From le Carré to Imelda Marcos in seven hops
Ki s s - and- tell memoirs are mostly about footballers and pop stars and showbiz personalities. Writers tend to be overlooked, though i do have an old book bluntly titled sleeping With Bad Boys and subtitled: ‘a juicy tell-all of literary new York in the 1950s and 1960s.’
the author, a former Playboy playmate called alice denham, wrote in some detail about her flings with fashionable american authors such as norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Philip Roth (‘a sex fiend . . . i was breathless . . . he hung in long and steamy’).
sadly, Ms denham never seems to have travelled to Britain in the 1950s, so she missed out on tweedy, pipe-smoking nights of passion with our own distinguished authors of the time, such as J. B. Priestley or J.R.R. tolkien.
in the meantime, we can now enjoy the secret Heart by a former lover of the late John le Carré, who goes by the name of suleika dawson. the book is billed as ‘ an intimate memoir’.
le Carré was an extremely private man, as well as married, so one can only wonder what he would have made of Ms dawson’s descriptions of ‘sex three or four times a day’; ‘ sex that only the hero and heroine can have — sex for the cameras, sex for the gods’; and ‘five hours of extraordinarily intense sex’.
intriguingly, in her youth suleika dawson was once engaged to another much older writer. this was Jeremy lloyd, who was best known for devising are You Being served?, the tV sitcom set on the clothing floor of Grace Brothers’ department store. He is said to have based it on the time he worked as a junior assistant in the menswear department of simpsons of Piccadilly.
the knockabout world of Grace Brothers, with its jokes about Mrs slocombe’s pussy, is a far cry from le Carré’s shadowy world of spooks and moles. let’s hope Ms dawson managed to tell them apart.
‘last night i dreamt you were squirrel nutkin,’ says Mrs slocombe to Mr (‘i’m free!’) Humphries in one episode called the erotic dreams Of Mrs slocombe. nothing quite so audacious ever happened to poor old George smiley in le Carré’s tinker, tailer, soldier, spy.
now, it so happens that the languid Jeremy lloyd was once briefly married to dame Joanna lumley, who, back in 1973, happens to have enjoyed a whirlwind romance with Rod stewart.
‘He was so fabulous . . . it was the time that he still wore pink satin suits and drove a lamborghini,’ she recalled not long ago.
the feeling was clearly mutual. ‘she was a wonderful, wonderful girl,’ Rod stewart reminisced to the sun in 2012, ‘but far too posh for Rod.’
Perhaps this is a suitable moment to take stock: to get from John le Carré to Rod stewart takes just four steps. But our cosy conga-line does not end there. in 1979, Rod stewart married his first wife alana, a supermodel.
‘Men think i’m beautiful and terrific — they take me to dinner and tell me how wonderful i am — it’s fun,’ she said at the time.
sadly, Rod’s mother was less happy. ‘there’s always an atmosphere when alana is around,’ she was reported to have said. stewart and alana divorced five years later.
it so happens that alana had previously been married to the perma- tanned actor George Hamilton. Hamilton is one of those actors who, though quite wellknown, appeared almost exclusively in forgotten films.
Wisely, he later diversified, opening a chain of tanning salons on the West Coast, and a cigar lounge in a hotel in las Vegas. He kept himself in trim by taking 120 vitamin pills a day, and placing matchsticks between his toes to ensure he wasn’t left with unsightly white patches after going under the sunlamp.
SO NOW, in six leaps, we have gone from John le Carré to George Hamilton. But here comes the unexpected last hop: in the late 1970s, Hamilton met imelda Marcos, the First lady of the Philippines, and the two became close friends.
Ferdinand and imelda Marcos fled their homeland in 1986; later, in a new York case in which imelda was acquitted of fraud, Hamilton testified that he had received (and later repaid) a substantial loan from a Marcos associate.
so, in just seven steps, we have leapfrogged all the way to imelda Marcos, and, in another leap, to her husband, a corrupt leader reliant on shady deals and double-agents — a seedy character who might easily have crawled from the pages of a novel by who else but John le Carré.