In 2004 when her husband, the jazz musician and writer George Melly, was diagnosed with dementia and lung cancer, Diana Melly was asked by her brother if she loved George. When she got home she looked up the dictionary definition of the word “love” – “to have great attachment to and affection for; and/or in a state of strong emotional and sexual attraction”.
The first definition applied to her current feeling for George, the second to a much earlier one. Through her long, full and sometimes topsy-turvy life, Diana, who has died aged 87, loved many people, in both definitions of the word, but not always, she admitted, in the right order or at the right time.
She was married three times (at 16, 20 and 26), twice divorced, and outside those more conventional arrangements there were numerous boyfriends and lovers (some of them adorable, many not).
Her life during the 1960s was of the kind you see in films – women getting on to planes with no shoes on, and lots of hash, LSD, kaftans and sex. Her “romantic life” was distracting, as it should be, but was often distorted by her sometimes bad choices and the fact that whether girlfriend, lover or wife, she took to looking after her various sweethearts, and often at the expense of her three children, one born from each marriage.
Her relationships with men were marked by the dynamics of the time. George and Diana were married in 1963 and for the first 10 years of their 45-year marriage, she put all her energy into being attractive to him “so that he would not look away” and also made herself indispensable to him by managing his tour diary, his transport, his finances, his meals, the various homes they shared together and later his complicated medication. George called her Miss Perfect.
Her writing career, which began with a semi-autobiographical novel, The Girl in the Picture (1977), was initially born out of Diana’s need to establish herself outside the definition of “wife of George”, but went on to become an almost addictive form of self-expression and therapeutic protection.
There was a further novel, The Goosefeather Bed (1979); a small pamphlet, I Am a Cypher (2020), a wry, self-aware account of her emotional and intellectual education; and two works of non-fiction, Strictly Ballroom: Tales from the Dancefloor (2015), about what became a mild obsession with ballroom dancing that emerged in her 70s, and a memoir, Take a Girl Like Me (2005), by some distance her most significant publication.
It is an honest book, funny and knowing, and often recounting her own part in her occasional downfalls.
Diana was born in Southampton, Hampshire, the daughter of Geoffrey Dawson, a railway clerk who during her early childhood was on second world war service, and Margaret (nee Turnbull), a cleaner. After the war, the family moved to Essex, where Diana attended Colchester girls’ grammar school. She left, aged 16, having been reprimanded by the head “for letting the school down” after being spotted in the foyer of a smart local hotel with a soldier.
Her first job was in London at the Cabaret Club, a discreet Soho club with a risqué vibe, where rich men could lounge with underclothed women and where John Profumo was later to meet Mandy Rice-Davies. She was paid in tips and Sobranie Black Russian cocktail cigarettes that she took home to her mother, who was working as the housekeeper in a large Hampstead villa, where they shared small lodgings in the basement.
Diana met her first husband, Michael Ashe, whom she married in 1954, at the Cabaret; and she would meet George eight years later at the Colony Room, another famously louche Soho club, no less glamorous than the Cabaret but catering for a more artistically low-life crew (if you don’t count Princess Margaret). After that she worked as an assistant at a ladies haberdashery in Mayfair from where, she once confessed, she stole a pair of white gloves.
In 1971 she began what was to turn into nearly a decade-long stint working at Release, a progressive charity set up by the radical feminist and political activist Caroline Coon and her partner Rufus Harris. Its aim was to help addicts and lobby for the decriminalisation of drugs.
Diana’s roles included making sure there were enough teabags, working the nightshift to take calls from troubled addicts, and fundraising from any source rich enough and willing to donate.
Her major achievements included securing a donation from the Ford Foundation following a trip to New York in 1973, but, given the hippy-ish “peace’n’love” credo of Release, the gifts sometimes took unlikely forms. Victor Lownes, the Playboy entrepreneur, had been given a large gold cast of a penis by his friend Roman Polanski, the film director, but after the two fell out he donated it to Release. It is not recorded how it got cashed in.
Diana had a tremendous capacity and drive to sort things out. She was good at it and found all sorts of people and things, wastrels and strays, rackety houses and veg patches to apply her sorting-out skills to. There were many pets that required her attention and love – Tuppy, Franny and Neko (the cats), Bobbie and Joey (the Papillon dogs), Danny (the guinea pig), Eggs (the rabbit) and, most adored of all, James Sebastian Fox (the fox). And there were many friends too.
Among others she looked after were the charismatic sprite of a writer Bruce Chatwin, who wrote to her from the US asking if he might come and stay with her at the Tower (the Melly country retreat, an ancient and attractively ramshackle building in the Brecon Beacons, now Bannau Brycheiniog, in Wales).
He enticingly suggested: “We can both write during the day and share all the cooking.” His writer-in-residence period ended up lasting nearly five years, during which time he wrote most of his 1982 book On the Black Hill and “failed even to make a cup of tea”.
She went on to care for Chatwin through his illness with Aids until his death in 1989. Then there was the famously spiky, alcoholic novelist Jean Rhys, to whom Diana acted as concierge, cook and companion, and the bon vivant, writer and artist Teddy Millington-Drake. With Francis Wyndham, Diana co-edited Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-1966 (1984).
When Take a Girl Like Me was published, it received some good reviews, but also some disapproving comment of the “promiscuous, hedonistic and self-indulgent” kind. Diana’s life clearly did lean towards the libertine and sometimes happily so, but the fun was not always harmless.
It led to difficulties in her relationship with her children and she herself also suffered greatly at times from low self-esteem and depression. There were two fumbling attempts at taking her own life and two nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalisation, one following the death from a drugs overdose of her eldest child, Patrick. Her daughter, Candy, from her second marriage, to John Moynihan, a sports journalist, also predeceased her.
She wrote that she found wearing the invisible cloak that envelops most women over the age of about 50 comforting and she sailed through the often choppy waters of middle-age quite contentedly, spending much of her time raising Candy’s daughter, Kezzie, sorting out George and listening to Radio 4.
After George’s death in 2007, she swapped Radio 4 for Radio 3 and at last, with nobody to please but herself, she developed a late-life love of physics, algebra and the Greek philosophers, and a tremendous passion for opera, which took her at the age of 84 across the Atlantic, economy class, to see two performances in three days at the New York Met.
She is survived by her son Tom, and by Kezzie.
• Diana Margaret Campion Melly, writer, born 26 July 1937; died 2 February 2025
