The Golden Lady (1977, Jack Ramsay)

 

When it comes to movie novelizations, you grow accustomed to them occasionally diverting from their source movies. However, Jack Ramsay's novelization of The Golden Lady takes this to the extreme, by being a novelization that once in a blue moon has something in common with the movie it is meant to be an adaption of. Going off the book, I suspect The Golden Lady had a very difficult journey to the screen.

The book is based 'on an original idea by Keith Cavele and Chris Hutchins' yet neither of them are credited for that original idea in the movie. Instead, Cavele is only credited as the film's producer, while there's no mention of Hutchins at all in the film. Hutchins was a well known PR man who later became even more famous as a gossip columnist. In his autobiography 'Mr. Confidential', Hutchins briefly touches on The Golden Lady, mentioning that he and Cavele wrote a screenplay for the movie, but that he got cold feet about the movie and sold his half share in it before shooting began. So, I imagine that with Hutchins off the production, his screenplay went the same way, making it necessary for a new script to be written. The filmed screenplay is credited to Joshua Sinclair, who at various points in his life has been a medical doctor specializing in tropical medicine, a screenwriter of spaghetti westerns, an actor in Italian exploitation movies, and a close friend of Mother Teresa. Sinclair's talents weren't however appreciated by the director of the Golden Lady movie, Jose Larraz. Never one to mince words, Larraz later claimed "the script was written by some pretty boy who couldn't write a letter home to his mother".

As Ramsay based the book on an idea by Cavele and Hutchins, rather than the filmed script by Sinclair, this is I suppose how the film was envisioned before Hutchins exited, and Sinclair entered the picture. The book begins in 1945 with, less of a Golden Lady origins story, rather with a Golden Lady conception story, as a young Danish woman makes her way home by train at the end of the war. She takes a shine to a young American soldier, but as he is engrossed in a book, she falls asleep and dreams of the time when, as a child, she was sexually molested by the village idiot. She then wakes up to find the American soldier is similarly trying to get fresh with her. She succumbs to his advances and later discovers she has become pregnant by him. The language barrier prevented her from getting the soldier's name, but she did note that he was reading To Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, so decides to name her daughter after Ernest instead. Thus, Julia Hemingway, the Golden Lady was born.

Cut to London, 1977, and the now grown up Julia Hemingway is a rich, self made career woman who likes the finer things in life, operates out of an office in Regent Street, owns race horses, enjoys being chaperoned around in a chauffeur driven Panther De Ville and giving commoners the royal wave from it. Exactly what Julia does for a living is shrouded in mystery.  At various points in the book she wears the hats of being an arms dealer, a human trafficker, a private detective and a high class prostitute. For the most part though, she is something of a fairy godmother to the rich and powerful, and makes their fantasies -which are invariably of a sexual nature- come true.

The book is very much a bloke's idea of Erica Jong era female sexual empowerment. When we first meet Julia she is picking up a guy who fancies himself as a Robert Redford lookalike and has a zipless fuck with him in a hotel room. From which we also discover that Julia likes to be the dominant one in the bedroom, literally kicking the guy into touch when he tries to get forceful and leaves him pining for her like a lovesick puppy. This is followed by a likely dig at Barbara Cartland, when Julia gets a laugh out of reading a gossip column writing by 'an aging female romantic novelist' that claims 'the days of crazy feminism were over...the pendulum had swung back, what young girls wanted nowadays was the firm hand of a dominant male'. Julia Hemingway begs to differ.

The closest Julia has to a beau is Max Rowlands, a married middle aged businessman, who has been out in the middle east rubbing shoulders with the Arabs. Max comes sniffing around, but Julia's verdict is that he is over the hill and none to great in the bedroom department. In keeping with the fairy godmother theme though, Max hires Julia to befriend his wife Pamela who is 'something of a flump', doesn't know how to dress properly and therefore is a social embarrassment to him. I suspect Pamela Rowlands is the type of person that Jack Ramsay imagined he was writing this book for. She's a bored, unfulfilled housewife who craves excitement, style and sophistication in her life. A wish that comes true when Julia's Panther De Ville pulls up outside Chez Rowlands and whisks her away for a glamorous make over, an expensive shopping trip and a threesome with two young hunks. This turns out to be one of the more honorable assignments that Julia undertakes in the book though.

