JOHN MORTIMER
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( Sir John Clifford Mortimer ( born 21 April 1923 ) is an English barrister turned prolific writer and dramatist .
..................... John Mortimer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )
John Mortimer is , or has been , a " Switch " in spanking terms . He is the Father of Emily Mortimer .
Recently some of John Mortimer's spanking exploits have come to light in the recently published book , " Devil's Advocate : The Unauthorised Biography of John Mortimer " .
These are a sample of articles about this book and Mortimer , some of the information is repeated :
Mortimer smarts at book's claims he was Rumpy-Pumpy of the Bailey
" Rumpole takes a great big
spanking
John Mortimer is no hero to
his muckraking biographer, report Richard Brooks and
Stuart Wavell "
Like one of the gnarled but magnificent lime trees that stand near his Chilterns home, John Mortimer has effortlessly weathered the tempests that have raged around his private life. Affable and avuncular, the 82-year-old bon viveur has remained a national treasure. But now the blasts are coming thick and fast from another direction, threatening the foundations of his reputation.
A new unauthorised biography of the grand old man of British literature claims that he did not write a word of Brideshead Revisited, the acclaimed television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel with which Mortimer was solely credited. The book even poses a question mark over the quality of Rumpole of the Bailey, his most popular creation.
These body blows are of a different order from Mortimer’s admission last year of fathering a love child, Ross, with the actress Wendy Craig 42 years ago. The old roué, twice married and patriarch of an extended family, never concealed the fact that he was “a ladies’ man”. Many felt a grudging admiration that a man blessed with so few physical attributes had managed to seduce so many beautiful women.
Yet even this skill assumed a new aspect last week when two former girlfriends stepped forward to confirm Mortimer’s predilection for being spanked, revealed by Graham Lord in John Mortimer: The Devil’s Advocate.
“When it came to love-making, what he most liked me to do was to smack him on the botty,” Molly Parkin, the writer, told Lord.
Shirley Ann Field, the actress, who had an affair with the married Mortimer when she was 26, said: “He had this thing about spanking and hairbrushes. I thought, God, what a strange one we’ve got here.”
Apparently Mortimer, who is no longer able to bend down to tie his shoelaces, could also hand it out. Field recalled visiting him at his London flat in Little Venice and asking his 26-year-old secretary why she seemed flushed. To which she replied: “Well, how would you feel if you had just been spanked?” It gives a new meaning to one of Mortimer’s angry utterances on the threat to foxhunting. He complained that nowadays animal rights were fetishised to the degree that “in Sweden, a man caught spanking his wife with an eel was fined heavily for cruelty to the eel”. This masochistic trait, Lord suggests, derived from Mortimer’s unhappy childhood.
The charge that Mortimer continued to take undeserved credit for Brideshead Revisited comes from several sources. He began the adaptation in 1977, but his five scripts did not meet with the approval of Derek Granger, a senior producer at Granada Television, who told Lord: “We started rewriting from scratch and discarded John’s commissioned material so that in the end John didn’t write a single word of the television series of Brideshead. I wrote it entirely with a young writer from the BBC, Martin Thompson, and Michael Lindsay-Hogg made lots of suggestions.”
Asked why he had not simply asked Mortimer to rewrite the scripts, Granger replied that the writer was too “grand” to countenance such a suggestion. “And I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of John: he can be absolutely ferocious if things go against him. He’s enormously self- admiring and can be very difficult and intimidating.”
According to Lindsay-Hogg, although Mortimer’s script had “turned the book into a nice little telly play, it had set off in the wrong direction . . . I don’t think we used any of John’s original script”.
Thompson confirmed: “I was simply told we weren’t using John’s scripts. We decided to be more purist. We took much more of the dialogue of Waugh.”
Speaking this weekend, Mortimer conceded that there was a degree of truth in this: “Maybe what I wrote in my scripts is not all there. Maybe.” However, he insisted that his work had not been completely abandoned: “Some of the scenes are mine. It is true nonetheless that (the director, Charles) Sturridge, in particular, put in more of the book.”
Mortimer pointed out that he had delivered five scripts as requested. Six further episodes were added later: “Changes often happen. And if Derek Granger believes I never wrote a word of what appeared on screen, why do I get the sole writing credit?” Indeed, for 24 years Mortimer has accepted praise for the virtuoso series starring Anthony Andrews, Jeremy Irons, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud — a fact that “stunned” Granger. “John even got paid for the extra episodes I wrote. I was baffled by that, but Granada didn’t know what else they could do. The series cost £10m to make and with repeat royalties, John would have made a very large amount of money.”
