Acouple of years before he died, Willie Donaldson threw away his writer’s
notebooks but kept the tapes from his answering machine. One night, after
deciding to write his biography, I listened to them.
The voices of Willie’s life crowded in: brisk television PAs, crack partners,
friends from the past, professional visitors from escort agencies, flirty
Sloane Rangers, dealers, the odd publisher, his part-time agent, a
gravel-voiced hood calling himself Pizza-Face Scarlatti, who might equally
have been a real gangster or Peter Cook playing one of his regular jokes.
The voices were cheerful, amorous, exasperated, concerned, hysterical (“It’s
lies – all lies!” one woman screamed) and sometimes downright scary.
For each of these people a different Willie Donaldson existed. He is
remembered as the author of an astonishingly funny book, The Henry Root
Letters, which came out in 1980 and remains a classic of British humour. But
he was more than that: to say his life was colourful would be a profound
understatement.
Born into a wealthy shipping dynasty and married to a debutante, he threw away
his inheritance on spectacular business failures in Sixties London after a
precocious success as producer of Beyond the Fringe, the satirical review.
Admired by the eminent humorists Peter Cook and Auberon Waugh, he was toast of
the town three times — with Beyond the Fringe, Henry Root, and his last
book, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics, which put him on the
front of magazines again, as a national treasure and comic genius, in 2002.
That success came at roughly 20-year intervals, however. Between times he was
thrice bankrupt, frequented with prostitutes and drug dealers, and became a
ponce and a crack addict.
Some people remember him with great affection. Sarah Miles, the actress, his
girlfriend in the mid-Sixties, calls him a “very, very good man”.
Peter Morgan, the film scriptwriter on The Queen, who was a member of his
young coterie in the early 1990s, says, however: “Willie had a profound
instinct to corrupt and destroy. There was an extremely large Dionysian
streak to him. He was quite diabolical.”
How did a privileged boy who went to Winchester and Cambridge and inherited
the equivalent of £3.5m today turn into this figure?
WILLIE was born in 1935 into a Glasgow shipping dynasty. At his mother’s
insistence, however, the family lived in Surrey. Willie was sent to
Winchester, where a surprising amount of his school career seems to have
been spent in the West End, visiting the theatre and the ballet. Mr and Mrs
Donaldson took a relaxed attitude to all this. When, at 15, Willie wanted to
see the Folies Bergãre revue at the London Hippodrome, they accompanied him.
The experience, he would later claim, changed his life. It was the first spark
of what would become an all-consuming perversion — the idea of sex as a
staged, observed event, “an illicit drug to be most excitingly experienced
with a silent performing woman off the premises”.
He was “thought to be vaguely wicked” at Winchester, according to his
schoolfriend Julian Mitchell, the playwright. While doing their national
service in the military, they travelled to Paris together to lose their
virginities with a pair of prostitutes; but on their return they found that
Willie’s mother had died in a car crash. His father, shattered by the loss,
rapidly drank himself to death.
The wealthy young Willie found solace in Sonia Avory, a debutante and famous
beauty. About six months before they were due to get married she was
involved in a serious car crash. She survived with a broken leg, a punctured
lung, a fractured jaw and serious cuts to the face. Scarred and lame, she
was no longer the enchantress of the party circuit. The chasm in interest
and intellect between her and Willie had also become apparent. He realised
that he should not be marrying her, but to cancel would have been caddish.
Decades later Sonia warily agreed to see me in her small terrace house in
Colches-ter. Bespectacled and with her grey hair cut short, she told me a
sad and surprising story. She, like Willie, had known they were making a
mistake but had not had the nerve to cancel the wedding.
“He was a good man, a good character,” she said. He had adored his mother and
her death had been one of the great blows of his life. He was clearly unable
to deal with life’s practicalities. “He had so much handed to him on a plate
but he made a terrible muddle of things. He just couldn’t control money. He
spent it like water.”
They lived in a large flat in Hans Street, Knightsbridge, and in 1960 they had
a son, Charlie. Willie had become a theatrical impresario, and after a false
start had great success with Beyond the Fringe in 1961. (Jonathan Miller,
one of the stars, still smarts at the cast’s low pay and remembers Willie as
a “crook”.)
