Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Harold Macmillan was on the devious side,’ said Lord Hailsham broodingly. ‘But at least he was unflappable.’ He brightened. ‘I invented that word. Macmillan had whizzed off to Australia, having described the resignation of Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with more panache than judgement as “a little local difficulty”. I was left to smooth things over. Refusing to suck up and describe Macmillan as a great leader, I described him as “unflappable”. The word has now passed into the language.’

  The refusal to suck up may have cost him the leadership. In 1963, when Macmillan resigned from ill-health after the Profumo crisis, Quintin Hailsham was his first choice as successor. Hailsham promptly announced his intention to renounce his peerage at the party conference.

  ‘It was a jam-packed electric occasion,’ remembers a Tory MP. ‘Quintin came across as a brilliant, vibrant, wonderfully exciting orator, in direct line from Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. By comparison, Butler and Maudling seemed drab and lifeless. When Quintin announced he was giving up his peerage, the cheering nearly blew the roof off.’

  But tragically, things went wrong. Quintin Hogg, as he was now called again, was loved by the Tory rank and file but had enemies in the cabinet. To people who absorb the butter of flattery quicker than a frying aubergine, he was abrasive and unpredictable.

  ‘He always speaks his mind,’ said an ex-minister. ‘And although he apologises afterwards, it can be very disagreeable until he does. He could, and still can be, insensitive to atmosphere, banging on at cabinet meetings. You can sit back and enjoy the distraction, saying this is frightfully good stuff, but self-important, rather mediocre people think it’s wasting time.’

  He was perhaps too emotional, too volatile, a touch exhibitionist. The English love eccentrics, but prefer them caged in an Oxford quad, or writing poetry like John Betjemen. Macmillan, persuaded by the cabinet to play safe, chose the reticent, mild-mannered, diplomatic Lord Home, who waited to renounce his peerage until he had the leadership in the bag.

  Today Lord Hailsham plays down his disappointment. ‘Being prime minister doesn’t bring happiness.’

  But until then he had regularly written poetry. With the loss of the leadership, the muse deserted him too. He never wrote another line.

  ‘In fact Quintin was heartbroken,’ said a fellow MP and close friend. ‘Bitterly disappointed. And it was a tragedy. He would have made a great prime minister, an intellectual giant, utterly fearless, with total integrity. People question his judgement, but on important matters he was always right: about wanting us to join Europe straight after the war, about the colour problem, denouncing Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and tempering much right-wing opinion.’

  Did he think himself he would have made a great prime minister?

  Lord Hailsham examined the thin, jeaned legs of a workman sidling along his window ledge, and then smiled.

  ‘As the White Knight remarked, I do not say it would have been better. I only say it would have been different.’

  True to form, he served with the utmost loyalty under Alec Douglas-Home (‘the nicest prime minister there’s ever been, but stronger on foreign policy than at home’), and later as Lord Chancellor under Edward Heath, whom he liked but found ‘difficult to reach personally’.

  Although he wept openly when Heath was ousted by Mrs Thatcher, always putting party before self, he instantly transferred his loyalty to the new leader, and was rewarded in 1979, when she gave him a second stint as Lord Chancellor.

  As someone who considered party loyalty all-important, didn’t he feel Heath had been rotten to Mrs Thatcher? Lord Hailsham shrugged: ‘One must not underestimate how traumatic it was for Edward Heath to be ejected by Margaret Thatcher. To have just missed being prime minister as I did was bad enough. But as Chief of the Tribe to be de-stooled is far more terrible. Edward Heath was good enough to ask me to Macmillan’s ninetieth birthday party, and produced a bottle of 1874 claret. It was still good – just imagine it was harvested when Bismark was chancellor.’

  Side-stepping tricky questions like a matador, he refused to comment on the Tories’ poor performance in the local elections. Didn’t he think Mrs Thatcher ought to let up a little and apply the brake?

  He pondered for a minute, examining his huge signet ring, once again regarding compliments to a leader he admires hugely as sucking up.

