Almost 20 years ago I interviewed Cynthia Payne, who died this week aged 82. I was, I think, one of the last people to see her house in Ambleside Avenue, Streatham, at it was in its sex-party heyday, in all its dowdy suburban glory. Payne was embarking on a major refurbishment and was on the phone coordinating deliveries when she let me in.
“Tell him if there’s no reply to leave it on the doorstep,” she said. “Nobody’s gonna run off with a lavatory pan, are they?”
At the time I’d been a full-time freelance journalist – oxymoronic as that sounds – for only a couple of years, and I’d been resident in Britain for less than five. As an American I had particular trouble understanding what a luncheon voucher was, or how one could be used to launder brothel-keeping proceeds. What did she do with them when she got them, I asked people. Did she funnel her profits though a fake cafe? And where did her clients get the vouchers?
You don’t understand, everyone said, but nobody else could remember how the system worked either. In the end I had to ask Madame Cyn herself. “I hate this question,” she said, swigging cough syrup from the bottle, “because it’s such a long answer.” I wanted the long answer, and she gave it. Originally, she said, in exchange for an entry fee, she gave her clients little plastic badges from Rymans. The men gave them to the girls upstairs and the girls later redeemed them, as proof of services performed, in exchange for payment.
It was a simple accounting system but it was badly compromised when some of the girls started buying their own badges at Rymans. In the search for a form of currency that could not be so readily counterfeited, Payne came upon a box of old, out-of-date luncheon vouchers. When the police raided her 1978 Christmas party, every man had a luncheon voucher in his pocket, which helped give the scandal its indelible comic tint. “A lot of people forget I went to prison for it,” she told me. “I always remind them.”
The queen of tears
By the time I met her Cynthia Payne had joined the after-dinner speaking circuit, and in that capacity she was also the freelance journalist’s best friend. Beyond being charming, patient and exceedingly helpful, she also provided me with a comprehensive cuttings file, videos of the two films based on her life – Wish You Were Here and Personal Services – plus a documentary called House of Cyn and a tape of her addressing lady members of the Wentworth golf club.
The last was, as I recall, particularly surreal and a weird thing to give to a journalist: the previous speaker at the charity lunch talks frankly and movingly (included on the tape in full) about several members of her family dying of Aids, reducing most of the audience to tears. The woman who subsequently introduces Payne as “the queen of the luncheon vouchers” does so in a voice choked with emotion. Unaware of what has gone on before, Madame Cyn then strolls into the room, shouting “I’m on a recruitment drive, girls!” at women who are still dabbing their eyes. She won them round in the end. Perhaps that’s what she wanted me to see.
Losing the best girl
When I heard she’d died I looked for the business card Payne had given me all those years ago (the one she handed to everyone she met in those days): a laminated mock-up of a luncheon voucher. On the back she had written: “To Tim, thank you for past custom!!”
She wrote the same to everyone – unless you were a woman, in which case she would write: “Sorry to lose one of my best girls!”