by Lynn Barber
Of course, in the past, her sickliness was exacerbated by her non-stop drinking, progressing from beer to wine to brandy through the day. ‘When I went out, I had a brilliant bag that could hold four beers, half a bottle of brandy and cigarettes all the way round, and also I was sponsored by Bombay Sapphire Gin, so I used to always take a bottle of gin as well. And even when I didn’t go out, I’d be sitting round drinking.’ Why this abuse? ‘I don’t think it was abuse. It was more like rock ’n’ roll!’ she cackles. Her drinking got so bad about three years ago, she had constant diarrhoea and her weight went down to six and a half stone. She also got really boringly aggressive at parties, till finally Mat and her friends said pack it in or they’d leave her. So in September 1999, she gave up spirits – she still drinks wine and gets pissed at parties, but not to the same annihilating degree.
Nowadays, she says, she looks after herself – she goes to the gym and is learning to box. And she has a good solid relationship with her fellow artist Mat Collishaw, now in its fourth year. Moreover, she is faithful – ‘But of course I think probably no one else is!’ She and Mat could afford to have children but she says she’s too old and also, ‘We have a really good life, we like it the way it is. If I keep fit and healthy, and in shape, I do actually have a few good years.’
But clearly the question of having children is preying on her mind – she’s just made a film with her mother which is ‘basically me asking her why she won’t let me have children. My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now. I asked is it because she thinks I’m so mentally unstable she’d be frightened for me and she said, “Yes, that’s one of the reasons.” The fact that I’ve got over so much, she wouldn’t want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again.’
How fragile is she? She seems cheerful and robust at present, but she has had plenty of brushes with madness in the past and at least one suicide attempt, when she threw herself off a cliff, aged twenty – ‘But I’m a really good swimmer!’ There was another very bad patch around her abortion in 1990, and one three years ago – perhaps the period of self-neglect commemorated in My Bed. When she goes down, she says, it’s like a spiral in which one failure reminds her of every other failure in her life – that’s why she could never face taking her driving test, because if she failed it would be like failing to win the Turner Prize and every other failure before that. But now she is determined to take her driving test and keep on taking it till she passes.
At least now she seems to have got out of the habit of destructive relationships that was such a feature of her teens and twenties. In those days, she says, she was so nihilistic she thought: I am shit, and that is why I am treated like shit. Was success as good as she expected? ‘Better! I’m happier. I look after myself more. I’m kinder to myself. I’ve got a nice house. And if I didn’t want to work for a couple of years I wouldn’t have to – it’s a great feeling, to know I’m doing it because I want to do it. The downside is I get terrible stress and my mind goes blank and I lose concentration because there are people on my case all the time for all kinds of shit. People try constantly to use me and I hate it.’
I must say that her life, what I saw of it, is incredibly pressured. The phone in her studio rings non-stop, and although she has a brilliant PA, Gemma, she has to keep making decisions. While I was there, she was having a great row with the ICA about the ‘Beck’s Futures’ exhibition because they were planning to show her new film in the bar and she wanted it in the cinema. She told Gemma to relay the news that she wouldn’t be attending the opening party after all – and suddenly the director of the ICA was on the phone grovelling, saying of course she could have the cinema. ‘The wheel that squeaks gets the oil!’ she crowed as she put the phone down.
I was amazed to see that a fortnight before her White Cube opening, half the work was still incomplete. Her stepmother was busy sewing the blankets, her assistant was building the 17-foot tower, Helter Skelter, which will be the centrepiece of the show, but she hadn’t even started the four paintings she had promised to make. All this, I’d have thought, was panic enough, but she had also agreed to appear on Have I Got News for You and said she ought to try and read the newspapers – though her main preparation would be choosing her lowest décolletage to frighten Ian Hislop.
She is also supposed to be writing a novel – she says it will have to be a novel rather than an autobiography because ‘one thing that success has taught me is censorship’. But why does she want to write? Are there things she can’t say in her art? ‘Yes, because – I should be careful what I say here, but I don’t think I’m visually the best artist in the world, right? I’ve got to be honest about this. But when it comes to words, I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art – and it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique.’
Aha! This used to be my own theory about Tracey, that she was a great writer and a merely so-so artist. If you see her drawings or her blankets from a distance, without reading the words, you think ‘pretty’ but not much more. It is the words that give them their edge. That is why My Bed was such a breakthrough, because it didn’t rely on words – but I suspect it relied on our knowing stuff about her history that we only knew from her previous words. But I’ve now revised my theory because there is a piece of hers in the Tate that is only words, For Joseph Samuels, 1981, and although it is vividly written, it is pretty tame by her standards. So she needs both – the fierceness of the words playing off the delicacy of the art – to really make her point.
Finally, I asked about this habit of hoarding things, the way she keeps archives of her life, never lets the past go. ‘Perhaps it’s because I never grew up.’ Or is it because she needs proof – as a teenager, did people call her a liar? ‘Yes. And not just as a teenage girl but even as a woman. That’s a good theory, I like that. And maybe I don’t believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing . . . it’s like with my work, people say, “Oh, the honesty and the truth behind it” – but it’s all edited, it’s all calculated, it’s all decided. I decide to show this or that part of the truth, which isn’t necessarily the whole story, it’s just what I decide to give you.’ So with this interview – honest as far as it goes, I hope, but only a fragment of the whole Tracey.
