She’s Electric

“The parties were bigger. The pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, the liquor was cheaper”.

F.Scott Fitzgerald : ‘The Great Gatsby’

“Sure enough they’ll be selling stuff when the moon begins to rise,
Pretty bad when you’re dealing with the man
And the light shines in your eyes”.

Crazy Horse : ‘Downtown’.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh goodness gracious. Oh my, oh my, oh my.
The room is spinning, spinning, spinning like some kids crazy top, going round and around like a wild carousel. And there I stand, stuck slap bang in the middle, amidst the whirling, swirling hullabaloo. Who are all these people and how do they all know my name? Princesses and politicians and gangsters and playwrights, the great and the good, the bad and the beautiful. Who on earth brought me here and who in hell is going to take me home tomorrow? So many questions. So few answers. My life deviates between astronomical euphoria and deep, dark depression. And all the time there’s questions. Endless bloody questions.

They called us THE BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS because we shone like stars and lit up those gloomy post-war pavements. Illuminated the intelligentsia while scandalising polite society with our wicked, wicked ways. Evelyn with his poison pen and Cecil with his camera and the crazy gang with THE LOOK. The new sensation, a fabulous creation, the danceable solution, a social revolution. And me? I, my dears, was the supernova at the centre of it all. So let me take you down ‘cos I’m going to…who knows where, although it surely won’t be a field filled with strawberries, although I’ll look you up when I get there. See I haven’t a clue where I’m going to, but I’ll sure as hell have fun getting there. One thing’s for sure – this isn’t the world we were taught about at school, the England of the Empire. This is a whole new world. As William Blake once noted, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Brenda Dean Paul is the name, part-time baronet’s daughter and full-time Bright Young Person is my game, born in sunny South Kensington in 1907, three years after my brother Napper, destined to become an (in)famous ‘society drug addict’ whose court cases would fairly blaze a trail of aristocratic decadence across the 1930s, 40s and 50s, which is a pretty good career by anyone’s standards. The scandal sheets would have it that my illustrious drug consuming career, which was followed with avid interest by the national press, somehow served as the missing link between aristocratic Bohemia of the 1930s and the wild and crazy jazz scene and beat subculture of the 50s, which is a hell of a handle to hang on such a young pair of shoulders. But for sure, if anyone was willing to take a walk on the wild side then it was yours truly. Can’t remember too much about it personally, but if it was in the papers then I guess it had to be bear some semblance of truth. Like they said about the sixties – if you could remember it then you weren’t really there. I was dead by then, but you take my meaning. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Print the legend, that’s what I say.

This was the beginning of what those not in THE KNOW liked to label The Jazz Age, synonymous with endless parties; of drugging and drinking, and the rebirth of The Dandy. See the crucial thing to remember about us is that we were the generation who just missed the Great War. Our fathers and brothers had been called up, had fought and often been killed, so ours was a kind of rebellion against the bleak austerity of the war years. Now don’t get me wrong - the war was a horribly harrowing and beastly terrible time, and we were determined that they weren’t going to have anything to do with that, so we simply opted to party and be childish. Granted, there was also a feeling amongst some of the boys that they had missed out, but that was more by accident of birth as opposed to design. I mean, dear Evelyn Waugh’s older brother Alec had joined up, been taken prisoner and came back a hero. Imagine how his younger sibling felt.

If I’m honest I’ve always had a compulsion to be compulsive. Try anything once was my motto. Then try it again, and again, and again, which is how I really got started with a dabble here and a dabble there, sweetly scented jazz cigarettes and the white stuff. In short, my serious drug use probably began with the regular use of alcohol and those ‘pick-me-ups’ available over the counter at pharmacies, although it was Gay Paree in the late 1920s and a wild, wild a party at some pretentious artist’s studio before I first tried heroin. After that, as they say, there was no looking back. Don’t stop me now ‘cos I’m having such a GOOD TIME! This artist may or may not have been Jean Cocteau, the self-proclaimed and totally unintentional enfant terrible of French culture, although I was too frazzled to remember. Legend had it that JC came to be regarded as second only to Thomas de Quincey as drugs-corrupter-in-chief of gilded English youth, which is SO HEAVY it hurts. The guy was a slime ball, and his paintings were expensively overpriced trash, but he knew the best people and threw the best parties so hey, who was I to argue? What I can tell you is that a round of dissipation in the night clubs of Paris led to a collapse in my health, which should have served as a warning but frankly Scarlet, who gives a damn? An alternative legend had it that I acquired my much talked about and, if the truth be known, wildly celebrated habit while undergoing treatment with morphine in a Parisian clinic. Don’t ask me. Like I say; I was there but I wasn’t there, if you get my meaning. What I can say is that either way, whether for medicine or pleasure, opiates for me represented a vocation, a calling, just like a career in nursing or the service of The Almighty, and once called I never ever looked back. After all, what was the point when there was so much more to look forward to? Granted, in those hurly-burly early years there were many attempts at cures, and I’ve lost count of countless times I would suffer the agonies of withdrawal in a string of nursing homes across London and the shires. But I’m made of stronger stuff and the cures never really took, which was fine by me as it meant I could always return to my syringe and works, the only kind of work that ever worked for me.

