Dirty Girl Things
Thursday, February 28, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Seven
Jacqueline Gold: the woman who reinvented Ann Summers \
Jacqueline Gold is the woman who turned her daddy’s chain of sleazy Ann Summers sex shops into a multi-million-pound ‘retail experience’. But beyond the boardroom there have been far harder battles - like facing up to years of sex abuse. She talks to Lucy Cavendish, of the London Telegraph (February 2008)
For such a teeny tiny person, 47-year-old Jacqueline Gold carries a lot of weight on her shoulders. She may look like a little doll with her side-tied chignon and tight-fitting Alexander McQueen dress, but during the course of our conversation she coughs nervously and, at one point, tears come to her eyes. I hadn’t expected this.
Jacqueline Gold: ‘I’m a fighter. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. I had to fight to raise my head and get my voice heard’
When I walk into her suite in the Covent Garden Hotel in London, where she stays three nights a week - she lives in a converted barn in Kent - she looks so perky and businesslike that I forget why I am here. For a moment I gaze at her plunging neckline, tanned cleavage, heavily made-up eyes, false eyelashes and French-polished nails, and then I remember who she is. She is Jacqueline Gold, the chief executive of the Ann Summers sex shops. In fact, they’re not really sex shops any more - they still sell cheeky underwear and vibrators but, as Gold points out to me, Ann Summers is now ‘a retail experience’.
However, we are here to discuss not Ann Summers, but Gold’s autobiography. Called A Woman’s Courage, it originally came out last year with a picture of a besuited Gold on the cover. It is currently being reissued as Please Let It Stop and now has Gold as a child - cute, sweet, dimpled - on the jacket. It’s doesn’t take a genius to work out why. Books such as Please, Daddy, No and A Child Called ‘It’ sell, and this book is up there with the best of them. It is, essentially, the story of Gold’s life and the abuse she suffered as a young girl at the hands of her stepfather. ‘The publishers wanted to change the title,’ she says. ‘I am sure that’s for commercial reasons, but for me personally it was because I thought the original cover made it look like a business book whereas, in fact, it’s a personal story.’
It starts with the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the man who was to become her stepfather, whom she calls John, moving in to her family home in Kent, with her mother, herself, and her younger sister, Vanessa. ‘John was a truly horrible man,’ she says. ‘He was very frightening and domineering. My mother was obviously dominated by him.’ Gold’s mother, Beryl, does not come across very well. ‘I don’t even remember her hugging me or Vanessa,’ she says. ‘In many ways I still can’t fathom her out. She couldn’t bear being on her own, which is why she let John move in. In many ways, I think she would have been happy living her life in the middle of a field with a bloke and nothing else. She was scared of everything, really.’
The sexual abuse started when Gold was 12. ‘I almost knew it was going to happen,’ she says. ‘His behaviour was always inappropriate.’ Most shockingly, she believes her mother not only knew about it but, in many ways, condoned it. Gold describes how her mother would tell her to go and sit on her stepfather’s lap to cheer him up if he was in a bad mood. ‘It was awful,’ says Gold. ‘I was terrified of my mother going out. She’d say she was going to the shops and I’d beg to go with her but she’d make me stay at home with John on my own. She’d do anything to keep him happy.’
The abuse stopped when one day, by then nearly 15, Gold told her stepfather he wasn’t to touch her again, and he didn’t. ‘I wish I’d known earlier on,’ she says. ‘But the thing with being abused is that the abuser makes you feel powerless. Somehow it’s your fault, so it takes a tremendous amount of courage to tell them to stop.’
Jacqueline Gold certainly has courage and yet, despite all that and her stratospheric success, her book is full of depression, divorce, failed IVF attempts, unfaithful partners, a boyfriend who gave her a date-rape drug, and more. Gold’s life seems to consist of one long list of disasters. But how can this be? This is the person who is regularly voted businesswoman of the year, who now has 136 Ann Summers high-street shops, who opened a shop in Dublin and faced down threats from the IRA. She even went to court in order to allow vacancies at Ann Summers to be advertised in Job Centres as, previously, they had been banned. And she has met the Queen.
‘I’m a fighter,’ says Gold. ‘I’ve always had to fight. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. At school I was bullied because I had no friends. My mother wouldn’t let people come back to our house so I was very lonely. I did have Vanessa but she’s seven years younger than me. So I had to fight to raise my head up and get my voice heard. When I started the business, I took on all these doubters. I have kept on going and it is that which has made me successful.’
Why is her personal life such a disaster then? ‘Oh, God, don’t ask me advice on relationships!’ she says. ‘I can help anyone professionally but when it comes to how you make a relationship work, I’m hopeless.’ But she seems so brave - it was pretty brave to publish the book - and she’s a risk-taker. ‘I do take risks,’ she says, ‘but I think I’m going to have to change to find the right man. I always feel I have to do everything. When I was with my husband, Tony, I wanted him to love me so much that I organised everything. I was very young when we married - only 20 - and I saw him and our life together as my get-out clause. My mother would never have let me leave home unless I was getting married. But I did love him so I did the cooking and the cleaning and the washing-up.’
