Frank Zappa, we are told, wasn't interested in the higher echelons of society "but the screw-ups", so why was he so taken with Pauline Butcher? The strait-laced, plummy-sounding secretary was the experimental legend's personal assistant during his rise to the top of the freak heap with The Mothers Of Invention. Adapted from her book, Freak Out! My Life With Zappa, Frank Zappa and Me (Radio 4) is the soapy retelling of this relationship of opposites.
Our story begins in 1967. The Seekers' vanilla hit Georgy Girl is playing in the background and a wide-eyed 21-year-old Pauline rocks up for what she thinks is a secretarial job in Kensington with a "fat executive". A crazy-haired Zappa turns up instead. She's wearing "a green mini dress, calf-length white boots and Vidal Sassoon cut hair," and he's sporting an "orange T-shirt with pink trousers". It's not only a sartorial meeting of opposites, it's a cultural one too. One of Pauline's first jobs is to transcribe the lyrics of The Mothers Of Invention's second album Absolutely Free. She tries but can't even get her mind around some of the titles. "Call Any Vegetable? Intoxication And The Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin?" Lucy Briggs-Owen (who plays the young Pauline) spits the song titles out disbelievingly, like the Spitting Image puppet of the Queen reading through the Wagamama menu. We soon learn that Zappa lyrics aren't the only things Pauline is pretty clueless about: she doesn't know how to boil an egg, what LSD does or who Sgt Pepper is. Frank (played with presidential confidence by Ronan Summers) sees this manic pixie dream-girl quality as "unique" rather than irritating, while Pauline is captivated by his confidence.
Their unrequited love story is sweet – they end up kissing, but nothing more – but is Pauline's tale a Cinderella story or a Pygmalion one? She moves to Laurel Canyon to work for him in his ramshackle, 14 bedroom mansion, eventually finding herself when she leaves his charge a few years later. "I took control of my own life," she says. The spell may have broken, but that combination of stoicism and devotion seemingly common to certain other rock star assistants (Freda Kelly, Pat Rhodes, Peter Freestone) remained.
