I write and read as instinctively as I talk, with none of the scaffolding of knowledge that I would probably need if I were ever to be asked to teach creative writing. Those instincts, I believe, came from being talked to like an adult from as early as I can remember (I was an only child and my mother did not find childish talk interesting), being read to and being given well-written books to read so that their written language seeped into my head as surreptitiously as spoken languages seep into the mouth of every infant.
My mother tempted me into reading for myself by agreeing to read alternate chapters of A Bear Called Paddington to me as long as I read the others for myself. The urge to follow the polite bear’s adventures was enough to get me hooked and soon I was making my own way, reading everything I could find in the local library and on my mother’s bookshelves – which meant I had read virtually every one of Georgette Heyer’s regency romances by the time I was 12 and was deep into saving foppish aristocrats from the guillotine with the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I use language much as a well-trained gun-dog might use his nose and ears. When it works well it is a triumph of habit and practice and nothing to do with intellectual rigour, powers of deconstruction or analysis.
I never managed to learn my multiplication tables either, but at least I’m not trying to earn my living as a mathematician.
A forgotten weekend in academia
‘We once spent a weekend together,’ I said as I reintroduced myself to the country’s oldest and most distinguished crime writer at a party deep in Mayfair.
‘Did we?’ she asked, smiling sweetly but looking entirely blank.
‘In Cambridge,’ I prompted, ‘King’s College.’
‘What on earth were we doing there?’ she asked with what sounded like genuine amazement.
It was a good question. I think she and I were the only working writers around the mighty conference table. Everyone else appeared to be either an academic or a lawyer. I believe we had been invited to discuss something to do with the legal implications of writing about living people, but like her I am more than a little hazy as to why that was deemed to be a good way for anyone to spend a weekend.
I remember there was a sumptuous dinner involved, evoking scenes from Tom Sharpe’s university satire, Porterhouse Blue, put before us by discreet college servants who would not have looked out of place serving Lord Byron. I also remember extremely spartan bedrooms, which would not have looked out of place in a Victorian prep school.
One of the most curious things about growing older is that some incidents from your past begin to take on the appearance of dreams or half-forgotten movies.
A little lone wolf
‘The eagle is probably the most powerful bird in the world, always flying alone, never in a crowd.’ The Middle Eastern merchant prince was talking with his eyes shut, a habit which, when coupled with long pauses, sometimes made it hard to tell if he had fallen asleep mid-thought.
My tape machine was taking care of preserving his widely spaced words, his closed eyes giving me the opportunity to look around the Aladdin’s cave of a room. Every inch of the mighty floor space was filled with objects elaborately decorated in gold. Anything that wasn’t gold was white or cream, from the endless sofas and the cushions of the heavily gilded thrones that we were sitting in to the tissue boxes that were carefully placed in order to be constantly within reach of anyone wishing to expectorate unexpectedly.
Around us were panoramic views of Hyde Park from the windows of one of the apartments in the newly built Knightsbridge block that was reported to contain the most expensive homes in London.
As a child I had often visited the site in its previous incarnation as Bowater House since it had contained my father’s office. Bowater House was one of the ugliest modern office blocks to go up in London after the Second World War. There has been a story told that in 1959 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the pre-eminent master of modern architecture, was taken past Bowater House in a taxi. His companion, Ernö Goldfinger, another eminent architect and designer, motioned towards the building.
‘This is all your fault,’ Goldfinger said.
‘I was not,’ Mies van der Rohe replied icily, ‘the architect of that building.’
Anyway, the building was demolished in 2006 and replaced with this equally controversial structure which seems to many to typify the dangerous gap that is opening up between the global super-rich and the rest of us in the twenty-first century.
‘Birds that move around in flocks make easy targets for any lone predator,’ my client resumed his musings without lifting his eyelids. ‘If you move in crowds you often end up being punished for the sins of others.’
