was predictably repetitive. Had she ever been a man? Yes. Could she actually sing? No, but we didn’t know that yet, and even when we did it wouldn’t stop her winning. What did Ireland’s doe-eyed country girl think of this hormone-hungry castrato who had hijacked her name? Not much: the voice behind All Kinds of Everything had herself shaved two years off her age at the 1970 Eurovision, and performed there under a name she hadn’t born with. If Yaron Cohen had done his homework properly, the 1998 Eurovision title would have been awarded to Rosemary International.
To Gunvor’s advantage, the few press-moths not drawn to Dana International’s billion-watt presence flittered instead around schlager-clown Guildo Horn, a balding, velveteen twerp whose overbearing tomfoolery proved of tireless fascination to the German-speaking press. In astounding consequence, few non-Swiss guests and commentators seemed aware of the stinking, fly-blown scandals piling up outside Gunvor’s dressing room. Even Terry Wogan maintained a tactful silence; perhaps as co-compere that year he felt constrained to rein in the schadenfreude.
It would be unfair, though, to over-estimate these consolations. Five months before, 400,000 of her countrymen had cheerfully nominated Gunvor as the sweet-voiced bearer of their Eurovision flame; now all those, and seven million others, were tuning in to gawp at a bankrupt topless model who had ‘fulfilled male desires around the clock’ at two Bern massage parlours. Her career in the private booths of the Roman Bath and Bolero ‘sauna clubs’ had in fact lasted no more than three weeks back at the end of 1996, yet the managers of both establishments proved able to dredge up fond and detailed accounts of their former employee.
‘Gunvor was a natural,’ said one, ‘she made a lot of money here.’ ‘The guests really enjoyed it when she sang for them,’ recalled the other, ‘naked, as God created her.’ This time, there was of course no quote from the singer. ‘And what does Gunvor have to say to these latest revelations?’ smirked Blick in the final paragraph. “‘We have no comment,” says her manager Rolf Egli.’
The horribly depressing truth that emerged later was this: having billed her a monstrous 33,000SFr for his professional services, the ever thoughtful Juerg Wyss suggested a remunerative solution to the tearful Gunvor. ‘He actually drove me to the Roman Bath,’ she would reveal. ‘It was December – I was singing in the church in the early evening, then going off to the sauna clubs … I told my mother all about it on Christmas Day.’
Gunvor was out fifth on the Birmingham stage, wearing a dress that proved this latest and most awful revelation had caught her off-guard. Elementary image management demanded something chaste and demure; instead, here she was in a slash-thighed, sheer-chested blood-red number, one of the raciest outfits yet seen on a Eurovision stage. ‘Gunvor in that dress,’ ran one online reminiscence. ‘She rehearsed before the Press Conference, and we noticed it was transparent – you could see her dark underwear.’ In Andreas-vision, it seems worse than that: either those are rosebuds embroidered on the fabric, or she isn’t wearing a bra. Whichever, it wasn’t helping her case.
Looking a little distracted, but less nervous than many rival performers, Gunvor somehow summons up a capable performance. Muted, yes – she doesn’t work herself up to the Gloria Gaynor levels of furious defiance scaled in her post-victory reprise at the qualifier – but in tune and in time. ‘Her singing wasn’t completely clean,’ said a former Swiss contestant. Said another: ‘The gloss in Gunvor’s eyes was missing for me.’ But in saying so to Blick, both rather undermined their own critical significance. To my eyes, and certainly my ears, Lass’ Ihn’s chief disadvantage as a Eurosong was less to do with Gunvor’s performance than with beardy Egon’s indulgently ruminative vi
olin solo.
Four slots after Gunvor, the contest, as a spectacle, is over. By then we’ve already had Dana International’s approximate disco warbling, and the cavorting histrionics that compel Guildo Horn to scale the scoreboard gantry and leap off-stage to pump his groin at some poor old dear in the front row – oh, look: it’s Katie Boyle.
