Howard Hodgson ends lunch in a rage against unearned fame. ‘Marilyn Monroe: drunken actress,’ he says, ‘fat drunken actress. Gets killed. Ohhh! Marilyn!’ He does a mocking voice for that last bit, like someone wailing about her death. ‘John F. Kennedy: one of the worst presidents the United States ever had. Bay of Pigs. Fucked everything up. Robert Kennedy was vastly more talented than John, but John gets killed. Ohhh! National monument!’
‘Diana Spencer: borderline personality disorder, eating disorder. The eating disorders and everything were just part of her borderline personality disorder. She wouldn’t have been able to be your wife,’ Howard’s blue velvet Nehru jacket shimmers as he gestures at me, ‘let alone the Prince of Wales’s wife. Absolute disaster…’ He trails off into some story about the ‘wickedly cruel’ princess, her secretary Victoria Mendham and a trip to the Caribbean… but his point is made: many people are only remembered because they died.
Howard is speaking to The Spectator at Hawksmoor near Borough Market in London ahead of the release of the first volume of his memoirs, This Life In Death. In the 1980s and 1990s, Howard was a big-time funeral director and a tabloid celebrity. He was nicknamed ‘Mr Death’ by the papers because his firm conducted one in every five funerals in the UK, but really he was better known for his endless infidelity. ‘Thigh-stroking PRs,’ as he now calls them, were always causing him trouble. I notice that his agent these days is a man.
Before lunch Howard did a hit on TalkSport radio station, and he has been interviewed in recent weeks by the Sun and the Express. At 74, he is once again trading his private life for press coverage. ‘I was the “rock star” funeral director they nicknamed Mr Death… women went wild for me and cheating was in my genes,’ ran the recent Sun headline. In conversations about This Life In Death, Howard regales journalists with half a century old tales of his sexual conquests, and lets them dig around the darkness in his life. Howard’s father beat his mother, and his three-year-old son Charles drowned in a pool in Thailand in 1982.
Howard says ‘it’s lovely’ to be back talking to the media, which is funny, since his last real engagement with the press ended so badly. It was 1992, a year after Howard had sold his funeral business Hodgson Holdings, and six years after he had floated it on the London Stock Exchange to make him very rich indeed. Howard, who was born in Edgbaston in Birmingham but does not have the accent, had bought his family’s funeral business from his father in 1975, and over 15 years taken it from doing 400 to 60,000 funerals a year.
So, 1992… ‘I’m spending most of my life shagging or drinking,’ Howard remembers. ‘I’ve become very irresponsible. I set up three businesses and pay no attention to any of them. I lose three quarters of a million pounds. By this time I’m believing my own publicity. Anything I touch is going to turn into a huge success.’ In This Life in Death, Howard writes that there was ‘a mini-David Beckham media fascination’ with him and his successful business, at least partly due to his long blonde hair. Between 1987 and 1990, Howard says he starred in around 30 TV programmes. Lots of chat shows and documentaries.
‘I had a book coming out,’ Howard continues, ‘How to Become Dead Rich. And the guy they commissioned to take the photograph for the cover said “look, couldn’t we do one with a glass of champagne and a bubble bath?” And I said “why would I want to do that?” He said “well, okay, no champagne, but just be in a bubble bath. It would be nice.” So he took the shot.’
Soon after the photoshoot, Howard’s marriage to his first wife Marianne ended. ‘The guy who’d taken the bubble bath photograph goes to the Sun and sells it to them because the book publisher hadn’t bought it. Nina Myskow writes a huge piece saying, what a vain, arrogant arsehole I am.’ Hodgson didn’t care that the photographer had sold the photo to the Sun, but he sought vicious revenge against Myskow on the BBC Radio Four programme The Board Game.
Howard inadvertently ended up being one of the last British businessmen to become a proper celebrity
‘We’re on this programme and the question comes up: what is fat? Vacuous? Blubberous?’ Hodgson says. ‘And I just pressed the buzzer and went, “Nina Myskow”, and the place roared with laughter. And for the next ten years, anything that sounded horrible… BUZZ! “Nina Myskow!” You know, BUZZ! I thought, I’m getting payback for the rest of your life. BUZZ! “Nina Myskow!” Don’t fuck with the Peaky Blinders…’
Like any good tabloid personality, Howard has now moved to Monaco and hired Mick Jagger’s former secretary to run his life. ‘Compared to Mick, that’s nothing’, she tells him when he thinks he has a difficult request. He is married, and has six children.
Howard inadvertently ended up being one of the last British businessmen to become a proper celebrity. With Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, Howard writes in his book, ‘entrepreneurs were replacing footballers as the bedfellows of rock stars as sex symbols’. Over the next 30 years, however, newspaper circulations died, and while Sugar stills hosts The Apprentice (‘He was very bristly,’ Howard says) and Branson is still about (‘shy guy, very nice guy’), the rest of Howard’s 1980s boy-done-good cohort are as famous as the rest of us average citizens.
‘That looks horribly like Macca! I’ve always wanted to look like Macca,’ Howard says, as he looks on his phone at photo of himself doing the interview on TalkSport. Earlier, he told me that he wanted to become famous because he grew up around ‘Beatlemania’ and thought it would be nice to have everybody think he was cool. ‘That is a good shot,’ I say. Howard looks at himself again, smiles, and seems truly happy.
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