Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  All the girls’ rooms were fitted with panic buttons: on the bed, on the mattress where they could be activated by hitting the bed three times, and on all the furniture around the room so that, whatever the customer asked the girl to do, she was always able to reach a panic button whenever she felt that the situation was getting out of hand. There were also recognised code words that, when the girls uttered them, would have us out of our room and into the girl’s in a matter of moments. There were often times when someone was causing a problem but we couldn’t beat him up and throw him out because he was too important and it would be more than our job was worth. We would have to call him ‘sir’ as we gently but firmly escorted him to the door and helped him to pull up his trousers before sending him on his way. While the temptation was always to get a bit rough with them if they caused difficulties, we had to handle these idiots with kid gloves and treat them with respect regardless of how stupidly they had been behaving inside.

  The best thing about working in the posh brothels in the West End was the light relief, and there was certainly plenty of that, thanks to the state-of-the-art sound system and customers who literally seemed to have no shame. There were many times when I and the other security guys had to stuff our fists into our mouths to stop our laughter from being heard as we sat in our secret chamber listening to the extraordinary antics of our social ‘superiors’. It was a real eye-opener.

  Because these girls were earning such shitloads of money, most of them were expected, and prepared, to do a lot of very strange stuff in return. There were the usual common or garden variety perversions: financiers who liked to dress up as babies and get smacked for dirtying their giant nappies or high court judges who wanted the girl to dress up like the matron in the public schools that they had attended years before. There were a surprising number of lawyers, Members of Parliament and Harley Street doctors who wanted nothing more than to be shagged by women with massive strap-on dildos that looked as though they had been designed to hurt. The more educated the client, the kinkier; that was the general rule. Those with higher degrees from Oxford and Cambridge seemed to enjoy cutting off their air supplies to maximise their climax. Perhaps it was all those years they had spent in science class that made them come up with such manoeuvres – or could it be all the free time they had on their hands? Every second ex-public school boy wanted to call his prostitute ‘Mummy’ which makes you wonder how damaged they were by their version of being abandoned by their parents to be raised in an institution, no matter how lavish and well appointed.

  A lot of what went on between the punters and the prostitutes seemed to be only secondarily about sex and more about control and power or, more importantly, the ceding of control and power to someone else. These were important men with a lot of responsibility in their lives and I suppose that perhaps they wanted not to have to be in charge for a change. We are talking about the men who decide the laws by which we are all supposed to live, who decide who goes to prison and who goes free, and who hold the destiny of the United Kingdom, in a very real sense, in their hands. That responsibility must have weighed heavily on their shoulders at times, and shooting their load was how they lightened their burden.

  I remember one very important, very wealthy man in his fifties who would regularly hire three or four expensive girls to strap on massive dildos and fuck him up the arse while he cried out for more. This would literally go on for hours until he must have been bleeding from both ends. We security guards would all wonder how on earth he managed to have a crap after having had such a going-over. It would all start off quite funny, but by the end you couldn’t help but wince at the thought of what the gentleman was putting his body through. It was hard work for the prostitutes, too, and they certainly felt that they had earned their money after a session with him. The girls would have to pause every so often to rest and catch their breath and he would shout, in his plummy accent, ‘Don’t you dare fucking stop! Don’t you dare fucking stop! I’m paying you good money for this! Give it to me good! Come on, Mummy. Who’s been a naughty boy then?’

  This guy was one of our favourites. We used to laugh our heads off whenever he came around. I wish that I could name names, but I can’t so you’ll just have to imagine who it was. Aim high, and you won’t be far wrong.

  The girls despised some of their customers, often with good reason, but there were others who were regular visitors to the establishment of whom they grew genuinely fond – a bunch of well-heeled elderly gents who gave them a lot of money and mostly wanted to talk to them rather than get up to anything saucy, either because they were just too old to have sex, or because they were simply desperately lonely and wanted the companionship of a pretty young woman for an hour or two. They might get jerked off, but then they would want to sit and talk about their lives or their current obsessions. In exchange for listening to these lonely old men, and sometimes for going out with them to a bar or restaurant, the girls received very large sums of money and felt fortunate in doing so.

  While the East End brothels might have feared being closed down by the cops, the West End ones had no such fears, as the police were regular visitors, albeit not in any professional capacity. They were either getting backhanders or free sessions with the girls. Either way, they came out looking very happy with life in general.

  Prostitutes and punters are both victims of stereotyping. Not all the girls are desperate and sad and not all the men are victimisers. I have worked for too long in some of the strangest places to think that it is always easy to pigeonhole people. Take it from me; it isn’t. I have met some serious people who were real gentlemen, and some supposed gentlemen who would kill your grandmother and sell her if they thought there was a market for dead grannies. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and life is not painted in black and white but in multiple shades of grey.

