There were tales of people buying vineyards and opening restaurants, taking over stately homes and opening zoos and safari parks. Anecdotes about quaint locals, eccentric relatives and hilarious animals were mixed with recipes and travel stories. Publishers loved them and if the author had ever appeared on television and had a name that was recognisable to the public so much the better. Many of them needed the help of ghostwriters.
Visiting these people in their new and alternative lives was always entertaining. The sense of relief and joy that they conveyed at having been released from the tedium of their previous lives reminded me how lucky I was to be a freelance writer, the financial cliffs that they were often staring over made me shiver with recognition.
I always admired their courage. If I had followed a different path I don’t know if I would ever have had the nerve to walk away from a secure life once I was used to a regular income, cushioned with a pension and paid holidays, in order to risk everything on being a writer. By starting at 17, when I had no debts, no dependants and outgoings that could be pared away to barest survival levels, sharing a flat with half a dozen or more other people, I had accidentally given myself a head start on the pursuit of the sort of ‘good life’ that these escapees from the rat race were often searching for.
Jim Martin’s island
Jim Martin had always cultivated an air of mystery, partly because he was naturally shy and partly because it added to his authority as an expert on the future of the planet and those of us who currently dwell on it. I think he would have rather enjoyed the idea that his death had a whisper of the Agatha Christie about it, his body found floating in the sea off his private island in Bermuda.
When I was first invited to meet Jim he was already a legend amongst those who were bringing Information Technology to the world. At the end of the eighties I was writing a company history for an IT consultancy that bore his name. Everyone had different stories to tell about him, some indisputably true, many more apocryphal. He had exotic homes around the world; he made millions of pounds a year from the books he had written about technology and from the lectures he gave. People like Bill Gates had gone to him for insights at the beginnings of their careers.
‘Jim is thinking of writing an autobiography,’ the consultants told me, ‘will you meet him?’
Catching him on a flying visit between lectures, we met briefly and got on well. Socially awkward when it came to normal small talk, he became wildly enthused and animated when standing on stages or lecturing about all the subjects that caught his interest. I was very happy for him to talk constantly about the things that fascinated him. It was like receiving a crash degree course in technology at a time when I, like most of the world, still knew nothing of computers or the IT revolution that was about to change everything.
I went out to his house in Bermuda’s Tucker’s Town; it had two private beaches and a next door neighbour who had just run for the job of President of America. I stayed a week and Jim never stopped talking, never losing enthusiasm, never losing focus.
The book failed to find a publisher and we lost touch for a while, but I never forgot that week, or how much I had enjoyed the company of the tall, awkward, professorial Jim.
Some 20 years later he got back in touch to tell me he had just donated £100 million of his own money to Oxford University to found the Oxford Martin School of the 21st Century.
‘And I’ve bought an island in Bermuda,’ he told me. ‘You and your wife must come out to stay. There is so much to talk about.’
The invitation was irresistible. The island was magical and the result was a book called James Martin: The Change Agent, which was a mixture of biography and conversation, all set on the island.
We met several times after that at a variety of venues and he came to stay with us in England. He became a friend. I was shocked when reporters rang to tell me that his body had been found in the sea and to ask if I thought there might be foul play involved. I could also imagine how he would have turned the incident into another of the anecdotes that he polished and delivered so lovingly, both in lectures and in conversations. To be able to finish your life swimming around your own private island at the age of 80, when you started it as a working-class boy in war-torn England’s Ashby de la Zouch, is no mean feat. I’d choose that every time over the option of a safe and sterile hospital bed, which was the answer I gave to the reporters.
Jim always said, ‘We can build any sort of world we want’, which was just what he did.
A Russian in hiding
Ivan ventured out of hiding long enough for a meeting at a publisher’s office in London. The editor was being exceptionally polite, even to the point of serving properly made coffee, which at the time was a rarity in any publisher’s office. Ivan, I soon realised, was going to be investing heavily in the firm that had agreed to publish a series of novelised historical sagas based on his own family’s history.
This was a year or two before the turn of the Millennium, when such deals were more generally called ‘vanity publishing’ and the concept of ‘self-publishing’ as an honourable pursuit was still a barely formed embryo in most people’s minds. Everyone at the meeting, therefore, was choosing their words carefully. No one wanted to say anything that would upset Ivan’s apparently sunny disposition because we had all heard that his explosions of temper could be as alarming as sudden electrical storms.
Ivan was a powerful, even overbearing character. He was enormously proud of the warrior status of his ancestors, many generations of whom had been pushed around various corners of the Soviet empire by historical and political forces beyond their control. He had emerged from this difficult family history as a ferociously successful businessman and had made a considerable fortune after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was very vague about the details but it had something to do with buying up state-owned industries. He was not a man who could be cajoled into talking about things that he didn’t want to talk about. Several of his friends were behind bars in Russia and one of his closest friends had been assassinated.
