FELIX Dennis, the piratical publishing tycoon, is one of Britain's richest men, with a fortune of £750m. He inherited a marmalade cat from David Bowie when he bought his house in Mustique. Earlier this year, he confessed to killing a man by shoving him off a cliff, but now denies this took place, saying he made the claim during an interview while the worse for drink.
To these disparate facts I should add that Dennis, 61, is a published poet, that he is serious and passionate about writing, and that he is touring Britain, performing to audiences lured by the promise of an evening during which the wine, if not the
verse, is free. Since he embarked upon these readings in 2002, around 20,000 glasses of superior plonk have been sunk.
Dennis arrives in Edinburgh by helicopter and with a retinue that includes two PAs, two PRs, a chauffeur and a sommelier. It is a dreich Thursday, and yet by 6.45pm there's a large queue outside Jongleurs. I ask the sommelier, Paddy Partridge, a young man with Rupert Everett's voice and Rupert Brooke's hair, whether the crowds are drawn by literature or liquor. "A bit of both," he says. "There are dedicated Felix Dennis fans mouthing the poetry as he reads it, but there are also, clearly, those who have come for a free piss-up. In Manchester, a few got so outrageously drunk, they had to be escorted from the building. One man was shouting during the reading and trying to chat up someone else's wife."
A few minutes before showtime, I find a seat and a drink – a fantastic Hendrix-purple claret – and get talking to a couple just along the row. James and Marta Aitken are big fans of Dennis's book, How To Get Rich, and have found his advice useful in their own business, Cashel Travel. Earlier this year they organised a birthday party at Culzean Castle for a Ukrainian oligarch who marked the occasion by staging a mock beheading of his missus.
At just after 8pm, the room darkens and a man called Toby bounds on to the stage. "Ladies and gentlemen," he says, "please welcome one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poets of recent times – Felix Dennis!"
Dennis ambles on, a sight to behold in peach shirt and mustard waistcoat, its silk backing the browny-gold of B&H packs. His hair is wild and grey, his stomach bulges like an antique globe, and he peers over the top of his tortoiseshell specs with a look of mischief and glee. He's Moses meets Midas with a side order of Mephistopheles. "Thank you all for coming on a cold autumn night," he says. "I'm sure the wine had nothing to do with it. Cheers!"
Everyone yells, "Cheers!" Someone shouts, "Slainté!" Dennis then spends a couple of hours reading, mostly from his new collection, Homeless In My Heart, which includes works addressing his past use of prostitutes and addiction to crack cocaine. Despite the sometimes lurid content, his poetry is old-fashioned, cleaving fanatically to strict rules of form and meter; he is a dactyl terror, an iambic pentathlete who writes for four hours each day and has more than 1,000 poems to his name.
The rhymes spout and gout from the crater of his brain, and we hear around 40 of them tonight. There are sad sonnets, comic verses and political shtick. In an aside, he even tackles Scottish nationalism. "You'll be on yer own soon, and God bless ya," he says in his best Cockney, raising a glass. "Make those English bastards pay fer all the oil."
Backstage during the interval, I discover Dennis secreting himself behind a curtain while flouting the smoking ban with a fly Silk Cut. Surprisingly, he gets nervous before performances. "I am on first-name terms with every single butterfly that resides within my tummy. But when I'm out there, and I've got the crowd by the throat, as I do tonight, then it's fine."
He stubs out his fag in a portable ashtray and waves a fist at the smoke alarm. "Don't go off, you bugger!"
Dennis credits poetry with keeping him alive. By the time he quit in 1998, his drug addiction had become so advanced that he was commissioning glass blowers to make crack pipes to his exact specifications. A year later, he began to write verse, "and I just didn't have time to go out and misbehave any more. So I think poetry saved my life. You can only go on the way I went on for so long and then you're dead."
I ask about the Oz trial. Dennis, who now owns a stable of 50 magazines, including Viz, Bizarre, Fortean Times and Maxim, was one of the editors of the counterculture mag Oz. In 1971, along with colleagues Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, he was prosecuted for obscenity at the Old Bailey.
Justice Michael Argyle said in his sentencing that as Dennis was "very much less intelligent" than his co-defendants he would receive a shorter prison sentence. Journalists often theorise that this remark was the barb that spurred Dennis on to make his fortune, but he says now that this simply isn't true. He was already well on his way to being an entrepreneur, but the trial taught him that "the only way to protect yourself in Britain was to have money". He seems, if anything, to feel sorry for the late judge – "idiotic not malicious" – and says he has planted a forest in his name.
Back for the second half, Dennis struts the stage like a swaggering sorcerer, sweat rolling from his forehead to his beard. He has poems about Hitler and hookers. He calls for the legalisation of all drugs, says that "unnecessary cosmetic surgery is a pestilence in this world", makes a joke about Peter Mandelson, and a hymn of the "poached-egg breasts" of a girl he once knew but whose name now escapes him.
He gives an encore, receives a standing ovation and leaves the stage, finally, offering autographs. "I'll sign anything you like," he says, "except cheques and IOUs." And with that, the wizard of Oz goes back behind his curtain.
