A Rake’s Progress Through the Rolodex

‘Mr Internet TV: The Ego and the Id’By John BentleySelf-Published, 516 pagesJohn Bentley might just rank among the most famous British entrepreneurs you have never heard of. A movie mogul at 30, he went on to pioneer internet television. Branded by the media in the Seventies as Britain’s “number one asset stripper,” he became a poster boy for the unacceptable face of capitalism and was a regular fixture in Nigel Dempster’s society column dubbed “Pretty Boy Bentley.”“Blow your own trumpet,” a Harvard professor once told him. “Nobody else will.” It is advice Mr. Bentley, now 86, puts to good effect in this rumbustious memoir which chronicles his playboy antics and his encounters with the rich and famous.It is full of tales of derring-do — he travelled overland through Asia in a Morris Minor and was once arrested on suspicion of being Lord Lucan — and derring-don’t. Much to his regret he turned down the chance to finance the musical “Cats” and the films “Grease” and Saturday Night Fever.” He describes his boardroom battles with as much relish as his bedroom trysts and the book contains some colorful vignettes. During his movie mogul years when he oversaw the production of “Don’t Look Now” and “The Wicker Man,” Lord Goodman, the chair of British Lion, would hold board meetings in his bed in a dressing gown, citing fatigue. Far from being fatigued Bentley beds countesses, heiresses, and even his own secretaries, and describes open house weekends at Victor Lownes’s Playboy mansion, swaps girlfriends with Jack Nicholson and enjoys the hospitality of Adnan Khashoggi.Cited by Jackie Collins as among the world’s sexiest men, he rebuffs the advances of Princess Margaret. “She was trouble with a capital T,” he writes. “The thought of bedding Margot while addressing her as Her Royal Highness was comical. Would it be poor etiquette to withdraw without permission?”He enjoyed a comfortable childhood growing up in Hove where his parents’ Irish maid would put on lipstick to answer the phone. An only child born out of wedlock to a woman 40 years younger than his insurance broker father, his life was always destined to be unconventional. After Harrow school where he told the headmaster his ambition was to be rich, he started working in the city as a messenger boy at 17. His wish was soon granted.Mr. Bentley patented a design for the disposable baby milk bottle and opened the first video rental outfit in the UK before dabbling in satellite and then internet TV. Despite the bravura his book is tinged with sadness and he paid an emotional cost for all his gallivanting. His first wife Dodie, mother of his two children, ran off with an Italian lawyer she met on holiday. He did not speak to her for 30 years and he was banned from her funeral. His second marriage to Kitty Percy, the cousin of the Duke of Northumberland, was almost over before it began as she resumed her heroin habit and betrayed him on honeymoon. In 1975, actress Viviane Ventura successfully brought a paternity suit again him which established he was the biological father of her daughter, Sheherazade Goldsmith, the ex-wife of Zac Goldsmith. Sheherazade rarely saw him growing up and he laments he has not heard from her for over a decade. His name-dropping can be comically cack-handed. His father has blue eyes as intense in color as movie actor Paul Newman, who I was later to meet.” The book is bracingly unwoke (‘Society needs to restore the birch for delinquent youths’) and his defense of friends like Roman Polanski (“many girls, past or present, will quickly drop their knickers to be in a movie”) and David Hamilton reminds you that he belongs to a different era.The book could have greatly benefited from a sharp editor. It is peppered with schoolboy errors (Nehru was never president of India), spelling mistakes, and an abundance of exclamation marks. He even misquotes the Queen, heaven forfend. “Recollections may vary,” is what Her Majesty said, not “differ” as Bentley has it. But nuance was never Bentley’s forte. He is brash and braggadocious, and his self-published memoirs are a fitting tribute to a monumentally flawed ego.

A Rake’s Progress Through the Rolodex

A Rake’s Progress Through the Rolodex

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