The book's blurb pushes Bond similarities 'a woman whose mind works faster than the barrel of James Bond's gun' , but aside from a love 'em and leave 'em attitude towards the opposite sex, I'm not really seeing comparisons between James Bond and the book version of Julia. The film version of The Golden Lady makes more of a concerted effort to turn Julia into a female Bond. In the film she's a gun totting mercenary, who kicks ass, has Bond like gadgets and briefly rubs shoulders with Desmond Llewellyn, playing Q in all but name. In the book though, Julia is less a female Bond and more a proto Ghislaine Maxwell. At one point she is assigned to set up a date between a visiting European nobleman, the Count Frederik Kroste, and a child prostitute who has been dressed up like a bride for the occasion "his royal highness is a man of peculiar taste". An incident that forces Julia to slum it in the 'badlands' of North Kensington (the book is horribly elitist by the way) and leads to the only real stab at action in the book. When one of the other customers in the child brothel tries to force himself on Julia. Resulting in her having to fight her way past him, and a few pimps, in order to return to the safety of her Panther De Ville, and away from all the common riff raff. It should also be mentioned that Julia herself is also technically a child molester, and takes on the assignment of deflowering an underage Arab prince, Prince Ahmed of Kubran. The uncomfortable sexualisation of Ahmed 'when he began to writhe and moan, she realized that his voice hadn't yet broken' suggests that as well as a female audience, Jack Ramsay was also trying to appeal to the sort of gent who when not hanging around the Playland Arcade back then, was posting off classified ads to Films and Filming magazine....if you know, you know.

Julia's endgame appears to be to profit from an illegal arms deal taking place between Max Rowlands and the Arabs. This is being blocked by the UK government due to their ties to Israel. So Julia has to dig up some dirt on Foreign Minister Donald Smythe, in order to blackmail him into turning a blind eye to the arms deal. Fortunately for Julia, Smythe regularly visits to the Piccadilly branch of the Jacey sex cinema chain, while Smythe's wife Liz has rape fantasies. After being befriended by Julia, Liz admits "I must have seen the Clockwork Orange movie a dozen times, just for the rape scenes". The Smythes therefore are easy prey for Julia who sends Evette, one of the women who works for her, to pose as an innocent French schoolgirl and seduce Donald. Resulting in him whisking her off to the Piccadilly Jacey for a fumble in the back row, which is photographed by another of Julia's operatives using an infra red camera. I am surprised they got away with setting this scene in a real life cinema and implying that it was a hotbed of underage sex and blackmail. Clearly either this book never came to the attention of the owners of the Jacey cinema chain, or they believed there was no such thing as bad publicity. 

Julia then once again plays fairy godmother, and grants Liz's wish to be raped, Clockwork Orange style. Leading to, what is in fairness, quite a suspenseful section of the book where a paranoid Liz travels around London thinking that every man who approaches her is out to rape her. Only for her to eventually get home and discover that the rapists have been waiting for her all along. As this is a book written by a man in the 1970s though, Liz eventually begins to enjoy the rape...so all's well that ends well.

Despite having written a number of popular paperbacks during the seventies, Jack Ramsay is something of a mystery man. His most well known book is The Rage (1977) about a rabies outbreak in Britain, he also wrote Deathgame (1978) in which left wing terrorists attempt to sabotage the World Cup Tournament. About the only solid fact that is known about Jack Ramsay is that he is not an alias for Ramsey Campbell, who had written a book which he wanted to put out under a pen name, had toyed with the idea of using the name Jack Ramsay, only to be informed that there was already a writer by that name. However, due to that story being inaccurately repeated over the years it has lead many people to believe that Jack Ramsay was a pen name for Ramsey Campbell, which is not the case.

