Hack

by Graham Johnson

  ‘Mad one!’ I muttered. I couldn’t think of a weirder scene. Michael Douglas, the Hollywood superstar son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, who went on to marry Catherine ZetaJones, after making his bones in Wall Street and Basic Instinct. And Jim Davidson, the East End comic noted for his casual racism and ‘nick, nick’ imitation of a police siren.

  ‘Was she shagging them at the same time?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you facking wanker – on-and-off over a few years. She had affairs with each of ’em, separately.’

  ‘OK, that sounds good,’ I said. ‘Two kiss ’n’ tells for the price of one. We’ll do a spread on Douglas first and then one on Jim Davidson.’

  The next day both Shirley and I went down to Worthing, a depressing seaside town in West Sussex. Sideways rain battered against my brand new but hopelessly underpowered Peugeot 103. The skies were grey. ‘Come, come nuclear war,’ it was that kind of place.

  At 17, Jenny Strachan had been a Page 3 girl with London at her feet. Rich men falling over themselves. Showered with gifts from wealthy Arabs. Dripping with invites to celeb parties and film premieres. Just over ten years later, she was a heavy drinking single mum, who lived in a rundown semi near the seafront, with a cold bog at the top of the stairs and a sun-bleached plastic swing in the garden. She was hanging on in quiet desperation. Struggling to keep the grease off her slope. Bewildered that real life had hit her.

  Today was a big day. The News of the World roadshow had rolled into town. The one chance to relive her glory days. To get back in the limelight. To recapture the power of her sexuality. To make some big dough – and a possible ticket out of here.

  It was always very sad – these old kiss ’n’ tell birds like Jenny often believed that selling a tawdry story was much more than it was – that it could be the beginning of something big, leading on to books, films, TV and that all-important presenting job in the media. Of course, I did not disabuse them of this idea. Like a pyramid salesman in a church hall, I always talked this line up to whip up the hysteria.

  When we arrived at the house, there was a delivery boy from the local offy arguing at the front door. He wouldn’t hand over her weekly case of booze until her bill was settled – as usual I paid. There were several empty bottles of plonk piled up in a milk rack by the doorstep and around the drain at the side of the house. This was the first rule of a buy-up. Keep them happy. Keep them plied with drink. She got someone to look after her seven-year-old kid Aaron and we went to a local hotel. That’s the second rule – get them to a hotel so that you can control their movements and their thoughts. Getting them off the plot keeps them away from rival newspapers, their family and their friends – hideous two-bit meddlers who often try and talk the birds out of it. Fuck them.

  The hotel was big, draughty and empty. Late winter and feeling a bit like The Shining. Shirley Ann Lye had tagged along, salivating over the prospect of a free hotel room, steak and chips and all the house white she could guzzle. There was definitely something unattractive about an old person who hadn’t yet worked out that it was unwise to crave pleasure so avariciously.

  Over my cook-chill lasagna, I started to tease the story out of Jenny. When did she meet Michael Douglas? When did you first have sex? Was he good in bed? In return I got scant details. Then the games began. ‘How much?’ she wanted to know. I phoned my boss. Back to the pub lunch. Like a pair of Venezuelan drug dealers, we bartered – she went high, I went low. Faxes went back and forth to Wapping with contracts and amendments. Every half an hour, I slipped off to the bog to change my tape – she kept getting suspicious at this. Twenty grand was her price. No way. I launched into the standard crib-sheet patter used to barter down greedy girls.

  ‘C’mon,’ I winced. ‘Michael fucking Douglas? May be famous love – but he’s always been a shagger. So you’re not the first. That seriously undermines the value of your story . . .’ etc.

  She was still acting the goat.

  ‘Listen it’s a fifteen-year-old story – you were having it off with him when you were 17 – now you’re 32. That makes it fucking ancient in newspaper terms – nowhere near twenty grand. Sorry.’

  Then she claimed the usual fake-prudish roll-back on the pictures, a common state with glamour models who want to reinvent themselves and be taken seriously.

