Life And Other Times

by Leslie Grantham

 

 

Leslie Grantham secretly tried to kill himself THREE TIMES in the nightmare hours after he was exposed in the newspapers.

In his upcoming shocking new autobiography, the EastEnders legend reveals in dramatic graphic detail how he:

SLASHED his wrists and throat with a Stanley knife.

HUNG himself from a tree with a skipping rope—only for the branch to break when he jumped.

SANK into a lake weighed down with bricks in a backpack—but couldn't drown himself.

"I couldn't bear to look at myself in the mirror—I was as depressed as I had ever been," says dad-of-three Leslie—who also reveals how he became HOOKED on internet porn and cavorted online for a mystery blonde dancer called Amanda.

"I let everyone down—my wife Jane, my children and the show. Life didn't seem worth living."

Leslie, 59, was just making a comeback as Dirty Den in May, 2004 when sordid pictures of him pleasuring himself naked on the internet hit the headlines.

"I tried to lie my way out of the situation instead of facing up to it like a man," he writes. "Things got so bad I tried to kill myself.

"I got hold of a Stanley knife from my toolbox and started to hack at my arms, trying to get at the veins beneath the skin.

"In my pathetic stupor I didn't feel a thing. I only managed to make minor lacerations. I even tried to slash my throat—but I couldn't go through with it and gave up and went to bed."

Rope

Jane, 52—his loyal wife of 25 years—was horrified when she saw his wounds. Leslie says: "As she bandaged me up and put me to bed, she told me, ‘Don't be stupid. We can sort this out'."

But only a permanent sleep was on Leslie's mind that night. After a few hours of tossing and turning, he got up and went into the back garden of his Wimbledon home.

"I found an old skipping rope which I tied to a tree branch. I made a noose, and tried to hang myself. But as I jumped, the branch broke.

"Undeterred, I tied the rope to an overhanging pipe. I murmured a quick apology to all of those I'd hurt so badly and jumped."

But the nylon rope simply stretched till his feet hit the ground. "What must I have looked like?" he asks. "The tragic hero, noose around his neck, ready to end it all, when I close my eyes and perform a perfect jump...straight onto the front lawn!

"I opened my eyes and, finding myself in Wimbledon rather than Heaven or Hell, accepted that, even at suicide, I was cr*p."

Yet he was still to have one more attempt just 24 hours later. "As I sat in the kitchen, learning my lines at 2am, I snapped. I couldn't go on," he writes. "I filled a backpack with bricks and a pair of dumbells and went to Wimbledon Common lake.

"There I smoked a last cigarette and waded into the cold water until my feet no longer touched the bottom.

"The weight of the backpack dragged me under, but I simply couldn't make myself sink. I couldn't drown myself.

"So I tried to die of hypothermia. After two hours I realised it was hopeless and went home, soaked and freezing."

In his book, the star blames the boredom of life on the set of EastEnders for his getting hooked on seedy porn and chat websites.

He reveals: "People assume you have a glamorous life—but we live in a waiting room most of the time. Actors kill the time in different ways.

"Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this new-fangled contraption called the internet.

"You could tap in these three letters—S-E-X—and a world of boundless, scary, fascinating, hilarious possibilities would open up. I'd absorb it all, watching the conversations on the screen. Before I knew it, this was the first thing I would do when I got to my changing room. Switch on my laptop. Log on. Watch. I was hooked.

"In between filming, I was emailing people, looking at the web and having sexy conversations with strangers. It became like the other member of my family."

Then one day he started swapping messages with a 23-year-old dancer from Sheffield calling herself Amanda. His downfall had begun.

"She sent me photos of herself, and asked if I had a webcam. I said I didn't— although the laptop did have an inbuilt camera.

"Her pester power was admirable. She played me, targeting the vanity all actors try to hide.

"I should have seen the light but I was blinded by the flattery of a vivacious girl who wanted to have fun.

Leslie with wife Jane

 

Stupid

"Suddenly, those endless hours in the dressing room between scenes were not so dull. I had company—and I liked it.

"Little by little she cranked up the intimacy. Crazier and crazier, I complied."

