In 1984, at a book launch, I saw a young woman sitting on a sofa who was all
legs, pale skin and flaming-red lips, wrapped tight in a black bandage of a
dress. She looked like a film noir beauty and had the strange, nervy manner
of a shy alien. It was the journalist Julie Burchill.
To readers of the NME during the punk years, Julie Burchill and her husband
then, Tony Parsons, were legends: the “hip young gun-slingers” of punk. She
was now writing a brilliant column for The Face, which I never missed.
I had to speak to her, but the prospect was terrifying. I imagined that I
personified everything she hated: Americans, liberals, hippies and the
middle class. I thought of my father, Jay, and how he would handle it. He’d
have gone straight towards her like a heat-seeking missile, never for a
second imagining that she wouldn’t want to meet him.
I took a deep breath and launched myself in her direction. “Hello,” I said,
“I’m Cosmo Landesman . . .”
“I know who you are,” she squeaked. It was a movie moment. Her words echoed in
my head: I know who you are . . . I know who you are . . . I know who . . .
Unbelievable! The hippest girl in London knew my name, knew my work. I had
arrived. I, who had just started my first column in the Literary Review, was
a somebody!
And then she said: “You’re the son of that couple with the open marriage. I
read about them in Cosmopolitan when I was a little girl.”
I kept smiling and gave a little forced chuckle that said: why, isn’t that the
funniest, most adorable thing in the world! But inside . . .
About the same time, I met Toby Young, whose family had moved into the house
two doors down from my parents’ home in Islington. His father, Michael, a
Labour peer, and his mother, Sasha, a painter, embodied the liberal
establishment. Toby, 19, had a style I had never encountered before: the
right-wing brat who took an impish delight in puncturing all that his
parents and their progressive-minded friends held dear. The thing about Toby
I spotted straight away was that he shared the Landesman hunger for
attention and affirmation. At any social event, he always worked the room in
an attempt to be the centre of attention.
Not long after meeting Toby I found myself having an affair with Julie. After
our first afternoon of cold vodka and hot sex, a voice inside my head said:
don’t fall for this woman; she will only break your heart. After our second
afternoon of cold vodka and hot sex, the voice inside my head said: don’t
fall for this woman; she’s crazy, immoral and treacherous. After our third
afternoon of cold vodka and hot sex, the voice said: don’t fall for this
woman. For God’s sake, wake up, Cosmo, this broad is a sociopath, a
Stalinist with Nietzschean tendencies who drinks like a fish and eats nice
middle-class Jewish boys like you for breakfast. You have been warned: stay
away!
Reader, I married that woman. Toby’s reaction on hearing of our affair was:
“How the f*** did you pull someone as cool and famous as Julie?” What he was
really saying was: how did someone like you who is neither cool nor famous
pull someone who is both?
He soon became the New Best Friend of Miss Burchill, and with this status came
an entrée into hip London society. He made her laugh. And she liked his
whole media-brat style, the way he got up the noses of all the hip people on
the scene.
At first, Julie was famous only among people who read the rock press and The
Face. Everything changed when she became a newspaper columnist. She became
the star and I became the husband in tow. The difference in our status was
obvious to everyone, especially me. But I wasn’t jealous of Julie’s success;
on the contrary, I was very proud of her.
Toby’s success was another matter, however. It sealed their newly established
best-friendship; it locked them into their own private members’ club. Toby’s
success had happened so fast that even he was surprised. In 1985, within
four months of writing his first article, he had a contract with The
Observer. So Julie was the big name, Toby was the rising star and I was the
fat girl who tagged along to the Saturday night disco with the two beautiful
mates.
Julie and Toby handled my lack of success with a discreet silence. They never
once talked about it in front of me. My failure was like a terrible physical
disfigurement that was too embarrassing to mention.
