by Judith Wills
It’s the suit. A quite ghastly two-piece skirt suit, knee-length, turquoise (yes, turquoise) in the style of Chanel but actually from Oxford Market, price £1 5s. Nearly a whole week’s cleaning wages for my mother. Made of some tweed-like material, thick, unyielding, ITCHY.
Also of course, I’m sweating. Boiling hot London day, bulky jacket, tights, blouse complete with pussycat neck bow tied too tightly, long sleeves, cheap nylon. So I’m sweating with the suit and sweating with nerves and wondering if I’ve got BO and dark patches showing through my jacket yet, and in this state I arrive at New Fleetway House – a less than prepossessing concrete office block nearly underneath the Holborn Viaduct. Shall I just leave now? I don’t want this job anyway. Who’d want to work in a place like this? Well, I do. Actually I do, very much.
Having negotiated the utilitarian entrance, the manual lift and a short stretch of windowless corridor, it really is like a Wizard of Oz or Through the Looking Glass moment, when all suddenly becomes light and beauty and bustle and glamour, the dream turns good, if rather quirky.
I stand like Dorothy/Alice surrounded by the Beautiful People who make Fabulous Magazine come true every week. I know them all because Fabulous Magazine is so cool it actually prints photos of the people who work there on its pages; it makes them its own mini-celebs. And, as I said, I am a reader. A fully paid up, order it from my newsagent, reader, from the very first issue which had The Beatles on the cover.
And I can see John Fearn, the art editor with the bowtie; Maureen ‘Mo’ who does the letters page. Heather Kirby the fashion editor. My God, there’s June Southworth who writes the Fab features and gets to mix with the stars each week. And here’s this ethereal gorgeous person, Anne Wilson, who is the ‘Ed’s Sec’ (for this is how ‘editor’s secretary’ is written each week in the mag). Anne Wilson is famous to us readers because she is so slim and lovely she is often used as a model on the pages of Fabulous. And now Anne Wilson is drifting over to me, smiling at me. It’s her job I have come to try to win.
What a joke. What a nerve.
‘Can I help you?’
Grab the side of a desk to stop myself running away.
‘JudithWillscomeforjobinterview.’ All in a rush.
Just smile, Mother had said. I smile but my lips have stuck to my gums and I can’t undo them. My suit’s the worst thing. They’re all wearing flower power, floaty things – even the men. God, what can possibly be worse than wearing the Wrong Clothes?
Then after a while Anne leads me through the inner sanctum door and there she is. The most envied woman in the teenage world. Unity. Unity Hall. The editor. Or ‘Ed’ as she is known to us readers. Her Ed’s Letter each week tells tales of who she’s met, which pop hero has come to the office, what great press parties she’s been to. Her life is so glamorous it’s even off the scale of my vivid imagination and here she sits before me in her Fabulous office at her Fabulous desk looking Fabulous – if with a slightly dodgy Cleopatra haircut and eyebrows, I later bitchily decide.
God knows what she thinks of my suit, my sweat, my accent, my red eye, my sheer all-embracing inability to talk or persuade her as to why she should employ me; my lack of personality or a trace of common sense.
‘Previous experience as a secretary, dear?’
None.
‘Qualifications?’
Poor A levels in English Literature, which may or may not be useful here, and Economic History, which definitely won’t, and shorthand and typing.
It was the shorthand and typing which was almost to be my downfall. For after a fifteen-minute interview, Unity decided that I had to have a practical test.
‘Just get your notepad out, dear, and I’ll dictate you a little letter and you can use Anne’s typewriter to type it out.’
My brain froze and hands shook as she dictated a letter to Cyril Maitland, Fabulous’s photographer in Los Angeles. I was so excited to have a letter to Cyril Maitland dictated to me by the editor of Fab that actually taking the dictation was not possible. When I came to type it up, all there was on the pad were a few meaningless squiggles in no known shorthand language. So I sat at Anne’s Olympia and decided to improvise the missing bits. In other words, I made it all up.
