‘Learning that leaving things to fester is unhealthy has been a big lesson’
Celebrity agent turned author Melanie Cantor on the love split that inspired her first novel
WHAT would you do if you were told you had three months to live? Aside from putting your affairs in order, you would, according to Melanie Cantor, write some letters – with those who had slighted you in life top of the list.
Reparation becomes ever more urgent as we grow older, says the celebrity agent turned author. And she should know.
“I was in a relationship with somebody for five years. In 2013 it ended. It was all very polite, it was right to end it and I felt no remorse. It was all very civil and we went our separate ways out into the world. But then subsequently it started to unravel.
“There was a lot that had gone unsaid. So I wrote and told him that he had let me down and that I felt a bit of a fool,” says Melanie.
“He wrote back and was contrite. But it wasn’t that I wanted him to be contrite – it’s easy to be contrite. Yet it was really cathartic for me. A year later the idea popped into my head: who would you write to and what would you say if you only had three months to live?”
That became the premise for Melanie’s new book, Life & Other Happy Endings, and although the story has a cheerful outcome, she says atonement for bad behaviour is important and it propels us to set the record straight.
Melanie, who has two grown-up sons from a marriage that ended in 1992, now lives very happily alone in East London with Mabel, her beloved French bulldog, chihuahua, Jack Russell cross and says she has no intention of ever living with a man again. Nor will she smother the desire to speak the truth to unkindness or injustice.
“There are some people who will only ever see their point of view so often I’ve just let things go,” says Melanie, reflecting on her behaviour in previous relationships.
“The point about not addressing things immediately is that eventually we explode when actually we could have dealt with them more rationally at the time.
“Confrontation is scary but for my part, I feel that the wisdom and experience that come with age have emboldened me. Which may terrify some people who already thought I was pretty bold! Learning that leaving things to fester is unhealthy has been a big lesson. I don’t let that happen any more.”
MELANIE is described in the press release for her book as a “human dynamo” and it is not an exaggeration. She started her own PR company at 26, looking after presenters including Michael Parkinson, Angela Rippon and the pop star Adam Ant, as well as magazines such as Tatler and OK!
In 1992 she moved into management, counting Ulrika Jonsson, Melinda Messenger and Melanie Sykes among her clients. In 2004, she hosted a makeover show on Channel 4 called Making Space, where she tidied up people’s messy houses.
She is famously no-nonsense – she wrote in 2009 about how she kicked her sons, Alexander and Joseph, out of her house and got some stick for it.
“There comes a time when men have to take responsibility and, though this might appear to be a harsh discipline, it comes hand-inhand with love,” she wrote at the time, adding that her sons and any future daughters-in-law would thank her eventually.
They have – and it is clear they have a close relationship even though Alexander, 34, lives in New York. Joseph, 32, lives in London and they have done Zoom meet-ups during lockdown.
Fashionista Melanie also started a diary on Instagram and Facebook called #projectuplift, wearing a different outfit each day to keep people’s sartorial spirits up during lockdown.
“I put up an outfit every day but I couldn’t sit at my desk all day in those gorgeous clothes and breathe,” she says. “I thought, I cannot keep doing this, so I cut it back to once a week. It was such a relief.”
This is the strongest indicator yet of the importance of two new loves in Melanie’s life: writing and Mabel.
After 10 years, four manuscripts and many rejections, Melanie was so relieved to finally get a book deal that she burst into tears.
“I actually gave up TV presenting and being an agent in 2008 in order to write,” she says. “I thought, ‘finally I’ve done it’, not realising it would take me 10 years before I wrote the manuscript that got the attention of the right agent. I am so blessed to have a contract, I have a purpose – to sit down and write book number two.
“I wrote four
manuscripts and started with what I had known as an agent within the media and I decided it would be a ‘boy meets girl’ romantic novel. “Then I wrote Fabulous Monsters which was quite extreme and was inspired by American Psycho. I was thinking: what if the whole time, a TV presenter who was so well-known and powerful and handsome could go round raping underage girls and women and everyone covered it up? It was totally prescient with Jimmy Savile and Harvey Weinstein.” Apart from the handsome bit.
“It did get picked up by an editor,” Melanie says, “but it never went to contract. Actually, I don’t think it was good enough. But it was heartbreaking. I just went out and got drunk, it felt like the end of the world because I had put everything into it and I felt like my heart and soul had been rejected.” She decided to focus full-time on writing in 2013, having attended the Faber Academy novel writing course led by Joanna Briscoe.
“I am now so grateful I had those years to improve those skills and I met some amazing people on the course. And this book feels right.”
For the past few weeks Melanie has been nursing fiveyear-old Mabel, who had back surgery for a slipped disc.
“She has to sleep in a crate for a month so we cannot go out – other than to the little terrace. I sleep on the sofa to watch over her at night.”
She is Melanie’s first dog and her love for Mabel has completely knocked her sideways.
“It reminded me of how I felt with my kids when they were younger, that feeling when something bad happens, it goes straight to my stomach. It was an incredible experience, I had no idea she would be so important in my life. I didn’t know what to anticipate, it struck me a hundred times more than expected. The love I have for her is unbelievable.”
But then Melanie’s life has been full of unexpected twists and turns. Like when she had just turned 60 and was passing through King’s Cross station one day, when a young woman came flying up to her.
“I was dressed up because I was going to Harvey Nicholls store and this girl asks, ‘Are you an actor or a model?’ I said, ‘a model? Have you seen me standing up?” (Melanie is petite). The woman explained that she was casting for a Dove personal care products poster campaign and wanted Melanie to be its face.
“So I was the face of Dove and all my friends loved it. Then a year ago I was in Liberty’s and this woman started following me round and staring at me. “Finally she came up and said she was casting for a Dove TV commercial, would I be in it? I started laughing and said, ‘I’ve already done you, I was in a Dove poster campaign’, and she was like, ‘I don’t care, I want you again!’ So I did a second Dove campaign.” Melanie is a notoriously social animal, never happier than at the theatre, at friends’ houses for dinner or in a wine bar gossiping and laughing. “I am missing the theatre but actually I have been better on my own than I thought I would be. And I am alive and I am grateful for that.
“This pandemic has brought climate change to the forefront. The world is telling us to go with caution as we emerge from lockdown. I genuinely think there will be a change. There’s no alternative.”
But Melanie cautions not to throw the baby out with the bath water and thinks that fashion, celebrity and just having fun should not be regarded as frivolous or forbidden.
“Celebrity is not pointless. Everybody has their use for celebrity and we need people to entertain us. Why shouldn’t we just enjoy ourselves?”
●●Life And Other Happy Endings by Melanie Cantor is published by Transworld, price £7.99 in paperback.