  ‘Like her, I am a workaholic, I work fast. Some’, he raised an eyebrow at two minions scribbling down every word at the end of the vast polished table, ‘would say too fast. You have to look at Margaret Thatcher pre-bomb and post-bomb. She was so outstanding, showed so much courage after the Brighton bomb. She may well have suffered a little from post-bomb shock. Shock takes different forms. After I pranged my car in January, my doctor told me this. The Prime Minister carried on working without a pause. If you insist on keeping going, you may temporarily have to appear a little sterner and most forceful to stay on course.’

  Having described Neil Kinnock as ‘an inexperienced second rater’ some months ago, he has revised his opinion.

  ‘Neil Kinnock took that jibe of mine very well indeed, and came back with a genial and handsome answer. What he said about the Brighton bomb, his sense of outrage, was absolutely right. Basically he is a very nice man, but not I think a large figure. Denis Healey, on the other hand, is a heavyweight – a bully and a thug, but a man of great stature.’

  He also has a soft spot for David Owen. ‘I like the fellow, not many do. He can be brash and abrasive, rather like myself, but he had the courage to leave his awful party. He is a very considerable person, much larger than David Steel.’

  The Alliance, he felt, had done rather less well in the local elections than expected.

  ‘Nothing will happen until the SDP and the Liberals become one party, exchanging their twin beds for the matrimonial couch, until the blushing bride Steel says yes to bridegroom Owen, and they consummate the marriage.’

  As Lord Chancellor, he is also speaker of the House of Lords, sitting on the crimson woolsack in a long wig and splendid black robes. According to Lord Longford, fellow Etonian and sparring partner over sixty years, ‘Quintin’s the most impressive Lord Chancellor we’ve ever had. He’s always been frightfully theatrical of course. In fact he’s far better in drag than out of it.’

  While Viscount Macmillan admits the best seat in the Lords is at Hailsham’s feet. ‘Quintin lounges with his wig askew, and you think he’s fast alseep, then he suddenly comes out with some devastating aside. He’s at his best when the bishops are holding forth. Of course he knows far more about their subject than they do.’

  The greatest tragedy of Lord Hailsham’s life was in 1978 when his wife Mary was killed in a riding accident, aged only fifty-five. Her face, merry, lively, charming, looks out of two pale-blue photograph frames on his desk. He says he will never get over her death, and assuages his loneliness in work and by lavishing affection on little Spotty, who was now noisily crunching a Bonio on the crimson carpet. He refuses to give up his rambling house in Putney for a smaller, more central place because there’d be no room for all his books.

  ‘He’s always got a different excuse,’ said a friend. ‘He can be frightfully obstinate.’

  According to his daughter-in-law, journalist Sarah Hogg, he is a wonderful grandfather: ‘Despite his massive workload, he finds time to write to my daughter every week. The only cloud on their relationship was when she refused to be confirmed and he started bombarding her with twelve-page letters, until she decided it would be easier to give in. All his five grandchildren lecture him dreadfully, particularly on his clothes – “You can’t wear that awful old shirt” – he takes it like a lamb, rather enjoys it. Children adore him, because he never talks down to them.’

  In the Boer War, the bullet that would have killed his father was diverted by a silver flask in his pocket. One hopes that any prospective bullet that might be given him by Mrs Thatcher is deflected by his wit and great wisdom. There’s p
lenty of life in the old Hogg yet.

  Beverly Harrell

  THIS PIECE WAS written in June 1985, during a trip to Death Valley, while I was writing a book about Patrick Lichfield photographing nude models for the Unipart Calendar. It is interesting, bearing in mind her later fame, to note the reference to Madam Cyn at the end. Having never heard of her, I even spelt her name wrong.

  Beverly Harrell is by any standards a remarkable woman. She has written a best-selling autobiography. She narrowly missed winning a place in the Nevada State Assembly. She lectures to enraptured conventions and universities all over America. But most important of all – she is the madam of the Cottontail Ranch, the most famous bordello in the Wild West.

  While I was staying in Death Valley, California, recently, her Cottontail Ranch burned to the ground. Naturally it was headlines in all the papers.

