Biography: Marriage with George Melly in Swinging London was electroconvulsive therapy - without the therapy. In the 1960s and long after, George was a highbrow swinger, galvanically dedicated to surrealism, jazz, pop culture in general, fly-fishing (!) and all sexual activities short of bestiality.
He believed that marriage should be wide open. Now Diana Melly, having been married to him, more or less, since 1961, has written a wide-open autobiography.
Take A Girl Like Me (the title echoes their friend, Kingsley Amis) is as funny as ECT. She tried that treatment once, at a time of deeper than usual depression, apparently without achieving much immediate change; however, her mood swings occurred almost naturally, with a little help from her friends and Valium, "mother's little helper". George continued to charm, amuse and excite her intermittently, whenever they were together, and to make her laugh and cry more than most other people. When anyone asked her whether she was related to George she replied: "Only by marriage."
Just right for the plunge into Soho and Chelsea with London's most animatedly louche, she was as beautiful as a fashion shoot by David Bailey, and not inhibited by too much education. She quit school at 14. Princess Margaret, herself a swinger, told Diana that her own education ended at the same age.
"I responded to almost any man who wanted me," Diana writes. She was 16 when she married her first husband, identified here only as Michael, "an imaginative, feckless Irishman of aristocratic origins". Many of the dramatis personae of this marvellously rackety chronicle have unlisted surnames, but nobody ever aware of Diana Melly will fail to recognise them. In the London of the gossip columns of those days, everybody knew everybody.
By Michael, she had a son called Patrick, who eventually became a casualty of hard drugs. In the book's saddest chapter, The Funeral, she describes how devastated she was by Patrick's death .
After she left that Michael, she lived for a while with another, more celebrated one, Michael Alexander, a writer, who took her by Land Rover to Afghanistan to do research for a book. When they got back to England, he married another woman. Diana was "engaged" three times (her quotes), then married Johnnie Moynihan, a Fleet Street journalist, son of Rodrigo Moynihan, the painter. Johnnie and she had a daughter called Candy. When the Evening Standard assigned him to Paris, they left Patrick with her aunt and Candy with her mother. Johnnie had to go on to Monte Carlo for a month, so she went back to London alone. In between men, Diana had occasional jobs as a coffee-bar waitress, a nightclub hostess, a mini-cab driver and a model. Then there was George Melly.
SHE WAS STILL married and so was he when he encountered her sitting on the piano in Muriel's, The Colony Room, an upstairs drinking club in Soho, whose clientele included Francis Bacon, Christopher Isherwood and other distinguished, hard-drinking, homosexual intellectuals. As George recorded in his wittiest autobiographical work, Rum, Bum and Concertina (Weidenfeld, 1977), he was actively homosexual at his public school, Stowe, and in the Royal Navy. But after the war he soon acquired the knack of sex with women. As a bisexual, he found that an orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm.
From the seedy glamour of Muriel's, he took Diana to that night's gala opening of Peter Cook's anti-establishment Establishment Club, where the cabaret satirically assailed all orthodoxy. Thus stimulated, the enamoured couple hurried to Hampstead Heath for alfresco love- making. That in turn led to their divorces and a marriage to each other, which has lasted, with them together and apart and together again and again, for more than 40 years.
Diana tells of three or four years of "uxorious bliss". During that time, she recalls, "I tried to be everything to George and one way was by continually altering my appearance. I thought that if one day I was a blonde in blue satin and the next day a redhead in black leather with a feather boa, George could be fooled into thinking he had more than one woman."
However, his many talents for attention and his voracious libido demanded genuinely variegated reality. The book is a catalogue of promiscuity on a grand scale, usually his, sometimes hers. He was often on the road with jazz bands and groupies; he dressed in the broad-striped suits of old-fashioned Chicago gangsters as he impersonated Bessie Smith, singing the blues with bawdy gusto. He wrote sophisticated dialogue for Trog's Daily Mail comic strip and erudite articles and books on the important and the trivial. He talked controversially on radio and television and became nationally famous.
DIANA, ON A different level of achievement, turned The Tower, said to be the oldest inhabited building in Wales, into a successful B&B, catering specially for fishermen. They could fish for trout in George's own private stretch of river, for which he had paid £46,000. He had raised the money by selling his beloved paintings by Magritte.
Diana also indulged in a number of ill-starred affairs and some demanding friendships. There was a messy liaison with a Welsh alcoholic engineer who spent a lot of time watching sport on television and drinking vodka and beer. Bruce Chatwin was a five-year guest, while writing, at The Tower, until he returned to his wife and died of Aids. At the age of 38, Diana travelled to Morocco with an 18-year-old hipster named Billy. Encamped without water in Marrakesh, she made contact with George, who was staying with his current mistress in La Mamounia Palace Hotel. He allowed Diana to visit his suite for a hot bath. She nurtured her children and a fox cub, worked voluntarily in a rehab centre for addicts, and suffered a nervous breakdown.
When Diana met George, she writes, "he had a reputation for being sexually wild and a boozer". In the ensuing years, he justified his reputation. Eleven years her senior, he has been the first to fade. Now that he is fat and deaf and half-blind and sustained by pills, that old black magic of bisexuality no longer has him in its spell. Long ago, he nicknamed her "Mrs Perfect" and portrayed her with a halo. More recently, she has nicknamed him "Captain Lobotomy". Their marriage, she concludes, has been "quite a power struggle". She has assumed some control as his secretary. In spite of all the vicissitudes along the way, she says she still has "a great attachment and affection for him."
So here they are, two ex-swingers, hand in hand, in the gathering dusk.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer of novels and children's books
Take A Girl Like Me by Diana Melly Chatto, 280pp. £14.99