Based on the books of his that I've read, my gut instinct is that Ramsay came from a background in journalism. His books are linked by this insider view of the boozy, cut throat world of Fleet Street and usually feature heroic journalist characters trying to tear through the red tape. I'm detecting an author bringing the mental baggage of a previous or perhaps concurrent occupation with Ramsay. Just as Guy N. Smith's characters tend to be unfulfilled bank employees, Richard Laymon's tend to be High School Teachers and John Halkin's protagonists were refugees from the TV industry, Ramsay gravitates towards journalists. Here that stock character is Bernard Hawkins, a newspaper editor and columnist, who is out to expose Max Rowlands and is about the only character in the book with a moral compass. The Golden Lady also touches on another of Jack Ramsay's themes, the generational conflict between the older, more ethical Fleet Street hacks and the younger, unscrupulous journalists who are happy to destroy the lives of others in order to get that all important headline. This shows up in The Golden Lady when Hawkins forms an uneasy alliance with a guttersnipe journo called Pete in order to dig up dirt on Max, who has been partying hard with tarty models and rich Arabs. I suspect Jack Ramsay favoured the likes of Bernard Hawkins than the Petes of this world. Although Ramsay's books have an eye for attention grabbing subject matter, rabies in The Rage and left wing terrorism in Deathgame, his approach is allot more quiet and non-sensationalist than you might imagine. Anyone seeking out The Rage and expecting an over the top, scare mongering, animals attack novel will likely be left disappointed by Ramsay's realistic and low key approach to the rabies theme. Perhaps because The Golden Lady was more of a commission rather something Ramsay wrote of his own accord, Bernard Hawkins isn't the all important, central figure that Ramsay's other journalist characters were. Indeed, Hawkins just abruptly disappears from the novel, pissing off to Cornwall with a redhead only for us to later find out that he was paid off by Julia. What is striking about The Golden Lady is the absolute moral bankruptcy of the book. Julia, for example, gets a woman raped, profits from arms dealing and child prostitution, yet she's still the heroine of the book, and the character it wants you to get behind. While the characters who stand in her way, like Hawkins and Smythe, are the ones the book wants you to boo and regard as party poopers. In contrast, the movie version of Julia does much to erase these troubling aspects to the character. As depicted in the movie, Julia is more in the tradition of aristocratic female crime fighters like Lady Penelope, the Contessa di Contini from The Protectors or Penelope St. John-Borsini, the heroine of The Baroness series of Men's Adventure books. I do wonder if Jose Larraz signed onto the movie expecting to film something more along the lines of the book, whose steamy sex and scandal contents were in keeping with the softcore dramas he was making at the time like The Violation of the Bitch, Madame Olga's Pupils and Black Candles. Whereas the action oriented, Bond wannabe script that ended up being filmed was much more outside of his comfort zone, and such an out of character film for Larraz to get involved with.

At the risk of being haunted by the ghost of Jose Larraz, I have to admit that I much prefer the movie version, and think Joshua Sinclair's script managed to pull an enjoyable piece of late 1970s fluff out of the noxious mess that was captured in book form here. The film version has grown on me over the years, the book less so, but it is memorably rotten to the core, I will give it that. If you're that rare breed of person who enjoyed the movie- for we are very few- and wish they'd have been further adventures of Julia Hemingway, then this book serves as closest we're likely to get to that. Ramsay's book also feels unexpectedly topical at the moment, what with the Epstein files currently threatening to bring down governments and institutions. All these years later, The Golden Lady proves that the rich and famous have always been a fairly ghastly, depraved bunch. "His Royal highness is a man of peculiar taste".

Sweet Cyanide (1976, Charlie Chester)

 

Note: this review is a little heavy on the spoilers, but given that this book is so obscure and difficult to experience firsthand these days, I felt a deep dive was called for.

