William Donaldson

In the absence of a reliable biography we can only piece together the life of William Donaldson - creator of Henry Root, producer of Beyond the Fringe, novelist, compiler of "toilet books" and sometime Independent columnist - from a number of personal glimpses and his own account of it. His gifts for fiction, his personal fortifications and his theatrical ambitions both in and out of the theatre obscure much of the autobiographical data.

Charles William Donaldson, writer and producer: born Sunningdale, Berkshire 4 January 1935; married 1957 Sonia Avory (one son; marriage dissolved), 1968 Claire Gordon (marriage dissolved), 1986 Cherry Hatrick; died London 22 June 2005.

In the absence of a reliable biography we can only piece together the life of William Donaldson - creator of Henry Root, producer of Beyond the Fringe, novelist, compiler of "toilet books" and sometime Independent columnist - from a number of personal glimpses and his own account of it. His gifts for fiction, his personal fortifications and his theatrical ambitions both in and out of the theatre obscure much of the autobiographical data.

His father was the owner of a shipping line based in Glasgow but (or, as Willie would have said, so) he lived in Sunningdale. The house was large and subsequently turned into a country club. His father's only desire in life was to have a pleasure boat for himself, but he said he couldn't afford it. He turned to drink. This role model of ineffectual masculinity was a partial but powerful influence on Willie. His mother was a formidable woman of the period who felt equal to ringing up the First Sea Lord to delay her son's entry into National Service (it clashed with the season). The family had servants. The loyal gardener was fired, Willie asserted, for voting Labour after the Second World War.

He went to Winchester. He maintained Wykehamists were unbalanced by cleverness; either they were too clever or they had to live their lives eaten away by the knowledge they weren't clever enough. For participating in two separate games of cricket (he was fielding on the boundary between two games) he was caned by a prefect in the library. He never acquired a taste for it. From Winchester (after National Service with Julian Mitchell: they were to co-edit an Oxford and Cambridge quarterly, Gemini), he went to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Without possessing any significant intellectual ability himself, he greatly admired it in those who had. He instinctively inclined to what he called "the enormous seriousness" of F.R. Leavis and counted as second-rate those who preferred Trollope to Dickens. He never read fiction himself but kept to philosophy, without claiming to understand it. "I'm an intellectual groupie," he said; he made clear that meant he uncritically admired intellectuals. He remains the only diarist on the Mail on Sunday to have phoned Sir Karl Popper for a quote. As he was writing under the pseudonym of Henry Root, a wet fish merchant, this baffled Sir Karl as well as the readers of the Mail on Sunday.

His parents died while he was at Cambridge, leaving him £80,000. Had he bought the block of flats in Chelsea he was offered at the time he would have been worth £20m at the time of his death. Instead he went into theatrical production, financing the shows himself. His mannerly diffidence was not an asset in this line of work. "I found it easier to put on a playwright's work than to tell him I didn't like it," he said. This period of his life was the inspiration for J.P. Donleavy's 1979 novel Schultz, with the American director Philip Wiseman as the title character.

Donaldson was the only London producer not to go up to Edinburgh to see the comedy sensation of Beyond the Fringe. But (or so) he was chosen to be the producer to bring it to London. "I was the only producer considered to be incompetent and ineffectual enough," he claimed. "I wouldn't have the drive and energy to put in costumes and dancing girls." He paid the performers poorly, something they still remember.

At this time he had three of the most lucrative West End shows running at the same time. Shortly afterwards he went bankrupt and his aunt died leaving him another £80,000. The last show he put on was the subject of a blasphemy trial. This sold a record number of tickets but (or so), in the manner of The Producers, he went bankrupt for the second time.

He had married the Deb of the Year, Sonia Avory, abandoned her and their son, Charlie, and gone through two fortunes by the end of his thirties. He went to live in Ibiza, where his second wife, the actress Claire Gordon, managed to shake him off. He invested his last £2,000 in a tourist business running trips in a glass-bottomed boat. His entrepreneurial drive was not matched by good management habits and this business failed also.

Now, it happened that one of his last accomplishments in his solvent days was his secretary. He had instructed her over the phone to strip naked, put on a fur coat and get in a taxi to come round to his house immediately. She did this and later he "tipped her on to the game", as he put it. Her loyalty and affection for Willie - much tried over the years - made her fly out to Ibiza, find him and take him home with her. In this flat in Elm Park Mansions he lived for the next 30 years. After she moved out, leaving the flat to him, the debris gently increased around him.

His sometime secretary was a colonel's daughter and behaved with the rectitude and generosity you might hope to expect from such a background. She was also a talented sex worker with a prestigious client list including members of the judiciary and security services. Her experiences formed the basis of Donaldson's first two memoirs, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975) and its sequel The Balloons in the Black Bag (1978). They never reached a wide audience but were two of the most brilliant books of the decade. Ken Tynan began the attempt to turn them into a musical with Clive James writing the lyrics, but the project failed.

Private Eye characterised Willie Donaldson around the time as a "whoremaster". Donaldson was hurt by this, and criticised the philistinism of Private Eye in general and "Pseuds Corner" in particular, but secretly held Richard Ingrams in the highest esteem. "If I saw Ingrams on the street, I think I'd burst into tears," he said. "If you wanted to entrust your life savings with anyone you'd do so with him," he said. "You can see why he chose [Ian] Hislop to succeed him." The fact that Donaldson couldn't be trusted with anyone's life savings was more apparent to him than anyone else. He didn't admire moral strength in the same way as he admired intellectual strength but he pined after it, wistfully.

