Costa Del Crime
Page 16
Upper and lower eye bags removed.
Nose reshaped; stitches dissolve internally.
Nose-to-mouth area shortened.
Fat taken from thigh to make lips fuller.
Silicone chin implant; stitches dissolve inside mouth. Loose skin removed from neck and jawline; muscles repositioned for longer-lasting result.
As the husband of one woman who spent more than £10,000 on cosmetic surgery explained, ‘I was shocked when I heard how much it cost, but the results are fantastic. It’s like she’s a new, younger woman to look at and she’s suddenly started making pretty outrageous sexual demands as well! I think the ops have unlocked her character, allowed her to be herself for the first time in years. It’s certainly rejuvenated our marriage.’
And the woman herself said, ‘Once I started talking about having it done, I was surprised how many of my friends had already had bits and bobs done. Others said, “Go for it. If you look good, we’ll do it too.” Only my youngest daughter was worried. She kept asking me, “You’ll still have a nice smile, won’t you?” But I definitely feel my face is still my own; it’s not a mask. Now my confidence has returned and I feel I’m really back in the world. I keep looking in the mirror and thinking, “Is that me?” I don’t care who knows I’ve had a facelift when it looks so wonderful.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
PORNO DEL SOL
It’s location, location, location, as ‘Grubby Vic’ makes his flicks along the coast
PORNO DEL SOL
One of the Costa del Sol’s most notorious porn-film-makers is a 59-year-old Brit with bleached hair called, rather predictably, ‘Grubby Vic’. He’s a remarkably straightforward character, considering the dubious nature of his business: he sees it simply as a matter of supply and demand. ‘I knock out the porn and the punters buy it by the bucketful. Is that so bad?’
It is typical of Grubby to play down his role as the ultimate purveyor of porn on the southern coast of Spain. He started in the film business more than 40 years ago when he worked as a camera assistant on some of those classic old Carry On comedies, starring stalwarts Barbara Windsor, Syd James and just about every other light-entertainment icon of the 1960s. As Grubby explains, ‘The pay was rubbish, but we had a right laugh – although I knew the producers were doing very well, leaving the rest of us struggling.’
It wasn’t long before Grubby and a couple of his pals from the camera crew decided to branch off into their own ‘specialised’ side of the film business. ‘I knew there must be a market for porn films, but back in them days there was no video so it was an expensive business putting together a movie. I contacted an old boy I knew who owned a few strip clubs in the West End of London. He got together a few grand, persuaded his favourite girls to appear for free and off we went.’
Grubby admits that those early efforts ‘weren’t up to much, but they made the rounds in all the dirty bookshops because there wasn’t anywhere else you could sell porn back in them days.’ Then he had the brainwave of advertising his ‘saucy movies’, as he called them, in the personal pages of Exchange and Mart. ‘Suddenly I had more customers than hot dinners. What was surprising was that so many people had their own home movie projectors to play the films. I made all the investor’s money back for him and even managed to keep a few bob for myself.’
But for the following ten years, Grubby struggled to make a full-time living out of the burgeoning porn-movie business. ‘I was also blacklisted by the so-called legit British film industry; at around the same time the UK film business collapsed. So not only was I not allowed near a film set, but most of my mates were on the dole. It was a difficult time.’
Then Grubby got himself a job running one of those very same Soho bookshops. He also fronted a couple of hostess clubs for one of the most evil West End porn barons of the 1970s. ‘It was a funny old time back then. We had loads of coppers in our pocket and the filthy mags were flying off the shelves at a rate of knots, but the porn-film business had stalled. It was just too tricky to make a decent movie that people would buy.’
Then along came the 1970s porn classic Deep Throat; suddenly Grubby and his merry men were back in demand. ‘But it was the invention of the video that made all the difference. Deep Throat and a load of other Californian porn films were initially shown in backstreet flicks; once they got released on video people started flocking to buy them.’
Grubby Vic was not one to let such obvious opportunities slip through his hands. ‘I taught myself how to handle one of the earliest video cameras. It was a huge great thing and weighed a ton, but once we’d shot the pictures that was it. We didn’t have to do all that long-winded processing that you had to go through with reels of old-fashioned film.’
Needing good weather to shoot an outdoor porn film about life in a nudist holiday camp that had the endearing title of Love in a Warm Climate, Grubby headed out to southern Spain and borrowed a criminal associate’s villa near Marbella to shoot his movie. ‘It was late October and I wanted the film ready for the Christmas market, so I was delighted to find it sunny and eighty degrees when I got out there.’ He has never looked back. ‘I knew it was the place for me the moment the plane touched down at Malaga Airport. Lots of pretty birds everywhere, plenty of geezers prepared to get at it in front of a camera. I never had to recruit any more actors from England. This was where it was at.’
From the late-1970s onwards, Grubby reckons he shot an average of ten porn movies a year. ‘They don’t have a long shelf-life. Back in them early days, it was all pretty straight stuff. I used to recruit women and men from local clubs and by putting advertisements in the classified sections of the Costa’s English-speaking newspapers. We never did much other than straight sex and a bit of oral. Back then we didn’t even like to show actual dicks. It was pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.’
