Authors: Lynn Barber
CHAPTER NINE
I used to interview Michael Winner at any opportunity, partly because he was such good fun but also because I was intrigued by him. I felt I was within a hair’s breadth of understanding his character but never quite got there. He readily agreed that his monster mother, ‘Mumsy’, was the root of all his problems but on the other hand he didn’t think he
had
any problems. And in a way he didn’t. He was fun to be with, he had plenty of friends, he believed he had achieved the perfect lifestyle. But he did once admit to me that he regretted not having children – ‘That is the one mistake that wipes out everything I have ever done.’
He also had an extremely twisted attitude to money which I think accounts for why he never had children. Winner’s father made a lot of money from property and was a serious art collector – he paid the world-record price for a Jan von Os flower painting and had a museum-quality collection of jade. He left it all to his widow, but Winner assumed that, as the only child, he would eventually inherit. Unfortunately he reckoned without Mumsy’s gambling habit. She virtually lived in the casino at Cannes. And when she died in 1984, the thirty-five crates that were meant to contain his father’s jade collection were found to contain only light bulbs and toilet paper – she had gambled everything away.
By that stage, Winner had made plenty of money himself, from films and property, but he still felt bitter about the lost inheritance. It was a reminder that women, even women who claimed to love you, could steal everything away. If you married, you might end up having to pay alimony. I think it’s significant that he only finally got married at seventy-five, when his fortune had been eroded by the property crash and he was facing serious debts. And, after his death, it emerged that many of his staff and ex-girlfriends who thought they’d been provided for in his will had been left nothing at all. Even his widow, Geraldine, had to worry about paying the electricity bill.
Most of my interviews with Winner were ostensibly about food and conducted over lunch, which was always a great performance. I remember a scene at the Wolseley when he actually made Jeremy King (the co-owner) get out a tape measure and measure our table because he believed it was smaller than the one next to it. It wasn’t; it was the same size. There was another hilarious scene at Assegai, a restaurant near his home in Holland Park which he never reviewed because he didn’t want the hoi polloi coming. I asked him why he liked the restaurant particularly and he said, ‘Oh because it attracts a very good class of person.’ So saying, he glanced round and saw what I’d been able to see for some time – a woman breast-feeding her baby at the next table. I thought he might have a heart attack there and then, he was so shocked.
The following interview is the last one I ever did with him and unusual because it took place at his home and did not involve food. Instead,
Observer Woman
magazine asked me to find out about his sex life and his attitude to women. This seemed a slightly dodgy subject, given that he was seventy-two and in poor health but, as always, he was happy to oblige.
From the
Observer
, 4 November 2007
Michael Winner certainly should know about women because he has been tended by them for seventy-two years. The current cast is Geraldine Lynton-Edwards who has recently been promoted to fiancée, Dinah May his assistant, various cooks, maids, secretaries and cleaners, followed by an army of ex-girlfriends wending back into the mists of time. He claims to adore women – ‘There’s no question, women are nicer, kinder people.’ On the other hand, he has never actually gone so far as to marry one. ‘I have some congenital defect that prevents me marrying,’ he explains. But that just possibly might be about to change . . .
So I trot round to his vast Kensington mansion to see how wedding plans are progressing, if at all. The maid opens the door and summons Dinah, who shows me to the private cinema downstairs. It has two old director’s chairs saying ‘Michael Winner’, and walls and walls of photographs of Winner with the stars he is so boringly besotted by – Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, John Gielgud, Diana Rigg, Sophia Loren, Charles Bronson. Presumably he has chosen to meet me in the screening room because he likes to remind people that he was a film director – something I always find it politer to forget. His tape recorder is already laid beside his chair (he always tapes his interviews) and Dinah brings coffee for me and peach juice for him.
I was expecting him to look frail because he’d told me on the phone, ‘I’m crippled for life, darling,’ but even so I am shocked when he limps into the room. His hands shake; his voice is wheezy; he seems altogether shrunken. This is all as a result of the terrible (and terribly obscure) illness Vibrio vulnificus that he contracted in Barbados at New Year. He was flown back in an air ambulance and not expected to live. He was in the London Clinic for five and a half months, and had nineteen operations, one of which removed his Achilles tendon leaving him with a permanent limp. There is a terrible irony in the fact that he has just published a book,
The Fat Pig Diet
, which proudly recounts how he lost three and a half stone last year by following his self-invented diet – eat less, eat early – but everyone will assume he lost the weight through illness.
