SO GRAND, SO BITCHY, SO BROKE

ADAPTED FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK "I'M COMING TO TAKE YOU TO LUNCH", PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND

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In the mid-1980s, I was in my mid-40s, managing Wham! and getting interested in making movies. I had a film production company and a business partner, John McLaren. One day he introduced me to Margaret, Duchess of Argyle. She was 79 and famous for having been been involved in one of Britain’s most scandalous divorce cases back in the 1950s. Photographs handed to the judge and jury (though not to the press), were said to be of the Duchess together with a dog and a member of the royal family. It was never revealed who was doing what to whom but within hours of the photos first making an appearance an out-of-court settlement was agreed.

When I met her, she was living in a grand suite at Grosvenor House, given to her for the price of a single room because the hotel thought they gained prestige by having a Duchess live there. She took advantage of this favour quite outrageously, living on free room service brought to her by accommodating room waiters.

An amusing dinner guest, she told stories and anecdotes dating back to the beginning of the century, particularly about the twenties when she was considered Britain’s greatest beauty; wined, dined and bedded by every eligible bachelor and many an ineligible adulterer.

She had a devoted dog that had never been housetrained. This she took with her everywhere as a deliberate ploy to counter the fact she’d become incontinent. Standing, chatting at the bar with her at the Caprice or Cecconis, you might suddenly realise that a large puddle was forming around her shoes. She would save herself by plucking the poor dog from the floor and giving it a hefty smack, then striding off to the ladies with it under her arm. ‘Naughty Fido!’

She wasn’t the only woman to live out her days in Grosvenor House. One day we were going down in the lift when another ancient woman joined us, about the same age as Margaret’s but even more dilapidated.

‘How’s Jeffrey?’ Margaret asked her.

‘Dreadful,’ her friend replied. ‘It’s got so bad we have to wash him and dress him from head to foot – everything – trousers, shirts, shoes, there’s nothing he can put on by himself. At meal times we have to feed him mouthful by mouthful and getting him to the toilet is a nightmare. It takes two of us to lift him into the car and if he gets any worse I’m afraid he won’t be able to drive.’

‘Bonkers!’ Margaret remarked as we left the lift. ‘Jeffrey isn’t her husband, you know. He’s her chauffeur.’

She had a wonderful deadpan humour. Sometimes it was difficult to know if you were being sent up or not. My first lunch with her was at Boulestin in Covent Garden, a grand old French restaurant left over from the thirties, a little faded since its days of greatest glory but with a wonderful wine list.

Because Margaret had known only the best in life, I thought I couldn’t get away with cheap wine, so to go with the starters, after a lot of consideration, I settled on a bottle of Puligny Montrachet which was £180 (and this was 40 years ago). I hoped she’d recognise its quality and appreciate my generosity.

During hors d’oeuvre she amused me with a story of great indelicacy about her youth. Then, to indicate she’d had enough, she threw what was left on her plate to her dog lying under the table. As the main course arrived the first bottle of Puligny Montrachet ran out and I asked her, ‘Margaret, would you like to move onto red?’

She smiled kindly. ‘Oh I don’t think so, darling. Let’s stick with this nice house white.’

I never could decide whether she’d known what she was drinking or not, but when I told the story to John, my film-making partner, it gave him an idea – how about a real-life soap opera showing the day-to-day life of a 79-year-old Duchess as she tottered around London in the nineteen-eighties living on her past.

It needed further thinking so we called in some experts. Film director Bryan Forbes came to my house and gave us a splendid afternoon of anecdotes, mostly bitchy, concerning his time as a young soldier in the war, as a struggling actor afterwards and of Richard Attenborough’s determined efforts to get himself a knighthood. And about the slight downturn in his own career, Bryan reminded us, ‘Nothing recedes like success.’

But he couldn’t see a clear direction of where the series should go.

Graham Chapman thought we should make it fiction but use celebrities to play themselves – pop stars, actors, politicians and sportsmen. We would film it impromptu in the trendiest places in town and he would make up the scripts on the spot. It sounded hilarious but too improvised to be a reliable twice- weekly programme.

Then Lynda La Plante came round. At that time Lynda hadn’t yet written her first novel but she was the hottest TV playwright in town.

‘We’ll get John Gielgud as the Duke of Argyle, Margaret’s divorced husband.’

‘How can you do that? Surely it has to be all fact or all fiction.’

‘Half and half – I’ll write fictional characters and blend them with real-life London society – half scripted, half real-life spontaneity.’

It sounded marvellous, though neither John or I quite understand how it would work.

‘Give me three weeks,’ Lynda said. ‘I’ll bring you something to look at. We’ll call it The Legacy.’

In fact, it took her a year. And what she finally came up with was an idea for a mammoth 1,000 page novel, not connected at all with our original idea. But for Lynda it was the start of a new career. When her book was published it was a smash, and for the next decade she was Britain’s best-selling novelist.

Meanwhile the Duchess was fading fast and John and I were in Hollywood where we sold our original idea to a Hollywood studio who, having driven us round Beverly Hills in stretch limos for a week, paid us $100,000 for the rights, then decided they wanted to combine it in some way with pig-farming in Iowa.

“It’s the last great American story that’s never been done,” they said confidently.

As far as I know, it still hasn’t.

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