*
That was my first encounter with Tracey and we got on well but I didn’t really expect to see her again. But, very much to my surprise, she kept inviting me to lunches and parties and openings and seemed to want to be friends. She mainly talked about herself and I thought that her idea of friendship was a bit of a one-way street, but then she was incredibly kind when my husband died in 2003 and kept ringing up to see if I was all right. She thought I was becoming agoraphobic (I wasn’t, but I wasn’t socialising) and insisted that I come to a party at the National Portrait Gallery with her. So that was kind, and she was even more kind a few years later when my little cat Delilah died of cancer. I rang my daughters to wail, ‘Boo hoo, boo hoo, I had to have Delilah put down!’ and they were mildly sympathetic but only mildly. ‘You can easily get another cat,’ said one, and, ‘Well you’ve still got Samson,’ said the other – both a bit brisk for my taste. I was still wailing when Tracey rang so I told her my cat just died and of course, as the mother of Docket and a besotted cat-lover, she understood my grief immediately, listened patiently to my outpourings, and sent a shedload of flowers.
I saw her at the 2005 Venice Biennale (when Gilbert and George represented Britain) and Tracey said wistfully that she’d love to do a Biennale, but she didn’t think the British Council would ever choose her. But lo and behold, she was chosen for the very next Biennale in 2007 so I persuaded the Observer to let me cover the story at length, from all the months of preparation to the opening. This was the nearest I ever got to seeing Tracey at work and I was struck time and again by her perfectionism. She actually paid for the restoration of the British pavilion, she was so eager to get everything right. �
�Doing the Biennale’ with Tracey was probably the most glamorous week of my life – night after night of dinners in gorgeous restaurants, parties in fabulous palazzi, whizzing between them in Ronnie Wood’s private launch. Unfortunately Tracey herself did not enjoy the Biennale, partly because she was ill, partly because she was having rows with her boyfriend, and also because her show was roundly panned by the British press (though not by the international press). Afterwards, she told me, she cried for a week.
But then, being Tracey, she bounced back, with highly praised shows in Edinburgh and at the Hayward Gallery and a very interesting show in which she ‘embellished’ some gouaches Louise Bourgeois gave her shortly before she died. She has regular shows in Rome, New York and London but has recently branched out into South America, and Miami. She celebrated her fiftieth birthday last year with a great party for all her friends at her house near St Tropez, and a visit to Château La Coste where she unveiled a new outdoor sculpture, followed by a party on the beach where, oddly, Joan Collins turned up. Tracey does have some very unexpected friends. I am lucky to be one of them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On Being Interviewed
Obviously being interviewed is pretty odd if you’re used to doing the interviewing yourself. As an interviewer, my aim is always to talk as little as possible – ideally I want a one-sentence question to yield a three-paragraph answer – and I’m confused at having to yack away about myself. I suppose it’s what one dreams of as a teenager – meeting a man who says, ‘Tell me all about yourself, you fascinating creature!’ But ever since my teenage fiasco with a conman I’ve been a bit guarded. I can only open up when I know I can trust someone, and I very rarely trust anyone I’m meeting for the first time. Perhaps especially journalists.
My big dose of being interviewed happened in 2009 when I published my memoir An Education, and when the film based on my conman experience came out. But actually I had some experience of being interviewed before that – I’d ‘done publicity’ for my two sex books and two collections of interviews (Mostly Men and Demon Barber) and generally took the line that if publishers or employers asked me to chat to the media I should oblige. It does not behove journalists to say they are shy.
But some of those early interviews were very odd. I remember a particularly strange radio interview with Michael Parkinson about my first collection, Mostly Men. He was in something of a career trough at the time, no longer on the telly but doing radio interviews with nobodies like me. And it was obvious from the moment I walked into the studio that he hated me. Almost his first words were, ‘You know Melvyn Bragg is a good friend of mine?’ Uh huh.
One of the interviews reproduced in Mostly Men was with Melvyn Bragg and it was not flattering. It was published in one of the first issues of the Independent on Sunday in 1990, and apparently Melvyn Bragg practically had a breakdown when he read it – it seems nobody had ever said a harsh word about him before. My harsh words were to the effect that he wasted a lot of time on The South Bank Show showing reaction shots of himself looking pensive or grinning, when he could just be concentrating on the interviewee.
Bragg retaliated by putting a hideously ugly woman interviewer into his next trashy novel, and now Parky was trying to add his mite by giving me a radio grilling. But he chose an odd tack. He decided to ‘expose’ the fact that I had once worked for Penthouse. It wasn’t much of an exposure given that I’d said it in the author blurb of my book, but his line was: How could I call myself a feminist if I’d worked for Penthouse? I’m not sure that I ever did ‘call myself’ a feminist. I mean obviously I was and am a feminist, being a woman and all, but I’ve never particularly called myself one. But Parky wouldn’t let it go. He spent the entire interview telling me off for working for Penthouse, and confirmed what I already thought anyway: that he was an exceptionally dull interviewer.
