She is a male fantasy who has always seemed too good to be true: a
stiletto-heeled sex bomb with the erudition of a college professor. She is
Belle de Jour, a London call girl who has whipped up a storm in literary
circles with a diary of her extraordinary life.
By her own account Belle is the sort of woman who will pleasure a man to
exhaustion and later discuss the finer points of French cinema. She will
perform the contortions of a gymnast and still do the washing up. Last week
it emerged that she is also fast becoming famous and likely to grow rich.
She is one humdinger — if she’s for real.
Her memoir of life as a high-class hooker began on the internet as a “web-log”
or “blog”, a diary accessible by anyone through their computer. As readers
admired its style and wit, mainstream publishers took an interest, keen to
mine further the chick-lit genre that made fortunes from Bridget Jones and
Sex and the City. Last week Belle confirmed she has signed a deal, rumoured
to be six figures, to turn her blog into a book. Film and fortune beckon.
There is only one problem: this tigress of the night with her Jimmy Choos, her
lacy basque and her liking for Chanel nail varnish may in reality be more
like a middle-aged author with horn-rimmed specs.
To cap it all, the writer in question, far from being a bed-trashing love
goddess, is a past winner of the bad sex award handed out annually by The
Literary Review magazine for the most embarrassing description of bonking.
THE story began last October when Belle first popped up on the web. It is
easily done: log on to a blogging site, register under a false name and away
you go. It is free and the software takes care of all the technicalities.
You can write what you like and nobody need know who you are.
“Her” life of vice began thus: “Belle de Jour, diary of a London call girl,
Vendredi 24 Octobre. Located what sounded like an excellent small, discreet
agency (word of mouth, as they say). After e-mail contact and sending my
photos, I finally arranged to meet the manager . . .”
From the start the blog had cultural complexities: the name Belle de Jour
comes from an acclaimed 1967 film, starring Catherine Deneuve, about a
French housewife who is a part-time prostitute.
The blog went on to describe how Belle was taken on to the escort agency’s
books and began to juggle clients, her on-off boyfriend and various other
troublesome characters in a whirl of hotels, nightclubs and taxi rides
around nocturnal London. What lifted it above the sordid morass of web sex
was its cleverness and humour.
In jaunty style, Belle skips from intimate body parts to the social anatomy of
Britain. At university she had “studied a wholly academic humanities subject
useless to the world at large”. Her flat is “furnished in the slightly naff
flowery vein favoured by landlords of the aspirant class”. And she has taken
care not to spread disease — by having a flu jab.
Word of mouth worked. Soon her blog was being mentioned by others on the web
and it came to the attention of the print media. In December a newspaper
awarded Belle the first prize in its annual competition for the best-written
blog.
Perhaps spurred on by her success, Belle was in expansive mood the next month,
as her entry for Vendredi 23 Janvier records: “Regarding orgasms at work. I
don’t. I don’t equate the number of orgasms with the level of enjoyment of
sex . . . Let’s be honest, this is a customer service position, not a self-
fulfilment odyssey . . .”
A few of the best bloggers have already gone to mainstream success and the
potential for Belle was clear. Somehow she came to the attention of The
Erotic Review, the magazine of highbrow smut that has been given a dose of
Viagra by its editor Rowan Pelling. It began publishing extracts from
Belle’s blog.
At the same time Patrick Walsh, a literary agent who includes the Booker prize
winner DBC Pierre among his clients, was talking to at least two publishers
about Belle. One was Serpent’s Tail; another was Weidenfeld &
Nicolson. Walsh was keeping Belle’s identity closely guarded. Peter Ayrton
at Serpent was presented with a woman said to be Belle, but was not told her
real name. He is not sure that she was the real Belle.
Heather Garnons-Williams, an editor at Weidenfeld, was asked to sign a
confidentiality agreement before being allowed to meet Belle. She won’t talk
about Belle’s identity.
Walsh said last week that he was working only with people he could trust: “We
did various things with bank accounts and so on to make sure that she
(Belle) can’t be tracked down. We are just not interested in playing the
guessing game. She has family and friends she needs to protect.”
He also had a property, in terms of the book, to protect and this week he will
be trying to sell the international rights at the London Book Fair.
Those who knew Belle’s identity kept shtoom; the rest were left wondering.
Could she be for real? Did such a multi-talented sex machine exist? It is a
publishing mystery — except for some overlooked clues about who Belle might
really be.
AMONG Walsh’s existing clients is Christopher Hart, an oddball, lively writer
who happens to be a contributing editor to The Erotic Review. His first
novel, published in 1999, was an elegy for rural life but he soon moved on
to racier things.
His second outing in 2001 was called Rescue Me and is the first-person story
of a man who becomes a male prostitute. Despite being as erudite as Belle’s
blog, the novel also won Hart the bad sex award from The Literary Review for
containing gems such as this: “Her hand is moving away from my knee and
heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole.
And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged.”