But just when I’m thinking: Poor thing – I mustn’t tire him, he starts shouting at about 1,000 decibels, ‘Di-nah! Di-nah!’ and she comes running back. It turns out he wants a radiator switched off which I could have done if he’d explained, but anyway she turns it off and he gives her time to get back upstairs before bellowing again, ‘Di-nah! Di-nah! Oh God!’ This time he explains, ‘She hasn’t pulled all the curtains back. I asked her to do it and she hasn’t done it. I’m a real old finicky arsehole, darling.’ I can do it, I tell him. ‘No. I like people to do what they’re fucking well told. Di-nah!’ So poor Dinah comes running back and he makes her draw all the curtains. (These aren’t even window curtains, just sound-proofing curtains round the cinema screen.) ‘Difficult patient, is he?’ I ask Dinah and she rolls her eyes while Winner bellows, ‘Difficult, darling! Difficult patient! Hahaha. Don’t say a word, Dinah! The truth must not come out! Oh, she’s wonderful, Dinah.’
Finally poor Dinah is allowed to go. She has worked for him for over twenty years so she must be used to it by now. I asked if she was an ex-girlfriend but he said no, she was already married when she came to him but, ‘If I’d known her before she was married, I’m sure she would have been an ex-girlfriend!’ Ex-girlfriend, I should explain, has a particular significance in Winnerworld. It is the equivalent to being, say, the fifth wife of a polygamous king who is now on to wife thirty-seven – it means you have been superseded but not forgotten and still retain a certain status. Winner boasts that he remains friends with all his ex-girlfriends though his
Fat Pig Diet
book slightly gives the lie to this when he recounts how a woman recently came up to him in St Alban restaurant in Regent Street and said hello and he asked her name and she said, ‘You should know. I slept with you for a year!’ But that, he explains, was unusual – ‘I’d lost track of her. I haven’t kept in touch with all of them, darling. But I’m on the phone to about two or three every day. Every day. Certain ones more than others. It’s a great pleasure. People say I’ve never had a family but I do have a family – a family of choice who I still adore, and help. Some of them have fallen on bad times or had illnesses – two are very ill actually and I pay all their bills.’
How many ex-girlfriends does he have altogether? ‘Well we did a count and funnily enough, it was very low, about a hundred and thirty. That’s not a lot! How can it be a lot for fifty years? Any self-respecting rock star gets through that in a day. Hahahaha. And they’re bloody nice people.’ But if they were so nice, why did he keep changing them? ‘Because I was a pig in my behaviour – as well as becoming a fat pig later – in that I could never resist temptation. So if I was with somebody and somebody else became available, I would have them. When I look back on the way I behaved, I feel sickened, absolutely sickened. I think: That person was loyal, decent, loved me – how could I have done that? And not really had any conscience about it? I mean openly going off with other people? It was cruel. And it was purely motivated by greed. They were all bloody nice people – I mean there were a few one-night stands in Hollywood and all that sort of stuff – but on the whole anyone I spent any time with was a really decent, terrific person.’
When were the one-night stands? In the 1960s? ‘Well all the time, dear. I would never reject a one-night stand. I wasn’t looking for them so much later on, but occasionally they’d turn up.’ Wasn’t he worried about catching something? ‘Well . . . obviously not. And I never did catch anything. Quite early on I found I had quite a low sperm count so the chances of having a child were almost nil.’ Did he ever pay for sex? ‘Never. Never ever ever. First of all, I’m too mean and it wasn’t necessary because I was getting it free. And the girls I’ve had were much prettier! Why should I trade in an Aston Martin for a battered 1936 Ford and pay for it?’
His detractors might assume that Winner’s women were all gold-diggers who chased him for his money but ‘That is nonsense!’ he insists – it was for his lovely bubbly personality. ‘Girls want to be entertained. They want to have a fun day. It’s no fun being with a very rich man if he’s unbelievably boring.’ And anyway he was chased by rich women as well. One was the author of
The Beverly Hills Diet
, who pursued him with pineapples back in the 1970s: ‘I would arrive at an airport somewhere and a chauffeur would appear with this enormous bag of pineapples. She thought pineapples were the way to my heart! Did she have the wrong number! I hate pineapples!’
