The bonkbuster queen is reined in
It is such a glorious day as I pull up outside Jilly Cooper’s country home that I half-expect to find her creation, the great cad Rupert Campbell-Black (nicknamed ‘‘Rupert Bare’’ because he spends so much of his time undressed) basking on the lawn in the buff. Yet it is Cooper, 78, clothed and recovering from an operation on her hip. She makes her way to greet me with the help of a Zimmer frame, enveloping me in a hug and apologising as an ageing greyhound brings with it an undeniable pong. ‘‘That’s my baby, Bluebell. I’m sorry, she’s got terrible breath,’’ she smiles indulgently.
They say you should never meet your heroes but an afternoon with Cooper is simply too good to miss. She began her career with a column in The Sunday Times charting the life of a young wife in candid and hilarious detail; casting it not as drudgery but as a terrific adventure. The novels that followed – if you haven’t read them, think National Velvet but with lashings of sex – became instant classics. For anyone growing up then, as I did, they weren’t just fun but an education when sex wasn’t often portrayed in a positive light. In her hands it became a jolly outdoor sport, as bracing and enjoyable as a morning swim.
In the early 1980s she moved to the countryside, where she completed Riders, the first of her Rutshire novels, basing it on the polo-playing set she found. The series went on to sell more than 15 million copies and the book has been reissued to mark its 30th anniversary. She is currently working on a new one.
The three of us (Bluebell comes too) settle in her cosy sitting room. Cooper’s husband of 52 years, Leo, died in 2013 and every inch of wall is plastered with portraits and pictures of the couple, their two children, Emily and Felix, and a host of pets past and present. I am stunned, I say, that so much time has passed since Riders was published, but even more so that in our sex-saturated world the publisher felt the need to tone down its cover. The original had a woman’s peachy rear with a beefy male hand placed, as one writer noted, ‘‘close enough to feel her break wind’’. The bottom is now smaller, the hand a more delicate paw perched closer to the hip than the rump – a strangely prim gesture.
‘‘When I first saw the artwork in 1985 I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have they done?’ It was terribly over the top,’’ she laughs. With time she came to see it not only as ‘‘beautiful’’ but ‘‘lucky’’, as the book she’d been working on for two decades shot up the bestseller charts. She didn’t know about the cover change for the new edition and was too busy to notice it until a week before publication. It is ‘‘a shame’’, she says diplomatically.
Thirty years on, some of the sexual behaviour of the 1980s is being re-examined. ‘‘I think the issue is the grope area. It’s the ghastliness of everyone being done for abuse. The publisher said that it was demeaning to women, so they moved the hand away. Now it’s a pat on the bum and not a grope.’’ Did she think the grope was offensive? ‘‘I don’t know . . . that’s what is so different. In my day we used to long for celebrities to jump on us – ohhh .’’ She shuts her eyes and sighs dreamily.
She may feel she wrote for another era, but she and a few other authors, such as Jackie Collins, set the template for the bonkbuster. Their women didn’t swish around in romantic reveries, but were as likely to pursue as be pursued. Janey Lloyd-Foxe, her ravishing but slatternly journalist, is, she admits, based on her own years rushing around Fleet Street.
Even re-reading the books today, I find them racy and hilarious, with a tendency to segue into descriptions of herbaceous borders or otters. Take this from Riders: ‘‘Making love to Hilary was like eating a pork pie when you were desperately hungry, then discovering by the date on the discarded wrapping that it should have been eaten a month before.’’
The world Cooper created was perceptive and warm, every character handled with affection – even the rogues. But when I suggest she might have written about sex for a purpose beyond the sheer fun of it, I get a furious denial. ‘‘I had absolutely no principles,’’ she cackles.
Cooper grew up as Jilly Sallitt in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, and claims to have had one ambition in life: ‘‘I longed to get married from the age of 14 because all of my generation did.’’ She ‘‘fluked’’ her way into an interview at Somerville College, Oxford, doing badly in the entrance exam and catastrophically in the interviews, and fled on the milk train home in the hope of finding ‘‘freedom’’. The answer was journalism; she landed a job on the Middlesex Independent newspaper, covering everything from ‘‘juvenile homosexual stabbings’’ to the marriages and deaths announcements. ‘‘It was heaven,’’ she says, ‘‘because you could do absolutely anything.’’