  My response was: ‘We can do the pictures tastefully but at the end of the day if you’re not going to do the underwear pics, then that fucks it up a bit. I know you’ve got kids – but the readers want to see photographs of sexy women, simple as that. That means a negligee or a basque, stockings, the full tackle.’ Even if kiss ’n’ tell girls refuse to do kit-off pics, then inevitably it happens when they get to the photographic studio. The booze comes out, the house music is pumping through the speakers, the stylist is buttering them up.

  Shirley explains to Jenny that the days of big newspaper dough are over – budgets are tight etc, with falling circulations, hard times, so she’s best to go for the deal on the table.

  By the time I’d gone through the rigmarole, I’d knocked her down to between 5,000 and 10,000. All do-able. But even after I’d given her an on-publication contract, she wasn’t happy. She still wasn’t going in-depth about the sex and she threatened to pull out. This was all standard. I knew the drill. I could wait.

  Then we went to the room to do the full chat. More wine. More prawn sandwiches. More chintz – I’ve seen more florid soft-furnishings than is healthy for one lifetime. Whenever I checked into a hotel room, I went through an obsessive-compulsive routine. All the leaflets, menus, directories, stationery and remote-control holders were immediately swept off the tables into the bin. I needed clean surfaces to lay out my tools – notebook, pens, contacts book, paperwork, phones – like a dentist-torturer might lay out his drills before a coercive interrogation.

  I sat on the bed and plonked her on a hard-backed chair in the middle of the room. She was still playing hard to get. Now she’s saying that she doesn’t want to do the story in case it hurts Michael. All the usual bollocks. The last-minute worries. Foolishly, like most daft girls, she still thinks she and Michael have a got a chance – that he’s going to land his Gulfstream at Biggin Hill private airport and whisk her away to Beverly Hills. I’m looking at her. Under the glare of the wall lights, she’s got a millimetre of foundation on, to cover up the craters in her face and the veins in her nose. Her breath stinks of alcohol. She is slurring and her brain is in an oscillating relationship with her mouth, swinging between emotions whilst mumbling angry words to herself. She reminded me of my hooker contact Gina. I mould my blag around her pretensions, explaining that doing a News of the World story is the best chance she has got to get back with Michael. It’s a chance to send an open love letter to him. To the world even, declaring that you still love him. Eyes on the prize. Eyes on the prize. She’s still coming out with all the bollocks. ‘But don’t worry,’ I tell myself, ‘this is in the bag.’ Little by little, step by step. Tape still whirring. ‘Why do you love him so much?’ Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. ‘Was he good in bed?’ Not quite the killer lines yet. She then starts crying. I comfort her. She puts her arm around me. Then cuddles me. I stay straight. But her hands begin to wander. Next minute she drops on to her knees and starts to take her clothes off.

  ‘Erm . . . no,’ I say.

  ‘C’mon, we can do the story later.’

  She tries to take my trousers down. I jump up.

  ‘Why don’t you want me?’

  This scenario is a minefield – but also a very common one in tabloid newspapers. It’s like a form of Stockholm Syndrome in which the captive falls for her captor. The underlying politics between us was a weird form of control and cunning. As well as being drunk, and friskily yearning to relive her glory days, she was also trying to win back control of the story from me. She wanted to turn the tables on her interrogator. A more sinister turn was also at play. Jenny was trying to compromise me. At this stage in the game, she had a good idea that I was trying to tu
rn her over. That once I’d got the chat and pics, it was slash and burn and I’d be off to Goodwood for the 3.15. Bump her for the five grand and that’s that.

  She wants a hold on me, so in the event that it does go nuclear, she can phone Ray and say: ‘Pay me otherwise I will go to a rival paper and tell them about your scandalous reporter.’

  In addition, I suppose she also wanted me to bat for her, thinking that if she could get me onside, I’d whack her money up.

  I’m no great shakes looks-wise, but I’ve had loads of these seedy seductions hit on me from WAGs, models and actresses. Some of them deliberately did it near the end of the story cycle, when they suddenly got cold feet and wanted to use it as leverage to pull out. When I came back to the office, Ray always used to say: ‘Well, did you fuck her then?’

  But I had to be double careful with Jenny here. There’s a delicate layer of sexual politics that also shrouds the situation like gossamer. If I knock her back, I’ve got to do it gently, because a woman scorned and humiliated may explode and walk out – and I’ll lose the story. My mind was tap-dancing furiously.