  I have been asked if it was depressing working for the brothels, and I can see where the question is coming from. I am not blinkered. I know that there are some girls for whom prostitution can become a trap from which it is difficult to escape. All I can say now, looking back many years later, is that I didn’t find it depressing at the time because I felt that protecting the girls was a job that somebody had to do, and that it might as well be me as anybody else, especially because I knew that I had the means, the ability and the willingness to do whatever it took to make sure that nothing bad happened to them. The way I saw it, the girls were in a very vulnerable situation, and they were much better off protected than not. Most of the girls were going to be prostitutes anyway, so the alternative to their working in a protected environment was taking to the streets, where any lowlife drug addict could and probably would have had a go at them.

  For me, at the time when I was doing the work, it offered good money and great insight into human nature, and it was a way to keep the money flowing while I continued studying and working hard to become a personal trainer. It gave me the time I needed to work out in the gym and to study, and I was glad for the opportunity. Would I do it now? Well, no. But then I am not the person now that I was then. In those days, the work enabled me to get the proper education that I had never received as a child and adolescent and for that, if nothing else, I was grateful to have it.

  I was also glad that I had put St Leonard’s almost completely behind me, and I was proud of how much I had achieved in the gym despite or perhaps even because of the injuries that I had suffered when I fell off the roof. While I accepted with bitter regret the fact that I would never be a professional boxer, there was no way I was going to let what had happened to me stand in the way of my goal of doing the sort of work I knew that I was best at. A lot of my colleagues in the gym and on the doors were on steroids and other illegal substances that helped to keep them bulked up, but I was built and buff thanks to my own tireless efforts, and I was thinking increasingly of a future in which I wouldn’t have to work for anyone but could be my own boss instead. Quite a few of the men I worked with back then are now dead as a result of th
eir steroid abuse, so, once again, I am deeply thankful that I was never tempted to take drugs of any kind, and I know that the rigorous training I had received in the boxing club had given me the discipline I needed. The physiology courses I had to take as I studied to become a personal trainer also showed me, in graphic detail, what steroid abuse would do to my insides.

  Although I was earning very good money, I did not want to be the hired muscle indefinitely. That was why I was working and studying so hard to acquire all the qualifications I would need to work in some of the best gyms in the country. It was time to move on from all that – and things were just beginning to take off in the more normal circles into which I was gradually moving.

  PERSONAL TRAINER TO THE STARS

  I got lucky when I was offered a job in the Barbican in the City as a free-weights manager. I knew that, if I worked hard and gave the job all I had, this could be a seriously good break for me. The gym in the Barbican was one of the best in the business, and it deserved its stellar reputation because it provided a top service at one of the best locations in London.

  Having successfully completed a series of professional courses, which I had funded in full on my own from the money I made providing security to brothels and working on the doors, I had started doing personal training seriously. Initially, I was still on security detail and doing a little mini-cab driving to pay the rent. The late 1980s was a time when personal trainers were almost unheard of and, in fact, I was one of the very first in the country and often had to sit down and explain exactly what I did to prospective clients who had never heard of the profession. Little by little, as a result of hard graft and being in the right place at the right time, the personal training became the most important element of my career. I got the Barbican gig out of sheer luck, and it certainly helped to launch my new venture. About thirty people had applied for the role, and I just happened to be the one to get the job. I don’t know why they liked me best, but I am certainly very glad that they did.

  The Barbican was definitely the best place for me to be at this point in my life, and it opened a lot of doors for me, both professionally and socially. It also helped with my self-esteem; they would not have hired me if they had thought I was the sort of person Auntie Coral had insisted I would become, would they? Because the Barbican was a top-class gym, it had a lot of very wealthy members from the professional classes and the world of show business, and it was also the gym of choice for many of the world’s celebrities from stage and screen when they were in town for one reason or another. The employees of the gym had to know how to look casual when the likes of Christopher Reeve (Superman!), Jodie Foster, our own Charles Dance, Janet Street-Porter and other celebrities, foreign and home-grown, came in. The regular customers, most of whom were company directors, wealthy lawyers and the like, also tried to look unimpressed as they nonchalantly got on with their own fitness regimes. Of course, they usually failed.

  It would be nice to be able to tell you that I became close personal friends with a lot of my celebrity clients but, while most of them were perfectly cordial and polite whenever I interacted with them, I was one of the help and a personal relationship of any sort wasn’t really on the cards. And, in fact, because of all the non-disclosure agreements that I was asked to sign whenever I worked with someone famous enough to warrant one, I can’t tell you very much about it at all. Suffice to say that I often had to pinch myself to make sure that this was really happening; that this was really me, Paul Connolly, the runt from St Leonard’s children’s home, working with the men and women most people only see on TV or when they go to the cinema.