It was the era of the ‘‘four-hour lunch’’ when ‘‘there was quite a lot of fun going on, a lot of parties and affairs’’. It must have been a great source of material. ‘‘Certainly with the editors I had on the local paper, with all three actually, there was masses of snogging in the back of cars.’’ Really? ‘‘Yes, lovely,’’ she smiles. ‘‘Lots of lovely snogging."
She was, though, completely incapable of holding down a job and was fired from 22 temporary posts. ‘‘I was so messy and disorganised,’’ she cries.
It was only at the age of 24, when she married Leo, a publisher of military histories, that her career began to take shape.
She found a job at a publisher, wrote a few short stories and seized an opportunity to serenade Godfrey Smith of The Sunday Times at a dinner party.
‘‘I told him that the awful thing about being a young wife was that one got up early in the morning and went to work, one shopped all of one’s lunch hour, got back from work, ironed, washed and tried to clean the flat, cooked one’s husband dinner, made love all night, got up again and went to work and after about six months you died of exhaustion.’’
Harry Evans, who was editor of the newspaper, offered her a column.
‘‘It was a miracle,’’ she says. ‘‘The first one I wrote was about a cricket match and it was March. Harry Evans said very sweetly, ‘I think you’d better put that one away until summer’.’’ She very quickly got the knack.
There was one memorable report from Princess Anne’s wedding in which she lingers on the tightness of the best man’s trousers.
But it was her skill at writing about relationships that really made her name. She and Leo had moved to Putney, southwest London, and she wrote about her attempts to be a perfect wife, accidentally dyeing his jock strap pink by putting it in the washing machine with her red underwear, getting sozzled at dinner parties and trying to keep him busy in bed so that he wouldn’t see the dust underneath it. Sex was a more or less constant theme (later Cooper’s Spitting Image puppet would pop up mid-scene repeating the word ‘‘sex’’). Were people outraged? ‘‘I did get a lot of post. But it was only if my mother hadn’t called by 11 in the morning on Sunday that Leo would say, ‘Uh-oh, you’ve gone too far this time’.’’
Did anyone try to rein her in? ‘‘Oh yes, Harry Evans did once. I wrote a piece about a strip club and I said the stripper’s member was rotating like an english setter’s tail. Harry took it out and said you can’t have that in a family newspaper.’’ We’ll try and get it in this time, I suggest. ‘‘Oh good,’’ she hoots.
Cooper has a knack of being dirty without every really seeming to be, approaching sex as though it were a mad sport such as synchronised swimming. She learnt about it on her aunt’s farm, which goes some way to explaining why so many of her analogies involve wildlife. Does she think we’re too easily offended today? ‘‘Yes, I do. I mean, to be offended because someone calls you ‘darling’ . . . I think there is a bit of the Victorian era about it: paedophilia, extreme respectability, beards,’’ she says anxiously.
Perhaps Cooper’s most enduring talent has been the ability to laugh at hardship rather than linger on it. Shortly after she and Leo married she suffered an ectopic pregnancy that left her infertile. Now she admits the experience was ‘‘devastating, because so much of being a woman is about being pregnant, it feels like a denial of being a woman if you can’t. It’s the effort that you put into it and nothing is happening and the curse is coming every month.’’ She shakes her head.
Instead she and Leo adopted, first Felix and then Emily. ‘‘The moment I held them in my arms it was a thunderbolt,’’ she says, ‘‘and I certainly couldn’t have produced anything as good myself.’’
When it emerged in 1990 that Leo had had a long affair , the shock was ‘‘cataclysmic’’, but the marriage survived. After he developed Parkinson’s disease she was determined that he remain at home throughout the illness, caring for him with a team of professionals.
Was marriage all she hoped it would be at 14? ‘‘Oh God, yes – 52 years of marriage is like building a cathedral. The secret to happy marriage is bedsprings creaking from laughter, not sex. Leo and I used to laugh ourselves sick. God, he was funny.’’