Cooper often wrote about being hard up and mentioned that she and Leo would have ‘starved’ unless she had been able to sell her short stories, so it was something of a shock to discover that they lived in a huge house on Putney Common, right next to the Dimblebys. Cooper’s Sloaney, upper-class tone earned her the epithet ‘Jolly Super’ at Private Eye, a nickname she turned to her own advantage with her ‘Supercooper’ and ‘Jolly Superlative’ collections of columns.
These two Sunday stars, Whitehorn and Cooper, were so big in their day they were satirised in a funny novel, Sunday Girl, by Lee Langley, where the madcap columnist runs out of true-life incidents to write about, and so starts inventing them for her Sunday column.
Jilly Cooper delighted the Sunday Times readers for 13 years, and then joined the new Mail on Sunday in 1982. But although she stayed there for seven years, filling the column started to became a struggle, and the strain was starting to show. Also, the zany life she chronicled was not coming over so irrepressibly amusingly now that she was middle-aged.
In common with most of the ‘first ladies’ Cooper also did interviews with big-name people of the time for the Sunday Times. And again, her byline was as important as the subject of the interview.
Cooper amusingly mythologised herself but her really big career is as a writer of bestselling blockbuster novels, and this is where her reputation will probably rest.
The four ‘first ladies’ who stormed their way into the male-dominated newspaper world of the 1970s were considered outrageous for their day, and between them they continually pushed back the boundaries of what it was acceptable to say in print. Katharine Whitehorn’s famous ‘slut’ feature mightily offended many of the housewives of her day and another column she wrote on ‘smelly grannies’ was also considered highly offensive.
Jilly Cooper’s revelations about her infertility and details about her intimate operations also seemed a shocking thing to read over breakfast on a Sunday. At the time readers were simply not used to finding themselves confronted by such topics in the serious newspapers, but these columnists paved the way for the even more intimate revelations and disclosures of later women journalists.
(One only has to think of Liz Jones telling all about her marriage to writer Nirpal Dhaliwal; a genuine no-holds-barred account that make Cooper’s coy revelations seem like something out of a Victorian novel. And then Dhaliwal, a talented writer himself, 16 years Jones’s junior, hits back with his own account of their marriage, writing not just about his own infidelities but how his many partners compare with each other. Dhaliwal is writing – refreshingly – about his own experiences as a highly sexed Indian man desperately trying to go to bed with as many Western women as he can, and this kind of stuff is assumed to be as fascinating to the reader today as Cooper’s chronicles of domestic chaos were in the 1970s.)
It was rare that any of the husbands of the four First Ladies ever got a chance to strike back. In any case, the impression given was that they were all blissfully happily and faithfully married, and there was never any hint of the husband’s inability to perform in bed.
This is in dramatic contrast to Australian journalist Amanda Platell, who has written columns giving details about her boyfriend’s erections, or lack of them, and naming him as well as shaming him.
Julie Burchill, another major and highly revelatory talent, landed her first job in journalism was as a ‘hip young gunslinger’ on the New Musical Express, where it soon became clear she was head and shoulders above all the other writers on the paper, although how exactly one could be either hip or a gunslinger at the International Publishing Corporation’s extremely staid offices, has never been revealed.
However Burchill-watchers were not surprised when she was offered a big-byline column in the Mail on Sunday, then edited by Stewart Steven. Burchill managed to entertain and infuriate the reading public in equal amounts week after week and, again, has laid every aspect of her private life completely bare for the reader.
Readers who have followed her columns and writings know that she has been married three times, first to Tony Parsons, secondly to Cosmo Landesman and thirdly to Daniel Raven, that she has two sons, neither of whom she brought up, that she lives in Hove, has struggled with weight problems and drug addiction, and has had eight sexual partners. Burchill has also written about the sexual prowess, or lack of it, of her various lovers and husbands, and about her lesbian affair with Daniel Raven’s sister Charlotte.
When given the chance, women journalists have almost always proved themselves to be vastly more uninhibited and far less hidebound than their male counterparts.
The ‘first ladies’ gave female journalists a prominence they had never previously enjoyed, and they each became public figures, at least during the lifetime of their columns. They were famous names, their columns were both prominently and highly promoted, and they were hugely well paid. But the era was not to last. For most later female columnists, such as The Times’ Libby Purves, their newspaper column is just one aspect of a portfolio career – a necessary precaution in these days where there is no security of tenure in any journalistic job.
In the days of the ‘big four’ light, frothy, personal columns were rare in newspapers. But nowadays it is difficult for any one columnist to stand out and columns are seen as a cheap way of filling up space – compared with sending reporters out on real stories, and what used to be known as newsgathering.
Former newspaper editor Bernard Shrimsley regards columnists as the ‘sauce’ in a newspaper and reckons that a ‘lipsmacking’ flavour disappeared from the Daily Express when Jean Rook died. Can you invent columnists, Shrimsley asked, and answered: ‘Trouble is, true stars make it all look so damned easy’
Shrimsley has also said that one reason for the proliferation of columns nowadays is that they are cheap to run and, from the look of them, very few columnists these days stray far from their ivy-clad manors: ‘This is a far cry from the days of the First Lady of Fleet Street (peace be upon her) who wouldn’t board a Jumbo without a top cameraman alongside, and one she chose because he could be trusted to help her with the luggage and not help her with the interviews.’
Many later columnists, such as Deborah Orr of The Independent and Rebecca Tyrrell of the Sunday Telegraph, are reporting mainly from the domestic arena; they rarely go out and get stories as Jean Rook, Lynda Lee-Potter and Jilly Cooper did.
The original – and best – First Ladies were out there, true professionals, not just reporting from the home front but interviewing all the celebrities of the day, establishing a huge range of contacts and earning their vast salaries.
The real sadness is that so many journalists who were big, or even household, names in their day, are soon forgotten when their columns no longer appear. Few, if any, of today’s young journalists have even heard of Jean Rook, Katharine Whitehorn or Lynda Lee-Potter, although Jilly Cooper remains well known because of her bestselling novels. But they need to be remembered and honoured because, as Jean Rook said, they created ‘massive openings’ for today’s confident young journalists who are, mostly, completely unaware of the debt they owe to these brave, outspoken and trailblazing first ladies.
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