Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  I was working for her. William Morris, her agent, had proposed she capitalise upon her celebrity and make a second fortune by writing a novel. Her approach was pragmatic. She herself did not write; for her diet book she had hired a journalist, for her novel she would hire a novelist.

  On the face of it, the deal appeared good. William Morris believed they could get an advance of $1 million in the USA. Then there was Britain and the rest of the world, probably also a film sale. Judy and I were to split the money 50:50; no fewer than four literary agents were involved, but even after they had taken their percentages my share still looked appealing.

  I’d met Judy the week before in Claridge’s where she had taken up residence. She swept downstairs and came fast across the lobby towards me, a neat, doll-like woman with a suppressed frenzy in the way she moved. She sat down and ordered a beer for me and an orange juice for herself, but we’d barely started talking when she began to shift and look about her restlessly. Suddenly she sprang to her feet. ‘We’ll move there,’ she announced, and set off rapidly across the room. After a moment I picked up her drink and my own and joined her. ‘No, over there,’ she said, as the same inner compulsion drove her to change tables yet again.

  She was very hard to talk to. A naturally plump child, her doctor had prescribed diet pills in increasing massive doses from the age of eight. She’d remained on them until her conversion to the Beverly Hills Diet. Her concentration span was down to about eight seconds.

  She explained to me that the heroine in her novel was herself, this would be her story. But it was a biography with a difference, for it would be the life she wished she had lived. In it, every humiliation she had suffered – and there were many – would become a triumph, every defeat a victory. ‘And I don’t want her wishy-washy,’ she instructed. ‘You heard of Catherine the Great? Like her.’

  In San Lorenzo we discussed the plot. The restaurant was crowded with the usual glitterati, many of whom she knew, for she was serviced by three separate PR consultants working concurrently to set up signings, TV appearances, lunches and parties. She was forever springing up to dart across the restaurant to accost someone. It was hard to keep her on track, but what we agreed to do was tape her real story, then alter everything, substituting white for black, adding lurid colour and frothing the mix into a blockbuster.

  I asked Judy whether the book would be written in the first or third person. She looked at me blankly.

  ‘Will the heroine be ‘I’ or ‘she’?’ I enquired, and explained the advantages and disadvantages of each method, the automatic empathy obtained from the reader if you wrote as ‘I’, the flexibility and wider range of scenes if related as ‘she’.

  ‘I,’ she instructed predictably. Then, a few minutes later over coffee, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking and we’re going to do my novel in first and third person.’

  ‘No, you can’t do that,’ I said.

  She jerked back, it was as if I’d struck her. Her face pinched with fury. She hissed, ‘All my life people have been telling me I can’t do things and I’ve proved them wrong, wrong, wrong! I will do it!’ Her small fist thumped the table so hard the cups rattled.

  Fasten your seat belt, I thought, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

  ‘Why aren’t you thin and pretty like your sisters?’ her mother had asked Judy as a child. Dosed with pills, she had been kept so hungry on her constant diet that at night she picked through her parents’ discarded leftovers. Steak fat became her favourite snack. In her thirties, while living on benefit in Venice, California, Judy took charge of her own case. Becoming her own laboratory rat, she reduced her weight from 170 to 98 pounds. ‘Being fat,’ she stated in her diet book, ‘Has little to do with what or how much you eat. Food fully digested can’t make you fat, it’s only undigested food stuck in your body that accumulates to become fat.’ Proteins should be eaten only with other proteins, carbohydrates with carbohydrates, and high-calorie binges can be offset by corrective feasts of fruit. This was the theory she’d developed into the Beverly Hills Diet.

  Medical reaction to her book, when it came out, was hostile. ‘Ludicrous,’ said the Professor of Nutrition at Columbia University, ‘Not one element of the diet or one sentence in the book has any scientific basis whatever.’ He warned of perforated peptic ulcers together with a risk of cardiac arrhythmia and death. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association identified eighteen major misstatements of simple scientific fact, its authors telling the Los Angeles Times they had found ten times that number of errors but the Journal didn’t have space for any more.