She says her marriage started to go wrong when she realised that being a housewife wasn’t the way she wanted to live her life. ‘After about a year I got resentful,’ she says. ‘I now realise it wasn’t Tony’s fault. I didn’t give him a chance to help out and he got used to having everything done for him. But I knew I wanted a different life.’
To find this life she went to work for her father, David Gold, who, along with his brother Ralph, owned Gold Star Publications, which produced top-shelf magazines. They had also, however, started up some Ann Summers shops and, pretty soon, Gold was put on work experience in that section of the business. ‘Back then the Ann Summers shops were all pretty sleazy,’ she says. ‘They were full of what men wanted women to wear. I remember this nightdress. It was called the Royale and it was long and sky blue with a split up the side. It was made of very scratchy nylon and horrible lace. My idea was to make lingerie that women wanted.’
It all started in 1981 when Gold went to a Pippa Dee party - a sort of Tupperware party but with racy lingerie instead. ‘I couldn’t believe it!’ she says. ‘The women were having a great time and they were snapping up the goods. I thought, “Why not do Ann Summers parties?“‘
She employed two of the Pippa Dee girls to front the business and recruit party organisers, put together a business plan and showed it to her father. ‘He said I had to present it to the board, so I did. It was very difficult. They were all quite hard to convince. One of them said, “But women don’t like sex.“‘
In the end, the board approved it and Ann Summers has been proving that women do like sex ever since. Does Gold feel that part of the reason it has been so successful is because attitudes towards sex have changed dramatically over the past two decades? ‘Well, I don’t want to show off,’ she says, ‘but I hope we were important in advancing that change. I have always thought that women should be able to enjoy their sexuality despite whatever opposition there has been to it.’
And yet there is something a bit dated about Ann Summers. After all, over the past decade so many upmarket lingerie and sex-toys-for-women shops, with their horsehair whips and silken blindfolds, have opened up that no one blinks an eye any more. Does Gold feel that Ann Summers is now at risk of being left behind by the likes of Coco de Mer and Agent Provocateur? ‘I think we are dealing with a different market,’ she says. ‘They all have shops in exclusive areas of London. I have them in shopping centres all over Britain.’
She is changing the shops, though, she says. Her vision for the future is to encourage women to have the aforementioned ‘retail experience’ so that they will, hopefully, remain in the shops longer. ‘We’re going for a boudoir feel,’ she says. ‘We’ll have peepholes in the changing rooms so that their partners can see them dress and undress. A bit titillating, really, but something that makes it an experience for a couple.’
This leads us back to talking about her own men. After her husband, Tony, there was unfaithful Ben, who used drugs, then Paul, who was serially unfaithful, then Dave, who spiked her drink, and then, finally, Dan, the much younger boyfriend who wanted to have a family.
Their relationship became irreparably damaged when it turned out they could not have children. ‘We had three failed attempts at IVF,’ says Gold. ‘It was very hard. All I can say to anyone thinking of having IVF is you have to be prepared for how difficult it all is, not just emotionally but physically as well. I’ve succeeded so well in my work life that I couldn’t believe how I was failing in my personal life.’
She says she and Dan tried their hardest to stay together but the relationship wasn’t working and they split up on New Year’s Day 2006. ‘I don’t want to end up like my mother,’ she says. ‘I’m not desperate to be with a man - any man - no matter what.’
This brings us back to her stepfather. By now, at the mention of his name, Gold is coughing a lot. She tells me it’s a nervous reaction. ‘Actually, that’s why I wanted to do the book,’ she says. ‘For years I didn’t tell anyone about the abuse. I still had to face him. I geared myself up mentally for every family event when I knew he’d be there, and it was torture. I developed this stress cough then.’ She worked this out only after she went for counselling. ‘I became very depressed during the whole IVF thing,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t realised I was, but then after Dan and I separated I realised I had no energy. It was an immense effort just to get up and feed the cats.’
In the end, after pestering her doctor, she went to The Priory for psychoanalysis. ‘I was diagnosed with depression and went on antidepressants and had counselling.’ It was during this time that she finally talked about what her stepfather had done to her. By this time she had told her sister and Dan, who were both supportive, but Gold says she felt a lot better once she accepted some professional help.
What’s interesting about this is that, although her mother died in 2003, John is still alive. Has she heard from him? ‘No,’ she says shuddering.
She says she has really struggled with the fact that, since the book came out, some relatives have come forward to say things like, ‘We thought something was up.’ ‘I don’t understand why they didn’t say anything,’ she says, now tearful. ‘One person told me that they had said something to my mother and that she’d brushed it off.’
She sits silently for a while. ‘I am not trying to make excuses for my mother but, actually, by the time she died, I felt sad for her in many ways. She was a very difficult and negative woman. The book has been very cathartic for me.’
Then she looks at her watch and jumps up suddenly. ‘Got to go,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a very important meeting in a minute.’ She smooths down her dress, pats her bun and goes off to greet her next investors as if she doesn’t have a care in all the world.
‘Please Let It Stop’ (Ebury, £6.99), by Jacqueline Gold, is available from Telegraph Books Direct (books.telegraph.co.uk; 0870 428 4115).
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©