5 December 2024

Adieu, Groucho Club

An establishment where my heart and my lighter were stolen.

Photo by Chris Grieve/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

I see that the Groucho Club in Soho has had to shut its doors for the time being. According to a report in the Guardian its licence has been placed under review pending an “investigation into an alleged sexual attack”. Whatever the investigation’s outcome, it is a grim association for a place that was once synonymous with celebrity and glamour – and which has fond memories for me. I was a member from the early days in the mid 1980s, not because I was a media high flier or anything but because the owner, Tony Mackintosh, was a friend of the family and I’d had a book review published and that was just about good enough for him.

Looking back, it was always in some danger of having its licence revoked. In those days, apparently, you could acquire high-quality cocaine there, though the only stuff I ever had was Château Groucho which was so bad that Will Self would call it “nocaine”. I remember once he scored some of the good stuff, although I never found out how good, as the person who was passed it – a well-known author and TV presenter – took the little envelope from Self and honked the whole lot up himself. He then ate an enormous plate of oysters. I think he ordered 18. I told this hilarious anecdote a few days later to someone from a newspaper arts desk who was taking me to lunch – oh my God, how dated is this story? – and I noticed that it hadn’t gone down well at all.

“He’s my boyfriend,” she said frostily, and apparently gave him the boot that evening.

Shall I bore you with my stories? (That was the real danger of the Groucho: not the drugs, but being bored to death.) Keith Allen once stole my Zippo lighter back in the days when you could still smoke indoors. I didn’t know it was him until I asked if anyone had seen it, since it had sentimental value as my wife had given it to me.

“Is her name Zippo?” he asked, and at that moment I knew it was him, and went to Maria, the manageress, and asked her what the protocols were for accusing unfunny but famous comedians of stealing personal items. She marched over to the table and made everyone turn their pockets out. Of course it was him. This anecdote became so well-worn that many years later, when the lighter became genuinely lost, my children bought one for me for Christmas with the inscription: “PROPERTY OF KEITH ALLEN”.

I fell a bit in love with Maria and then did so properly after my marriage collapsed and we had a brief fling which broke my heart when she ended it. My favourite person in the place, after Maria, was Bernie Katz, a tiny, bustling figure who made the club run smoothly and was beloved by absolutely everyone. Tatler, in a piece about him, said he was “always there for his A-list friends”, but he was certainly there for me. I wasn’t even C-list but he made me feel like I was the most important person in the place. He did this with everyone, but every time he was being genuine. I still feel miserable when I think about his death, and I suppose it was after he left the place – which was a couple of years before he died – that it began to go downhill. Although the Groucho, like Soho, was always going downhill. “You should have been here ten, 20, 30 years ago” was the cry that echoed round that part of W1 ever since it was given a name of its own.

For the Groucho now I can barely muster a molecule of regret. I had to resign in 2007 when it became an extravagance I could no longer afford. It was either that or MCC and I didn’t have to think about it for a second. By that stage Cool Britannia was in the grave but I am glad I was there when it was ground zero for its biggest players. These places always need extras to make up the numbers and I was there, like Zelig, when… ah, but discretion kicks in here. Many of the people involved are still alive, and I don’t want to get into any trouble.

But if you had told me then that I would be moving to rural Scotland, and then to Brighton, I would have assumed you were losing your mind or on a mission to insult me. The idea of leaving the Great Wen, and its omphalos, the Grouch, would have seemed beyond ludicrous. But here I am and I don’t mind it at all. I don’t like the idea of private clubs now and the only one I would have any time for would be the Colony Room, also in Soho, but that too has gone the way of all fleshpots. You have to remember that these places only existed because the pubs were shut in the afternoon. Francis Bacon may have been a Colony fixture but the York Minster – AKA the French House – was also good enough for him and anyone could walk in there. Actually, I did meet him there and he spent the whole evening buying me and my girlfriend champagne, but that’s another story for another day.

Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse, and as George Harrison put it, all things must pass. I hear the editor of this magazine is stepping down, and that is also the end of an era. But not, I trust, the end of this magazine, or ahem, its columnists. And the people in it are much nicer and much more deserving than the members of the Groucho.