Another tale of murder and gender confusion from 'Carl Noone', better known as comedian Charlie Chester. Whereas his later book 'Even the Rainbow's Bent' dealt with a gay man who turned to murder after an ill-fated attempt to live as a woman, here Charlie tells us one about a murderous schoolgirl trying to pass herself off as a choir-boy.

The seemingly sweet and innocent Kristi Marlowe dotes on her diminutive daddy Timothy 'Tiny Tim' Marlowe but despises her new stepmother Brenda. "In little Kristi's mind...there was no peace and no harmony. There was only hate!".

Kristi is in dire need of someone to look up to, which isn't easy when your father is a jockey, and Tiny Tim puts his foot in it when he lets slip that he wishes that Kristi had been born a boy. Due to the fact that she could then have followed him into the manly world of horse racing. Frustrated by this, and overhearing that girls are similarly excluded from singing in the local church choir, young Kristi decides to go undercover as a choir boy, disguising her real gender by cutting her hair, stealing a boy's clothes and infiltrating the boys only church choir.

Chester's gender non-conforming characters never show a great deal of imagination when it comes to their choice of new identity. Whereas Even the Rainbow's Bent's psychopath Adrian merely calls himself Adrienne when he lives as female, Kristi Marlowe comes up with giving her first name a masculine twist and abridging her second one. Thus Kristi Marlowe becomes Chris Lowe. A rather unfortunate choice of name from Chester, since it's now more synonymous with the keyboard player in The Pet Shop Boys, giving you an unwanted mental image of what that Chris Lowe would look like had he been born a west end girl. I fear a young Chris Lowe would have thoroughly had the piss taken out of him, if a copy of Sweet Cyanide had ever been passed around his schoolyard. It might have even caused him to wonder 'what have I done to deserve this?'.

On the surface Sweet Cyanide hardly sounds like it has all the ingredients for an explosive book, the worlds of choir singing and horse racing hardly cry out exciting subject matter. Yet Sweet Cyanide is surprising rich in incident by Charlie Chester's standards, containing few dull stretches. This is perhaps due to the fact that Chester is initially juggling three storylines here. As well as the drama with Kristi/Chris, Sweet Cyanide follows Brenda as she embarks on an affair with her touchy feely boss J.W. Deakin, in order to further her career. Chester lets his comedy credentials slip with the saucy line 'as far as she was concerned lying back in the bedroom, might one day mean sitting up in the boardroom'.
Whereas elsewhere Tiny Tim gets a shot at becoming a big time jockey, only to find there's trouble at the top when he gets threatened by hardmen goons who want him to throw a race on behalf of their guv'nor. There is a noticeable anger in Sweet Cyanide over the diminutive among us being pushed around by taller folk. A recurring theme in both Tiny Tim's dealings with the gangsters and Kristi's experiences with the taller choirboys. Allot of which comes across as quite heartfelt and personal on Chester's behalf. Odd, as Chester looks to have been of average height, and not someone who you'd expect to carry around mental baggage over his height. Its a trait of this book that would have made more sense had 'Carl Noone' been a pen name of say, Arthur Askey or Lynsey De Paul.

Due to the demands of his job, Tiny Tim is largely an absent parent. When he isn't out horse racing he's spending time hanging out with boxers at the local steam baths and impressing them with his poetry. Suggesting that Kristi isn't the only one in her family who is suffering from sexual confusion. 'It surprised Tim too, to learn that many a hard face with a broken nose enjoyed the odd stanza of poetry'. The unexpected male bonding over poetry in Sweet Cyanide is likely the result of Charlie bringing a bit of himself to the material. In real life Chester fancied himself as a poet, and as a result of being in the public eye would regularly receive amateur poetry from members of the public, as well as incarcerated prisoners, examples of which can be found in his 1977 non-fiction book 'Cry Simba'. Fortunately for Tiny Tim his poetry wins him fans like ex-boxers Ernie and Mick the Mountain, who volunteer themselves as protection against the gangsters who are threatening to duff up the jockey. Ernie and Mick the Mountain are the sort of gruff, dim witted, salt of the earth types that you find littered throughout Chester's books. They are the kind of characters who, if this were on film, would have probably been played by Nosher Powell, Ivor Salter or Derek Deadman. Some might feel that Chester was indulging in patronising, working class caricatures here, but I sense genuine warmth and affection in his writing 'they might never win prizes for academic thinking, but they had a classic loyalty, and strange as it may seem there were some soft hearts among the tin ears and resin'.

