by Lynn Barber
My father died in May and very soon afterwards I was asked to do Desert Island Discs with Kirsty Young. Naturally, I was thrilled and wished my parents could have been alive to hear it. I included a favourite song of my father’s, ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, as one of my eight records and was touched afterwards to get dozens of letters from old people saying they hadn’t heard the song for decades and were so glad to hear it again – they thought nobody else remembered it.
I knew that Kirsty Young was a good interviewer (much better than Sue Lawley) because I’d been listening to Desert Island Discs for ever, but it was only when she interviewed me that I realised how very, very good she is. I’d thought that all her questions would be pre-planned, and of course many of them were, but she also made impromptu connections that couldn’t have been scripted. For instance, I chose Pulp’s ‘Common People’ as my first record and she asked if I would call myself a friend of Jarvis Cocker’s and I said no, I’d met him a few times and obviously admired him but not enough to count as a friend, and then she used that as a link to ask about my friendship with Tracey Emin. Time and again she made these deft segues, and I was dazzled by her speed of thought.
But she also asked some quite hostile questions. She picked up the admission in my book that I’d been very promiscuous at Oxford (of course I knew she would) and nagged away at it like a terrier with a bone. ‘You say you slept with fifty men! In two terms! And those terms aren’t very long, are they?’ No, I agreed limply, I was rather jamming them in. This unfortunate turn of phrase was of course much relished by the tabloids who quoted it endlessly. Come to think of it, perhaps it was just as well my parents were dead.
Another thought. My daughters were already in their thirties when this publicity blitz happened, and I knew I didn’t have to worry about upsetting them. They had heard all my shocking revelations before and joked about them with their friends. I had taken the precaution, when I wrote An Education, of showing them the manuscript before I sent it to the publisher, in case I’d said anything that might upset them, but they gave it the green light. But supposing I’d been doing all these interviews years earlier while my daughters were still at school? I would have had to censor myself – though how well I would have succeeded is doubtful. But it gave me more sympathy with interviewees who have children at home, who must always have to think about how their remarks will go down at their children’s school.
As well as doing interviews about An Education, I also started being invited to talk at book festivals, which was a whole new world to me. Of course they were fun, but I am still puzzled by the idea that people will pay to hear writers talking, when the whole pleasure of books for me is that they don’t require a captive audience in a hall but just one person reading privately in an armchair. Poets are different of course – I can understand why they would want to read their poetry aloud and other people would want to listen to them. But I couldn’t face reading my own prose out loud and said that, rather than give readings, I would prefer to be interviewed on stage and take questions from the audience.
I said yes almost indiscriminately to all the festivals that asked me. One of them was Richmond, which I happily accepted because Richmond is only a couple of miles from Twickenham where I grew up. The date was in my diary, the arrangements were made, and then they asked me to send an author photo for their programme. I sent my favourite photo, taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd, which showed me wreathed in smoke, enjoying a cigarette. The organisers said they couldn’t use it! They had funding from Richmond Council and health and safety regulations meant they were not allowed to publish anything that promoted smoking. Could I send them another photograph? No, I said. If the good burghers of Richmond were going to be so terrorised by a photograph of me smoking, imagine what my actual presence would do! The organiser was very sweet and kept offering compromises, but I withdrew on principle and Richmond had to struggle along without me.