I was writing a novel about a group of young people on the make in the
Eighties. It was essentially a roman à clef featuring Julie, Toby and
everyone I knew. After a year I had three completed chapters, six aborted
chapters and hundreds of pages of notes. The contrast between Julie and me
couldn’t have been greater. In the late 1980s she sat down and bashed out a
novel called Ambition, which became a bestseller.
Watching her write was an unorthodox masterclass in how to write while smashed
out of your skull. She would write only in the evening, usually with the
television on, like a schoolkid doing homework. I knew she was getting ready
to work when she would ask me to go and open a bottle – usually wine or
champagne.
Drink was her creative lubricant. She’d put paper in her machine (these were
the days of the typewriter), alcohol in her blood and cocaine up her nose.
Then it would start: she’d sip and tap . . . sip and tap . . . sip and tap .
. . tap and tap-tap-tap-tap till she had liftoff. And then, after a furious
rush of tapping, she’d say: “Baby, put out a line for me.” More tapping and
sipping, and then she’d say: “Baby, put out a line for me. Oh, and get me
another bottle, please.”
Then there would be an outburst of furious tapping. I would look over and see
her hunched over the keyboard typing with one finger – just one crazy,
demonic finger hopping up and down, speeding right and left across the
keyboard with a frenzied life all of its own. Then it was break time. Out
would come her mirror, she’d check her lipstick, pout and put away the
mirror. By now thoroughly drunk, she would look over at me, wink, smile and
say: “Okay, baby? Put out just one more line for me. Cheers!” The refreshed
demon finger would go into a final frenzy and I’d hear the triumphant cry
of: “Finnn-iish-ed!”
You’d think, given how drunk she was, that whatever she wrote would be
incomprehensible rubbish. But it was perfectly formed copy.
I could never work at night the way she did. I was an early-morning riser.
Sometimes Julie would come into my study to check on my progress.
Julie: Oi, Marcel Proust! How’s it going?
Me: Fine. Julie: How many words have you done today?
Me: Loads! Julie: How many? Me: Umm . . . about 250 . . . She’d give a little
snort of disgust and go off to dust.
By 1986 I was writing for The Guardian. Whenever I had to turn in a piece, I’d
become a nervous wreck, rewriting every paragraph. Julie was very
supportive, although there were times when she’d scream: “You can’t write
out a f****** shopping list without doing 17 rewrites! For f***’s sake, just
bash the f***** out!”
The only time I could write with confidence was when I wrote under her name.
She had been given the job of film critic for The Sunday Times. After
attending a few screenings, she decided that she’d had enough of sitting in
a dark room with “smelly old men”. From now on, I would be dispatched to go
and sit with the smelly men, watch the film and take notes, which she would
polish up.
It was as if, in using her voice, I could find the confidence I needed. I
wrote some good stuff, which appeared under her name. Julie didn’t care
about being found out. On the contrary, when people complimented her on one
of my pieces, she had no qualms about telling them: “Oh, Cosmo wrote that
one.”
In 1991 Toby told Julie and me about his idea for launching a magazine that
would be an intelligent guide to popular culture. He immediately coopted us
to join him. He would use Julie’s name to give it credibility and also to
help us attract writers. “Let’s call it the Modern Review,” Julie said. The
whole operation was run from Toby’s sitting room in his small flat in
Shepherd’s Bush. For such a small periodical, we managed to get a lot of
media attention.
Four years later, after a fight between Julie and Toby, the Modern Review came
to an end. Toby got a call from Graydon Carter to go to New York and work on
the magazine Vanity Fair. I got a call from Julie to tell me our marriage
was over.
The end of a marriage between two journalists would not normally raise much
press attention, but the context – high-profile feud between magazine
owners, plus the fact that Julie had taken off with a woman – meant it was
newsworthy.
Although I avoided the papers, I found out that I was being referred to as
“Julie Burchill’s estranged husband”. I hated that. It seemed to me to
suggest that I was somehow strange – and that was why I had been dumped.
Extracted from Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me, by Cosmo
Landesman, published by Macmillan at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for
£13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
