Rich men’s toys
‘It’s going to be hard to get quiet time together,’ the client said. ‘I’ve got a private jet and I go back and forth to New York a lot. That would be a good opportunity to talk without interruption.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed, always happy to meet a client wherever they would be most comfortable – particularly if it involved being pampered for a few hours in a private jet.
He was not the first wealthy client to make that suggestion and I doubted he would be the last. Some suggest taking a few days at spas, resorts or in country houses that they don’t usually get much use from. Others like to do their talking on the decks and in the cabins of their yachts, even if we never travel more than a few miles off the Riviera coast and come ashore for dinner every evening.
Rich men love their toys and in most cases they also love to share them. If they are hiring a ghostwriter they already have an eye on how posterity will view them, and they want their scribe to see them at their best. On a commission in Hong Kong I couldn’t understand why my client was being so cagey about inviting me to his house, always arranging our meetings in his office with its sweeping views out across the harbour. When the invitation finally arrived, on my last day in the city, his wife showed me their newly installed ornamental fish pond (a bit like the Trevi fountain in Rome only in white marble with gold decorations), and explained that her husband had not wanted me to see the house until the fountains and waterfalls were all working perfectly.
The mega-rich grow accustomed to perfection. Their days are kept peaceful and well oiled by immaculately discreet butlers, cooks and drivers. Their jets and limousines are more comfortably upholstered than most people’s living rooms. They travel through life on a cloud of unruffled luxury and they see any interruption to that perfection as a failing. Many of them seem to be suffering from a variety of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which requires that they are cocooned at all times in a world of total order and cleanliness.
When I am getting to know them I try to get them to make all the decisions about where we should meet and what we should do together. Just as Nick Carraway entered the party-world of Jay Gatsby in order to tell his story and Charles Ryder became immersed in the aristocratic world of Brideshead, I want to sit in the rooms they use the most, eat what they eat, drink what they drink, go to the restaurants where they are known and comfortable. As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ Or in other words, ‘until you walk a mile in his shoes’.
More than once a client has become impatient with my reluctance to express any preference as to where or what we should eat. They want to be generous and to supply whatever my needs might be – the Jay Gatsby syndrome again – when all I want is to get beneath their skins and see the world through their eyes and taste it through their food choices. If that means many hours trapped on private jets and yachts or in the luscious bowels of the Dorchester – so be it.
The soporific brothel
The idea came from the girl’s husband, a British engineer who had been working for several years on a project in the Far East. He’d met her through mutual acquaintances. They fell instantly in love and married despite the fact that they didn’t have a language in common. Over the following few years, as he taught her English, he learned the story of his young bride’s life from the simple village where she was born to the brothels of Bangkok and eventually to freedom and security through marriage to him, a kind and gentle foreigner. He was proud of everything she had achieved and he thought that she deserved to have her story recognised, so on a business trip back to England he made contact with me.
‘I would need to spend time with her,’ I explained, ‘would she come to London?’
‘It would be better if you met her in Thailand,’ he said, ‘then you could see the actual places where the events happened.’
Nobody paid any attention when the girl and I checked into the reception of the ‘hotel’ in Bangkok where she had worked as a teenager. They were used to local girls and foreign men using the rooms upstairs. One wall of the reception area was made of glass, behind which a selection of scantily clad girls and women sat or lay or wandered around, like bored specimens in an exotic aquarium. One of them was actually knitting as she waited. Every time a man moved towards the glass they would all burst into a frenzy of flirting and pouting, putting on performances that they hoped the shadowy figure behind the glass would find attractive, all wanting to be the one who was chosen to go upstairs, to be given a chance to earn an hour or two’s wages.
Having paid the receptionist, my tiny guide and client led the way up to a small room furnished with nothing but a double bed and a bathtub. The ancient air-conditioning unit wedged in the window was stubbornly silent and the heat was overbearing.
‘We can talk here,’ she said, climbing onto the bed, sitting cross-legged and opening her handbag. ‘You want a coke?’
Grateful for any sort of fluid I accepted the proffered bottle. When I unscrewed the lid a jet of warm sticky liquid sprayed out, soaking the already grubby sheets. She covered her mouth with dainty fingers, prettily smothering an involuntary giggle.
I took the tape machine from my pocket and laid it on the pillow.
‘You sweating bad,’ she said, pointing to the dark patches on my T-shirt. ‘You take off shirt.’
As I struggled out of the clinging T-shirt she took a swig from her bottle and lay down with her head beside the tape machine. I pressed the record button.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s start from the beginning.’
