Slightly inebriated from the champagne she consumed the night before, Priscilla Tempest, the newly installed Press and Public Relations Officer at London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel scrambles up to the seventh floor. She stands aside as the lifeless body of international arms dealer Amir Abrahim is wheeled out of Suite 705. Hotel manager Clive Banville, anxious for answers, asks the hotel’s housekeeper if she noticed anything suspicious. Yes, the housekeeper replies, she saw someone rushing down the hall, someone who looked a lot like Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret.
Blimey. What the heck is going on at the Savoy? Royalty, secrets and scandal!
And so begins Prudence Emery’s tale of murder and intrigue at one of London’s most esteemed addresses. Released in Canada in 2021, Pru’s inaugural novel Death at the Savoy, co-written with fellow Canadian Ron Base, recently hit the American market. The audiobook is already out. Scandal at the Savoy, the second in the series, will be released in March 2023 and a third, Princess at the Savoy, is in the works. It’s quite an accomplishment for the gregarious Nanaimo-born octogenarian now living in Victoria.
“I’m 86 years old, right?” Pru exclaims. “So, it’s kind of a third career for me. Who knew at age 86 I could be doing this?”
Prudence knows the setting well. Hired in 1968 as the Savoy’s Press and Public Relations Officer, the author spent six years catering to the needs of the hotel’s illustrious guests: the Burtons, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Hope, Liza Minnelli, Noel Coward and others. Truth be told she never saw Princess Margaret fleeing a crime scene or anywhere else for that matter and, yes, the lead character, Priscilla Tempest, is patterned after Pru herself.
Prudence first documented her life at the Savoy in her 2020 memoir Nanaimo Girl, a breezy account of her life before and after her Savoy experience, including growing up as a rebellious young woman on Vancouver Island, partying in swinging London in the 1960s, and beginning in 1975, working as a freelance publicist for the international film industry.
Pru has had a rich and colourful life, but it’s her six years at the Savoy that attracted the attention of her writing partner, veteran journalist Ron Base. They first met decades ago when Prudence was a freelance publicist and Ron was writing movie reviews for Maclean’s and TV Guide. Pru’s job was to get columnists and their readers interested in upcoming releases.
“She had a budget to bring reporters in from newspapers and magazines,” says Ron. “She wanted somebody to interview Oliver Reed, so it was ‘Ron, get on a plane, come to Montreal and interview Oliver Reed.’ She got me to all kinds of movie sets.”
Eventually, the two lost touch. Ron became the Toronto Star’s full-time movie reviewer while Prudence continued promoting new releases. Years later, after Ron left the Star, he created his Sanibel Sunset Detective series, a collection of mystery novels which take place in and around Florida’s Sanibel Island. Intrigued by Pru’s entry into the memoir field, he picked up a copy of Nanaimo Girl.
“I was knocked out by the writing,” says Ron. “It turned out to be a rollicking, well-written memoir but what really knocked me out was the years she spent at the Savoy. And I’m thinking as I’m reading this, my God, this would make a terrific mystery.”
As the author of 13 mystery novels, Ron knew something about the genre.
“I got on the phone with her and said how would you like to write a mystery novel? You know about the Savoy, and I know something about Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. I can add that and off we went.”
Prudence was surprised but intrigued.
“My first thought was I know nothing about murder and mystery,” she says. “My first reaction was I don’t know how to do this and still I said yes, like all my jobs.”
She said yes to a lot of jobs. She admits she can be a bit impetuous, perhaps even reckless.
“My whole life has been a sheer lack of direction,” she says. “I had no plans at all. Every job I got I never applied for, things just happened for me.”
Like when she got a job at Montreal’s Expo 67 ushering VIPs around, whetting her appetite for public relations work.
“I kind of straddled public relations and Visitor Services.”
Or when she was approached by hotelier and Savoy Group managing director Hugh Wontner about a job at the hotel.
“[Mr. Wontner] said ‘What are your plans?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m going skiing in Bavaria, I’m meeting my friend Christine and then I’m going back to Montreal,’ and he said, ‘Would you care to become press and public relations officer at the Savoy?’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ There’s no way I would have walked into the Savoy and say I want to work here. I’d never even been to the Savoy.”
Or when she produced Hattie’s Heist, at age 77, a 20-minute comedy she wrote and co-financed.
“You know, I haven’t a clue. I just had the feeling I wanted to do it. The idea of old ladies robbing a bank appealed to me and so I wrote a short version, and the director extended it to a longer version. They were all very enthusiastic. It was great fun.”
Doing her own thing has come easily to the Nanaimo native. She was born into wealth and privilege and expected to follow convention. She didn’t.
“Daddy came from a very well-off family,” she says, and decorum was the name of the game.
“My parents sent me away a lot. When my sister was born, I was sent off to Victoria to live with another family, then again in Grade 6 to a Strathcona girls boarding school. I was away from the family environment more than I was in it.”
As a young girl, she was asked to sing in front of family friends.
