Landesman's crazy saga is the Eighties in a nutshell

13 April 2012

One of the enduring images of Cosmo Landesman's new memoir Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me, is of his wife Julie Burchill, fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, bashing out copy on a typewriter. Landesman would dutifully lay out line after line of white powder until she had lift-off. "Then there would be an outburst of furious tapping," he notes. "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 of its own."

That snapshot of connubial bliss or heedless decadence, depending on your point of view captures the zeitgeist of the Eighties. Hard work and hedonism went hand in demonic hand.

On the face of it, Landesman's book seems like just another trivial, gossipy memoir. However, his account offers a more truthful insight into the period than any academic, politician or historian could offer.

The success of Thatcherism depended on reasons other than simply a strong work ethic, and it wasn't just North Sea oil that fuelled the economy. A fair few of "Thatcher's children" had their noses in the cocaine trough.

Trivial lives (not that Ms Burchill is in any way trivial, heaven forbid) can often be more revealing than ponderous self-serving memoirs. David Blunkett, take note. The gossipy, lightweight Goncourt brothers provide a fascinating portrait of the French literary scene in the late 19th century. Bohemian life in Paris was fuelled by absinthe, or the green fairy as it was nicknamed. For Baudelaire, Flaubert and Zola it became the gateway to artistic creativity and, in some cases, madness.

Beverley Nichols wrote The Sweet and Twenties, a from-the-horse's-mouth account of life as a bright young thing in London which offers vivid vignettes and pen portraits of all the players of the day. Most of the protagonists are superficial fopdoodles such as singer Teddie Gerrard, who owed her popularity to her bon mot "I've never been kept [long pause] ...waiting". How they all must have laughed.

But Nichols's memoir captures the spirit of the era. Life was an endless merry-go-round of parties. One of his diary entries reads: "Breakfast with Lloyd George, lunch with Diaghilev, tea with Sean O'Casey, cocktails with Gershwin, dinner at the Garrick Club with HG Wells." That's a lot of demonic fingers and not a line of cocaine between them.

If you can remember the Sixties you weren't there, so the old saw goes. If you have forgotten the Eighties, you were there and there's no better way to remember them than by reading Landesman's book.

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