I stretched out and propped my head up with my arm, so that I could watch her as she talked and show her that I was listening, encouraging her to keep going even when the words became difficult. Both of us sipped from the cokes. Once the bottle was empty my head was beginning to feel uncomfortably heavy on my arm and my cheek stuck to my palm with a slick of new sweat. She had her eyes closed most of the time so I thought it would be okay to put my head on the pillow too. When my eyelids also grew unbearably heavy I thought it might be a good idea to rest them, after all I could continue talking and listening.
By the time her husband showed up to see how we were doing the recorder lying between us had run out of tape and both of us were so deeply asleep we didn’t even hear him coming into the room, only waking up when he sat down on the end of the bed and coughed politely.
An opportunist hack
When first attempting to find my way in the world as a writer I flirted with the idea that I should try to get a full-time post on a national paper or magazine.
An enterprising national journalist, who had taken on some public relations writing commissions for a Middle Eastern country, had found himself overloaded with work and hired me as a subcontractor. This was in the mid-seventies when cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi were little more than immense building sites and the rest of the world was only just waking up to the fact that the people who lived there had become the richest on the planet, due to the revenues that were springing from their oil wells, and were going to be building entirely new and extraordinary metropolises where recently there had been little more than fishing villages.
Needing to pick up some papers from him I went to his office one day in Fleet Street and he introduced me to his surrounding colleagues. The atmosphere had all the noise, bustle and excitement that newspaper offices in Hollywood movies manage to reproduce and for a moment I wondered if this was where I should really be. The wide-eyed wonder with which I was looking around must have been obvious.
‘So,’ one of the journalists asked as he waited with a phone clamped to his ear for someone to pick up at the other end, ‘are you hoping to get into a place like this, or are you just an opportunist freelance hack?’
The person at the other end of the line obviously picked up because he didn’t wait for my answer, introducing himself and saying
where he was calling from. The other person hung up.
Someone senior to the people I was sitting amongst burst into the room, hurling expletive-laden abuse in all directions. None of them seemed to be particularly bothered but all I could think was that I wanted to get back out into the fresh air and freedom of the street.
Walking home along Fleet Street I decided that I would stay on the outside a little longer, as far as possible from people who thought screaming abuse was a satisfactory way to pass the day and nowhere near anyone who was likely to hang up the phone as soon as they heard who I was.
A book goes global
Every week for about 15 years I continued to run the small ad in The Bookseller simply announcing ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ and giving my phone number. Sometimes months would pass with no responses and then a call would come which would set me off on a new adventure.
Towards the end of the eighties I received a cryptic call from a woman in Birmingham, who told me she had a friend who’d had a book written about her by a journalist, but who now wanted to tell the story from her own perspective. She wouldn’t say any more, apart from the fact that she had been given my name by a librarian when she enquired how she should go about finding a ghost. The librarian had consulted a copy of The Bookseller that she happened to have under the counter.
Money was tight at the time and I had to decide whether such a vague lead was worth a train ticket all the way to Birmingham. Some instinct told me it would be, and anyway my curiosity had now been piqued. I wanted to find out what this story was.
In a small, crowded house I met Zana Muhsen, who told me how she and her sister, Nadia, had been sold by their father as child brides in the Yemen. It had taken their mother five years to find them and another couple of years to get Zana out. Nadia and their children were still trapped down there and Zana wanted to write a book that would draw attention to their plight and help them to escape.
It seemed like a great story, almost a classic fairy tale. Two innocent young girls imprisoned in a frightening, alien, exotic culture and then the tense story of Zana’s escape. I wrote a synopsis and sent it round to a few agents. John Pawsey, an agent then working on the South Coast, thought it looked like a ‘nice little package’, and agreed to send it out to the London publishers.
Everyone turned it down except for one, who offered us a few thousand pounds, which we accepted gratefully. Sold was duly published as a rather cheaply printed paperback and sank with barely a trace. So far, so predictable. Chalk it up to experience and be grateful for an interesting experience, a few thousand pounds and a book with my name on the cover as the co-writer.
A few months later John Pawsey rang to say that a German publisher was interested in the story and would like to meet us. This time Zana came down to London and we met in the gentlemanly environs of John’s club. The German was charming and offered us an advance five times the size of the British one. A few days later John rang again, could we come to a meeting with a French publisher, then a Dutch one, and so it rolled on. Over the next few years the book came out in about nine different languages. It went to the top of the bestseller charts in all the countries it came out in. It became France’s bestselling book of the year and Zana was feted in Paris as a cause célèbre.
John was able to go back to the British publishers and remind them that they owned this property and had possibly not exploited its full potential. Amazingly, they agreed and reissued it as a handsome hardback.
Just over 20 years since that first telephone call we have sold more than 5 million copies of the book around the world and I still get emails most days from readers telling me that they have just discovered it or that it is their favourite book ever, and asking what happened to Zana and Nadia after the end of the book. I am able to tell them that Nadia and the children are now free to travel to England.
