An Education Page 11

  My long stay in hospital had a markedly stiffening effect on my character. I emerged with far more courage than I'd had before, more willingness to say no, less eagerness to please. And soon afterwards I did the interview with Bob and Kathy in New York that proved to be a great turning point in my career. Up till then, I'd always written interviews in the third person, which was the convention then. Even if you had to mention yourself for some reason it was always in the guise of ‘your reporter’ or ‘the present writer’, because it was felt that journalists must serve the great god objectivity and never intrude into their own articles. I'd gone along with the convention quite obediently – I still thought of myself as a novice – but when it came to writing about Bob and Kathy I felt I had to say that I'd worked for them for seven years, and that it would be dishonest not to.

  I explained all this to Ron Hall but, as an old Sunday Times hand, he was deeply wedded to the objectivity convention and said it was ‘unprofessional’ and ‘girlie’ to write in the first person. But, with my new hospital courage, I dug my heels in and said I couldn't write it any other way. Eventually he conceded: ‘Well try writing it your way but then, if I say it doesn't work, you must write it my way.’ I agreed. I wrote it my way and he never mentioned his way again. From then on I wrote all my interviews in the first person and felt I'd finally found my voice. I never believed in ‘objective’ interviews anyway – if there are two people in the room, you can't pretend the interviewee is talking into space. I wrote with increasing confidence and soon afterwards, in 1986, won my first British press award.

  The next year I won the award again for the only ‘world exclusive’ scoop of my career – an interview with John Paul Getty II. Getty in those days was a recluse who had fled from Rome in 1972 after his wife Talitha Pol died of a drugs overdose, and had been holed up for years in Cheyne Walk. But there had been recent rumours that he was staying in the London Clinic suffering from an obscure circulatory problem. So when my colleague Pauline Peters said she needed help with a phone-round asking foreigners why they chose to live in England, I decided to ring Getty at the London Clinic. I was put through immediately, and he chatted away about his love of England and particularly cricket. I typed up the quotes and gave them to Pauline, whereupon everyone in the office fell about and said it was a well-known fact that Getty never gave interviews and I must have been speaking to an impostor. ‘But that's ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I'll phone him again.’ So I rang the London Clinic, asked to be put through to Mr Getty, and the receptionist said, ‘Oh no, he never takes calls.’

  So then it became a sort of crusade for me to get an interview with John Paul Getty just to prove that it was him I'd spoken to on the phone. I kept writing to him every week, never getting an answer. But then I wrote to his solicitor, Vanni Treves, and Vanni Treves invited me to his office and said Mr Getty never gave interviews, but he might agree to meet me for a chat provided I didn't have a notebook or tape recorder or anything to remind him I was a journalist. (He hated journalists from the time his son had been kidnapped in Rome and he had been hounded by the press.) Treves said, ‘I'll call you when the time is right.’ So that's what happened: he called me one afternoon, said ‘Come over to St James's Place’, met me on the street and took me up to Mr Getty's apartment. Mr Getty didn't exactly chat – he was watching golf on television – but he let me look around the apartment and admire his beautiful old wind-up gramophone and Gustave Moreau paintings, and he answered enough of my questions to make a decent article. It was a world exclusive when it was published because it was the first interview with Getty – almost the first sighting of him – for well over a decade. In later years, he became much more sociable and quite often invited journalists to attend the cricket matches at Womersley, his country estate, so my scoop evaporated (as scoops tend to do), but it was enough to win me another press award.

  As the Sunday Express's only ‘award-winning writer’, I was well looked after at the paper, with a generous salary, lavish expenses, a company car, my pick of travel freebies and a beautiful office (when we moved over Blackfriars Bridge) overlooking the River Thames. I had virtually all the perks a journalist could hope for – except recognition. It was depressing that nobody I knew ever read the Sunday Express. When I went down to my parents' village in Wiltshire, everyone at the pub would compliment me on my articles, but in London I never met a single Sunday Express reader. And after a few years, inevitably, I got itchy feet. I kept applying for other jobs, thinking that as the winner of two British press awards I was bound to be in demand. But I never was – I think the Sunday Express was so unfashionable that Fleet Street editors never read it.

  But in late 1989 I was having lunch with Ron Hall at the Groucho, when he introduced me to a former Sunday Times colleague of his, Ian Jack, who said he was helping to launch a new newspaper, the Independent on Sunday. (The Independent had been running, very successfully, since 1986, but now it was spawning a Sunday sister, edited by Stephen Glover, with Ian Jack in charge of the Review section.) I said ‘Will there be jobs for feature writers?’ And he said, ‘Maybe. Send me your cuttings.’ So I did. But just then the Sunday Express sent me to Punta del Este in Uruguay to write about the Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht race. Or actually not about the race – heaven forfend – but about the balls, the parties, the celebrations when the yachts arrived. It was supposed to be a great opportunity to see South American high society at play. The Express yachting correspondent kept us informed of the race's progress and eventually I got the call – fly out now, the yachts will start arriving in about three days. So I scrambled off to Punta del Este – where I learned that the yachts were still three days offshore, in a dead calm.