Mortimer admits: “I was advised by my agent not to talk about it.” To be fair, Mortimer was writing prodigiously at the time, having just delivered six stories based on the Rumpole television scripts to Judith Burnley, chief fiction editor at Penguin. Burnley told Lord that Mortimer was a careless writer: “He’s a bit sloppy, as he was with his ties when we were lunching.”
A more damning judgment came from Irene Shubik, who had commissioned the Rumpole television series from Mortimer: “Frankly he couldn’t write a real plot. It was all anecdotes strung together and there was never any heart in it . . . And if you asked him to make any changes he’d say, ‘Yes, darling, of course’, but then he wouldn’t do it, or only half do it. He was the definitive show-off.”
All in all, it’s quite a spanking. Mortimer alludes to the practice in the first episode of Brideshead, when the Oxford undergraduate Sebastian Flyte (played by Andrews) buys a hard hairbrush to spank his teddy bear, Aloysius.
By Lord’s account, a taste for masochistic sex suggests a child deeply wounded by parental neglect. Mortimer, he claims, had a lonely, cold childhood, at odds with his own version of events.
Mortimer does admit to having had affairs with Parkin, Field, Craig, Jane McKerran, who later married Brian Walden, the former Labour MP, and Susan Elliott, wife of Denholm Elliott, the late actor. However, he could not recall an affair with Jenny Bailey, a public relations executive who is named in Lord’s book.
“This is a very silly book,” Mortimer said. “However, I’m prepared to forgive Graham Lord because it was he who uncovered the fact that I’d had a son, Ross. And Ross has brought huge happiness to our family.”
........ August 14, 2005 , www.ezilon.com/information/article_7906.shtml
Mortimer smarts at book's claims he was Rumpy-Pumpy of the Bailey
Sir John Mortimer, wit, raconteur, man of
letters and creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, had his famously
affable mood shattered yesterday by revelations in a new biography.
"Oh God," he said, on learning that the book will expose
salacious details of his private life, including claims that he
liked to spank and be spanked. "But what can I do? I can't stop
it. It's a rather unpleasant book."
Leaked details of The Devil's Advocate, which is published this
week, have already revealed that Mortimer, a talented lawyer as well
as novelist, dramatist and TV and radio writer, had an illegitimate
child with the actress Wendy Craig 40 years ago. And there is more
to come. Written by Graham Lord, the former literary editor of the
Sunday Express, the unauthorised biography is an account of
Mortimer's sex life and difficult marriage.
Complaining that the book was filled with "half-truths",
he said he was horrified and would refuse to read it.
"Graham Lord told me he was going to write the book, and then
told the publishers that it was authorised. So we said we didn't
want people to talk to him. It's very upsetting."
Mortimer's friends and family refused to co-operate, leaving Lord to
rely on the testimony of enemies, former friends and newspaper
clippings. Those who remain close to Mortimer, such as the writer
Kathy Lette, are also criticised by Lord. But when he defended the
producers of Oz magazine in 1971, Mortimer argued that anybody
should be able to publish anything in the interests of free speech.
Mortimer is known to the public as a brilliant figure who, aside
from his work as a judge and QC, wrote the Rumpole series, the
script for the classic television series The Jewel in the Crown and
numerous books and plays.
But Lord paints a very different picture, portraying him in The
Devil's Advocate as a ruthless charmer and egotist who treated his
first wife Penelope cruelly for the 22 years of their marriage
during which he is said to have had numerous affairs. It is also
claimed that he embellished many of the stories of his triumphs.
Acquaintance after acquaintance is lined up to dish the dirt,
including former lovers. Molly Parkin, a fashion editor and painter,
and the actress Shirley Ann Field both said they had affairs with
Mortimer - and both claimed that he liked to be spanked.
Field, who, the book alleges, was 26 when she had her affair with
Mortimer, is quoted as saying: "He was fun, enormously
charming, and made me feel so special and safe. However, he had this
thing about spanking with hairbrushes. I thought, God, what a
strange one we've got here. I just thought the spanking was a public
school sort of thing."
An unnamed television producer is quoted as saying: "John's an
awful shit pretending to be a nice guy. He's ambitious, absolutely
ruthless and has a huge ego."