He admits even when web images of him exposing his private parts appeared in the newspapers, he "was in denial and couldn't admit my behaviour fully".

But he does concede: "She got me good. If I have any recriminations, they're mainly aimed at myself."

Speaking exlusively to the News of the World about his book, Leslie admits he nearly "destroyed" his family—and felt he had badly let down Jane and sons, Spike, 19, Jake, 17 and Danny, 10, who has Down Syndrome.

Hanging his head in shame, Leslie says: "What I did was a stupid, stupid thing, and it should never have happened. And the sad thing is that I should have known better.

"But I just got caught up in the vanity of the whole thing. I got sucked in. Now I have to live with what I've done day by day.

"Luckily my wife Jane is a marvellous woman—and she has been kind enough and brave enough to take on my frailties. I'm so lucky to have her.

"She has kept the family together—through her strength, her loyalty and her love.

"And the same goes for my children.

"Obviously Jane was devastated by my actions. And, for a period of time, it could easily have gone the other way.

"But because she is such a fantastic person, we've managed to get our relationship back on track, and she has made the family a unit again."

Now Leslie claims his days of surfing the internet are over— temptation put into shutdown.

"I deliberately don't access the internet any more. I have absolutely no desire to go on it at all," he says.

"Thank God, I got caught. I don't have to lie about this any more. Now I'm just trying to get on with my life."

 

Pictures of Leslie as a youngster taken from the book

 

Book Signing

 

 

 

 

Interview With Leslie Grantham

Why did you write the book?

"When you've got 60 years of crap in your head, you use it as therapy really, just writing everything down. Someone saw a chapter and said 'hey, why don't you write a book?' I thought - well, why not? People have always said to me over the years 'why don't you write your book?' and as soon as you've done it they're like 'why did you write it?' Everyone else has had their hang on it, everyone else has made quite a good living out of me over the years, so you think well, it's some therapy. When you've got as many monkeys on your back as I have, it's cheaper than a psychiatrist!"

Did you have any reservations while you were writing it?

"I just sat in front of a computer and typed it all out, and when I was done I thought 'God, I'm boring'. You then spend a couple of weeks taking out all the boring stuff, and then you realise it's all boring, but in the end someone's asked you to do it, so you do it. And whether it works as a book or not, it's not for me to say.

"I could have gone out and written how marvellous I am, like everyone else does, but I'm not a marvellous person, am I? I've got a huge amount of frailties, a huge amount of complexes and a huge amount of problems. So in the end, it's just basically putting your story out in a book. If anyone wants to buy it, they buy it. It's not going to win the Nobel Prize for writing. I don't do a job that's as hard work as laying 10,000 bricks a day, I'm just a guy who got very lucky, became an actor, became quite well known and did some exciting things and some pretty dreadful things; so in the end, you use it as therapy."

It's going to be an interesting read, nonetheless.

"The only person who comes out of it badly is me. I haven't done a 'look at me, aren't I marvellous? Pat myself on the back' tale - it's a warts-and-all. You can see that on the photograph on the front cover. The picture hasn't been posed and taken by a top photographer, it's a photograph of how I look!"

The lowest point in your life was the murder of the taxi driver in Germany...

"You're 18, some 40-odd years ago, and you're in Europe, a young man in a foreign country. There are no excuses. What happened was absolutely dreadful, and I suffer every day. Just because if you've spent X amount of years in prison, it doesn't mean the day you come out it's all forgotten. I've got to live with it. I will live with that till the day I die. There are no excuses, but there are things that led me down that path. We all set out in life to travel along life's motorway, from A to B, and unfortunately along the way I went via X, Y and Z. A very good friend of mine, Joe Pasquale, said that you travel down life's motorway and always end up in the Little Chef!"

Did you think your life was over at that point?

"Yeah, because I had to then get on and move on. You then have to get through every day, and for anyone who's not been in that situation it's hard to imagine. You're in a situation where you've been locked away from the world, you've got to survive in another world that's even harsher and more rigid and more uncompromising than the normal world. How you do that is by bucking the system in such a way that you get through it, or by buckling under.

