Best years of her life
For better for worse, in sickness and in health... When Alex Pursey married Britain's most famous footballer she also took on Britain's most infamous alcoholic. Here the former Mrs George Best tells Euan Ferguson about living life at fever pitchEuan Ferguson
Sunday May 15, 2005
Observer

There comes a point, too often in life for too many of us, when you know you've fallen out of love with someone. Alex still 'loves' George, she says - he was in touch the night before we met - but just in that way: 'in love', no, and I wonder whether she can remember the moment when she realised that that fine madness had gone. 'Pretty much, yes, sadly. I think it was when I found myself draining his bile tube. That tends to do it for a girl.'

It's not meant to sound callous, simply honest. Honesty is one of the more instantly endearing traits of 33-year-old Alexandra Macadam Pursey - Best as was. She has taken a fair swathe of criticism down the years. For, bizarrely, gold-digging: even though when she wed George he was pretty well broke, selling off medals, and their first married residence was his dive of a flat in Chelsea, where she had to wash her knickers by hand in the sink. Criticism for, bizarrely, encouraging his alcoholism, simply by being photographed holding a glass of wine while he was trying to stay straight: this criticism coming from tabloids who, she says with some disgust, used to take him out and keep him drunk for days. Implied criticism, from some of the snobbier quarters, for simply being too much of a cliche: the blonde Surrey model who became an air hostess and then married a top footballer, and became a little too excited by the thought of a night in Tramp or a holiday near Tommy Hilfiger's villa in Mustique.

Her gaze is direct; she is clad from head to toe - via the one-time Rear of the Year - in denim; and she tells the truth about her book. She found it 'surprisingly easy' to write. It is not, she says, a literary masterpiece. 'It's the kind of thing you'd read on the beach in a couple of hours.'

And, yes, there are, in the 279 pages before the last line of Always Alex ('Even after everything I've been through, I still believe in love...'), more than a few blonde moments. During her first on-off relationship with a footballer, John Scales, she writes, in passing, 'His team-mates started to call him "Gigolo" - unfortunately, it took me a while to cotton on to the full significance of that nickname.' Or later, after she broke her arm during a brawl with Best (and then went back to him), she comments, in passing, 'The only good thing to come out of it was that I had the excuse to have my hair washed and blow-dried at the hairdressers twice a week, a real indulgence. Well, I told myself, I think I deserve a little treat!'

Well indeed. But between these moments there is also a rather candid and valuable study of rampant incurable alcoholism; the book benefits from eschewing any pretence to great academic insight and being written in this breezy style. This is the story, you realise, of tens of thousands of women and men who live with a full-time alcoholic: the wheeling and diving hopes that it's over; the tendernesses together - 'for I suspect now,' she says, 'that alcoholics can often be much sweeter, when sober, than other people; there's a need, and a softness, and a romance to make up for the lost time'; the sudden violence; the wheedling promises which you know will be broken; and the insane jealousies. For all that it features rather more encounters with the likes of Mick Jagger and Elton John than feature in the lives of most alcoholics and their co-dependants, this is simply the straight and revealing telling of a tale familiar to too many people in this country. 'I think people are interested in alcoholism,' she says, quietly. 'If I was still married to George, I'd read it.'

If she was still married. They married in 1995, and fairly acrimoniously got their decree nisi last April. George almost died several times along the way. He received, famously, a liver transplant (wow - who got George's in return? went the joke at the time), after drinking his way past the normally ruthlessly effective Antabuse implants. After a while he started drinking with his new liver. He beat Alex and broke her arm, and cut much of her hair off while he was drunk; and towards the end, after she had nursed him through and past the operation, draining the bile from his tube with plastic gloves and a measuring jug, and tried to sort out his shambolic finances, he went on a few benders and disappeared off with other women and ended up, of course, in the papers again.

Did she, once she'd finished the book, look back with any degree of astonishment? 'God, yes!' she laughed. 'I couldn't quite believe the things I'd put up with. The way they came round time and again, and I'd do the same. You're always hoping. Always. Until one day, if you're lucky, you manage to stop.

'It is, of course, a disease. It's partly genetic, I've been told, and read. George's mother was an alcoholic. And it doesn't go away. I've spoken to other alcoholics, who may have had years off the sauce, but they all say that they think of it every day. Many of them, though, have had counselling, or done the steps. George wouldn't hear of it. He's actually an extremely shy man, and never wanted to deal with it in that kind of confrontational way, and that's why it was never dealt with; it just seemed to go away some times, possibly because those times he was almost dead. And to anyone trying to deal with it, I would argue very fiercely that "cutting down" is never the answer, no matter what they tell you: the only answer is a complete halt, forever.'