After I’d finished my fiction, an hour passed, during which time I sat, virtually in an hypnotic trance brought on by my nerves, a dreadful thirst and utter disbelief that I’d managed to get into this space, the holy grail of my young teen years. At some point someone offered me a cup of tea but I had to refuse – what if I spilled it down my front?
Then I’m summoned back into Unity’s office for the verdict.
She’s talking to me about how bad my shorthand test was. And I’m agreeing, and nodding and trying to look okay about it, and babbling, ‘Well, never mind, it was great to meet you; thanks for seeing me anyway …’.
She finally gets a word in, shouting.
‘NO DEAR – I DO want you to work for me! I’M OFFERING YOU THE POST.’
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’
‘I want you to have the job!’
‘But why? – you just said you haven’t seen a worse effort at transcribing in years!’
‘YES, DEAR – well I expect you’ll improve, and I like you,’ Unity boomed. ‘In fact I think your letter to Cyril was better than mine!’
I reckoned she just felt sorry for me and hadn’t the heart to turn me away. It wasn’t until years later that I cottoned on to the fact that all the best magazine stories are made up, so she no doubt thought my letter showed true promise.
And thus I was to start as Ed’s Sec in one week’s time.
I’d landed the job of my dreams.
WOW, COOL, GROOVY, WOW, COOL, FAB!
• I’m the new Ed’s Sec of Fabulous.
• I work just off Fleet Street.
• I don’t have to get in until 10 a.m.
• I am earning £4 10s a week on a three-month trial basis.
• Soon I may be able to afford a new dress, a floaty dress.
• I can talk to John, Anne (who is still at Fab, promoted, appropriately, to beauty editor) and Mo, just by shouting from my desk. Not that I would. As John says a few days into my new job, ‘What did Unity employ you for? – You wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’
• I can even see Doug Perry when he comes in once a week. He works for Radio Luxembourg (London), which is an even more glam job than working for Fab, and writes the Fab Luxy column. He’s rather nice.
• And I might get to see some of the stars who come in to see us hoping for a paragraph or two, or even a whole feature written about them.
• I now know the true meaning of the phrase ‘deliriously happy’. For I truly am.
• Well, 75 per cent deliriously happy; 25 per cent shit scared. How the hell am I going to pull it off?
two
Now and Always
AUTUMN 1967
Brian Epstein died in August. BBC Radio 1 was launched on 30 September. It was a Saturday, but I got up early to listen as Tony Blackburn introduced the first song – The Move, ‘Flowers in the Rain’. The leak above my bed was mended, the drip stopped, but the landlord still hasn’t given me a key to my bedroom door.
Now let’s talk about Doug Perry.
We only had one date.
He asked me out, but instead of doing the sensible thing and just allowing myself to be taken on a date, what did I do?
Yes, of course – I invited him round for a meal at the bedsit. Of course I did.
It did make sense to me in that split second I found myself inviting him so it’s completely useless now to want to scream at my young self, ‘WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU THINKING OF? DON’T DO IT.’
I’d been in London for three months and was yet to make any female friends in town. Perry was the first person of either sex who had shown any interest in me whatsoever. And I just wanted to be grown up and to be liked and to be cool, and I thought that was what nice grown up cool people did – invite friends round to their pad for
a meal.
But there was a problem, the first in quite a long line of problems relating to my liaison with Mr Perry – I couldn’t cook: hell, I could not cook. Years of moving home and family ructions and a mother who spent long spells in various hospitals with depression and other ills had ensured that somehow being taught the rudiments just never happened.
Mother also spent a fair bit of her civilian life with her friend Mrs Hill, whom she’d met in the Ashurst Clinic in Oxford. Mrs Hill had undergone a frontal lobotomy to try to curb her antisocial urges, which included trying to kill cats and other small mammals. For many years, from when I was about 9 to about 17, Mother had a strange fascination for this woman.
‘I Put a Spell on You’. Was that Nina Simone?
