Good golly, Miss Molly! Molly Parkin is dead at 93.
Born Molly Thomas in Glamorgan in Wales in 1932, she was brought up in Dollis Hill in north-west London. Her rollercoaster life led her to fame (but not much fortune) as a journalist, novelist, fashion-writer, hat-maker, chat-show host and artist.
An artist is what she really wanted to be – and was. Her dad, she told me, had wanted to be an artist, too. She also told me he had sexually abused her when she was a little girl.
In her twenties, she had a series of affairs with men old enough to be her father. In a jazz club once, she had a brief (unconsummated) encounter with the great Louis Armstrong and, over several years, she was the unlikely mistress of the actor James Robertson-Justice, Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor films.
I seem to remember her telling me that all the barrister and Rumpole creator, John Mortimer, had wanted from her was ‘hour after hour’ of mild bottom-spanking.
In the 1970s, I was with her in a hotel in Cardiff (we had been recording a TV quiz show there) when she and former Labour Foreign Secretary Lord George-Brown chased each other round my bedroom on all fours. In the end, nothing ‘happened’ that night because both of them were far too drunk.
Sex and drink were Molly’s joy – and ruin. She boasted that she had once pleasured the entire Wales rugby team and acknowledged that it took her years to get to grips with her alcoholism. But ultimately she came out on top (her kind of turn of phrase), and those who know say that her paintings (some in the Tate) stand the test of time.
She got rid of her philandering first husband, Michael Parkin, amusingly correcting the street sign outside their Chelsea house to read ‘No Parkin’.
She gave me a painting by her second husband, Patrick Hughes. I love it. It’s of a rainbow-striped scarf hanging over a crescent moon.
I got to know her because we shared a literary agent. I liked her because she was generous-hearted, self-deprecating and funny.
‘I like the philosophy of the sandwich,’ she used to say. ‘It typifies my attitude to life, really. It’s all there, it’s fun, it looks good, and you don’t have to wash up afterwards.’
The agent Molly and I shared was called Irene Josephy. She recruited me when I was still a student at Oxford and introduced me to the disappearing Soho of the 1960s. She took me to notorious haunts, such as the Colony Room in Dean Street. Molly introduced me to some of the louche low-life denizens of that world, including Muriel Belcher (who ran the club), Francis Bacon (the artist, who took a passing fancy to me), Daniel Farson (another of Irene’s clients, who offered me lunch at the Caprice and then fell fast asleep just before the bill arrived) and Molly – her particular favourite.
Irene was eccentric. She sat in the corner of a large, bare office on the first floor of a house in Craven Street, by Charing Cross, drinking gin and water, and never washed her hair. She had a fine head of strong grey hair, kept clean, she insisted, by its natural oils.
From the age of ten, I wore either glasses or contact lenses. Irene explained to me that the eye is a muscle: ‘you either use it or lose it.’ On her advice, I abandoned spectacles altogether. Long distance, short distance, reading or driving, I can do it all now without specs. Seriously.
I have Irene to thank for my home, too. In 1972, when I wanted to buy my first flat for £16,500 (in a mansion block off Baker Street, where T S Eliot had once lived), she lent me £2,000 for the deposit. I am not sure she was much of an agent, but she was a remarkable friend.
In her erotic fiction, Molly Parkin did not mince words.
A Gen-Z-er (born between 1997 and 2012) would have no difficulty understanding what was going on in a Parkin bonkbuster, whereas the euphemisms we oldies were brought up on now mean nothing to the young.
Forget a bit of ‘slap and tickle’. A recent poll among Gen-Z revealed that 76 per cent had never heard of ‘a knee-trembler’, let alone ‘rumpy-pumpy’, ‘hanky-panky’ or ‘nookie’.
What euphemisms are our grandchildren using for a touch of ‘how’s your father’? Top of the poll is ‘a sneaky link’. What Shakespeare referred as ‘the act of darkness’ is now known simply as ‘a smash’. Instant mashed potato will never taste the same.
Gyles Brandreth is on tour (gylesbrandreth.net/tickets)
