In a Fleet Street career that spanned 20 years, Lesley-Ann Jones was invariably to be found in the thick of the action. From the side of the Live Aid stage in 1985 to the aeroplane seat next to Hugh Grant as he flew back from his Los Angeles disgrace in 1995 (Grant took one look at the familiar face next to him and bolted), Jones made herself a fixture of the showbiz world of the Eighties and Nineties in a way few have managed.
Mandy Smith with Bill Wyman in 1989. It was an illegal and immoral relationship. It was accepted, and blind eyes were turned
Some of her celebrity subjects became almost friends – she partied with rock stars and A-list actors from Freddie Mercury to John Hurt to Raquel Welch, and shared confidences with Linda McCartney, Madonna, George Michael, Michael Jackson and others. Confronted with a wide-eyed, expectant young Welsh girl, countless celebs were persuaded to unburden themselves of startlingly intimate revelations.
Now an acclaimed biographer of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and others, Jones recalls her years with the celebrity set in a new memoir, Tumbling Dice, in which she shares many of her eye-popping, close-up recollections of the stars.
BILL WYMAN AND MANDY SMITH
It was illegal and immoral – and I turned a blind eye
The first time I met former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman was during my 15 minutes of TV-presenting ‘fame’ in the early Eighties. He was charming, unthreatening, avuncular and persuasive. We started going out in a group that included two sisters, Nicola and Mandy Smith, often accompanied by their middle-aged mother, Patsy.
Lesley-Ann Jones with Mandy Smith. Bill threw a party for her birthday. ‘So how old are you today then, Mand?’ somebody asked. ‘Fifteen,’ she said
Mandy quickly emerged as the ringleader. She was brazen, bold and great fun. And it is glaringly obvious now that Bill was gathering a clan to conceal his love affair with Mandy. In the limo, he would always say to one of the boys: ‘Would you mind walking Mandy in?’ He would then take my arm and beam for the photographers. At the end of the night, when the car dropped us off, it would always be Bill and Mandy left in the back. Just the two of them. We knew about their relationship. What we genuinely didn’t know was how young Mandy was. We assumed she must be about 19 or 20. We had no idea that Bill was having her educated at an expensive fee-paying establishment within walking distance of his King’s Road flat.
Bill threw a party for her birthday.
‘So how old are you today then, Mand?’ somebody asked.
‘Fifteen,’ she said.
She had been dating Bill by then for more than two years.
I was horrified, and that was the end of our friendship. I remember hearing that they’d split up, then that they’d tied the knot. Mandy had turned 18 by then, while Bill was 52. Bill and Mandy’s was the wedding of the year. All the Stones rocked up. But the marriage collapsed in 1991 and Wyman would later shrug off the whole tragic episode as a ‘mid-life crisis’.
And we’re still asking, all these years later: did Bill groom Mandy? In 2013, following the sex abuse scandal involving Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter et al, Bill walked himself into a police station and invited them to interview him. He was told there was no case for him to answer. Why not? Because no one had lodged any formal complaint?
It was an illegal and immoral relationship. It was accepted, and blind eyes were turned. The perpetrator was an A-list rock star. I am a mother of a son and two daughters and I turned a blind eye too. I am ashamed.
PAUL AND LINDA McCARTNEY
Why Macca refused to let her tell her own story
Sitting in her cluttered, flagstoned kitchen at Woodlands in East Sussex, the boar-infested estate her husband had owned since the Sixties, Linda McCartney and I nursed mugs of tea. The McCartneys lived a bohemian life there, surrounded by falling-apart furniture, guitars, horses and mud. In a cosy side room with a smoking wood fire, there was a Van Gogh. We’d met a few times before and always had a good laugh – Linda was open and kind.
The McCartneys lived a bohemian life, surrounded by falling-apart furniture, guitars, horses and mud
It was 1991 and I was there to discuss writing her autobiography. I’d suggested a title Linda adored – ‘Mac the Wife’ – and we scribbled an outline for a book that would trawl her childhood and teenage years, wade through the Beatles and Wings eras and review her roles as wife and mother. But Linda said Paul would have the last word, and he did. She sounded tearful when she called to tell me he ‘wasn’t going to let [her] do the book’ after all. She never told me why, and we never got round to discussing it before she died.
