I’M A CELEBRITY ...SO HOW DID I GET HERE?
From grumpy Victoria Wood to the eternally sunny Roger Moore, our pick of the year’s best TV and showbiz memoirs
THE REAL STANLEY BAXTER by Brian Beacom
(Luath Press £20) Baxter, who won countless awards for his television spectaculars, has, at the age of 94, decided to come out as homosexual in this riveting authorised biography.
It would’ve been more surprising if he’d come out as heterosexual, as Glasgow’s answer to ethel Merman was always very campy, and thoroughly at home in a frock. Nevertheless, Baxter always dreaded‘ what people will think of me . . . I never wanted to be gay. I still don’t’.
the chief casualty was Baxter’s wife Moira, who went mad and danced naked in the garden. Not only that, ‘she punched me and my glasses flew off ’. eventually Moira committed suicide. this is a harrowing and courageous account of what it was like living for nigh on a century in what he calls ‘poofter hell’.
REVOLUTION by Gary Numan (Constable £20)
PoP star Numan was capable, in the eighties, of selling 40,000 singles a day — Cars was one. Yet he has been consistently unlucky in the people he meets. they always want to slash his tyres or blackmail him. Customs officers are routinely ‘unfriendly’. David Bowie was ‘petty’.
ever since childhood, Numan has ‘become aware of hostility’. Maybe it’s him? He doesn’t like speaking on the phone or looking anyone in the eye. He says he is ‘stubborn, argumentative and opinionated’, so when he also says he was once £600,000 in debt, owing to a penchant for purchasing private planes, my sympathy is limited.
these days, Numan and his wife go in for cosmetic surgery and in the photos resemble Gomez and Morticia addams.
TO THE END OF THE WORLD by Rupert Everett (Little Brown £20)
everett spent years trying to make a film of the Happy Prince, his biopic about oscar Wilde. ‘I’m a nervous wreck,’ he said at one point, ‘and we haven’t even started shooting.’
the bulk of this brilliant book consists of a film diary — casting s essions, budget chasing, costume f i ttings, location hunts.
there are s uperb penportraits of Colin Firth, emily Watson and tom Wilkinson. Dare one say it, but everett is a better writer than he is an actor, and is wryly aware that before the cameras he is ‘a toothless old circus dog’.
He’s funny about treading the boards in dire provincial theatres, ‘riddled with moths, as cold as the t o mb, and smelling of cabbage’, an a t mosphere he secretly relishes.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR: THE BEATLES IN TIME by Craig Brown
(Fourth Estate £20) Less of a conventional book than a vast Beatles dossier, crammed with snapshots, lists, vignettes, digressive asides and funny footnotes, this is a magical
mystery t our — in which Yoko turns into Shirl e y Temple, Beryl Bainbridge says the Fab Four made ‘ a disgusting noise’ and Philip Larkin complains t he group ‘seems wonderful until you are finally sick’. Threading through the saga is the fate of Brian Epstein, who unravelled as The Beatles t hemselves unravelled, with everyone by 1969 getting ‘fractious and scratchy’.
THE MEANING OF MARIAH CAREY by Mariah Carey
(Macmillan £20) AS A mixed-race child, Mariah was viciously racially abused, and throughout her life she has endured ‘ a constant clashing of feelings of abandonment’.
She had a ‘destructive and unpredictable brother’, an ‘inebriated’ mother, and a sister who ‘threw boiling hot tea on me’. Fortunately, there was the solace of music, allowing Mariah ‘to rise above my conditions’. She made billions for Sony: four singles went to No 1, back-to-back.
Yet writing, singing and doing promotional tours non-stop meant she ended up ‘ i n the hold of extreme exhaustion’. Plus, she had a horrible partner, Tommy, who was always ‘ vibrating with rage’. The lesson: success and riches do not bring happiness, only a splashier kind of suffering.
