On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members’ club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or worse.
As a shy, provincial, working-class virgin, I’d always dreamed of being a famous writer in That London – I slept beneath a map of the Tube whereas other girls favoured pin-ups from Jackie magazine – but though I got there at 17, I stupidly married the first man I had sex with and allowed him to lead me back to his Essex hometown, where I tried my best to be a decent person for a few years. But it wasn’t meant to be and by 1984 I was having an affair with a young boulevardier who lived on the King’s Road and spent his evenings in the West End. One day we were rendezvousing in Soho’s Colony Club, at 41 Dean Street; as we left, we passed an old townhouse at number 45 being revamped – it was the Groucho Club. There was something in the air that day, and not just lust; I decided to run away with him then and there. Within weeks I was back in London, with a second chance at making it. Without the Groucho, I’m not sure it could have happened as spectacularly as it did.
Of course, the Groucho has been ‘ruined’ more times than my nostrils
We thought it would be a place for old rogues to talk about their glory days – and indeed, Jeffrey Bernard was a fixture, hiding from various publishers who had given him advances for the same book – but within weeks of opening, media twenty-somethings like myself were spending most of our leisure time and a good deal of our working time there. The big newspapers were keen to hire us upstarts from the pop and style press, and huge amounts of money were washing around. Then there was the newly enshrined institution of all-day drinking – the 1988 Licensing Act permitted pubs and bars to open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., whereas before they had to close between 3 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., breaking any attempt at a session. It was hard to say where business ended and pleasure began. To save time, we did both at once.
It’s ironic that the club was named for the saying by the most famous Marx brother (‘I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member’) because although I styled myself Queen of the Groucho Club (cringe!) I never actually joined. I was taken on as something of a mascot; I was rich, generous and polite – a lovely combo – and I made friends with the staff quickly. Most of them were older than me and perhaps felt protective due to my squeaky voice and reckless ways, but the tips didn’t hurt.
I’d sometimes go there three times a day: make my son breakfast and see him off to school, have a line and put on some lippy and cab it over for a breakfast meeting with an editor, go home and write a column, back there for lunch with a publisher, cab home and write a chapter of my dirty book Ambition, welcome my son in from school, make tea for him, play video games with him and put him to bed with a story, settle the babysitter in and then off for the evening’s entertainment. Oh, those Wild West Wonderland evenings! My media set was soon joined by the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst putting his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the bar for free drinks for all), Britpop groups (Blur were the house band) and assorted alleged ‘comedians’ (including the one who, when drunk, was forever flashing something that looked like a penis – only smaller), all accompanied by more lines than W.H. Auden’s face. It might have looked cliquey from the outside but, as with the Swinging Sixties, there was no nepotism and a great deal of meritocracy – unlike these days when the lively arts have been colonised by the posh. This was my life for ten years; I enjoyed it so much that even though these were the glory days of travel journalism and I was offered numerous First Class jaunts, it never even crossed my mind to go on holiday – I was living the dream and I didn’t want to miss a thing.
Of course, you saw a nasty side to some people, as everyone was so ‘relaxed’ among their own kind; my antipathy to ‘National Treasures’ was formed at the Groucho, based on the horrible way many of them behaved towards the staff, especially a famously unfunny pair of clowns, whose marriage is now no more. (Their divorce was the only thing they did that ever made me laugh.) But I could be a bit of a high-handed and hard-hearted hustler myself; I was forever getting my husband to ‘have a word’ with famous people who sat at my table hoping to exchange a bon mot (or drugs) with me, and ‘remove’ them from my table if they didn’t get the hint. It was easy to get big-headed if you were favoured; once, I pitched up late with my retinue to find all the tables taken. After a few minutes, the manager and a brace of waiters swept in carrying a table aloft, which they proceeded to set up for my gang, pushing occupied tables aside. I saw that scene years later in Goodfellas.
