All of the denizens of the high table were famous and all of them were, conservatively speaking, at least three times my age. High table invitees were assembled in an anteroom first in order to be greeted and introduced and we made more polite small talk before being wheeled out to the adoring paying public. It was glorious, like stepping into the teachers’ common room at Hogwarts; part of the last great hurrah for publishing elitism before the much-needed tidal wave of democratisation hit books and education and life in general. The age of deference was teetering on the brink of extinction, although it would prove to be a long-drawn-out demise, and a whole new world was arriving through the doors which had been thrown open by the pioneers of the sixties.
I received several more such invitations from Miss Foyle and I confess I accepted every one of them because it was a magical kingdom to visit, albeit a suffocating one to live in as a young man trying to break into what seemed like a closed and elite world.
Nearly 40 years later my wife and I received an invitation to one of the Queen’s summer garden parties at Buckingham Palace.
‘This’ll be a bit of a test for all your wishy-washy republican opinions,’ she said when I showed her the invitation.
I didn’t bother to struggle with my conscience for long. For so many years I had been forced to walk all the way round the giant slab of a building and its walled gardens whenever I wanted to get between Victoria Station and the West End that the temptation to see inside the walls was too much to resist, as it has been in any of the other palaces I have managed to infiltrate around the world over the decades.
As the Queen and her family descended the palace steps to mingle with the guests on the lawns I was struck by the fact that she was still dressed pretty much as Miss Foyle had been that day at tea. It was like being transported to a pleasantly landscaped time capsule, rolling green lawns filled with top hats, brass bands, tea tents, officers and bishops. Maybe not as much has changed as I would like to think.
A new breed of stars
As well as bombarding publishers and agents with letters offering my writing services in the early days, I also approached individuals and organisations that I found interesting and that I thought might like to commission books or articles. One of the earliest commissions I received as a result was from a drama school in South Kensington called the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. It had been the training ground for a number of stars including both Julian Fellowes, who went on to create Downton Abbey, and Hugh Bonneville who played the lead in the series.
Founded in 1926 the school evolved from being the hobby of two gentlemen from good families who had an interest in music and drama (particularly opera), to being one of the main drama schools in London. My task was to interview as many people as possible who were still alive in order to write a history. The interviewees ranged from a grand old lady called Dolly who received me for tea at her stately Kensington home wearing a tea gown, to Terence Stamp, who was part of the new generation of young working-class actors then becoming global stars. Although proudly working class and previously a flat-mate to Michael Caine, Stamp was by then living in an apartment in the Albany, Piccadilly, and suggested we meet for tea across the road at Fortnum & Mason, where he was a regular customer.
The sixties may have witnessed a social revolution, but the old world of the London Establishment, epitomised by Christina Foyle and Dolly in her tea gown, still held an enduring appeal for those who could afford to join it. In the coming years, of course, the avalanche of new media and new stars and reality show celebrities would finish the job of change that was started by men like Stamp and Caine and old London society would eventually be swamped in a tsunami of foreign wealth.
The mould was eventually broken and now it is hard to conceive how it could ever have seemed unusual for two men from ordinary backgrounds to rise to such heights of celebrity, but the world’s nostalgic longing for what came before can be clearly seen in the viewing figures for Downton Abbey and royal weddings.
The reality of reality television stars
‘We’ve booked a suite at the Covent Garden Hotel,’ the publisher told me. ‘They’re taking him straight there from the studios. He’s contracted to stay in the room for a week and not talk to any other media. Stay with him till you have everything you need. We need the book by the end of the month.’
I arrived at the hotel at the same moment as my new client, although it was hard to see him in the crowd of minders, producers, stylists, publicists, managers and everyone else plus their assistants that was milling around him, all hoping for a little of the stardust to rub off. At that moment he was the number one story in the tabloid media having just won the biggest reality show that week and, more importantly, having won the hearts of several hundred thousand teenage girls who might be accurately referred to as ‘our target market’.
Reality television as we know it today started in the mid-nineties. There had been reality programmes before, such as Candid Camera, but the idea that the people who took part in the shows should become famous simply because they appeared on television screens was new. Some of the shows were linked to talent (Opportunity Knocks, Stars in Their Eyes, etc.), but increasingly they were based simply on whether the public liked the participants enough to want to watch them. If they wanted to watch them a lot then they would want to know more about them and there would then be other ways to merchandise both their looks and their personalities. One of the ways to do this was to write books about them or to get them to write books themselves. Most people lack the skills or experience needed to write books under that sort of pressure, and that is where we ghostwriters come in.
