SOAP AGENT COMES CLEAN
How Melanie Blake became a bestseller.
When Melanie Blake was a child, in Manchester, ‘chubby with glasses and dirt poor’, she used to accompany her cleaner mother to work with a library book to keep her company – ideally one by her favourite author, Jackie Collins. ‘Those books were filled with these amazing women who weren’t just wives or girlfriends, they were managers and publicists. I’d watch my mum with her knees bleeding from scrubbing the floor and vowed that was the kind of woman
I was going to be,’ says Melanie, 44, who’s acted as manager, agent and publicist to dozens of household names, as well as emulating Jackie by writing two rollicking bonkbuster novels. ‘I felt like a stork had dropped me in the wrong place and I wasn’t meant to be there.’
Until she was seven, Melanie had a normal home life. ‘We were from a working-class background. My dad had his own successful printing business, my mum looked after us at home. We all loved watching TV together and we were happy,’ she says.
Yet overnight, everything changed when Melanie’s father joined a doomsday cult. ‘He got into this extreme born-again Christianity, which believed that everything that wasn’t in the Bible was a false idol. We couldn’t watch television, read books or magazines. He came into my bedroom and broke the legs of my Sindy and Barbie dolls and ripped all my posters of the bands and soap opera stars off the wall.’
Melanie put them up again inside her wardrobe, where she also had hidden a black-and-white TV set she’d found in a skip. ‘I used a coathanger as an aerial and used to hide in there to watch my favourite programme, Top of the Pops, but then Dad found out and trashed it all. Life was awful.’
Her dad also gave all the family’s money to the church. ‘Suddenly we had nothing,’ says Melanie. To survive, her mother started working as a cleaner, feeding her children from the equivalent of food banks and clothing them in charity-shop finds.
‘If she came home with something new
Dad would always take great pleasure in smashing it. Once she came home in a new outfit and he ripped it off her back in front of us. I remember her crying and saying, “Why can’t I have nice things?”’
One Christmas, when Melanie was nine, he smashed her elder brother’s new guitar over his knee and burnt her brand-new Care Bear. He made his children study the Bible for hours and stood outside their school with placards that read ‘The
End is Nigh’.
‘I was bullied for that and for having free school meals,’ Melanie says. At school, teachers wrote her off as a no-hoper. ‘My English teacher said the only thing I’d be writing was labels on factory boxes,’ she says.
But, inspired by her beloved Jackie Collins novels, which she hid from her father, Melanie was determined to prove everyone wrong. As soon as she turned 16, she left home and lived in a squat with strangers. ‘There was no heating or electricity. At night I was so cold I thought I was going to die,’ she recalls. ‘There were two other girls and four boys and we all slept together in a huddle on the floor – no funny business, just to keep warm. It was a really rough area, we were living on something like £1 a day, buying tangerines and chocolate from Aldi, but I was so happy it didn’t matter. It all felt so bohemian.’
She was devastated when one night she returned to the flat to find it boarded up. ‘I had to sleep in a shed in the garden.’ After that, the council gave her a flat. ‘They saved my life.’
Having lost weight after a bout of tonsillitis, gained contact lenses and dyed her hair blonde, a now super-glamorous Melanie worked as a receptionist and shop assistant to save up enough money to move to London. She arrived in the capital on her 17th birthday, knowing no one and with just enough money to last her three months.
Intent on landing a job in the music business, she found a flatshare and for the next two years sent hundreds of begging letters to production companies, applying for every job going, while she supported herself by handing out flyers. After one particularly bad day, when she’d been giving out free drinks at Euston station and a woman knocked one out of her hand, soaking Melanie and sneering, ‘Get a real job!’, Melanie decided to throw in the towel and head back to Stockport. But that same day the agency who’d got her the flyer work called.
‘They said, “Have you ever been a camera assistant?” I said yes. I had no idea what it was. They said, “Can you get to
Elstree [studios] at 10am tomorrow?” I said yes. I had no idea where they were. I got there at 10am, and I looked up at the studio and it said Top of the Pops. I said, “Thank you, God. It’s not you he’s looking after, Dad – it’s me.”’
At first, Melanie admits laughingly, she was ‘terrible’ at her job. ‘But I learned quickly!’ Tasks included buying Mariah Carey kittens to play with from a local pet shop and hollowing out a speaker so David Beckham could hide in it to watch his girlfriend Victoria perform with the Spice Girls without being bothered by fans.
Although initially daunted, Melanie soon learned that most of the pop stars were friendly and began defying their managers’ orders not to talk to them. ‘J-Lo sacked hers after I told her we’d been banned from making eye contact with her,’ she says.
The singers started valuing her no-nonsense opinions.
‘I told Westlife they might want to switch off the wind machine as the silk shirts they were wearing kept blowing up, which was very unflattering, and said, “Kylie, do you know the lighting you’re using is turning your hair blue?”’
In the Elstree studio car park, Melanie often bumped into one of soap’s most famous face. ‘Gillian Taylforth is as chirpy and friendly as you would imagine, and after saying hello to me one day after we’d caught sight of each other on several occasions, I told her I thought it was odd that someone
‘I SAID, “THANK YOU, GOD. IT’S NOT YOU HE’S LOOKING AFTER, DAD - IT’S ME”’
as famous as her didn’t seem to be in many magazines – I used to devour all the mags and papers back then. She said it was because she was older, which shocked me as she was only around 46 at the time.