  Although there was a ‘full house’ at the time, happily all Beverly Harrell’s ladies and their customers escaped unhurt except for red posteriors and extremely red faces from having to charge naked into the twilight leaving their clothes to turn to ashes. Even more heart-warming to animal lovers was the fact that all the prostitutes rushed back through the flames to rescue Miss Harrell’s two poodles and a chihuahua, who were trapped in her blazing bedroom, and then risked their lives setting free the brothel’s three guard dogs, whose kennel had also caught fire.

  Nor was their ordeal over. When the fire engine failed to show up from Goldfield, a town fifteen miles away, the girls and their clients fought the fire themselves. According to the Death Valley Gazette: ‘One “real” brunette was observed spraying the flames with a hose in the altogether, aided by her recent client, who was clad only in a pair of unmatched brown and black socks.’

  As California is the next state to Nevada, I decided to drive over the border and visit Beverly Harrell and her brave girls. As we set out in noonday temperatures of 125 degrees in the shade, my driver pointed out a towering red rock, known as Corkscrew Peak. Appropriately, on the other side of the road, we passed a house built in 1905 entirely from 50,000 bottles consumed in one riotous night’s drinking.

  Brothels were legal in Nevada, my driver explained, and were to that fun-loving, hell-raising state what gourmet food was to France. One man had even produced a Michelin Guide on the subject. Having been given a massive advance by his publishers, he visited thirty-seven brothels, sampling the wares, and star-rating the girls and amenities, which included orgy rooms, jacuzzis, dominance dungeons and even nine-hole golf courses, so the wives had something to do while their husbands were inside. The author must have enjoyed the task for the book is now in its third edition.

  Nevada is obviously proud of its brothels, one of the last relics of the old Wild West. Whenever there’s a town celebration, the tarts, resplendent in satin leotards and fishnet stockings, have their own float.

  Now the driver was pointing out a pretty ranch-style house with a very green, beautifully laid out garden, and a large airstrip. That was the Cottontail’s fiercest rival, he said, Fran’s Star Ranch, which sells T-shirts advertising ‘Fran’s Friendly Fornicating Facilities’ or exhorting you to ‘Have a Good Lay’ or to ‘Support Your Local Hooker’.

  Back in 1978, Fran’s Ranch suffered the same fate as the Cottontail, and burnt to the ground. All the local wives promptly got together and organised a huge street party and several charity dances to raise money for Fran to rebuild the brothel.

  The landscape was getting starker, dust devils swirled, Joshua trees held up their spiky branches like praying hands. ‘Business As Usual’ said a large sign as we swung off the motorway up Frontage Road. At the end, surrounded by nothing but desert, creosote bushes and a few unseen rattlesnakes and coyotes, we found the ruins of the old Cottontail, and Miss Beverly Harrell herself supervising the rebirth of the new one.

  Bulldozers had already spread gravel over the charred ground, and three vast caravans had been towed in, so the girls could carry on working, plus a smaller caravan for Miss Harrell herself.

  ‘This little girl doesn’t sit around,’ she said in the twanging voice of a Damon Runyon hood.

  I was a bit apprehensive about my welcome, but Miss Harrell, a sort of Bette Upper-Midler, was affability itself. Despite orange hair not unlike that of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, reddened eyes to match her square red glasses, and a pallor emphasised by no make-up, she could obviously look extremely handsome when done up.

  Now resting from her labours, she was sitting in her caravan’s shadow, one of the only bits of shelter from the punishingly relentless sun, reading her press cuttings on the fire. On a nearby table, a kitchen pinger ticked away to indicate when time was up for a customer.

  Miss Harrell said she had been off the property when the fire started. ‘I was sad when I first saw the ruins, I shed a tear, but I can’t sit around and cry when eighteen years of blood, sweat and toil go up in smoke. I’ve got too many people depending on me. The fire started because of a gas leak in the water heater. It was a very hot night, a hot wind fanned the flames. Lee, Mona Silver, Susie, Lili and Annie were all working.’

  No, I couldn’t speak with any of them, she said firmly, working girls didn’t like publicity; anyway they were busy at the moment. Glancing at the three caravans, I half expected to see their sides heaving.

