Very few single girls actually have that much sex

Marianne Macdonald says that, in an encounter in New York with Sarah Jessica Parker, she realised, finally, how much of a myth Sex and the City really was The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of interviews. This meant that some 100 journalists, flown in to hear her thoughts on the movie, had in turn been cancelled. Maddened, they spent two days abusing the PR until, in a furious act of concession, she allocated some of them a far shorter slot with Ms Carrie Bradshaw the following day — seven and a half minutes, supplemented for the fortunate by a round table in which participants had 20 minutes, perched in groups of eight around a table, to ask SJP questions before she was hustled from the room.

Anyway, while all this was happening, the trailer for the Sex and the City movie was playing on a loop in the suite where the journalists were held, like passengers for a long-delayed plane, unenthusiastically eating seafood from silver tureens or squinting at laptops pushed on to gilt tables. I must have watched that trailer 60 times, which is why it was such a shock when Sarah Jessica Parker finally appeared for her interview. It was as if she had aged ten years. The golden girl of the trailer, whose skin and hair seemed radioactively to glow, had become a tired, normal-looking 43-year-old no prettier, albeit a lot thinner, than any of my girlfriends. It felt like the last in a Sex and the City hall of mirrors, each reflecting a more benign version of reality. The first was the TV show, in which singledom was airbrushed to a Wonderland where the women’s friendships were always good-natured, a supply of good-looking single men appeared in each episode like magic, the biological clock was a barely perceptible tick and the women never, ever, bought a self-help book.

Equally absent were the other accessories of the single woman: the moments of despair; the tears, the tantrums and the constant lamentation on the lack of men. Far from the SATC universe in which con versations are always about men and sex, they almost inevitably revolve around the etiquette of replying to the question, ‘How’s your love life?’, the latest self-help books and how so and so met her new boyfriend. Very few single women actually have that much sex.

SJP volunteered that she never really felt comfortable having those conversations, in any case, ‘even among my girlfriends: I have a child, I have a husband, I have really followed a far more conventional life than Carrie. In every city I have known single people say it’s hard to find men, and I don’t see that New York is any harder [than anywhere else]. I always think Los Angeles might be harder, because you’re in your car all day. I feel like in New York, if you walk out on the street, there’s all this hope and potential. In the subway in New York you meet men, you’re in restaurants and you’re waiting outside in the street — you’re pushed up against each other in the city, you just have to be willing to be surprised by somebody and not have a fixed idea about who you’re supposed to date.’ As she was saying this, and more, I had another SATC reality check: that, unlike Carrie, SJP was not totally sweet-natured. Occasionally she didn’t bother to hide her impatience — ‘Why do we need a Sex and the City movie? You don’t!’ — and she openly rolled her eyes at the notion that she and her fellow actresses didn’t get on. ‘How tired is that? Have you ever heard that of The Sopranos? I actually heard that of The Sopranos, but you guys didn’t. After a while it’s actually an offensive, insulting question when it doesn’t exist in any other way, in any other job you do, and this story kind of repeats itself. You start to think there’s a misogynist overtone to it — this idea that four women cannot work or function and be happy and like each other.’ This woman, you realised, was in fact as far as you could get from the über-rich, über-stylish, über-poised goddess of a million articles. She was just normal — cleverer, undoubtedly, than most actresses, but still, just a normal woman labouring like an ant with a crumb under the fabulous weight of her fame. She hardly ever shopped for clothes, she explained, and if she did she got only one or two things; she would always borrow from designers and give things back. She did the school run unless she had to work, she was intimidated by the fashion shows and she had as many — maybe more — insecurities as anyone else.

