Cooking ruined my marriages: Keith Floyd's only 'mistress' was his restaurant By Keith Floyd
Last updated at 9:15 AM on 15th September 2009
Witty, warm and with a genius for cooking equalled only by his fondness for a glass or five of wine, Keith Floyd was the first of a new breed of celebrity chef.
His death today - from a heart attack at the age of 65 - comes during the Daily Mail's serialisation of his irrepressible autobiography.
Yesterday, in the second extract, he explained how his TV career was born.
Today, he explains how his obsession with his restaurants meant that being a chef always came first - and why all four of his marriages ended in divorce. 
Ill-suited: Keith and third wife Shaunagh. A misunderstanding over his 50th birthday ended the marriage Don't ever go into the restaurant business. It kills marriages, it kills relationships, and it kills life. It kills everything. And I, the man with four ex-wives, should know.
Bear with me while I talk you through it. Strange though it may sound, I was a late starter on the romantic front: throughout my youth I suffered from severe acne, that most ancient form of contraception.
But my complexion was OK when I met Jesmond, my first wife, when I was 23.
She was a barmaid at one of my favourite pubs in Bristol, the Greyhound - dark-haired, charming and with a wit as dry as the Sahara sands. We went out for just a matter of months before deciding to get married.
Young - but so what? - we set about creating a mini-empire of restaurants in Bristol.
With Jesmond working tirelessly as a waitress, we scrabbled together the cash to open Floyd's Bistro, followed by Floyd's Restaurant and Floyd's Chop House.
The arty types of Bristol loved them. Every evening I'd open the door to find queues of people snaking along the pavement. Suddenly, in a small way, I was huge.
To add to this happy state of affairs, our son Patrick was born, in November 1968.
Becoming a father was the most exciting thing, but, thrilled as I was, I was completely fixated with my restaurants. Jesmond and Patrick occupied second and third places in my life.
It's a harsh statement for the average decent person to absorb, but anybody in this business will tell you that a restaurant is like a mistress, forever demanding. I was just obsessed by the restaurants and thought everybody else should be, too.
I have always fallen in love easily. And I have never entered a relationship which I didn't firmly believe could work out. I never expected any of my relationships to end in tears, and when they do I ask myself the question: 'When am I going to learn?'
I can't honestly remember what Jesmond and I started rowing about. Really I can't. But once our arguments had started they became more and more frequent and increasingly fierce.
Chances are you have been in a relationship that crumbles and you think, there's no going back. We were at that stage. I sold my restaurants at a loss, packed my bags and left.
So there I was, without a wife and without a job. You'll notice this becomes a bit of a theme with me, actually. It's remarkable how often my marriages and my restaurants seem to go down the pan at approximately the same time.
One morning, I climbed on to a boat and spent 18 months cruising round the Mediterranean. I wasn't thinking about the future at all. Moreover, I had vanished without thinking much about Patrick, a confession that sounds too cruel. I was on a voyage of utter selfishness.
As time went by, I would come to think of him all the time and then the nightmares started; nightmares that any absent parent might have about the safety of their child. But for the time being, I thought only of myself.
Keith with his second wife Julie who split up because of the chef's late night gambling and drinking Moving on ten years or so, and you'll find me back in Bristol with a new restaurant to my name and guess what? A new wife as well, my second.
Julie was a regular at the restaurant, a blonde, vivacious and witty woman about ten years younger than me. Our romance was of the whirlwind variety and when, just a few months into the relationship, I proposed, Julie said yes.
The breakdown of my marriage to Jesmond I attributed to the foolishness of youth. Now, in the early Eighties, I was approaching my 40s and had the wisdom of maturity from which to draw.
Our daughter, Poppy, was born shortly after Christmas 1983.
She was a great big baby and she was very red - that's why we called her Poppy. It just seemed to fit.
Alas, history was to repeat itself. Within a handful of years, though my TV career had by then taken off in some style, my relationship with Julie had fallen apart. We were filming in France - Saint-Malo, to be precise - when the divorce writ arrived.
