JILLY COOPER: SAVE MY BONKBUSTERS!
What does Jilly Cooper think of THAT sanitised book cover? Ghastly, darling! Here she blasts back at the PC prudes
‘Fifty Shades Of Grey? Whacking isn’t for me’ ‘Do breasts with implants feel just like wine gums?’
JILLY Cooper is, unusually, cheesed off. She is reflecting on the ‘awful’ change to the cover of her newly re-released blockbuster Riders. What is upsetting her? The image on the latest version of the book has been toned down, diluted, sanitised. In short, it just isn’t sexy enough.
The jacket of the original, published in 1985, became iconic. It featured a pert female bottom, clad in skin-tight white jodhpurs, being caressed by a lascivious male hand. The hand cupped the woman’s buttock, straying perilously close to… ahem… indecency.
There was no doubt it belonged to the devastatingly handsome anti-hero of Jilly’s Rutshire Chronicles, that philandering equestrian Rupert Campbell-Black.
But what has happened now? Rupert’s priapic bravado seems to have deserted him.
In the latest edition of Riders, which is republished this week to coincide with the book’s 30th anniversary, the roving male hand is suddenly smaller and less prominent. It is also more decorously positioned on the woman’s hip rather than her bottom.
It is almost as if that 24-carat cad Rupert has been subdued; emasculated even. It also led to a furore over the two covers this week when female authors weighed in with their views on the new version.
Some considered the new cover to be more ‘respectful’ of women; most, however, decried it as risible: a sop to feminism by a society that, hypocritically, defends mass-market pornography. What does Jilly think though? ‘They have moved Rupert’s hand, which is much smaller and less suntanned, by at least a centimetre!’ she protests.
‘I adore my publishers, we have not had a cross word in 40 years, but I was shocked when I realised how they had cleaned up the jacket. We have become so puritanical!’ Is this bowdlerising more an attempt to appease the sensibilities of the politically correct than an indication of a growing national prudishness? ‘It’s both,’ sighs Jilly. She appreciates that many people, particularly feminists, find her racy novels deeply silly and decry them as sexist. But Riders belongs to an era before the grim constraints of political correctness; it predates paternity leave, stay-athome dads and shared domestic chores.
‘In the 1980s, a good wife provided food d and sex for her husband on demand. I don’t think my generation of women was s good at saying if they wanted sex, either.r. It was considered unladylike,’ she says.
And Jilly’s books are shamelessly erotic.c They are also funny, racy, prodigiously popular and underpinned by a moralal belief that cadishness and bad behaviour ur do not prevail in the end.
Jilly is one of those rare intervieweeses who makes a few hours in her company ny feel like a larky chat between friends.
She is witty, conspiratorial, outspoken en and often rather risqué.
The topic of the day is sex and how it has changed in the three decades sincece Riders was first published, so there is scope for both ribaldryry and reflection.
Jilly is 78, and since the death th in November 2013 of Leo, her husband of 52 years, a widow.
‘I don’t have sex now,’ she says, ‘ so these days I ’ ve nothing to draw on f or t he s ex s c enes in my books, except the imagination and memory.
‘I’ve always believed you should write from things you know about, so it’s difficult but I’m trying to remember. I suppose I could watch porn on the internet. Then I could write from that.’ Would you? I ask. ‘No!’ she cries, ‘because I wouldn’t know how to find it. I can’t use a computer. I’m a technophobe!’
Instead she writes on an old manual typewriter in her Cotswold garden where lawns descend to a mist of lacy cow parsley into woodlands beyond.
‘People expect to see steam coming out of my office when I’m writing a sexy bit,’ she laughs. She pats the sleek black greyhound lying at her feet. ‘ At least I have Bluebell to inspire me,’ she says, ‘ so the dog antics in the book are up to date.’
In the Rutshire Chronicles book she is writing (she says it will be the last of the series but I doubt it), Rupert is approaching his 60th birthday and a gay couple are planning their wedding in a cathedral (outraging Rupert).
Internet dating, of which Jilly has no personal experience (her technophobia again), is another a theme.
‘Gosh, I couldn’t do that meeting online,’ she says. ‘ What would one wear? Running shoes, I suppose, so you could make a swift exit. But lots of people do it now.’
We reflect on the furore that surrounded Riders when it first came out. The horsey fraternity of Rutshire (based on Jilly’s Gloucestershire) was, it seems, in a permanent state of arousal. There was sex, mainly adulterous, at every opportunity and in all permutations: al fresco, in stables, bluebell woods, horse boxes.
From well-thumbed pages a generation of pre- i nternet teenagers gained an insight into the mechanics of an orgy; a ‘heaving anthill of legs and arms’, as Jilly described it.
Her children Felix, 47, and Emily, 44, were in their teens when the book was published. ‘Felix read the fourin-a-bed scene and said: “Mum! How do you know about these things?” and I said briskly: “I’ve got something called an imagination.”
‘Emily was lovely. She has read all the fiction I’ve written, and she came back from her boarding school [Downe House in Berkshire] and said: “Mum, your books have been banned.” I rang the headmistress and said: “Miss Farr, how do you expect us to pay the fees if you ban my books?”
‘I suppose I don’t blame her; Riders is jolly strong but I think it helped the sale of torch batteries. Lots of teenage girls were reading it under the bed covers.’ There was approba- tion from unexpected quarters and indignant outrage from others.
Jilly says: ‘A woman charged up to me at a literary dinner, roaring: “I’ve j ust r ead every word of your disgusting book,” and I said: “Gosh, I’m sorry.”
‘A sweet old lady of 88 took a group of her bridge friends to the film that got made of it. “We enjoyed it so much,” she said, “much better than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was absolutely disgusting. That wretched man Mellors [the gamekeeper] knew nothing about foreplay.”
