Paedophile quote that sparked a family feud
The son of Joan Collins and the late Anthony Newley has outraged his mother with claims that his father was ‘drawn to youthfulness’
JOAN COLLINS is spitting tacks. Her appearance in Bristol on Saturday at a demonstration over violence against women has been eclipsed by a shocking allegation made the next day by her 52-yearold son about his father Anthony Newley, who died in 1999.
In an interview to promote his memoir Unaccompanied Minor, Alexander Newley – Dame Joan’s only son – said of his father: “He was a paedophile,” adding, “my father was drawn to youthfulness; he thought innocence was an aphrodisiac. That was his sexual proclivity and it’s a very dangerous, destructive thing.”
In the book, to be published this week, he also claims: “He had been honest with my mother about his appetite for young girls, and said he would change, but she married him anyway.”
The highly damaging assertion has left the acclaimed portrait painter, known as Sacha to his friends, at odds with both his mother and his sister, singer Tara Newley. Dame Joan, 84, has been quick to dismiss the allegations against the second of her five husbands as “absolutely untrue”.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain yesterday she said: “Never in a million years would I have been married to someone like that. Categorically, I can say that it is not true, that I never saw any of that kind of behaviour from Anthony.”
She added: “I think that Sacha’s being extremely naïve and not really knowing the meaning of that word [paedophile] because what Tony admittedly was – he loved young women of 17, 18, 19 years old.”
As for Tara, 54, she is “shocked”. “I don’t recognise the man he is describing. I had an incredibly close relationship with my father and am deeply upset by these false allegations.”
Sacha has long nursed grievances about his dysfunctional childhood and been vocal about the disconnection he felt from his parents while growing up.
This has culminated in the decision to write a public confessional in which he explains how unsuited to parenthood they were.
Although he loved his mother “deeper than I can process” he had a strained relationship with her and describes her as a “narcissist” in thrall to a career to which she was “enslaved”.
WHILE she had little apparent interest in “porridge-stirring motherhood” his father exhibited obsessions bordering on OCD. Each shower entailed six towels because Newley could not bear to use the same one on different parts of his body. He is also said to have “depended on the promise of an after-show tryst with a starlet or groupie”.
In 1971, after eight tempestuous years, Newley and Collins divorced. Sacha was five years old and says his mother then “abandoned” him and his sevenyear-old sister. In 1981, when he was 15, she was cast in her careerdefining role of Alexis Carrington in TV’s Dynasty. She appeared in nearly 200 episodes over the next eight years and missed much of her children’s development.
“I can’t remember her hugging me, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I just wanted Mummy to love me,” says Sacha, adding that she chose instead to nourish him “at a distance”.
The children lived in their father’s mansions. “It was Hollywood and all the people were beautiful and gorgeous, wafting in and out of parties,” he says. “My father put sex front and centre. He exposed me to all that.”
More generously and perhaps in light of his own decision to live 3,000 miles from his 13-year-old daughter – in New York with her mother, from whom he is divorced – Sacha concedes his parents’ inability to offer him a loving childhood could be explained by the tender age they found fame.
Dame Joan made her stage debut aged nine and Anthony Newley – who is described as a “high-functioning autistic” – was just 14 when he starred as the Artful Dodger in the 1948 film version of Oliver Twist. Newley went on to co-write the lyrics for James Bond theme tune Goldfinger and to marry four times.
According to publicity material for the new memoir “both Joan and Anthony were infantilised after being thrust into the spotlight so young, rendering them ill-equipped to care for Alexander and his sister Tara”.
Sacha suggests his father’s relationship with Dame Joan was ultimately destroyed by an X-rated film they made together in 1969. He suggests that Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? revealed his father’s true desires.
IN the “autobiographical” film, Newley played Merkin, a middle-aged singer making a movie focusing on his promiscuous relationships with women, particularly the adolescent Mercy Humppe, played by 21-year-old Connie Kreski.
Sacha describes the character of Humppe as “the ‘perfect childlover’ – an underage girl”. Dame Joan played Merkin’s wife while Sacha and his sister appeared as the couple’s screen children.
“My mother was destroyed by that film: it was the end of their marriage,” he says.