Tony Booth’s fourth wife discusses her extraordinary life and the actor’s battle with Alzheimer’s

MEMOIR

MARRIED TO ALZHEIMER’S  

by Steph Booth (Rider £12.99, 256 pp) 

Nobody who remembers the ‘Jack the Lad’ persona of the actor Tony Booth could possibly be surprised by his widow’s frank account of his final years — some of which reads like a TV script.

It made me question how much some actors are actually acting. In Booth’s case it seems we were watching a mere tweak away from what he was like in real life — and his fourth wife Steph Booth describes this as ‘a life less ordinary’.

The former alcoholic, who married four times; fathered eight daughters by five women; womanised; refused to give up his cannabis habit; noisily paraded his socialism to the occasional embarrassment of his daughter and son-in-law, Cherie and Tony Blair . . . this unrepentant hell-raiser deteriorated into a pitiful, frightened old man whose last years were blighted by Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet somebody in heaven was certainly watching over the old Liverpool Catholic sinner, because in 1998 he married Steph, 24 years his junior, who could certainly match him in bolshiness — to the extent of refusing to let his disease come between them, right until the end.

Of course, Steph is too honest to claim any saintly crown; on the contrary, she is admirably frank about being driven mad by her husband, even (once) hiding from him in quiet desperation as he stumbled about the house calling for her. I cannot imagine any of the 700,000 unpaid carers in the UK who live with people with dementia not recognising many of the incidents in this brave account.

Steph calls carers ‘invisible’, and explains: ‘Whatever your choice, there will always be guilt, sadness, loss and grief. There is no escape from that fact and it is something we have to learn to live with.’

Steph — herself divorced more than once and with a very troubled childhood behind her — met Tony at a party in 1996, and they very quickly discovered much in common: film, books, football, the Labour Party. They married the year after Tony Blair became prime minister and therefore had to put up with much scrutiny themselves.

Nevertheless Steph is at pains to portray their marriage as pretty ordinary: ‘We rowed and fought, loved and laughed, were happy and sometimes sad, and generally faced up to the fact that if the relationship is worth anything then so is trying harder when the going gets tough.’

From the start, Steph was concerned that her new husband chain-smoked cannabis joints every single night — when ‘it wasn’t always pleasant’ to be around him. With hindsight she comments, ‘I was blissfully unaware of the damage Tony’s drug use was going to do to his brain and the effect that would have on both our lives.’

In 2004, after subterfuge on Steph’s part in order to get him to see a doctor, Tony was diagnosed with dementia.

Anybody who knows somebody in the earlier stages of dementia will recognise Steph’s account of how her plausible, charming husband could deceive the unwary — even a psychologist responsible for diagnosis. Again and again, Tony refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong, and Steph herself admits: ‘For me, it was a strategy of not facing up to the reality of what dementia could bring and whether I could cope with it.’

In the end she did indeed cope — though not without immense stress, heartache, anger and despair. Her vivid narrative, including the terrible ‘breaking point’ when Tony hit her over the head and had to be sectioned, the difficulty in achieving the right sort of medication, the dilemmas over respite care . . . All this will be painfully familiar to many carers.

But reading her description of her husband’s last days, and imagining Tony’s daughter Cherie and Steph singing together at his deathbed, is a poignant reminder that love can survive ‘the dementia bubble’ and continue after death.