NOT SO SILLY JILLY

JILLY Cooper is a popular very popular novelist: she has sold millions of what have been dismissively called bonkbusters, and she is an English icon of sorts. The problem is that promoting Jilly Cooper's books largely involves promoting Jilly Cooper herself. Her image - 60 but still girlish, gap-toothed, horse loving, silly - seems to be part of the package. Allied to that, she seems to be a warm hearted person, unable to say no. The result is that while she is very wary of interviews - these days they tend to be confrontational, she says - she has to keep doing them.

There are three things she hates about the way interviews tend to go, she confesses as we wind up ours: a) The "you must be so rich" line; b) "why do you write such rubbish and why don't you write something proper for a change?"; and c) questions about her marriage, following very public revelations seven years ago about her husband's six year affair. So interviews with her tend to focus on her need to please and to live down to the "Silly Jilly" image, with her gushing about animals and bubbling on about how lovely and sweet everything is. And of course Jilly Cooper is not silly at all anyone who hits on a winning formula and has the enterprise and determination to make fame and fortune out of it can hardly be a ditzy doo.

We met last Friday evening in Dublin's Shelbourne hotel; she had just travelled with the publisher's PR from Belfast where she had a book signing, having flown over from Leeds (another signing) that morning. The next day, more of the same in Dublin and a slot on Pat Kenny's TV show in the evening. It had been a long day, the Shelbourne was in the midst of its usual Friday night throb, and we retired to her room upstairs and she drank vodka while I drank gin, chatting on the couch as the light began to fade over St Stephen's Green.

She is in Dublin as part of a three week book tour to publicise her latest novel, Appassionata, going into paperback; it's something she has to do regularly, but despite the regimented unnaturalness of the interview convention, she is easy and warm hearted - sometimes rabbiting on about stuff, sometimes more reflective and lower key. (And she never once describes anything as jolly super".) She tells me how wonderful and modest her PR is, how well the chauffeur drove, how sweet everyone is, but she is genuinely affectionate, impulsive, and instantly likeable. And people are moved to sweetness with her - at book signings she gets presents of all sorts from fans - today chocolates, a T shirt, a box of tea bags (it's a long story!).

She didn't start off by writing books (she has written more than 30), but in journalism. She grew up in Yorkshire and Surrey - her father worked in the War Office during the war, and later in an engineering firm in Yorkshire; her background is solidly middle class ("upper middle class, darling, my mother said"). After a stint as a cub reporter, PR and a variety of other jobs, she married Leo Cooper (a publisher of military history books) in 1961 and settled down to become what she has described as "a fat housewife in Fulham". A chance meeting at a party with the editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine led her to write a feature about being a "young wife". She got "nine job offers that week". She moved on to writing a long running and much read humorous column in the Sunday Times, along with high profile interviews, and later the Mail On Sunday.

In the early days she was also asked to write "a book on how to stay married".

"We had just adopted Felix, and Leo had just started his own publishing company and I had just left work to adopt Felix and we were very happy," she corrects herself - "in a state of euphoria because of just adopting a baby, and suddenly somebody says, `write a book', so I thought I would."

Non fiction, I comment.

"Somebody said fiction!" she says with a big laugh. "What an awful joke! It was a sweet book, actually, I still stick by it. It says silly things like, get your hours changed at work from 8.30 to 4.30 so you can get home and do the housework so your husband won't see you doing it." Does she really think that is what one should do? "I don't know anything any more. Somebody's got to do the housework sometime. I just think it's actually very nice for women to get home early so they can do a bit of housework, or have two minutes on their own. But it seemed a very good idea, because I could actually get home and do some shopping and I could clean the flat a bit. And I just think men hate seeing women doing housework, they feel so guilty about it.

Women don't actually mind doing it?

It sounds like another planet to me. One is reminded that despite the racy books and girlishness and long hair, Jilly Cooper is actually 60 and a woman of her generation. This puts in context the loyalty this famously betrayed wife seems to feel towards a husband whose attitudes and highly publicised and now long finished affair, have been commented upon in the press.