But Grubby’s arrival on the Costa del Sol coincided with the influx of British criminals taking advantage of the lax extradition treaty between the UK and Spain. ‘A lot of heavy fellows turned up on my doorstep wanting a piece of my porn-film business. They couldn’t accept that I was running a straight business and the last thing I needed was a bunch of bored old bank robbers with nothing else to do but cause me a load of aggro. That’s what often happens out here when villains want somewhere to launder their cash. Most of them didn’t have the skills to knock out their own movies so they tried to muscle in on my set-up, but I somehow managed to see them off without any real problems.’
From the late-1970s through to the mid-1980s, Grubby says he continued knocking out porn videos, but then came demands for more varied types of movies.
‘The punters no longer wanted to just watch a pretty couple in their mid-twenties getting it together by the side of a luxury swimming pool in the sunshine. I was being asked for more specialist material, like S and M, orgies, bisexual stuff, even some gay material.’
Ever the adaptable professional, Grubby started franchising off some of his work to other supposed filmmakers on the Costa del Crime. ‘It was a recipe for disaster. I started working alongside some right cowboys who didn’t know one end of a camera from a Hoover. We wasted a lot of cash on rubbish product and meanwhile others were flooding the market with anything-goes material, which was pretty explicit. I used to take a week knocking out a decent porn film, all shot at one house with lots of set-ups featuring at least five different women and three men. But these arseholes were trying to do it all in a two-day shoot. As the quality started to deteriorate, so did the demand. The punters knew they were being conned and turned their backs on us.’
Then Grubby discovered that one of his cowboy partners had raped an actress in front of the rest of his camera crew and threatened to kill anyone who reported him to the police. ‘That was completely out of order. This animal even pulled a gun on me in a row over what he’d done. That was when I realised I had to pull out of the business until things cooled down. I didn’t want to be associated with a bunch of sick bastards like that.’
With four marriages under his belt and ‘an assortment of kids here and back in London’, Grubby’s nice little earner only came to an end with the internet in the mid-1990s. ‘It was inevitable something would come along, so I wasn’t that surprised. I had a long, hard think about the business and realised I needed to, shall we say, readjust my thinking.’
Ever the opportunist, Grubby then began setting up internet porn sites and sex phone-in services catering for all types of perversions. He ran his new operation from a tiny office above a jeweller’s shop in the centre of Marbella’s old town. ‘I had three women and three men sitting there answering emails and taking calls twenty-four hours a day. It was brilliant for a couple of years.’
But Grubby still had a dream to make ‘really classy porn movies’ that could be broadcast over the internet. He also wanted to take full advantage of the massive influx of British residents on the Costa del Sol. ‘I started approaching people with holiday homes and offering to pay them to use their houses as locations for my brand-new, slick porn movies. Then I offered to film their homes separately so that when the owners wanted to sell them they could put the footage out on the internet through local estate agents. With more and more people buying and selling properties regularly out here it worked like a dream.’ Grubby says his latest business venture isn’t nearly as exciting as the early days of porn, ‘but I’ve got a steady income and I think I’ve been wise about moving with the times.’
Today his life revolves around occasional visits to his rented office and relaxing around the 40-feet pool of the million-pound villa he shares with his 28-year-old fourth wife Sharon. ‘Look, I came here with nothing, and when I die I can’t take it with me so I reckon I might as well enjoy every penny while I’m fit enough to have a good time. People get all embarrassed when I say that I make porn, but what the hell’s so bad about it? You can’t tell me that in every suburban street back in Britain half the men and women haven’t sat down and watched a porn video. It’s what makes the world go around.
PART THREE
I’M A COSTA DEL CELEBRITY, GET ME OUT OF HERE!
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CELEBRITY SQUARES
Freddie Star is one of the celebs who has found it hard to make it work in Spain
CELEBRITY SQUARES
Along with the hundreds of thousands of Brits who’ve flocked onto the Costa del Sol to start a new life in recent years are a handful of celebrities. Two of the most famous are Coronation Street star Bev Callard and outrageous comic Freddie Starr. For some inexplicable reason, they’ve both chosen to live right in the middle of the vast ex-pat community where even a visit to the local supermarket is guaranteed to provoke a few comments.
Bev Callard lives behind tall iron gates in a whitewashed, red-roofed villa, which nestles among citrus trees and palms in one of the Costa del Sol’s best-known resorts. When Bev upped sticks, quit the Street and moved to Spain in 1999, she seemed to be deliberately opting for a stress-free, pressure-free, hassle-free environment well away from the traumas of her stormy, highly publicised private life. Within months of arriving on the Costa del Sol she had adopted the kind of lifestyle that meant her biggest decision of the day was whether to take breakfast on the terrace or by the other side of the swimming pool. Back in those heady, early days in Spain, Bev said, ‘Now this is what I call bliss.’ With a glass of sangria in one hand she added, ‘And that sort of compliment doesn’t come easily for a lass from Leeds, let me tell you.’
