Denmark has really changed. Barely a decade ago, a life that celebrated the life of one of its most lovable scoundrels hit theaters. It ended up selling 314,545 tickets and winning four Robert awards โ the country’s answer to the Oscars.
But today Simon Spies, the package travel pioneer whose champagne lifestyle never failed to bring a smile to tabloid newspaper readers in the 1960s and 70s, is more likely to be a catalyst for revulsion than joy.
A large legion of former employees have told the makers of a DR documentary how they risked losing their jobs if they rejected Spies’ sexual advances. It was either ‘Simon says’ or a pink slip.
Most were aged just 15 to 18. Known as ‘morgenbolledamen’ (morning bun girls), they were hired primarily for their looks and were expected to have sex with their employer.
Spies Group dissociates itself from the founder’s actions
“When they got too old, wanted to do something else or weren’t good enough, they were just replaced by someone else,” a former Spies Rejser employee, Lise Lotte Breeden, told the creators of ‘Spies and the morning bun ladies’, which is available via dr.dk/drtv from today.
In addition to performing sexual services for Spies, for which they were paid extra โ the morning bun ladies had a number of other peculiar duties, including washing his hair, drying his back and playing tennis with him.
A handful of the former morning bun ladies have therefore demanded an apology from the Spies Group, the company which, via a few name changes, is still essentially the same as Spies Rejser, the company founded by Simon Spies in 1956.
Spies Group has not responded to the demands and declined to participate in the documentary, but it has informed DR that it strongly distances itself from the founder’s actions.
Sadistic tendencies not covered in feature films
Some of the nasty details are mentioned in Christoffer Boe’s film ‘Spies & Glistrup’, in which ‘Game of Thrones’ star Pilou Asbรฆk had the lead role.
Upon its release in 2013, Glistrup’s daughter Anne-Marie Glistrup told BT that “the film is pure fiction”, while Spies’ daughter Janni, who inherited her father’s fortune after his death in 1984, distanced herself completely from it.
However, it leaves out how Spies had sadistic tendencies and would pay morning bun ladies extra if they allowed him to be violent towards them. On one occasion he even broke a young woman’s arm.
“After all, he had to cross boundaries. That’s how Simon was. He was extremely transgressive,โ said a former breakfast lady, Charlotte Nielsen, to the documentary producers.
Nevertheless, many of these details were public knowledge prior to the making of this documentary. For example, it is well documented how Spies always kept three ‘morning bun ladies’ whose delivery of freshly baked breakfast rolls was only part of the services they were expected to provide.
Tolerated then, but not today
Defenders of Spies might want to point out that the legal age for sexual intercourse in Denmark is 15 โ in 2008, the current foreign minister, Jeppe Kofod, notoriously had sex with a girl that age when he was in his early 30s, and seduced her after a political event where he was the guest speaker.
Furthermore, girls of that age often bared their breasts on page 3 of Ekstra Bladet during that period โ an archive that the tabloid charged readers to access until relatively recently.
The #MeToo movement, which was initially a slow mover in Denmark, has since 2020 helped to root out many bad apples in Danish society, including several high-profile politicians.
A CPH POST account of his life published in 2011 concluded: “Despite his numerous moral transgressions, Spies will always remain a beloved part of Danish history – an incredibly complex and unique character who captured the hearts and imagination of an entire country in his own party . journey through life.”
But perhaps this needs to be changed out of respect for the morning bun lady’s demand for an apology โ some post-#MeToo edit that emphasizes how tabloid readers are no longer amused by depraved behaviour, however eccentric.