Sweet Cyanide is a book of mixed messages when it comes to the role of women. On one hand, the Kristi storyline carries with it a sense of injustice at the preferential treatment of boys over girls, the key to Kristi's disturbed behaviour. On the other hand, Chester is contemptuous towards Brenda over her adultery and rejection of the traditional wife and mother roles. Not only does Brenda go out to work and refuses to act as a mother to Kristi, but she has also had herself 'fixed' so that she can't have any children with Tiny Tim. Leading randy toad J.W. Deakin to quip "that means you can have all the fun without any of the risks". To Brenda, sex is a bargaining tool, she largely cuts off Tiny Tim who has nothing to offer in return for her favours, while leading J.W on with the promise of sex, without ever actually putting out for him.
In Chester's book, hold girls back and you'll screw with their heads and cause them to hate their bodies, but let women out of the kitchen and they'll turn into adulterous, power hungry bitches. Ultimately, Sweet Cyanide is a book that is fighting a battle within itself over whether it wants to be a feminist book or an anti-feminist book.

Of course, Charlie Chester being Charlie Chester, his more unsavoury obsessions rise to the surface in Sweet Cyanide. While Chester is rather reserved and dispassionate when it comes to regular sex, his writing comes alive when Sweet Cyanide drifts in the direction of S&M and jailbait themes. Homosexuality threatens to unmask Kristi due to the other choirboys' bullying and sexual curiosity. The choirboys' beating and stripping of one of their own 'in their course juvenile way they would take turns to spit on his penis', gives Kristi both the shock of being exposed to male genitalia for the first time, and the fearful realisation that when her own number comes up, she'll have no penis for them to spit on. Kristi's identity is accidentally discovered by fellow choirboy Ginger Catlin, after a fight between them turns into a grope-a-thon "so little Chris Lowe has got tits like a girl" pervs Ginger. A Charlie Chester book isn't a safe place to be a schoolgirl, they are the subject of a woodlands rape in 'Bannerman', murder in 'Even the Rainbow's Bent' and sexual blackmail in 'Symphony & Psychopath'. Is it any wonder that Kristi wants to opt out of being one?

The torch that Chester carried for S&M predictably rears its head in the Brenda storyline. All but pimped out by J.W. Deakin to a rich and powerful man, Brenda agrees to throw some sex in the direction of one Arnold Laiker, after J.W tells her that Laiker can help advance both their careers. A man with a dirty mind, Laiker had speculated to J.W that Brenda might be a lesbian, only for J.W to jump to her defense "when it comes to sex, she takes some beating". A comment misunderstood by Laiker, leading him to think that Brenda is a severe masochist. The subsequent S&M encounter between the two does little to conceal Chester's own love of this subject matter. "Brenda cried out and tried to cover up, but whichever way she turned she received the leather". It's also the point in the book where Chester's writing is at its most entertainingly tabloidish 'Arnold Laiker wasn't just kinky, he was a bloody depraved monster. A lunatic'.

For all of his sleaze inclinations though, there is something a little out of time and old fashioned about Chester's books. The gangster and later police procedural aspects of Sweet Cyanide feel like a throwback to a second feature, British crime feature from the early 1960s, and when Chester turns the air blue, he tends to favour mild expletives like 'sod' and 'bloody'.

