Molly Parkin, Madame Arcati and me
By Victor Olliver
International style icon, legendary bohemian, writer, painter and poet Molly Parkin secured her place in the
hearts of millions as a witty TV personality and seminal fashion editor on Nova, Harpers & Queen and the Sunday
Times. Born February 3, 1932, in Pontycymer, Wales (clock-time uncertain but 11 pm is given as approximate),
she was awarded a Civil List Pension by the Queen in 2012 for her services to the arts. Victor Olliver offers a
glimpse of the Molly he knows and loves – and of the Molly to be found in her birth chart.
as an ideal email-interview. Moll’s (past) sex life is a thing
of wonder. For instance, her torrid affair with the character
actor James Robertson Justice, featuring the unorthodox use
of a lightbulb, intrigued the Telegraph diarist. What drew my
friend’s interest was a story Moll told of her sexual encounter
with a 23-year-old ‘surfer boy’ in Las Vegas when she was 73.
I emailed Moll and didn’t think I’d even get a reply. Yet soon
enough she responded with huge enthusiasm. She wrote in
block capitals. At that time her eyesight was not as sharp as
it once was (but recently restored to near ‘technicolor’ 20-20
perfection with the removal of cataracts). Following email
exchanges between us, Moll worked on Madame’s impertinent
questions. And after publication of the stunningly frank
interview – in which she also revealed her father’s sexual abuse
and how his assault on her in childhood left her deaf in one
ear – she and I (as Madame Arcati) became intimate remote
friends, corresponding frequently by email, always planning to
meet up, eventually. It was ages before I told her my name.
I (Victor) felt like the third person in the relationship.
How I got to know the fashion and style legend Molly Parkin
is worth telling because something of the nature or peculiarity
of our meeting is anticipated in her birth chart. We actually
became ‘permanently engaged’ through the agency of someone
who has never existed in the living-breathing sense. Or if you
prefer, through someone else’s dream. What am I talking
about? Allow me to explain.
It’s no secret that back in 2006 I launched my alter ego
‘Madame Arcati’ on a blogging website of that name. Yes,
I became a sit-down keyboard drag artiste. Madame was a
potty-mouthed media and celebrity scourge whose exclusives
and commentary earned her (or rather, me) a fleeting infamy
(or others’ in-for-me vows of revenge) in the blogosphere, not
least among certain fellow journalists. Doubtless, Noël Coward
would not have been impressed. He, after all, created Madame
Arcati for his comic play Blithe Spirit: she is a prim, spinsterish
but sharp-witted and eccentric clairvoyante medium first
brought to brilliant life on stage in 1941 by the sublime
Margaret Rutherford, a role she reprised in David Lean’s 1945
movie co-starring Rex Harrison. A film still of her as Madame
adorned my website. (Dame Angela Lansbury reincarnated
Madame in a successful 2014 West End revival.)
When Madame wasn’t castigating editors for bullying or
revealing adulterous affairs in the hypocritical world of
tabloid hackery, she ran long Q & A interviews with people
she admired. At some point, a friend suggested Molly Parkin
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Sep/Oct 2015 The Astrological Journal
Moll and I finally came face-to-face on a date at London
Soho’s Green Carnation club. There she hosted a wild weekly
Tuesday night party with her daughter Sophie Parkin and
granddaughter Carson (a formidable trio known as The Parkin
Lot). Here you’d find a mixed age beau monde with after-work
boho tastes, drawn by the celebrity-among-friends lure and
an incongruous mix of Sixties classic pop (Moll’s taste) and
Noughties dance anthems. You never knew who might turn
up. One night a row of elderly ladies in hats and pleated skirts
sat along a banquette in the rainbow gloom – I did wonder
whether the charabanc to Worthing had taken a wrong turn.
For our first meeting I went with a male acquaintance, and
because Moll had no idea what I looked or sounded like, he
agreed to pretend to be me as a joke. Moll wasn’t long fooled. “I
just knew your friend couldn’t be you,” she said later. “You talk
the way you write!” That night I took over from Madame. Moll
and I danced to 40-plus-year-old floor-fillers. What had been
a remote bond, only possible through the online veil, became a
more-or-less instant connection for real.
Later on in our friendship, Moll told me something that took
me completely by surprise - she had worshipped Margaret
Rutherford from an early age and named her as her first style
muse. The two had even met. The actress had once kissed the
little girl Molly at a stage door and called her ‘darling’, an early
lesson in luvvie-speak. So, when I had first written to Moll in
the guise of ‘Madame Arcati’, asking for the email-interview,
I’d unwittingly tapped her Rutherford fascination and it was
this that drew the fast response. As Moll said to me, “It was
the spirit of Margaret Rutherford drawing us together. Anyone
Molly Parkin, Madame Arcati and me
calling themselves Madame Arcati had to share my passion!” It
was a sign, a blessing!
For over half a century, Molly Parkin has in effect put on a
one-woman international show as influential