Books Stick to the day job Eric Morecambe, Les Dawson and Harry Secombe all tried it – now Dolly Parton has written a celebrity novel. By Roger Lewis
I
have a shelf of celebrity novels. Madonna, Sharon Osbourne, Carrie Fisher, Ethan Hawke…. They’ve all had a go – even Gyles Brandreth. Yet though perhaps they think they are making things up, celebrities can be inadvertently much more confessional in their fictions than they are in their official autobiographies, which are usually ghosted rubbish, full of evasions and gaps and phoney niceness. Leading the field here is Eric Morecambe’s Mr Lonely (1981), where a surprisingly harsh picture of showbusiness is presented. Sid Lewis, to all intents and purposes Eric himself, is motivated by a permanent anger. He can never shake off his early days, when he was ‘looked down upon’ and trudged, to scant applause, around working men’s clubs, summer seasons, fêtes and police stag nights. His wife ‘never did win a verbal argument with Sid. He was much too devious’ – and his personality as a performer is that of Eric himself: his trick is ‘Never give the punters time to think’ and he would ‘walk, talk, ask, beg and shout’ – ie keep jabbering, keep everyone distracted. In time, Sid becomes a television hit, and he is killed when stabbed accidentally by an awards statuette. What’s hard to take are the sex scenes.
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Eric’s image was that of a pipe-smoking family man in Harpenden. Sid also lives in that district; has a family – but he goes off on erotic adventures. ‘Do you always do as you’re told?’ ‘Depends how big the bed is.’ We don’t really want to know Eric Morecambe’s sexual fantasies, or his philosophy: ‘Conscience doesn’t stop you from doing it. It just stops you from enjoying it.’ The formula is similar in Les Dawson’s A Card for the Clubs (1974), a lightly fictionalised account of a woebegone stand-up act in horrible northern towns. Harry Secombe’s Twice Brightly (1974) is another one, with the genial goon learning his trade in what was the Windmill Theatre, doing his no doubt hilarious shaving routine between the striptease acts. Barry Humphries’s brilliant Women in the Background (1995), about a drag act played by Derek Pettyfer, who is ‘rich, famous, between wives’, sounds a lot like what handling Dame Edna must involve. ‘Barry Humphries’s comic novel is about a life in a goldfish bowl, in which the goldfish are piranhas,’ says the blurb. And exactly the same may be said of Adrian Edmondson’s The Gobbler (1995), where the beloved young comedian, ‘a grotesque hero for the nineties’, doesn’t have friends; only professional enemies. Julian Mann, who may just be a portrait of Rik Mayall, or of
somebody very similar, is a drinker and womaniser with income-tax problems. His life is one big ‘orgy of booze and young models’. Anyway, you get the picture. Celebrity fiction doesn’t hold back on what it takes to be a celebrity – nor on the rage and hunger required if fame is to be sustained. Which brings us neatly to Dolly Parton’s offering, Run Rose Run. Her spanking new novel deals with ‘a backwoods innocent stumbling into superstardom’. The book explores the relationship between AnnieLee Keyes (‘I turned 25 years old last week, and I’m asking you to give me a chance to sing up there on that stage’) and Ruthanna Ryder, not only the established queen of country and western but ‘one of the most successful musicians in the history of the business’, no less. AnnieLee and Ruthanna seem identical to Dolly herself – her younger and current selves. Ruthanna, for example, ‘clawed her way to the top of her industry’. Now if she enters a hotel suite, she’ll expect to find displays of gigantic fruit baskets and trays of chocolate ganache flecked with edible gold. AnnieLee, meanwhile, who is starting out, sleeps rough in the park and seems to go for days without eating or requiring a hot bath. Both women are ‘beautiful, talented