  ‘Why won’t you let me give you a blow job?’ she carried on. ‘Shirley says you like blow jobs?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. Doesn’t everyone? Er . . . But I’m a News of the World reporter. I’m a professional. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t find you attractive. It’s just that I can’t do that when I’m on a job.’ I was also conscious that my recorder was on and I didn’t want to catch any of this mad chat on tape. I know a few reporters who have got into trouble for sleeping with kiss ’n’ tell girls, including one who had sex with a Liam Gallagher buy-up and went on to become a deputy editor of big red-top.

  There is a rational explanation for Jenny’s behaviour – kiss ’n’ tell girls like her can’t be held responsible for their own actions. Slags like Jenny have been used and abused by men for a large part of their adult lives. Living examples of the depravity of men – and especially celebrities whose desires have got to be fed by sexual cannon fodder like Jenny. The hidden trail of jetsam that powerful egos leave in their wake – and then the News of the World comes along and wants to exploit them further. Often, the only way they know how to deal with men is through sex, especially in difficult situations, where there are issues of control at stake. That’s their default setting as a method for dealing with men who want something off them. Often, these kinds of girls have been bullied and coerced for years, and when that happens again they use sex to cope with it, to control those who are doing it. Makes for a very fucked-up situation during a kiss ’n’ tell.

  The constant delaying tactics on kiss ’n’ tells also stem from their baggage. Kiss ’n’ tell girls often flip-flop whilst doing a story because it’s too much pressure on their emotionally fragile frames. The act of selling a story is seen as selling a part of themselves, a process that is intensely private for them. They become resentful and lash out. Become uncooperative. ‘I’ve sold my body over the years in real terms and in kind – and now you want me sell part of my soul.’ That kind of thing.

  At the time, I couldn’t give a fuck about all this. I just wanted the story. More large glasses of wine were poured into her. Instead of the polite talk, now it was time to put her under manners.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re wasting my time here’, I bullied her. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I shouted. ‘Fucking tell me this story now. I’m warning you, right, I’ve got enough now to run it, with or without your fucking say so. If you fuck me about any more that’s what’s going to happen – we’ll print the story and you’ll get fuck all.’ More wine. More abuse. More threats.

  Suddenly, Jenny sprang up like a ninja. ‘You cheeky bastard.’ She dived across the bed towards me, sending the table full of bottles and empties crashing to the floor. She was still holding her glass of wine. But I could see her bringing it up horizontal, holding the stem like a knife handle. Thrusting it towards my face. I parried slightly and ducked. The glass smashing against the wall. Her hand was bleeding but she recovered quickly.

  ‘You smarmy little cunt,’ Jenny shouted. Shirley Ann Lye just stood by and laughed.

  Most of these kiss ’n’ tell women are as hard as nails, often from poor backgrounds where they’ve had to fight tooth and nail. Jenny tried to stab me with the razor-sharp stem again, but I doubled back, vaulting the bed to get out of her range. A cascade of bottles and glasses shattered against the walls and floors behind me as I bobbed and weaved. Foolishly, she then came at me with her feet and fists, but soon lost her balance, falling over into the half-eaten room service which sloshed all over the chintz. Seeing my outro, I stepped over her, opened the door and got off down the corridor.

  But like a Messerschmitt ME109, it wasn’t long before she was on my tail, armed with a fresh wine bottle. Down the fire escape, through the lobby and into the hotel bar. She flew down seconds later blazing a trail of expletives and threatening to ‘smash this bottle over your fucking head – how dare you? I’ll break your fucking neck . . .’ etc. To be honest, I lost my nerve. I began to panic. The manager-cum-barman didn’t know what to do. Neither did I. This was fucking embarrassing. What do you do?

  For no more than its shock value, I shouted to the manager to call the police as she pursued me around the lounge and restaurant. I knew that would calm her down – and it did. Then she was on the phone to her old man. Oh no! Here comes trouble. I steeled myself for the local hard man to come bouncing through the double doors like John Wayne to rescue her. I thought of the options? Do I knock him out? Good for self-defence but bad for business. Since I had been handed down my Section 47 for avenging the rape of my girlfriend, I had always been wary of fighting – in case I got the sack. My brush with the magistracy had knocked the stuffing out of me. I often turned the other cheek. On the mean streets of London most of the time, my boxer’s face and accent were enough to buy me some time before things got spicy. The other options were to get off out the back door. Or front it out. I decided to front it out. In the end, her boyfriend turned out to be a reasonable feller, a pilot who flew light passenger planes to the Continent. He obviously understood that his partner had problems and I got the impression he’d been on the ropes a few times himself. He calmed her down. She had a drink. He took her home.

