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Diana Melly photographed in 1960 by Ida Kar\u00a0\u00a9 National Portrait Gallery, London<\/p>\n
\u2018Being pretty is a major disaster for women,\u2019 Diana Melly once told a friend, and beauty certainly had a hand in her destiny that she spent a lifetime resisting. Her parents, George Dawson, a bank clerk, and Margaret (n\u00e9e Timbrenell) who worked as a housekeeper, separated early, and Diana spent most of her childhood in Essex being shunted between her mother and an aunt with some haphazard schooling. The last exam she took \u2013 and passed \u2013 was the eleven-plus. She hated her grammar school and longed to leave when she was fourteen, having received a prize for not having an Essex accent, but no approval for anything else. Her parents wanted their pretty daughter to go to drama school and arranged for elocution lessons. But she started work straightaway, at first in a shop and then, at fifteen, as a hostess in a nightclub. Aged sixteen, in 1954, she married Michael Ashe, whom she described as \u2018an imaginative, feckless Irishman of aristocratic origins which impressed me at the time but meant that he considered most jobs beneath him\u2019. Patrick, her first child, was born a year later.<\/p>\n
Maddened by the condescension of her upper-class mother-in-law, she left the marriage, returned to her mother\u2019s bedsit, put Patrick in a creche and started to work in a coffee bar and as a fashion model. Two years later she set off with the writer Michael Alexander to Afghanistan. He was gathering material for a book, Offbeat in Asia <\/em>(1960). \u2018When we came back,\u2019 she wrote in her memoir, \u2018he left me and married someone else.\u2019 Adrift in London, she got engaged to three different men; \u2018I responded to almost any man who wanted me,\u2019 she wrote later, and \u2018occasionally I went to bed with men I didn\u2019t really like so as not to seem rude.\u2019 She stuck to the journalist John Moynihan, by whom she had her daughter, Candy. Moynihan was an habitu\u00e9 of Muriel\u2019s drinking club in Soho, and it was at Muriel\u2019s that Diana met the writer and jazz singer George Melly, whom she married in 1963, stayed with for 44 years until his death in 2007, and with whom she had her third child, Tom.<\/p>\n \u2018Mugging up\u2019, as she put it in the remarkable memoir she wrote in her seventies, Take a Girl Like Me: Life with George<\/em><\/a>, began at once. She was a consummate learner and never wasted time. She clearly needed to know about jazz and surrealism. She also had to get used to a new life, in which \u2018Hello Diana\u2019 was usually followed by \u2018Where\u2019s George?\u2019 Her memoir is the story of their passionate, wayward and nearly impossible marriage, strewn with adulteries on both sides, with drugs and drunkenness, with unhappiness and serious mental breakdowns, and with the deaths of two of Diana\u2019s children. Yet it was also a life studded with success and achievement, with humour and energy, and, perhaps most important, with friends.<\/p>\n There was disorder, but also order. Diana enjoyed managing George\u2019s singing career, his finances and even some of his sex life. Her friend Sonia Orwell told her that she should be running Marks and Spencer, and many of her friends had their love lives, their holidays and much else organised for them by Diana. She wrote two novels in the 1970s, Girl in the Picture <\/em>(1977) The memoir is full of pain. Diana describes herself as \u2018frozen with grief and guilt\u2019 when Patrick died at the age of 25 from a heroin overdose. She remembers her refusal to hear what he was trying to tell her about his addiction. Candy died from cancer in 2013. Diana never got over her sense of failing her mother and her children, of not loving them enough. The adulteries often hurt, though both George and Diana eventually relaxed into something they thought of, though never referred to, as an \u2018open\u2019 marriage, and to tolerate what were often felt as betrayals. Diana\u2019s sense of her own culpability wasn\u2019t a form of shame. She didn\u2019t go in for secrets, for pretence or cover-ups or even, much, for apology. She tells it all in her memoir, sometimes in brutal detail, and the book has been both admired and excoriated for its brazenness, candour and complete absence of self-pity.<\/p>\n Diana knew she was dying from cancer several months ago. \u2018Death is boring,\u2019 she said, \u2018but dying is fascinating.\u2019 Her capacity to be interested in other people, other places, other lives stood her in good stead. She found cancer as interesting as she\u2019d found politics, difficult ideas and her own back garden. She was given to quoting Epicurus on the importance of friendship, and friends flocked to see her. She dressed up for them, had stories for them, and managed, extraordinarily, to enjoy those last months. She was 87 when she died on 2 February and she is survived by her son Tom and his children, Django and India, and by Candy\u2019s daughter, Kezzie, whom Diana brought up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n