Getting to the bottom of John

The first time I came across John Mortimer was while I was working as a gossip columnist. I had for some reason or another to telephone him in search of a quote, and did what dozens of my kind had done before, and dozens have done since. The telephone was answered by an elderly lady’s high, reedy voice. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Mortimer. I am sorry to trouble you. Is Sir John available?’ The voice, slightly peeved, fluted back: ‘This is John.’

Poor old John Mortimer —- this happens to him, as I understand it, all the time. I dare say it happens too, occasionally, to his second wife Penny, who speaks in a tobacco-seasoned growl. But his face never goes unrecognised: owlishly bespectacled, snaggle-toothed, wet-lipped, friendly, crowned with raffishly long white hair and, now he’s in a wheelchair, at waist height. Everyone recognises him and everyone loves him.

Valerie Grove’s book is the story of an entertaining and productive writer, a top- flight conversationalist, a kindly host and father and a serially faithless husband. To those of us of a younger and more puritanical generation, the bed-hopping (enumerated in the account of his first marriage, tactfully alluded to in that of his second) is quite hair-raising. Was nobody of that generation true to his wife? His chat-up lines, reproduced here and there, are along the lines of ‘fancy a quick f*** and then home?’ They were tried, apparently, on a huge number of women and worked on a lot. With those who resisted him, like Shirley Anne Field, he formed adoring romantic friendships. But everyone was at it. At the party to celebrate Mortimer’s second marriage, Peter Cook offered Germaine Greer a lift home and was told, ‘No thanks. I f***ed you after the last party and you were no good.’

The most gripping part of this book is its first half — which isn’t really about John Mortimer so much as it is about his first wife, the novelist Penelope.