By the time I was 11, old enough to show an interest in how food got on the table, we were actually living with Mrs Hill and her three youngest children. And to live successfully as an outsider in the Hill household, you had to a) obey the rules and b) be neither seen nor heard. So activities such as playing music, making a noise or creating mess or disruption to the household of any kind – including cooking – were out.
Later, we left the Hill home in Botley and for two years Mum and Dad tried to make another go of living together. They split up again, Mum and I moved to the caravan, and I still didn’t cook, except for one time when I was nearly 16.
Mum’s tired. She does all these cleaning jobs and then she walks up the steep road to the top of Botley where Mrs Hill lives, then back down again. I think I’ll cook our tea today. It can’t be that hard. She’s bought two small breaded fish fillets and chips.
So I turn on the small gas ring and the grill. I grill the chips and one minute they’re white and pasty, the next minute they’re black. I fry the fillets but I don’t know you have to put fat in the frying pan and they stick to the bottom. She’s sitting there, watching Nationwide, and waiting. So I serve it up. The chips are still not cooked inside. The fish is in small pieces. She smiles, trying hard not to mind about the waste of money, and we have a tin of pilchards instead. And I’m definitely not going to be cooking for her any more, well, not for a long while.
I could not cook, and I didn’t cook. But that didn’t stop me inviting Doug Perry round for dinner. I offered him steak, chips, vegetables, apple pie and custard. I remember telling him the menu when I invited him, standing there in the Fab offices like some demented waiter. I thought men liked steak and I liked apple pie, and it all sounded straightforward enough. Poor sod, he probably thought he’d fill his belly with decent food then have his wicked way with me.
Poor man. What kind of a message was it giving out to him – making him come round to my bedsit on our first date, plying him with plonk, inviting him to sit on the bed (to be fair to myself, there was nowhere else to sit except on the picnic chairs that were set up with the picnic table for our meal in the small empty square between the bed and the TV – good job we were both thin as rakes). I didn’t want to sleep with him, hadn’t even thought of it, but of course he wasn’t to know that.
I didn’t think to try the apartment cooker beforehand, nor did I have enough gumption to borrow a cookbook from somewhere and bone up about cooking steak and the rest of it. In those days you couldn’t just call in a takeaway, there was no such thing. And, anyway, I didn’t have a phone.
But I did shop for the food and a nice bottle of Mateus Rose, buy the picnic table, lay it with my best Habitat cutlery (happily by this time my wages had gone up to £6 a week having, miraculously, passed my three-month trial). I didn’t realise that Habitat was quite trendy – it just happened to be the nearest shop I could find that sold household items.
All I had to do was cook the food. I would actually even now prefer not to recall too much detail of the preparation and mastication of that meal because it still makes me blush today, but it was, basically, Hell’s Kitchen combined with Junior Masterchef, worst of, multiplied by a million. As the awfulness of the food sank into both our stomachs and brains, conversation seemed increasingly superfluous and pointless, and so in profound silence Doug did his best to eat the inedible, then he left. Didn’t even try it on. So at least the meal served a purpose of sorts.
Henceforth when he came in to Fab to do his weekly column we would avoid each other to such a degree that I don’t think I ever saw him again. Turned out he had a steady girlfriend all along anyway. Maybe was even engaged, I recall. So he got his just desserts with that meal in every sense of the word. And it probably helped me to begin understanding that there are certain things you can’t wing without a little bit of knowledge and/or expertise. I should have been taken out for a nice drink and a Wimpy, or a ham omelette at The Golden Egg and then things could have turned out differently. But then I’d never have been free to date Jason Eddie.
EARLY 1968
The wife only appeared once in six months, my room door key never materialised, and finally the Spaniard tried to rape me.
I wouldn’t let him. Perhaps he was so surprised at just how determined I was that I wouldn’t be raped, that it stopped him in his tracks a bit, but it was lucky that the apartment doorbell rang mid fight, the Spaniard vanished into his own sitting room, I ran to the door and it was Jason Eddie, come to take me out for a drink.
