A Curious Career

by Lynn Barber

  After demolishing the Chinese supper, Hitch announces that next day we are invited to lunch with the British Ambassador. Is that normal? I ask. ‘Oh yes, I’m forever rubbing shoulders with the quality!’ he laughs. What about the White House? Does he get asked to lunch there? No, he says sorrowfully – he once gave a lecture at the White House (and had his shoes shined for the occasion) but he has never met Obama, though he voted for him. ‘It’s annoying. It’s like living in Washington and not going to see the Lincoln Memorial.’

  The funny thing is that we British journalists still think of Hitch as one of our own – but he has lived in the States for over thirty years and became an American citizen in 2007. He no longer follows British politics and says he doesn’t recognise half the names in Private Eye – he doesn’t know who Ed Balls is for example. But his fondness for England is still strong. When his appetite returned after the chemo, he asked for Marmite and Oxford marmalade and Branston pickle, and told Jeremy Paxman to bring him the memoirs of George MacDonald Fraser. One of Hitch’s great fears is that he might never see England again. He wants to revisit not just his usual haunts – London and Oxford and Hay – but Dartmoor and Cornwall and parts of Sussex where he grew up. Carol says eagerly, ‘Could we go in the spring?’ but he makes no promise.

  Next day I go to collect them for the Ambassador’s lunch. Hitch has clearly made an effort – he is newly shaved, and wearing a blazer. Carol is still getting dressed – he complains that she has a horror of being early, he of being late – but eventually emerges in stilettos and jeans, plus a huge fur hat and a jacket with a gap at the back to show her thong. While we are waiting for a taxi, I ask if she will tell me her age but she says, ‘Nah. Why should I? Some of my greatest chums, like Melina Mercouri, would never tell their age. You can say early fifties if you must.’

  As soon as we arrive at the Residence, Hitch starts shimmering like Stephen Fry, greeting the butler by name, asking for his ‘usual’ (whisky) and smoothly introducing me to Sir Nigel and Lady Sheinwald. We are only five for lunch, but it is formally served, with footmen and printed menu cards. Hitch had warned me beforehand that our conversation must be strictly off the record. It was unfortunate to say the least, therefore, that while they were all chatting away about plays they had seen, my handbag suddenly started chatting loudly too. In all my years using tape recorders, this has never happened before – the bugger somehow managed to turn itself on and launch itself into replay at full volume – and there were an embarrassing few minutes while I violently attacked my handbag and the Ambassador stared.

  Afterwards we went back to the apartment for Hitch to be photographed and Carol talked movingly about how good he has been throughout his illness. ‘He has been without any self-pity, any despondency, but just absolute realism, and almost a kind of poetry in explaining his condition. And he’d get up and try and write and hold conversations – imagine having the worst flu you’ve ever had and getting up every day. And our dinner table when people came round – I mean Hitch at his illest is still a scintillating conversationalist.’

  He is indeed. I was expecting to find him stoical, but what impressed me even more was the sort of gallant bravado he brings to his situation. Why does he feel he needs to fly into collapsing countries to prove his courage? He is proving it now, every day. Only once, in all our conversation, did he seem near tears. He told me that he thought his right vocal cord had gone and, ‘If I did lose my voice I would feel that that was . . . No, actually, I can’t bear to think about that. That would give me depression which I have not yet had.

  ‘But if I were ever threatened with morose moments, the thing that would cheer me up is that some people who I admire for being very courageous and for having helped free their countries still keep in touch. This is my answer to your question about revolutionary tourism – I didn’t just do it for that reason but to try and clarify the situation. And it does make me proud, the friendship with those people who I knew when they were dissidents.’

  *

  He died on 16 December 2011 – having lived a few months longer than his doctors predicted. The obituaries were wonderful, full of real love as well as appreciation. Ian McEwan’s description of their last days together at his cancer clinic in Houston was particularly moving – Hitch insisting on being helped (with all his drips) to his desk and writing an essay on G.K. Chesterton he had promised.

