Confessions of a Ghostwriter

by Andrew Crofts

  I returned to writing begging and submission letters with renewed gusto. Hundreds a week would fly out from my garret to the desks and bins of the literary world; no agent, publisher or editor was safe from my constant entreaties.

  Most of the agents I started relationships with accepted that an open relationship would work well for both of us. If one complained that they really wanted me to work exclusively for them I had an answer ready: ‘If you can find me three or four books a year I won’t have time to work for anyone else.’ Now and again one of them would manage to do that for a year or two. The trick was to retain their friendship whenever that particular seam of gold ran out and I had to return to looking for new pastures.

  It wasn’t long before I was set on a path of lifelong professional promiscuity.

  How can anyone write four books a year?

  There are a number of stages to writing a book, each of which takes a great deal of time. You have to research it, you have to plot the whole thing out in your head, you have to write it, you have to sell it to an agent or a publisher and you then have to promote it to the potential readers. For most writers one, or at the most two, books a year are more than enough.

  If you are ghostwriting, however, several of those stages are removed.

  The research nearly always comes from one place – the author’s head or filing cabinet. The structure generally becomes clear during the research period, meaning you can go straight to the writing and seldom have problems with ‘writer’s block’, a condition which usually occurs when you are trying to force yourself to write before you are ready with the material. The ghosted book will also probably be an easier sell to agents and publishers, although not always, and you do not have to be involved in any of the promotional activity which happens months after the writing is finished, allowing you to get straight on with the next book without interruption.

  As a result you can be actually writing any day that you are not meeting with the client, which gives you far more writing time than if you are originating all the material yourself from a variety of sources and then trying to sell it to the world.

  Waking up in the orphanage

  Upon waking up in the orphanage I was assailed by a sickening sense of déjà vu, although I knew I had never been there before that night. I had never even been to Croatia before. There were the echoing sounds of children shouting, doors slamming, feet running on hard floors. The smells of institutional cooking mingled with those of disinfectant and economy cleaning fluids.

  The orphanage had only just re-emerged from the rubble of a bombsite and the floor I was on was yet to be inhabited by children, which was how I was able to find a bed for a few nights. The bathrooms were brand new, clinically and spotlessly clean, but still had that communal feel about them, the rows of basins and showers threatening an invasion of privacy at almost every turn.

  The return of this place from the ashes was a miracle of optimism, which was why I was there. My client had been instrumental in restoring it after enemy shells had all but destroyed it. The debris from wave upon wave of ethnic cleansing had been eradicated by a mixture of sheer hard work and good-heartedness. The restored orphanage now stood as a beacon of hope amidst the ruins of the beautiful old spa town. My client would turn out to be something of a saint, albeit with a twinkle in his eye, which had landed him in more than one controversy, and had also landed him a blue-chip publishing deal.

  So why was there this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I rose from my bed in the sparse dormitory and prepared to go in search of breakfast?

  Then I remembered my first morning at boarding school; seven years old, away from home for the first time and terrified of the new, unknown world my parents had left me in. But I came from a privileged world, where people could afford to pay school fees and my parents would return at the end of term to pick me up and take me back to the security of the home I longed for so painfully whenever I was parted from it. There had been no bombs or gunfire to be heard in my childhood. The abandoned and abused inhabitants of this building had no such luxuries and no such hopes to cling to.

  Pulling myself together I made my way downstairs to be engulfed by a crowd of the bolder children, all jabbering at me at once, while the more timid stared, wide eyed, at the stranger who had appeared in their midst, entirely unable to communicate with him beyond the odd gleefully shouted references to English pop singers and footballers that every child in the world seems to know.

  The resulting book was a reasonable success. It was dramatised for television and the author became the subject for a tear-jerking episode of This is Your Life. Some of the orphans whom he helped at the beginning are now adults telling their own stories of their interrupted childhoods.

  Under armed guard in Lahore

  It was an unusual ghosting project because the main character was 12 years old and had recently been assassinated. The story could have been narrated by a second person, but he was in hiding somewhere in Europe and was not at all sure he wanted to raise his head above the parapet in this way.

  The project had been sparked into life by a producer who wanted to make a film about the life of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy who had allegedly been sold by his parents to a carpet factory owner at the age of four. Six years later, the story went, he succeeded in escaping the clutches of his tyrannical master. A young boy alone in the world, surviving off foraged scraps, he stumbled across a Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF) rally. The organisation took him under its wing, and he began working to spread the word to other enslaved children that they too could be free. He participated in raids on illegal factories and addressed international conventions. He was awarded the Reebok ‘Youth in Action’ Award and a scholarship to study law in Boston. But before he could start to enjoy the results of his hard work, his life was cut short by a hail of bullets from the gun of an unknown sympathiser or employee of the carpet masters. Ehsan Khan, who ran the BLLF, had been forced to leave the country or face a similar fate, or imprisonment, and was now hiding in Europe.

