A Curious Career Read Free

don’t come all slimy like that godawful crap.’ Retreating from her, I thought I’d introduce myself to Madame Dali because she was sitting alone, so I said I was a journalist from London and she screamed, ‘I never give interviews. Never. Never. Never,’ while simultaneously patting the sofa to indicate I should sit beside her. ‘Are there always so many people here?’ I asked, trying to make conversation. ‘Listen. They are very interesting people. Why should Dali see you and not them – you think you are better?’ Agh. I could see why people avoided Gala.
    By this time I was desperately worried about my flight – I was supposed to fly back the same night – but Dali said we would talk again in the morning. I explained that I had nowhere to stay in Paris, so he told the Captain to find me a room at the Meurice, which he did. So then I interviewed Dali the next day, and the next, and the next, and in the evenings I went to parties in his suite, and gobbled my way through all the pyramids of marrons glacés dotted round the room. I was present one morning when the Captain brought in a French couple carrying two enormous packets of thick paper and I watched Dali signing each sheet ‘Dali 69’. When I asked what he was doing, he said, ‘I am manufacturing money’ – apparently he signed them and the publisher later added a doodle and sold them as Dali drawings. Eventually Gala started giving me the evil eye and Dali said regretfully that he thought we had done enough interviewing. But he presented me with a wonderful gift – a conical hat made of wax flowers and butterflies that he had designed for Gala to wear to a fancy dress ball in the 1930s. When, years later, I lent it to a Dali exhibition in Stuttgart, they insured it for £15,000. So that was my first celebrity interview, which naturally made me want to do more.
    I kept dropping hints to Guccione, so eventually he sent me to Ravello, Italy, to interview Gore Vidal. Alitalia lost my case on the way, so I arrived in a rumpled dress and terrible plastic shoes but again my subject was kind and said I must stay while Alitalia found my luggage. Vidal virtually interviewed himself, telling a well-honed string of anecdotes – but I noticed that, when the tape ran out in the middle of an anecdote, he stopped and waited while I turned the tape over – no point in wasting a good anecdote on a silly girl when it was intended for the world. He and his companion, Howard Austin, took me out to dinner (still in my plastic shoes) in Ravello that night, and got very loud and jolly on crème de menthe. I have never, before or since, seen anyone drink crème de menthe right through a meal. Rather to my regret, Alitalia returned my suitcase the next day so I had no further excuse to linger.
    Soon afterwards, I left Penthouse and spent several years as a full-time mother. (There was no question of maternity leave in those days.) David and I were married in 1971 and had our first daughter, Rosie, in 1975 and our second, Theo, in 1978. We lived in Finsbury Park which was considered a dangerously rough area in those days, though I notice that nowadays it counts as ‘desirable’ and has been renamed Stroud Green. I did the usual rounds of mother-and-baby club, playgroup, nursery, and made some good friends. David was teaching media studies (a brand-new subject in those days) at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and I had some residual income from two sex books, How to Improve Your Man in Bed and The Single Woman’s Sex Book , that I wrote while I was at Penthouse . During these playgroup years, I wrote a very different book, The Heyday of Natural History , on a subject that then interested me, Victorian popular naturalists. It got rapturous reviews when it was published in 1980 and gave me a sort of respectability but I look at it now and think: What a waste of time. I dedicated it to my mother, thinking it would make up for my sex books, but she only said she liked the