It’s a gloriously sunny day in the Cotswolds. Cow parsley bursts from every hedgerow, bunches of wisteria hang from Rich Tea-coloured manor houses, horses flick their tails in the fields and Range Rovers roar along the narrow roads. It’s very much the sort of day Jilly Cooper would describe in her books. As I pull up to a particularly beautiful 14th-century manor house, discreetly tucked at the end of a lane, I half expect to see a naked man hitting balls on a tennis court.
No naked man. But there’s the dame, standing in her driveway, a little stooped and using a stick, but definitely Jilly Cooper: thick mane of hair, twinkly blue eyes, jersey with a dog on it. ‘Hello, darling,’ she says, ‘come in.’
Jilly Cooper outside her Cotswolds home, 1991
I’ve never met Cooper, although I sent her a case of Pol Roger after my first novel came out because she gave me a quote for its cover. We last spoke on the phone a few months ago when I called to congratulate her on the enormous success of Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of her 1988 novel, the one that features the naked tennis.
Today, though, I’m here to talk to her about the Rivals precursor, Riders, Cooper’s debut Rutshire Chronicles novel. Forty years ago this month, the first of her mega bonkbusters was unleashed on the world – a fizzy, frenetic and certainly frisky 1980s story about the showjumping circuit, which also features an orgy and an introduction to her most famous character, Rupert Campbell-Black, who’s a monster throughout. He beats his horses, he cheats endlessly on his wife, he tries to seduce teenage girls. ‘Don’t you just love him?’ says Cooper, settled on a sofa in her sitting room, holding an Emma Bridgewater mug of coffee. She has recently re-read Riders herself. ‘I adored it. I shouldn’t say that, should I? I sound boastful. But I just loved it. It’s wild! I was shocked.’
By which bits?, I venture.
‘By Rupert being so beastly, and all the sex. All sorts of sex! And two women going to a party and necking one another, and a man in a ballet skirt. Because I’m old and 88 now, I do get shocked by things.’
Since we’ve got on to the topic of sex in, oooh, under three minutes, I suspect that there is an element of trademark Cooper mischievousness here. The topic of sex is never far away. Can we just clarify what necking is, I ask, unsure.
‘Kissing.’
Like snogging?
‘Yes. Sean Connery was gorgeous, I necked him.’
Dame Jilly!
‘We lived in Fulham and Sean and his lovely wife Diane were in Putney, and they came for dinner. I was in the kitchen, pretending to cook, and he came in and took me in his arms and kissed me.’
Were you married?
‘Yes, of course I was. And he rang me up the next day and we had a long chat, and he said, ‘Look, I love Diane,’ and I said I loved Leo [Cooper’s husband], and really better we didn’t. Isn’t that lovely? It was a very nice thing to do.’
Well, sort of lovely, I say. If one of my married friends snogged another man over the moussaka at a dinner party, I reckon their husband might be quite angry.
Jilly with her husband Leo Cooper, 1982
Cooper is aghast. ‘Would they really? But everybody went to bed with everybody in those days.’
And nobody minded?
‘No, it just happened.’
Although Cooper was also working hard on her books, she says the 80s were largely about sex and drinking. ‘Masses of sex and massive drinking. They were fun. There was no awful social media, no bullying. Much more freedom.’ Oh, and jumpsuits, she adds. ‘Jumpsuits were very 80s. But I never wore a bra, and there was that awful thing where, in order to go to the loo, you’d have to take the jumpsuit off completely. So there you were, without a bra, your jumpsuit around your ankles, and some man would barge in.’
There was, of course, also the IRA, Thatcher’s politics, miners’ strikes and Aids, but these don’t hugely creep into Riders. It’s about tight jodhpurs, cold champagne, constant erections and sharp class observations. When Rupert’s wife Helen puts blue blocks in the loo to stop the dogs drinking the water, he is horrified. ‘It’ll be chiming doorbells and musical lavatory paper next.’ In Jilly Land, although there are moments that may cause modern readers to blanch – the occasional lack of consent, women being labelled fat at 11 stone – characters largely get over any setbacks and carry on living fairly gilded lives in pretty Cotswold houses.
A bit like the one we’re sitting in now, which was saved by the runaway success of Riders. Cooper and her husband, a military-history publisher, moved to Gloucestershire from London in 1982, but although she was a celebrated Mail On Sunday columnist at this point, writing about marriage and love, and sex (inevitably), she says they were on their uppers. One weekend in 1985, their bank manager came to see them, sat on the terrace, overlooking the lush valley beneath it, and remarked, ‘What a lovely property. What a pity you’ve got to sell it.’
