Free Please Let It Stop by Jacqueline Gold Page A

many businesses can justify having a troupe of dancers, but we can. One of the joys of a company like Ann Summers is that there are so many opportunities for innovative marketing. The idea of having a Roadshow originated in 1987 when one of our party organisers created a fashion show with a few girls and guys she knew. Wearing Ann Summers outfits, they danced in nightclubs while she canvassed both party bookings and recruits. One night some of my area managers invited me along to one of these shows, in Uxbridge, Middlesex. While the dancers were all pretty sexy, one of the male dancers caught my eye – he was just gorgeous with an amazing body. His name was Ben. He was twenty-four, four years my junior and once we got talking I found out he was confident and intelligent, which just made him even more attractive. In all, he was quite a package and I really fancied him.
    By 1988 the dancers had been reinvented as the Ann Summers Xperience and were playing to delighted audiences abroad as well as in Britain. Working on the premise that you can never have too much of a good thing, we launched another dance group, Xcalibur, five years later which Ben would eventually join. While Xperience had both girls and guys who danced raunchily, Xcalibur was an all-male group, more along the lines of the Chippendales. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to find five men who looked delicious, could dance and were happy removing their clothes. Never being one to shirk a challenge, I searched high and low, initially seeking out an existing dance group with a view to training them. That didn’t work so we were at a bit of a loss, when Vanessa and I had a chance meeting with a blond Adonis called Steve Golding. Of all the places in the world, we found him in a wine bar in Croydon! He had modelled but was finding times a bit lean and was definitely open to new things. A meeting was set and that was how, one very pleasant day, Steve turned up at our offices with four tanned, trim and gorgeous men. Now all we had to do was turn them into a hot and disciplined dance troupe. It took a bit of work but they became a huge success – it’s amazing the effect a group of men in G-strings can have on an audience of women. Unfortunately, the women can get a bit overexcited, with some of the dancers suffering scratches and bruising, as well as having their underwear torn off in the heat of the moment.
    Tony and I were still in the throes of separation when I met Ben so for a while things were just kept simmering at friendship level, but there was no doubt we were both very interested. I went to watch more shows, which meant we began to see each other more often, until a few months later in 1988 we began a relationship. It was Ben who made the first move, something which appeals to a certain old-fashioned side of me. He was an electrician by day and a dancer by night and we got on very well, even though his lifestyle was very different to mine. We became inseparable very quickly – within the limits of my work schedule and his shows! We went out a lot to nightclubs and parties; we went on holidays and we led a very busy social life. It was a complete contrast to my previous relationships.
    Ben represented a new, expansive phase in my life. When he came along it was as if he’d tapped into something that was already in me: a desire to get out there and discover the world, to meet new people and open my mind to new experiences. I was already going places as a young businesswoman and now I wanted to do the same in my personal life. When we were together it was always fun and incredibly exciting. So was the sex: when we first met we were having sex up to six times a day. I hadn’t had anything like that and I soon discovered why. Apparently before he met me he’d been taking steroids to give him the body he wanted. But they had also impaired his sex drive. By the time we got together he’d started taking testosterone tocounteract their effect. He went