The young man at the centre of the storm in the hotel lobby looked happy but dazed and more than a little exhausted. Just a few weeks before he had been struggling his way through life at the bottom of the pile, much like everyone else, and now glossy, frothy magazine editors were offering him a quarter of a million pounds for a one day photo-shoot with a girl who was being swept along by the same reality television gravy train and they needed security whenever they were in public.
The publisher was allegedly shelling out similar money for the book – not to mention paying for a suite in one of the trendiest of celebrity hotels – then there were the music people wanting to get him into a studio and the rat pack of tabloid scandal-mongers and paparazzi scavenging around the lobby and in the street outside in search of any juicy scraps that might be chucked their way.
Once we were safely in the suite and the excitable young celebrity had worked out what a ‘concierge service’ was and had put a good few things on the publishers’ hotel bill, we started talking. It wasn’t long before it was obvious that he was not going to be able to concentrate for long enough amidst the constant interruptions and distractions, each one more urgent than the last. We decided on a new plan. His mum would tell me the story of his life, while he bounced round the room and occasionally ventured out for fresh air, only to return a few minutes later flushed with the excitement of being chased by the media and fans, and often clutching a fresh newspaper or magazine bearing some entirely fictitious story about what he had been up to since the end of the show.
‘I can’t have done any of this,’ he would wail at us, partly amused, partly appalled, ‘I’ve been stuck in here with you.’
Later, when the hardback book was in the shops and the publisher arranged a fanfare of publicity and interviews, an earnest journalist from one of the broadsheets asked him what it felt like to write a book.
‘I didn’t really,’ he said with the honesty which had so disarmed the show’s viewers, ‘this posh bloke came to the hotel with a tape machine.’
A few months later, when they were preparing to bring out the paperback, I went back for an update. By that stage the dust was settling on his overnight fame and he was living with his real girlfriend in a small one bedroom flat. Someone answered my insistent knocking at the door in what must have been their pyjamas.
‘They�
�re still in bed,’ I was told, ‘through there.’
There were so many people sleeping or sitting around in the living room that it was easier just to close the bedroom door and climb into the warm bed with them, tape machine at the ready once more.
A genuine talent
Towards the end of the seventies I received a call from a publicity lady at the ICA, a small, artsy theatre venue in the Mall.
‘We’re putting on a play called Talent by a young writer called Victoria Wood and we wondered if you would like to interview her. You may have seen her singing funny songs on New Faces or That’s Life. She’s playing one of the lead roles as well. Believe me, she’s going to be a huge star.’
Publicists always tell you that people who aren’t yet stars are going to be very soon, that’s their job, but it was a free ticket and seemed like a good contact, so I happily went along.
Needless to say the play was a gentle revelation and although the young Miss Wood was painfully shy and modest she managed to be a joy to interview. Hearing or seeing someone who is genuinely honest and funny is always life-enhancing. Coming across French and Saunders in a fringe theatre somewhere, just before they broke through into television, I experienced the same rush of pleasure at seeing life from a different angle for the first time.
Playing back the interview with Victoria Wood afterwards, and then reading through her words once I had typed them up into an article for a women’s magazine, I actually found myself laughing out loud again; a pretty fair indicator that the publicity lady’s predictions were going to come true.
If Victoria Wood was the only thing that ever came out of the hundreds of thousands of hours of talent show television that the world has endured, it would still all have been worthwhile.
A real media circus
I had been invited to join a panel judging a literary prize. It was a serious opportunity for the writers who entered and had been created, like most literary prizes, to provide a publicity vehicle for the careers of those we judged the winners. Tired of meeting in offices and one another’s houses, we decided to have our final judges’ meeting in a traditional little French restaurant which happened, by coincidence, to be opposite the entrance to the hotel where I had spent a merry week with the reality show winner just a few months before.
Since one of our party was a regular at the restaurant we were given a table in the window. As the meal progressed and we debated the relative strengths of the competition entries, I noticed that people were gathering in the street outside the hotel.
As our discussion continued the crowd swelled and I saw that many of them knew each other and were carrying cameras. They were chatting amongst themselves with apparent casualness. Curious members of the public paused to see what was about to happen and it was beginning to be hard for the traffic to pass.
The moment Paris Hilton, the ‘It Girl’ of the day, stepped out of the hotel entrance the relatively tranquil scene boiled up as the photographers elbowed one another and the tourists out the way, clambering over the bonnets and roofs of parked cars in their attempts to snatch their pictures.
A few hours later, as I made my way home through Victoria Station, I saw the star’s face shining out from the front page of the evening paper. If only we could conjure up such feats of publicity for the young writers hoping that we were going to make them famous.
Culture clashes and other bad marriages
Human relationships lie at the heart of virtually all great stories. The more discordant the relationship the more fascinating it is for the reader and the more tightly it is likely to hold their attention, forcing them to keep turning the pages. Love stories have always been winners, and what happens when love dies is a close runner-up.