‘I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Don’t think your dirty little book Riders will get you out of it’, but it did!’ The novel went straight to number one in the bestseller charts, paving the way for Rivals three years later, Polo in 1991 and the subsequent Rutshire escapades. The quoted number of books she’s sold varies wildly but it’s certainly northwards of 12 million worldwide. Although Riders nearly didn’t come out at all, because around 1970, years before its eventual release, Cooper carried the original manuscript to lunch at Langan’s, got drunk and left it on the 22 bus on the way home to Fulham. Despite an appeal from the Evening Standard, it was never found and she rewrote it – on her long-serving typewriter, Monica – years later. It could make a fortune for someone, I suggest, if it’s ever discovered, dusty and yellowing, in a lost property office.
‘I always liked that [phrase]. Whenever someone said ‘she lost her virginity’, she can’t go and find it in a lost property office!’ says Cooper with a giggle, going off on a slight tangent. You see? Back on her favourite topic.
Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals, 2024
She’s lived in the same Cotswolds house ever since, and I cannot remember a more magnificently bonkers home. There are dogs literally everywhere: dog photos, dog sculptures, dog paintings, dog cushions, dog stained-glass windows, dog cartoons, dog salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table and, hanging from the nearby dresser, a grand total of four dog wall calendars. If something isn’t a dog, it’s probably a horse (horse sculptures, horse paintings, a rocking horse in the hallway), plus sheep and fox statues in the garden. There’s also a very touching animal graveyard at the end of the garden, where dozens of Cooper’s dogs have been buried beneath little slate headstones that say things like ‘Barbara, our most precious treasure is buried here’ and ‘In loving memory of Gypsy, friend to everyone’. No dog at the moment, alas, since her beloved Bluebell died in 2021. But she’s mulling over whether she can juggle another with the demands of writing.
It was her devotion to animals, and horses specifically, that inspired Rivals. She grew up riding, and ponies were ‘the great love’ of her life, but after suffering a fall when she was 14 and damaging her shoulder, she lost her nerve and never rode again. Instead, she channelled this passion into the book. So that’s why it’s about horses, and also beautiful people, because she likes those very much, too. ‘I love beautiful people, I had a very beautiful family, so that’s why I’m besotted with them.’
She shows me a black and white photo of her father, a moustachioed brigadier who does indeed have an air of Rhett Butler. He was working at Ford in Essex when Cooper was born in 1937, but he was called up after war broke out, whereupon her mother moved young Cooper and her ‘divinely glamorous’ older brother Timothy back to Yorkshire, where they lived with ponies and dogs and, crucially, books. Her mother believed that finishing a novel was much more important than doing the washing-up. Cooper was dispatched to boarding school in Salisbury and, on leaving, having written endless pony stories as a child, determinedly sought out and won a job as a junior reporter on the Middlesex Independent.
There were hiccups on the path to bestseller glory. She left the local paper after three years and tried her hand in public relations, but resigned after the boss jumped on her, then was sacked from her next 22 jobs because she wasn’t much cop at typing. She re-met Leo, who she’d known when they were both growing up in Yorkshire, and he proposed on their second date. They married at Chelsea Register Office in 1961 and she set about trying to be a good wife. This proved challenging although ultimately fruitful, because when Cooper sat next to the editor of The Sunday Times Magazine at a dinner party in 1969, she told him about dyeing Leo’s rugby kit pink (including his jock strap), having put a pink scarf in the wash. Enchanted by this funny, garrulous young woman, he offered her a column. And that, as they say, was that. She was off. Columns, books, worldwide fame. Now, certainly national-treasure status.
Jilly was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2024
Leo died in 2013, having had ‘horrible, horrible’ Parkinson’s disease since 2001, but Cooper still peppers her conversation with him. Heartbreakingly, she says that’s why she finds it much harder to write books now, ‘because I haven’t got all Leo’s fun’. Their marriage was rocked in 1990 when it was revealed that he had been having an affair, but she remained devoted to him. ‘Leo was very attractive,’ Cooper says, carefully, during our conversation about changing attitudes towards adultery, as if this justifies it, ‘there was lots going on.’ And she had her moment with Sean Connery, after all.
