Everybody adored Jilly Cooper. Publishers, interviewers, readers, anyone who met her, they all came away charmed, with stories of how delightfully funny and self-effacing she was.
Gap-toothed, with laughter lines around her eyes and a shaggy ash-blonde mane, she had a unique talent for flattering everyone while poking fun at herself.
Among journalists, she was generally regarded as our Queen Mother – sweetly wicked, universally respected and a great deal more astute than she pretended to be.
Her bonkbusting novels, racy slabs detailing the upper-class shenanigans of media types, sportsmen and musicians, are best enjoyed the way Jilly liked to tackle life itself… with a generous gin and tonic to hand.
‘I am not a proper writer,’ she giggled. ‘At parties, I get drunk, when I should be observing people.’
Her death on Sunday at 88, following a fall at her Cotswolds home, seems incongruous because it was impossible to think of Jilly as old or frail. She certainly didn’t – she felt perpetually ten years old, she said.
Her relish for life was undimmed, especially following the success last year of the Disney+ adaptation of her bestseller Rivals.
Starring David Tennant as a scheming ITV mogul, its stellar cast also featured Emily Atack, Katherine Parkinson, Danny Dyer and Oliver Chris, as well as Aidan Turner playing a big-headed Irish chatshow host based (according to rumours that Jilly never denied) on Terry Wogan.
Gap-toothed, with laughter lines around her eyes and a shaggy ash-blonde mane, Jilly Cooper had a unique talent for flattering everyone while poking fun at herself
Among journalists, she was generally regarded as our Queen Mother – sweetly wicked, universally respected and a great deal more astute than she pretended to be. Jilly Cooper poses after she was awarded her CBE medal
Rivals was her second chart-topping novel, published in 1988 when she was 51. The first, a saga of showjumping called Riders, took her 20 years to write: she left the first manuscript of 50,000 words on a London bus in 1970 after a boozy lunch and, despite desperate appeals, never got it back.
For years, she said, she nursed a forlorn hope that some bus driver would find it and get it published under his own name.
When the rewritten book finally appeared in 1985, it featured a saucy cover that perfectly captured its appeal – showing a young woman’s porcelain posterior in tight jodhpurs, with a tanned male hand resting lightly on one buttock.
We could just glimpse the scarlet cuff of his showjumper’s blazer, and the riding whip clutched in her left hand.
The tagline read, ‘A story of raging ambition by day, passion and rivalry by night.’ Her roistering hero, Rupert Campbell-Black – played by Alex Hassell in Disney’s Rivals – was widely believed to be based on Andrew Parker Bowles, the former husband of Queen Camilla.
Several other men, including two Tory MPs, the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Suffolk, were equally convinced Jilly had modelled her leading man on them.
‘It’s not the type of thing one goes around boasting about,’ Brigadier Parker Bowles once said. ‘Still, I took it, and continue to take it, as a great compliment.’
Whatever the truth, it had no effect on her friendship with the royals. In a statement issued yesterday, Camilla said: ‘I was so saddened to learn of Dame Jilly’s death last night.
In a statement issued yesterday, Camilla said: ‘I was so saddened to learn of Dame Jilly’s death last night’
‘Very few writers get to be a legend in their own lifetime but Jilly was one, creating a whole new genre of literature and making it her own through a career that spanned over five decades.
‘In person she was a wonderfully witty and compassionate friend to me and so many. May her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.’
The queen of the bonkbuster’s pages were laced with sex and double entendres – even the name of the fictional English county, Rutshire, where the escapades were set.
In Jilly Cooper country, every man wanted to be in the saddle and every woman was yearning for a good hard gallop.
But she was never smutty, much less pornographic, and the lustiness of her prose hid an exceptional talent for weaving complex plots without dropping the threads.
Readers who picked up the books for fun, attracted by those naughty jackets, were snared by her stories and became emotionally involved with her characters.
So did Jilly. Her rakish husband Leo complained that he ‘did get fed up with being called Rupert or Jake in the middle of the night … before I realised she was only thinking of her invented heroes’.
Leo refused to read his wife’s books. ‘I suspect I may find out things about her that I don’t want to know,’ he huffed. He, too, liked to claim that Rupert Campbell-Black was based on him.
Leo refused to read his wife’s books. ‘I suspect I may find out things about her that I don’t want to know,’ he huffed. The pair are pictured outside their home in 1991
Leo and Jilly attend the Cartier International Day held at Guards Polo Club, Windsor Great Park on July 25, 2004 in Windsor
‘It must be plain that, as far as passion by night is concerned, she has plenty of practical experience,’ he said.
‘In fact, the publisher’s editor rang me and said: ‘Er, this is rather awkward, I hope you don’t mind me asking … how could Jilly possibly know about such-and-such sexual practice?’ – and then went on to describe some particularly energetic cavorting in a horsebox.’