Guildo’s presence – and solid seventh place – was brokered on the dark side of democracy. This was the first year of near universal televoting, in both national qualifiers and the final proper: Herr Horn’s selection as Germany’s representative was due less to his lamely appalling song than a vote-Guildo campaign stirred up by DJs of the ‘I’m a loony, me’ school. The nation’s extensive community of non-ironists were appalled and ashamed, expressing fears – or hopes – that in failing to understand why it was funny to call your backing group the Orthopaedic Stockings (‘It’s because they support me’), the televoters of rival nations would send Guildo home without a point. In response, Guildo’s studenty fanbase pledged to cross borders in order to cast their televotes for Germany, an oath widely held responsible for the maximum points awarded to him by Holland and Switzerland. Those Germans with memories of their 1933 general election should have known better than anyone that giving people the vote doesn’t guarantee they’ll use it wisely.
Terry introduces the pre-interval show – an orchestral medley, which the audience can’t know is the last live music that will ever be played on a Eurovision stage, though if you’d announced that as the colliery band struck up there might have been cheers. Ulrika Jonsson takes charge of the voting, and does so without passing comment on Gunvor’s unfolding fate – not even when fellow stragglers Greece, to uncouth audience jeers, bag the only points they’ll get (that’ll be twelve) from Cyprus. Nor are there any sightings of her in the Dana-dominated green room; it’s only as I watch the parrot-feathered Ms International step back on-stage to a household cavalry fanfare (boom: we’ve just blasted through the camp barrier) that the grim resonance of Gunvor’s fate tolls out. Somehow, her nul points had seemed almost pre-ordained, the logically dismal conclusion of all that’s gone before. But of course it wasn’t – going out to perform Lass’ Ihn, she’d have been thinking: I can still turn this round. A good performance here, a decent score, and I can go home with my head held high. Sod it, I might even win. That’ll show the bastards.
‘Zero points and rock-bottom for Switzerland,’ mourned a Zurich broadsheet the next morning. ‘A debacle, which happened last thirty-one years ago in Vienna.’ The more considered press were blaming the result on their nation’s isolationism: ‘We’re not in the EU – no one loves us,’ was the heading above one editorial.
Blick, of course, spun it rather differently: ‘At the end, Gunvor stood there naked.’ ‘Thank heavens we have better ambassadors for our nation,’ announced the Christian Democrats’ press spokesman, going on to namecheck a list of Swiss cyclists who two months later were all thrown out of the Tour de France in the race’s worst ever drug scandal.
When Gunvor landed at Zurich airport the following afternoon, a huge press crowd lay in wait, along with a handful of fans holding aloft bottles of champagne. ‘For her?’ responded one to a journalist. ‘Don’t be ridiculous – this is for Egon!’ The violinist and Rolf pushed their trolleys through the arrivals-hall ruck, dispensing dutiful thoughts on their nation’s status as ‘friendless outsiders in a united Europe’; Gunvor, with her mother but minus Michi (the tabloids had already been linking the singer with Damian, one of her backing vocalists), eventually emerged to mumble a token civility before being sped away in a waiting car. ‘No sign of her vamp behaviour,’ crowed Blick, ‘just a scared young deer!’
Ditched by Michi, Gunvor moved back to her mother’s flat and considered signing up for the army. But not for long: three days later, having consulted the hapless, hopeless Rolf on how best to resurrect her showbiz career, she appeared on a TV chat-show to set the record straight. It was not a success. Recklessly attempting to put an upbeat gloss on her sauna-club career, she claimed to a startled host to have enjoyed the experience: ‘My boyfriend had just left me, and I was having a lot of one-night stands. I wanted to be a rebel, to prove I had no inhibitions. Having sex with married men at these clubs was not unpleasant.’ When asked why in that case she’d lasted only three weeks, Gunvor responded that the management had sacked her ‘for exceeding the time limit with clients’. ‘In other words,’ concluded next morning’s Blick, ‘her men were enjoying more sex than they had paid for!’
The result at Birmingham had already spawned the odd works-better-in-German joke (What’s the difference between Gunvor and ladybird? The ladybird has more points); the three million Swiss who played the national card game Jass were abbreviating a void round as ‘a Gunvor’. The non-Blick media had proved generally compassionate – many papers referred to her by default as ‘poor Gunvor’ – but after her disastrous, sympathy-sapping chat-show performance, the gloves came off.
