Madame Cyn at 80 ...and sin’s just a distant memory
PUSHING her shopping trolley along a quiet suburban street, she could be any respectable lady of advancing years.
But this is Cynthia Payne, the infamous madam, whose highranking clients exchanged Luncheon Vouchers for sexual favours in the Seventies and Eighties.
Now nearing 80, she lives in the same house that hosted swinging parties and striptease. But the days when a police raid ended with a jail sentence for keeping a brothel are now a distant memory.
‘Most of the people who came here are dead now,’ she says of her clients, who numbered judges, vicars, MPs, bank managers and senior police officers with fetishes ranging from spanking to being covered in Hoover dust. ‘But I still get recognised in the street and people smile.’
Cynthia’s twinkly brown eyes and honey-blonde curls belie her age. Immortalised by actress Julie Walters in the movie Personal Services, she is now looking for an impresario to turn her life story into a musical.
‘I bumped into Andrew Lloyd Webber and suggested one called An English Madam. But he said, ‘‘I’ve already got too many madams in my life.”
‘I even wrote to Tim Rice to suggest it. He said he was too busy but would look me up when he was in my neck of the woods. But I haven’t heard from him.’
She also fancies appearing on the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? ‘I’d probably find Nell Gwyn was an ancestor,’ chuckles Cynthia, who twice stood for Parliament as the Payne and Pleasure candidate.
But instead of the wild times that earned her the nickname Madame Cyn, her days in Streatham, SouthWest London, are now spent thinking about supper, not sex.
She says: ‘I don’t do much any more. I live for my food. I have Type 2 diabetes but I don’t diet.’
This weekend she is looking forward to tucking into a roast chicken. ‘Those half-cooked ones from Lidl are very good,’ she adds.