It just goes to show, fairy tales can happen, even in the world of publishing.
Revenge can be bitter
I believe that one of the reasons Sold was so popular was Zana’s lack of bitterness in the telling of the story. She might have been angry with her father and the other men who had held her and her sister as virtual prisoners for so many years, but she was not looking for revenge.
Many people decide they want to write books in order to get their own back on someone, desperate to tell their side of a disputed story, but such motives never make a story enticing to readers or publishers.
Some people want to attack their parents for cruelties that they believe were inflicted on them in childhood. Some want to get back at spouses and partners who deserted or betrayed them. Some want to expose the wrongdoings of petty officials or lawyers or big corporations or neighbours who have made their lives hell. None of these tales of woe will hold the sympathy of a reader for long.
Private grievances that might catch a reader’s attention for 500 words in a newspaper, which they have bought already, will not necessarily tempt the same person to spend several pounds and several hours of their life to read at greater length in book form.
Bitterness is not attractive and it certainly doesn’t work if it is stretched out over 200 or 300 pages. Courage, understanding and forgiveness are always more attractive to readers and generally make the teller of the story feel better about themselves at the same time. The moral high ground always provides a more attractive view of the world.
The Princess speaks
The Princess wanted to meet at Claridge’s.
‘We could have tea,’ she suggested, ‘and no one will know what we are talking about.’
She had already told me that she had read Sold and one or two other books that I had written.
‘I think the world needs to understand that these problems afflict women from all levels of society,’ she said, ‘not just those at the bottom. I think perhaps it might even be worse for the women like me in royal families. There is even more control; even more restrictions. We can talk about all these things when we meet.’
The Princess had enjoyed a great many privileges. She was educated at an American university and she held down a good job within the government of her country, but she had still had to fight – sometimes actually trading physical blows – against male members of her family who had wanted to marry her to a man from another royal family, and who did not approve of the way she lived or dressed or talked.
‘I am one of the lucky ones,’ she said as a waiter poured out the tea, ‘one of the ones who have been able to escape. Most are not so lucky. My mother never even went to school. She cannot read a word.’
My experience over the coming years was to bear this out. A fellow ghost once told me of a client in a similar position to the Princess who hired her and they managed to get all the way to a completed manuscript, with the support of her apparently benevolent husband. When the moment came to publish, however, he put his foot down and the ghostwriter did not hear from her again. I guess he had been humouring his wife all along, not believing that she would ever get as far as talking to publishers. I did not hear from my Princess again either.
Confessions of my infidelity
When I set out to become a writer in the early seventies literary agents were no more than fantasy figures to me. I had no idea who they were or how I might find one to help me. I imagined that once I did locate one, however, he or she would take me under their wing in much the same way that Colonel Tom Parker had looked after Elvis, and they would do everything to launch me that Brian Epstein had done for the Beatles. Surely, I reasoned, literary agents must work in the same way as these infamous Svengalis of the music business, who we read so much about in the ‘Swinging Sixties’.
Eventually I discovered where these mysterious agents’ addresses and telephone numbers lay hidden and I started to pursue and plague them with letters and synopses and ideas and manuscripts. I was a frustrated and deluded stalker in pursuit of the ideal soul-mate who I fantasised would accompany and support me through my professional life journey, assisting me i
n picking up all the glittering prizes along the way.
After what seemed like for ever one of them broke free of the ranks of rejection and indifference that had till then greeted my lovesick overtures, and agreed to take on the project I had sent to woo them. When they sold it I experienced an almost overwhelming surge of joy and tearful relief and assumed this was the start of my meteoric rise to fame and fortune, just like Elvis and the Beatles. But the next set of ideas I sent my beloved new agent didn’t seem to catch her fancy. I could see I was losing her attention. What should I do? Should I scream and cry and make a scene? Should I sulk and pout? Should I beg?
Then it occurred to me that just because she didn’t fancy my ideas, that didn’t mean another agent wouldn’t be interested. I wrote to tell her that if she wasn’t interested I wouldn’t just be chucking my work away, I would try to find another partner who would appreciate me more than she did. She replied that she was hurt by this betrayal. I pointed out that I had to live and I had managed to leave myself with no other skill in life than writing with which to support myself. This was a matter of basic survival. I promised always to bring projects to her for first refusal. She told me if she couldn’t have me to herself then the relationship was over and I had a sickening feeling that I had made a terrible mistake.
But then another agent took one of the rejected ideas and managed to sell it, and yet another agent came to me with a project that had landed on their desk and needed a ghost and some royalties dribbled in from the book sold by agent number one, who resumed a semi-amicable relationship with me as a result. I realised that if I wanted to take advantage of every opportunity that came along, and if I wanted to exploit every idea and lead that came my way, I was going to have to run my professional life like an open marriage.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 6