Publishers like sending you to book festivals because, hopefully, you sell lots of books by signing them afterwards. And it was always gratifying to see a queue of people holding copies of An Education, waiting patiently for me to sign them. But one of the curiosities of these book-signings was that, more often than not, I would notice some woman, often about my own age or slightly younger, hanging around the back of the queue because she wanted to talk to me afterwards. One or two of these women had been to Lady Eleanor Holles and wanted to ask if I remembered so-and-so (I never did – I am hopeless on names) but, more interestingly, a few of them had memories of Simon, my conman. One of them had been ‘engaged’ to him and had a daughter by him but of course he did a bunk immediately. Another woman my own age told me that her daughter had gone out with an illegitimate son of Simon’s who went to Israel to look for him when he was eighteen. He found Simon eventually, but it was not a happy meeting, and he came back rather appalled by what he had seen of his father.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to finish the story of Simon. When An Education came out, he rang me a couple of times from Israel but I always slammed the phone down as soon as I heard his voice. The Daily Mail offered to fly me out to Israel to meet him – they said they’d tracked him down through various aliases though none of the names meant anything to me – along with a reporter. I can’t think of anything I’d like less. To meet Simon again would be bad enough, but with a Mail reporter present! People kept asking, ‘Aren’t you curious to meet him?’ But no, absolutely not. He would tell a pack of lies about his life’s adventures, claiming he had always loved me, and I would look at him and think: How disgusting that I ever imagined I could marry such a lying slimeball.
Anyway, I learned in early 2013 that he was dead. I had an email from a man in Israel who said he believed I knew his late father, and enclosing some photos that were obviously of Simon. He said he wanted to talk to me about his father in order to ‘move on’ with his life. I had no desire to talk to him, but I wanted confirmation that Simon was dead, and I remembered that one of the women I’d met at a book festival had said she knew a son of Simon’s (a different son – he seems to have had zillions of children) who lived in Glasgow. Eventually I tracked her down and she confirmed that yes, Simon had died about a year earlier. Phew! I was amazed at how relieved I was, that I would never hear his creepy voice on the phone again. Everyone tells me I should forgive him, but why? He took advantage of my youth, but much worse was the way he so coolly conned my parents. He knew that he had to get them on side and he set about it in a very calculated manner, flattering my mother about her looks and my father about his intelligence. And they were so ashamed afterwards they wouldn’t even mention Simon’s name until a few months before they died. When my mother said ‘Forgive me’ on her deathbed, I think it was for Simon she meant.
When paedophilia became a hot topic in the early Noughties, I heard the term ‘grooming’ for the first time and recognised immediately that that was what Simon did to my parents. Technically, he was not a paedophile because I was sixteen when I met him, but sixteen-year-olds were more innocent then, and it was essentially a paedophile relationship. My whole appeal to him was that I was a schoolgirl, and his to me was that he was a grown-up, and he relied on the fact that schoolgirls didn’t question what grown-ups did.
But I hadn’t really defined this thought until I went to watch the filming of An Education at the old Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Ealing. Carey Mulligan and the other girls were acting a classroom scene with their teacher, played by Olivia Williams, and when the scene ended Olivia Williams rushed up saying she had lots of questions she wanted to ask me. Most of her questions were about my memories of school, but then she asked, ‘Do you think he was a paedophile?’ And without a second’s thought I answered yes. Amanda Posey, the co-producer of the film, almost fainted. Apparently this had been a huge problem all the time her husband Nick Hornby was writing the script – on no account must Simon be seen as a paedophile, because then no good actor would agree to play him and audiences would stay away in dr
oves. So thanks to Nick’s script, and the brilliant casting of Peter Sarsgaard, they managed to fudge the age question in the film, and I’d just airily blown it. Amanda presumably swore Olivia Williams to secrecy and tactfully suggested to me that if ever asked the question again, I should perhaps rethink my answer. But anyway, yes, I believe he was a paedophile and that he groomed my parents to deliver me to him, and that is why I have never felt the slightest desire to forgive him.
An Education gave me my first glimmer of what it must be like to be famous. Until then, I’d believed that I was entirely a private person. Other journalists probably knew who I was, but I was not a figure of public interest. But then, through the book and, even more, the film, people I didn’t know seemed to know about me, which I found disconcerting. Often they addressed me as if we were old friends so I’d be racking my brain the whole time thinking: Who is this person? and feeling guilty about my bad memory. It must be a million times worse for really famous people when everyone they meet seems to know them. It gives me a bit more sympathy with my interviewees than perhaps I had before.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Age
I’m writing this on my sixty-ninth birthday so the question of age looms large. Next year it will be three score years and ten which I’ve always believed, and still believe, is quite enough. I suffered from having parents who lived to ninety-two and wouldn’t wish the same on my own children. But I’ll have to have a seventieth birthday party! And see this book published! Maybe I’ll stick around a bit longer, or lie about my age.