Willie invited members of his social and theatrical set to parties at Hans
Street. Stars of the moment — Susan Hampshire,
Cleo Laine, JP Donleavy, Susannah York — would arrive. Today, most of them
recall the size of the sitting-room, but not the presence of his wife. She
was there, though. Once an actress turned to her and asked if she wanted a
drink. “Did I want a drink? It was my flat!”
Eventually it became clear that Willie’s contact with actresses was sometimes
more than professional or social. Sonia hired a private detective. The full,
rich variety of Willie’s infidelities became apparent.
Willie had had the idea of staging a revue about sex, to be called The Love
Show, and signed the young Terry Jones and Michael Palin for £50 each in
their first paid jobs as writers. Working on the cast, he contacted Sarah
Miles’s agent.
As it turned out, The Love Show did not appeal to Sarah, but its producer did.
Willie told a friend their need for each other was so great that they
consummated their love halfway up the stairs.
After a weekend with her parents in 1965, Sonia returned with Charlie to find
a note from Willie: “Have gone away”. And that, effectively, was the end of
their marriage. WILLIE went to live with Sarah Miles, but throughout a
relationship that lasted around two years she was also conducting an affair,
once or twice a week usually, with Lau-rence Olivier. So far as she knows,
Willie was never aware that he was being cuckolded by the greatest actor of
his generation. Ultimately she threw Willie out and he took up immediately
with the 19-year-old American singer Carly Simon, who was visiting London.
His subsequent behaviour — staging hopeless productions and buying dodgy
businesses — had the air of a sustained, probably subconscious, attempt to
blow what was left of his inheritance and rid himself of the curse of money.
By 1972 he had succeeded, returning from a disastrous venture in Ibiza with
all his possessions in one small suitcase.
He lived for the rest of his life almost entirely from his writing, working on
through hardship, emotional collapse and drugs. Along the way he moved in
with his former secretary, Cherry Hattrick, at her home in Fulham. Unable to
sleep one night in 1979, Cherry read a book from America — and began to
laugh.
The Lazlo Letters by the comedian Don Novello presented an overenthusiastic
defender of traditional values, Lazlo Toth, writing unwelcome letters to the
famous and self-important, sometimes enclosing a small bribe. In the morning
Cherry suggested to Willie that he read it. Soon he was working on what
would become one of the most successful books of the 1980s.
Willie started sending out letters under the name of Henry Root. The
beneficiaries of his impeccably ill-judged support included senior
policemen, politicians, publishers, Esther Rantzen, business magnates,
lawyers, newspaper editors, the Queen, model agencies, columnists, judges
and football managers. Because he was utterly sincere, his targets would
often reply, choosing to ignore or put a positive gloss on his maddest
claims, his most insulting insinuations. Cherry worried that the letters
were too obviously comic, but she underestimated the vanity of those in
public life.
He sent Margaret Thatcher a pound with a letter and followed it up with a
second: “Mrs Root and I have recently formed ‘The Ordinary Folk Against Porn
Society’. We meet once a week with some of our friends . . . to discuss sex,
drugs, nudity and violence. While I know these are all subjects that
interest you, I expect you’ll be too busy at the moment, what with one thing
and another, to address us yourself. Don’t worry. We understand. However, a
signed photograph and message of encouragement would mean a lot to our
members.”
A signed photograph and polite note arrived within a few days.
The Henry Root Letters became a number one bestseller. Willie was successful
again – fashionable even. But the better things appeared to be going for
him, the more depressed he was becoming. He began seeing “business girls”
and was introduced by one of them to crack cocaine.
He confessed his “squalid cavortings” to Cherry and begged her not to leave.
They got married but nine months later she walked out. He stayed on in her
flat, his home for the rest of his life.
An old friendship was revived. Willie had been closest to Peter Cook of all
the Beyond the Fringe team and had shared an office with him in Soho in the
1960s. He had then avoided him during the Seventies and Eighties, seeing him
as one of the Private Eye gang with whom he had a feud.
In 1987, however, they appeared together at the Cheltenham Literary Festival,
and for the next few years they had what Willie called a “flirty
relationship”, seeing each other for lunch and talking on the telephone.
”We’d get together and talk about drugs and pornographic videos,” he told
Harry Thompson, Cook’s biographer. “I was then heavily into crack and f***
knows what, and I think I understood him. We were the two sad old addicts,
stumbling around, bored in the afternoon.”