‘My mother was wonderful, too. She said: “Darling, I’m getting on very, very well. I’ve got to page 402 and I know it’s only showjumpers who behave like this.” ’
Among the horsey set, however, there were rumblings of disapproval.
Jilly recalls: ‘Michael Clayton, then editor of Horse & Hound, was furious about all the adulterous sex. He said: “Showjumpers don’t behave like this!” But thank goodness for sweet Harvey Smith [the Olympic showjumper]. He left his first wife for Sue, his current one, shortly afterwards, saying: “Kings have abdicated for love.” I adored him for that.’
Jilly is hilarious company: irreverent, indiscreet, whip- smart, reed slender and dressed in a tiger print dress, her hair still thick and leonine, her skin peachy and unlined.
‘I wouldn’t have cosmetic surgery,’ she says. ‘I’m not being virtuous. I’m just too wet. The pain you would get... although I’ve wondered what it must be like fondling breasts with silicone implants. I imagine they’d have the consistency of wine gums.’
She is due to have a hip replacement the week after we meet; she has osteoarthritis and standing can be painful.
‘They are going to put a huge metal thing i nside my l eg. I’ll set off machines at airports,’ she laughs, ‘but they tell me I’ll be as right as rain afterwards and I’ll be able to romp with the grandchildren and play golf. Do I want to? No!’
She will have the operation on the NHS because ‘they looked after Leo so beautifully’.
Her husband had Parkinson’s disease for 14 years before he died.
In the final years he was confined to bed at home where Jilly and a team of carers looked after him.
So what does she miss most about him? ‘His kindness and his wonderful wit,’ she says. ‘He was terribly funny. He was once asked what I wore in bed and he said: “Dogs mostly. If you reach out for something furry, you get bitten.” ’
She hoots with laughter: we are
back to sex again. ‘Now women are as bald as pink billiard balls,’ she reflects. ‘All that shaving and thongs! I’ve always found them very uncomfortable. And do they still have cut-out bras and crotchless knickers?’
In the Eighties, porn was confined to sex shops and top-shelf magazines. Now that it is ubiquitous and available to all on the internet, Jilly believes that this cheers up an awful lot of people, as well as giving them ‘new ideas for keeping sex alive in a marriage’.
She is gloriously nonjudgmental but she is concerned about sado- masochism; the predilection for linking sex with dominance and cruelty which gained momentum when Fifty Shades Of Grey was published.
‘I don’t think beating is a good thing. If children think it’s the norm to hurt people, that worries me,’ she says. ‘I read the book and giggled, although I am sure it is not intentionally funny.
‘It has sold masses so lots of people must be enjoying it. I suppose whacking goes on but it wouldn’t be for me.’
She regrets, too, the dissociation of the words ‘to love and to cherish’ from the act of sex, and laments the fact that sex education in schools is so grimly preoccupied with the mechanics rather than the wonder.
‘It all seems so dingy!’ she says. ‘ Then there’s sexting which is horrid. Perhaps it could come later, when they’re older and in love.’
She also wonders if people today are more likely to talk about sex than actually do it.
‘Everyone is so tired now,’ she says. ‘The wife most prized in Riders was the one who made everything easy for her husband. She was at home cooking and looking after the children. Everyone works too hard now. They don’t have any time or energy for sex. The mums are too busy taking their children to Mandarin lessons and ballet; there’s all this creative child-rearing.
‘When I was a child my father evidently dreaded the school holidays as my mother was so tired looking after us they had much less sex!’
Riders belongs to a different era, an age before helicopter mothers monitored their off- springs’ every move; when children roamed freerange as did Jilly, who rode her pony over the Yorkshire moors all day when she was a girl. The novel was conceived in the Sixties when she wrote the first draft and, after a boozy lunch, left it on a London bus. It was never retrieved so for a while she wondered if a raunchy book about the riding fraternity, written by a West Indian bus conductor, would be published: it never was.
The idea remerged in the Eighties when she and Leo left London ( where Jilly worked as a star newspaper columnist) for rural Gloucestershire and actually encountered the racy riding set the book was based on.
Much in the novel was drawn from her own life. Janey Lane-Fox, a journalist and tawny-haired seductress who marries showjumper Billy in Riders, is bereft when she discovers she cannot have children. Jilly, also endured the crushing sadness of infertility, in an era before IVF was commonplace. She and Leo adopted Felix, then Emily.
‘I’ve always said I could never have produced anything as lovely as they are, so it was a blessing not being able to have my own,’ she says.
Emily, a make-up artist, is there when I arrive, preparing Jilly for our photoshoot; she lives a few miles away with her husband and their three young sons. Felix, married with two little daughters, lives practically next door to the old chantry which has been Jilly’s home for 30 years.
‘Jago, my eldest grandson, is 11. He’s taking his statins now,’ she says [the malapropism for SATs exams is intentional].
She also has a step-grandson, Kit, 19, who is the son of Laura, Leo’s daughter from his first marriage (‘a lovely boy’). He helps her with the research for her books.
‘He brings me up-to- date with the current terminology,’ she says, ‘whether the young say “shag” or “bonk” or “poke”. When I wrote Riders it was tits and screwing. Now it’s “boobs” but do we still say “shag”?’
A day spent with Jilly is a delight. Although her hip must be giving her gyp, her good humour never falters. There are hugs when I leave.
She waves f r om t he door, shrouded in a white cloud of clematis. But the question still hangs in the air: what word do we use to describe sex now?
Riders by Jilly Cooper, 30th anniversary edition, is published by Corgi Books.
‘Couples today don’t have any time for sex’