Shirley Conran needs her ass kicked for letting ABC fuck up the book and miniseries.
If you are a 70s or 80s kid, you know the questioned phrase “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” made popular by the novel and subsequent miniseries Lace, which was so fucking popular in the 1980s that the television special Eunice actually told the ultimate spoiler answering that question. The late Shirley Conran showed her entire ass with the first novel, a trashy rich bitch fest following four friends throughout their lives trying to find their place in the world. Lace II, on the other hand, was chitterlings on rye crisp served with piss that spawned the flatulent phrase “Which one of you bastards is my father?”, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Now for those of you that ain’t hip, the series centers about four lifelong friends in a boarding school in Gstaad, Switzerland that are young and hot in the pants, which allegedly gets one of them knocked up. As best friends, they agree to hide the parentage of the child who becomes Lili, an adult softcore film star that had a tough upbringing after her mother was told she was killed alongside her parents during the Austria uprisings. Using her body after being abused and escaping prison and foster parent abuse, she’s spent her adult life amassing wealth to find out which one of the four friends below is her mother:
Jennifer “Pagan” Trelawney – The hotheaded British heiress to the Trelawney estate falls in love with Abdullah, the crown heir to Sydon.
Maxine Pascqual “La Comatessa” Chazalle – The hot to trot French sex tart whose youthful sexual adventures leads her to becoming a stuffy, stiff, provincial French countess.
Judy Jordan – The poor West Virginia girl that claws her way to following her own destiny amongst the feminist movement founding Verve! Magazine.
Kate Ryan – A rich American daughter who finds purpose as a journalist and helps Judy co-found Verve! Magazine.
Judy, of course, is revealed as the mother.
Lace II now enters the chat and it ain’t nothing like the miniseries. Just so you know going into it, Lace II ain’t shit. The miniseries was a betrayal to the fans and the novel is just a hysterectomy without anesthesia. It’s so much mess going on that most of it is unbelievable after the whirlwind that is the first novel.
Judy and Lili trying to have a mother and daughter relationship, albeit very awkwardly because both of them got side dick problems. Lili is mourning the death of her financier Jo, and is seeing Simon, a dude on the down low. Judy is unsatisfied playing the heavy mistress role when her longtime married lover Griffin goes through a divorce that his wife facilitates and expects her to play the cheated on wife. Pagan is dealing with sobriety in a sexless marriage after her husband Christopher has a heart attack and can’t fuck apparently, anymore because of it. Maxine catches her husband Charles in bed with his secretary, and under pressure from his side piece of ass, asks for a divorce he doesn’t want. Kate just wants out of the magazine to run off and document rebels fighting somewhere in the East to live out being Walter Cronkite.
You know, first world rich bitch problems.
While all that shit goes on, Lili gets kidnapped. Only we don’t really focus on that because everybody else’s problems before the kidnapping take precedent, which is 90% focus of the novel and the kidnapping is a fart that is only a thought once the smell hits.
Judy is about to lose the magazine because they printed Lili’s account of being raped by a high influential DC Senator, who is suing the shit out of her. Kate’s just fucking gone, enjoying being harassed and intimidated covering the civil war as a real journalist (and I don’t even remember the country because that’s how irrelevant that entire plot is to the story). That’s a sad cry for her character considering she’s in 90% of Lace while Judy is all but a extra special co-star in it.
Pagan’s husband Christopher, the one that was giving her the good dick until his heart attack, dies in a fucked up accident, leaving her back to drinking, depression, and neglecting the kids they had together. Maxine’s marriage to Charles de Chazalle is falling apart after three kids and his incessant infidelities that she is hell bent on showing her husband how her pussy is fire. This leads he rback to her first lover Pierre.
Now remember the part about Lili being kidnapped? Okay, well the kidnapper is sending ransom notes saying Lili’s father has to pay the ransom. Judy done stuck to a lie that the father got killed in battle via Vietnam, then has a breakdown to her secretary out of the blue instead of Kate, Maxine, or Pagan half ass looking for Lili. Now from Lace we know she was raped and lost her virginity in said rape to Abdullah. Then we find out not only did she fuck Nick, but also Curtis and Bobby – two fucking characters NEVER MENTIONED in the original novel, so this is news to us, and Curtis, who was the die hard love of her life and apparently ran off to marry Debra and secretly sent money to help her with Lili made her run into the arms of Bobby, a terrible poker player that ran off to be a blues singer in Europe. She told both of them they were Lili’s father, so they could chip in on the money she had to pay the foster parents. The kidnapper, of course, doesn’t know that story.
Now while Judy is running around playing Scooby Doo, Lili gets from up under Simon and starts fucking around with Gregg Eagleton, who is a race car driver and obsessed about races. Pagan hooks back up with Abdullah, whom apparently she never lost her virginity to and finally fucks him the first time on a pool table during a IRA bombing of their social club. And yippee, he wants to marry the bitch he’s been lusting after since he was nineteen and after raping her friend. Maxine and Charles have reconciled, mostly because Judy had time to talk some sense into him in a fucking kidnapping and he’s a horn dog wanting that snapping Maxine pussy. Whooptie fucking doo there. Kate’s still in the jungle somewhere. All of them meet in Istanbul, which Pagan playing Velma discovers that Tony, Judy’s wayward prodigy, took a private conversation she had with her partner out of context and kidnapped Lili so Judy would have the cash to save the magazine, but it’s went terribly wrong. In the most unbelievable negotiation imaginable, Judy and Lili talk themselves out of his clutches and into the local police sniper sight where he’s gunned down like Chuck Norris taking out Iranians. And of course, it ends on a real cheezy, “Mommy saved me, she really did come for me” Vista Valley PTA bullshit conclusion that just totally ignores how horrible and selfish everybody is in this world.
I have no idea how do you take a guilty pleasure like Lace and turn it into this monstrosity. First off, Conran just made it damn near an afterthought the entire Abdullah raped Judy baby out with the bathwater in Lace II, with Judy finally telling Pagan, Maxine guessing it, and Judy telling Pagan to keep on seeing Abdullah. Crazy right, considering Lili fucked Abdullah for an entire year in Lace, which she acknowledges but feels like he’s suffered enough so Lili shouldn’t know. Then Conran tried to rope sympathy for Abdullah since now he’s the good guy and non-rapey in his older age by rehashing Abdullah killing his wife and only heir in a helicopter crash (even though it was the wife’s fault in Lace what happened), and most of his time in the sequel is fighting off communists trying to turn his country into an narco fanatic terrorist state, which he is happy to forget about if he can beat the brakes off Pagan. Oh, did I mention Abdullah is never referenced or heard from again once Judy, Tom, Gregg, and Pagan go looking for Lili? It’s like he became the kid from Family Matters and just went up the stairs and never came back.
The only part worth a damn was Maxine get it in with Pierre again, because in Lace they were really sexually suited for each other much better than she was with Charles. I was happy to see that she could turn the tables on both of them this go around. I just didn’t like that Conran made her so sexually inexperienced in this novel. Maxine was the one that was enjoying sex the most when all of them became active, and she was definitely having orgasms before her friends discovered them. That wasn’t enough to carry the book because Maxime’s sexual timidness felt like a bitch slap to turn her damn near into Anita Bryant.
Conran’s dead and gone now, and copies of this book should cover her casket as a reminder that just because ABC offers you a shit ton of money to make a sequel they can milk doesn’t mean you should.