  But the BBC Today programme struck a sour note when it described him as ‘a journalist, an atheist and an alcoholic’. Hitch used to get furious if people called him an alcoholic and I remember this was an issue when I first interviewed him for the Observer. I saw him, over lunch, drink three or four whiskies and at least one bottle of wine but he insisted that he had never missed a deadline, never slurred his speech, never at any point been incapable and therefore could not be an alcoholic. Kingsley Amis used to make the same argument, equally unconvincingly. But of course the definition of an alcoholic is infinitely flexible – Californians consider anyone who drinks more than one glass of wine an alcoholic. I remember once interviewing the actress Ali MacGraw who talked at length about how she’d been in rehab and was now a ‘recovering alcoholic’ and had turned her life around. How much were you drinking at your peak? I asked. ‘One evening I drank a whole bottle of red wine!’ she confessed wide-eyed. It was all I could do not to guffaw.

  The most jarring reaction to Hitch’s death came from my younger daughter. I was raving on about how brilliant and witty he was and what a loss to journalism, and asked if she’d ever read any of his articles. She said no – but she thought he was brilliant on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!. Hitch on I’m a Celeb? It was one of those moments when the earth tilts on its axis. It took quite a lot of hard interrogation to establish that she meant the actor Christopher Biggins, and I wondered, not for the first time, how I could have so failed to educate my daughters.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pop Stars

  I love, love, love interviewing pop stars – I wish I’d done more of them. Obviously I mean the ones who write their own stuff and are mad as snakes – I’m not keen on squeaky-clean members of manufactured boy bands who do what Simon Cowell tells them. The ones I admire are those who started writing and composing in their teens, pouring their hearts out alone in their bedrooms, often with no encouragement at all. And who then had the guts to go out and expose themselves to the ridicule of their schoolmates by getting up on stage. So brave, so young! I think they’re heroic.

  I was lucky in that I just caught on to pop music at the last minute, when so many of my contemporaries missed it. Pop music while I was growing up in the 1950s was terrible, you have no idea. At school, we listened to the Top Ten where the choice was between Liberace, Lonnie Donegan, ghastly Bill Haley, and soppy Paul Anka. (I know there were great people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard performing in the States, but we never heard of them at Lady Eleanor Holles School.) Consequently my friends and I preferred trad jazz and took the ferry over to Eel Pie Island every Saturday to listen to Acker Bilk. What is maddening in retrospect is that we could have been taking the bus to the Station Hotel in Richmond, a couple of miles down the road, to listen to the nascent Rolling Stones, but, again, we’d never heard of them.

  So, aged sixteen, I believed that pop music was rubbish and trad jazz was what you had to listen to if you aspired to be a beatnik which I did. And then the situation got complicated because my much older conman boyfriend introduced me to classical music and I realised I had an awful lot to catch up on. I think this is what happened to most of my contemporaries – they graduated very quickly from pop to jazz to classical music and never went back. Luckily, I did.

  What saved me was that a friend of mine called Lizzie had a younger sister who, for some reason that I still don’t understand, ‘discovered’ the Beatles before most of the world had heard of them – i.e. in 1962 rather than 1963. Lizzie’s sister’s bedroom was entirely covered with posters of the Beatles and she played ‘Love Me
Do’ on her Dansette all day long. Of course she was younger than us so we pretended to despise her tastes and asked patronisingly how her ‘insects’ were coming along, but it meant that when the Beatles did finally arrive, with Please Please Me in 1963, I already felt I owned them. And, like anyone who followed the Beatles’ career from start to finish, I learned through them to take pop music seriously.

  Unfortunately being so keen on the Beatles meant I missed out on many of the other great pop groups who emerged in the 1960s – there were just so many of them! I saw the Animals at an Oxford commem ball but I never saw the Kinks or the Small Faces and I stupidly still ignored the Rolling Stones till years later. (Mick Jagger is second top – Rupert Murdoch is first – on my perennial wish list of people I want to interview, though he is well known to be a useless interviewee – he claims not to remember the past.) And I missed nearly all the pop stars who emerged in the 1970s because I was deep in nappies. David Bowie still remains a complete blank.