But why was he always so reluctant to commit? Most of his girlfriends believe it was the baleful influence of Mumsy, Helen Winner, a compulsive gambler who spent all his inheritance in the Cannes casino and then took to suing him for more cash – it was one of her lawsuits, he believes, that brought on his first heart attack. He saw women as a threat to his money and he does care a lot about money: it is vital to his
amour-propre
to be a very rich man. ‘It’s a dreadfully mean thing to say, but I used to see flashing above girlfriends’ heads “Alimony. Alimony. Alimony”. I would think to myself realistically three out of four marriages fail and my chances won’t be any better than anybody else’s and probably worse. So do I really want to give away millions of pounds? Which is a terrible thing to say. But I just never wanted to get married. And they were wonderful people. The only one who behaved as appallingly as I did was Jenny Seagrove.’
And yet the actress Jenny Seagrove was the one he came closest to marrying. He auditioned her for a part in his movie
Appointment with Death
in 1987 and rang her agent and said, ‘I have two offers. Firstly, I wish to marry Jenny Seagrove. Secondly, I want her in the movie.’ She got the part in the movie, but she couldn’t marry Winner because she was already married to an Indian actor called Madhav Sharma who refused a divorce. (This could explain Winner’s willingness to propose.) And when she eventually got a divorce, Winner somehow failed to marry her though they lived together for six and a half years. She left him in 1993 just two weeks before he was going into hospital for a triple heart bypass. So she behaved pretty badly? ‘Oy vey! I couldn’t walk 30 yards without breathing problems and she left. She wasn’t nice then. But I had not been nice before so you have to make allowances. She went off with Bill Kenwright [the theatrical impresario], and I remember saying to a very famous actress, “I’m sure that all happened afterwards,” and she said, “No, no, I can tell you, Michael – there were rehearsals going on.” Hahaha. But it doesn’t matter because I did it first.’
They are only just on speaking terms again. ‘A few years ago, a mutual friend said Jenny would love to have a chat. So I wrote her a card and said love to see you sometime to have a chat. To which I got an answer eight weeks later: “I don’t feel quite ready for a chat yet.” That was after we’d been apart for three years! I wasn’t asking for a blowjob! And then the same thing happened the other day – a mutual friend said she’s so keen to talk to you, she wants to know your mobile. I said I don’t have a mobile and she knows the phone number – she lived here for six and a half years. So then she says to this fellow, “Well I don’t think this is the time to call him. And if I do call him, he’ll ask me out to dinner.” So I said Emil, can you take a letter: “Dear Jenny, May I make it clear that I do not wish to have dinner with you, nor do I wish to have breakfast, lunch, tea, or night-time cocoa. But I wish you well.” And then – humiliated by this letter which I sent through an intermediary, hahahaha – she rang me at five to one, when she knows I always have lunch at one, and we had a very nice chat. But that was the first time in eight years.’
Anyway, all this mad pursuit is now in the past because, at seventy-two, for the first time in his life he is engaged. The lucky girl is Geraldine Lynton-Edwards who has been his girlfriend for several years but is now officially his fiancée. Perhaps ‘girl’ is a bit of a misnomer – Winner admits that he met her in 1957 when he was making his first movie. ‘I spent a day interviewing people in my father’s office near Olympia and next day the secretary rings here and says, “There’s a girl turned up for the interview.” I said, “Well, that was yesterday.” And – I’ll never forget the way she said it – she said, “I think you’d like to see her.” So I thought: Oooh! And I walked round to the office and there was Geraldine, and we had an affair then, and we’ve seen each other from time to time over the years.’ Hang on, hang on! I cry. He met her fifty years ago? So how old is she? I’ve always assumed she was in her early fifties. ‘Oh listen, she annoys me greatly. She looks like a well-preserved fifty and she keeps telling everyone she’s sixty-eight or sixty-nine or whatever she is! I say, “Why are you telling them this? Keep your bloody mouth shut!” Because she looks incredible. At all times! And she hasn’t had plastic surgery or anything.’