The crazy childhood and eccentric relations of Simon Doonan, legendary creative director of Barney's New York, provide the hilarious inspiration for a new TV show, writes Jackie McGlone
SIMON DOONAN'S Scots-Irish mother – a Spitfire mechanic during the war –was a glamourpuss with a bottle-blonde beehive, but when she sneezed her dentures flew out, scuttling across the lino like a fleeing crustacean.
His dad crafted homemade Cha
teau Doonan vino out of parnsips, potato skins and banana peels, while teaching himself Latin, so everyone in Doonan's bonkers family was permanently tipsy, including his lobotomised, paranoid schizophrenic grandmother Narg (that's Gran spelled backwards), his blind Aunt Phyllis and his dotty Uncle Ken, who conversed with invisible people.
"How different from the home life of our own dear Queen", murmurs the pixieish Doonan, a self-confessed queen, who grew up with his sister Shelagh (aka Slag, a lesbian social worker), in ordinaire Reading – "a cemetery without lights" – with a bunch of batty relatives and miscellaneous loopy lodgers.
He chronicled his adventures with his nutty family in his hysterically funny but poignant memoir, Beautiful People (Harper Collins), the inspiration for a new BBC 2 comedy series. (He's also sold the film rights of his first book, Confessions of a Window Dresser, to Madonna, whom he knows en passant.)
The show is produced by Jon (Ab Fab/Little Britain) Plowman and written by Jonathan Harvey (Beautiful Thing/Gimme, Gimme, Gimme). They have updated it to 1997, with Meera Syal as Simon's blind aunt, Wild At Heart's Luke Ward-Wilkinson as the 13-year-old Simon and Olivia Colman, of Peep Show, his mum Betty.
Betty, nee Martha Elizabeth Gordon and with a strong streak of Glaswegian in her blood, dominates the book and the series. Doonan remembers her riding her white bicycle down the middle of the High Street in the 1950s, while smoking a Woodbine and wearing rubber, high-heeled, glitter-flecked galoshes.
"Frilly nighties are grotesque", she would declare. "The neighbours are ordinaire and English people are dreary; Jews and Scots are fabulous without exception" .
The young Simon, a marginalised freak who knew he was a "pansy" at the age of ten, was convinced from an early age that he was Madame Bovary, flitting around the backyard trailing a long piece of diaphanous fabric in the style of the Ballets Russes.
He and his best friend Biddie Biddlecombe, who lived next door and who could out-camp Simon, craved fabulousness, which they believed they would find in London, where all the beautiful people wore kaftans and slept on big circular beds, with satin sheets and mink bedspreads, while champagne corks popped.
"Our hopes and dreams were incompatible with the esprit of our gritty, violent hometown", sighs Doonan, who did escape from Reading with Biddie into a series of grotty, vermin-infested lodgings.
In London, Doonan began dressing windows for Aquascutum, then moved to Nutters of Savile Row, where, perhaps inspired by his disgusting digs, he created punk-themed displays of tuxedos alongside dustbins overrun with taxidermied rats wearing rhinestone tiaras and bracelets. "It was my window-dressing epiphany", he says.
Immediately, he was head-hunted by Maxfield, the avant-garde department store in Los Angeles. "Before I knew it I was on a plane; I was 25 and it's the best thing I ever did."
Now a waspishly witty columnist on the New York Observer and creative director of Barneys, Madison Avenue, where his astonishing window displays have become the stuff of urban legend, the 55-year-old Doonan says: "I can't believe that anyone recognised the groovy telegenic nelly potential of my book."
Speaking from his glamorous Manhattan apartment, which he shares with his partner, the designer and potter Jonathan Adler, to whom he recently got married in San Franciso, Doonan has just watched the entire series on DVD and says the TV people have done him proud.
"Of course liberties have been taken", he agrees. "But they've done a magnificent job because they've preserved a lot of the essential elements of my life, and the message of looking for the beautiful people, but here they are all along, in our own backyard.
"Each episode begins with me grown-up in New York and being reminded of some incident from my childhood. When I began skipping down memory lane, I realised that the jarring things were the things most clearly lodged in my memory – the crazy outfits, the flying dentures and freak accidents, like the time I took my blind Aunt Phyllis out for a walk and fractured her skull.
"The great thing about my family and the thing I am most grateful for is that they were insanely unconventional. They really did put the fun into dysfunctional. And me being a nancy and my sister being gay, all that stuff they took in their stride. They were fantabuloso!"
• Beautiful People, BBC 2 at 9.30pm tomorrow
The full article contains 824 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