BANANARAMA: REALLY SAYING SOMETHING by Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward (Hutchinson £20)
Sara and Keren, now old ladies, look back at their boisterous past — crushes on David Essex and Donny Osmond, ‘snogging with local boys’, watching the ‘sexist, racist and homophobic’ telly of the Seventies. After A- levels, they moved to London to be either bilingual secretaries or air hostesses, and ended up in a flat owned by a Sex Pistol. A pair of Sid Vicious’s old bondage trousers remained in a cupboard, which maybe had occult properties as the girls started singing, ‘shaking maracas and banging tambourines ’, and were championed by John Peel. ‘We have a multitude of silver, gold and even platinum discs, so I guess we did OK.’ The Krankies were fans. I’d never heard of Bananarama. I thought it was a pudding.
WILD THING: THE SHORT, SPELLBINDING LIFE OF JIMI HENDRIX by Philip Norman (W&N £20)
When McCartney, Jagger and other grandees first saw hendrix, ‘ Everyone was dumbstruck, completely in shock, as if hit by a 50-megaton h-bomb’. This book is a first-rate analysis of hendrix’s ‘fretboard wizardry and showmanship’ — but nothing became the guitarist’s life like the leaving of it, aged 27. Philip Norman gives a forensic account of hendrix’s death, about which controversy still rages. The official cause given at a cursory inquest was ‘inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication’, but things were much more complex than that. Was it murder?
THE DREAMER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Cliff Richard (Ebury £20)
DON’T expect Sir Cliff to reveal anything about his private life in his memoir: he is very clear the career has come first, eclipsing all else. Famous since the age of 17, he l ong believed that ‘ having a girlfriend would kill everything for me’.
he di dn’t want domestic distractions, he just wanted to be the English Elvis. A few years ago, however, South Yorkshire Police raided Cliff ’s home in Berkshire with news cameras rolling. he was never arrested and the case was dropped. But the £2 million Cliff received in compensation from the BBC in a privacy case didn’t cover even half of his legal costs.
LET’S DO IT: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF VICTORIA WOOD by Jasper Rees (Trapeze £20)
IT’S sad to l earn this great comedian, who had a genius for spotting language’s absurdities — macaroons, minestrone, guttering and vinyl flooring — and who died from cancer in 2016 aged 62, wasn’t as much fun in real life: ‘disturbingly taciturn ’, care worn, glum, disappointed somehow, exactly like her own mother, who had a ‘reputation for bossiness’. (Wood was imperious on the Dinnerladies set, unforgiving if Celia Imrie or Anne reid fluffed a line.)
Subsisting on Curly Wurlies, she grew up on the Lancashire moors in a house that was ‘isolated and cold and damp and uncomfortable’.
After youth theatre and a degree in drama from Birmingham, she sang bittersweet songs of her own composition on radio, then appeared in New Faces alongside a stuttering ventriloquist. She wrote a play, Talent, based on these dire experiences — and her career took off.
RAISING AN EYEBROW: MY LIFE WITH SIR ROGER MOORE by Gareth Owen (History Press £20)
The secret of Moore’s success was that he never took himself or his profession entirely seriously. What he liked best were the film star trappings and the tax exile life.
Also, he was uncomplicated: his philosophy was ‘why be negative when you can be positive?’ This is of course easier when money is plentiful, from the Bond franchise and his investments.
If magazine photographers came to Moore’s home in Monaco they had to ‘pay hugely for the privilege’. he was nearly 90 when he died in 2017. his one regret was that he’d never appeared in The Morecambe & Wise Show.
MUNKEY DIARIES by Jane Birkin (W&N £20)
MuNKEY was Birkin’s toy monkey, to whom she confided her private thoughts f rom childhood and onwards — and which form the basis of these journals.
Over the years, Munkey has heard about a lot of posh bohemianism — chateaux holidays and Jane speeding around Paris in a taxi, with her legs out of the window.
But she does not seem at ease even now. She was married in her teens to the composer John Barry, who treated her appallingly. ‘I am beginning to hate him. I hate his selfishness,’ she wrote at the time.
Then came Serge Gainsbourg, another chauvinistic pig. ‘ he bashed me and tore me down by my hair and slapped me.’
Jane maintains this was how Gainsbourg expressed Gallic affection, and was ‘a camouflage for extraordinary shyness’. That’s not how the reader sees it.