Still, it was an extraordinarily easy-going place to be, especially considering so many egos were present, which is why the news of police involvement came as a shock. I presumed that it must be drug-related, but that puzzled me too; drug use was very open there – it was almost like we had diplomatic immunity. There was a ‘no drugs’ rule in theory – but the nickname of one upstairs room, the Peruvian Procurement Department, made a nonsense of this. One man came back to my table and said, ‘Would you believe it? I just saw a man urinating in the cocaine room.’ For me, the club’s growing hypocrisy about drugs – marked by the blackballing of Toby Young for daring to write about the copious use there, in 2001 when Matthew Freud took over the club – was when the rot set in.
Sour times were just around the corner. Two years ago my once-beloved drinking compadre, now bitter enemy in the culture wars, Zoe Williams, wrote in the Guardian: ‘The peak of the Groucho Club was the Julie Burchill era, before she went hell-for-leather anti-woke, when she used to do nice things, such as giving £20 notes to homeless people. This was the late 80s, early 90s, when those were the people we lionised, the ones who were kind to people on the streets, not the Bullingdon Club tradition of burning £50 notes in front of them.’
One unfortunate incident revealed the entitlement of the new wave of members, more likely to be actors than hacks; whereas I gave money to the homeless, in 2007 Alan ‘Jonathan Creek’ Davies bit the ear of a homeless man outside the club who wanted only to shake his hand: ‘He suddenly went for my left ear. It was incredibly painful. I shrieked and my eyes were watering. He hung on and drew blood.’
Of course, the Groucho has been ‘ruined’ more times than my nostrils. In 2016 a letter from a dozen old-timers to the manager complained that the club had ‘lost its unique feel’ and become ‘too corporate’ and that new members were not from ‘the traditional media/arts background’. A current member told me: ‘They’ve gone hard on private events, so often you can’t get a seat, which sort of defeats the point of the whole thing.’ Another complained: ‘It’s full of old people – sixty-somethings going off to the loos to do coke. They’ve been desperate to try to get young people in, but the young people they’ve got are kind of weird. I saw Alex James from Blur in there the other day with his son – they both had the same haircut, the one he’s had since the 1990s, which made me feel sort of sad.’
I would say this, at 65, wouldn’t I, but I don’t think the anxiety and sobriety of the young generation ever helps get the party started, and sure enough, the old members have complained about the young members using the club as a workspace rather than a speakeasy. (In my twenties, contrastingly, I once described it larkily as ‘a youth club with sex, drink and drugs.’) It’s always the way, though, with places of public fun: first come the interesting people, then come the beautiful people, then come the rich people, then come the posh people – and it’s done, because posh people are oxygen-stealers. I can’t help not wanting to be in the same room as Princess Eugenie, unrepentant talent-snob that I am.
When the company Artfarm bought it for £40 million two years back, it was bound to become respectable. But not respectable enough, apparently – I’ve been told that the alleged offences aren’t anything to do with drugs, but are very serious indeed. Whatever the outcome, it’s a bitter irony that we louche guttersnipes were never accused of being involved in anything but the most juvenile and self-harming of misdemeanours while the new ‘respectable’ Groucho stands accused of being the location of one of the worst crimes imaginable. In a statement sent to members on Friday afternoon, the club said:
Reports that a serious crime may have taken place at the Groucho have been widely circulated. At this stage we would like to take the opportunity to both assure you and confirm that the club (or indeed its staff or members) are not considered a suspect in any allegation of serious crime.
The club took the decision to voluntarily close its doors for practical reasons for a short period of time following agreement with the council that there should be a temporary suspension of our licence. We are working on matters relating to some of the licence conditions.
Inevitably there has been some misinformation circulating. As soon as we have any further information we can share with you, we will of course do so.
Whatever the club says, it seems unlikely to reopen any time soon. I can’t say I’m sorry; I loved the Groucho – it was my office and my playpen for a solid decade when I experienced enough fun, love and money for nine lifetimes – but it died a long time ago, when the bohemians left and the businessmen took over. The police inquiry seems merely part of the last rites. Its passing makes me think of something Cyril Connolly (who would surely have adored it there) once said of our culture in general: ‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.’ Or indeed, as in the blissful days of my gilded youth, his ability to put £20,000 behind the bar without turning a hair.
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