Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints Read online

  Praise for Simon Doonan and Beautiful People

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  “My favorite fresh new writer of the year award goes to Simon Doonan . . . the most brash and brilliant thing in type.”

  —Liz Smith

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  “Humor is his ultimate weapon, and whether Doonan’s in Los Angeles getting arrested in Vivienne Westwood plaid bondage trousers or coping with a gay-bashing policeman in Blackpool, he keeps his comic cool. This endearing book pays tribute to a madcap childhood and the power of familial love.”

  —Publishers Weekly

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  “Simon Doonan is one of the most clever, funny, wicked, silly, sweet people on this planet. He and his sinister wit are glamorously sublime.”

  —Narciso Rodriguez

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  “Doonan’s work is always fun and funny.”

  —Dallas Voice

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  “Effortlessly witty.”

  —The Village Voice

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  “Fabulously entertaining. . . . Visionary fashion director of Barneys department store, [Doonan] is known for taking the ordinary and spinning it into the fantastic. . . . A kick, a hoot, a truly wonderful read, with loads of down-and-dirty details about characters who are way more interesting than those dull Beautiful People Doonan was so all afire to find.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

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  “Simon is a male Lucille Ball.”

  —Donna Karan

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  “A damned good autobiography—a brisk read about an odd life oddly lively, with comic bits that will make you laugh your slippers off and sad bits that will cause you to wake the cat up for a soothing cuddle . . . amusing and markedly unpretentious . . . [Beautiful People] would make a great off-Broadway monologue.”

  —RM Vaughn, National Post (Canada)

  * * *

  “Beneath the hilarious camp in Simon Doonan’s memoir. . . , I was touched by his wistful yearning for the life of glamour, glitz, and Beautiful People, which he ultimately achieved.”

  —Dominick Dunne

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  TARTS

  Chapter 2

  FUN

  Chapter 3

  BLEACH

  Chapter 4

  NUTS

  Chapter 5

  EYEBALLS

  Chapter 6

  CAMP

  Chapter 7

  GUTS

  Chapter 8

  GIFTS

  Chapter 9

  VERMIN

  Chapter 10

  DAUGHTERS!

  Chapter 11

  PUDDING

  Chapter 12

  NO KNICKERS

  Chapter 13

  PUNKS

  Chapter 14

  MY WILLIE

  Chapter 15

  HOLLYWOOD

  Chapter 16

  CREVICE NOZZLES

  Chapter 17

  BLANCHE

  Postscript

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Names and identifying characteristics of certain glamorous varmints in this book have been changed. Conversations presented in dialogue form have been re-created from my memory of them, but they are not intended to represent word-for-word documentation; rather they are meant to evoke the gist of what was actually said.

  FOR JONATHAN ADLER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Massive amounts of gratitude to the gorgeous folk and glamorous varmints who enhanced my text by jogging my highly selective memory: I refer to my dad, Terry Doonan; my sister, Shelagh Doonan; my old chum Biddie Biddlecombe (also a sister of sorts); all the Adlers; and, last but not least, my therapist Dr. John Pappas.

  A vente thank-you to all the glamorous, recklessly encouraging varmints over at Simon & Schuster, especially my editor, Amanda Murray. Thanks also to: my assistant, Danny Evans; my agent, Tanya McKinnon; my lawyer, James Addams; and my nanny, Marita.

  Across the pond, thanks to the beautiful people at Harper-Collins including, but not limited to, Sarah Bailey, Claire Kingston, Fiona Marsh, and Elizabeth Woabank. Thanks also to Jon Plowman, Caryn Mandebach, Jonathan Harvey, and Gary Ventimiglia for believing in the groovy telegenic nelly potential of this book.

  Lastly, thanks to my brain for showing me the ugly truth about the Beautiful People.

  Some of it wasn’t very nice,

  but most of it was beautiful.

  Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz

  INTRODUCTION

  My mother was a beautiful person.