Not that lying about my age will fool anyone. I have a friend, same age as me, who gets terribly hurt if she isn’t asked for proof of her age when she requests a senior concession at the cinema. I’m always amazed if they do. I know I look old because three times recently people have offered to help me with my luggage on the train. The first two were men – foreigners of course – but the last when I was coming back from a party in Hastings, and maybe looking a bit extra shaky from a hangover, was a woman, and not a young woman either, but a woman of about fifty with bleached blonde hair and tattoos. And although I declined her kind offer, and said I was fine, thank you, I realised I must look very old indeed and I could either cry about it or decide: I don’t mind and thank God there are still a few people – not many – who feel inclined to help old people with their luggage. I suppose someone soon will want me to do an oral history about how it felt to grow up in the dark ages of the 1950s without a television or computer, and did we have gas lighting and keep coal in the bath? But OK, I’m up for it, I’ll do old if that’s what’s required and I certainly don’t want to pretend to be young.
It strikes me that there are two basic stereotypes for women my age and older. You can either be a sweet old biddy, patting kiddies on the head and saying how you long to put your feet up and have a nice cup of tea. Or you can be a wicked witch who scares people stiff. I’ll go for the latter. I already own a black cat, and sometimes talk to it; I could easily advance to muttering in the street, and waving a walking stick at irritating children. Basically it’s a choice between do I want to be feared or do I want to be patronised and frankly I prefer the former. My father managed to terrify people even when he was ninety and blind, which I found admirable. It required a lot of shouting, though, which I’m not very good at.
Sixty-nine is pretty old for a journalist – of course it’s pretty old for anyone, but particularly for someone in what is supposedly (though not really) a young profession. In my thirties I assumed I would retire at sixty, but when I got to sixty I was still enjoying work, so there seemed no good reason to stop. Also, I was newly widowed and desperately needed work to distract me, to get me out of the house. Maybe I should warn my employers that I will never voluntarily retire. They will have to prise my gnarled fingers from the keyboard and I will kick up an almighty fuss. That is assuming newspapers still exist by then.
I’m probably the oldest still-practising interviewer, which is quite an odd thing to be. Whenever interview scenes are portrayed in television drama or films, they usually consist of a young, pretty woman interviewing an older man. And of course that’s how it was when I started. Interviewing was seen as a form of flirtation; it was assumed that a younger woman could winkle out secrets merely by batting her eyelashes. Actually, I don’t think I ever flirted with my interviewees, but I suppose I capitalised on the fact that I was young, and pretty. Quite likely I giggled a lot, and crossed and uncrossed my legs a few times – I had fabulous legs in those days, I once came third in a national Lady Cantrece Lovely Legs competition (Lady Cantrece was a brand of tights) – so it is not impossible that some of my interviewees fancied me. But I was already in love with David, so I certainly never went on a date with an interviewee.
When I started, my interviewees were always older than me, and nearly always men, and it felt very natural (probably because of my relationship with my father) to be asking cheeky questions of an older man. I was much more inhibited about interviewing women. If they were great beauties, or famous actresses, I felt in awe of them; if they were not beauties – if they were writers for instance! – I felt that my own prettiness put me at a disadvantage and that they were bound to hate me. The upshot was I avoided interviewing women as much as possible.