‘We struck up an instant connection and Gillian – then one of the biggest stars on EastEnders – suggested I might enjoy working as an extra on the soaps, to get a birds eye view of the drama world. She gave me the details of an agency she knew the extras were employed by and the next thing I knew I was in the Queen Vic myself, silently ordering a drink in the background.
‘Soon I was working on all the big soaps and found myself connecting with more of the leading ladies. Extras weren’t supposed to talk to the talent, but I was bold and opinionated.’
Claire Richards from Steps then asked Melanie to manage her solo career and by the time she was 30, Melanie was turning over €4 million a year as a hugely successful manager, specialising in relaunching the careers of ‘retired’ stars, such as the Nolan Sisters and Patsy Kensit. Melanie has gone on to work with dozens of actresses, including Beverley Callard, Stephanie Beacham, Gillian Taylforth and Nadia Sawalha to name just a few.
Today, Melanie lives in a €3 million villa in London with her elderly poodle, a world away from her ‘terrible, terrible childhood. There’s been no family money and no rich husband for me, and I see that as making me stronger than so many others who haven’t had the journey I’ve had,’ she says.
Her work has allowed her to hobnob with Hollywood grandees and royals, and date the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence – ‘He was adorable, a great, great guy, so kind and loving and sexy.’ She’s been a guest at numerous wild parties, such as ones thrown at Oasis singer Noel Gallagher’s Supernova Heights and another at Claridge’s held by a famous acting couple where all the guests were on drugs and some were even indulging in threesomes. ‘I didn’t partake, but it was really exciting to be witnessing such debauchery and not be a mess.’
All this insider knowhow is put to perfect use in Melanie’s latest novel Ruthless Women (her previous bestseller The Thunder Girls, about a girl band’s reunion, was based on her music industry experience).
In her new book she lifts the lid on the very steamy and ultra-competitive world of soap operas, with plenty of scenes lifted from her real-life adventures, such as the time she was invited to an awards ceremony with a household name she represented. When Melanie left her house, she found the well-loved soap actress, who was in her
50s, already in the car in flagrante with her 20-something driver. ‘She had one leg out of the window and the car was parked across the road so other people were having to swerve round it – anyone could see them! Less than an hour later, she was all smiles, being photographed on the red carpet. I thought, “If only the fans knew what was happening 45 minutes ago!”’
She recalls another time she had to provide a bailout. ‘As the door to the hotel bedroom opened, there was one of the most famous female faces from one of the biggest soap operas in the world, naked, passed out, surrounded by men half her age also sparked out. The room showed the usual signs of the sort of debauchery this particular
star was fond of, drugs on the table, rolled up notes cast aside and empty bottles covering the floor. It took less than five minutes to pay off the “casuals” to keep them quiet about their wild night with one of TV’s sweethearts and not sell her out to the tabloids.
‘Apart from her show bosses, who would hit the roof, there was also the husband at home who as usual had no idea what his wife was really up to.’
Melanie pulls no punches when she reflects on her career. ‘I’ve represented the cream and quite frankly some of the rotten apples of TV soaps. I don’t list all my former clients - I’ve dumped too many bitches to count. Also I don’t want their names doing the rounds for the guessing game as to who might be based on who in Ruthless Women. Let me tell you, in those pages, the backstabbing, bonking and debauchery might seem extraordinary but to me it was all par for the course.’
She has helped to keep some shocking secrets out of the press – one of the things that most keeps her in demand. ‘The thing about soap stars is they are truly fascinating even – maybe especially – when they are behaving badly,’ she admits. ‘I’ve dealt with crime, suicide attempts, bankruptcy and blackmail, and kept most of it out of the press. If I care about a client, I will go to the ends of the earth to protect them. I need to be a fan of someone to take them on.
‘You can feel like their mum and want the best for your clients, but I’ve had those awful phone calls where I’ve been shouted and screamed at. It can make you cry, but then you pull yourself together and get on with it because showbusiness isn’t a normal place and all that glistens definitely isn’t golden, but it is fascinating.
‘One of the most challenging things to deal with can be the “celebrity lover” because nine times out of 10 these men are rotten to the core. They usually want to be the agent and I could list you 100 women who’ve lost everything to them.’
Melanie continues to work hard, determined as always to have the last laugh. ‘I’ve spent all my life fighting back. I wanted revenge on my Dad for saying I couldn’t have certain things or watch TV, so I proved him wrong.’ She no longer has any contact with her father. Her mother eventually walked out on him after 30 years of marriage only to die shortly afterwards of ovarian cancer, just two weeks after she received the diagnosis. ‘That taught me that you never know how much time you have left, so don’t let things happen to you – make things happen.’
That was Melanie’s philosophy when in 2017 she fulfilled a lifelong dream by buying five pieces of her late idol Jackie Collins’s jewellery at auction, including a 50-piece morganite and diamond necklace. ‘Now
I feel that Jackie [who died in 2015] is somehow looking down on me, because I epitomise everything she wrote about,’ Melanie says. ‘Some people think of
Jackie as tacky, all leopard print and big jewellery, but to the little girl who had watched her mum scrubbing floors, wearing your idol’s jewellery and writing her kind of books… It doesn’t get any better than that.’
Melanie’s latest novel Ruthless Women is published by Head of Zeus, price €16.99.