  When I was six years old, she sneezed and her dentures flew out. They hit the kitchen door with a sharp clack! and then rattled sideways across the linoleum floor like a fleeing crustacean. I have absolutely no recollection of graduation day or my twenty-first birthday or what I did last Christmas, but as long as I live, I will never forget the sight of glam Betty Doonan in her tight skirt and white stilettos chasing her fugitive dentures.

  Am I strange? Quite possibly.

  I was born in 1952, the same year that Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne. In 2002, fifty years later, Queen Elizabeth and I both celebrated our jubilees. Naturally, we both took strolls down our respective memory lanes. While hers was doubtless strewn with ermine capes, bejeweled accessories, sparkling crystal toasting goblets, and well-fed corgis, mine was not.

  As I wandered through the windmills and filing cabinets of my mind, I was taken aback by what I found, and did not find.

  Yes, there were flying dentures, but where was the more picturesque stuff—the Hawaiian sunsets, the Easter bunnies, and the fluffy kittens? Where were those dreamy summer afternoons spent chasing butterflies through fields of daisies while riding a white Victorian bicycle? Was I too sloshed to recall them? Did they ever exist? And where, most important of all, were the Beautiful People?

  As a fashion-obsessed, nelly teen growing up in Reading, it was inevitable that I should develop a deranged fixation with the phenomenon known as the Beautiful People. In the 1960s, the Beautiful People, or B.P.s as we devotees called them, were big news. Every fashion magazine was crammed with fascinating drivel about these self-indulgent glamour pusses. No detail of their lives was too trivial for my consideration: I simply had to know everything about their hairdressers, their palazzos, their caftans (the Beautiful People always seemed to be photographed wearing caftans), their eating habits, or lack thereof, and the unguents they slapped on their gorgeous faces. Where did they live? It wasn’t Reading, for sure. The Beautiful People were totally Euro-fabulous: it was all about Rome and Gstaad and Saint-Tropez. They had never seen, or smelled, the Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory.

  What were the qualifications needed to join the B.P.s? Were there any membership dues? Nobody seemed to know. It was all very mysterious. There were certain common denominators: most Beautiful People seemed to have loads of spare cash, ramparts of thick hair, and fake lashes. Having a closet full of Valentino couture seemed like it might speed up the approval process.

  The fact that I was several hundred miles away from the nearest Roman palazzo living in a rooming house with a bunch of batty relatives and miscellaneous lodgers only served to fuel my ardor. I daydreamed of escaping the grotty milieu in which fate had se
en fit to place me and running off to the fashionable excitement of the big (Emerald) city, where the Beautiful People were waiting to welcome me into their bracelet-encrusted arms.

  So where were they now? Why, when I took that stroll down memory lane on my fiftieth birthday, could I find no trace of them?

  Though devoid of B.P.s, my memory banks were, I hasten to add, by no means empty. Au contraire! As I began to write this memoir, I found that they were teeming with vivid recollections. I found half a century of jarring occurrences, freakish individuals, fashion follies, deranged unsavory types, varmints, and vermin. There were hernias and food poisonings, cringe-making encounters with law enforcement, and stomach-churning regrets. There was no shortage of heartwarming material.

  Woven through this tapestry of recollections, like a gaudy strand of hot-pink silk, was my family, immediate and extended, in all its raw majesty: my mother, the feisty 1940s broad; my troubled and anarchic grandmother Narg; my blind aunt Phyllis; my bra-burning sister, Shelagh; and Biddie, my showbiz-crazed childhood best friend.

  Revisiting my temps perdu proved both cathartic and entertaining. Sometimes I wept, but more often I chuckled. As you may have already predicted, it was not long before I had my Oz epiphany and figured out that there was indeed “no place like home.” What happened to the Beautiful People? Like Dorothy’s mates, they were there all along. I had simply failed to recognize them.