Lord describes an 80th birthday party for Mortimer given by Kathy
Lette. He writes: "[She] risked over-exciting him by taking him
to a restaurant in Covent Garden, School Dinners, where the
waitresses were dressed in skimpy schoolgirl tunics. To stimulate
him beyond endurance she took him also to another 'erotic' London
venue, Club RUB, which should be 'huge fun', she twittered. 'It's
all quite naughty and they whip you with lettuce and things'.
Lettuce? What, no hairbrush?"
Lord then says that Wendy Craig threatened him with legal action for
invasion of privacy if he published the story about her son with
Mortimer. The boy was born in 1961.
He adds: "He [Mortimer] spiked my guns by confessing all to the
The Sunday Telegraph, but Wendy Craig was not a party to the
decision to go public."
Lord does concede that Mortimer's "close friends, however, are
unswerving in their admiration". "'We all adore him,' said
Lette. 'He's just God's gift to womankind.' On another occasion she
said Mortimer was 'a total babe magnet'."
Mortimer said yesterday that he was dismayed that the book will be
serialised, and said that an authorised biography by The Times
columnist Valerie Grove, to be published by Penguin next year, would
set the record straight.
He also claimed that Lord had not been completely honest with the
sources of some of his information, citing a critical quote by the
thriller writer Frederick Forsyth which appeared in an article
written by Lord in last week's Mail on Sunday. But Mortimer, now 82,
told The Independent on Sunday yesterday: "Freddie wrote to me
and said he had never spoken to Lord."
He added: "I'm not going to read the book. He [Lord] is very
angry with us because we told people not to speak to him."
In the biography, however, Lord writes: "When I asked John
about writing his biography he encouraged me to do it and agreed to
co-operate. I sent my publisher a proposal for what I called an
authorised biography. The project began to collapse when Mortimer's
literary agent demanded to see a copy of the proposal and accused
me, aggressively, of lying because I had called the book
'authorised'.
"Ironically, Mortimer did me a huge favour because his devious
behaviour showed me an unattractive side of his character."
........... Aug 14, 2005 , Andrew Johnson , Times Newspapers Ltd.
John Mortimer
In these grimly tolerant years Paul Bailey's Three Queer Lives (Hamish Hamilton, L14.99), an account of eccentrics who camped in the shades of the prison house, was a little gem. I particularly liked Arthur Marshall who, when an officer in the war, referred to Field Marshal Montgomery as 'a dashing little hockey mistress' and told his fellow officers that the initial 'C' in his own name stood for Cynthia. `Damn silly name for a man,' said a gloomy major, but called Marshall Cynthia every evening in the mess.
Ken Tynan's Diaries (Bloomsbury, L25) were continuously entertaining, although the author, whom I always thought I liked and admired, emerges as a high performance operator with no deep or genuine feeling for much except spanking and cigarettes.
The Uncommercial Traveller (Dent, L30) was a marvellous edition of Dickens's journalism, an author who kept his erotic fantasies entirely to himself.
.......... Spectator, The, Nov 24, 2001 by Mortimer, John
John Mortimer
Sir John Clifford Mortimer (born 21 April 1923) is an English barrister turned prolific writer and dramatist. His oeuvre includes over fifty books, plays, and scripts. The play, A Voyage Round My Father (1971) is autobiographical, recounting his experiences as a young barrister and his relationship with his blind father.
Mortimer's most famous creation is a character named Horace Rumpole, a barrister whose specialty is defending those accused of crime in London's redoubtable hall of justice, the Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for "Rumpole of the Bailey", a 1975 episode of Play For Today; Played with gusto by Leo McKern, the character proved popular, and was spun off into a Rumpole of the Bailey television series for Thames Television and a series of books (all written by Mortimer). In September - October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast 4 new 45-minute Rumpole dramatizations by Mortimer starring Timothy West in the title role.
In August 2004 he became a father when he met his son Ross Bentley, more than 40 years after a secret affair with Wendy Craig. The son was brought up by Craig and her husband, Jack Bentley, the show business writer and musician. In Mortimer's memoirs, Clinging to the Wreckage, he wrote of "enjoying my mid-thirties and all the pleasures which come to a young writer."
John Mortimer has five children, Sally Silverman, Jeremy Mortimer, Ross Bentley, Emily Mortimer ( CLICK HERE for our page ) and Rosie Mortimer and lives with his second wife, Penny Mortimer, just outside Henley.
..................... John Mortimer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
