Hard to think of anyone who could have crammed more into life than Molly Parkin – celebrated artist, fashion editor, designer, erotic novelist, performer, teacher, mother, provocateur and friend of Francis Bacon, Quentin Crisp and Anita Pallenberg – who died this week, aged 93.
Or, for that matter, anyone who enjoyed sex quite so much.
Not just having a lot of it, but talking about it, and making us all blanche with the endless details and unexpected partners.
Because she certainly didn’t limit herself to her ’18 or 19 fiancés’ and two husbands – Michael Parkin (an art dealer and father of her daughters, Sarah and Sophie) and painter Patrick Hughes, with whom, back in the day, she shared a very energetic year of orgies at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
No, Molly enjoyed sex with, well, pretty much anyone who took her fancy, as she told me at length when we met in 2015.
There was a ‘very jolly’ liaison with writer Anthony Shaffer (who wrote The Wicker Man and Sleuth) in her crumpled sheets; with the celebrated architect Cedric Price; with a ‘dotty aristo’ who had a rubber fetish and another aristocrat called Hector who gave her magnums of champagne, diamonds and a 1932 Rolls-Royce.
Not forgetting on-off affairs with musicians Bo Diddly and George Melly and a series of lacklustre couplings with Morse star, John Thaw (‘NOT the sexual marathon I’d been used to’) when they were both between marriages.
Molly Parkin, journalist and writer pictured at the age of 29 at her first art exhibition
Molly Parkin Ray’s Jazz Cafe 5th Anniversary Party at Foyles Bookshop on November 12, 2007
There were also the ‘spanking years’ with the late author Sir John Mortimer. Of whom she said, when we met: ‘A clever, clever man, but all that spanking put me off – hours and hours of: ‘Don’t stop darling, don’t stop.’ It hurt my hand and I had children to get up for school.’
But we can come back to all that later or there’ll be no room to tell you what brilliantly warm and funny company she was.
How magnificent looking, too, with her black fringe, kohled eyes and colourful outfits, hats and turbans that made her look a cross between Liz Taylor and a giant purple Quality Street.
How extraordinarily talented and hard-working – excelling at everything she did, winning attention, accolades, prizes, and a lot of newspaper column inches.
But perhaps most of all, how she was the strongest and most resilient woman imaginable, battling behind the glamour with abuse, alcoholism, divorce, bankruptcy and much more and never giving in to self-pity.
Molly’s method was simply to make a joke and push on.
Born in 1932, the younger of two daughters in Pontycymer in the Garw Valley, Wales, her childhood was both a brutal training ground and the root of troubles ahead.
Her parents were religious, depressive alcoholics. And while Molly adored her mother, she lived in fear of her father, who alternately beat and fondled her.
Molly Parkin with a photograph of herself by David Bailey in London on February 3, 2014
Molly Parkin at home in World’s End, Chelsea, London, on October 18, 2010
She was a disruptive influence at school, but nothing could dim her brilliance for art and, aged 17, she won scholarships to Goldsmiths College in London and Brighton School of Art.
But it was when in 1954, aged 22, she started a teaching job in the art department at a school in Elephant & Castle, that her life really began – after she met Doctor in The House star James Robertson Justice, then in his 50s and a friend of Prince Philip.
‘I felt safe with him because he was like my grandfather,’ she said.
Though perhaps rather less so when he took her to a restaurant and spent the meal with one hand in her M&S panties.
And later, to the Cadogan Hotel in Belgravia, where he ripped them off in the lift and spent the night giving her a very thorough introduction to sex.
Their affair lasted for several years and overlapped with another, with former Tory MP Lennie Plugge, who was even older – until, in 1957 she met Michael Parkin and, on their second date, agreed to marry him.
For a while, life looked great. Molly and Michael were part of the King’s Road party set. Her paintings started selling for thousands, she was driving a yellow Rolls-Royce and they were living in a house in Chelsea with their daughters.
Sadly, the good times didn’t last. In 1964, thanks to his infidelities and her drinking, they split. And with Michael went her creative urge. She couldn’t paint. A disaster for most people. But not Molly.
Undaunted by a lack of experience, she became an award winning fashion editor for The Sunday Times.
On top of that, she wrote successful erotic books, started a restaurant and a shop and designed hats for iconic fashion store Biba.
She also embraced her sexual urges with a trio of regular lovers – Tony Shaffer, Cedric Price, and a chap from the publishing world about whom she was uncharacteristically discreet.
‘It was quite a juggle and a lot of laundry bills, darling,’ she giggled as we drank tea during our interview. She also told me how she’d always had a fetish for posh boys.
‘I liked the sweetness of Old Etonians and they loved me,’ she said. Not David Cameron, mind, because he was ‘too straight’. Though she found Boris ‘very attractive’.
Anyway, I digress. Because after five mad, success and sex-filled years and a few sackings, she met her second husband, painter Patrick Hughes, in 1968. They lived first in Cornwall then in 1979 decamped to Manhattan where she hung out with her old pals Quentin Crisp and Andy Warhol.
The idea was to put the vim back in their marriage by throwing ‘very jolly’ orgies in their hotel suite – for four, six, eight people and more.
But, soon, everyone wanted to take part, and the bigger they got, the less Molly joined in.
Instead, she and Anita Pallenberg – the ex-girlfriend of Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger – would walk around the edges, poking the writhing bodies with sticks and saying, ‘You get in there!’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this marriage foundered too and, after Hughes allegedly threatened to kill her, Molly was on her way back to London.
Where first – thanks to Pallenberg – she lived in the Rolling Stones’ mansion on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea (where Marianne Faithfull had tried to kill herself) and Molly and her two grown up daughters threw pool parties every Saturday to lift the mood.
Next, she moved to the Chelsea Arts Club, where they welcomed her because she ‘added to the ambience’. Until, that is, her excessive drinking, smoking (100 a day) and sexual encounters got out of control.
Her drinking was legendary –Soho’s Colony Club with Francis Bacon, then on to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, followed by a late night dive in Earl’s Court, and ending up in Smithfield meat market for pub opening at 5am.
Along the way, punctuated by liaisons – with waiters, meat porters and an entire Welsh rugby team who were ‘missing their mams’.
Of course, however much she protested, it was neither sustainable nor much fun. She was thin and broke, with boxes of unopened bills.
In 1987, after a monster binge in a gold lamé dress, she passed out in a gutter, was visited by a vision of her grandmother, slept for two days – and joined Alcoholics Anonymous when she woke. She never drank or smoked again.
But she’d neglected to pay a lot of tax along the way and was declared bankrupt. And homeless, until in 1998 she was given a tiny council flat in World’s End, Chelsea, which she painted blood red and festooned with colourful paintings and textiles.
Once sober, she slept with only three more men – all of whom actually sounded rather nice.
An Indian masseur (‘so very skilled and tender’). A friend of the Greek shipping magnate
Aristotle Onassis, who she met on a flight from Athens – ‘heavily built, just as I like them’.
And the third, in a Las Vegas loo when she was 73, was a 23-year-old Australian surfer, who she declared ‘the best I’ve ever had’.
After that, she threw herself back into painting, being an adoring and adored grandmother and great grandmother and, in 2012 was ‘utterly flabbergasted’ to be awarded the rare honour of a Civil List Pension, a special award granted to individuals such as artists, by Queen Elizabeth II.
Molly Parkin might have had more than her fair share of ups and downs, but she was also charismatic, talented, funny, brilliantly positive and unapologetic. The world is a much paler place without her.