One paper ran an interview with an unnamed associate who claimed the lyrics to Lass’ Ihn were inspired by the night Gunvor came home early to find her boyfriend in bed with another man. The Roman Bath manager came forward to deny sacking Gunvor on the grounds she had stated: ‘It was three days before this girl took her first client,’ he now remembered, ‘and we asked her to leave because she did not correspond to our concept of beauty.’ Just three weeks before, the worst crisis Gunvor had faced involved a jocular reprimand from Rolf for dyeing her hair without his permission. Now here she was, being publicly branded too ugly to shag old men in a massage parlour.
The feeding frenzy was now gnawing her down to the bone. On 24 May the papers reported that Gunvor and a male associate had been ejected from a Bern nightclub, having racially abused a Spanish waiter and refused to pay their drinks bill. ‘I don’t understand her attitude,’ said the Rock’n Eat’s deputy manager. ‘We had Bonnie Tyler in once, and she was no trouble.’ On 28 May, two policemen who pulled a black Lancia over found that its infamous driver possessed only a learner’s licence; four days afterwards it emerged that Gunvor had escaped from a similar situation weeks before using a full permit borrowed with menaces from one of her Eurovision backing singers. ‘Gunvor said that if I didn’t co-operate, she wouldn’t let me go to Birmingham,’ said Sandra Heusser. ‘Now I want nothing more to do with her.’
For certain sections of Swiss society, this documentation-related motoring infringement was the unforgivable last straw. Tabloid voyeurism made way for broadsheet indignation: ‘No money, no underwear, no driving licence,’ began one editorial, ‘the Birmingham Nullnummer is a Barbie of bad taste, infecting us all with the trash virus.’ The considered journal Weltwoche ran a 150-line article on ‘the Gunvor phenomenon’: ‘the story of a publicity addict who has become a national celebrity, though not in the way she had hoped’.
At this point Gunvor would have been well advised to essay a little dignified silence. But she was never well advised. Rolf, clearly a graduate of the ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ school of PR, proudly announced that Gunvor had turned down an offer from Playboy, thereby encouraging ‘sex king’ Patrik Stoeckli to nab some cheap column inches by promising Gunvor a 500,000SFr contract to make five porn films. Soon after, Rolf put her up for another chat-show, where in a sob-racked interview she confessed that Juerg Wyss had compelled her to perform a sexual act upon him before their photo shoot. The host waited for her shoulders to stop shaking, then barked, ‘So was that oral, or a hand job?’
By late June Gunvor had lost so much weight that she was compelled to deny whispers of an eating disorder, and – when the press began to rumour it – a suicide attempt. Yet all the while Rolf was plotting her comeback. In the middle of July Gunvor fulfilled her first post-Eurovision public engagement, firing the starter’s pistol at the Davos Uphill Inline Skating final. A week later, her manager announced that Gunvor’s new single would be released to coincide with a major concert at the Zurich Civic Centre on 24 Ju
ly.
Extraordinarily, the gig was organised in co-operation with Blick, who promoted it on an eager daily basis. ‘After tears at the television: Blick lets Gunvor sing!’ One can only hope she understood that in doing so, the paper was merely hosing her name down prior to dragging it back through the mud. Perhaps, then, there was some grim satisfaction for her in the concert’s crushing commercial failure. ‘Gunvor and a sophisticated light and laser show – 1,300 tickets already sold!’ trumpeted Blick on 23 July, but, in fact, of the crowd that half-filled the hall the night afterwards, all but 114 had been let in for free. Loud and heartfelt cheers greeted Gunvor’s rendition of Lass’ Ihn, though these trickled to polite applause as she ran through a cover of Bryan Adam’s Everything I Do … and followed this with My Way, in French. The finale was her new single, the Egon-penned Money Makes, whose opening chords released a snowfall of ‘Gunvor dollars’ on the mildly curious audience. Some picked up on the bravely jocular reference to her ongoing financial troubles, but few cared: Money Makes joined Lass’ Ihn in failing to make the Swiss charts.