My list of crimes went on for two pages. As I remember, it was gambling, whoring and drinking ad infinitum. It was terrible, absolutely terrible, and a little exaggerated, I have to say.
The whoring bit was nonsense. The late-night gambling and drinking may have seemed suspicious but I have never been unfaithful to any of my wives.
So those were Julie's problems with me. My problem was her mother, whose animosity towards me was intense.
She lived in Guernsey and wrote to Julie saying that I was a bigamist and had lied about being a pupil at Wellington School. I was not a bigamist and I had been a pupil at Wellington School.
I believe Julie, who didn't have a bad bone in her body, was heavily influenced by her mother. When Poppy was born, I took our baby by plane to Guernsey and arrived on the doorstep to introduce grandmother to her granddaughter.
'You're not coming in,' she said. A few hours later I was at the airport returning home, mystified.
Julie found a new man and together with Poppy they went to France to start a new life in Toulouse. I felt desperately unhappy. My attempts to create a home for my family had so far been spectacularly unsuccessful.
Convinced that my TV career was coming to an end, in 1989 I bought a pub in Devon, the Maltster's Arms, and converted it into a restaurant amusingly named - I thought - 'Floyd's Inn (Sometimes).'
Keith Floyd went on to become a celebrity chef - here he is in Spain in 1982 It had been a while since I'd had a new wife and it was here, in that pub, that I met my third, Shaunagh. Some 20 years younger than me, she was a blonde, very pretty, gentle woman from Dartmouth.
After the usual whirlwind romance that preceded all my marriages, we tied the knot in a register office in the early Nineties. It didn't take long for us both to realise we were ill-suited and had nothing in common.
The death knell of the marriage was probably my 50th birthday. I have always been sensitive about my birthday, ever since childhood.
Being born on December 28 meant that some people - certain mean uncles spring to mind - would buy me only one present for both Christmas and my birthday.
So this particular year, when I came downstairs, I was terribly hurt that neither she nor anyone else mentioned it. The morning progressed, and still nothing.
By lunchtime, I lost it. I kicked all the customers out of the pub - about 50 people as well as Shaunagh - and buggered off to Dartmouth, checking into the nearest hotel. I later found out that she had planned a surprise party for me for that evening.
Our brief marriage came to an end in 1993. How long were we married? I cannot tell you any more than 'not long'. Shaunagh eventually moved in with a gravedigger from Dartmouth.
There is not a day goes by when I don't reflect on the effect of my life upon my two children. I feel guilt, remorse - anger, even. When I lay so ill in hospital after collapsing in a drunken haze last year, as I described on Saturday, my son Patrick wrote a note to me in a day book kept by the ward staff.
It said simply: 'I love you very much and am proud to be a Floyd.'
I owe both him and my daughter Poppy so much. As I said, if it had not been for the devotion they showed me when I was so ill last year, sleeping by my hospital bed, holding my hands and willing me to pull through, I'm convinced I would not be telling you my story today.
Pictured here in 1987 - Floyd has always had charisma in the kitchen It may surprise you to learn - or perhaps it won't - that cooking was not my first choice of career. At 16, inspired by the movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire, I became a news reporter.
It was a short-lived episode, which I can take you through with speed.
To prepare myself for the interview at the Bristol Evening Post - God knows how I'd got one in the first place - I went out and bought a bow tie, the first of many.
To complete the image of a hack, I also bought a trilby. If my intention was to look a complete and utter wally then I certainly achieved it.
As a cub reporter I covered several stories in Bristol Crown Court, including a case involving an up-and-coming young actor named Peter O'Toole, then playing Hamlet at the city's Old Vic theatre.
He'd been nabbed for drink-driving and I can't for the life of me remember what happened to him, so I'll assume he was found not guilty.
I dashed back to write up the story. Once done, I handed the folios to my editor, a man named Richard Hawkins. 'Were there other reporters in the courtroom?' he asked. I told him there was only me. In other words, I had an exclusive.
Whereupon Richard ripped the pages in two and threw the pieces into his bin. My story was 'spiked', as they say. Well and truly killed.
