CHAPTER ONE

1967

Drip. Drip.

Drip. Drip.

It's July 1967. Monday morning, my first morning in my very first London bedsit, and this isn't the start I'd planned. I'd wanted the rhythm of music to wake me up, not the dull beat of dripping water on my head. Never mind, saves washing hair.

(Did I say bedsit? Well not so much a bedsit as a tiny single bedroom in someone else's apartment with use of their K and B. The leaseholder, a Spanish guy with a wife who, he says, lives mostly in Spain, won't give me a key to my door but I'll worry about that later.)

The drip is a leak from the flat above but at least it gets me out of bed.

I'd caught the coach from Oxford to London, stayed with my sister a few days and found this room in the Evening Standard small ads. One pound ten shillings a week. Enough money in my Post Office savings book to last for a month by which time I must have a job or else I go back to my Mum, the cat, the budgie and our home – a 16 –foot caravan on a small estate in Botley.

I have to make this work. Mum can't afford to support me any more and who wants to live in a bloody caravan anyway? Not me.

At 11am I have my first interview. Well, to be honest, the only interview I've got lined up. For the only job I want to do. Ever. But I don't stand a chance. But I've got to try. Otherwise, I'll never know.

So I dry my hair and curse the kinks that appear, and put on the warpaint: Rimmel Truly Fair make up for Combination Skin; Boots Cream Blusher, Truly Fair powder compact (anti-shine); bright pink lipstick (ex-Mother), Boots Powder Eyeshadow in Shimmer Blue. All fine. Shaking hands, stab eye at last hurdle - Rimmel Stay Put Mascara in Brownish-Black. Bugger. Not that stay-put then – as my eye streams the mascara ruins everything. Have to start again. Bugger! I'm going to be late.

10.15. Run down Gliddon Road, across the Talgarth Road and join the crowds jostling into Baron's Court tube station on their way to work. Feel the rush! I'm actually part of the London rush hour. How fantastic is that? When you've come from living in a caravan and then you leave your mansion block and walk down the streets of west London to get the Underground and you can actually mingle with Londoners and pretend to be one – well, that's amazing. Even more amazing to get out at Blackfriars and walk down towards Ludgate Circus and FLEET STREET. Fleet Street!

(I'm 11 and it's my first visit to London, and I'm standing on Fleet Street with my mother and her friend Mrs Webb. As I don't talk a lot, ever, they aren't to know that I am almost wetting myself with excitement to be here at last. With the help of one of my life's many decent coincidences, it turns out that Mrs Webb's oldest son works in an office right on the Street itself. So here we are, waiting for him to take us to lunch.)

(There was a year, around the age of 8, when I wanted to be a stable girl, but two years ago I decided I want to be a journalist and that's been my career decided ever since. Nothing more, nothing less will do.. So just to stand here, near the Daily Express and the Daily Mail and Reuters ...)

("Do you think he's a reporter? Is he Cassandra? Do you think she's a journalist? Where's the Cheshire Cheese? Where's the Wig and Pen?" all this said to myself, not out loud, I don't like to be a nuisance.)

(This is the only place to be, I have to be here. I can't wait to grow up.)

Strange, now, to think that a walk down grubby old Fleet Street was enough to begin the process of turning me from a shy no-hoper child into, several years later, a walking advertisement for Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

Thanks God for aspiration and ambition, the fantastic surge of anticipation that comes in around adolescence. The blind faith that says 'I am special! and the ignorance that allows you to say 'I can do anything I want!'

Without that, a large helping of luck, and the undoubted advantage that my eventual ambition was to work on a teen magazine rather than be the next Simon Jenkins or Katherine Whitehorn, I would probably still be in Botley today.

By the time I cross Ludgate Circus and begin the journey down Farringdon Street, I'm not so much walking as wobbling along, as my knees have given way with nerves. I would ask the way now but I can't because my voice has disappeared along with my bravado. I'm holding my A-Z but I'm too embarrassed to look at it as I don't want people to think I am new around here. My stabbed eye aches a bit. Also, I am itching.

It's the suit. Quite ghastly two piece skirt suit, kneelength, turquoise (yes, turquoise) in the style of Chanel but actually from Oxford Market, price one pound five shillings. Nearly a whole week's cleaning wages for my Mother. Made of some tweed-like material, thick, unyielding, ITCHY.

Also of course, I'm sweating. Boiling hot London day, bulky jacket, tights, blouse done up right to the neck, pussycat bow, long sleeves, cheap nylon. So I'm sweating with the suit and sweating with nerves and wondering if I've got BO and dark patches showing through my jacket yet and in this state I arrive at New Fleetway House – a less that prepossessing concrete office block nearly underneath the Holborn Viaduct. Shall I just leave now? I don't want this job anyway. Who'd want to work in a place like this? Well, I do. Actually I do, very much.

Having negotiated the utilitarian entrance, the manual lift and a short stretch of windowless corridor, it really is like a Wizard of Oz or Through the Looking Glass moment, when all suddenly becomes light and beauty and bustle and glamour, the dream turns good, if rather quirky.

I stand like Dorothy/Alice surrounded by the Beautiful People who make Fabulous Magazine come true every week. I know them all because Fabulous Magazine is so cool it actually prints photos of the people who work there on its pages; it makes them its own mini-celebs. And, as I said, I am a Reader. A fully paid up, order it from my newsagent, Reader, from the very first issue which had The Beatles on the cover.