  Medical censure seemed only to increase the book’s sales; Macmillan followed it with The Beverly Hills Diet Lifetime Plan, paying Judy $900,000 as an advance. A week after publication the book was number one in the best-seller list. In November I went to Claridge’s to start taping Judy’s life. That morning, as I walked towards her suite along the normally hushed corridors of the hotel, I could hear from thirty yards away the violent row taking place within.

  The scene inside was one of remarkable confusion. Every piece of furniture was littered with clothes. An agitated task force of two maids, a housekeeper, assistant manager, and a room-service waiter were searching the piles while, like a demented fury, Judy flew between the rooms shrieking abuse as she tore open drawers and closets to snatch up a further armful of clothes and fling them at the staff. She was so overwrought it was minutes before I could fathom what had happened to cause such drama. The belt to one of her Valentino dresses, the one she wanted to wear right now, was missing.

  The response of the hotel employees, and their evident terror under the tongue-lashing of this tiny woman, was due to the fact that, only a week before, the hotel had lost a collar to one of her dresses on the way to or from the dry cleaner. On that occasion Judy had insisted a hall porter be sent to Rome to replace it.

  Refusing to be drawn into the search, I sat down at the writing desk and started to go through my notes, waiting for the storm to pass. Such behaviour on my part was clearly unacceptable to Judy, for it brought on a fresh paroxysm of fury. My apparent calm before the onslaught – a calm I did not feel – so enraged her that, losing all control, she began to pound her fists upon the wall. At that moment the telephone on the desk started to ring.

  No one made a move to answer it. After a few moments I picked it up. ‘This is Lady Rothermere’s secretary,’ said a woman’s voice, ‘I’ve just spoken to her in Jamaica. She says she’s been eating papayas for three days, she has very bad diarrhoea and her anus is inflamed. What should she do?’

  I hesitated … ‘Judy will have to get back to her in that area,’ I said.

  I delivered the draft of a first chapter to Judy. She started work on it at once with a coloured pen while I sat at the writing desk going through the transcript of what we’d recorded. At lunchtime I said I was going out to get something to eat.

  ‘No,’ she told me, ‘I don’t want you doing that. You can eat here today, but not every day because it’s very expensive. From now on you must bring your own food.’

  I ordered a sandwich from room service while she asked for three plates of toast. When it came she removed the top from the paprika bottle she carried with her, emptied it in a mound on the tablecloth and used it as a dip. This was merely an appetiser; when it was finished she took from the closet the gnawed carcass of a chicken, scarred by bite marks. Behind it on the shelf I saw vegetables, nuts, biscuits and the bags of boiled sweets which she sucked constantly.

  While eating she continued work. When she’d finished she threw the grease-stained pages at me. Some of her changes were good, some were not, but, scrawled in green ink, her words might as well have been carved in granite for she would amend nothing. Amongst other additions, she had put in the sentence, ‘In childhood I nailed my foundations.’

  ‘You can’t say “nail”,’ I objected, and she glared at me as I went on, ‘You don’t “nail” foundations, you pour or lay them.’

>   ‘This is my book,’ she snapped, ‘And I’ll say whatever I want. A word means exactly what I want it to mean.’ She fixed me with a look. ‘I’m going to fart,’ she said.

  Judy’s eating habits were eccentric. Sweets, toast, bread rolls … she ate the entire time. Several times each morning she’d mix a rank-smelling paste of bran and yeast which caused welts to raise across her skin and briefly turned her complexion bright red. She had a metabolism like a furnace and a voracious appetite. I arrived at her suite at 10 am one day to find her clutching a roast pheasant in her hands. She consumed it then wiped her bloody mouth and announced, ‘Lord Weidenfeld is gonna publish my novel.’

  ‘Without reading it?’ I asked.

  ‘I sucked him off last night and he promised to buy anything I come up with.’