It was Cook, Willie claimed, who suggested that he try ecstasy. “If you take
it, you love everybody,” Cook had promised. “You’ll even like Rich-ard
Ingrams [former editor of Private Eye].” Willie tried it, but his view of
Ingrams remained unchanged.
Willie became caustic about Cook’s reputation after his death in 1995. Much of
this can be explained by the fact that, in the second half of his life, Cook
was a serious boozer. Willie put much of the posthumous adulation for him
down to the guilt of those in the television and comedy worlds who had
spurned him over the previous 20 years.
Willie had loathed alcohol so much throughout his adult life that it coloured
his judgment of character. Obviously there was inconsistency here. He had
also once disapproved of all drugs except for pot, yet he was smoking crack.
It was the transgressive thrill of buying, dealing and smoking crack — the mad
adventure of it all — that excited him. The advantage of crack over cocaine
is that, while cocaine was acceptable, even expected, at the dinner parties
of media folk, crack had a rat-like inner-city bite to its reputation.
Crack and sex tend to go together, and the type of sex it led to — hard,
objectified, perverse, commercial — suited Willie just fine. Even when he
had established a little crack-taking social circle of young writers and
film-makers, the pipe would only be a prelude to the real action that would
be happening later when he received a visit from Abby, Isabelle, Tracy,
Michelle or one of the other escort agency girls.
Of these girls, Michelle occupies an odd role in his memoirs. Wild, funny,
desirable (Willie told a friend that the best sex he had ever had was with
Michelle), she was also his nemesis. Thinking it would be helpful to meet
the real Michelle, I contacted her through her boyfriend.
Willie had written that he hated to think of her at home, her hair up, her
legs hidden, putting her boyfriend’s dinner on the table. That turned out to
be precisely what she was doing when I visited their house in the suburbs of
west London. It was slightly difficult to imagine her as the person Willie
had described — “a really dirty girl who is at once insatiable and
contemptuous”, who would take him lower than he’d ever imagined possible, to
a place from which there was no return.
She was thin, dark, pretty, probably in her late thirties. Her boyfriend and I
sat at the kitchen table while Michelle talked of crack and sex at Willie’s
flat. He was “absolutely an addict”, she said. He would be really quiet
until he had the crack inside him, Michelle said. “That’s when the
perversions started.”
Standing at her cooker in a neat suburban kitchen, Michelle conjured up a
vision of hell. “He was a game old sod,” she said. “He loved his mind games.
He was really into mind games. Sexually, there was always playtime going on.
He was a watcher. Another girl June came over one time with a dark girl from
America. The dark girl was with Willie and I was sort of with June and I
gave one to June and one to Will. Or Abby would come round with her black
boyfriend and they’d do the boy-friend/girlfriend thing for him. It turned
him on if someone f***** me.”
Michelle believes that Willie’s weakness was for “bitches, ruthless women. He
mentally tortured himself. He liked to play the big king and then he changed
and became all submissive. He would be humiliated. I would ignore him and he
would get more and more excited by it all”.
Not that he was always the victim. He had taken part in a fantasy for one of
Abby’s clients, a banker.
“The banker wanted to be beaten up by a sleazy guy, a really serious gangster.
Willie agreed to play the part and he had to go down to the charity shop to
get a trilby and a suit and a striped tie from Oxfam. When the banker was
there, Willie pushed him around and slapped him with the back of his hand
and then I domineered him a bit too.”
Happy days. Four years before Willie died, Michelle stopped visiting him. She
says, rather startlingly under the circumstances, that he was corrupting
her. WILLIE first saw a picture of Rachel Garley, his last great love, in a
book of The Sun’s greatest page three girls. She became an object of distant
longing and admiration.
“I wasn’t typical of a girl with her tits out in The Sun,” Rachel says now.
“It was a bit dipsy the way I became a model. I went on holiday with my mum
and met this photographer.”
When Willie was profiled by The Sunday Times Magazine in 1996, Frankie Fraser,
the former East End gangster, and Rachel were photographed with him. After
the shoot they went for a drink at Soho House and a few days later he asked
her to accompany him to a charity event at which Fraser was appearing. She
lived with her boyfriend, the photographer Iain McKell, and their daughter
Jasmine. Willie did not wish the date to seem improper, so he paid her £500.
That way she could tell Iain that it was a job.
