It was brilliant getting paid for being curious, and having the licence to ask anything I wanted. After I put my page to bed, I’d go to a gallery opening then a play, then a gig; my page was the Insider’s Guide to Going Out, and I was the Insider, so Going Out was my job and London was my oyster. But there was no time to write. So I went freelance. And immediately went nuts. Now, instead of writing, I was researching and pitching ideas, panicking, eating peanut butter out of the jar and watching double bills of ER, kidding myself it was useful to watch drama because it would embed brilliant ideas about story structure in my head. My evenings were dedicated to obscure fringe theatre, some of it brilliant, most of it not. A low point was watching an avant-garde puppet play about vampires with rock songs blared out in Catalan while puppet Draculas bit puppet virgins and puppet cherubs frottaged merrily above.
By now I also had another distraction from writing. I was going out with a graffiti artist. We met in the bookshop he worked at, and, uncharacteristically, I set out to seduce him. It took a month or two, and several visits to the shop. First I tried wearing short skirts and reaching for books on high shelves, then I started ordering books with flirtatious titles. When I turned up in red lipstick and asked for Darian Leader’s pop-psychoanalysis book Promises Lovers Make When it Gets Late, he finally asked me out. We went out for nearly a year. A brilliant year, in lots of ways. He played me old records, which we danced to, in his garden. He tagged my books. The other day, looking up a recipe, I found, on the inside cover of the cookbook, a lazy, lolling pear with twinkly eyes he’d sketched in fat blue pen, now slightly faded. On holiday in Paris, instead of going to the Louvre, we wandered the banlieues looking at graffiti he’d heard was particularly good. It was romantic at the time. But it wasn’t love. When we broke up, I still didn’t commit to theatre. Instead I threw myself into work. I interviewed the President of Moldova, in the icy capital, Kishinev, and flew to Genoa to meet James Thiérrée, who looks just like his grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, has his own circus, and can play the violin on roller skates. But it had never been my dream to be a journalist, and I felt I was floundering.
If only I’d spent my twenties trying to be more like Neely than Anne. If only I’d read other books. I wish I’d been a fan of lady detectives; one career where women are almost over-represented in fiction is crime-fighting. But most of all, I wish I’d read Lace. I’ve always avoided Shirley Conran’s novel because I thought it was just another bonkbuster. It’s a curveball to read it now and find out it’s really a career woman’s handbook.
Although the story runs from 1943 to 1980, Lace was published in 1983 and is catnip to anyone who grew up in the Eighties. The hair is huge, money equals happiness and glitz is king. Take, for example, ‘Kate’s huge, quiet living room. Leopard-skin and tiger-skin cushions were strewn on the couch, which ran thirty feet along the depth of the room. Above them hung a collection of paintings and engravings of tigers and leopards . . . The wall opposite consisted entirely of panels of smoked-mirror glass, each concealing liquor, games, TV, stereo, projector and other valuable clutter.’ So airy, that ‘other valuable clutter’! It’s all very Bret Easton Ellis (no relation). Lace makes me crave the sharp, heady scent of Elnett hairspray, and leopard print. A look I’ve never liked. But I do now own a leopard-print scarf. I got to the end of Lace and just couldn’t help myself.
To get the filth out of the way, yes there’s plenty. I’ll never look at a lemon meringue pie in the same way again, and I will never, ever date a man who keeps a goldfish. But the filth is not the point. The point is work.
Conran’s four heroines meet in Switzerland where Judy is studying French and waitressing to pay her way. She doesn’t have rich parents like Maxine, Pagan and Kate, who are at finishing school dreaming about boys, and she wants money, independence and challenging work. Conventional Maxine tells her if she marries well she won’t need to work. ‘Wanna bet?’ replies Judy. That’s how hardboiled she is. They vow to stick together through thick and thin (in Maxine’s thick French accent it comes out as ‘sick and sin’). Slowly they come round to Judy’s view that work is what counts.
Conran lards the novel with lovingly detailed descriptions of how to run an interior design consultancy and turn a crumbling champagne estate into a multimillion tourist destination (Maxine), raise a fortune for cancer research (Pagan), become a top publicist (Judy), a war reporter (Kate) or start a magazine for new, independent women (Kate and Judy). She gives the fifth heroine, enigmatic Lili, a success story too, as she beats poverty, neglect and exploitation to become a serious actress and international film star. Lili drives the novel with her explosive opening question, ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’ You have to read all 700-odd pages to find out. Now that’s storytelling.