I never told him what he’d interrupted, or why I wanted to get an Evening Standard and find somewhere else to live, RIGHT NOW. He must have wondered why I looked dishevelled and flushed and he did ask what had happened but I couldn’t tell him because, I think, I couldn’t face him and the Spaniard having a fight. I once witnessed my father and my brother fighting, blood pouring down my dad’s face, and I didn’t want a repeat. I never told a soul for years what happened in that bedsit, in fact like with so many of the less groovy things that happened to me in the next few years, I put it right out of my brain. NO need for counselling (not in those days); just get on with life, forget it. You move to London, things like that sometimes happen. They help you change from naïve country bumpkin to wordly wise woman, is the best way I could look at it.
It’s only now that I look back and wonder if the way I behaved (example: the Doug Perry scenario) gave people the wrong impression.
I remember chatting with the Spaniard, being friendly with him, testing my powers of socialising which up until my move to London had been non-existent. I was also beginning to realise that I could, if I tried hard, look quite reasonably attractive, so perhaps I was unconsciously testing my erratic powers of flirtation with the guy who was, I have to say, not fanciable in the slightest – short, fat, garlicky, not my type. On the other hand, how I behaved to him might have had no influence on the outcome at all – he probably would just have pounced on any female around at the time, whatever she did or didn’t do or say.
I never saw him again. The next morning he had disappeared – a curt one-line note was left on the kitchen table to say he had gone to Spain for a holiday and within less than two weeks I was moved out, with the help of Eddie and his old pink-and-yellow convertible and ensconced in Avonmore Road, West Kensington, in a good-sized double bedsit (this time complete with its own tiny kitchen) with a nice Polish landlady, Mrs Filipinski.
One tube stop nearer town, one more lesson learnt – seemed symbolic, progression of a sort.
I had met Jason Eddie at my first Fab party. These parties were legendary at Fleetway House – Unity would invite all the staff, a small selection of readers, her mates from Fleet Street proper (her husband, Owen Summers was a Fleet Street big boy crime writer and they were one of the first glam media couples), and as many pop stars and budding pop stars as she could round up.
Jason had come along with his brother. After a few minutes he swaggered towards me.
‘Hi! I’m Jason Eddie.’ Held out his hand. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Judy, Unity’s secretary. I know who you are.’
From that moment he didn’t let me out of his sight, and after a while had me almost believing that I was the most fascinating per
son in the room – obviously not true. I was flattered. And I had a special interest in this man.
He was nothing special to look at. Medium, stocky build, dark blonde hair, nice smile like his brother, fancied himself as a singer, like his brother. What attracted me to him was his GSOH – and the fact that his brother was the person I had dreamed of day and night from the age of nearly 13, whose face had adorned my bedroom walls since I first saw a photo of him on the front cover of a magazine, whose records I’d nearly worn out playing them on my Dansette, and who still had the power to turn me into a dumbstruck fan every time I met him. Jason’s brother was the legendary ‘UK Elvis’ – Billy Fury.
I’m in the newsagents at the bottom of Botley Hill. I’ve just got off the school bus and I have a shilling and I’m going to buy some sweets. I wait to be served and in front of me is the loveliest face I’ve ever seen. On a magazine called Marilyn. This is it – love at first sight. I don’t know who it is. But I have to buy the magazine and find out.
Billy Fury. He’s a singer. He has a record out. I’m going to save up and buy it, and then a record player. If there is someone this gorgeous in the world, then life might be worth living after all.
What Fury’s voice or music was like wasn’t really going to matter – but as it turned out, I liked that too. And Mum bought me my first LP – Billy Fury – for my 14th birthday.
Jason had left Liverpool a week or two before we met, and arrived in the Smoke to seek his own celebrity in the recording industry. By using his brother, he got an invite to the Fab party and began what I now realise was serious networking. Although I was still only Ed’s Sec, and pretty useless to him really, he wasn’t to know that so he went after me quite determinedly. Perhaps he did fancy me a bit but certainly at the start this would have been a secondary consideration. So there was this wonderful serendipity – we were both madly using each other while pretending not to.