Months earlier, Bev, then 41, husband Steve, 34, and their ten-year-old son Josh had packed all their worldy possessions into a lorry and a van and set off for their new life on the Costa del Sol. They didn’t tell anyone they were leaving except their immediate neighbours in Bolton, where they lived, and a few close friends.
For almost a decade, Bev had played the role of desperate wife and manhunter Liz McDonald in Coronation Street. But now not even the neon lights of nearby Marbella could lure the blonde actress out of her quiet little paradise in the sun. She insisted to journalists and friends that she was going to stay put and resist all the obvious Mediterranean temptations. ‘I’m happier now than at any time in my life. This is a new start for us. Some people might think it’s a crazy thing to do to uproot from a comfortable home in England, but we all knew it was right for us. We have had our difficulties, Steve and I. That much is no secret. But now we have a fresh start ahead of us.’
Bev believed that her marriage problems being blasted across countless tabloids had fuelled the cracks in their relationship. Steve had been caught by the papers in a compromising relationship with another woman. There were stories about crockery being thrown and shouting matches, but Bev insisted the opposite was true. ‘There was too much silence between us. We were losing the art of communicating with one another.’
As Bev settled down with husband Steve in Spain, the couple set about lovingly transforming the interior of their new home with a veritable kaleidoscope of pastel shades and an elaborate mural in the stairwell. Along the landing, Bev even had her own special ‘retreat’ – a room that housed her own wall-length wardrobe, mirror and a collection of 250 pairs of shoes. One corner of the downstairs office was also filled with Liz memorabilia. A scarlet stiletto shoe, set on a stone plaque, was a leaving present from the cast of the Street; and hanging in a frame was a tiny scrap of a black Lycra miniskirt, worn by Bev’s character so often in the hit soap show.
So with Bev and her family settling down to a new start, one might have thought that the actress would continue the low profile she said she craved. Meaning every word, she explained at the time, ‘The house is pretty well hidden, so we don’t expect people to be climbing the walls, and we have already checked out the places we can go which the tourists will never find. Anyone has to have times when they are just allowed to be themselves. But in the main, I don’t mind being a celebrity one bit. It’s one part of the job. I enjoyed my years as Liz. I was so proud to be a part of the Street.’
But like most showbusiness stalwarts, Bev soon started to feel the need for some attention. At her favourite restaurant, the Jamaica Inn, curious glances followed her everywhere, but the main thing was that she was being noticed…
Cut to less than a year later. Yet another tabloid headline, this one screaming, ‘Bev Split with Husband Number Three’, seemed to prove that the idyllic life on the Costa del Sol hadn’t quite had the desired effect for Bev Callard. Add to that the fact that Bev had also returned to the Street as a temporary barmaid at the Rover’s Return and it becomes clear that Spain isn’t always the answer to all your problems.
Ironically, friends of the couple told the Sunday Mirror that their life in the sun was to blame for the bust-up. ‘It just highlighted the cracks they had been papering over,’ said one pal. But then, marriage problems were nothing new for Bev Callard. She’d first wed at 16 and had a daughter, Rebecca, who is now in her late 20s and also an actress. Marriage number two was to economics teacher David Sowden. Then along came Steve.
In the middle of all her domestic chaos in Spain, Bev set up an aerobics training school on the Costa del Sol to fill in the gaps between acting jobs. Then, in 2003, she signed for a permanent transfer back to Coronation Street. She’d managed to go full circle in the space of three short years.
These days she still considers her luxury home in Spain to be her main base and divides her time between there and a flat in Kilburn, north London, which is above her daughter Rebecca’s flat. Today she is not so keen on discussing her private life, but she says she’s very happy with her single status and her recently
revived run of acting work. Son Josh is at a British boarding school and, with a second series of the TV comedy series Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps about to start shooting, as well as the transfer of a radio comedy show to television and talk of a starring role in a film, she is now busier than ever.
As one of Bev’s closest friends says, ‘She gave it all up to move to Spain and try to save her marriage. It didn’t work, but then that’s the mistake so many people make when it comes to the Costa del Sol. They think that a bit of sun and sangria will make everything OK, but it’s the opposite. When you’re stuck in a house with your husband or wife in a tricky relationship, all the problems are magnified because you haven’t got your usual friends and family around you.’
It’s a lesson to us all.
Freddie Starr’s story is depressingly similar to Bev Callard’s with one big difference: he is still living on the Costa del Sol full time. Back in 1999, Starr quit Britain claiming he had to escape the Child Support Agency after he’d been locked in battle with an ex-lover about maintenance for their three-year-old daughter. He sold his luxury home in Berkshire and his Mercedes, and bought a million-pound villa in the hills behind Torremolinos for himself and wife number three, Donna. So it wasn’t exactly a life of poverty for the comedian whose career peaked in the early-1980s when a now-notorious national newspaper headline proclaimed, ‘Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster’.
By the early-1990s, he had two failed marriages behind him. Then followed a highly publicised affair with his personal assistant and a live-in relationship with a woman called Trudy Coleman, who gave birth to the child that became the focus of the maintenance row when Freddie quit Britain.