Molly Parkin
- Episode aired May 30, 2011
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- ConnectionsFeatures Arsenal: Chelsea Hotel (1987)
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From the Chapel to the Chelsea
"To know that there is life after abuse."
Molly spoke this line from the heart, about her emergence into sunlight after the horrors of her early upbringing. You might assume that the rough end of Glamorgan would indicate an ancestry of unbroken servitude, but her family had actually owned several castles before being brought down by a dangerous mix of drinking and gambling. That chaotic spirit was still around, as her father performed violent sex on her as a small child - something which, ironically, she came to relish in her maturity.
But she would grow up as a good chapel-girl, and display a strange mix of puritanism and hedonism in adult life. Almost in the same breath, she expounds the glories of fidelity within marriage, and multiple relationships outside it. As for drink, it was not until she took the pledge, well into her fifties, that she realised that many families don't drink at all. Until then, it was unthinkable not to go on week-long benders, usually ending at the meat-porters' pub that opened at 5.00am, a favourite alcoholics' hangout, or when in New York, not to live the hedonist life at the Chelsea Hotel (graveyard of the Sex Pistols). How she managed ten novels on top of her day-job as a fashion editor in this dissipated state is hard to fathom. Yet eventually it was a sympathetic barman who said "Moll, I think you should take your friend home." The 'friend' was the other half of herself.
She is honest enough to admit that her excesses (including cocaine addiction) affected her looks, and her art-college training was put to good use in craftsmanlike work with the mascara after a face-lift. Even by the time of this interview, at seventy-four, she exerts the same powerful appeal, something better than just noble wreckage.
Drink/drug reminiscences are liable to become over-personalised, too difficult to share, and the last fifteen minutes are in danger of becoming wearisome, but she does at least spare us the time-wasting sermon of the reformed addict - "I've had my fun. You can't have yours." Defiant and unrepentant to the end, our Moll.
Molly spoke this line from the heart, about her emergence into sunlight after the horrors of her early upbringing. You might assume that the rough end of Glamorgan would indicate an ancestry of unbroken servitude, but her family had actually owned several castles before being brought down by a dangerous mix of drinking and gambling. That chaotic spirit was still around, as her father performed violent sex on her as a small child - something which, ironically, she came to relish in her maturity.
But she would grow up as a good chapel-girl, and display a strange mix of puritanism and hedonism in adult life. Almost in the same breath, she expounds the glories of fidelity within marriage, and multiple relationships outside it. As for drink, it was not until she took the pledge, well into her fifties, that she realised that many families don't drink at all. Until then, it was unthinkable not to go on week-long benders, usually ending at the meat-porters' pub that opened at 5.00am, a favourite alcoholics' hangout, or when in New York, not to live the hedonist life at the Chelsea Hotel (graveyard of the Sex Pistols). How she managed ten novels on top of her day-job as a fashion editor in this dissipated state is hard to fathom. Yet eventually it was a sympathetic barman who said "Moll, I think you should take your friend home." The 'friend' was the other half of herself.
She is honest enough to admit that her excesses (including cocaine addiction) affected her looks, and her art-college training was put to good use in craftsmanlike work with the mascara after a face-lift. Even by the time of this interview, at seventy-four, she exerts the same powerful appeal, something better than just noble wreckage.
Drink/drug reminiscences are liable to become over-personalised, too difficult to share, and the last fifteen minutes are in danger of becoming wearisome, but she does at least spare us the time-wasting sermon of the reformed addict - "I've had my fun. You can't have yours." Defiant and unrepentant to the end, our Moll.
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- Goingbegging
- Apr 2, 2021
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