Nothing’s going to happen around here unless WE make it happen. So proclaimed our two main protagonists, Brian Howard and Harold Acton, as they embarked on the brilliant construction of this eccentric, upper class Dandy world of aesthetes. As is often the case, those two leaders were the least talented, whereas the followers – Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, Robert Byron – were the ones with the real talent. Many of them were at Eton, and most of them were at Oxford, and all of them were OUT THERE. How could I possibly resist?


Before I proceed further I must add at this juncture that it’s important to understand that the use of hypodermic morphine was prevalent in parts of the elite classes of England in the early twentieth century. One is reminded of the case of Lady Diana Cooper who, together with Katharine Asquith (the then prime minister’s daughter-in-law, which speaks volumes for the circles I circulated in), lay ‘in ecstatic stillness through too short a night, drugged in very deed by my hand with morphia’. Although the police cracked down, on the surface at least, on the street trade in cocaine in the capital during the Great War and the 1920s, they left the aristocracy alone, which, in the grand old scheme of things, is exactly how it should be. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for democracy until it comes to parties. Then I become somewhat fascistic in my outlook. I mean, if a member of the upper classes got into trouble with their drug use, they attended one of a number of private nursing homes that would treat their withdrawal symptoms with gentle reduction cures, bed rest and champagne. Cocaine and heroin became my constant companions, my love, my life. They kept me alive, kept me confident, kept me beautiful. One may end up losing one’s mind, but heaven forbid one should lose one’s looks.

You have to remember that our parents were essentially Victorians, and all we really wanted to do was get away from all that, which is the duty of any younger generation. So the girls began wearing short skirts and sleeveless dresses, and drugging and drinking – all the things their parents deeply disapproved of. It was a kind of iconoclastic mockery, in that began a mock homage society to the Victorians.

It never did spoil my looks though and, modesty aside, I remained in possession of a singular beauty throughout my entire life which, in my somewhat humble opinion, is all a girl can really aspire to, although my very existence was to become difficult as the British state, which had hurriedly criminalized drug use under the ubiquitous Defense of the Realm Acts, began a remorseless pursuit of your not so humble correspondent and her small circle of associates. Granted, this pursuit did not really begin in earnest until the early 1930s, when that circle included my dear doomed brother, my close friend and lover Anthea Carew (oh yes my dears, I was well ahead of the game on that particular score) and various other members of a network which came and went like empty vessels in the night while yours truly sailed on, all hands on deck, steadfast in my narcotic orbit.
As early as 1931 the Metropolitan police had me under almost continual surveillance, which was something of an inconvenience when it came to acquiring the necessary resources in order to furnish my little hobby. My first prosecution occurred in late 1931, after my dear father had visited Scotland Yard to beg the police to stop his wayward daughter obtaining drugs. By this time, a warrant had already been issued for my arrest on seven counts of receiving dual supplies of morphine. Apparently they were somewhat miffed at the fact that I’d got a string of quacks penning scripts all over town, which in their eyes at least, simply wasn’t cricket.

See, the 20's and 30’s were the golden age of nightclubs. At the Trocadero, we would dance the night away, with the incentive of a 25-guinea clothes voucher given to the best-dressed lady.
We would Job-Rot, Shimmy and Heebie-Jeebie to the music of the new jazz bands and drink as if it were going out of fashion, with only the minor inconvenience of the occasional police raid to dim the lights. We reveled in the semi-illegality of the whole crazy scene, which seemed to add extra allure, excitement and sheer naughtiness to the clubs, which were packed every night with an eclectic mixture of the aristocratic, the rich and the famous.
The Kit-Kat in the West End was a favourite haunt of the smart set, while The Embassy in Old Bond Street was beyond doubt the place to be seen.

Detective Sergeant Griffey of Scotland Yard was tasked with arresting me, but way too late in the game discovered that I’d vanished from London. Pfff…into thin air! Enquiries eventually traced me to Devon, a place I had spent my childhood and where I thought I still had a few good friends, although history reveals that I was somewhat mistaken on that particular score. So, on a cold November night, as I waited in my motor car outside the local doctor’s surgery while my maid collected a morphine script (well you didn’t actually think a member of the British aristocracy would be seen dead inside the premises of purveyors of suppositories and surgical supports did you?), a torch flashed in my face. ‘Are you Miss Brenda Dean Paul?’ asked a harsh voice. ‘I am an Inspector Sergeant from Scotland Yard and I would like to speak to you…’ The horrible little man then proceed to issue me with SEVEN summons to appear at Marlborough Street Police Court under the Dangerous Drugs Act. Later that night, in a fit of severe depression and somewhat low expectation, my dear friend Anthea Carew drove me back to Chelsea through the pouring rain as I somewhat frantically tried to prepare for the case which, the way the cards were stacked against me, might easily have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence.

The French have an expression know as “Jolie-laid”, which literally translates as “pretty-ugly”. Not pretty ugly as in downright despicable, but rather “pretty” and “ugly” at the same time, which by my translation means that those of us who veer away from society’s perfectly symmetrical forms can ultimately seen as more attractive than those who stay on the proverbial straight and narrow. Pretty isn’t really pretty unless you add a dash of ugly.

