New York - The one-page letter, titled simply “CONTRACT”, was typed out and faxed one evening in April, 1981, from a penniless, twice-divorced teacher to a wealthy, married businessman.
The pair were having an affair, but now, she made it clear, she wanted to set out ground rules for their relationship.
She would, she wrote, perform “mistress services” for him, becoming his “sexual property” and providing “companionship” unless she was “indisposed or travelling”.
As long as their bizarre agreement lasted, she would provide “all sexual acts as requested, with suspension of historical, emotional, psychological disclaimers”.
In return, he would “compensate” her handsomely, with “tasteful accommodations to her liking, together with expenses accrued in the normal course of her activities”. He would also agree to her bizarre stipulation that she should be allowed to record all their conversations.
And so was set in motion an outlandish literary venture, which will soon be dramatised on the London stage.
The book that grew out of the affair, The Mistress Contract - A Memoir By She And He, was quietly published in the US in 2011, with its authors remaining resolutely anonymous. The book’s publishers confirm the couple - she is now 88 and he is 93 - are still together, talking to each other every day while living in separate homes in the same city on the West Coast of the US.
Their book, which will be published in the UK in November, will form the basis of a new play by Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplays for the film The Iron Lady and the BBC series The Hour.
It opens in January at the Royal Court Theatre as part of Vicky Featherstone’s inaugural season as its first female artistic director. She has described the script as “extraordinary”, while publishers insist it will challenge the way we see our relations with the opposite sex.
But is any of it actually true? Hannah Westland, of the book’s UK publishers Serpent’s Tail, admits they only have the guarantee of its American publisher, Fred Ramey.
He tells me that he bought the book after its female co-author faxed the contract made between the lovers - as well as a brief excerpt - to him out of the blue.
He has since met the couple, who transcribed the tapes of their conversations after recently “rediscovering” them, and is “confident they didn’t make it up”.
Sceptics point out that their cerebral conversations - drowning in pretentious, literary allusions - are unnaturally stilted and detached.
Ramey counters that these are “the voices of educated people of a previous generation”. He says he’s not sure why they went public with a book containing their most intimate conversations, but says their “contract” fires intense debate: “Is this love, or something else? Was hers a feminist act, or an act of submission?”
Certainly, it seems to be incredibly regressive for a woman - never mind a feminist - to celebrate being paid to be a kept woman. Indeed, some will say there is a word for a female who effectively took money in exchange for sex.
But the couple in question would argue they’re simply being honest in admitting they both got what they wanted from the contract.
What’s troubling is that Ramey withholds even the most basic biographical information about them - insisting they bound him contractually to protect their anonymity. Should this ring alarm bells, given that the book world is now riven with hoaxing scandals?
From the recently exposed World War II fantasies of would-be special forces assassin Joe Corry, to a string of phoney Holocaust memoirs, publishers have been caught out suspending their critical faculties in a desperate attempt to sell books in a dwindling market.
So what are we to make of the couple whose erotic life we are about to hear so much about?
The publishers describe the woman as a “highly educated, intelligent woman with a history of involvement in the feminist movement”. He, meanwhile, is a ‘practical man’ whose attraction to her has not diminished since they first met as post-graduates in the Fifties.
They were part of the same group of academic friends, and were romantically involved even then. But they moved apart when her then husband transferred to another university.
The man in question also married and moved on, starting his own business. When they met again, nearly 20 years later, she had long finished the second of two unhappy marriages.
Their affair began in the late Seventies, and they saw each other regularly - perhaps two or three times a month. She taught at a primary school, while he lived the life of the big businessman several states away, attending board meetings and making major investment decisions.
Enlightened feminist that she was, she was deadly serious about the contract - indeed, it was she who suggested it. Almost 15 years after her second marriage had ended in legal battles and ugly recriminations, she wanted the stability that a wealthy man could provide. She felt the contract gave her a “sense of security” she hadn’t known, even when she was married. He, in turn, he realised he was now committed to her in ways he hadn’t previously considered.
He bought a house in the hills where they could meet in privacy - the first of several properties he would provide for her.
They claim that they started recording their conversations one Saturday after buying a tape recorder that could fit in her purse. The conversations over the years spanned all the locations one would expect of adulterous couples - the bedroom, restaurants, the car, conversations over the telephone as well as holiday destinations such as Honolulu in Hawaii.
And what do a pair of contractually bound adulterers talk about? Mainly, according to this book, they discuss relations between men and women - and with a candour that offers a penetrating and, at times uncomfortable, insight into the different ways the two sexes think.
It is all, admittedly, on a rather higher academic plain than the kind of chat you might find between the protagonists in Fifty Shades Of Grey. In their first recorded conversation - on the telephone - she confides she has been reading The Joy Of Sex, the controversial and highly explicit Seventies sex manual by British scientist Alex Comfort.
It has given her a few ideas in her new paid role as sexual servant. “I have the terrible feeling reading it that you have been underprivileged and that I must do something about it,” she tells him. “The woman is supposed to be a lecher and a temptress. I’ve tried to puzzle out why I never have been.”
They agree she should try to be more creative in her sexual wiles.
When they talk about sex, they invariably end up arguing about the differences between men and women. Why is she so reluctant to tell him what she likes and doesn’t like in bed? he asks. “You’ve looked at me as a source of pleasure, and when I didn’t give it to you, you put me down as a clod, insensitive,” he complains.
But he is an insensitive clod. She often has to stand her ground against a lover who, for all his claims to be a sensitive man, is a typically pompous and over-bearing alpha male. Recalling their early days, he says she wanted “companionship, with breakfast, long walks, a sense of intimacy”. He says he just wanted sex.
In the book, he argues that once the contract is in place, the situation is much better because both have something to offer that the other wants.
“Now, [in exchange] for sex, I bring financial rewards, a sense of involvement with the external world and maybe some sort of excitement.”
Most wives would reach for the knife drawer over such a patronising remark, but a mistress under contract doesn’t have that option.
Instead, she laughs it off, just as she does his response to her admission that she didn’t want to have sex with her husband during the five years she was having their three children.
If it had been him, says her lover, he would have left her. He’s a man, he explains grandly, who in his 30s had to have sex five times a day or go mad.
As for his professed sensitivity, it’s barely evident in his response to her comment that her mother worked hard to bring her up.
“Taking care of two kids is hardly a full day’s labour,” he intones. “No female should be a deadbeat, supported human being.”
Which makes you wonder why he is happy to finance a mistress.
For all their supposed honesty, the couple hardly ever mention their children - she has three, he has one. Perhaps that’s one aspect of an adulterous relationship that is too uncomfortable to dwell on.
And for all his professions of love and commitment, she still worries she might lose him to another woman as age takes its toll on her. That’s surely the danger that always hangs over any mistress.
She tells him she is frustrated at feeling she doesn’t meet his standards as a “sexy lady”. He insists he doesn’t want anyone else, and - we now know - he meant it.
But why on earth did they agree to make this contract in the first place? For her, it was just “so much fun” to give up all her old freedoms and her feminist views, and to be paid for something that she previously did out of love.
As for him, he says he has more money than he knows what to do with, and doesn’t mind she’s expensive: he was, he admits, bowled over by the “sheer genius” and “audacity” of her contract. “I thought it was the greatest offer I’d ever received.”
So we are encouraged to accept that a sex contract between a married man and his mistress really can fulfil them both. Whether that really was the case - or indeed whether their story is true - is another matter. - Daily Mail