At first I like Maxine best. She travels, first class, with nine maroon leather suitcases, stamped in gold with her initials and coronet (she’s a countess). She eats a little caviar (no toast), a tub of home-made yoghurt, a peach from her hothouse and drinks a glass of champagne. She brings her own silver spoon to eat with (well, she’s got to fill those nine suitcases with something). She makes notes, in a duplicate book and on a tape recorder. Conran devotes whole paragraphs to expounding Maxine’s tried and tested method for taking notes, not forgetting to tell us that her pencil is solid gold.
Maxine has come a long way since she was a chubby teenager hoping to attract a husband. Encouraged by the others, she gets her teeth done, has a nose job and a radical haircut, plucks her eyebrows, diets and spends hours rolling away her plump thighs with a rolling pin (does this even work?). Newly svelte, she attracts a sexy skier but decides she doesn’t want to marry. She wants to be ‘une sérieuse’! She persuades her father to let her spend her dowry on studying interior design and leasing a shop, and eventually she marries a client who admires her business acumen as much as her beauty. Though he does also fancy her. They have a lot of rampant sex, and when she wears underwear to a party after he’s told her not to, he stops the car, throws her knickers over a hedge and spanks her. I did say there was filth.
Pagan is more ramshackle, i.e. less intimidating. She evolved her ‘carelessly marvellous’ style during the war when she ran out of clothes and started plundering her dead father’s wardrobe, and then her grandmother’s. Now she’s eccentric, vintage, thrown-together, fabulous. She bags an Arab prince as her first lover, dark and flashing-eyed and every other cliché. Abdullah’s been taught the arts of love by a wise old man in Cairo, and is expert in deferring his own pleasure and giving women undreamed-of delight. This is not a skill shared by Pagan’s first husband, a bad banker called Robert. Robert first goes out with Kate. When he decides Pagan is a better investment, he lies to both women and manipulates Pagan into marriage. He is icy, snarling and a terrible lover, and when Pagan asks him to take a bit longer, he calls her ‘frigid’ and a ‘castrating bitch’ (how I don’t miss those Eighties insults). She uses the kitchen egg-timer to establish she can masturbate to climax in only five minutes and confronts him. He responds by raping her. (This is not the only rape in the book – Conran is very clear that some men really do hate women.) She leaves, but her spirit is broken and all she can do is hide in a gloomy cottage and drink herself into oblivion. She’s eating baked beans laced with vodka out of the dog bowl, dressed in gumboots, old riding breeches and nothing else, when Kate rides to the rescue. Women are, pleasingly, always rescuing women in Lace, which makes a nice change from the backbiting and husband-stealing that go on in Valley. Pagan falls in love, then, with Christopher who is definitely a Good Man – he is so good that he has dedicated his life to trying to cure cancer. While Robert just wanted her to be a society hostess, Christopher encourages her to find her vocation, so she starts raising money for his research and soon realises she loves work too. And – women helping women again – Judy mentors her.
Kate also starts out floundering and uncompetitive, perpetually attracted to men as overbearing as her father. After Robert, she marr
ies an architect who criticises her underwear from a design perspective. And while she’s with this knickers snob she has not one orgasm. She always fakes.
Judy (again) helps Kate out of the marriage into (obviously) work. Kate becomes a journalist and a writer, with Judy acting as life coach and cheerleader. She gives Kate an alarm clock (a gold one, from Tiffany’s) to help her get up two hours earlier every morning to write her books. One is called Danger! Women at Work, which could almost be an alternative title for Lace. Then Kate dreams up a magazine. Her pitch is: ‘It’s 1970 and the Sleeping Princess is waking up. She’s got her own job, her own money, she can make her own rules and run her own life.’ I wish VERVE! really was a magazine – I’d buy it. Editing it gives Kate the confidence to seek her own pleasure – and she gets it. Never have I read a book in which the female orgasm is taken so seriously as a right worth fighting for. It does make Lace a jubilant read.