  Susie, said Miss Harrell, now gazing meditatively at the charred remains of an aspen tree and a pile of cardboard boxes, had been particularly brave, dragging out the little poodles, Frou Frou and Socks, and the Chihuahua Tinker, who had huddled terrified under the bed. From the caravan window, three furry faces yapped in agreement.

  Even braver perhaps, after the guard dogs, Hooker, Rogue and Jezebel, had been set loose, and were charging panic-stricken round the desert, were the naked clients who helped round them up. The dogs, being very vicious, might easily have had their hands – or something much worse – off.

  ‘The fire engine,’ said Miss Harrell scathingly, ‘could easily have made it. Their excuse’, which she plainly doesn’t believe, ‘was that two fire engines were out of order, and the only one left wasn’t insured to leave the city limits. So the girls had to watch the Cottontail burn down,’ Miss Harrell went on, turning round to check the pinger. ‘They were very shaken, they all lost fantastic wardrobes in the fire.’

  Then one girl wearing only a G-string, and another a pair of pants, and the rest nude, had piled into the car with the six dogs and driven to Tonepah, fifty miles away, where they’d stayed in a motel.

  Miss Harrell refused to elucidate on how her clients got home, but said that with typical Nevadan generosity, the Tonepah locals had asked all her girls out to meals, and, when they returned to the Cottontail, had provided them with clothes, tea and, most important in this heat, ice.

  ‘Conditions are pretty primitive at the moment,’ said Miss Harrell, who is obviously a trooper with a sense of adventure. ‘We’re back in the old 1900 days, when the girls hauled their water, and cooked on camp fires, and the red lantern marked the tent that was being used for sex in a miner’s camp.

  ‘At least we’ve got a freezer and a microwave on the way,’ she went on with satisfaction, and says she plans to build a bigger, ritzier Cottontail, by bringing in four massive 24 foot by 64 foot mobile homes to provide sixteen workrooms for sixteen working girls.

  Although insurance will cover most of her costs, and replace the orgy room and the jacuzzi with the red lights underneath the bubbling water, what saddened Miss Harrell most was the loss in the fire of her collection of old guns, and antiques gathered over a lifetime.

  ‘There were armoires, that’s cupboards, sweetie,’ she explained kindly in her Brooklyn accent, ‘Tiffany lamps, Queen Anne chairs, Sheraton chairs and bordello paintings.’

  She was even more upset at the loss of her library, which included works by ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsch-ee and many books on psychology’, which were read more by her girls than the customers, because the television reception in the area was so b
ad.

  Her customers range from local miners to city slickers and tourists who drive down from Vegas 156 miles away. Richer clients charter planes and land on the 1,000 yard air strip. Her finest hour was when an old cargo plane had engine trouble and was forced to crash land nearby. The crew had such a good time, they stayed on at the Cottontail for nearly a week.

  Next moment two extremely seedy individuals in black shades drove up saying their huge and dusty black car had overheated. Could they use the hose? One jerked his head rather unenthusiastically in my direction. Out of one eye, I could see Miss Harrell frantically shaking her head and waving her palms back and forth.

  What sort of girl made the best prostitute, I asked.

  It wasn’t enough to have a beautiful body and face, replied Miss Harrell, beadily watching the two seedy individuals, who were now drenching the new gravel with precious water. Most beautiful girls were too imbued with their own importance, and too self-centred. A good working girl must be able to listen and be a bit of a psychologist as well.

  ‘The customer may have had a bad day at the office,’ she went on, as we both lifted our feet off the ground to avoid being flooded. ‘Or had a row with his wife. He wants sexual favours, but more than that, he wants someone to talk to.’

  Nevada women were enlightened, she went on, her voice taking on a singsong recording machine quality, as though she was launching into one of her lectures to universities.

  ‘They like the idea of legal prostitution. They would rather their husband went with a working girl than partied around with his secretary, or the wife of a neighbour and broke up a marriage. Wives often drive their husbands out here. Young men of Nevada’, continued Miss Harrell, ignoring the rising tide like Canute, as her voice became positively messianic, ‘are far better sexually educated than in any other state. They are fortunate to have legal brothels where working girls can teach them. Men don’t know unless they’re instructed. Fathers bring their sons here, so they won’t go into their marriages blindly.’