Paul’s former publicist Geoff Baker, an old Fleet Street mucker, later shed some light. ‘It was Paul being a control freak,’ said Geoff. ‘He gets a bit confused sometimes and loses sight of what counts. When Linda told him she wanted to do it, he lost his rag.’ I gathered it was along the lines of, ‘There’s only one f****** star in this family.’
No one but Linda could tell Linda’s story, so it will never be told. Maybe that’s what Paul wanted. But if he truly believed there was only one star in his family, he was wrong.
A hellraiser by reputation, in reality the actor John Hurt was gentle and unthreatening
JOHN HURT
He wanted to buy my baby
A hellraiser by reputation, in reality the actor John Hurt was gentle and unthreatening. ‘All I’ve ever really wanted is a sweet little wife and a clutch of kids,’ he told me on a summer night in 1985, dangling his feet in the pool at the stately home of Who bassist John Entwistle. He and his second wife Donna were struggling to conceive.
When we next met, two years later, I was five months pregnant. John dropped to his knees and pressed the side of his head to my melon-shaped bulge. ‘Does it kick?’ he whispered. ‘Can I feel it?’ His eyes were brimming with tears when at last he stood up. ‘I say, I could buy your baby, couldn’t I?’ he suggested. ‘I’m sure you can’t manage on your own. If it would help…’ Guess what, it was a no from me.
He made one more attempt when my baby Mia was a few months old. He asked to see photos and took out his cheque book. ‘A hundred thousand,’ he declared. ‘All yours.’
It was another no.
By the time I saw him again, nearly eight years later, he’d had two sons by his third wife, and he enveloped me like a long lost child.
‘And who’s this pretty thing?’
I introduced Mia, who was now nine years old. John gasped. His crinkly eyes flashed.
‘At last,’ he whispered, ‘at last.’ Tears threatened. He bent down and picked her up, and smiled. ‘My little girl,’ he said.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE
Did Diana have the hots for him?
In 2008, I was approached by a former hotel employee, now working as a nurse. She said that not only did Michael Hutchence and Princess Diana enjoy a tryst in the Sydney hotel where Hutchence would later commit suicide in 1997, but that his passion for Diana had fuelled his affair with Bob Geldof’s wife, Paula Yates. Diana died in 1997, at the age of 36. It was said that Hutchence never came to terms with her death. Only weeks later, aged 37, he too was dead.
Michael Hutchence with Paula Yates in 1994. Diana died in 1997, at the age of 36. It was said that Hutchence never came to terms with her death
My contact wanted a million Australian dollars for the evidence: a fold of letters written by Diana, but various editors laughed me off the phone. Who knows what became of the lady with the letters?
MARCO PIERRE WHITE
A saucy proposition from the ogre of the kitchen
‘You know we’re going to bed, don’t you?’ Marco Pierre White had his hands on my shoulders and he was apparently serious. My daughter had toddled ahead and was feeding the ducks. There must have been a perfect response, but I couldn’t think what it was. I simply stood there, open-mouthed.
‘You know we’re going to bed, don’t you?’ Marco Pierre White had his hands on my shoulders and he was apparently serious
Marco was a 28-year-old rising star in the world of haute cuisine. The editor’s idea was that I would work in his kitchen for a week and get the measure of the animal in its natural habitat.
He had agreed, but insisted on interviewing the interviewer first. I had brought my three-year-old daughter Mia straight from nursery, and when Marco finally appeared he was tossing his Medusa mane and wiping his hands on his apron. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded, peering at Mia. ‘She’s not welcome in my kitchen, just in case you’re thinking of bringing her. Would you like a drink?’ he roared at her. He gave her a wine glass and poured some water in it, instructing her to say ‘when’. When she didn’t, he kept on pouring, emptying the entire bottle into the glass, down her frock and all over her shoes.