  She’d sold the UK rights? I didn’t believe it for a moment, but to my astonishment a cheque came through a couple of weeks later. But Judy was discontent. ‘He’s never asked me out since,’ she complained. ‘He only screwed me to get my book.’

  Only two things calmed her, eating and shopping. She was earning literally millions of dollars from the worldwide sales of her diet book; she spent it with an urgent frenzy. She flew everywhere first class, she would drink only Roederer Cristal champagne, she bought clothes and shoes with reckless abandon. She led me through her closets to view her wardrobe of Valentinos, Ungaros and Halstons, indicating her fourteen suitcases and trunks stuffed with originals still in their wrappings. ‘In the next chapter,’ she said, ‘I want to wear this shirt with these $80 pantyhose and this froufy short skirt which shows off my cute little legs and makes me look thin as a minute.’

  The heroine of her novel and her real self became inseparable in Judy’s mind, and as her invitations dwindled she grew more and more demanding. After church on Christmas Day she telephoned as I was helping Jenny prepare lunch. ‘I want to work, I want you to come round,’ she said.

  I told her I couldn’t and she said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m alone and all I got to think about is my novel.’

  One morning we set off for the British Film Institute to research the background of the various Hollywood stars she intended using in her book. On our way there I explained we must be discreet in the library, for we were not BFI members and had no right to use it.

  But she wasn’t listening. ‘I want you to take me to see Randy Newman on Saturday night,’ she said.

  I explained that I was sorry, but I could not. She said, ‘I want you to take me to lunch on Sunday.’

  I explained that I had a date, but surely she knew lots of people … ‘No, I want to be with you,’ she stated. As we drew up outside the BFI she said, ‘I want you to marry me, Jeremy.’

  I passed it off with a laugh, but I was already wound tight, taut.

  She was wearing an ankle-length mink coat and carrying a large paper bag loaded with rolls, bread sticks and pretzels. Marching up to the library counter she issued instructions to a surprised girl who meekly guided her to the shelves, intimidated by such forcefulness. Almost everything the girl produced she rejected as inadequate.

  At last we seated ourselves at a table with a pile of film books. While I went through these making notes, Judy took out her food and began voraciously to eat it, scattering crumbs, complaining loudly of the deficiency of the library and upbraiding me for not working fast enough.

  In that otherwise silent reading room I felt myself growing more and more tense. She thrust a pile of volumes at me. ‘I can’t work here,’ she announced, ‘I want you to take these out.’

  I explained we couldn’t; it was a reference library, and anyway, we were not members. The reason struck her as irrelevant. She strode to the counter. ‘I’m Judy Mazel, the bestselling author,’ she announced. ‘I want to take these with me.’

  Losing this argument drove her to fury. She stamped back to our table and dropped the heavy pile in front of me. ‘Go out and buy these,’ she instructed. ‘Bring them to my suite and we’ll work tonight. Or can’t you,’ she taunted, ‘because you’re going out with your boyfriend? You’re a faggot, aren’t you, Jeremy?’

  I’m a mild man, but something in me snapped. I found myself on my feet, grasping her by the throat and shaking her like a doll while she shrieked and a wild light of triumph flared in her big blue eyes. Everyone in the crowded library had stopped work and was staring at us. I set her down. This could end very badly, I realised.

  By Easter Judy was no longer being interviewed by journalists or invited on to chat shows. Her novel had become all-important; she’d telephone at any hour of the night to discuss it. I’d grown to dread her voice, my nerves would twitch with the effort of restraint. At our meetings she insisted on sitting upon my lap. She had discovered a plot to take her diet book out of the best-seller list; the BMA was trying to suppress her work, she told me.

  The conspiracy against Judy spread wider. I arrived one evening while she was changing to go to a first night with Sir Hugh Casson. The BMA had forbidden magazines to publish news of her, she informed me. They had forced the BBC to cancel her TV show. Her skirt was clinging to her thighs, she could not find a slip. She became hysterical, shaking so hard she seemed about to fall apart. ‘Hold me!’ she ordered.

