Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Maxine’s first lover, skiing champion Pierre Boursal, was based on one of France’s most eligible young bachelors, Henri Roussel, who looked like a Greek god. I met him as Maxine did, on top of a mountain, in a snowstorm. (My, the French girls were cross.) He was my boyfriend until – back in Britain – I tired of writing my love letters in French, then having them corrected by him in red ink and returned to me. His own letters were written in impeccable English because, as a child, he had had an English nanny. After we split up, Henri married and in due course had a son, Thierry Roussel, who grew up to marry the Greek shipping heiress, Christina Onassis, and provided the gossip magazines with stories more outrageous than any in Lace.

  Two of the schoolgirl friends were keen skiers, but Judy couldn’t afford it, while Pagan was all elbows and angles on skis. In real life, Pagan was based on an Audrey Hepburn almost-look-alike called Phoebe Atkins, who was similarly gawky on skis, although she could ride like the wind. We met when we were both sixteen, at a grand party in Paris where we felt unsophisticated compared to the elegant, flirting Frenchwomen who smelled delicious, were surrounded by appreciative Frenchmen and never ran out of conversation. In our homemade dresses, Phoebe and I smuggled a chocolate cake under the white-draped buffet table where, crouched on the floor, we became best friends for life.

  Two years after we hid under the tablecloth, Phoebe went to a cocktail party at the Jordanian Embassy, where a Sandhurst cadet – King Hussein of Jordan – fell in love with her. For the next two years I scuttled behind them as a lady-in-waiting – Phoebe’s mother wouldn’t let her see the King without a chaperone – while Phoebe was belle of the balls. Pagan’s spangled net ball dress was one that Phoebe really wore and the king really did give her a Persian lamb riding cloak that had belonged to his grandfather.

  Every time Phoebe went out with the king, His Majesty had to provide a blind date for me: this was invariably his Prime Minister or his Finance Minister or someone similarly grand, balding and ill at ease with a nineteen-year-old girl. Phoebe and I used to complain about the safety precautions – we would get settled in His Majesty’s limousine and then be hauled out by some bodyguard and shoved into another, ordinary car. Then one of the bald heads was blown up by a car bomb, and after that we never complained.

  Sadly, both Phoebe and Hussein knew that the king’s marriage had already been arranged. Their affair didn’t last long. Phoebe eventually became a hands-on farmer in Cornwall – as far as she could get from sophisticated London life. She married a real professor and he really did have a heart attack on their honeymoon and there really was a subsequent seduction scene, which resulted in my goddaughter, Zenna.

  Apart from that, I should emphasise that none of the sexual experiences in Lace happened to any of my own friends – as far as I know. I disliked my fictional Prince Abdullah, who was based on Prince Ali, son of arguably the richest man in the world, the Aga Khan. Prince Ali Khan’s amatory exploits were splashed all over the newspapers, and were always current gossip in London; also, he was at one point the brother-in-law of the Duke of Bedford.

  Judy was an important member of the little group of friends in Switzerland because Judy had no money, no connections and no one to help her. Each of the other girls expected to get what her mother expected her to get: a faceless husband with plenty of money, who would support her and her children forever. But Judy knew that the only person who could improve her life, longterm, was Judy.

  The real-life Judy, who also grew up in poverty and had only herself to rely on, was Betsy Nolan, who, through sheer hard work and determination, managed to become the best book publicity agent in America. When I arrived in New York in the glittering early eighties, I was penniless – and not just because British currency restrictions allowed you to take only £50 a year out of Britain. Betsy, who quickly realised that I had no money, invited me to stay for the weekend at her mouth-watering apartment on East 57th Street – within a credit card’s toss of Bloomingdale’s. I stayed for six months, Betsy says, although I swear it was not more than three. It was Betsy who coaxed and threatened me into writing my first novel, Lace, and of course Betsy who publicised it. Lace went straight to number one on bestseller lists around the world – except in New York, where it was number two. Betsy sighed, ‘So yours isn’t quite the Cinderella story, but you did darn well for a beginner.’

  In the following year, the mini series of Lace achieved the highest viewing figures of the 1983-84 viewing season. In the middle of the night, Betsy phoned me with the news and said, ‘Cinderella after all!’

  Since Lace was first published, the question I’m most often asked is: Who is Kate, in real life? Possibly the person most interested was my ex-husband, Sir Terence Conran, who told me that he had paid his lawyer to read Lace to check that I had said nothing libellous about him. Imagine paying a lawyer to spend ten hours reading Lace! Nice work if you can get it.

  Oddly enough, it didn’t occur to me until years later that I had based Kate’s journalism career on my own. Scotty was my real life editor, Gordon McKenzie, and Kate’s feelings about the enemy soldier she shot were my feelings when, in the Australian outback, I shot a man-sized kangaroo at close range in the days when they were considered vermin. I never hunted again.

