Low life
Nice girls
Jeffrey Bernard
A Nice Girl Like Me Rosie Boycott (Chatto & Windus £8.95) Princess Grace Sarah Bradford (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.95)
Ahappy ending and a sad one here. In the rather rich mixture of the two books, the outsider, Rosie, pips the favourite, Grace. The princess didn't get her fairy tale ending but it is to be hoped that if Rosie can stay off the booze then she's got hers already. Rosie Boycott is an alcoholic who was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, co-founded Spare Rib and finally hit rock bottom when she was taken to a London alcohol clinic. At least she's managed to get a good book out of three of the most ghastly institutions I can imagine although I share only the latter experience with her. She also, in her time, co-founded Virago, the feminist publishers, took heroin and ended up in a Thai prison for so doing. You name it and she's done it. Half of the book is autobiography and the other half laid out in alternate chapters — is the story of the stay in Charter Clinic which she left two and a half years ago. She actually manages to turn squalor and despair into something of a wry comedy and it's good stuff, proving one of her old doctor's dic- tums, Max Glatt's, when he once said to me, `If you want to know about alcoholism ask an alcoholic.' The humour keeps bub- bling to the surface in spite of the horror and anguish, and as she says of the time in the clinic, 'The ability to find the saddest situation funny was not uncommon. We'd all been in appalling scrapes at some point or another in our drinking careers and the stories, though often macabre and scary, were hilarious.' It's good to see you back, Rosie.
Princess Grace remains an unknown to me. Not only was she the last person to own up, she just doesn't come across. I don't think she would if you sat through all her films again and again. Sarah Bradford has researched her biography well as befits a lady who has dealt with Disraeli, Cesare Borgia and the subject of port wine, but what we want to know, the simple nitty grit- ty question, is did she or didn't she? 'Confi- dential magazine's answer to the unspoken question "Does she or doesn't she?" was a heavy implication that, as long as the men were not officially married, she did,' says Miss Bradford. Personally, I've never believed a sheet of ice to be necessarily a fire screen but that seems to be the general Hollywood conjecture in this book that will sell like hot cakes for up-market bedside
tables. What we do have here is some fascinating stuff about film makers and film stars, and Sarah Bradford could write a cracker on the making of a film.
But firstly, the background stuff. The Irish-American Kellys must have had cup- boards bursting with skeletons and, reading a little between the lines, which is how I read the book, they were very likely a load of shits. With a father like Jack Kelly she must have had strange attitudes towards men. Another man who comes over as a prize bastard is or was John Ford who directed Grace Kelly in Mogambo. Most of your actual stars come over as having been fairly simple people — I don't mean daft — hav- ing taken part in a sort of expensive game. But I wanted actually to meet Gable, Holden, Cooper et al as I read on. The Princess was at times surrounded by some fairly down to earth people and that must have been a relief from Philadelphia. John Ford at a party on Mogambo to Ava Gard- ner: 'Ava, why don't you tell the Governor (of Uganda) what you see in this 120-pound runt (Frank Sinatra) you're married to?' `Well,' replied Ava, 'there's only 10 pounds of Frank but there's 110 pounds of cock.'
Previous page