"The only way that I got through it was my sense of humour - some people don't think I have one, but I do. Everyone who's in prison is entitled to be there - you should be there - and to get through it you have to fight against something, against normality. We all do it. Some people do it by skulduggery, some people do it by bringing in contraband, I did it through other ways - drama was the thing that got me through prison.

" How long were you in prison and where were you located?

"I was in prison from 1966 to 1978. I started off in Germany in army detention and then came to Wormwood Scrubs in London in the men's wing, then to Portsmouth and finished off in Leyhill, an open prison in Gloucester, then back to Wormwood Scrubs and the hostel system. While I was in the hostel system, I got into drama school.

" There's a part of the book called 'the longest setback in parole history'. What were the circumstances surrounding this?

"Well, I was in prison which was basically for domestic crimes, anyone who killed their mother, father, sister, brother, children, or even their canary I suppose. I was one of the first prisoners to be sent there for doing what wasn't classified as a domestic crime. While I was there, there was a psychiatrist attached. Middle of the night, he came into my cell, and I said 'lucky you found me in'. That humour went straight over his head. He asked me to come down to the kitchen and talk to some chap, not a prisoner, but one of his patients from the local psychiatric ward, who discovered that his wife was having an affair with a wrestler, Kent Walton, one of those ones on a Sunday afternoon on World Of Sport, and I spent three-and-a-half hours saying to this chap: 'don't be stupid, you don't want to end up in here, it's not a very nice place', and he said 'nah, I wanna do it, I wanna kill him'.

"In the end, I was so tired I said 'do it', and he broke down in tears. Then the psychiatrist said to me 'thanks very much, you've solved his problem, he'll be fine'. Couple of days later, I saw the psychiatrist and said 'how's the guy?' he said: 'oh, he's fine, him and his wife have made it up, they're going off on holiday, second honeymoon, they've got you to thank for everything - you really helped them through a difficult time and you helped me.' Then I got this seven-year knockback, which was unheard of in those days for parole.

"The prison officers at the prison I was in, Kingston in Portsmouth, were up in arms about this, because some chap had killed his four kids and he'd got released. I was shown my parole stuff and there was a letter from the psychiatrist saying that I was unstable and shouldn't be released, which was about a week after I'd helped him in this situation. So when I did later meet him I let him have a one-word piece of my mind. The trouble is with doctors and psychiatrists, as you know, if you walk into a doctor's and you've got your leg hanging off, you've obviously got bad legs. If you walk in with a sore throat he says 'what's the problem', you say 'I've got a sore throat', and he looks in your mouth and says 'tonsillitis'. Same for psychiatrists. You lie on a bed or a bench, tell them all your problems and then after about seven weeks, they've taken a few thousand pounds out of you, they come up with some kind of diagnosis. They're basically charlatans.

" Do you think prison was a turning point in your life?

"I think it showed me where I wanted to be. Because of the fact I joined this drama group in there, and was seemingly okay at it; people were interested in my abilities. That put me in the direction I wanted to go, so I've got a lot to thank for that. What I did to end up in there was a terrible thing, but then life is like that - what's that thing that you see on the side of a golden syrup tin - from adversity comes strength?"

You mention in the book Princess Diana - how did you meet her and what did you think of her?

"In between jobs I used to work in a clothes shop in Fulham Road, and before she was Lady Di, or Princess Di, she was a regular customer. The man who owned the shop was a lovely man called Clio DeMondi. If you ever saw those pictures of her with those frilled blouses she used to wear, they were his. When she became Princess Di, she still used to come into the shop - we used to have to take stuff over to Kensington Palace - Clio's new creations - and she would choose which ones she wanted.

"Then when she came out onto the set of EastEnders, she actually remembered me from the shop and from delivering the stuff. After that, I was always being invited over to the palace, to pop over, but I couldn't because of the schedule. In the end I said 'I can't,' and then I felt that it wasn't because she thought I was a fantastic person, it was one of those things because I was in that position. And don't forget when she came out to the EastEnders set, the next day she was seen at the Superman set, bashing Charles over the head with a fake film set bottle. I felt a bit at the time like it was 'I'm bored, I need to get my toys out of the box, what toy shall I look at today? Oh, I'll go over to the EastEnders' set and get those toys out, let's go over to the Superman set and get those toys out'.