There is John Fearn the Art Editor with the bowtie; Maureen 'Mo' who does the Letters Page. Heather Kirby who is the Fashion Editor. My God, there's June Southworth who writes the Fab features and gets to mix with the stars each week. And here's this ethereal gorgeous person, Anne Wilson, who is the Ed's Sec (this is how 'Editor's Secretary' is written each week in the Mag). Anne Wilson is famous to us Readers because she is so slim and lovely she is often used as a Model on the pages of Fabulous. And now Anne Wilson is drifting over to me, smiling at me. It's her job I have come to try to win.

What a joke. What a nerve.

"Can I help you?"

I grab the side of a desk to stop myself running away.

"JudithWillscomeforjobinterview."

Just smile, Mother had said. I smile but my gums have stuck to my teeth and I can't undo them. My suit's the worst thing. They're all wearing flower power, floaty things – even the men. God what can possibly be worse than wearing the Wrong Clothes?

Then after a while Anne leads me through the inner sanctum door and there she is. The most envied woman in the teenage world. Unity. Unity Hall. The Editor. Or Ed as she is known to us Readers. Her Ed's Letter each week tells tales of who she's met, which pop hero has come to the office, what great Press parties she's been to. Her life is so glamorous it's even off the scale of my vivid imagination and here she sits before me in her Fabulous office at her Fabulous desk looking Fabulous – if with a slightly dodgy Cleopatra haircut and eyebrows, I later bitchily decide.

God knows what she thinks of my suit, my sweat, my accent, my red eye, my sheer all-embracing inability to talk or persuade her as to why she should employ me; my lack of personality or a trace of common sense.

"Previous experience as a secretary dear?"

None.

"Qualifications?"

Poor A levels in English Literature, which may or may not be useful here, and Economic History, Shorthand and Typing.

It was the Shorthand and Typing which was almost to be my downfall.

For after a 15-minute interview, Unity decided that I had to have a practical test.

"Just get your notepad out dear and I'll dictate you a little letter and you can use Anne's typewriter to type it out."

My brain froze and hands shook as she dictated a letter to Cyril Maitland, Fabulous's photographer in Los Angeles. I was so excited to have a letter about Cyril Maitland dictated to me by the Editor of Fab that actually taking the dictation was not possible. When I came to type it up, all there was on the pad were a few meaningless squiggles in no known shorthand language. So I sat at Anne's Olympia and decided to improvise the missing bits. In other words, I made it all up.

Then one interminable hour later, during which time I refused a longed-for cup of tea for fear I'd spill it down my front, I'm summoned back into Unity's Office for the verdict.

She's talking to me about how bad my shorthand test was. And I'm agreeing, and nodding and trying to look okay about it, and babbling – "well, never mind, it was great to meet you; thanks for seeing me anyway …"

"NO DEAR – I DO want you to work for me! I'M OFFERING YOU THE POST."

"What did you say?"

"I want you to have the job!"

"But why? – you just said you haven't seen a worse effort at transcribing in years!"

"YES DEAR – well I expect you'll improve, and I like you," Unity boomed. "In fact I think your letter to Cyril was better than mine!"

I reckoned she just felt sorry for me and hadn't the heart to turn me away. It wasn't until years later that I cottoned on to the fact that all the best magazine stories are made up, so she no doubt thought my letter showed true promise.

And thus I was to start as Ed's Sec in one week's time.

I'd landed the job of my dreams.

Copyright © Judith Wills. All Rights Reserved

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About Judith Wills

Judith Wills was born in Oxfordshire, the youngest child of a telephone salesman and an ex-primary schoolteacher. She was a painfully shy child. Her first memory is of hiding inside her mother’s voluminous Fifties skirt on Banbury High Street to avoid being seen by one of her friends. Well, she was only ten.

After a partially-successful education at various Grammar schools in Oxfordshire and later at Oxford College of Technology, Judith left home (or homes - she and her divorced mother had lived in at least eight different places since she was 11) and moved to London at the age of 17; a bold move on her part as she admits that previously, even getting on the bus to cross Oxford on her own had been a trial.

What had sustained Wills through her tricky and lonely childhood and teenage years was an inner determination that life could be better and should be more fun. She also had a complete passion for pop music, pop stars and the glamour and excitement of show business, using the make-believe world of music, TV, and magazines whenever life got too tough to bear.

At the age of 14, she wrote an English school essay titled Castles in the Air, describing her dream to be a writer and work in Fleet Street, meet her favourite pop stars, go to the USA ‘and write books as a side interest’.

Surprisingly, it all came true. She landed a job on the top pop magazine of the day – Fabulous – at the tail end of the Swinging Sixties, and spent several (mostly) happy years at the heart of the London media and show business scene.

Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick is the true story of those times. But it isn’t Wills’s first book. Her years as a show business writer ended when, at the age of 26, she decided to move out of London and back to her ‘country bumpkin’ roots.

She began a new career as a food and health journalist, magazine editor and author. Since then she has written over 20 books on food and health including the best-selling The Food Bible and The Diet Bible (Quadrille) and she has a thriving career as ‘The Diet Detective’, and a website thedietdetective.net

Now, with over 2 million books sold worldwide, she has written more best-selling diet and healthy lifestyle titles than any other British author.

Judith wrote Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick after the title came to her while walking down the backstairs of her rambling old home, carrying a load of laundry. "I began laughing at the memory of some of the things that happened to me all those years ago, and the next minute the washing was abandoned and I was at my computer, typing furiously."

Wills lives in Herefordshire with her husband Tony and has two grown-up sons, Will and Chris, and three stepsons. She enjoys walking, cooking and gardening – and is still as much in love with pop music as she was in her teens.

Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick is available from Amazon.co.uk. Click on the below link to purchase this book today.