“Daddy would always make me do things I didn’t want to do,” Prudence recalls. “He’d drag me off in my burgundy velvet dress with the lace collar and I’d have to sing at parties. He encouraged me to be an entertainer.”
She admits she was angry and resentful, but, in fact, performing for an audience was good training for the future.
“I like to make people laugh and I think that came from him wanting me to entertain.”
She says she was a brat at home, competing with her sister for attention and hanging out with her guy friends, Squarehead, Sunny and Rags. By the time she was sent off to yet another boarding school at 14, Crofton House in Vancouver this time, her rebellious streak was taking root.
“That’s why quite a few girls get sent to boarding school because they’re brats and the parents always hope that the school will smooth them out and turn them into young ladies.”
When asked if boarding school smoothed out the edges, Prudence laughs uproariously. “Let’s just say I knew how to use the correct knife and fork.”
Prudence not only learned proper etiquette but managed to turn a negative into a positive. Being brash, bold and fearless can be advantageous when trying to make an impression, and adopting a softer, carefree persona can open doors.
“I would say that’s right for a certain period in my life,” Prudence says.
It was the start of the swinging sixties and Prudence was studying commercial art in London. Initially, her father paid all her expenses but by year two, the money dried up and Pru had to leave art school and fend for herself.
“It was the best thing to happen to me,” she says. “I learned how to support myself. I was a barmaid and sometimes worked in the kitchen and I met lots of fascinating people.”
She held several casual jobs, kept up a social life, and by her own admission, “had a rollicking good time.”
Flamboyance is another trait that has served her well. Stickhandling publicity for Canadian and international movie productions after her time at the Savoy, a total of 120 in her career, meant cajoling, pleading and stroking the egos of high-priced stars. Meeting powerful personalities head on is not a job for the meek or timid.
“Some were dreams and some were awful,” she recalls. “The actors and the crew want to get on with their jobs, and there’s me dragging actors off to do interviews and a lot of them don’t like doing it,” she says. “That’s the business. You need a good sense of humour and the ability to get along with people.”
Prudence retired from the film business in 2009 and nine years later she wrote Nanaimo Girl, which brings us back to the birth of Death at the Savoy and her new career.
“It gave us a great opportunity to rekindle a friendship,” Ron says of the collaboration. “We spent lots and lots of hours on the phone talking about our various misadventures and people we knew. Occasionally, we even talked about the book,” he laughs.
They established a loose schedule – “it wasn’t like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It just went along,” says Pru – and because they lived in different cities, they communicated by e-mail.
“I did an outline and she played around with it a bit,” says Ron. “I sent her a couple of chapters, she would edit them, send them back again, and I’d re-work them.”
“I anglicized his writing, put in quotes and added characters,” says Prudence. “Mountbatten says something is ‘garbage’ and I changed it to ‘rubbish’ because the English always say rubbish. They wouldn’t say garbage. Ron is the nuts and bolts and I’m the champagne and caviar,” she adds.
Ron says he was initially nervous about working with another writer.
“That’s what I wondered about when we set out to do this because I had never done it before. I had always written alone. We came to pretty easy agreements on stuff. She’s very easy, she’s very sharp and she’s very intelligent. It turned out to be a joy with Pru. It really did. These novels require the two of us,” he says. “Without one, there is no other.”
Their collaboration extended beyond writing, too. Ron suggested she employ her movie-biz contacts to promote and distribute the book. Prudence continues the story.
“Knowing I worked on three films with Sophia Loren, Ron said why don’t you send it to Sophia? I said there’s no way Sophia’s going to endorse it. He said do it anyway, so I sent it to Eduardo Ponti, her son. His wife, Sasha Alexander, read it and phoned me to say could she option it and that’s how it got optioned for a film. My feeling is it would be a series.”
While the idea of turning the novel into a film or TV series is making the rounds, Ron and Prudence are finishing their third book in the series, Princess at the Savoy, with no end in sight to the collaboration.
Flush with success, Prudence recalls her girlhood mantra, a testament to carving your own path.
“I’m never going to get married. I’m just going to have lots of lovers and live a fabulous life painting and writing.”
And in a way, it came true.
“It did, didn’t it? Isn’t that amazing!”
SNAPSHOT
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give her?
“You could say [the 20-year-old] refuses to say follow your dreams because everybody says that. I’m pretty happy with what I did. My philosophy was to defy expectations and have a rip-roaring good time.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“I haven’t a clue. I’d go back to my life in London when I had this romance with a much older man. He was a journalist, and he wrote screenplays. He introduced me to my first film set. They were filming one of his stories. He also introduced me to parts of London I wouldn’t have known about.”
What are you grateful for?
“Laughter and life. I like to make people laugh. I used to say why take life seriously when you never get out of it alive? I did come from a slightly batty background but in the end, they were a generous and supportive family.”
What does success mean to you?
“Comfort, mentally and physically, and a huge range of friends. Being published is a miraculous surprise. There again, it was the sheer lack of direction. I never thought I’d be writing. People say I’m a writer. I find it hard to believe and I guess I have to accept it.”
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