How did you actually land the part in EastEnders, given your troubled history to that point?

"I'd done a play in Battersea Free Theatre written by Matthew Robinson, and he liked what I did in that. After that he offered me some episodes of Doctor Who, and I did some episodes for him. Then he offered me a part in Coronation Street, which I didn't want to do. Then he was asked by Julia Smith to set up the initial casting and directing of EastEnders, and he suggested me. I went in and saw Julia and Tony [Holland] - who I'd met while I was at drama school because they'd done the TV training course there. Although I auditioned for the part of Pete, I got the part of Den. Then, just before they offered me a contract, I went in and said to them 'this is my past, if you want to give the job to someone else...' and they said 'no, we want you'."

Would you say EastEnders is the highlight of your life?

"No, the highlight of my life was marrying my wife and having children. Whereas my wife and children were cherries on the cake, EastEnders was the icing. From that, I went on and did some, I think, pretty remarkable television like The Paradise Club, 99 to 1, things like that. EastEnders gave me the springboard, but there's only so many people you can beat up on the Square, and so many in the pub. In the end, I decided I wanted to move on - not that I knew that anything else was on the horizon, just that I'd done all I could in the series. Eastenders was pretty forward-thinking; their storylines, rather than having one an episode, seemed to have six or seven. We covered every colour of the rainbow, there wasn't much else to do."

Horror stories often come from those who have finished working on the series. How was it for you?

"I'd never diss EastEnders at all. Even in the book, I do say I feel it's lost its way, but I don't say it's a pile of crap. In fact, I've got some great mates who are on the show - Wendy, and Nigel (Nigel's left now) Perry Digweed, people like that, and Laila Morse, who actually only phoned half an hour ago - she's coming to the book launch. So's Wendy, I think, if filming allows. I'm in contact with them all the time. It's like working anywhere - there are some people you get on with, some you don't. And it's not because you dislike them, some people you'll automatically gravitate to."

What's your opinion on Wendy Richard's character in EastEnders being killed off?

"I think it's a terrible mistake. She's been there since day one. Wendy might be quite relieved. She's had quite a run of health scares in the past few years and she talked to me about it when she decided she didn't want to do it any more - I said 'Wendy, you're not a spring chicken any more, now's the time to enjoy yourself'. I think she's been in it a long time and in the end there's only so much you can do. It's sad for the programme and it's sad for Wendy."

How did you feel when you originally found out that Den was going to be bumped off?

"I was the one who wanted to leave in the first place, and they then told me 'stay on' and I did an extra year's filming in five weeks. The bumping off was my decision. The BBC said 'we're not going to kill him off, we're just leaving it with the fact he was shot'. And a few years later, as I understand it, Sharon's going through the market and sees a ring for sale that was Den's. Well, Den never wore any jewellery!"

"If I had some criticism of the show, it would be that they don't know the history of it. Characters are turned from one thing into another overnight. No one knows the history of the show, because there are so many changes going on - and they also think the audience is quite stupid. I can't count how many times people have said 'that's absolutely ridiculous!' The fans are not stupid, but why has Coronation Street been consistently solid since day one? Because they have people who do their homework."

"The trouble with EastEnders is that people don't do their homework. If you're funded by public money - it's a bit of a tragedy really that they don't care about their audience. I can give you things off the top of my head - Michael Higgs, who played Andy the gangster; suddenly after a while [they] decided that they shouldn't have a gangster living in the middle of the Square when no one knew he was a gangster [even though] he was ripping people off, and so they get rid of him. Yet they bring in three other people, one whose first appearance in the Square was with stolen drugs, and counterfeit money. They bring in other gangsters after them, and then they go 'ooh, we've made a mistake, he's not really a gangster, he's a nice guy.' The audience aren't stupid, they actually know. That's the problem with EastEnders - the writers don't meet the cast."

To most, you probably had the most sought-after job in the whole of soapland. What took you down into the depths of despair again?