But sex is still not as important as work. Which is why Lace makes Riders (which came out three years later) look deeply old-fashioned in the way it presents women’s roles, and Valley positively antediluvian. It’s also why career girl Judy is Lace’s real heroine. Growing up with a father who was often out of work, Judy ‘thought about financial security the way other girls did about Prince Charming’. She doesn’t want to end up having no life, like her mother. She doesn’t believe marriage guarantees anything: work will bring her security, money, independence and impact. She starts out as a secretary in Paris, always on the lookout for opportunities and living as frugally as she can. With admirable ingenuity she uses an electric iron as a stove (the linen setting for eggs or toast, the wool setting for stews). She becomes a couturier’s manager and publicist but doesn’t want to play second fiddle to anyone so off she goes to New York. It’s Maxine’s husband who assures her she’s old enough to set up her own PR agency. ‘You’re nearly twenty-three, Judy,’ he says. ‘A woman of that age is not too young to be responsible for little children, so why not for a little business?’ Perhaps Conran is using her character as a mouthpiece but who cares, when it’s such good advice? Judy’s soon the hottest press agent in the world.
Through all this, she’s been supporting and empowering other women. Her vision for VERVE! is that it will ‘give its readers the support that she had found in Kate, Maxine and Pagan . . . Alone their frailties might have overwhelmed them. Together they had strength and speed and style.’ They are also all fabulously immodest about their ambitions, and I love the scene where they’re honoured with tea at Buckingham Palace, and go round saying what they wish they’d been taught when they were younger. (This is Conran on her soapbox again, but it’s entertaining – and useful.) Pagan wishes she’d been taught to earn her own living, Kate that she’d learned to handle her finances, Maxine would like to have been warned there would be trouble ahead, and Judy wishes she could have unlearned the idea that a woman needs a man for status or protection.
She does want a man in her life, though. Publishing magnate Griffin Lowe does not seem to be the answer when he approaches her at a work do and suggests they run away to dinner. She can’t, she says; she’s working. He replies ‘No need to, if I say you’re not.’ The rotter! Judy walks away, but at the end of the evening when she leaves last, like the consummate professional she is, and finds Griffin waiting outside in his Rolls-Royce to offer her a lift home, she takes it. And doesn’t ask him in. Cool as a cucumber is Judy. They do end up going out. And she makes him respect her by punishing him for acting thoughtlessly; she leaves him tied up, his clothes slashed to ribbons, on her bed, covered in lemon meringue pie, and when he protests, she tells him he was once a Boy Scout and ought to be able to work out how to free himself.
She is honest about her mixed feelings. Although she doesn’t want to be dependent for her happiness on anyone, she does fantasise about marrying Griffin. Yet when his wife gives him a divorce and he rushes round to ask her, she doesn’t jump to say yes. She reasons it out. She loves him, but she loves her independence too. She worries that he’s got into the habit of cheating on his wife, and doesn’t want to become that wife. And – massive, capital-letter SPOILER ALERT – she also has another reason to say no. It turns out she is Lili’s mother – as a teenager, in Switzerland, she got pregnant and paid for the baby to be fostered. But Lili’s foster mother took her on holiday to Hungary, they got caught up in the revolution, and Lili went missing, presumed dead. It’s incredibly moving when they are reunited. Judy decides this is a ‘firmer bond’ than any marriage could be, and so she’ll stay with Griffin as long as it lasts but won’t marry him. Because, you know, since feminism, who needs to be bound by the marriage plot?
Although Judy is wonderful, I worry that I’m choosing the wrong heroine again. Judy says herself that Kate’s the only one with any talent, while her role is to push her into using it. Yet again I’ve been attracted to the handmaiden not the princess, the cheerleader not the star. For a moment I have the alarming thought that maybe I want heroines so I can be their best friend and loyal sidekick without ever facing the challenge of becoming a heroine myself.