As well as professional interviews, I also gave dozens of interviews to students from my husband’s media studies course at the Central London Polytechnic. I gave an annual lecture on interviewing and said that if anyone fancied interviewing a celeb, I would be happy to critique the result. They had to find the celeb themselves, and some of them did, but a few had the bright idea of asking if they could interview me instead. I always said yes, on condition that they sent me the finished article to appraise. I gave them a one-hour time slot, say from 4.15 to 5.15, which I regarded as their first test. Could they turn up on time? And could they accept that an hour meant an hour? Of course most of them turned up late and then looked surprised when I said, ‘Well it’s 5.15 now, your time’s up.’ They probably thought I was a real grouchy cow – which I was – but I wanted to inculcate the lesson that punctuality matters in journalism. An article that is late for its deadline will probably never be published at all. And if you have sometimes spent days negotiating with a PR about whether you will have sixty or seventy-five minutes with an interviewee, as I have done, you know it would be daft to waste any one of those minutes by turning up late.
I learned a lot from letting students interview me. But what I mainly learned was that I could never tell during the interview how good they were. Some students seemed really on the ball, asked interesting questions, elicited interesting answers – and then went away and wrote a completely standard piece with no insight at all. I advised such students to head for television or radio – they were good at interviewing, they just weren’t any good at writing it up. It was the other type who interested me, the ones who seemed rather bumbling and inattentive at the time, and then came back with a humdinger of a piece full of sharp observations on my voice, my smoking, my ‘tinkly’ laugh, my way of dealing with awkward questions (‘I can’t remember’ my usual standby), but also noticing their surroundings, my drawing room, my cat. I was often amazed that someone who had seemed half-asleep could have picked up so much good detail.
So, as I say, I was not a complete novice when I started doing publicity for An Education in 2009. But I found the whole experience unexpectedly intense because suddenly there were dozens of interviews to do, not just for the UK, but also for Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and then endless ‘down-the-lines’ for regional radio stations. And I was quite nervous about doing them because I was always afraid of letting slip the real name of my conman, which I wanted to keep secret. I’d called him ‘Simon’ in the book and then Nick Hornby, who wrote the screenplay, changed his name to ‘David’ in the film – which was confusing because it was also the name of my husband – so I always did a mental double-take when anyone asked about ‘David’.
There was also the problem of my parents. I knew they wouldn’t see the film (my father being blind, my mother crippled with arthritis, both in their nineties) but I thought that other people in their retirement home might come across my interviews – as indeed they did. Almost every interviewer attacked me for being ‘cruel’ to my parents. I would say unsentimental rather than cruel – or perhaps unsparing would be a better word. With friends and daughters I could defend myself by saying, ‘But look, you know what monsters my parents are!’ and anyone who had experienced my father’s shouting and my mother’s wilful obtuseness would warmly agree. But I couldn’t say that to the public at large because I knew there would be a keen audience at Bramble Cottage retirement home. So I really had to just take it on the chin – which is something you learn to do a lot in interviews.
(I remember when interviewing Vanessa Redgrave, I quoted a paragraph from her autobiography where one of her children said wistfully, ‘Can’t you stay with us, Mummy? Do you have to go and save all these other people?’ It seemed to me a crucial admission – that Redgrave was so busy saving the world, she neglected her own daughters – and I said accusingly, ‘Don’t you regret that?’ ‘Yes,’ she said simply, ‘I do.’ All my huffy-puffy moral indignation deflated instantly, and I found myself murmuring, ‘Oh well, we’ve all made mistakes.’ It was the honesty and genuine regret that was disarming.)
Anyway I did the first round of interviews for my
book in early summer 2009, but knew I had to do another round in the autumn because the book was coming out in Australia and New Zealand, closely followed by the film. My mother fell ill in July and I spent a lot of time visiting her in Brighton Hospital but she seemed to be on the mend so I went for my usual week’s holiday in France. She died the day after I got back. She was ninety-two, she’d been in hospital with breathing difficulties and was told she had a dicky heart – I should not have been as surprised as I was. Nevertheless I was in a fog of disbelief for weeks: My mother died – how could that be? I always thought she would outlive me.
I was still puzzling this over when I had to do my next radio interview, a ‘down-the-line’ from a London studio to an Irish station. The interviewer asked something about my parents, and I was chatting about them, getting into a by now familiar groove, when I suddenly thought: Hang on. My mother’s dead. But the interviewer had moved on to ask about something else, and I thought: This is not the moment to say, ‘By the way, my mother died.’ And after that – after that one lie by omission – I decided not to tell any interviewers my mother died because if I told one, then I’d have to tell them all and I didn’t feel ready to talk about it yet. So I went on talking about my parents as if they were both still alive, right through the film premiere and into the New Year. I didn’t finally tackle the subject until my father died a few months later, when I wrote an article about becoming an orphan for the Sunday Times. I preferred to write it in my own words, rather than try to explain my very complex mix of feelings (guilt, relief, sorrow) to an interviewer. But it meant that for more than six months I kept up this strange lie.