It was the last fiction — that we were all being brainwashed to live like a celebrity, like Sarah Jessica Parker, when even she didn’t live like that. The whole thing really was madness. Her character in the show wouldn’t have behaved the way she did in real life, in real life SJP didn’t behave like her character, in real life she certainly didn’t look like her character, and she definitely didn’t live like the celebrity we assumed she was, which had us so irritably on the back foot. I know, we knew that. But it seemed to me that we kind of didn’t, at the same time. And as I was thinking this I looked up from my laptop to see Kristin Davis, who played the Pollyanna-ish Charlotte, wander into the suite. She was in high, shiny, pointed black boots that were almost hookerish, and she looked as much younger in real life as Parker looked older. She chatted idly to the PR, then glanced round and noticed the trailer looping on the TV in the corner. ‘Oh, I haven’t seen that!’ she exclaimed, and she and her friend went and plonked themselves on the sofa to watch. It was a mesmerising moment, because all the journalists looked at her, not knowing how to react.

Their uncertainty was spelled in the air like a plane trail: did they react as if she was normal, like them, which was how she was behaving and how, after all, she actually was; or did they react as if they were in the presence of celebrity, one of the women they had flown across the world to interview, read about all night in their hotel room, waited all day to meet? It teetered for a moment, and then the journalists all did a kind of collective mental shrug, and lowered their eyes to their laptops. The balance had fallen in favour of reality even as they went back to their profiles, doing the opposite. It is when you see the English enjoying themselves that you realise the futility of life. Perhaps I should say trying to enjoy themselves: for in the attempt, rarely successful, they turn either glum or public nuisance.

The occasion of these melancholy reflections was a rainy weekend in Torquay, whither I had gone to attend a medical conference. It took place in the English equivalent of a grand hotel: a mixture of pomposity and grubbiness, whose management had managed to find the last waitresses in Eastern Europe trained in the Soviet school of hostelry.

During a break in the proceedings, I took a ride into the centre of the town. It was evident that 1950s gentility was in the death throes of its hopeless struggle against 21st-century vulgarity, the palm court having ceded to the cannabis plant. The taxi-driver, wheezing from the sheer physical effort of sitting at the wheel, pointed out the sites as we drove through the pastel-painted terraced houses.

‘That’s a drug drop,’ he said. ‘Everyone round here takes drugs. This is bedsit land. They come from all over the country to do nothing.’ I said something about it being a shame, that it must have been nice once.

‘They’ve all got several identities,’ he said. ‘So that they get a few cheques each week from the social security.’ Having expressed my pride in being a taxpayer, I asked him the crucial question for any taxi-driver about his job: did he work nights? He reacted as the Transylvanian peasants in Dracula reacted to the approach of dusk. ‘A friend of mine’s just got over his broken leg,’ he said. ‘Broken in three places it was when his passenger stamped on him because he didn’t want to pay the fare.’ ‘Couldn’t he just have run away?’ I asked. A brief survey of the taxi-drivers of Torquay had convinced me that there were not many athletes among them who would catch up with a lamentably healthy young psychopath. The driver hadn’t returned to work, even though his leg had healed. Who says that deterrence doesn’t work?

I found the only second-hand bookshop in Torquay. The man at the counter, who was about as healthy as the taxi-driver, and for the same reasons, was discussing the state of the book trade with a customer who had asked for the best price possible on a book marked at £1.50. He spoke with a dyspnoeic rotundity, gasping between phrases.

‘We’re closing down in a month’s time,’ he said. ‘We’re the last of ten shops in Torquay to go. It’s the internet that’s killed the trade.’ That, and the vile distractions of the younger generation.

A man came in who did not look so much unemployed as someone for whom the question of employment had never seriously arisen in the first place.

‘Have you got any books by Evelyn Waugh’s husband?’ he asked.

‘Who’s that?’ asked the man at the counter noncommittally.

‘Alec Waugh,’ said the potential customer.

‘Evelyn Waugh was a man.’ ‘Was he? I thought he was a woman.’ ‘No, he was a man.’ ‘Funny name for a man, Evelyn. I always thought he must be a woman.’ Oh my country, how I love thee!