Forty years of writing about sexual shenanigans in posh circles would immunise most authors against shock.
But not Dame Jilly Cooper, who says she squirmed when she recently reread her 1988 novel Rivals – now turned into a hotly anticipated Disney+ series streaming from October 18 – for the first time in decades.
“I have not read Riders for 25 years and I was shocked by how rude it was,” she laughs. In the same breath, the 87-year-old proclaims: “Life is quite short of joy and I think sex is heaven. You should have as much as you can and I think in books you should have quite a lot too.”
Author of high society ‘bonkbusters’ like Riders and Mount! Dame Jilly has invited cameras into her 14th century Gloucestershire home as the final guest in the BBC1 documentary series In My Own Words, showing on Monday, 30th September.
By the time she wrote Rivals – the TV version of which stars David Tennant and Aidan Turner alongside Emily Atack, who plays a naked tennis match, and Alex Hassell as charismatic but misogynist Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black – she was a grand master of saucy penmanship.
Dame Jilly claims most of her books simply fictionalise behaviour she has witnessed. She says: “In 1982 we moved to the Cotswolds, which gave me a very different social set to write about. It was here I would finish Riders. When we moved to the country, I learned how to create aristocrats and I came up with the idea of Rupert Campbell-Black, who was the most beautiful man in England and is an absolute sh*t.
“All my heroes in my romances are very macho. They are strong, brave and if a woman is stupid they will tell her she is being stupid. People did like the books, as they liked the men and the romantic element of it. So, I suppose, I just rewrote stories that happened to me.”
Documentary viewers will see Dame Jilly reflect on her life and work – from her childhood in Yorkshire, where her love of horses, dogs, and devilishly handsome men were all forged, to her early career in journalism and publishing in the 1950s and 1960s.
She remembers the home in Putney, south west London, which she left 42 years ago., where she lived there with her late husband Leo Cooper and her children.
While living there she first found success in the late 1960s, writing a groundbreaking newspaper column about marriage, sex and society.
She says: “At that time, it was blissful being a housewife and getting a newspaper column. I later got a job in fiction, but back then during the 1960s, fiction was very difficult. You could not have any sexual description at all.
“I got fed up, so I wrote a story and waited, terrified, for the editor. She called me and said ‘You can’t find any good stories but this is quite good of yours. So we would like to publish it.’ For a writer, it is like an orgasm to be published.
“I then started lengthening the stories and they did all right, too. Nobody went to bed together in them. It was just a love story.”
As the years passed, those stories grew into bestselling books like Riders, published in 1985 – although the novel was not a hit with Dame Jilly’s bank manager.
“We were always broke and were worried about money. But then Riders got published,” she remembers. “Obviously, the bank manager had been sent a copy and so he came down for the weekend. He sat on our terrace and said ‘Lovely old property this. What a tragedy you have got to sell it and don’t think your dirty little book Riders will get you out of it.’
“But it did! It sold like an angel. My book about class saved our house in London and Riders saved this house in Gloucestershire. So, thank you. We went to Coutts (the late Queen’s bank) after that!”
Admitting she’s “no prude,” Dame Jilly’s inspiration for her racy tomes – dubbed the Rutshire Chronicles – came from a polo match. “The first time I went to a polo match this lady turned to me and said ‘Wherever my son goes he gets mounted within half an hour.’ I thought ‘Oh boy, I have got to write a book about this.’”
While her late brother Tim was the inspiration for many of her leading men. “I had this ravishingly beautiful brother. All the girls at school used to say to me ‘Please can we come and stay in the holidays so we can get off with Timothy,’” she says. “I think he was a model for me as a romantic hero, as he was quite arrogant. But he was a good games player.”
Admitting to being dubbed “The Unholy Terror” by teachers for her own naughtiness at school, she adds: “I was always writing letters to boys. The only thing I was ever interested in was men. That is awful isn’t it?”
But her wry observations of the opposite sex have found her fame. “Rivals was number one and was a bestseller. It is heaven to be number one. It feels as if you have conquered the world,” she says.
“Some are snobby towards what I write. They call them ‘bonkbusters.’ I don’t like the word. There are people who make lots of money and writers who just get kind words. They would love to have my sales.”
But not all Dame Jilly’s experiences with men have been fun. In the documentary she recounts a very traumatic incident when an unnamed author tried to force himself on her.
“Men were all macho back then. They were tremendously bossy and very dominant. Male chauvinist p*gs all of them. They were much more forceful in telling you what to do in those days,” she says.
“I was in the publicity department for a big publisher and one of their authors took me out for lunch. He was a great big gross creature. And suddenly, in the back of a taxi, he ripped my clothes off.
“I was struggling away, so I collapsed into the office and a man said to me ‘Jilly, why are you crying? What happened?’ I said ‘Somebody tried to jump on me in a taxi. He tried to rape me. It was horrible.’
“And so he said ‘You must tell me. We will go to the police. We are not having any of that at all.’ Finally, I muttered out the person’s name and he said ‘Oh. That is one of our authors. Out!’
“I was very shocked. I was almost raped and there I was being kicked out of the office. It was attempted rape. It was just horrible. I was a junior member of the publicity department and he probably thought nothing would happen.”
Turning to happier subjects after her shocking revelation, Jilly tells how she loves to start the day writing on the trusted typewriter she calls Erica.
She says: “My house is 14th century. It was a monks’ dormitory. I like to think of them dancing around here and being naughty. I hope they were being very, very naughty indeed. A lot of the characters in my books live in my head around here. I ought to move but I love it. My children don’t want me to move because they want it.”
As well as a magnificent collection of books, Dame Jilly keeps her Damehood medal in her study, awarded to her in May by King Charles. “My Damehood? Wasn’t it amazing? It is so extraordinary, I can’t quite take it seriously,” she says. “I am terribly honoured and touched, but it seems a strange thing to be, really.
“At the time I thought ‘Gosh this can’t be me? Me! Bonkbuster Jill.’ But we went up to the Palace and he was absolutely charming, Charles.”
Dame Jilly. who wished King Charles well after his cancer revelations, adds: “He just said to me ‘Well done. It is wonderful.’ I said I hoped he was OK. I said to him ‘You must look after yourself because the country loves you so much.’ Then he whispered to me ‘We have two rather good horses coming up at Ascot.’ Sweet isn’t it?”
Her honour, is just part of the rich tapestry of Dame Jilly’s life, for which she is unerringly grateful. She says: “I have lived an incredibly lucky life. Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky. I had brilliant parents, a heavenly husband and lovely children.”
As for her legacy? She says: “I hope I am a bit funny. I hope I cheered people up. I hope I tell a good story.”
In My Own Words is on BBC One on Monday 30 September at 10.40pm. Rivals streams on Disney+ from October 18.