I knew next to nothing about that part of the world and this seemed like a good way to find out a bit about its history from someone who had learned it from the stories his parents and grandparents had told, stories that had been handed down to them by previous generations.
Ivan had chosen Switzerland as his hiding place. He liked skiing so he had selected one of the oldest and grandest of ski resorts as his sanctuary from the world. He also liked to eat in five star restaurants and so he had bought a chalet within two minutes’ walk of a legendary grand hotel. The hotel management provided him with housekeeping services within his chalet very like the ones they offered to their room guests, which meant he did not have to have any staff living in the house with him or interrupting his solitude unnecessarily. Ivan liked to keep his own company for as much of the day as was humanly possible.
He hired a room for me at the hotel and I would walk to the chalet each day so that we could talk, looking out from his living room over the pristine Alpine view. At lunchtime we would go down to his garage. He would choose from the line of shiny four-wheel-drive monsters that he had collected there, and would drive us both to the underground car park at the hotel, a journey of no more than a hundred yards. We would then ascend to the dining room and sit by picture windows displaying the same Alpine view that we had just left. After lunch we would return to the chalet for another session. We would follow the same routine in the evening.
The tape machine would still be running on the table during the meals but Ivan’s eyes were forever darting around the room and the family saga would often be interrupted by observations on other diners.
‘That is the family of the Shah of Iran,’ he would whisper.
If anyone with an accent or the look of an Eastern European came into the room he would fall silent and hurry us through to the end of the meal so that we could purr back to the safety of the chalet. He was never clear about whom he feared was out to find him,
but it was easy to imagine that he had made many enemies on his path to riches.
Education at Madame Jojo’s
My middle daughter needed to make a film as part of her media studies A level and asked if I had any ideas. I was at the time working with the manager of an electro-pop act which had sold more than 20 million albums during the late eighties and nineties and I suggested that she should ask him if she could film an upcoming relaunch of the lead singer (who was also the manager’s partner), as he was releasing a solo album.
The first venue for the relaunch was to be Madame Jojo’s, an infamous nightclub in the heart of old Soho, which had become even more famous in the seventies when its owner, Paul Raymond, had turned it into a transvestite burlesque cabaret. Paul Raymond, like his Soho neighbour, Christina Foyle, had been one of the earliest London characters I had interviewed as a freelance journalist and I had retained an affectionate fascination for his seedy and glamorous little corner of the world ever since. There were rumours that by the time Raymond died his interests in Soho property had made him the richest man in England.
The pop singer’s manager, an exceptionally kind man, liked the idea of having a student film crew adding to the buzz of the launch night, but one question still remained; would the school authorities, not to mention the parents of the film crew, be happy to have these vulnerable young minds let loose in one of the most infamously sleazy night joints in the history of the West End?
Fortunately my daughter had allies amongst the teachers and the project was given the green light. Partly in my role as parent/guardian and partly as a tourist from the seventies, I said that I would come too.
The star’s name had worked its magic and the place was a heaving, sweating mass of bodies, almost exclusively male. The star himself was the sweatiest of all as he strutted his stuff on stage in a costume of leather and feathers. The students, enthralled at being allowed to step through a time warp into a real-life Rocky Horror Picture Show, behaved like professionals, moving with their cameras between the audience and dressing rooms with perfect discretion. I slid to the bar at the back of the room and found myself a stool from which to watch with a cocktail.
It had been a long time since I had been to a transvestite bar. The last time had been in Papeete, on a trip to Tahiti while I was still in my twenties. (My art teacher at school had whetted my appetite for the South Pacific when talking about Paul Gauguin’s escape from civilisation to ‘paradise’.)
I’d been working as a travel writer, a role that I was partly inspired to take on by Hugh Lofting’s ‘Dr Dolittle’ books. In my memory the doctor and his animal friends would spin a globe and the doctor would stab blindly at it with his finger. Whatever point his finger fell upon they would then set out to find. Maybe that only happened once in the whole series, but the image became immovably wedged in my mind and was, metaphorically speaking, pretty much how I chose the places I wanted to visit. Later, when I fell under the spell of Byron and his alter ego in Childe Harold, the image of the lone traveller took on an even more intense romance. The portly, balding fantasy figure of John Dolittle had grown into a world-weary, dissipated young Byronic hero – or so I hoped.
Hergé’s adventures of Tintin also contributed to my urge to visit exotic foreign lands, his tales made all the more tempting by the fact that we were banned from reading them at prep school. The school authorities seemed to be under the impression that text mixed with pictures would be a hopelessly corrupting brew for our young minds, rendering us too idle ever to read solid blocks of text again. It’s hard to imagine what those teachers would think of today’s social media and entertainment mix, where everything comes in bite-sized pieces and usually in video or abbreviated text form.
