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 Ramsay 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 Ramsay 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".