In the 1980s he pinched an idea from America and produced a sensational variation on Don Novello's The Lazlo Letters (1977). He adopted the character of Henry Root, a wet fish merchant, and wrote to social and political luminaries. Thus, to the Treasurer of the Conservative Party:

Dear Major-General Wyldbore-Smith: I'm a blunt man accustomed to plain speaking. What's the going rate for getting an honour? I don't mean an OBE or a CBE. Those are reserved for crooners or those who are quick over the high hurdles. What would do the trick? £25,000? £50,000? I enclose a pound. This is for yourself personally, you understand.

The Henry Root Letters (1980) was followed immediately by The Further Letters of Henry Root (1980), then Henry Root's World of Knowledge (1982), Henry Root's A-Z of Women: "the definitive guide" (1985), The Soap Letters (1988), Root into Europe (1992, made into a television series, with George Cole as Root) and Root about Britain (1994). The letters were the last great commercial success of his publishing career and netted him yet another £80,000 (a sum that inflation had diminished, but still in property terms a good million at current prices). This went more slowly than other fortunes but as inexorably.

A diminuendo of successful "toilet books" beginning with The Complete Naff Guide ("by Kit Bryson, Selina Fitzherbert and Jean-Luc Legris", 1983) and The Naff Sex Guide (1984) lasted 20 years. All such books were satires on social and professional guides, written with enough authority to be taken - by the increasingly susceptible - at face value. His recent Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2002) is a masterpiece of this small genre, with a full third being unreliable and half of that outright invention. He had met Elmyr de Hory, the famous art forger, in Ibiza, and had for several years a number of his works in storage.

This period of commercial decline was marked by great productivity - Donaldson must have sold a million copies of various books. Collaborators helped the output, as did previous books. He turned a novel into a play and then the play back into a novel which he then sold to the original publisher. The only person to object was the collaborator on the stage adaptation who sued for plagiarism (and lost heavily). Willie Donaldson was a superb collaborator. He provided the strategic direction, the critical theory, the discipline, and the collaborator would provide the jokes. That only sounds grudging if you discount the value of the strategy and critical theory.

He also wrote what his admirers consider the best novel of the 1980s, Is This Allowed? (1987). It is a largely autobiographical account of his relationship with his younger "Princess" and his treatment of her. Most novels of this sort are written to exonerate the author and to inculpate the girl (cf Keith Waterhouse's Bimbo, published in 1990). Donaldson's work does the opposite, never allowing his self-awareness to excuse his conduct. For him confession did not merit absolution. The book chronicles how a ruthlessly selfish man takes a wonderfully attractive woman down into the pit. He likes her a little when she's sober but likes her a lot when she's on crack. He is also interested in how he feels when she sets out to seduce his friends. Melanie, as she was called, had a very substantial real-life talent in this and other fields but was steadily degraded by their practice with crack cocaine.

Donaldson made no secret of his strange appetites but his charm, kindness and ability to concentrate on people sometimes helped them forget caution. He would have been of great clinical interest to medical researchers: though he took a very large amount of crack - and on a regular basis - he never became addicted to it. He appreciated the humorous implications of that apparent contradiction.

His love life was limited. His sex life was depraved but interesting. His social life was dominated by his talent for fiction and theatrical presentation. Parts of all these lives were catalogued every Saturday in the early 1990s for his column in The Independent, "William Donaldson's Week", where his cast list included people such as Lord Dynevor, Terence Blacker (his collaborator on The Meaning of Cantona, 1997), the Marquess of Blandford, Sarah Miles, "Mad" Frankie Fraser, a surprising number of very beautiful, very well-built page three girls, and Craig Brown.

Lacking any sort of social snobbery, he was acutely class-conscious. "I am much more left-wing than Tony Benn," he once said. His political instincts were formed by embarrassment and disgust at his own class. He had a visceral revulsion for middle-class vulgarity. He was neurotically sensitive to this. If a woman looked at a menu and said, "Decisions, decisions!" he would want to leave the room. And yet he also said, "I find stupidity relaxing", and "I am much happier in the company of thieves and prostitutes than of literary people".

Once, he looked around his small flat, at the yellowing books, the sofa ripped by cats, the male decay of loneliness. It was larger than Quentin Crisp's quarters (he had lived round the corner) but more depressing. "You cannot live as I have lived and not end up like this," he said. I remembered a line he'd put into one of our collaborations 20 years before. "Promiscuity is the M1 to loneliness!" He had been quoting one of the agony aunts. We laughed at the time.

He didn't return phone calls in his last months. He went in solitude. When his mother-in-law was dying he saw that she would reconcile her Access bill with her bank statement and note down discrepancies of pence. "When people are dying they get more like themselves," he said. He called his last, impenetrable autobiography, published in 1998, From Winchester to This. In 2003 he published I Am Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me . . . : a dictionary of received ideas and this autumn comes The Dictionary of National Celebrity, written with Hermione Eyre. He was found dead by his neighbour in his flat on Wednesday.

Simon Carr