Would she have another stab at romance? ‘You never know,’ she says, ever the romantic. I suggest Muddy Matches, the dating app specifically for people in the country, but Cooper says she isn’t tempted by a dating app. It would be impossible, anyway, as she doesn’t have a smartphone or a computer. Monica has recently given up and been replaced by back-up typewriter Erica, so it’s a very analogue household. And Cooper’s children, Felix and Emily (adopted in the 70s – she couldn’t have babies herself), would be quite ‘irritated’ by a romance, she jokes.
Felix lives practically at the end of her garden, and Emily is not far, so her five grandchildren are often around. Cooper is mulling over a book titled Grannymosity (‘isn’t that good?’) based on competitiveness between grandmothers. She also has decades of her own diaries upstairs, which her publishers are desperate to get their hands on.
‘I say to my children, ‘Do you want to be rich and embarrassed, or shall I throw them away?’ She’s mulling over a book on Sparta, too. ‘Do you know about Sparta? It’s riveting. In Ancient Greece you couldn’t commit adultery in case it ruined the family, but in Sparta you could.’ There we go – back to sex.
But then it’s sex, or more formally ‘services to literature’, that earned her a damehood last year. She didn’t believe it when the letter landed on the doormat, but then it was off to the palace to be honoured by the King. ‘I said to him, ‘You will please, please look after yourself? We love you very much, and you’re very important,’ she says, at which point Charles thanked her, then lent in and said quietly, ‘By the way, we have two very good horses running at Ascot this weekend.’ Given that Cooper has three photos of the King and Queen on her mantelpiece, we can take it they’re pals. A night on the gins with her and Camilla would be a riot.
For someone so iconic, Cooper is enormously self-deprecating, often referring to herself or something she’s said as ‘silly’. Ageing and losing her memory are clearly troubling her. Another dame, Penelope Keith, came to visit recently, whereupon Cooper said, ‘Oh, Penny, I’m so worried and terrified of getting dementia,’ and she said, ‘My dear, don’t worry, your brain’s full. You’ve got these huge books and all these characters, so your brain’s full.’ Wasn’t that sweet?’
She was ‘flabbergasted’ by the success of the TV adaptation of Rivals, partly because she believed that the only people who read her books are now in their 60s and 70s.
No, no, I say, I have a 30something friend who’s recently thrown a Rivals-themed party.
‘Do you really? Oh, I could cry.’ She’s been forbidden by Disney to say a single word about the second series, currently in pre-production. When might we get to see those bottoms back on our screens? Nope, not a peep. On this, Cooper’s a vault.
When I quiz her about her current pin-ups, she’s a bit stumped. ‘Men at the moment are very wet,’ she says, lamenting the lack of characters like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant. We settle on Aidan Turner, who was in Rivals. She also likes John Reardon, the star of Canadian TV show Hudson & Rex (Rex is a German Shepherd, which is presumably also a plus in Cooper’s book).
Talk of men encourages her to enquire about my own love life. I’m seeing someone but it’s complicated, I reply. ‘There are more and more gays, aren’t there?’ she says, as if to explain the paucity of decent men in the hetero dating pool. And yet such is her charm, such is her twinkle, that Dame Jilly can get away with this – 88 and slowing down, perhaps, but still fascinated by relationships and sex, still partial to a handsome man in a suit, still making riotous jokes about it all. Still like a heroine from one of her books, in fact. No wonder James Bond fell for her all those years ago.
Riders by Jilly Cooper is published by Transworld, £10.99. To order a copy for £9.34 until 1 June, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free delivery on orders over £25.
JILLY COOPER’S MOST 80S LINES
‘Hunting’s like adultery,’ he said. ‘Endless hanging about, interspersed with frenzied moments of excitement, very expensive and morally indefensible.’
Rupert Campbell-Black, Riders
‘Well, it’s an acquired taste. Whisky and dry martinis don’t taste very nice the first time.’
Janey Lloyd-Foxe on oral sex, Riders
‘Lizzie’s lovely; if she lost three stone, I’d marry her.’
Rupert Campbell-Black, Rivals
‘He turned over, lay back and pulled Podge on top of him… breasts swaying like party balloons when the front door opens.’
On Rupert Campbell-Black, Riders
‘He rested his head on her breasts. Actually, she was much less fat without her clothes on.’
On Jake Lovell and partner Tory, Riders
‘One Gloucestershire peer has described you as ‘rather a nasty virus, that everyone’s wife caught sooner or later.’
Declan O’Hara to Rupert Campbell-Black, Rivals
‘…she’d expected him to just be another loud-mouthed, upper-class English s**t. In the flesh he was glorious, and much more American looking than English.’
Cameron Cook meeting Rupert Campbell-Black, Rivals