In the event Lady Luck smiled upon me and, as fortune would have it, I was bound over by the magistrate and ordered to stay at a London nursing home, and later at the home of my physician, Dr Fleming, the latest in a seemingly endless list of medical men hired to oversee my personal treatment. Quacks, the lot of ‘em! But they served a purpose in that they convinced the beak I was serious about going straight. I mean, as if! So, while unhappily incarcerated at Fleming’s Regents Park house, I was visited by dear old Anthea and other a few other like-minded drug using friends. I want to make it categorically clear hear and now that it was Fleming who informed the Home Office that he believed Anthea was smuggling drugs and syringes in for yours truly, and a warrant was in turn issued for her arrest. She left immediately for Devon for, like me, she had grown up there, her father being the Dean of Exeter cathedral. She sped off in a hired Daimler, for which the cheque later bounced. Say what you will but make no mistake. Us women liked to travel in style.
Prior to this we had stayed together in the Park Lane Hotel, but the stuffed suits masquerading as hotel management did not take kindly to hedonistic goings on within its hallowed interiors, which was a real shame as we were having SO MUCH FUN! The night porter was called to Anthea’s room and apparently (don’t ask me – I was positively blotto) discovered us both in a state of advanced intoxication, one in bed, the other sitting on the bed ‘in an almost nude condition’. We were dutifully informed that we were not regarded as suitable guests and were unceremoniously informed that our room was required. Fine by me, and we promptly shifted the base of our operations to the Dorchester. How’s that for class in the face of adversity? Still, it was damned inconvenient and it seemed that while the years between the wars would see a growing acceptance of contraception and of the value of sex within marriage, marginal forms of sexuality remained tightly policed. BOO BLOODY HOO!


At this juncture it’s worth pointing out that it is notable that authorities such as hotel managers and pharmacists were keen to collaborate with the Met in their surveillance of my little network as, in their eyes at least, our drug taking and erotic practices transgressed cultural norms and created an ongoing scandal in interwar Britain. I mean – AS IF! So, a series of inter-related court cases in the summer of 1932 saw both us femme fatales (as the press would have us) feature heavily in national and even international newspapers; in the US, I was viewed as an example of the ‘Decaying Aristocracy’, those blue-bloods who ‘had drunk too deeply of life’s pleasures’ and now cut pathetic figures. Pathetic? Depends where you’re standing is what I say.

So let’s recount. In February 1931 I made my debut court appearance charged with bouncing a cheque. The following decades saw me in and out of various courts, receiving sentences of up to six months in prison for possession of dangerous drugs; obtaining goods on false pretenses; incurring debt by fraud and refusing to pay taxi drivers. With each court appearance my name found its way into the press and became increasingly more notorious. Like I’ve always said – any publicity is good publicity. In 1932 I was dispatched to Holloway Prison where I developed bulimia, dropping to five stone, which did wonders for my image. After all, you can never be too thin, although as a result over the next few years I was in and out of nursing and care homes, which in my book was a small price to pay.

Believe it or not, but by 1935 I had somehow managed to stop taking drugs – and my ghostwritten memoirs, My First Life, were published. I harbored vague notions of a career in the movies although if I’m truly honest acting ambitions were very much only in my dreams and I fell back into drug addition. In 1939 I suffered the indignity of being evicted from my flat because I had the temerity to walk about naked and answer the door in the nude. I made yet another appearance in court in 1940 for buying goods on other people's account. Didn’t they know there was a bloody war on?

In the mid-1950s a young so-called artist by the name of Michael Wishart reported to the press that he’d watched me sitting in a restaurant, taking a syringe of heroin from my handbag and filling it "from a vase of flowers on the table." Maybe baby. I retaliated by bragging to a reporter that I was cured and was preparing to open my own addiction clinic. As if!
It was at this point that things really started to get tacky. In 1952 a former flat mate (who shall remain nameless, the heartless bitch) wrote to the police to tell them that I allegedly augmented my income by allowing sadists to whip me. And your point is? Granted, at this point I was somewhat raddled with addiction but believe me, I was still beautiful, and to prove it I defied the critics by playing the lead in Ronald Firbank's play The Princess Zoubaroff. A triumph, if I say so myself. Let’s face it; I’d been in Berlin in ’27 when Deitrich was still a pup. I knew how to act. After all, I’d been doing it my whole life.
In 1957 I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Rome with a parcel of cocaine in my possession. But they couldn’t hold me down and, once I was back in dear Old Blighty I assumed the moniker of one Miss Isolla Hampton, blagged myself a lease on the Irving, a lovely old Victorian theatre tucked away in a murky corner of Leicester Square, with the intention of promoting bright new things on its hallowed stage. Sadly, I never got to realise my ambition, expiring as I did in the bed of my Kensington High Street flat. I may have spent the last years of my life rolling in the gutter, but I never, ever lost sight of the stars. After all, only the shallow truly know themselves.

Now, my darlings, that’s what I call a career!