Hart was educated at Cheltenham, Oxford and London, and his male prostitute is
happy to discourse on Rousseau, Goethe and Schopenhauer; in the same way
Belle is wont to drop into her blog mentions of Samuel Pepys, Tennessee
Williams and Richard Dawkins.
They also share a fascination for Liz Hurley and a tendency to name-check
Britney Spears and Harvey Nichols. In addition they both seem to dislike new
year resolutions but to enjoy the words “septuagenarian” and “glutes”.
While Belle drops into her blog the name of Doris Day, Hart chucks John Mills
and Kenneth More into his novel. In Belle’s blog, as well as in Rescue Me,
characters cuddle up together “spooning”. Just vague echoes and
coincidences? Perhaps. But there are links between Belle’s blog and the real
Hart, too.
Early on in the blog Belle hangs out in the Blue Posts, a pub in Soho. It
happens to be just round the corner from The Erotic Review, with which Walsh
has of late been keeping in close contact, according to some sources.
As for family, Belle is coy about her parents but in one unusual passage she
describes how her father has a problem with marriage: “It’s not that he has
some bizarre hang-ups about the sanctity of marriage . . . No, it’s actually
dad’s overenthusiasm for the blessed event . . .” It is a description that
fits well with Hart’s father who is a retired Church of England clergyman.
There are other hints, too. Among the cultural figures whom Belle mentions are
the writers Jonathan Coe and Jeffrey Eugenides. Although highly successful,
these writers are pretty rarefied reading for a busy call girl.
Maybe Belle just has good taste. Or maybe she knows that, like Hart, they are
linked to the bad sex award: Coe has long expressed a fear of winning the
prize and Eugenides was once nominated for it.
There is another suggestive passage in Belle’s blog. It is an entry in
December when Belle describes an occasion when she hands in a payslip at the
bank with a drawing scribbled on it.
“The cashier looked at the drawing and looked at me. ‘This is good. Did you do
this?’ she asked. ‘Yes, well, I’m a . . . cartoonist,’ I
lied. Which is how the people at the bank came to believe that I draw for a
living.”
Interestingly there is a well-known real illustrator and cartoonist — who also
happens to be called Christopher Hart. Was art imitating life? Last week
Belle was playing very hard to get for a call girl. She did not seem to be
taking e-mails or males.
Walsh was giving little away. “It’s not Hart, but I can see how you put these
connections together,” he said. He insists Belle is a real call-girl.
However, Pelling let in a chink of light. She admitted that she knows who
Belle is. So is Belle a past winner of the bad sex award? “It’s entirely up
to your own speculation,” she said.
Did she know whether the author was a thirtysomething man with glasses, as
Hart is? “I would neither agree nor disagree,” she said, beginning to laugh.
Is Belle, Hart? “I can’t possibly comment.”
When finally tracked down yesterday Hart said: “Oh not the call girl, oh,
you’re kidding. I promise you it’s not me. But I wish it was me.”
He said he is working on a novel with hardly any sex in it, adding jokingly:
“Perhaps I’m all sexed out after writing Belle de Jour.”
So he denies being the mystery writer? “Yes, I am denying it,” he said. But he
would say that, wouldn’t he? “Yes, I would say that, wouldn’t I.”
There is, of course, one big obstacle to Hart being the author: could a man
carry off the pretence of being a call girl? The answer may be that Belle is
more than one person.
Could Pelling or Annie Blinkhorn, her deputy at The Erotic Review, have a hand
in giving Belle a feminine voice? Pelling refused to be drawn.
“I’m free to say that I have met Belle,” Pelling said, “but I really don’t
feel free to speculate.” Early in her blog, Belle recorded: “Yes, I really
am a call girl. A bored journaliste (sic) could probably fake this blog but
I’m not that clever.” Many people increasingly think he/she is.
SELLING SEX BY THE BOOK
There is a long tradition of sexual confessions becoming publishing phenomena,
and often the authors are not at all what they seem
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Also known as Fanny Hill, it was first published in 1749. It tells the story
of an orphan girl who travels from country life into urban decadence. Giving
an account of her sexual awakening and prostitution that was extraordinarily
frank for the time, it was in fact written by a man called John Cleland.
The Story of O
A beautiful fashion photographer in Paris has an affair with a man called
René. It is so overwhelmingly intense that O submits to degrading sexual and
psychological experiences. Though its content is shocking, its style made it
a classic. It was published under the pseudonym of Pauline Reage, and many
suspected the author was a man. She was in fact a Frenchwoman, Dominique
Aury.
The Bride Stripped Bare
Published last year, it is the tale of a suburban housewife who embarks on a
journey of awakening, including sex with strangers. Though published
anonymously, the author was unmasked as Nikki Gemmell, who admitted she had
drawn on the experiences of her friends in writing the book. It went on to
be a bestseller in her native Australia.
One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep
Last year a teenager from Sicily became a sensation with a novel about her
sexual adventures. It was pitched as a thinly-veiled autobiography. The
author, Melissa Panarello, initially tried to remain anonymous but the
book’s success forced her to reveal her identity. It has sold 500,000 copies
and is being translated into English.