Articles about Cooper mention that Leo doesn't read her books (he doesn't read any fiction, she says by way of explanation, and he loved The Common Years, a non fiction book about her life in London; besides, she doesn't read the books he publishes), that after their marriage he went through her wardrobe and threw out the items that offended him, and how she is defensive of, him, supportive of him, concerned that nothing bad be said or thought of him.

So, what is Leo like? "He's lovely, he's very funny, and he's vulnerable and fearless and a darling man, and it's just awful for him, he's built up as this sort of .. . I'm getting nervous again. It's been a very long haul, because every time I have another book out I have to go out and talk to people. I don't mind that, because I love meeting journalists, and I love the press, but there's always this nervous ... that's why I seem very inadequate. No, I am inadequate. The combination of worrying about talking about my marriage and having critics saying gosh you write junk becomes a bit wearing after a bit.

"They don't all do it, but they think I just ought to go back and do something else. There's been a lot of that in the last year."

Which brings to mind the "imagined inadequacy syndrome" that an interview in the London Independent last week suggested she suffered from, and which the Guardian in turn commented on. Does she suffer from it? "The problem with me is that I am so terrified because I know they [the press] want to talk about my marriage and I don't want to talk about my marriage. I have a lovely husband at home, and every time they write about my marriage it crucifies him. He is a darling man and he doesn't need this kind of . . therefore I'm so nervous when I talk to them.

"And it's very difficult at the age of 60 to be frightened of journalists. I'm so nervous of saying the wrong thing, or making some indiscreet remark I'm worried for him. I know this sounds awful but he has to sit there and read it all. And this journalist gave this lecture at the end saying he sounded awful and bossy and horrible. I'm sure she meant it very nicely, but to try and improve somebody's marriage in an interview is unpardonable."

Of course, having to hawk her marriage around on publicity tours is horrendous, and she points out that it all came to public attention long ago, and other high profile, similar cases aren't dredged up over and over - the difference is that she's selling books. "It was awful. But it's not ... the awful thing is, we're fine and we are very happy, and, poor Leo, I go on tour and he just sits at home reading pieces saying how "beastly he was, which, seven years on, is very bad luck."

So why do people keep asking? "Well, because they are riveted by it, aren't they?" And I suppose Cooper the novelist knows how people are riveted by salacious details of indiscretions. "I mean, everybody's riveted by everything, and nobody knows anything, and everybody's like lemmings, too ... I don't want to talk about it because - it's extremely painful."

Asked if she has put it all behind her, she comments: "I don't think you ever put anything behind you," and she talks about how everybody else's marriage is Africa - "a dark continent, you have absolutely no idea what is going on. They're called `partnerships' in your generation, and what are they going to be like? I mean, nobody knows what you get up to, do they?"

WITH each of her most successful novels - Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous - Jilly Cooper has chosen a specific subject: showjumping, television, polo, toyboys, and now with Appassionata, orchestras, and created around it a steamy tale, usually continent straddling, and often, over endowed with characters (many of them common to several books).

To research Appassionata, she travelled the world with orchestras: "I had no idea they behaved so badly and I had no idea also that they hated the conductor. I had no idea about the terrible tensions between soloists and conductors. I didn't realise there were constant power struggles."

I ASK her - it may be cheek on my - part, but I'm genuinely curious - if she started to write novels for money or fulfillment. And she tells how she graduated from journalism to fiction.

When she was writing her column, a friend, who was involved in publishing teenage magazines, asked her to find some fiction; she couldn't, so she wrote some stories and serials herself. "And all these magazines started buying them. And my agent, my now agent, wrote to me and said these would make wonderful novels. They were about 16,000 words long, and I extended them to 50,000 [a series of "permissive" romances, Emily, Bella, Imogen, Prudence, Harriet and Octavia]. And the short stories were published as a collection.