Why? I don't know. Perhaps Richard had developed a soft spot for Peter from seeing him in the pub.
But by keeping my wonderful scoop out of the paper, he had certainly done the actor a favour. He was at that time being lined up to star in Lawrence Of Arabia, but had been told by studio bosses that if he found himself in trouble (even if he was not guilty) then he'd be out of the picture.
I might not have enjoyed watching my editor rip up my report, but I feel indebted to him for changing my life in a way that had nothing to do with newspapers.
A highly intelligent man, Richard was also a gastronome; he loved fine cuisine and one day took me and my notebook - I can't precisely recall why - to a restaurant called The Hole In The Wall, which was famous in Bath.
The sight that met my eyes there astonished me: a table laden with exotic hors d'oeuvres - mushrooms a la grecque, ratatouille, taramasalata, three kinds of pates and terrines, as well as roasted red peppers with chopped garlic. It was just amazing food that most British adults in the Sixties, let alone teenagers like me, would never have seen.
The Hole In The Wall was run by a wonderful, bearded man, George Perry-Smith, a former public school master. He looked biblical and indeed wouldn't have been out of place at the Last Supper (and his culinary skills would have made him a welcome addition).
I found him quite intimidating, but eventually plucked up the courage to ask him about the food he served. 'Where does all this knowledge come from?' I asked.
'Oh, quite simple, dear boy,' he said. 'Just read Elizabeth David,' naming the classic food writer who first brought the concept of Mediterranean food to Britain. It was a revelation.
My parents did not share my enthusiasm for the life of a hack. Dad, an engineer, would say: 'You've got ambitions beyond your capabilities.' And I dare say he was right.
Sadly, he never saw me make it on TV. He used to say: 'You ought to get a job at the Royal Mail. Earn £7 19s 6d a week and be a sensible person.'
But I think he would have been satisfied that the sacrifices he made to send me to a fee-paying public school, Wellington School in Somerset, had been repaid with my career in television. I think he would have very much appreciated that.
For my next career I was again inspired by a night at the cinema. I went to see Zulu, the true story of the depleted British Army regiment that fought a million or so Zulu warriors, and, as with The Day The Earth Caught Fire, I was foolishly taken by the whole business.
The following morning, I put on my bow tie, trilby and a trench coat and walked into the Army recruiting office. 'I want to be a soldier,' I announced. My parents were extremely proud.
As with journalism, I did not have the longest career in army history. I had a nervous breakdown in the second year of my three-year commission. All I can remember is that I had some sort of collapse and then I found myself in a military hospital in Germany.
From there, I was transported back to a psychiatric hospital on the South Coast of England, and later discharged - after being offered the chance to transfer to the Catering Corps - on the grounds that I was 'temperamentally unsuitable'.
By now, however, I had well and truly fallen in love with cooking and decided that was the career for me.
Dressed in my chukka boots, a three-piece suit and regimental tie, I marched into the Royal Hotel in Bristol and told the manager of my ambitions.
I was taken to the kitchens and introduced to the head chef, but throughout our brief chat he had a look of disdain in his eyes, his body language sending out the message that he didn't really want a second lieutenant, public-school-educated chap anywhere near his kitchen.
Eventually, he said: 'I'll tell you what. What is the difference between a waiter and a bucket of s***?'
This was a life-changing question and I knew it. I stood with my hands behind my back to show that I had no fear. And then I said: 'Sir, I think it's the bucket.'
It's always nice when you answer correctly, and chef was suitably impressed. But I still had a way to go before landing the job. My next feat, the second challenge, was to obey his command: 'Go and cook this beetroot.'
He handed me the vegetable and really wanted me to mess up. He thought I was going to peel it.
But because I had been brought up by my mum, a superb cook, I knew that you cook beetroot in its skin and peel it afterwards.
Which is exactly what I did. I was hired. The rest, as is so often said, is history.
• Extracted from Stirred But Not Shaken: The Autobiography by Keith Floyd, to be published by Sidgwick & Jackson on October 2
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. Sophie has boobs but hardly she hasn't got the brains.
