On her death bed, her daughter finally asked her about it. There was always speculation about the relationship between her mother and Smithy. He said: ‘Gina, please let me – I’ll wear a dress’, and I said: ‘Darling, I can’t – it’s women-only.’” He wanted to come into the club but I wouldn’t let him. “And I was, like: ‘You mean, you knew Mick Jagger?’ And she said: ‘Oh yes, and he was always so kind and respectful. “And my mum would be outside, taking deliveries, doing the laundry or whatever, and she said that he used to stop and talk quite often. He lived in Cheyne Walk, and would pass by the Gateways to get to the King’s Road. The two Ginas were watching television together when Mick Jagger appeared and Gina Snr asked for the remote to turn the volume up, saying: “Oh, it’s Mick – such a lovely boy.” In her mother’s final three weeks, there were a few astonishing revelations. Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. “I think I then said: ‘Does Dad know?’ And she said: ‘He started it! It’s his club!’” “I said: ‘What?’ And she said: ‘Lesbians! You know, women with women.’ So I was, like: ‘Really? Really?’” You do know what the club is, don’t you?’ I said: ‘What do you mean?It’s a club,’ and she said: ‘It’s a lesbian club, Gina.’ She said: ‘I want to talk to you about something because you’re going to hear about this at school. “It was Sunday lunchtime and my mother and I were washing up after lunch. She was 13 when she discovered for the first time about the club’s clientele and purpose. I could say what I wanted as well.”Įven as small children, she and her friends helped with jobs for the club: counting threepenny bits and sixpences from the till for the cigarette and fruit machines, and wiping down bottles of tonic water that were stored in the garage. There was a lot more conversation, and I had a lot more access to my parents than my friends did to theirs.
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“I was glad to go home to the laughter and fun. There’d be this ghastly father who was a boring old fart and a mother who was terribly uptight,” she recalls. “When I went to other people’s houses I would find them extraordinarily suffocating and conventional. But Gina was aware that her family was more fun than her friends’ families, and if most of the people who visited were pairs of women friends, this seemed perfectly normal. The decor was monochrome: “My mother was never into chintz.” Bedtimes were strict meals were served at the same hour every day homework was not to be shirked a neighbour would take her to church every Sunday. There was no flamboyant atmosphere of bohemian chaos. He explained to Gina that it was in recognition of the kindness shown to him in New York as an illegal immigrant when he had been offered safe harbour by a black woman, and then a Jewish family. As well as her parents, Smithy had been invited to move in by Ted shortly after his daughter’s fourth birthday. Growing up, she says she had no idea of what sort of club her parents ran.įamily home life in the leafy mock-Tudor suburbia of Isleworth, West London, was unusual … but not to her.
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I first met Gina Jnr (as she was never called) in Bristol in 1975 when she stood out as someone striking in a wide-striped black-and-gold form-fitting men’s suit with a Louise Brooks bob.
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After Ted’s death in 1979, Gina kept the club running but its last night was in 1985. They turned it into a women-only venue in 1967. Ted married an Italian actress, Gina Cerrato, in 1953 (they had a daughter, also named Gina, a year later) and the couple ran the club with Gina’s right-hand woman, Smithy, a former member of the US Air Force from California. The lease had been won in a bet at a broadcast boxing event at the Dorchester hotel by course bookie Ted Ware in 1943, and initially he offered it as a hang-out to a group of his lesbian pals who had been kicked out of their old Soho haunt the Bag O’ Nails pub after new owners took over and banned them. The longest-running lesbian club of all-time – the one whose actual clientele appeared in the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George the one where Mick Jagger tried to talk the owner into letting him crash in a frock the one that was a sanctuary to every class and sort of woman, from well-known figures such as the writer Patricia Highsmith and the artist Maggi Hambling (then an art student) to swimming-pool attendants at the Tooting Bec lido – has been given a new lease of life in the first full-length documentary film to celebrate its history, and ensure that it is not erased.īehind a dull green door on the corner of King’s Road and Bramerton Street in Chelsea, down some rickety steps to the basement lay the dive, a former strip club.