FRANCOISE

AN ABRIDGED CHAPTER FROM MY BOOK ‘SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM’, PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND.

One day in the mid-Sixties, United Artists, who I was signed to as a songwriter, called me to say one of their French artists had taken a liking to a couple of songs I’d written. If she were to fly to London, would I like to produce them with her?.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Françoise Hardy.’

I remember feeling my ears turn bright red, in fact they almost fell off. Because for some time now Françoise had been top of my list of the people in the world I’d most like to shag.

No one has ever said ‘yes’ more quickly and the next day I recorded the backing tracks and booked a vocal studio for two weeks ahead, then flew to Spain to polish up the goods before I met her.

For ten days in Valencia, I surfed and sunbathed and ate very little. The morning I got back home I stood for ages admiring myself in the bathroom mirror. It was time, I decided, for some new clothes. So I took a taxi to Carnaby Street (which is what we did in those days), and went into John Stephens.

The campy vampy assistant took out his tape measure and put his arms around my waist. ‘Just under twenty-eight,’ he said.

Which was amazing because I hadn’t had a waist that small since I left school.

‘What do you mean by “just under?”’ I asked. ‘Do you think I could take a twenty-six?’

He puckered up and pondered. ‘Well... I suppose... If sir’s weight is on the way down, rather than on the way up, it might be a good idea. Otherwise I’d suggest a small twenty-eight.’

I wasn’t sure what a ‘small twenty-eight’ meant but the allure of the lesser size was too much for me. ‘Let’s go for twenty-six,’ I said.

He went off to find something suitable and from the selection he came back with I chose a cotton twill at £23, which was pretty pricey for 1967.

I went into the changing room, took off the baggy thirty-inch trousers I was wearing, and pulled on the twenty-six inch ones.

It wasn’t a breeze. I mean - the legs went in OK and I managed to pull the trousers up, but it was a struggle to get the top button done up.

At this point the assistant pulled the curtain aside and asked, ‘How’s it going, sir?’

Keen not to let him see I was struggling, I blew out all the air in my body, pulled in my stomach and nonchalantly did up the top button.

Keeping my stomach pulled in, I studied myself in the mirror and it looked pretty good.

‘And the zip, sir,’ the assistant said, ‘you’ll need to do that up as well.’

I knew at once it wouldn’t be a smooth pull. But squeezing my tummy even further, and ignoring protests from the parts of my body that once the zip was done up would have no place to go, I managed to pull it to the top causing them to plop into the tiny amount of space still available.

‘Oh, very snug, sir,’ said the assistant. And he stared admiringly at the bulge which had appeared below and to the right of the zip.

Thrilled at my arrival in the world of twenty-six-inch waists, I agreed to take them.

That evening I didn’t eat, and the next morning was the day of the session with Francoise. It was at Pye Studios and she looked stunning. When I told her how to sing, she was delightfully acquiescent, as I was to her. All I wanted was that working together might lead to something more. On her part, she just wanted the session to go smoothly so she could get on her evening flight back to Paris. Afterwards, we sat talking while she waited for her airport car to arrive.

Trying desperately to make sure we’d see each other again, I said, ‘I’d like to write another song for you. Tell me a bit about yourself so I can work it into the lyric. For instance, what kind of man do you like − younger, older, same age?’

 ‘A touch older,’ she said. ‘And worldly.’

‘Like me?’ I said laughingly,' ‘if I wasn’t gay.’ Then thought: What an idiot. Why did I have to add that?

But if I hadn't, it would have made no difference, because she smiled and said, ‘‘Oh no. You’d be too thin for me.’

Then the car arrived.

An hour later, back home, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten for almost two days and I was depressed. I replayed our conversation in my mind and couldn’t believe how cack-handed I’d been.

I had a bottle of good wine in the rack, something I’d been given for my birthday and still hadn’t opened – a ’52 Cheval Blanc – but the only food in the fridge was a one-pound slab of Sainsbury’s cheddar. Never mind, I sat and stuffed it in. And when the Chevel Blanc was finished and there was still some cheese left, I opened the only other bottle I had in the house, some Spanish plonk from Del Monico’s. Which saw me through to bedtime.

In the morning, my headache woke me up. I went for a pee, then grabbed my trousers to go into the kitchen and make some coffee. But I couldn’t get them on. My twenty-six-inch waist had come and gone in a single day. The cheese had done for it. So I put on my baggy old thirty- inchers instead.

A month later my thirty-inchers were no longer baggy. A month after that I had to buy new ones, this time thirty-two-inch. And since then I’ve never looked back.

Now, a half century later, my waist has grown to a luxuriant fifty inches. And a few weeks ago, sitting on the sofa, channel hopping, I chanced on a French TV station doing an interview with Françoise Hardy. In her seventies, she still looked wonderful − the perfect Parisian woman - slender, sensible and stylish – modest make-up, perfectly cut clothes, a fragility of movement, a firmness of speech.

For ten minutes I continued down the slippery slope of potential regret, wondering what my life might have been like had I rejected being gay and followed a path of normality, perhaps marrying someone like her. But don’t worry - the story doesn’t end with another cheese and wine event….

It’s even sadder. It’s those damned trousers.

Seeing her had reminded me of them. For fifty years they’d been in a bag of old clothes that had moved from house to house with me as my life shifted and changed. So I got up from the TV and went to the clothes closet. And there in the bottom drawer was the bag, and in it were the trousers.

I pulled them out and pulled them on, except I couldn’t. Not mildly couldn’t. But totally, completely, you-must-be-nuts-to- even-try, couldn’t. My calves wouldn’t even go through the holes at the top intended for my thighs. So after all those years I finally threw them away.

The only comfort I could take from all this was that if by chance Françoise and I were to meet again, I’d no longer be too skinny for her. But that’s of no consequence, because once I’d finished my brief consideration of how things might have turned out had I taken another path, I came to the firm conclusion I’d got things right.

Being gay has been great.

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