TRAGIC END
Sad final days of Lovers’ Guide’s guru who died ‘a hermit’ on £6-a-day after £70k coke habit and depression battle
After her first raunchy film, Wendy would get approached in the supermarket by men asking for sex advice
SHE was the sex guru we will forever be thankful for — after helping the nation have more fun in the bedroom.
At the height of her fame in the Nineties, Wendy-Ann Paige was a millionaire and would get mobbed when she walked down the street.
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But she died at her Essex flat last Friday aged 61, having spent her final years as “a hermit”, following battles with depression and PTSD and a £70,000-a-year cocaine habit.
Wendy found fame when she became the face of the groundbreaking sex-education video, The Lovers’ Guide, in 1991.
It was so explicit it had an 18 certificate and showed Wendy having real orgasms during sex with her then partner Tony Duffield, and a graphic scene of a male model masturbating.
The video rocketed up the sales charts, beating Disney’s Little Mermaid and Bruce Willis action movie Die Hard to the No1 spot.
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At the age of 28, Wendy was thrust into the limelight and landed a publicist and five sexpert book deals.
She wrote the best-selling Sextrology in 1994, a guide to finding the ideal sexual partner through astrology, became a newspaper astrologist and also joined The Sun as our sex columnist.
Wendy recalled: “I would take calls from readers and the phone lines would not stop.”
Despite her success, Wendy was said to be living on just £6 a day in recent years.
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Police were called to her small flat in Southend, where she was found unresponsive on December 13.
The man who knew Wendy best at the end was her partner, Christian Bines, 50.
Raunchy sex tutorial The Lover’s Guide was the first explicit video to gain an 18 certificate - as opposed to an X rating
“I just woke up and she was dead.” devastated Christian said.
“She wouldn’t move and was already gone. I instantly phoned 999.
“They reckon she may have overdosed on tablets in the night.
“I remember the evening before she said she wasn’t in pain any more.
“She’d been in agony ever since falling down some steps when going to the cinema in October last year.
“The accident left her with a slipped disc in her back, a broken collarbone and arm, which she never truly recovered from.”
Wendy was working as a marketing director in 1989 when she met Tony, then 36, a sound engineer with the band Madness.
He had visited the office to see a friend who worked there.
Wendy caught his eye and the pair bonded as he fixed her filing cabinet.
He was married with a child at the time, but “relentlessly pursued” Wendy.
She previously told The Sun: “In the end, I gave in. Tony and his ex-wife were into swinging and they advertised in a swingers’ magazine for ‘real people’ to appear in a sex education video.
“He left his wife for me and asked me if I wanted to do it instead.”
Wendy recalled how the video’s expert doctor, Andrew Stanway, asked her to go to his house and masturbate in front of him for her audition.
There were 35 male film crew in the room and cameras everywhere.
Wendy
There was just one female. After I finished I said, ‘Can I do it again?’
She said: “I wasn’t nervous, I was a natural. I had a thoroughly good time and after I orgasmed he said, ‘You’re hired!’.”
Wendy filmed all her X-rated scenes at a film studio in Acton, West London.
She explained: “There were 35 male crew in the room and cameras everywhere, just one female. After I finished, I said, ‘Can I do it again?’ .”
After her first session, Simon said to the camera crew: “Stop everything! From tomorrow we are all wearing baggy chinos to work.
“Wendy, you can have a two-hour break as we are all going to the toilets for a joint.”
Wendy, whose mum Daisy died of ovarian cancer when she was just 19, had not told her soldier dad William about the video.
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She said: “Although he was shocked, he was very proud of me and even watched the video after the reporter left, which was very embarrassing indeed.
“He was a lovely, gentle man but would never have done anything like that.
“My mum was the gregarious one. She would have loved it. I was sad she never got to see it.”
After its release, Wendy would get approached in the supermarket by men asking for sex advice with questions such as, “My wife won’t wear heels in bed, is she a prude?”
Sex with Tony was like going on a busman’s holiday. I was bored. I wanted more adventurous sex. I found doing cocaine more enjoyable than having sex with Tony
Wendy
She married Tony in Las Vegas during 1992 and they moved into a £1million, 18-room house in East Sussex.
But their marriage began to suffer because, she claimed, Tony was jealous of her fame and couldn’t “keep up” with her in the bedroom.
Wendy said: “Sex with Tony was like going on a busman’s holiday. I was bored.
“I wanted more adventurous sex. I loved sex and had a huge appetite for it. Tony had had a heart bypass, he couldn’t keep up with me and would just lie on his back.”
Wendy got a taste for cocaine and jetted all over the world to party with rock stars.
She said: “I found doing cocaine more enjoyable than having sex with Tony.
“At one point I was spending £70k a year on it — that’s not including the drugs the rock stars gave me.”
Wendy and Tony tried to rekindle their relationship by moving to Thailand in 1999 to open a restaurant, but they split the following year.
She featured in The Sun in 2001 to reveal her new fiance Dave Smart, an electrician, who she had met at a hospital while being treated for depression.
Talking to The Sun in 2021, to celebrate The Lovers’ Guide’s 30th anniversary, then-single Wendy said: “My life is very different now. I miss my old life.
“Things have changed so much and people don’t recognise me any more.”
‘Imagine going from all that to where she ended up’
She added: “It was important for me to film The Lovers’ Guide.
“I believed in the message behind it and think it’s still relevant today.
“I’d met men who thought women can give oral sex for an hour with no aches or pain.”
After news of her death broke, Essex Police confirmed they were alerted by East of England Ambulance Service Trust at about noon on Friday.
A spokesman said the death was being treated as “unexpected and unexplained”.
Poignantly describing Wendy’s final years, Christian said: “She was on benefits. When we first met, neither of us had anything. We were in poverty, living off £6 a day.
“She lived a very simple life. She would even go without the basics, some days she wouldn’t even eat.
“She went from so much money to nothing. She was such a lovely person. Imagine going from all that to where she ended up.
“We just about got through together, but it was really tough.
“There was never any heating, it was becoming really difficult to pay off the bills she had. Unbelievable isn’t it?
“She went from being a millionaire to scraping by on £6 a day. She had a flavour of that lifestyle and had to settle with this.
“We used to go to the charity shop and she loved it.
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“She’d get a dress and some more video tapes for her player.”
A muted ending for a woman who brought joy to so many.
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