Root of all wicked humour
Willie Donaldson was a womaniser, crack-smoker, upmarket pimp and comic genius. Forty years ago, he wrote some of the funniest ever spoof letters, says Craig Brown
On 21st March 1979, Mr Henry Root, founder of Henry Root Wet Fish, took his first steps on his mission ‘to correspond with important people in all walks of life on the vital issues of our time’.
He typed his first letter to Sir David Mcnee, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
‘Dear Sir David,’ it began. ‘Hang on! Ignore the media! Ordinary folk are with you all the way in your campaign for greater police powers. Better that ten innocent men be convicted than that one guilty man goes free! That’s what the lounge-room revolutionaries fail to understand.
‘Don’t be depressed by the fact that your “image” isn’t too clever just yet. We have to face it that you come across a wee bit charmless. So what? Do we want this once great country to be policed by the likes of Mr Victor Sassoon the barber and cosmetics expert from Los Angeles?’
Root went on to express his sympathy for Sir David’s lack of headline-grabbing accomplishments.
‘What a pity the recent “Gunman Holed Up in Village Pub Shot Dead By 392 Policemen Situation” didn’t happen on your patch! That would have been just the break you needed. As it was, the Chief Constable of Essex was able to pick up the apples on that one. Never mind. Your chance will come.’
He ended his letter with a polite request. ‘Could you oblige with a photo?’ His plan was to pin the photo on the bedroom wall of his son, Henry Jr, to encourage him to shape up. ‘He idles around in his room all day, sewing sequins onto his disco pumps and worse.’
As was to become his standard practice, Root enclosed a small gift with his letter. ‘Here’s a pound. Use it to enforce Law and Order.’ Like many of Root’s correspondents, Sir David seemed most grateful. ‘Your kind comments are appreciated,’ came the reply.
Over the course of that year, Henry Root offered a good many busy people his advice. Asking Harriet Harman why ‘an attractive lass like you should want to confuse her pretty little head with complicated matters of politics, jurisprudence, sociology and the so-called rights of citizens’, he added that ‘a pretty girl like you should have settled down by now with a husband and a couple of kiddies’.
He congratulated Sir Joseph Cantley, the judge in Jeremy Thorpe’s trial on having ‘tipped the jury the right way... Well done! You never looked to me like the sort of man who’d send an Old Etonian to the pokey.’
And he attempted to enrol the Chief Constable of Manchester in his pressure group, The Ordinary Folk Against the Rising Tide of Filth in Our Society Situation (TOFARTFOSS).
As a captain of industry himself, Root knew how tough life could be at the top. He sympathised with the Queen’s problems with Princess Anne. ‘My Doreen, 19, is completely off the rails, too,’ he confided. ‘So I know what it’s like.’ He reassured the newsreader Angela Rippon, ‘Your admirers like you just the way you are,’ before asking her, ‘Could you possibly send me a photograph of Anna Ford? I’d write to her myself but, as I’m already writing to you, it seems silly to waste a stamp.’
And, on the very day of Margaret Thatcher’s first general election victory, he wrote her a letter (‘Copies to: Mr Laurie Mcmenemy, Mr Paul Johnson and Mrs Whitehouse’) and offered her the benefit of his experience. ‘I don’t much care for the look of Norman St John Stevas. My father taught me two things I’ve never forgotten. “Mind this, son,” he used to say. “Never spit in a man’s face unless his moustache is on fire. And never trust a man who wears mauve underpants at teatime.” ’
Forty years on, The Letters of Henry Root and The Further Letters of Henry Root, published a year later, remain wonderfully funny. Many of Root’s correspondents are now dead and buried, and it’s hard to remember exactly who some of them were (Victor Matthews? Judge Pickles?). But while most jokes fade with time, Henry Root has continued to soar, like the nose of a rocket, freed of its structure. Unburdened by topicality, the character of Root himself – bluff, bossy and appalling, but bursting with bonhomie and optimism – whizzes aloft.
On 9th April 1979, Root writes to
the Lucie Clayton model agency in the Brompton Road. He is, he informs them, organising a ‘knees-up’ on the 25th May for the officers and men of the Rifle Brigade, in a private suite at the Savoy Hotel. ‘I’d like you to supply the cabaret. What we have in mind are a dozen or so “models” to jump out of a cake and “mingle” with the guests. I naturally don’t want to be too explicit in a letter, but perhaps I should emphasise that the “models” should be top types and would be expected to “go a bit”, if you follow me.’
The registrar at Lucie Clayton, who signs herself ‘S Neill’, replies, ‘Neither the Savoy Hotel, nor the adjutant of your former regiment, confirm your statement about the 25th May, and certainly you are writing to the wrong agency. I have, however, been on to the Provost Marshal’s department who will be sending some men to see what it is that you really need.’
Root’s riposte is, as always, blunt and to the point: ‘Dear Miss Neill, I don’t understand. It was the Provost Marshal who recommended you in the first place. Yours sincerely, Henry Root.’