"I think the fact is that you've got lots of people with lots of problems and they deal with them in different ways. I thought no one liked me, so I thought I'd end it all. [But] when you've got the wonderful family I have got, my cousins, friends like Wendy and Mo and other mates, there are people you're letting down. You're also letting down your fans. At the time, it all feels pretty desperate because you've done something stupid, or you get led into something stupid, [or] you've been played like an old trout on a fishing line. You end up making an absolute fool of yourself."

Did you think the idea of bringing Den back to life then was far-fetched?

"There were promises made that weren't fulfilled. I actually only came back for 18 months, for the twentieth anniversary."

What promises were you made?

"You know, the scripts. The scripts in the beginning were fantastic, but like everything else - Den was never a gangster. He was a big fish in a small pond, a ducker and diver, but yet suddenly... that's the amount of pressure you're under when you're working four episodes a week. You've got writers churning out stuff without actually doing homework."

How did the second stint compare with the first?

"The second stint at the beginning was fantastic - I mean, it was lovely to see Wendy, June, Adam and Pam St Clement and meet people like Scarlet, Nigel, Perry, Cliff and Steve who I knew from football, but in the end you realise it's just like a sausage factory. You're not getting scripts 'til the night before, you're in first thing in the morning at 7:30 recording at 8, you're not getting home till 9:30 with 60 pages of dialogue. And in the end you think, 'this isn't what acting's about'. I think that the trouble with television at the moment is there are only so many times you can paper over the cracks before they show... certainly television is a fantastic medium, but it's all, I believe, about style over content."

What was the truth behind the internet porn scandal?

"The fact is that I was set up. I'd been having conversations with certain people while I was doing research, and was sucked into it by an undercover journalist. It was all a scam. But at the end of the day I think 'well, I shouldn't have been doing that in the first place!'"

So you do look back with regret?

"I was an absolute stupid fool. It could have ruined my entire relationship with my wife and family, but luckily I've got a wonderful wife and kids - it's been difficult for them, but basically I've got the vanity of a stupid old man. Because I'm well known and newspaper fodder, it's hard. I was advised that just working in an office, I could have got away with it for 20 years! It's not something you should be doing. In the end, it becomes like a drug, like cigarettes or gambling. As a warning to other people, the internet is just a drug. You start off playing stupid freecell or cards, and then you start using it for research, and you're using it all the time, and you're like 'let's find a bit of background about this'. You type in something innocently and it comes up with all sorts of things. I worked with a wonderful girl in theatre who went on to be a big name in Star Trek, and my boys looked her up and suddenly I was like 'don't press that one!' because I'd read the small print - I'd been in that situation before, when you're doing research and you're led down a path you don't want to be in."

The legacy of Dirty Den lives on - where do you go from here?

"I'm doing a tour next year, and also another book to be written about how not to write a book! It's about what to reveal and what not to reveal. I'm doing it half-heartedly, but, like anything else, actors who are successful write books about anecdotes. That's an easy way of writing a book, but there's also a way of writing a book, whether it's in the third person, first person or second person, and saying 'this is not how to write a book', and next time I'll do it differently."

You've landed a part in The Bill haven't you?

"I was supposed to play a character in The Bill for a three-parter, but I said 'I'm tied down to all these book signings'. It was impossible to work round the dates. I'm playing some guy that's, believe it or not, an ex-con, out on home leave and he gets mixed up on something and he's out looking for a kid that he's told the father he'd look out for. It's a very nice episode. I've done The Bill before. It's only down the road, it's very handy for me. They're nice people, and it's a fun thing for me to do. I'm not doing a James Bond, but it's nice to get your face back on telly."

Do you have any remaining and unresolved ambitions?

"Yeah, I'd like to do a cowboy. There aren't many Red Indians in Wimbledon. I'd love to do a cowboy or a war film, but I'm quite happy... Also, I've done non-stop theatre since I left EastEnders the second time and I actually enjoy that, because it's what you come into the business for. I've done two tours of 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt', the Jeffrey Archer play, and this year a thing called 'The Decorator'. It's far more rewarding and fulfilling because you get immediate response from the audience.

 

ISBN 1-85725-216-0

Publication Date 18 October 2006

Binding Hardback RRP £18.99

To buy this book call +44 (0)1752 202301