I wouldn't go as far to say Chester just wrote the same book over and over again, but after you've read a few of them, you do become aware that he stuck to a formula while knocking this stuff out for New English Library. Sweet Cyanide apes the structure of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent, by initially being sympathetic to characters who are driven to murder, before turning against them in the second act when their actions trespass into more callous and reprehensible behaviour. At the outset of the book, Kristi isn't the Bad Seed/Midwich Cuckoo type killer kid that you'd quite expect. Instead she is a sensitive introvert and victim of sexual discrimination. Even her first murder -bashing a guy over the head with a metal pole while he's in the process of raping her- seems a quite justifiable act of self defence. Perhaps because of this, Chester's regular trick of turning the reader against his killer in the second act -Kristi tries to commit the 'perfect' murder and frame Brenda for it- doesn't quite come off here. Especially as even Chester himself doesn't seem particularly enamoured with Brenda, leaving the reader conflicted as to whether their allegiance should remain with Kristi or transfer to the never particularly likeable Brenda. It seems not even Chester has a heart of stone when it comes to Kristi. Whereas in Even the Rainbow's Bent, Chester signs off on a contemptuous note towards Adrian/Adrienne by refering to him as a 'warped creature' here his summing up of Kristi shows a much more compassionate side to him 'Sister Florence had tears in her eyes at the dejected little figure who obviously craved affection'.

Unfortunately Sweet Cyanide does follow the path of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent by turning into a police proceederal for its last act. Chester once again sidelines all his main characters and hands the narrative reigns over to a generic police inspector - here called Jack Morley- who shows up to solve the crime and unmask the culprit. The last acts of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent do drag those books down a few notches. After spending two thirds of the book following incredibly strange mixed up characters we suddenly have to wave goodbye to them and spend the remainder of the book waiting for a dullard of a police inspector to solve crimes we've already been privy to. However in Sweet Cyanide there is at least one part of the mystery that the reader is equally in the dark about. Namely the whereabouts of Tiny Tim who has disappeared en route to a horse race in Australia. As this point, Chester does manage to generate some suspense over whether Tiny Tim arrived in Oz safely or fell foul of the gangsters who were on his trail. It's also worth sticking around for the priceless, penny dropping moment when Inspector Morley puts it all together, which suggests Chester should have had a career writing clues for the gameshow 3-2-1. After his pal Detective Sergeant Ed Sayers remarks that choir-boy Chris Lowe deserves a 'dressing down' from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', Morley has his eureka moment. Pointing out that the opposite of dressing down is dressing up, Morley also tells Ed that if you take the 'Pa or' away from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', and bring the two remaining words together you get Ma Lowe, which could be pronounced Marlowe. Therefore Kristi Marlowe dressed up is Chris Lowe, at which point you half expect Ted Rogers to show up and tell Morley that he has just won Dusty Bin.

After teasing the reader over the fate of Tiny Tim, Chester does rather drop the ball at the end of Sweet Cyanide by forgetting to resolve this subplot, forever leaving us unsure over whether Tiny Tim is alive, dead or tiptoeing through the tulips. Given that the book ends with Kristi being lead away by kindly, concerned nun Sister Florence, it does feel like Chester missed a trick by not having Sister Florence turn out to be Tiny Tim, who'd taken a leaf out of his daughter's book by dragging up as a nun in order to rescue Kristi from police custody. Then again, after you're read a few of his books you do come to except sloppiness as part of the whole Charlie Chester experience. There's also evidence that the title Sweet Cyanide was an 11th hour brainwave by him, since Cyanide plays absolutely no part in the actual plot, and Chester clearly felt obliged to write a line that justified using that title "she may be sweet, but she sounds like Cyanide to me".
After the awfulness of 'Bannerman' I came close to throwing in the towel on Charlie Chester books, but I'm glad I stuck around for Sweet Cyanide, which has restored my faith in the comedian turned sleaze writer, and dare I say might actually be the dirty old bugger's best book.