"And I always wanted to write a big novel about showjumping. I lost the book on a bus - it's a true story." She refers to the fact that she lost, on a bus, the first draft of Riders, which had taken a year to write. "I took it out to lunch because I was so pleased with myself, to put in a few commas and fiddle around with it, and then I lost it." That was 1970. She finally finished rewriting it in 1984; she wasn't writing it all that time (which is a relief): "I was just saying: `Oh dear, I live in London, how can I write a novel about showjumping in the country?' It was a terrible, awful thing to happen."

And was the second version better? "The first one was very light and the second one was... bigger, anyway! I don't know. I liked it, but I wrote it terribly fast at the end because I ran out of time. I got a lot of money to write it and I was trying to finish it to get the rest of the money." She's not at all defensive about this - just matter of fact.

"It sounds ridiculous. I mean, Shakespeare wrote for money, Balzac wrote for money, everybody writes to live, don't they? I think it would be very stupid, with what I have to sustain, to start writing meaningful biographies about, you know, Oliver St John Gogarty - I always think that's such a wonderful name. And so basically one is stuck with this. But I like doing it really, so I'm not complaining."

She hand writes and uses a manual typewriter, but keeps meaning to become computer literate: "but I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel so I tend not to stop and learn word processing".

Many other writers don't have to personalise their work to sell books, but she says: "I don't mind. I feel sad about this book [Appassionata], because I don't mean to be at all conceited, but I think it is better than it's perceived to be. I can get very low because I had four big interviews in England and they all said the same thing why are you writing such rubbish, why aren't you doing something better? And actually, a music critic of the Birmingham Post came up to me when I was signing books and he said, `you wrote me a lovely letter after I gave you an amazing review', and I said, `so you did'. One forgets the good ones.

"Recently I've had a sort of collective push about - for God's sake, get off your arse and do something serious and stop messing around with silly books. I feel very fed up because - I don't mean to grumble - I just think, you sit there and you try quite hard to write the book ... and the music people liked it and said it was very like an orchestra."

Her "Silly Jilly" image is a handy, rhyming pigeon hole, and there is, indeed, a degree of the silly old me I lost my manuscript and I can't use a computer about her but while she may be frivolous at times, she is not a silly person. When I ask her about, the tag, she comments: "Women of my generation weren't expected to be successful or have careers. I didn't want a career, I wanted a husband and children. But I always wanted to be a writer and I'm very lucky ... Also there's the question of jealousy."

The unspoken assumption I make is that the "silliness" is to compensate for daring to be a success. Or is she just being disingenuous?

IN any case, right now she's in Dublin, and she smiles, relaxing. "I love Irish people." In fact, her adopted daughter Emily (25) is from Northern Ireland, and Felix (28) is also a Celt - he's Welsh.

"I love Irish heroes. Two of my loveliest heroes are Irish, I've an Irish hero in Rivals, and this one is called Viking O'Neill. I'm very keen on Irish men." In real life too? "Yes, but I'm not an activist! I think they're wonderful - they're very funny, usually, and they've got very good manners and they're very attractive and they're very laid back too.

"I remember getting very drunk - not very drunk but slightly drunk - with this heavenly Irishman. He was so attractive. It was in his house - he was drying his hair and he came in with a pink bathtowel. And it was the only time in my life I ever made a pass at a man, and he was very close to me. I can't remember what happened but I just suddenly put my hand on his shoulder and I said, `oh you're so gorgeous'." She is enraptured.

"And he said, `oh, so lovely of you to say so, but I do love my wife, but thank you so much'. It was so touching and so nice. It was the only time I've ever done it but it was not embarrassing or humiliating because he was so sweet, and it was very extraordinary, and I have never forgotten it, ever. Actually, rather shamingly, it was about 15 or 20 years ago. And it was a good thing it came to nothing, because I was happily married also. This was one of those instinctive things because he was so heavenly, so I couldn't help myself."

What a romantic.