To questions like that, Jilly always replied: ‘Research.’ She could spend years investigating the backdrops for her novels.
Riders meant numerous trips to horse shows, race meetings, pony club camps and cavalry barracks. She compiled far more background information than she could use – each book was like the tip of an iceberg of research, she said.
The writing was done at extraordinary speed – 1,000 pages of typewritten manuscript in just six months, on occasion.
She worked on a manual typewriter nicknamed Monica, beginning at noon and writing until 5pm, in a gazebo at the bottom of her garden.
The gazebo, she claimed, was haunted – built near the site of a medieval monastery where two monks had hanged themselves: ‘I’ve never seen them, but the dogs refuse to go in there.’
Instead of using a word processor, she kept a pair of scissors attached to the typewriter by a string. To edit a page, she snipped out paragraphs and stapled them into new places.
Her relish for life was undimmed, especially following the success last year of the Disney+ adaptation of her bestseller Rivals
Riders, Rivals and the novels that followed were rip-roaringly anti-feminist. Jilly’s heroes always wanted their wicked way, and the heroines were eager to make sure they got it
‘I know using a computer would be much easier,’ she said, ‘but there is always a danger of accidentally wiping the whole thing.’
That portable typewriter was purchased in 1982, when Jilly was commissioned to report on the Tory party conference.
Hunting for a second-hand machine, she was intrigued to find one ‘with a label reading Monica slapped on the side – probably belonged to a girl in a typing pool, I don’t know!’
She used it for every book, and even in the acknowledgements for her 2002 novel Pandora, gave thanks to ‘Monica the typewriter, without whom none of this would have been possible’.
She learned to type in a succession of secretarial jobs during her teens, but longed to get into newspapers. Her Victorian forebears founded and edited the Yorkshire Post, and she thought of journalism as a glamorous calling.
In 1957, aged 20, she landed a job as a cub reporter at the Middlesex Independent in Brentford. In search of stories, she said, she would ‘go and drink gin with the police and the firemen’.
Her editor was a hard-drinking eccentric who once sent her out to stop people in the street, tell them that the world was predicted to end in four days’ time, and ask them how they intended to spend their last hours alive.
She met her first serious boyfriend while out on a story – George, an older man with a green Jaguar who gave her the eye as she walked into a building and waited for her to come out.
Jilly Cooper on the ‘Russell Harty Plus Show’ in 1973
Jilly Cooper with her adopted children Felix and Emily and their dogs, circa 1978
An actor, he took her back to his house in Kensington ‘and we just talked. On our second date he became my first wonderful lover.’
This was not the beginning of her interest in men, though. That started much earlier, when she was Jill Sallitt, the daughter of a brigadier who was evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.
‘My parents loved each other very much,’ she said. ‘My father Bill was a wonderful man. A gentleman, strong and silentish, who treated women wonderfully.’
She grew up in Yorkshire before being sent to Godolphin School in Salisbury. ‘I was known as the Unholy Terror in the staffroom. I was always writing letters to boys.
‘All I thought about was men, the only thing I was ever interested in. Lorry drivers, gardeners, anybody who came by, were all the object of lust.’
Despite a patchy academic record, she applied to Oxford University, simply because she’d heard ‘there were ten men to one woman’.
This bold attempt failed, but her sheer chutzpah brought success as the Swinging Sixties arrived, with a succession of ‘glamorous boys’.
One of them shared a flat with a friend called Leo Cooper, whom she had known as a child. Her abiding memory was of a birthday party where young Leo, exasperated by another little girl who was boasting about how rich her family were, threw jelly in her face. ‘I thought it was incredibly stylish,’ Jilly said.
Jilly declared she was a hopeless housewife and told him her secret for a happy marriage: ‘If you amuse a man in bed, he won’t worry about the mountain of dust underneath’
When they met again, she was working at the Ideal Home Exhibition, selling candelabra, with her hair pinned up primly. On their third date, Leo removed the pins and ordered her never to put it up again, because he intended to marry her.
They were wed in 1961. Leo, a publisher of military books, had a daughter from a previous marriage but, after suffering an ectopic pregnancy, Jilly discovered she was not able to have children of her own. Instead, the couple eventually adopted a boy and a girl, Felix and Emily.
Over the next six years she tried a dozen jobs, always quitting from boredom if she wasn’t fired first. Wearing a low-cut dress to one London party during the Summer of Love, she found herself chatting with the editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine, a man named Godfrey Smith.
Jilly declared she was a hopeless housewife and told him her secret for a happy marriage: ‘If you amuse a man in bed, he won’t worry about the mountain of dust underneath.’ When Smith stopped laughing, he asked her to write a feature expanding on her theory.
The piece proved a huge hit. ‘It sounds terribly boastful, but I was offered ten jobs that week.’ With a weekly column, which became her first book, How To Stay Married, Jilly was quickly a celebrity. ‘I was so excited to have a column. I was like a little child with a brick on the end of a rope. I just didn’t care whose ankles I hit.’