Alex becomes almost amusing as she recalls the times she spent believing he had stopped, only to find a tell-tale bottle - hidden once in a pile of chopped wood - and knowing it would be a matter of hours before she'd find him surrounded by empties, in his bed or a park or a ditch, and she'd have to go traipsing round Chelsea pubs, begging people to stop killing him.

'One thing I realised is that the more I tried to stop him, to tell him to stop, the more he would resent me, and seek an excuse to start a row to get away. It's a grim situation: the more that you, one person who truly loves and wants to help, try to love him and help an alcoholic, the less they want to be with you.'

She grew fairly angry at other people. 'I mean, I didn't not drink. I've been drunk in my life, for goodness' sake. I've had a glass or two of wine. I've had my nights, in my youth. But I loved George, and I wanted more than anything for him to live. But there were people who would accidentally end up helping to kill him, for selfish reasons.

Landlords would serve him, even when I'd pleaded. He was good company. He was George Best. Complete strangers would come up to him in the pub, after his transplant, after they'd all read about it, and buy him a drink, just so they could say "I bought George Best a drink." And he'd never refuse. Couldn't refuse. He was nice to everyone who approached. George would always get annoyed at those celebrities who refused to talk to people in the street, or the pub. They bloody well put us here, he'd say; give something back. So he'd take a drink off them: and if he had too much wine in front of him, he'd take brandy off them instead.

'I remember him telling me about the football. I've never really got or understood football, and didn't fall for George because he was an idol or anything; I fell for him because he was charming George. But he would tell me how he'd practise with both feet, anywhere, at any time, determined to be the best not on one foot but on both feet. There was no option in his mind but to be stubborn, to be the best. And once that passed, I've thought: he had to be the best at drinking instead. Had to be the best at keeping bars open. Preferably the dirtiest bars: if you had a line of pubs, wine bars, gastropubs in any street, you knew you'd find George in the filthiest old man's pub at the end, with the sticky carpet.'

Very little of the glamorous about drink comes through in this book. She writes - in that breezy, hopeful style which actually engenders strong sorrow when you turn the next page to find the inevitable let down - about the swollen feet, the hobbling, the inability to walk up hills on holiday, the swollen testicles, the lack of a sex life, of the shakes - but only occasional shakes, 'because most of the time he never got a hangover; he simply topped up'. The book, taken as a whole, is an incredibly sympathetic portrait of George, and a fiercely unforgiving portrait of alcoholism.

How much did she resent it all, I wonder: losing her twenties; crying herself to sleep so often, trying so furiously, so diligently, to help someone else conquer something largely unconquerable? She thinks for quite a while. 'No, not at all, I don't really resent it, resent George, at all. Because we also had a great time together; he gave me a good life, too, often a really good life. The good times.'

And now? She has written this book - and along the way I ask why: why, if, as she says, she now just wants a 'quiet life'? 'I suppose I wanted to set some of the record straight. It wasn't my idea, it was suggested to me. Things like this, and going on I'm A Celebrity, and climbing Kilimanjaro for charity... they have been good for me, but I mean it when I say I want a quiet life from now on. I just wanted to set some things straight in the book, and now it's done. People who said I didn't love George enough, or had encouraged him in his drinking, when the complete opposite was true... Now it's done, and I don't know exactly what I'll do, I've been thinking about it... I'm still doing a bit of modelling... I'm too old, apparently, to go back to airlines... I'd love to run some kind of business. Quietly. Meet someone I trust, someone nice.'

But Alex, you're not going to settle for someone simply 'nice', are you? You're a 33-year-old model, the ex of the most famous footballer Britain has known, one time party animal. Who's going to see you settling for a nice, quiet, tweedy stalwart? Besides, since the last day in court with George, you've gone through a boob job, admitted to a one-time cocaine habit and had a series of dates which, with the best and most forgiving will in the world, couldn't be called low-profile: 44-year-old businessman Howard Kruger, hit the headlines when he was charged with molesting a minor (a charge he denies) and then, more recently, Simon Jordan, an honest unassuming lad who just happens to be worth £40m and be chairman of Crystal Palace.

Both are now over, she says and she is quite, quite single and, she insists, yearning to get out of the headlines. 'To find the right man, though yes, it might be hard, is every girl's dilemma. To get the mix right, to meet someone who you're wild about, want to tear their clothes off, but who is also stable, and reliable and want to give you children. You tell me. Do they exist? If so, that's what I want. I just want - trite though it sounds - to now be happy. I'd love it too for George. But, do you know, I'm not sure if he ever has been happy, in his life.'

· Always Alex, by Alex Best, is published by Blake Publishing at £17.99.