Henry Root was the alter ego of William Donaldson, whose other creations included royal expert Talbot Church (‘The Man the Royals Trust’) and top TV mogul Liz Reed (company motto ‘A Tragedy Aired is a Tragedy Shared’).
Willie died in 2005. His life was far too higgledy-piggledy to be contained within a single sentence, but the Daily Telegraph obituarist gave it his best shot. ‘William Donaldson, who has died aged 70, was described by Kenneth Tynan as “an old Wykehamist who ended up as a moderately successful Chelsea pimp”, which was true, though he was also a failed theatrical impresario, a crack-smoking serial adulterer and a writer of autobiographical novels; but it was under the nom de plume Henry Root that he became best known.’
Perversely, Willie would probably have appreciated the unforgiving nature of this description. The Root Letters are enlivened by his visceral distaste for the self-satisfied and the self-deluding; he viewed most of his own behaviour with a similar contempt. He set himself high standards, which he never reached. ‘The salient features about me are laziness, self-indulgence and sex addiction,’ he once confessed. ‘I’m genuinely shocked by my own behaviour.’
I knew Willie for the last 20-odd years of his life. He had been sent a spoof book of mine to review by Country Life, of all publications, and he phoned me soon afterwards to arrange a meeting. I remember b th the phone h call ll well; ll h he spoke k with a conspiratorial voice, as though we were two subversives in a foreign land.
His life might have been written by Henry Fielding. He grew up in great wealth, surrounded by servants. After Winchester, he went to Cambridge, where he began a magazine, Gemini. Contributors included the aspirant young poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Plath said that Gemini was the best thing that had happened at Cambridge since she had been there. He was taught by F R Leavis, whose rigid aesthetic standards he admired, to the point of engendering in him a lifelong belief that his own writing was unforgivably trivial.
Around this time, his father died, leaving Willie the equivalent of £3 million. Within a matter of years, he had managed to lose it all, largely on a series of disastrous theatrical productions, though one of them – Beyond the Fringe – was a huge success. By and large, he had a knack of picking surefire flops, and giving the thumbs-down to soaraway hits. He was perverse in that way: he never felt comfortable courting the middle classes. Late in life, when he was almost penniless, he staged An Evening with Mad Frankie Fraser, in which the old villain indulged in fond reminiscences about his days as enforcer for the Richardson gang.
After being declared bankrupt in 1970, he went to Ibiza, where he invested his remaining £2,000 in a glass-bottomed boat for tourist trips. He left Ibiza later that summer with only £250 left. He then moved in with a former girlfriend, and between the two of them they ran a brothel in Chelsea.
His first book, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a fictionalised account of this period, was widely praised, not least by Kenneth Tynan, who attempted to turn it into a musical, but without success.
And then, in 1979, along came Henry Root, which fast became one of the bestsellers of the decade, producing profits
th that tided Willie over until his next ba bankruptcy hearing.
His love life, too, was a p picaresque mixture of the fo fortunate and the butter-fingered: a at different times, he was loved by tw two famous beauties, Sarah Miles a and Carly Simon, but he let them b both down.
‘What exactly was it that w was so irresistible about even t the sound of Willie Donaldson’s v voice?’ wrote Simon in her r recent autobiography. ‘Willie h had a magic that seduced me f from the h start.’
Though he always dressed smartly, in a shirt and tie, with a blazer from John Lewis, and held himself upright, he lived the most bohemian life of anyone I’ve known. He looked a little like Max Wall, and shared his po-faced humour, interrupted by a sudden flashing smile.
Once when I met him for lunch, he said, ‘At three in the morning last night, I was driven by yardies to a cash machine to get money I owed them for crack cocaine. Honestly! You’d expect better behaviour from a man of my age and standing!’ He liked to view himself with an amazement touched with disapproval.
Whenever I describe Willie and his rackety life to people who didn’t know him, I notice their lips puckering in disapproval. Charm – real charm, rather than its smarmy counterfeit – is almost impossible to convey in words. But, as Simon says, Willie had a magic, and a bottomless sense of humour that gave a touch of offbeat genius to The Henry Root Letters and his later masterpiece, Brewer’s Dictionary of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics.
Though he saw himself, with some justification, as a reprobate, he remained fascinated by moral philosophy, and liked to chew over the finer points of this or that moral quandary for hours on end. He was often baffled or appalled by his own shortcomings. Many of his finer judgements still resonate with me. ‘I am nice but not good, and you are good but not nice,’ he told me over lunch one day.
Sometimes, his satirical instincts masked personal hurt. A couple of years before he died, he fell in love with a young woman who left him for a man from Fowey in Cornwall. Shortly afterwards, I turned on the radio to hear Willie presenting a short series about England. One of the places he happened to be visiting was Fowey. ‘They are so in-bred in Fowey,’ he said, ‘that a fellow can easily find out that he’s his own grandfather.’