Confessions of a lifelong bitch

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made such a good one. And we bitches could use the recruits.

Looking back, I don’t blame myself for growing up to be a bitch. It was my parents’ fault for letting me spend wet weekends watching all those Golden Age Hollywood films, usually starring Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis, and culminating in The Women, the 1939 sparkling cyanide of a comedy by George Cukor. At one point Joan Crawford, as a shop girl cutting a swathe through the married men of a higher social circle, rounds on their spouses and informs them: ‘There’s a name for you ladies — but it isn’t used in high society, outside of a kennel.’ Even the 12-year-old me knew what she meant.

Then there was glam rock. When I wasn’t mainlining Hollywood, I was staggering around in silver platformed boots at the local teenybopper disco to songs like ‘The Bitch is Back’ (Elton John) and ‘Queen Bitch’ (David Bowie) absolutely delighted that men could be bitches, too. The following morning I would lurk in my purple bedroom with the curtains closed and calm my Babycham hangover with nuggets from the twin titans of literary bitchery, Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker.