End of an era Where did it all go wrong for Soho’s Groucho Club?
Reading of the resignation of the Groucho Club’s managing director, Matthew Hobbs, I presumed at first he had quit from boredom – apparently you can’t even take a drink out on to the smoking terrace any more. When I read that a “tether” was involved, I wondered if he was tired of policing the kinky sex things many members got up to. But no, he was simply at the “end” of said tether, according to a source: “You can imagine what running the Groucho is like – it’s a really exhausting job.” But not half as exhausting as my decade of cheap thrills and expensive habits played out in Soho’s slickest house of fun, I’ll wager.
I was a shy girl, averse to clubs of any kind. So imagine my somewhat smug surprise when I found myself at the top table of the most talkedabout watering-hole in London halfway through the Eighties.
I never actually joined – with my squeaky voice, lovely manners and penchant for spending like a sailor on shore leave, I think I was a mascot – but I practically lived there. A breakfast meeting with your publisher turned into a luncheon with your newspaper handler and then before you knew it, it was the cocktail hour and your gang was being decanted from taxis with your cocaine burning a hole in their pockets. (The third rule of the Groucho Club – “Illegal substances of whatever class is firmly prohibited by club rules, whether they be internalised orally, rectally, intravenously, intranasally or by any means whatsoever” – was probably the most widely ignored ban ever with the possible exception of no petting in swimming pools.)
It was an extremely diverse (before the word became a scold) place. My teenage protégé Toby Young would be having sex with a model in the lavatories – while eternally thirsty pensioner Jeffrey Bernard would be upstairs hiding from the five publishers he owed books to and had already drunk the advances from. Damien Hirst putting his £20,000 Turner Prize winnings behind the bar; Roland Rivron, off his rocker, riding a mountain bike down the staircase and crashing into the bar, partially demolishing it; Damien Hirst (again) setting fire to the publicist Mark Borkowski’s chest hair, requiring him to seek hospital treatment; Bono sucking up to – sorry, singing to – Bill Clinton while banging out “Happy birthday to you” on the club piano; Wayne Sleep lunching Princess Diana. And more film stars and pop tarts than you could shake a stick of Touche Éclat at.
There was a pecking order, but it wasn’t based on fame – more on how much the management liked you. I saw reception turn away sober superstars and then warmly welcome desiccated old soaks; for instance, once I entered late with my entourage and found every table occupied. There was a whisper in my ear – “Well, we can’t have this, can we, JB!” – and the manager passed by me carrying a small table aloft with six waiters behind him each carrying a chair. I felt like Princess Margaret as they moved other diners aside to make a place for us. That sort of treatment is bound to go to one’s head and if that head is full of conceit already, it’s probably not good for the soul to carry on for too long. I left London when I was 35 and I’m pushing 60 now; I moved to Brighton, where having fun is completely unconnected from networking, rubbernecking and genuflecting, and I love it.
Eventually I became somewhat repelled by the pecking order of the London media, even though I was quite near the top of it. But I’ll always remember my Groucho years fondly; it was the nearest I had to a finishing school, going in a shy girl and coming out a worldly and somewhat depraved woman. But I’m pleased that, like poor exhausted Mr Hobbs, I too got out before it finished me off.
‘Sober superstars were turned away – old soaks were welcomed’