Why My Memoirs Are Here
In 1981, a tabloid journalist whom I had met on numerous occasions in London during the 1960’s called me in Los Angeles, requesting an interview because he had been commissioned to ghostwrite a book about my life. I quite liked the fellow and agreed to collaborate with him.
Alas, as soon as I saw what he had written, I realized that I had been gravely mistaken in trusting him to do justice to the subject. Not only was it written in appalling "journalese,” but a slew of grave errors, distortions, and outright fabrications made his article completely unacceptable to me. I phoned his boss, Don Short, another notorious London tabloid journalist who ran the Solo literary agency, and in the wake of our conversation, I decided that only I could write such a book. I was also in the midst of a serious split with my current girlfriend and badly needed a therapeutic distraction, which I found by immersing myself in such an activity. Thus was born the beginning of my memoirs, which the agency named STASH, Portrait of a Living Legend. When I queried its pretensions, Don Short replied, "Well, you are still alive, and you are a legend!
Soon after Don contacted me, they had secured an extremely lucrative offer from the now-defunct Sunday tabloid News of the World, the UK's most widely circulated newspaper at the time. During a meeting to discuss the terms, I frankly expressed my distaste for the appalling style typical of their stories. Their unctuous response was to assure me that I would be able to sign each and every paragraph and that I had nothing to be concerned about. The temptingly large check proffered assuaged my reluctance, and I signed a contract for a three-part series. Almost inevitably, as soon as the required interviews were conducted, the sub-editors, armed with vitriolic pens, rewrote everything to suit their own scandalous requirements. Thus, on Sunday, January 17, 1982, the front page of “Britain’s Biggest Selling Newspaper” proclaimed:
“MY WICKED WAYS, CONFESSIONS OF THE PLAYBOY PRINCE”.
The double spread inside insisted: Under a banner headline in bold letters running across both pages:
“ONE THOUSAND NIGHTS OF LOVE, THEN I STOPPED COUNTING.”
They included a photograph of me with the sub-headline “Revealed at Last: The Wicked Life of Stash, the Playboy Prince”.
That morning, Victor Lownes, the head of the Playboy empire in the UK, invited me to play pinball with him and casually mentioned that he had read the story, which I hadn’t yet seen.
"Oh, how does it look?" I innocently queried. ”Bad!” He flatly stated.
I've seldom felt as embarrassed as I did on that day, as I walked through the beautifully decorated conservatory and saw all of the assembled celebrities delving with relish into that trash.
The embarrassment resulted from having been both idiotically hoodwinked and lured by a large sum of money to believe that the proverbial leopard could change its spots. However, because all of my cherished memories had been vulgarly trampled underfoot, I only returned to writing about the past episodically over the following decades. When I did, I was offered other equally dodgy arrangements, ultimately resulting in publishers attempting to lure me into writing a ghostwritten celebrity gossip book.
While there is an undeniable sense of wonder from having survived those fascinating decades, I have formed an unabashed, ever-growing, unique philosophical perspective on those times that does not mar the unbelievably audacious nature of the events that constituted the story of my life. It is highly doubtful that one could even aspire to such unbridled adventures in the neo-puritanical times we are living through today.
Thus, should you wish to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, simply subscribe to my Substack, where my Unchained Memories will now be serialized.
Photo: Sandy Grigsby, Briofive