  ‘I want to make a film of Iqbal’s life but I think there should be a book to go with it,’ the producer told me over lunch at the Rib Room, a haunt of the international rich in the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel in London’s Sloane Street. He was an imposing man, dressed completely in black, right down to his Gucci cowboy boots. ‘You need to come over to Lahore and see the village where he came from, the factory where he was enslaved and the place where they murdered him. You need to talk to his mother and to the people at BLLF. We will need to arrange for protection.’

  At our next meeting in the Rib Room Ehsan Khan was also there, emerging unannounced from his hiding place for a few hours to talk about the project, preparing the way for our trip. After lunch Ehsan hurried away, vanishing into the crowds as I strolled with the producer to Harrods where he wanted to pick up some of his favourite cigars.

  ‘I will make all the travel arrangements,’ he said as we walked. ‘My brother-in-law is the chief of police in Lahore. He will provide us with the security we need.’

  It was decided a friend and co-worker of Ehsan’s would come with us.

  A week or two later we were ensconced in the Pearl-Continental Hotel in Lahore and news reached us over a sumptuous breakfast buffet, via the producer’s luxury Vertu mobile, that all the campaign staff of BLLF had been arrested and were being held somewhere where we could not get access to them.

  ‘I have talked to my brother-in-law,’ the producer said, ‘and he will see what he can do.’

  Later that morning we were taking coffee with the brother-in-law in his office, overlooking the overgrown courtyard of the colonial-style police station. The atmosphere in the office was relaxed as the two men seemed to gossip about friends and family, and perhaps talked a little about our plans for the coming week. Excluded by the language barrier, entirely reliant on them for everything, I settled down to await developments.

  A shiny black Range Rover was found for us; the sheer siz
e and splendour of it, I was assured, would be enough to intimidate anyone who might prefer not to see us in their village – and an armed guard was added to our entourage. There were reports that the imprisoned BLLF campaigners were being beaten somewhere in the bowels of the police station, which caused the producer consternation, but his brother-in-law merely shrugged to demonstrate his helplessness in the face of such inevitable injustice.

  The streets of Lahore were hot and exciting, with a hint of threat in the stares that followed us wherever we went. Outside the city the Pakistani and Indian armies were lining their tanks up along either side of the border. In the villages the children and buffaloes splashed and wallowed in the red waters of the canals and rivers as the adults sat around watching the world in much the same way they must have been doing for centuries.

  Everyone we came across wanted to tell us their side of the Iqbal story, playing up their own role in the drama, enjoying the break we were providing in their usual daily routines. Iqbal was both a local hero and already something of a mythical figure. It was becoming increasingly hard to tell the fantasies from the realities in everything we were being told.

  The whole village seemed to be congregating in the school building where we went to meet more people who claimed they had known him. The crowd spilled out into the street, peering in through the door and windows at us. Overcome with emotion at one point, the producer made the mistake of opening his wallet to distribute largesse and the policeman had to insert himself and his rifle between us and the villagers as they pressed forward with their hands outstretched.

  In the evenings we paid visits to a number of the producer’s family members, and one of his mother’s servants joined us, falling asleep in the back of the car and snoring loudly as we continued to travel to the brick kilns and carpet factories where whole families still work in virtual slavery, and out into the desolate fields where our little hero was murdered, watched from a distance by suspicious eyes as flocks of crows circled noisily in the air above us.

  Iqbal’s legend has all the elements of a classic fairy tale, a folk story that can be passed from mouth to mouth, growing and mutating as it goes. It was becoming almost impossible to see where the facts of the story might be but the fundamental truth about bonded child labour was becoming abundantly clear, just as it was in Europe and America in the days when children worked long hours in factories and mines and were sent up chimneys. The story of this one little boy who became a martyr made it more human and more understandable, just as Oliver Twist made Charles Dickens’s message about the workhouses and orphanages of Victorian London more accessible and memorable. A drama teacher at an American school recently contacted me to ask if he could dramatise the book for a performance by his pupils, so maybe one day in the future Iqbal too will be the subject of a West End/Broadway musical.

  Later I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, where the complex characters frequented the Pearl-Continental Hotel and the same cafés and streets that I had travelled through with the producer. I smelled again the dangers that mine every cross-cultural encounter in modern Pakistan, feeling grateful for whatever protection it was the producer’s brother-in-law gave us.

  The tentative handling of firearms

  ‘Take it,’ my ebullient host insisted, thrusting the lovingly oiled and polished shotgun (almost certainly not the correct name for it, but certainly what it looked like) into my hands. ‘Feel the weight.’

  I confirmed that I could feel the weight all too well. My previous experience of handling firearms had been limited to shooting lessons with Colonel Molesworth at prep school, which I only signed up to in order to get out of games at least one day a week, and firing an air rifle from a bedroom window at rabbits which threatened my wife’s vegetable patch and magpies which she had caught attacking the house-martin nests that cling to the eaves of the house, and which she believes we have a moral responsibility to protect from all aggressors.

  ‘Let’s take it outside,’ my host suggested, ignoring my obvious eagerness to put the thing down as quickly as possible, steering me out with a firm, brotherly arm around the shoulders. ‘Go on,’ he said once we stood in the heat of the sun, ‘fire it.’