Why didn’t I whack the ogre over the head with the bottle? Well, Marco was testing me, clearly. He was known for abusive behaviour. Could I take it? Would I crumble at the first four-letter word? I have lost sleep over this for years, believe me. Mia appears to have survived unscathed. Years later, I told White’s former kitchenhand Gordon Ramsay about it, to his guffawing mirth.
RAQUEL WELCH
The real reason she never posed nude
The Raquel Welch with whom I became friends in LA was a fabled but faded drama queen, old enough to be my mother. I was an upstart nobody, young enough to be totally in awe. She was promoting a fitness video, and she called me ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’, and, as if it were my name, ‘baby’. I’d heard vague bisexual rumours and had a fictitious boyfriend up my sleeve, just in case.
The Raquel Welch with whom I became friends in LA was a fabled but faded drama queen, old enough to be my mother
‘White girls are just so tightly wrapped sexually,’ she remarked through ravenous mouthfuls of chicken and rice cakes.
‘Hmm,’ I thought. ‘How does she know?’
It seemed a good time to ask why she’d never done topless or nude work.
‘Dark Latin nipples, baby,’ she shrugged. ‘Wanna see?’
I declined. It didn’t stop her talking about her sex life. She confessed to a penchant for copulation in cars, a habit acquired during her misspent San Diego youth. She clutched her fingers together like a snake’s head and jabbed at me to emphasise a point. I was mesmerised and terrified. I legged it to the bathroom, past a stash of racy videos.
After that interview, we were inseparable for three months, before our friendship abruptly faded. At the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or at Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, we’d bump into Raquel’s celebrity pals Carrie Fisher, Nancy Sinatra and Dean Martin.
Raquel, born Jo Raquel Tejada in September 1940, could talk for Bolivia, her native land. She also constantly fished for compliments, and it was my job to provide them. ‘Baby, aren’t you going to tell me I look pretty today? Do I look sexy? C’mon, baby, a girl’s gotta know…’
She usually did, of course. But how on earth did she still look as fabulous as ever, 25 years on from her only memorable movie, One Million Years BC?
‘The secret, baby, is to start having “the work” before you actually need it!’
She then referred to herself unnervingly in the third person.
‘Raquel started getting things done back in the Sixties. All it’s taken is a tuck and tweak here and there ever since. By the time you really do need it, you’re ahead of the game.’
JOHN LENNON
The true love of his life (no, not Yoko)
Sitting in her new West End restaurant one day in 1989, Cynthia Lennon recalled the secret love life of her late husband.
‘I realised early on that I was going to have to share my husband with the entire world,’ she said. ‘It was the so-called Swinging Sixties. Everyone was doing everything with everyone. John would do as he pleased – I had always known that about him. All that mattered was that he came home to me, and to Julian.’
Sitting in her new West End restaurant one day in 1989, Cynthia Lennon recalled the secret love life of her late husband. ‘I realised early on that I was going to have to share my husband with the entire world,’ she said
But Cynthia’s most astonishing revelation was her conviction that the real love of John’s life was not Yoko Ono but Alma Cogan, a fading singer eight years his senior. She said John believed Alma somehow to be the reincarnation of his beloved mother Julia, who had died when he was 17. ‘I don’t believe he ever recovered from that,’ said Cynthia. ‘It disrupted his ability to have normal relationships with women.’
Alma, was the highest-paid British female entertainer of the Fifties. She later shared a bill with The Beatles, and an intense affair ensued. ‘When I first heard about them, I didn’t care, to be honest,’ said Cynthia. ‘I was deeply in love with John. I have never stopped loving him.’
Cynthia was adamant that, had Alma lived, the affair would have fizzled out naturally, and John would have come home ‘as he had always done’.
It was Cogan’s death from ovarian cancer in 1966, aged 34, and the need for a replacement mother figure, Cynthia believed, that threw him into the arms of Yoko Ono, whom he addressed as ‘Mother’.
‘He was complicated,’ said Cynthia. ‘More screwed-up than most people ever knew. I wanted more than anything for John to be happy. I don’t believe he ever was, and that kills me.’
‘Tumbling Dice’ by Lesley-Ann Jones is available to order at amazon.co.uk