Mr. Rose's Lonely-Hearts Club Band
Stacy Innerst, Post-GazetteClick photo for larger image.
The Morning File is a fan of the London Review of Books, and not because we like London, reviews or books. It's the personal ads. The magazine has achieved notoriety for oddball personals that run alongside the highest-of-brow academic pieces. David Rose, the advertising director, started things off in 1998 with the goal of getting something other than the earnest, standard-issue personals. What he got was certainly planets removed from SWFs looking for someone to share longs walk in the woods, etc. There began a flood of self-deprecating, darkly comic pleas from people "seemingly less keen on looking for love than perhaps working through some stage of therapy," as the Daily Post of Liverpool put it. The Morning File has shared some of these personals before. Now they've been compiled in a book, "My Name is Naughty Lola."
Just a cross-dressing pharmacist
The title was inspired by this ad: "They call me naughty Lola. Run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46)."
Some others from ananova.com:
"Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling around hospitals guessing the illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds."
"My ideal woman is a man. Sorry, mother."
"Not everyone appearing in this column is a deranged cross-dressing sociopath. Let me know if you find one, and I'll strangle him with my bra. Man, 56."
"Ploughing the loneliest furrow. Nineteen personal ads and counting. Only one reply. It was my mother telling me not to forget the bread on my way home. Man, 51."
"Mature gentleman, 62, aged well, noble grey looks, fit and active, sound mind and unfazed by the fickle demands of modern society seeks . . .damn it, I have to pee again."
"Slut in the kitchen, chef in the bedroom. Woman with mixed priorities (37) seeks man who can toss a good salad."
"Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite."
"Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth."
"My finger on the pulse of culture, my ear to the ground of philosophy, my hip in the medical waste bin of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Box no. 7648."
"To some, I am a world of temptation. To others, I'm just another cross-dressing pharmacist. Box no. 3661."
"My Name is Naughty Lola" comes out today in the U.K. and will eventually find its way to American book stores.
It's an art form
Victoria Coren, writing in The Observer (England):
"How do you find love? That is the question I have been asking myself, as I simultaneously flick through the lonely hearts column in the London Review of Books, and surf internet listings for people who enjoy S&M. This is not a personal quest, delighted though I'd be to meet a horsewhipping novelist. (I can picture him now: diffident, work-averse and tea-drinking by day; masterfully wielding the handcuffs by night. The little poppet.) No, I am just interested in the theory.
" 'They Call Me Naughty Lola' is a delicious read, stuffed with comically self-deprecating and very British encapsulations of personality. Whether or not these adverts attract lovers, I can't tell -- but they are so beautifully worded for the space, one wonders whether the primary motive isn't simply the literary challenge anyway."
How the pope came to be
There might not be a Pope Benedict XVI were it not for a lonely hearts column. During a visit to his family home in Bavaria this September, the Pope acknowledged that he never knew how his policeman father and cook mother met. He learned that his father Joseph Ratzinger placed this ad in a Catholic newspaper in 1920:
"Middle ranking civil servant, single, Catholic, 43-years-old, immaculate past, from the countryside, is seeking a good Catholic pure girl, who can cook well, and who can do all housework, who is also capable of sewing and a good homemaker in order to marry at the soonest opportunity. Personal fortune would be desirable but is not however a precondition."
The March 7 ad got no responses, so he placed it again on July 11. Maria Peintner replied, and they were married on Nov. 9. (No word on any personal fortune.) The London Mail said the pope was "touched" by the story, saying it reminded him of the words of Albert Schweitzer: "Coincidence is the pseudonym dear God chooses when he wants to remain incognito."
First Published: November 2, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