  I was never a war correspondent – although I knew a few – but at one point I was fashion editor at the Observer. Often I collaborated with manufacturer, Jeffrey Wallis, who famously worked with the iconic French couturier, Chanel, to launch her clothes in England; the Wallis Chanel suits became so famous that – for the first time in history – Frenchwomen flew to London to buy their clothes. They also purchased my friend Mary Quant’s sensational outfits, her huge fur hats and her avant garde makeup. We all had terrific self-confidence when wearing our hairpieces, our false eyelashes, our pearly pink lipstick, our thigh-high boots and Mary’s miniskirts. But the fashion designer Guy Saint Simon was based on my son, Jasper Conran, whose debut collection really was stolen and held to ransom. It was Jeffrey Wallis who masterminded the retrieval from the locked home of a well known but hard-up fashion personality. I drove the get-away car.

  In the last glamorous days of Fleet Street I became women’s editor of the Daily Mail, but I had to give up journalism when I contracted a chronic illness. For years I could not work, which had a disastrous effect on my bank balance. Bit by bit, I started to write when I could, but by the time I started Lace, I could only afford to live in a tiny basement flat. Then Lace set a European record for an advance for a first novel: the advance plus the movie sale totalled over a million dollars at a time when a secretary earned $100 a week. To make a million dollars would have taken her two hundred years.

  Looking back, Lace certainly turned out to be my own Cinderella story. One day I was a single mother of two young sons with not enough money to buy bicycles for them, then suddenly I was world famous and had a million dollars in the bank. Don’t let anyone tell you that money isn’t important. It is if you haven’t got any.

  As Lace became an international success, I commuted on the Concorde between London and New York. I was hurled on a round-the-world-tour, staying in glamorous hotels in New York (The Plaza), Paris (a pale blue suite in the Ritz) and India (that hotel in the middle of a lake), and when I was working in Los Angeles on movie scripts I stayed in the Bel Air Hotel (swans on the lake). All expenses paid by publishers or movie studios. In the studio in Los Angeles, I worked with the best directors and best producers in the world. Outside the studio, everyone wanted a piece of Lace. On my first day, as I was being served breakfast in my four-poster bed, the waiter thrust his CV into my hand and said earnestly, ‘I also tap dance and speak Japanese. Can you get me a part?’

  It was easy to see why Lace was a success in Hollywood – because of the money it made. But why, I wondered, were women around the world, in China, in Russia, in India, in Africa, similarly obsessed? There were three reasons, I decided, and they all came from my newspaper career: I knew how to research and I had a lot
of interviewing experience. The third and most important reason was because I remembered clearly the letters that women readers had sent to me, in which they spoke haltingly about their personal life and their problems. Clearly, these women felt that they could not talk aloud about their sex lives to anyone they knew.

  When I wrote Lace, the average man thought the clitoris was a Greek hotel and the average woman didn’t know how to enlighten him. The contraceptive pill had just appeared, but few women felt sexually self-confident. Girls were hesitant, confused about sex. Now that they didn’t risk pregnancy . . . should they or shouldn’t they? Did first-time sex leave you feeling like a goddess or a doormat? Would he still love you tomorrow? What did ‘being good in bed’ actually mean? A lot of women felt inadequate; a lot of girls acquiesced because they were frightened of being dumped; a lot of bewildered girls felt rejected when they were dumped. There was a lot of anxiety and disappointment.

  There still is.

  My Hollywood producer described Lace as an enormous, creamy meringue that is somehow good for you. What she meant was that Lace is a book that not only describes sex, it explores the feelings, the emotional aspects of sexual encounters, relationships and love. Yet to me – above all else – Lace has always been a book about friendship. It shows that close women friends can share important life experiences and support each other in ways that a man cannot; and this is the reason why – like that Greek hotel – Lace lies waiting for another generation to discover it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a great debt to my editor, Michael Korda, for teaching me so much in New York and making the process so enjoyable. I also greatly appreciate John Herman’s support, care, editorial involvement and American spelling.

  Without Morton Janklow’s perception and judgment this book might never have been started, let alone finished, and I also owe a great deal to Betsy Nolan for her shrewd advice.

  For reading my manuscript, I am most grateful to George Seddon, Celia Brayfield and Giorgio Sandulescu. For typing on and on . . . and on, I would like to thank Bettina Culham, who somehow managed to decipher Linear C.

  For helping to ensure that this book is technically accurate, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor T. W. Glenister, Dr. Jonathan Gould, The Cancer Research Institute, Alexander Mosley, Victor Sassie, Richard Pearce, Patrick Forbes, William Frankel, Clive Carr, David O’Brien, Mike Ricketts, Peter Alexander, Michael Crawford, Lanham Titchener, Ian McAlley, Roger Wood, Alexander Weymouth, David Maroni, Patrick O’Higgins, Peter Boumphrey, Sebastian Conran, Jasper Conran, Rowland Castro, Anna Weymouth, Dee Wells Ayer, Lesley Blanch, Sandy Fawkes, Mary Quant, Tina Vanzyl-Lubner, Pat Miller, Shirley Lowe, Ruth Janner Morris, Deirdre McSharry, Anna Palmer, Myrna Shapiro, Jill Haas, and Ellie Boris.

  My thanks also to Arthur Klebanoff, Jerry Traum, Anne Sibbald, Arnold Kinsman, Aimee Mikaelis, Rebecca Head, Deborah Gordis, Willow Morel, Mary Jo Valko, Joan Feeley, Anna Wintour, Nina San-tizi and Mallory Andrews, who were kind enough to help me when I needed their expertise, and also to my assistant, Linda Sheridan in New York, for what can only be described as everything.