  But I did catch up with some of them later, interviewing Rod Stewart, Boy George, Morrissey, long after their peaks. Morrissey was a weird one. I interviewed him in 2002 when he was touring the States, trying to establish a solo career but without much success, and I met him in a most unlikely army town called Colorado Springs where I would have thought they shot people like Morrissey on sight. He was staying at a sort of golf-spa hotel a few miles out of town, and cut a lonely, miserable figure. He was obsessed at the time with a lawsuit brought by one of his former bandmates, and he was so busy telling me chapter and verse of this lawsuit I could hardly get him to talk about music at all. I got the impression his career was washed up but (as so often) I was wrong.

  I also had a very funny experience in the 1980s, watching a group called Tears for Fears shoot a video in the California desert. Actually I should call them ‘Tear for Fear’ because only one of them, Curt Smith, was present – the other one didn’t like flying. Curt had to ride around on a quad bike lip-synching ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’. I and a couple of other journalists were meant to follow around in a Winnebago caravan, together with the PR, Mariella Frostrup. I must say that much as I admire Mariella’s subsequent career on radio and television, I have never admired her as much as I did then. We journalists were all jet-lagged and grumbling, the driver kept getting lost, the Winnebago developed engine trouble, the temperature was in the high thirties, we seldom if ever caught up with Tear for Fear but Mariella bubbled on. We were running so late that we didn’t arrive at our final location till after midnight. It was by a lake, called Salton Sea, but because it was dark we couldn’t see it. My God, we could smell it though – an extraordinary smell which was revealed in the morning to come from heaps of rotting fish all round the lake shore. Mariella kept exclaiming, ‘Isn’t it picturesque!’ But it was hard even to see, our eyes were streaming so badly from the poisonous fumes.

  I suppose my favourite pop star ever was Jarvis Cocker, whom I first interviewed in 1998. But for some bizarre reason, he insisted on doing the interview at my house. This caused me a sort of category confusion – I found it hard to be an interviewer and a hostess at the same time – and also I was star-struck which is a terrible fault in an interviewer. Before he came, I spent hours whirling round the house, hiding the more embarrassing family photos, trying to arrange my CDs in some sort of faintly plausible order, banishing the pot-pourri (he once described pot-pourri, along with Belgian chocolates, as his ‘worst fear’) and generally behaving like a demented fan. Of course I am a fan (Pulp’s ‘Common People’ is my favourite pop song ever) but you can’t be a fan while doing an interview because you have to try to meet as equals. Years later I interviewed Jarvis Cocker again, at his home in Paris, and we had to make lunch for his stepson and again there was this confusion between the domestic and the professional, between him cooking fish fingers and me laying the table while asking questions. I think Jarvis does it deliberately as a way of ‘keeping things real’, which I approve of in theory but in practice find difficult. Perhaps I don’t really want interviews to be too ‘real’ – I need my professional armour.

  Recently, I went to Paris to interview a pop star again, this time Pete Doherty of the Libertines and Babyshambles. It was in a strange, scuzzy, evil-smelling flat with piles of books on the floor and a big shaggy dog sniffling around, but it turned out the flat was not his own but a friend’s so whatever clues it might have yielded were misleading. I told myself beforehand not to let myself be charmed by Doherty – of course he charmed me within minutes, not least by saying, ‘Are you really Lynn Barber? I’m so honoured.’ He is, or seems to be, a very sweet lost soul. But I find drug-users very difficult to understand. Barely ever having taken drugs myself, I can never tell if they are ‘on’ something and how far gone they might be. Doherty at one point used a menthol inhaler and I got wildly excited thinking this must be some new way of snorting cocaine. Doherty mischievously urged me to try it – it had no effect at all, apart from clearing my sinuses. Doherty told me he was off heroin – but he told another interviewer, just a few days later, that he was on a maintenance dose. Who knows? I feel I am too old, now, ever to understand drug-users.