  This memoir is intended to set the record straight and pay a bit of long-overdue homage to the real Beautiful People, my Beautiful People. It’s a toast not just to my family and the glamorous varmints I have known but to all the tarts and trolls and twinkies and trouts who have thrown on an elegant chapeau, or a ratty wig, and gone in search of glamour and fun.

  Here’s to us! Long live the Beautiful People!

  CHAPTER 1

  TARTS

  At the age of twenty-one I went in search of the Beautiful People.

  I was not alone. Joining me on this earnest and passionate quest was a childhood friend. His name was James Biddlecombe, but everyone called him Biddie.

  Looking back I realize that Biddie and I were suffering from a mild but persistent affliction. There was no formal diagnosis and no known cure. Our malaise can best be summed up as follows: we were a couple of low-rent, latter-day Madame Bovarys. Like Flaubert’s antiheroine, we saw glamour and modish excitement in the faraway and only boredom and dreariness in the here and now. In Reading, our industrial hometown, there was no shortage of dreary here and nows.

  We fed our fantasies and illusions by reading endless drivel about the Beautiful People in my mother’s glossy magazines. These effortlessly stylish trendsetters owned sprawling palazzos in Rome and ultragroovy pied-à-terres in Chelsea. They slept in six-foot circular beds covered with black satin sheets and white Persian cats. The Beautiful People were thin and gorgeous, and they had lots and lots and lots of thick hair, and their lives seemed to be about a hundred million times more screechingly fabulous than Biddie’s life and mine combined. They did not work much, but they had buckets and buckets of money, which they spent on things like champagne and caftans and trips to Morocco to buy caftans.

  Soon they would be spending some of it on us. Soon we would be lolling on their Afghani rugs enjoying goulash and hash brownies, and meeting all their bohemian friends at lavishly decadent soirees thrown in our honor.

  “What a gas! Here come Simon and Biddie,” one Beautiful Person would whisper to another.

  “Intriguing. Do tell . . . ”

  “Such a divine couple. New in town. A bit common, but otherwise totally happening. I simply must introduce you!”

  Biddie and I were not a couple per se. As preteens, we had once shown each other our “bits” down by my father’s compost heap, but that’s about as far as it went. Our relationship was something else. Something equally intense. Something quite spiritual.

  Biddie and I were sisters. Our sisterly bond began at about the age of six. We clicked because we shared the same camp sense of humor. We had the same interests and disinterests. Biddie and I hated to play conkers or marbles. We preferred to spend our time doing highly nuanced imitations of our female teachers. Their personal style was our obsession: Miss Stoddard’s bloomers, Mrs. Milner’s bowling ball breasts, sadistic Miss Bagnold’s crisp shantung suits.

  As we grew older we became more perverse. We developed a shared fascination for anything tawdry or illegal. This included, but was not limited to, the swarthy bloke down the street from Biddie’s block of council flats who, though married, was caught soliciting in the public toilets down by the river. He was arrested and denounced in the local paper. Whenever we saw him in the neighborhood, we would become all giggly and knowing.

  By the age of ten Biddie and I had graduated to national tabloid exposés. When the Christine Keeler scandal broke, we thought we had died and gone to heaven. The daily revelations about reefer smoking, interracial sex, and spanking among the bowler-hatted, pompous politicians, the landed gentry, and their female companions rendered us all of a quiver and steamed up Biddie’s National Health spectacles.

  It was not long before we began to identify with the two high-priced tarts at the center of this erotically charged hurricane: Biddie was the cheeky blonde Mandy Rice-Davies and I was the enigmatic brunette Christine Keeler, the girl the News of the World dubbed “The Shameless Slut,” the girl who brought down the Conservative Government of England.

  Not everyone thought these young ladies were as glamorous and interesting as we did. The majority of our little classmates were forbidden to read or watch anything about Mandy or Christine. Biddie and I were only too happy to fill the gaps in their knowledge. In fact, we used the Profumo Affair to institute a reign of terror. Many of our victims would, after a heavy bombardment of salacious details, hold their chubby little hands over their reddened ears and beg for mercy.