  The next day Jenny didn’t remember what had gone on. Sure enough, she was as good as gold. Did the chat. Eventually, she started to talk. For me, the interview was always an anti-climax. Most of their stories were boring – it was like listening to someone read out the phone book. I was only ever interested in the little details that gave glimpses into the lives of these girls behind the scenes – how they lived when they weren’t out partying.

  Jenny said: ‘We ended up back at his apartment. He seemed shocked when I asked if I could have a bath. But I wasn’t trying to be sexy – I just wanted a soak because I lived in a grotty bedsit and never got the chance.’

  She lived a double life. By day she was a teenager living on the poverty line in a stinking hovel strewn with dirty underwear and unwashed dishes. By night she was a teenage sex siren clad in the latest designer gear in the hottest clubs.

  I whisked her up to London to do the studio pics. Bang – in the paper.

  Headline: ‘Love Rat Michael’s Night of Lust with Film Beauty. Kiss and Tell Exclusive.’

  Picture caption: ‘Steamed up: Michael made love to me in the bath.’

  Sad Jenny: ‘Still in love.’

  Intro: ‘Glamour girl Jenny Strachan last night broke her silence on her steamy affair with movie idol Michael Douglas – and revealed how he first seduced her in the bathtub.’

  Best quote: ‘Although I stripped off for a living and appeared in a soft porn movie I wasn’t into that kinky stuff and walked away. He was very adventurous and was the only man ever to satisfy me. After drying ourselves we got on to the bed and explored each other’s bodies.’

  Payoff: ‘I realised that this was the man I loved. N
ow his wife’s divorcing him maybe there’s hope. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds trying to get in touch. But you only get that kind of ending in the movies.’

  I went on to do many big name kiss ’n’ tells and they all followed a similar pattern. I did girls who’d slept with Wayne Rooney, Jarvis Cocker, Liam Gallagher and Jonathan Aitken. I turned some of my old mates over to get the Liam one. What did I care? Friends were no longer useful. I had joined a cult, and began to cut all ties with my previous life. And the story was a valuable prize to boot – no one had done hellraiser Liam before. It all started when three enterprising students, who I’d known for years, came to me for help when they found out I was a rising star on the Screws. They’d set up a small indie dance label, and one day asked me to help with publicity for their latest act, a little-known singer from Hull called Berri. She’d already gone Top 20 with her debut single, but needed one more push into the big time. However, instead of bigging her up, I plastered Berri all over the paper for her one claim to fame: getting shagged by Liam Gallagher in the bogs of a hotel. Berri was left genuinely lovelorn after Liam never called her back, like he’d promised to, as he’d bent her over the cistern and whispered sweet nothings in her ear. It was always good to end one of these stories with a comical payoff. That one was: ‘For heartbroken Berri the truth had finally dawned – Gallagher just used her for a convenience.’ How we laughed!

  Headline : ‘Oasis Rat Liam Loo-ved and Left Me.’

  Picture Caption : ‘Ladies Man Liam . . . passionate sex in hotel loo.’

  No one ever heard of Berri again, her career in tatters after being publicly humiliated. And my mates realised that I’d just used them as a convenience as well. But what do you expect when you come to the Screws asking for publicity? A dance with the devil, no less. ‘Like Berri, you’re going to get fucked.’

  I carried on doing more kiss ’n’ tells. Footie players, soap stars and movie types all went through the sausage factory. These were the good times – no privacy laws, or super-injunctions, before phone hacking when we could get away with anything we wanted. Even men started doing kiss ’n’ tells on famous women they’d bedded. Boyfriends turned over girls such as model Sophie Anderton and EastEnders Samantha Janus. And finally, now I’m doing the ultimate on myself. I’m blowing the lid on me – in this book. Pop culture eating itself. Mad, innit?