I had lighted on the island of Tahiti while making my way from New Zealand to Hawaii, and had ended up staying in a gigantic resort hotel which seemed to cater almost solely for groups of pensioners getting on and off cruise liners. Even with the idyllic island scenery as a backdrop, this was not the paradise that I had imagined when daydreaming my way through art lectures a dozen years before.
Drowning my sorrows in a pool bar I got talking to a Finnish businessman who suggested we take a ‘le truck’, the colourful and uncomfortable local mode of transport, into town. Wandering around town with my newly made friend we eventually ended the night in a transvestite bar. Lord Byron would undoubtedly have felt very at home lounging on those cushions, being entertained by the house cabaret, although I’m not at all sure what Dr Dolittle or Tintin would have made of it. By the next morning I had radically changed my view of the Finnish business community.
As the evening at Madame Jojo’s wore on one of the teachers, who was youthful enough to look like he was part of the student team, wove his way over to me at the bar. He leaned close to be heard over the roar of the crowd and the throb of the speakers.
‘Now this,’ he said, ‘is what I call education.’
From the lips of an Iraqi child
It was the eleventh of September 2001. I would not normally be able to pinpoint the date of an interview so precisely without referring to a relevant diary, but this day would turn out to be memorable for everyone.
I was due to visit an English woman who was married to an Iraqi man and was telling the story of her life. Their home was north of Hyde Park, a part of London heavily populated by immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, their culture spilling out onto the streets from open-fronted shops and cafés in a heady mixture of scents and sounds and stacks of tempting, unfamiliar products. She and I were talking upstairs while her husband redecorated downstairs. To distract himself while he laboured he had the television on.
It was early afternoon and my client and I had been talking for three or four hours when her husband shouted urgently for us to come downstairs. When we got there we found him standing in front of the television, paintbrush in hand, staring at a cloud of smoke that was billowing from one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The three of us stayed transfixed for an hour, trying to work out what was happening as the second aircraft hit the other tower and the commentators said there were other attacks expected.
The children needed picking up from their school round the corner and so my client’s husband hurried off to collect them. When they returned the television was showing scenes of the buildings collapsing down onto the streets below, enveloping the city in an apocalyptic cloud of dust, smoke and debris.
‘What’s happening?’ their eight-year-old asked, his eyes wide and serious.
‘Someone is attacking America,’ their mother explained.
‘Serves them right,’ the little boy shrugged, ‘after all the things they have done to us.’
I love supermarket bookshelves
Supermarkets get a very bad press; blamed for killing the high street, for squeezing the profit margins of small suppliers, making us all obese … and so the list of accusations rolls on. But I confess I like the democratising effect they’ve had on many areas of life, including what they’ve done for bookselling. They only exist because we all secretly, and guiltily, like what they do for us. We show our approval by shopping there and all they do is give us more and more of what we want, when and where we want it.
The book trade has historically been one of the most vociferous of their critics, accusing the supermarkets of undercutting their prices and catering to the lowest common denominator. But I have to confess that were it not for the supermarkets many of the books I have been involved with, from celebrity autobiographies to misery memoirs, would never have seen the light of day. I’m sure there are many in the literary world who would think that was no bad thing, but I would contend that these books, which the more traditional booksellers never wanted to stock and publishers consequently didn’t want to publish, are amongst the most accurate reflections available of our current times and our current obsessions.
If a time traveller arrived back at the beginning of the twenty-first century from some place
far in the future, I would contend that he would learn more about the way most of us live from visiting a large supermarket than he would from visiting a bookshop or an art gallery or an opera house.
Supermarkets have created thousands of new book buyers who would never have stepped inside a traditional bookshop. (Many in the bookselling trade seem to be blissfully ignorant of just how intimidating bookshops can be to anyone who is unused to them.) They have brought pleasure to many tens of thousands of readers and opened the eyes of many thousands more to elements of life that were previously brushed under the carpet.
Led by the supermarkets, the traditional bookshops eventually started to stock the books that they had previously abhorred, even to the point of creating entire sections for them – or maybe ghettoes would be a better description.
By restricting the number of titles on offer the supermarkets made their shelves less intimidating to those who know and care little about the finer points of the literary world, and with clever merchandising and competitive pricing they made it easier for a customer to pick up a book and drop it into the trolley along with all their other purchases. Some would say that by doing so they ‘devalued’ the book as an object, but I would suggest that by making it more accessible they increased the potential market for authors. The sort of books beloved of the more traditional readers will never make it onto the supermarket shelves and will be able to keep their prices higher for a little longer – but I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing. The people who decry the falling prices of books are often the same people who champion the provision of free books through libraries. It is hard to see why one source of cheap reading is a good thing while another is bad. I think books should be accessible to as many people as possible, both in terms of content and price and availability, which makes the supermarkets an ideal place to sell them.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 11