  We discovered that if we merely chanted the words “Christine Keeler! Christine Keeler!” over and over again with increasing ferocity, some children could even be reduced to tears. We were eventually caught and punished for this game by a teacher who could barely disguise her amusement.

  This incident only served to strengthen our commitment to Mandy and Christine. We admired their moxie. Though barely twenty years old, they had already done quite well for themselves. They hobnobbed with lords and spent their weekends being pampered in large country houses. They were Beautiful People–ish.

  By the time we reached the age of sixteen—i.e., old enough to become prostitutes—Biddie and I had morphed into reckless fun seekers. We were an anything-for-kicks double act. If we had been girls, real girls, we might so easily have become the next Mandy and Christine. Biddie was tall and exotic and hilarious. His exhibitionism, comedic timing, not to mention his ability to play female leads, had garnered rave reviews for his all-boys high school drama society.

  Though mousier, shorter, and more secretive, I was even more likely to become a tart than Biddie, albeit of the straightforward male variety. I was the first male personage in our hometown, preceding even Biddie, to walk into a ladies’ jewelry shop and demand a pierced ear.

  “Have you thought about a career?” asked Terry, my dad, one day over Sunday lunch. My parents and our extended family of assorted lodgers and mentally ill relatives all craned their necks in my direction, anxious to hear my thoughtful reply.

  “Pass the gravy. I’m moving to Paris,” I began, eliciting a gasp of surprise from my blind aunt Phyllis.

  “Eiffel Tower!” ejaculated Narg enigmatically. Narg was my schizophrenic grandmother. I reversed her name from Gran to Narg when I was about six, declaring that it suited her much better, which it did.

  “I’m going to sell my body on the Left Bank to Existentialists and people like that.”

  Nobody batted an eyelid. With two certified lunatics in residence—Narg and my uncle Ken—we all had a very high tolerance for startling pronouncements.

  My parents, Terry and Betty, shou
ld probably have been more concerned. From an early age, I was excessively focused on obtaining the freedom which comes with having a bit of extra cash in my pocket, and was prepared to do whatever it took to get it. I happily washed dishes at the Mars bar factory canteen in nearby Slough. I also put in time at the local cork and bottle top factory; disgusting fauna—snakes, centipedes, and large, orange, powdery-looking spiders—frequently emerged from the bales of Indian cork and crawled up my arm.

  I looked upon this period as a warm-up. Consorting with rich old Parisian men, no matter how wizened or grotesque of habit, could not possibly be any more creepy than this, and would probably be a lot more lucrative.

  Instead of becoming a prostitute, I went off to university, courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government, leaving Biddie in Reading working at the local department store. Three years later I came back with a mediocre and useless general arts degree and found myself in exactly the same position as Biddie, only he was in Soft Furnishings and I was plonked down in Clocks and Watches.

  While Biddie unfurled and scissored his brocades and velveteens, and counseled customers about their Lancelot pelmets and Austrian poufs, I flicked a feather duster over my dreary brass carriage clocks and windup travel alarms.

  Though this was not what I had in mind for us, it had its advantages. In this dusty, suburban retail milieu, we enjoyed fame and notoriety. We were grand poissons in a small pond, especially the flamboyant Biddie, who when customers innocently asked, “Where can I get felt?” could never resist replying, “Come round the back, dear, and I’ll show you what I’ve got!”

  With his long neck, dangly earring, and madly au courant henna’ed Ziggy Stardust toilet-brush coiffure, Biddie was the store’s biggest personality, and a dead ringer for Mr. Bowie. He was pounced upon more than once and asked for his autograph, even during working hours. The good people of Reading took no issue with the notion that David Bowie—Britain’s most exciting pop phenomenon—would have elected to spend his days slicing up chintz in a regional department store.