Towards the end of my twenties, I started a theatrical history column for the Guardian. It meant several heavenly hours a week in the sepulchral gloom of the Theatre Museum’s underground archive, rummaging through old playbills and programmes and photographs of long-forgotten starlets and matinee idols. One afternoon, I was reading about the premiere of A Taste of Honey, a play which shocked audiences in 1958 with its story of a working-class white teen who goes out with a black sailor, gets pregnant and, after he goes away to sea, sets up house with her gay friend, who will be a surrogate father to the baby. Critics thought the playwright Shelagh Delaney was trying to be like the Angry Young Men, and that women shouldn’t really be angry. But the play’s firebrand director Joan Littlewood said at least Delaney knew what she was angry about. I gazed at a picture of Delaney in a big coat, collar up, cigarette dangling, staring fearlessly at the camera – an image Morrissey loved so much that he used it as the cover of the Smiths’ album, Louder than Bombs. Delaney looked like she knew what she wanted and could take on anyone. Her rage and sense of purpose suddenly made me feel that I was doing everything all wrong. Just as Anne had supported Lyon’s and Neely’s ambitions instead of developing her own, here I was, delving into archives instead of breaking new ground; writing about theatre instead of making it.
Delaney threw herself at A Taste of Honey, and Susann gave everything she had to Valley. I tried to do the same. I wrote a play and gave it a title from one of Sylvia Plath’s strange, intense love letters. ‘I am living now,’ she wrote, ‘in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought’. My play Patching Havoc was inspired by my first relationship – its heroine’s fiancé was in love with God. In my favourite scene, she challenged him to make a bush burn, and he set fire to a pot plant. The play was jagged and messy, but it had more sincerity than all my previous safe, careful, perfectionist plays put together. I’d written it seriously, and selfishly, and sitting in the dark at the final performance I thought I’d finally worked something out. I watched my heroine, who also had a cake saved from her bat mitzvah, decide to change her life, and take The Cake out of the freezer, actively choosing to wreck it and start again. She ended the play watching it defrost. I had a stack of plays I wanted to write, but that wasn’t what was making me feel so free. I’d worked out how to work. Now it was time to work out how to love.
9
CATHY EARNSHAW
IF THIS WERE a novel, I wouldn’t let my heroine fall tempestuously in love three times in a row. It would make her seem fickle and unserious. It would strain credulity. But I had a lot of catching up to do. Since Cambridge, apart from the graffiti artist, there’d been only flirtations, unrequited crushes and the obligatory fling with an actor. But I was one year off thirty, most of my friends were in relationships, and I was conspicuously not. And I’d been reading Wuthering Heights.
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bsp; I’ve read Wuthering Heights every year since first finding it at twelve. In the run-up to my birthday I get out my copy and sink into it like a hot bath. Often actually in a hot bath, with a glass of wine. Wuthering Heights is, for me, so synonymous with love that reading it is almost as satisfying as having a romance. Cheesy though French film posters are, I have one of the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film on my bedroom wall; in French it’s, pleasingly, Les Hauts de Hurlevent. When I dress up for parties or dance around my kitchen, my soundtrack is always Kate Bush’s heart-lifting song. Wuthering Heights is a book I think about, one way or another, every day. At 29, I tried to live by it.
I thought my Cathy moment had come. I wanted intensity. I wanted to be swept off my feet by avalanche love. Love that would make me dance like a moonstruck sprite; Bush based her video on Oberon’s wild, wired performance in the film. I was trying to ditch my inner good girl. I was doing more theatre, at last, and I loved the late nights, drinking red wine and banging tables and talking about stagecraft, and the deep concentration of the rehearsal room, where we would unpack the characters I’d dreamed up alone in my room. I wrote a play about a puppet called Martin and three angry women – his best friend, his enemy and his ex-lover; the women were also the puppeteers so poor, hapless Martin couldn’t escape them. I was binge-writing until dawn. I was even being cavalier about the washing up. I was also powering through my Sopranos box set and lusting after Tony Soprano even though I knew he was a bad man (possibly because he was a bad man). I liked the glint in his eye, and I thought going out with a man like that would help me be a bit more wild. To which end I was writing a play about rewilding Scotland, and reintroducing wolves. I was inhaling Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves and trying to find the incorrigible, dangerous wild woman she promised was in me somewhere. When I interviewed a gamekeeper on a remote Highlands estate, he invited me into an enclosure of wild boars. I hesitated, and he laughed at me for writing about wild animals when I was so obviously scared of them. I’d even been scared of his dog. And the dog didn’t have tusks. I said I’d always tried to write about what I fear and what I desire. He turned off the electric fence for a moment and in I went, and the wild boars roared. It was researching this play that made me start eating meat again after eighteen years. I was pushing at the boundaries. Things were shifting.
How To Be A Heroine Page 16