But in my late twenties I suddenly came up against the question of age. As I mentioned before, the Evening Standard commissioned me to do a series of interviews with footballers and it came as a terrible shock one day to realise that I was interviewing someone younger than me. The footballer was maybe twenty-five to my twenty-nine but it still felt obscurely wrong, humiliating. On the one hand, he was thick as two planks, but on the other he was married, with two children, and owned a substantial house. He felt like a grown-up, albeit a stupid one, whereas I still felt like a student. I thought: Is this what my life is going to be from now on, trying to wring a few interesting remarks from morons who are younger than me? If someone had told me then that I would be interviewing a tennis player (Rafa Nadal) when I was old enough to be his grandmother, I might have packed up my career there and then. Luckily, my footballer series didn’t last long, but it was the first hint of something that would become a problem later on.
Apart from the footballers, nearly all the people I interviewed in my twenties and thirties were older than me, which was fine. But when I was at the Independent on Sunday in my mid-forties, it occurred to me that, if I only interviewed older people, this would be an ever-diminishing field and probably quite a boring one. If I wanted to stay current, if I wanted to be a contender (which I did), I would have to interview younger people. I found it hard at first. I remember going to Jonathan Ross’s gorgeous house overlooking Hampstead Heath and thinking: It’s not fair. I could accept that pop stars and film stars became very rich very young but to find someone who was ‘only’ a television presenter (sorry, Wossy) living in such glamour was quite a shock. (I’m often asked if I ever envy the people I interview and I can answer truthfully no. But I do sometimes envy their houses.)
Luckily this dilemma eased when I left the Independent on Sunday to join Vanity Fair and they only ever asked me to interview older people. But in fact they very rarely asked me to interview anyone at all. This led to another dilemma. I was under exclusive contract to Vanity Fair which meant I was not allowed to write for anyone else, but they only gave me half a dozen interviews in two years. I was fabulously well paid but I was stuck at home twiddling my thumbs. I suppose in retrospect I should have learned to play the piano or something, but I mainly spent my time reading British press interviews and grinding my teeth that it wasn’t me doing them. A whole new crop of interviewers – Ginny Dougary, Jan Moir, Deborah Ross – had arrived to steal my thunder. So by the time Vanity Fair dropped my contract, I was so hungry for interviews I would have interviewed children, cats, dogs, footballers, anyone, and my qualms about younger people had disappeared.
My preference now, in old age, is to interview much younger people – so much so tha
t I get a bit sniffy if anyone offers me Sir David Attenborough or Diana Athill. I feel I’ve done old people: I know a lot of them as friends and I am one myself. Whereas young people are a whole new world. Often I don’t know what they’re talking about but they’re quite pleased and amused when I ask them to explain. It reminds them of talking to their grannies. I still feel a bit goatish asking young people about their sex lives but it’s much easier now than when I was in my forties – they know I have no evil designs on them and they are often surprisingly frank. I think there are advantages for the reader too.
The trouble with young interviewers is that they’re wet behind the ears. They believe what PRs tell them! They are thrilled if a record company flies them out to Croatia to watch a British group perform. They don’t ever wonder why they couldn’t have watched the group in England (answer – because they might not seem so exciting in a half-full hall in Paignton). They are grateful for the free T-shirts PRs give them – especially nowadays when they are so badly paid they probably need all the free clothing they can get. They don’t ask why a film has been ‘in the pipeline’ for three years (answer – because it is so bad it will go straight to DVD) or why an actor has not been seen on screen for over a decade (numerous answers – but often because he’s become uninsurable either through drink, drugs or general seediness). Journalists are often told off for being cynical. They don’t have to be cynical but they do always have to be sceptical, and this is harder for the young.
The young don’t have that automatic bullshit detector which I think only comes with age. If they meet someone who says he’s a successful entrepreneur they believe him without even asking any back-up questions (What is your company called? What does it do? Can I look it up in Companies House? Are you in the Sunday Times Rich List?). That is why it’s so easy for conmen to con people. If someone is supposed to be rich it should be possible to establish how they made their money, otherwise alarm bells should ring. This was a lesson I learned the hard way from Simon.