When people marry across class, racial and cultural barriers things hot up still further. From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Romeo and Juliet the examples of great culture clashes are to be found everywhere in the literature of love.
Over the last 50 years, as multi-racial societies have proliferated and people have travelled further and more often than ever before, various patterns have emerged amongst the cross-cultural love stories that have filled the shelves of bookshops. Traditional tales of princesses falling in love with simple woodsmen and incurring the wrath of their parents have been replaced by more complex dilemmas.
First there were the women who wanted to talk about the agony of arranged or enforced marriages that had gone wrong, leading to terrible abuses and dramatic escapes. Then there were the women from Western cultures who found that dashing young Arabs and Iranians who had arrived in their cities on a wave of oil money and swept them off their feet, then led them into the heart of families who disapproved of everything they were and everything they did. There were tales of ‘mothers-in-law from hell’, and ‘tugs of love’ over children when each parent wanted to instil different cultural values into their offspring, some of them feeling so strongly that they were willing to actually kidnap them from their partners and sweep them off to other countries.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall hordes of beautiful and ambitious girls from the East marched to the West in search of jobs and rich husbands and it was the turn of Western men to fall in love and find themselves out of their depth culturally and emotionally, struggling to keep in touch with their children when their young wives disappeared back to their mothers, taking their children with them.
Sometimes the victims of these marital disasters would come to me hoping for a bestseller like Zana Muhsen’s Sold, but many just wanted to have their side of the story set down so that when their children grew up they would be able to read how hard their estranged parents had fought to keep them. Better to discover that you were a victim of a ‘tug of love’ than being left to believe that one of your parents simply didn’t care enough to put up a fight.
Clubs for gentlemen and players
It is always best for ghosts to talk to their clients on the client’s home territory. Whether that means a palace in Africa or a brothel in Bangkok, a château in the Dordogne or a stilted hut in the Malaysian jungle, it needs to be somewhere where they feel completely comfortable and safe enough to open their hearts and spill their secrets. They need, in other words, to feel able to ‘be themselves’.
Sometimes fate intervenes. I had one client, for instance, who was forced to spend several hours a week in hospital on a kidney dialysis machine and managed to persuade the nursing staff on the ward that it would be a good use of her time if I and my tape machine sat at her bedside during those long tedious hours. It did, in fact, help to focus my mind on one of the main themes of the story, the effect that her health problems had had on her chances of fulfilling her dreams.
Sometimes it is not possible for the client to provide the venue, possibly because there would be no privacy at their home or because the writing of the book is a secret they are keeping from their family. Then neutral venues need to be found, places which offer the same safe environments plus plumbing and refreshments on demand. Hotels are often the best option. Bedrooms are good if it seems appropriate or meeting rooms if they are not too sterile. Often, however, it is the lobbies, lounges and restaurants that offer the best opportunities to sit in relative comfort, ordering cakes or alcohol when required, ignored by the floating population around you, most of whom are too busy with their own lives to bother listening in to the conversations of others.
If the client belongs to a club, that can serve in the same way. The grand gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall make their grand members feel as safe as if they were in their own homes, surrounded by fleets of servants. Celebrities, particularly the younger ones, prefer the newer, flashier clubs, which tends to mean more interruptions as phones buzz and acquaintances come and go, kissing cheeks and exchanging snippets of news. Often in those situations there is also a minder/manager/publicity body in attendance, which is good if it makes the celebrity feel more comfortable and protected, bad if it makes them wary about bari
ng their souls. These people are often paid to steer their clients away from saying anything that might be damaging to their image or might lead to a court case. It is almost impossible to make these guard dogs feel secure and their constant jumpiness often infects the clients, making them less willing to show their true selves, making them stick to the company line, making them talk as blandly as they would in a half hour magazine interview.
Modern recording devices make it far easier to hear what the storytellers are saying in loud, crowded places. Sometimes it is even clearer on the machine than it is face to face. It wasn’t always so. In the days of cassette tapes I did an interview over lunch in the roar of the Savoy Grill and could hear nothing over the background noise, either during the lunch or afterwards in my office. Luckily, there were other opportunities to ask the same questions again later because the client had drunk so much claret at the lunch he was unable to remember anything we had spoken about.
A Year in Provence unleashes an avalanche
In 1989 author and advertising man, Peter Mayle, published A Year in Provence, telling of his family’s adventures while moving its home to the South of France in search of the ‘good life’. It was by no means the first of the genre, as a child I was completely enthralled by Gerald Durrell’s telling of his family’s move to Corfu in My Family and Other Animals, but it was such an enormous bestseller amongst the book-chattering, Provence-loving classes that it launched an avalanche of imitators, some of which turned out to be much better than the original.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 10