  Because I had a strong background in boxing, boxing training and elements of the sport were an integral part of what I did. Those unfamiliar with the art of boxing usually don’t realise that training to become a boxer isn’t just about throwing punches and being tough, but is a subtle and complex affair that calls for working on the body’s strength, agility and musculature with a great deal of understanding of anatomy and physiology. Really good boxers know a lot about how their bodies work and, even when they are not very highly educated in an academic sense, they are always very knowledgeable in every practical way that matters to the professional athlete.

  Thanks to my studies, I was now able to approach the subject of personal training from the viewpoint of a boxer and a fitness trainer. Customers were curious about boxing, so most of my clients wanted to do work that integrated elements from that sport with what they already knew from aerobics. I already knew from my own experience that boxing training is the best all-over workout you can get because boxers are not just strong and able to channel aggression but also extremely fit. I quickly realised that elements of boxing training can easily be adapted to the needs of anyone who wants to get fit, from the daintiest young woman to the bulkiest doorman. The clients loved my workouts and enjoyed the elements of boxing that I worked into them, and I started to become quite well known on the fitness circuit at a time when boxing was still, for almost everyone, just for boxers. Word spread about the services I had on offer, and I was often asked, ‘Can I do a bit of one-to-one boxing with you, then?’ Life is strange. I had planned to become a professional boxer, been thwarted in my plans and now I found myself boxing again. In an odd way, my dream had come true, albeit not exactly as I had imagined it as a young kid in the ring at Dagenham Boxing Club.

  Becoming sought after meant that I had to learn how to talk to famous people without appearing star-struck or overly impressed. The last thing the celebrity clients of upmarket clubs want is to have to deal with people fawning all over them, and they are entitled to work out without having to worry about being treated differently to anyone else.

  Nowadays, integrating some boxing training into a workout is old news, but at the time we were the first ones doing it in Britain. We were doing it long before it became hip. We made it hip, in fact. I developed a series of exercises and workouts that was unique to me and started to sell my services all over London to an increasingly eager clientele. I showed my clients how to strap and tape their hands up like real boxers, how to make sure that they were warmed up properly and that their technique was good, and how to cool down and stretch out – all the basic skills that I had learned in the course of my many years in the boxing ring. I combined everything that I knew from my boxing training with the scientific knowledge I had acquired from the studies I had done in working towards becoming a personal trainer.

  My style wasn’t that of a traditional boxing coach. Boxing coaches come from the old school and do ballistics stretches and other exercises that can be unsafe for regular clients who don’t have the strength or fitness to deal with them. I was teaching boxing to the general public, so I had to know how to look after them properly. Not being athletes, most people can’t be trained like boxers. Continuing with my work, I developed a system of exercise called BoxerobicsTM and started my classes at Dance Works on Oxford Street, another gym with a top-notch clientele. I was proud of what I was doing, because I felt that my work was not just providing me with a living, but also making a positive difference in the lives of the people who signed up to use me as their trainer. I could see for myself how they felt better physically and better about themselves psychologically as they became more fit, stronger and healthier.

  Things were going very well, but I still had to do a little door work in the evenings to pay the bills. Then something fantastic happened. The media started to notice me.

  Because of the high profile of the gyms where I was working, not to mention of the celebrity clients and media types who frequented those gyms, and the growing popularity of boxing training as a keep-fit method, Time Out did a magazine piece on me, and Health and Fitness magazine started to do a weekly segment on me too. Other health and leisure publications quickly followed suit. At the time, I was the only personal trainer in London doing boxing, BoxerobicsTM and boxing training. In fact, I was one of the very few personal trainers in London at all, as this was a profession th
at was then in its infancy. While some trainers were offering boxing exercises without knowing anything about boxing, and some boxing coaches were opening classes to the general public with no awareness of what ordinary health-club members can achieve and what is too dangerous for them to attempt, I was able to straddle both worlds. I discovered that I was a very good communicator, and much more articulate than I had previously thought. It didn’t seem to matter that I had dropped out of school young; I was still more than able to get my ideas across in a way that my clients could understand and appreciate.

  As I was becoming well known and acquiring a healthy reputation in London and around the country, I attracted the attention of a company called Pickwick Pictures that was planning to make a fitness video with a beautiful Australian supermodel named Elle MacPherson, who went by the moniker ‘The Body’ because, it was said, she had the most perfect physique of any woman in the world. I was approached by Pickwick Pictures while I was working in the Barbican.

  ‘We want to make a video called The Body Workout, with Elle MacPherson,’ they explained, ‘and we need to have some boxing in it. We’ve heard that you are the man for boxing. Would you be interested in working on the pilot for the video?’

  Even I had heard of Elle MacPherson but I tried to look unimpressed as though I worked with celebrities of her calibre all the time.

  ‘Perhaps. I’m quite busy. I’ll have to check my schedule.’

  ‘OK. Look, we’ll do some work in London and then we’ll fly you over to America and we’ll see how we get on. Does that sound good to you?’