The second time they went out, he again paid her £500, an amount that she now
realises “to an old person was a lot”. Willie told Rachel he had resorted to
ringing up a High Court judge with whom he had had an affair at school,
saying he needed money rather urgently.
Rachel thought he might have taken the judge for £1,000. My suspicion is the
judge, who is now dead, was not blackmailed but, like many others, helped
Willie out with £200 or so.
The relationship with Rachel deepened into what Willie liked to call “a
passionate friendship”. Beyond the page three looks and figure she is
bright, curious and open. She recalls her visits to his flat with real
warmth. “He used to sit on the chair and I’d be on the sofa. He’d sit there
with his pipe and a brandy [he had developed a liking for it] and a cigar
and sometimes I’d have a Red Bull.” But for the fact that the pipe was
crack, it would be a vision of domestic contentment.
“All we did was sit there and talk about our experiences with other people.
I’d go to an orgy or something and tell him all about it.”
He would also visit Rachel and Iain at home, sometimes collecting Jasmine from
school. He was a regular babysitter for them. Although allergic to such
festivities, he spent three consecutive Christmas Days with Rachel and her
family.
“He’d come over on Christmas morning bringing presents, and we’d get some
drugs and have a really nice Christmas,” she says.
Willie knew himself well enough to see that if Rachel went to bed with him it
would be the end of their relationship. But he began to involve her in his
work. One plan was an English version of The Story of O in which she would
pursue a series of personal fantasies.
This involved another of his pro-tégés, Sebastian Horsley, who wrote a candid
column in The Erotic Review about his use of drugs and prostitutes. He was
the kind of self-destructive younger writer Willie found good company.
At his suggestion, Sebastian took Rachel out to dinner. A few days later they
had lunch at his flat. “Of course, I fell for her,” says Sebastian.
When they became lovers, Rachel did the great unforgivable thing: she cut
Willie out. It was several months before the truth was revealed. Sebastian
wrote in the Erotic Review column how he had given Rachel a treat on her
birthday by taking her to a prostitute. There was a photograph of him with,
in the background, Rachel lying on a bed with a black girl.
Willie was devastated, winded by what he saw as a double betrayal. He stopped
seeing Rachel but his greatest rage was towards Sebastian.
“I felt I had committed an act of patricide,” Sebastian says. But he points
out: “There was something repellent in setting us up and then hating us for
falling in love.” WILLIE’S lungs began giving out in his sixties. Pulmonary
damage is one of the most frequently recorded physical effects of
crack-smoking.
I was at home in Norfolk in June 2005 when an obituary editor reached me:
“There’s a rather odd rumour going about that Willie Donaldson has been
found dead.”
I rang around. None of our mutual friends knew anything. Eventually I called
Cherry Donaldson who, although she and Willie had separated in 1987, was
still officially the tenant of his flat and knew the usually shambolic
details of his life. She too had heard nothing.
I rang the local police station, where the duty officer suggested I called the
coroner’s office. It was closed. I tried the police again. The duty officer
was disapproving of my persistence.
“At the end of the day, this is just a rumour, sir. What we’re talking here is
rumour control.”
“There’s his wife,” I said. “She’s very upset.”
“Wife, sir? Wouldn’t she know already?”
“They didn’t live together.” The woman police officer considered the full
oddness of what I was telling her.
“You don’t think that ringing up his wife was a little bit insensitive, sir?”
I hung up. Willie could have turned this into a wonderful story,
self-important and thick members of the constabulary being something of a
speciality of his.
Cherry spoke to the police. They rang her back to confirm that a 70-year-old
man had been found dead at the address she had given. It was true. Willie
was dead.
Two days after his death, Cherry and his son Charlie, now 45, entered the
flat. It was in a grim and squalid state. A film of fat, the residue of
thousands of fry-ups, covered the kitchen. In Willie’s sitting-room and in
the “literary room” where he worked, they found credit-card statements,
unanswered letters from friends and magazine photographs of Rachel Garley.
His computer was logged on to a lesbian porn site.
© Terence Blacker 2007
Extracted from You Cannot Live As I Have Lived And Not End Up Like This, by
Terence Blacker, to be published by Ebury Press on March 22 at £12.99. It
can be bought for £11.69 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst
on 0870 165 8585
Terence Blacker will be talking about Willie Donaldson at The Sunday Times
Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, March 24 at 4pm. To book tickets call
0870 343 1001
