HOLLYWOOD CAME CALLING, BUT NOW FLEABAG’S KILLED OFF MY DREAMS!
For 50 years, top writers have shared life-defining moments with Femail. Here, we reveal what happened next . . .
WHAT I WROTE IN 2006
MY husband was looking bemused. ‘There’s a phone message for you,’ he said. ‘From Rachel Weisz. isn’t she the actress?’
i ran to replay the message. and there it was: the melodic voice of an a-list star phoning my house to say she would like to ‘ option’ as a film project my proposed book about my ten years as editor of an erotic magazine.
as ‘editrice’ of the Erotic Review, my world was the sort of disappearing, non-PC britain where a leading politico might keep a PVC bodysuit in his closet; or where a blonde philosophy graduate can make a fortune from offering services you wouldn’t find listed in the Yellow Pages.
When i finally met Rachel, clutching an agent Provocateur bag stuffed full of old copies of Erotic Review, i told her how people would start soliciting my advice on extremely intimate matters.
The most respectable, strait-laced people turned out to have mistresses, or shoe fetishes, or secret fantasies that don’t bear repeating. What will be interesting is to see what hollywood makes of this idiosyncratic tale.
still, if anyone has a claim to be erotic on both sides of the atlantic, it’s our home-grown sex goddess Ms Weisz.
and if anyone can sell our peculiarly british brand of bedroom farce to our u.s. cousins, it is her.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Everyone daydreams about who would play them in the movie of their life, and for a while it looked as though my fantasy could become reality.
When Rachel acquired the film and TV rights to a memoir i was writing, she had just won an oscar for her role in The Constant Gardener and was so hot she could set your barbecue aflame.
but almost 14 years later, the project has fallen dormant once again.
i suspect #MeToo will have played a part, as things i wrote in the draft of my memoir seem anachronistic in 2020.
i’m not sure there will be so many belly laughs now at a scene where an author brings a small leather ‘flogger’ to an Erotic Review lunch and carries out a little light CP (corporal punishment) on my startled, but not unwilling, deputy editor. or the time one of the male publishers asked a member of staff to pose fully clad, but with knickers round her ankles, so he could draw her for a magazine ad. or the numerous times staff members would approach one another with the salutation: ‘ Would you mind if i rummaged through your drawers?’
There’s also the Fleabag effect on the TV landscape — it’s hard to be more provocative and funny about sex than Phoebe Waller-bridge.
back in 2006, i was dispatched to meet Rachel at her mother’s home in Cambridge, and we were soon chatting about erotic literature, politics and a few mutual acquaintances. after that meeting, the prestigious dramatist Terry Johnson joined the project.
but at the time it was becoming even harder to raise money for film projects. The project lay fallow, but in 2014 i was told they were thinking of adapting my story for TV.
i met Rachel once again, and we noted at once how much happier we both seemed in our slightly older skins.
Then, when i happened to be going to Los angeles, the production company suggested setting up a meeting with one of the top bods at the u.s. television network hbo, david Levine.
This was the pinnacle of my screenplay journey: a meeting in the heart of tinseltown.
i was shaking with nerves, but relaxed as soon as i saw that Levine’s office was stuffed-full of novels. he was far more like a puckish, chatty publisher than a TV mogul.
We had a glorious chat and i began to daydream about rolling credits. but i knew the chances of an optioned story being made into a drama is infinitesimally slight.
and here we are, almost six years later. The project has again fallen dormant. Meanwhile, Rachel’s brilliant performance in The Favourite has propelled her to ever greater stardom.
but i haven’t lost hope. i’m re-writing my memoir, as it’s 24 years since the young Rowan first tightened her editor’s corset. Perhaps it could now be a historical drama.
24 years on, perhaps it could be a historical drama