Often the pieces were frivolous. Her mother Elaine was aghast at one in which Jilly described putting Leo’s underwear in the same wash as a red blanket, ‘with the result he was the only member of the rugger 15 with a rose-pink jockstrap’.
This sense of fun was at the heart of what she felt romance should be. ‘Marriage is kept alive by bedsprings creaking from hysterical laughter as much as glorious sex.’
She wrote a series of ‘permissive’ novels, with names such as Octavia and Imogen, breaking the golden rule that an author should never accompany her characters beyond the bedroom door.
Starring David Tennant as a scheming ITV mogul, Rivals’ stellar cast also featured Emily Atack , Katherine Parkinson, Danny Dyer and Oliver Chris, as well as Aidan Turner
But she was no feminist. ‘I do love men,’ she said. ‘I think they need to be honoured and praised and encouraged. This women’s liberation will do no good … men need their panoply, their regalia, praise, to get it up, sexually. Things will go terribly wrong if they lose that.’
Riders, Rivals and the novels that followed were rip-roaringly anti-feminist. Jilly’s heroes always wanted their wicked way, and the heroines were eager to make sure they got it.
She loved to combine bawdy humour with intelligent wit. One of her characters, sexual novice Marcus (in the novel Appassionata), compares the clitoris to a wonderful restaurant in the Dordogne, France … the sort of place you discover joyfully one drunken evening and can never find again.
In her real life, though, sexual freedom didn’t always bring happiness. In 1990, a woman named Sarah Johnson revealed she and Leo had been having an affair for six years.
Jilly was devastated, and humiliated. She and Leo separated, but quickly discovered they could not live apart.
‘There’s this terrible pain that is caused by somebody being unfaithful to you,’ she said. ‘If you’re doing it yourself, it’s a jolly romp. The flip side of the jolly romp is crucifixion for the other person.
‘I love Leo – I never haven’t loved him. But I think one can love someone like mad one day, and not love them the next moment. An affair can happen to anybody. I don’t think it’s a reason for a marriage to break up.’
But it was years before she recovered her confidence. ‘If the telephone rings and somebody hangs up when I answer it,’ she said, ‘I know it doesn’t mean anything now, but I get a twinge.’
‘I do love men,’ Jilly said. ‘I think they need to be honoured and praised and encouraged’
She consoled herself with her love of animals, especially her dogs, who shared her bed for decades. With her typical sense of mischief, Jilly told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that Leo was wary of ‘reaching for something furry’ at night in case it bit him. That’s not the sort of joke Radio 4 listeners are accustomed to hearing.
A goat also joined her menagerie of pets. She named it Chisholm, after a critic who had dared to give a sniffy review to Rivals.
In 1999, she was lucky to escape without serious injury from the Ladbroke Grove rail crash in which 31 people died. ‘I was sitting in the carriage working on a chapter for my new book,’ she said, ‘and then, without warning, it was WHAM! and a ball of flame.
‘I just thought: ‘God help me, I’m dying.’ I was terrified, we all rolled over and there was a terrible silence. Then people started crying, screaming, yelling, and there was smoke everywhere.
‘A man fell on top of me and he was saying: ‘I love you, Ellen, I want you and I love you.’ But I never discovered who he was.’
Helped out of the carriage through a broken window, she said: ‘Everybody was crying. I just went around hugging people, saying: ‘It’s all right, you’re alive, it’s OK.’ She made her way to a nearby Sainsbury’s, where kindly staff wiped blood from her face and picked glass from her hair.
But, to Jilly’s dismay, ‘it was 8.30am and they wouldn’t open up their booze counter. I was saying: ‘I could murder a brandy!’
Still in shock, and unaware that people had died, she returned to the wreckage to collect her book. A rescuer shooed her away: ‘I’m trying to get somebody out, madam. I think your chapter is very low priority.’
Awarded an OBE in 2004 and a CBE in 2018, she was made a dame in 2024’s New Year’s honours, for services to literature and charity
During Leo’s last years, she nursed him through Parkinson’s disease. After he died in 2013, she threw herself into work. ‘The worst problem for geriatrics is being lonely and having nothing to do,’ she said. ‘But I’ve got all my characters teeming through my head.’
Her final novel, Tackle!, was set in the football world: Jilly was a supporter of local team Forest Green Rovers, and so Rupert Campbell-Black became a club owner.
Awarded an OBE in 2004 and a CBE in 2018, she was made a dame in 2024’s New Year’s honours, for services to literature and charity.
Though she took pride in her sales figures, and referred to her books as her babies, she was never precious about them.
‘I know they’re frivolous, imperfect, but people love them,’ she said. ‘Basically, my aim in life is to add to the sum of human happiness.’
And Jilly Cooper surely did that.