  They remained that way for something like two weeks. The jet set, who had rushed to Punta del Este when I did, hung around for a day or two and then moved on, never to return. Even the locals lost interest after a while. I sometimes felt I was the only person in Punta del Este who still expected to see sails coming over the horizon. I would stand on the freezing quayside dawn after dawn, praying for the sight of a sail, like some poor fisherman's wife whose husband's boat has not come in. And all the time I was going mad with impatience, thinking I was missing my chance of a job at the Independent on Sunday. When the yachts did eventually arrive, weeks later in the middle of the night, all the balls and parties had been cancelled, and the only celebration I remember is drinking a lot of Steinlager on the winning New Zealand yacht and hitching a lift on the Rothmans yacht down to Montevideo. And then it was bat out of hell back to England and a very cross David, who had had to do the school run for three weeks instead of the promised four days. I assumed that my chances of joining the new Independent on Sunday would have gone.

  Success

  But no. Luckily the Independent on Sunday had been so busy hiring real journalists – foreign correspondents, sports editors, political columnists – they'd completely forgotten about the humble feature-writing job, so it was still open when I got back from Uruguay. I went to see Stephen Glover, the editor, who looked askance at my CV – seven years at Penthouse, seven at the Sunday Express, two sex books (like so many of the Independent's top brass he was a vicar's son) – but said languidly that Ian Jack and Sebastian Faulks seemed to think my interviews were really very good. The judges of the British press awards thought so too, I told him, given that I'd already won two and fully expected to win more. So, with no great enthusiasm, Glover offered me the job. It meant a huge drop in salary and no car, but by now I was desperate to leave the Sunday Express. And it was tremendous fun joining a new newspaper which everyone was talking about. Also I loved the fact that the office was next door to Bunhill Fields cemetery, which has one of the biggest starling roosts in London, so I could hang around the back stairs every sunset watching the birds fly in.

  In theory, I was one of a writing team who could turn our hands to anything; in practice, I started doing interviews from the day I arrived and made that my speciality. We did dummy runs for
about two months before the paper was launched so I assembled a good backlog of interviews for Stephen Glover to choose from. In the very first issue he ran an interview I did with John Aspinall in which – I always believe – Aspinall admitted to having seen Lord Lucan after he murdered his nanny. But the wording was slightly ambiguous and nobody else seemed to read it as I did, so that first interview passed without comment. But some of my interviews over the next few weeks attracted huge attention, especially an attack on Melvyn Bragg and an interview with Richard Harris in which I commented on his strange habit of rummaging about in his tracksuit bottom. Suddenly, at the age of forty-six, I was an ‘overnight success’. People started calling me Demon Barber and writing hot-under-the-collar articles about whether such ‘aggressive’ interviewing should be allowed. I found all the fuss very odd because I'd been writing similar interviews for the Sunday Express for years, but suddenly I was characterised as this mega-bitch hatchet-woman who stitched everyone up. I worried that it would stop people agreeing to be interviewed by me. It probably did stop some, but to others it seemed to act as a spur – they felt it was a badge of courage to take me on.

  (I'm still quite bemused by the Demon Barber reputation. I think it arises from the fact that readers remember the hatchet jobs more than they remember the friendly pieces. But whether this is because I write them better, or because of general Schadenfreude, I never know. The interviews I remember from the Independent on Sunday are the more thoughtful ones I did with Rudolf Nureyev, Roald Dahl, Muriel Spark, but they got less attention. The same thing happened again at the Observer – it was the hatchet jobs on, say, Harriet Harman, Marianne Faithfull or John Prescott that readers seemed to remember.)

  That first year on the Independent on Sunday – 1990 – was my glory year, when I won another press award, and also a What the Papers Say award, and had almost nonstop attention. Suddenly all sorts of people wanted to meet me, strange dining societies from the Inns of Court to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich were asking me to grace them with my presence, clubs were offering me complimentary membership, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions wanted me to speak in their debates. I accepted a few of these invitations but soon realised that I found such occasions depressing, and would come back feeling obscurely dejected. At first I couldn't work out why but then I realised – all these people who wanted to meet me were clearly disappointed when they did meet me. Whatever they were hoping for, I wasn't it. Partly, I suppose, it was my age. When the launch issue of the Independent on Sunday was going to press, Stephen Glover had said, ‘We'd better give you a picture byline – do you have a photograph of yourself?’ I did indeed, a very nice photo that I'd been using for years at the Sunday Express. Unfortunately it was ten years old and the intervening years had not been kind so the photograph gave a highly misleading impression of my looks. But there was more than that – people expected me to talk as I write, i.e. crisply and decisively, whereas actually I am a terrible waffler and of course burdened with an elocution accent. If I could communicate only by words on a page, how much more satisfactory I would be!

