Lynn Barber

The sexploits of Mariella Novotny

Mandy Rice-Davies described her as a ‘sexual athlete of Olympian proportions’. But who was this ‘pocket Venus’ from Sheffield?

Mariella in 1972. Credit: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 
issue 26 June 2021

Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any credible way. Searching for facts in the foetid gloop of Pizzichini’s prose feels like bog-snorkelling. The subject, Mariella Novotny, was a ‘party girl’, or prostitute, who turns up like Zelig in many 1960s scandals.

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