  I protested a few times but he was my host and a powerful personality. I was also beginning to feel wimpier than even I was comfortable with. I did as he instructed, the noise almost blowing my head off and the recoil digging painfully into my shoulder. As I returned to reality, my ears still ringing and the explosion still echoing off the distant mountains, I saw that he had a camera in his hand.

  A few weeks later, when safely back in England, my host sent me some prints of the pictures.

  ‘What are these?’ my wife asked, picking them up from where I had put them aside. ‘Are they from the Pakistan trip?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, feeling an all too familiar prickle of disquiet.

  ‘What’s with the gun?’

  ‘Oh, just messing around.’ I tried to sound so casual that she would lose all interest in her line of questioning, and failed.

  ‘So,’ she said as if recapping for a particularly dim schoolboy, ‘these are pictures of you posing in one of the most politically volatile places on earth with a particularly lethal-looking firearm? And someone else has the negatives? Was that a good idea?’

  ‘Well, obviously, when you put it like that …’

  The faulty memories of rock gods

  The approach came at the end of a lunchtime talk at the Biographers’ Club, as everyone was moving towards the cloakrooms, some exchanging business cards, others hurrying off to their next appointments, all of us having tarried too long over a gossipy meal. A rock journalist of senior years, who had several music biographies under his belt, introduced himself and came quickly to the point.

  ‘I have a friend,’ he said, ‘who was a big rock star in the sixties and early seventies. He was absolutely at the centre of the business and knew everyone who was anyone during that period, not just the music people but the artists and the writers and the fashion designers, the whole “Swinging London” scene. There have been a few problems and he’s a bit down on his luck. He wants to write an autobiography but there’s no way he would be able to do it himself. I’m not even sure he can read – probably dyslexic or something. He keeps asking me to help, but to be honest I think I’ve known him too long. It needs someone to come at it fresh and catch his voice.’

  ‘What sort of problems has he had?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he avoided my eyes as he took his coat from the cloakroom attendant, ‘there have been a few issues. He’s not been brilliant with the money and he has a few bad habits …’

  ‘Drink? Drugs? Gambling? Sex?’ I tried to prompt him to be a little more specific.

  ‘Umm.’ He made a non-committal sound which seemed more affirmative than not.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Well, you know. It was the sixties and …’ he shrugged his coat on, ‘would you just talk to him? Give him a bit of guidance on what his options might be?’

  Stories from people who were insiders in London at that period are always intriguing. It was a time when the Beatles and all the others were changing the music scene for ever and people like Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon were changing the way we all looked. It was an era that seemed revolutionary and exciting at the time and with the passing years had also taken on a patina of historical interest as well. To be honest I was already hooked.

  The call came and we agreed to meet at his home in World’s End, Chelsea. It was a council-owned flat in a shabby Victorian block with gloomy brick stairwells that reeked of urine and echoed with a mixture of hostile sounds. Inside, the flat was surprisingly bare. The rock star lived alone like any other old man on a meagre pension, surrounded by the simple necessities of existence. It was a perfectly safe and clean little flat, but gave no hint that the old boy with the bad haircut, who seldom moved from his armchair with an ashtray balanced on the arm, apart from going to the pub, had on
ce been adored by millions, playing live to crowds of thousands and reputedly sleeping with hundreds.

  By the time I met him I had already checked the idea with an agent, who told me that if the stories were sufficiently star-studded we would almost certainly be able to get him a deal because there would be potential for a lucrative newspaper serialisation. At that stage several of the richest newspapers were waging circulation wars and were paying sums for book extracts that dwarfed anything that the publishers were willing to shell out.

  Pete was extremely affable, especially if we were in a bar, and full of stories that didn’t quite lead to anything but were enough to put together a synopsis which hooked a major publisher. When someone has a fund of anecdotes people in pubs will inevitably tell them that they ‘should write a book’, but anecdotes alone will not hold a reader’s attention for 200 or more pages. Pete had absolutely no powers of description and no emotional insight into himself or anyone else that he had ever met. He would greet any questions I might have with an entirely uncomprehending stare, before launching back into another anecdote. Despite all that, however, he had led an amazing life and I was sure there was a story in the meteoric rise and fall of his star.

  ‘Why don’t you give me a list of 20 people you hung out with during those years,’ I suggested after one particularly long and fruitless session with the tape machine, ‘and I’ll go round and see what they have to say, like I would if I was writing a biography. Then I’ll put everything back into your words.’

  Sometimes the partner or friend of someone famous can provide greater insights into their worlds than the central characters themselves. Kathy Etchingham, for instance, met Jimi Hendrix on his first night in England in 1966. She became his girlfriend, living with him in Mayfair’s Brook Street and remaining his friend until his death in 1970. During those four years he rose from being unknown to being a legend of the music industry and Kathy was an integral part of that scene, a period when British groups like the Beatles and the Animals (and Pete) were making music history. I had helped her to capture the period in general as well as the intimate details of Hendrix’s short life in her memoir Through Gypsy Eyes, painting a picture of a life that no one else had experienced, and the resulting book had worked well. It seemed likely to me that if I could find some witnesses as good as Kathy I would be able to bring Pete’s world to life on the page in the same way.