  My brush with fame was minuscule and short-lived – it lasted a matter of months – but it gave me some sympathy with the problems of real fame. It is extremely disconcerting to meet people who think they know you when you have no idea who they are. But they often talk with such familiarity, as if they really know you, that you feel they must be old friends or colleagues whom you have somehow, unforgivably, forgotten. I suppose that really famous people must get used to it – but then getting used to it must cut them off from normal people and make it more difficult, or even impossible, to form ordinary friendships across the fame divide. Jonathan Ross once told me about what he calls ‘the fame nod’–the way famous people will nod to each other across a crowded room, establishing rapport. He says that the public always assume that all famous people know each other, so they never get properly introduced: the nod is a way of saying, ‘I know who you are and I expect you know who I am too.’

  (In recent years I've had another little taste of, not fame, but face recognition when I've appeared on a long-running television series called Grumpy Old Women. I found that if I went shopping in Crouch End the morning after one of these programmes had been transmitted, quite a few strangers would nod and smile at me in the street. If I went the following day, I might get one or two nods. But by day three there'd be no signs of recognition -– television memories are that short.)

  Working on the Independent on Sunday was tremendous fun at the beginning because I had some great colleagues – Ian Jack, Zoë Heller, Sebastian Faulks, Blake Morrison, Allison Pearson, Nick Cohen, Simon Garfield, Michael Fathers – but the circulation soon began dropping like a stone. There was general dissatisfaction with Stephen Glover, the editor, and endless plots to oust him. I didn't object to the plots – what I objected to was not being invited to join them. But then I was a woman. In all my years on Penthouse and the Sunday Express I had never for a minute known what it was to suffer sexual discrimination (nor have I since), but the Independent on Sunday was run by an entirely male cabal who clearly regarded women as second-class citizens. They would occasionally invite me or Zoë to conference if there were television cameras about but were normally quite content to have all-male meetings at which they would solemnly discuss the question ‘What do women want?’ I remember once Peter Wilby, deputy editor, popped his head out of conference to ask me ‘What do women think of Maastricht?’ before going back to tell his colleagues, ‘She says not interested.’ The trouble with feeling discriminated against, I found, is that it is cumulative and corrosive: you start becoming more and more ‘sensitive’ to perceived slights till you develop a really heavy chip on your shoulder. I would go home and rant to David about patriarchy and male chauvinism while he stirred the risotto and asked whether I wanted poires Hélènes to follow. It was a crazy situation and made me eager to escape the Independent on Sunday for my own sanity.

  Escape came eventually in the portly shape of Graydon Carter. In 1993 I was having lunch at the Groucho Club (as so often in those days) when someone told me that Graydon had just been appointed editor of Vanity Fair in succession to Tina Brown. I knew him slightly – he had bought several of my Independent on Sunday interviews to run in the New York Observer, which he edited, and at his request I had called to see him when I was in New York. He was a besotted Anglophile with an absurd collection of English country-house bric-a-brac in his office – old cricket bats, snowshoes and sepia photographs of rowing teams – but I loved his bonhomie and wit. As soon as I heard he'd gone to Vanity Fair, I thought, I wonder if he'll offer me a job? Sure enough, the phone call came that very afternoon.

  He offered me a contract for a quite fabulous amount of money. The only drawback was that he wanted me to move to New York. I said I couldn't – David worked in London, the girls were still at school – but Graydon compromised and said I could remain in London provided I pop over to New York at regular intervals. My idea of a regular interval was once a year whereas his, it turned out, was more like once a month, but actually that was the least of our problems. The main one was that I was just not cut out to be an American journalist. In England, I could phone my editor and say ‘Do you want an interview with X?’ and get an immediate yes or no. At Vanity Fair I had to ‘pitch ideas’ and then go through layers of editors, all of whom asked what my ‘angle’ was going to be. I have always deeply hated and resented this question. If you have an angle on someone, it means you have already decided what to write before you meet, so you really might as well not bother interviewing them. But the Vanity Fair editors seemed to expect almost a synopsis of the interview before it took place. Also, getting ideas past this incredible bureaucracy meant they were often months out of date by the time they were approved.

  Then there were the fact-checkers. Of course I'd read Bright Lights, Big City and knew what fact-checking entailed, but I still didn't realise what an incredible palaver I was letting myself in for. The weird
est example came when I was writing a profile of P. D. James and said something about her spending the weekend in Salisbury. Back came the fact-checkers. What was this place Sall-is-burry? Well, it's a cathedral city in Wiltshire, about 100 miles west of London. What was my source for saying that? Well, as a matter of fact, my parents live near there. That, it turned out, was not a source. I had to find an ‘accredited’ guidebook that said where Salisbury was. Of course it wasn't difficult, but what was infuriating was that they then put a great chunk from the guidebook into my article so that P. D. James spent the weekend in ‘Salisbury, a city founded in medieval times in the county of Wiltshire and famous for having the highest cathedral spire – 404 feet – in England.’ It was madness, but it happened again and again – huge wodges of irrelevant fact would suddenly appear in the middle of my paragraphs, completely ruining the flow.