  In horror and pity I found myself obeying, not knowing what else to do.

  Finally, I completed taping Judy’s life. Now I was faced with the onerous task of changing the real-life Judy Mazel into a bewitching heroine to captivate the reader.

  ‘I’ve taken a cabana at the Marbella Club for the summer. We’ll live there and work on it together,’ she informed me.

  By now my stomach had contracted to a fist; I felt physically sick when I was with her. Explaining that if there was any hope of turning these crumpled, food-stained pages into a novel I needed seclusion to do so, I told her I intended to install myself in West Malling Abbey, a Benedictine religious order living under a vow of silence which permitted no communication with the outside world. In the whole time I knew Judy this was the sole occasion I saw her lost for words.

  She flew to Spain alone, and I did as I’d announced. Over a ten-day retreat I rose at 5 am for matins, spoke to no one, and read nothing published later than the fourteenth century. On my return I holed up in Jenny’s flat and went to work. Occasionally in the gossip columns I read of Judy and the scenes she caused in the Marbella Club through the summer. I mailed her my chapters as I finished them. On the telephone to my agent she expressed her displeasure, and set to rewriting them. In September she returned to London. On the 31st, the last date specified in my contract, I delivered the final chapters to Claridge’s. When I asked at the desk if she was there, the three hall porters shook their heads and stared at me in a strange, speculative fashion. I left the manuscript with them but remained puzzled by their reaction until next day, when I read that Judy had been arrested.

  In Hammersmith Police Station detectives questioned her about a £7,000 cheque which had bounced. There were, it seems, other businesses in London who had provided Judy with goods or services and not been paid. She spent that night locked up in the cells but, next day, her remarkable flair in salesmanship obtained her bail. She fled to California … and that was the last I ever heard of her or of the book.

  27

  Gilston Road

  Mother died.

  Though sudden, it was not wholly unexpected. She was a heavy smoker, attacks of breathlessness had landed her in hospital several times. My brother Hamish, who was living in the basement of Gilston Road, found her – she’d had a heart attack.

  My other brother, David, came up from the school where he worked and the three of us sat in the vacated house and felt utterly weird. Unused to being together, we were in shock, possessed by disbelief and that sense that normal rules don’t hold and the world is made of glass. In the following days the bureaucracy of death was of help to all of us with its rules and conventions, calls to relatives and family friends, and arrangements that had to be made.
/>   My emotions stayed blocked, but my feelings for Mother anyway were ambivalent. I had never been able to forgive her for how she’d acted at the time of Nanny’s death, eleven years before. She had been found in the kitchen, hands still plunged in the sink and her limbs locked rigid with pain. Like a loyal old donkey, she’d gone on working until her body finally gave out and stopped. The hospital found her cancer so advanced it had spread throughout all her organs. The doctor said he’d never seen such an extreme case of malnutrition; for months she had been living on only bread and tea.

  ‘If you’re going to be ill you can’t be ill here,’ Mother had told us as children, and the same was said to Nanny, who’d been with her for sixty-four years. She was sent off to die at her sister’s house in Clapham. I’d been living in France at the time but flew to visit her there. I was so distressed and grief-stricken I reverted to the uptight, emotionally frozen Englishman I thought I’d long left behind me and was unable to tell her how much she’d meant to me, that I admired and loved her unreservedly, and that any good that might exist within me had come from her alone. But I wrote to her every day until she died.

  A week after Mother’s death Jenny told me she’d fallen in love with a talented young musician she had been seeing. And this too was not entirely a surprise, but the actual split was horrible, for we’d never fought and still liked each other. But after six years the relationship had leached out through negligence and the perils of the everyday. ‘I understand, of course I’ll move out,’ I told her. We sat at the kitchen table and drank a glass of wine and such a weight of doom fell upon us we could not speak or move but only weep.

  I moved into Gilston Road to unpack my single suitcase and leather grip in what had been Mother’s room.