  Drunks, of course, are a different matter. My father and plenty of my friends are or were big drinkers and I am not exactly teetotal myself so I don’t feel fazed by interviewing alcoholics. But this one, below, with Shane MacGowan, was a marathon, and one that came back to haunt me when my husband died.

  From the Observer, 11 March 2001

  Five o’clock, Bloom’s Hotel, Dublin. Shane MacGowan tumbles out of the lift into my waiting arms. The photographer and his assistant and I have been waiting since three, with a cheery Irish PR saying, ‘Oh, this is nothing – he kept a journalist waiting four hours yesterday!’ I want to murder him. We made various sorties to Shane’s hotel room but were blocked by a burly man who seemed to be acting as his minder.

  So on the one hand I am relieved to see Shane at last. On the other hand, I quite want to bundle him back in the lift and forget him. I was prepared for the teeth, the famous blackened stumps, but the suit is an unanticipated horror show, with its thickening patina of stains down the trousers culminating in big blobby spatters on the shoes. If he has not been sick down his trousers several dozen times, he must have a very good stylist. His skin has the shiny pallor of someone who has never seen daylight. He lurches towards the bar. The photographer tries to head him off, saying he wants to do photographs outside before the daylight fades. Shane says, ‘Ginantonic’ and plonks himself in a chair. I chatter brightly about James Joyce; Shane mumbles unintelligibly; the photographer tears his hair.

  But eventually, with coaxing from the photographer, the assistant, the PR and me, we get him out into the street. He flinches as the last rays of sunlight hit him and sinks into a doorway – luckily a very photogenic doorway – and the photographer clicks away. Every single person who passes down the street stops and says, ‘Shane, good on yer!’ or ‘How’re you doing?’ A few bravely rush up and hug him. I didn’t realise till then that he is a sort of god in Dublin – or not a god, more a prodigal son. Everyone seems to know him, everyone seems to love him, even little old ladies who surely can’t ever have been Pogues fans shake their heads fondly and say, ‘Shane! God love you!’

  After the photographs, we stagger back to the hotel. I remark that the bar is terribly noisy – couldn’t we sit somewhere else? Shane says, with sudden furious clarity, ‘It’s a bar. It’s meant to be noisy.’ The bar it is then – our home for the next six hours. Of all the Irish bars in all the world, this must be the most thoroughly charmless. It looks like a motorway Travelodge.

  But it is Shane’s bar and no doubt after his death it will be called ‘Shane’s Bar’ – maybe the hotel will be rechristened ‘Shane’s Hotel’. Gin and tonics begin to appear as if by magic – rows and rows of them filling the table, perhaps materialised by fairy folk because I never see them coming.

  I start by saying I very much enjoyed hi
s book A Drink with Shane MacGowan – it is one of the freshest, most original biographies I’ve ever read. It’s written as a conversation with his girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, and it’s a picture of their relationship as much as of his life. Shane, truculently, mumbles that it’s not his book, and he is not happy with it. He doesn’t like the title – ‘A Drink with Shane MacGowan’ is not accurate because of course it is many drinks over many years. And then he doesn’t like the byline – why is he credited as co-author when it was all Victoria’s work? It was just an interview, he insists, just her sometimes switching on the tape recorder when they were talking. And he doesn’t ‘stand by’ anything he is quoted as saying because he might say one thing one day and something else the next.

  So is he cross with her for writing the book? ‘I can’t be cross with her,’ he says indignantly, ‘I love her!’ But he is cross with the book. And with the publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson. There is some ongoing saga whereby he claims they agreed to pay his hotel bill and haven’t done so. They say they did agree to pay – for two days while he was doing interviews – not the six weeks (and counting) he has stayed there.

  Anyway, he says ominously that he has not finished cutting the book. The press release claims that it recounts his days as a rent boy in London, but there is nothing about being a rent boy in the book. ‘I can’t believe you were a rent boy,’ I say rudely, ‘who would pay to rent you?’ ‘You’d be surprised,’ he says. ‘There are women who would climb over their grandmothers to get to a celebrity – Victoria, for instance!’ and he emits the first of his exploding-coffee-machine laughs.