| Tabloid revives memories of the 'Manacled Mormon' Errol Morris's documentary makes unlikely stars of a former Miss Wyoming and a Fleet Street gentlemanThe London film festival begins this week, and – though it's early days to start picking winners – I'm tempted to say that if the festival could somehow, like an American high school prom, crown a king and queen of the festival, these titles might go to Peter Tory, the diffident former diary journalist of the Daily Express, and Joyce McKinney, the 61-year-old former Miss Wyoming. They are the unlikely stars of Errol Morris's new documentary Tabloid, about the strange case of the sexually voracious American former beauty-queen McKinney and her brush with 1970s Fleet Street. It does not have the gravitas or chill of his recent films The Fog Of War and Standard Operating Procedure. But it's a fascinating insight into the pre-history of the celebrity industry: a lost world where newspapers, with buccaneering, freebooting journalists, and some serious money to spend, could make hay with juicy stories and make anti-stars of members of the public who didn't suspect the backlash of malice and spite that lay in wait for them. As a semi-willing sacrificial victim of the British tabloids, McKinney emerges as the missing link between Christine Keeler and Princess Diana.Before Facebook and Twitter, before Big Brother and SuBo, there was Joyce McKinney, a natural "reality" diva. She was a pretty, fun-loving beauty pageant star with a wild streak and a bubbly personality concealing an iron will. In 1977, she appears to have fallen impulsively in love with a heavy-set, unprepossessing fellow called Kirk Anderson: a Mormon. In the midst of their courtship, Anderson's disapproving church elders sent him away on a "mission" to a British branch in Ewell, Surrey. Gutsy, feisty McKinney hired a private investigator to discover his whereabouts and followed him to England, on a mission to "de-brainwash" her true love and bring him back to the States where they could be married. She planned to bring along an entourage of hired hands and besotted males to help her – McKinney claims she needed a lot of guys as bodyguards in case the Mormons threatened her. But did she actually need them to intimidate the hapless Anderson?In any event, McKinney showed up outside Anderson's church in Surrey with just one follower and chivvied, bullied and sweet-talked Anderson into coming with her in the car. She whisked him away to a cottage in Devon for three days of what she insisted was consensual sex, and claimed that to cure his impotence she consulted a demure book of instruction for newlyweds, which advised experimenting with bondage. Anderson pressed charges and McKinney found herself splattered all over the tabloids as the sultry temptress who sexually enslaved the "Manacled Mormon". And later, the tabloids discovered that her interest in bondage did not come from some prim manual. She'd had a secret Bettie-Page-style career in kinky soft porn.Morris interviews two likeable and charming figures. The first is McKinney herself. She is a garrulous woman who was fragile and vulnerable, yet scheming and manipulative, a very Diana-ish combination. She had an innate sense of showbusiness flair and a way of giving the papers great copy – but, like a Big Brother contestant, had no obvious talent to offer. In the dock, she was utterly unabashed and unafraid, and, although the experience brought her close to complete nervous breakdown, she brazened it out and skipped bail. I think it had something to do with her being American. A British woman, schooled in crippling self-consciousness and the depressing class system might have felt more keenly the nastiness of the situation. Either way, McKinney was closer to the tough Mandy Rice-Davies rather than the sensitive Christine Keeler.The other, quiet star of Tabloid is Tory, the Daily Express columnist who was tasked with looking after Joyce and squiring her about town in various uproarious wheezes dreamed up by his editor Peter McKay. Tory is raffish, amusing, elegant; he was quite clearly as dazzled by McKinney as everyone else, but bemused about her now. While the Daily Mirror insisted on nastily doing down McKinney by insisting on her soft-porn past (she had of course been adopted by a rival paper), Tory and the Express took McKinney's side with gallantry and humour and published photos of her dressed up as a nun.Tory's relationship with Joyce could be compared to Richard Kay's relationship with Princess Diana. Tory cheerfully describes her as "barking mad". ("We don't have that expression," says Morris. "You can have it!" returns Tory.) When McKinney describes her life as a prim young woman, running around with a "friend" who was a wild child into sex and drugs, well, the audience is entitled to wonder: who is this friend? Could McKinney perhaps have projected her self onto this shadowy figure?McKinney may possibly have had a mild, undiagnosed psychological condition, although some sections of the press had pushed her into extreme situations that would send anyone up the wall. But though she was wounded by her tussle with the papers, Joyce was not crushed, and bizarrely found herself in the papers much later in life when her dog was involved in pioneering cloning techniques. She retained her sense of humour, and so did Tory, who emerges as one of Fleet Street's gentlemen. I hope that Tory and McKinney can be reunited for the premiere of this highly entertaining film on Saturday night.London film festivalFestivalsNewspapers & magazinesPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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