He fell silent again, his eyelids still lowered and I pondered his words. I remembered an afternoon soon after starting at my first boarding school. I was seven years old and walking on my own in the grounds in one of the few moments of the day that was not crammed full of sport, lessons and pointless regimentation. One of my school reports of the time, which my wife sweetly unearthed from the cellar recently to amuse the children, claims that, ‘Andrew believes his contemporaries offer limited intellectual stimulation – he is not always an easy person to deal with but one that is learning to be more tolerant’, which could explain why I was walking on my own, at several levels.
Rounding a corner I bumped into a teacher on routine patrol duty.
‘Why aren’t you with friends, Crofts?’ she asked in a voice that was not without a hint of kindness. ‘You’re a funny little lone wolf, aren’t you?’
I prefer my client’s analogy of the lone eagle soaring proudly across open skies.
The greatest living playwright
There was always an extra buzz of excitement at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party when one of the club’s grandest lady biographers brought her husband along. He was a man widely seen at the time as Britain’s greatest living playwright, the closest thing you would find to a ‘household name’ in the cultural world.
Moving, as one does at these sorts of parties, from one conversational group to another, I found myself next to the grand lady biographer after the wine had been flowing for a while. She made the usual polite enquiry as to what I did for a living (coincidentally her equally splendid mother and father had been two of the literary grandees who had made similar polite enquiries at the first Foyles Literary Lunch I attended nearly 40 years before. Then I would have told them I was a novelist or perhaps a journalist).
When I explained that I ghosted books and that many of them were memoirs she loudly summoned her husband to join us from another nearby group.
‘You need to talk to this man,’ she instructed him. ‘He’s a ghostwriter. You’ve been saying for years that you are going to write about your wartime evacuee experiences and you’re never going to get round to it. Why don’t you just let him do it?’
For just a moment it looked as if the greatest living playwright was actually weighing up the benefits of having someone else lift the burden of authorship from his shoulders, but the moment passed and the polite conversations rolled on. He died a year or two later and I suspect he never got round to writing down those memories, although his wife wrote a moving, and bestselling, account of their relationship.
The selling power of celebrities
Alexandre Dumas, père, had a ghostwriter, or ‘nègre’ as folks like me are sweetly referred to over in France. His name was Auguste Jules Maquet. In the 1830s Maquet, a novelist and playwright, had tried to have one of his own works published but was told: ‘You have written a masterpiece, but you’re not a name and we only want names.’
Nothing has changed apart from the scale of this hunt for ‘names’. Marketing books is one of the hardest tasks any business person can take on and anything which makes the titles more noticeable to the public is going to be irresistible. Celebrities are consequently created and nurtured specifically for the purpose of selling products from movies to perfume, clothes to books. If an author is not a celebrity then t
he publisher will do their damnedest to make them one – usually with limited success.
A diet book by a film star is certain to gain more column inches than one written by an unknown doctor, a memoir by a television soap star is far more likely to get a six figure deal than one by a distinguished Shakespearian stage actor who appears nightly in front of audiences numbered in their hundreds rather than their millions.
Realising how useful it is to have a cast of characters who are known to wide segments of their markets, business people who want to attract the attention of customers need to invent celebrities to do the talking for them. To begin with these celebrities were people who had genuinely achieved something remarkable or unusual, like winning a war or being crowned king. Then they began to be drawn from the entertainment and acting worlds. Eventually that supply also proved inadequate for the marketing needs of the modern world. The newspapers were able to invent some of their own by inflating and personalising scandals and court cases, but it was the proliferation of the television and music industries that was to provide the most fruitful opportunities for creating celebrities that other people would want to listen to or watch.
Many of these people end up wanting to write books or are asked to put their names to books in order to help sales, and so they find themselves sitting down with people like me.
The most surprising thing is how very ‘normal’ many of them are. They might have been involved in ‘news’ stories that have kept them on the front pages for weeks on end. They might star in television programmes which are watched by tens of millions, but more often than not they live very ordinary lives in very ordinary houses with very ordinary partners and fret about all the same things as everyone else.
Most have virtually no power over their own destinies. The ones who appear in the television programmes are generally treated like commodities by their producers and masters, who pay them little or nothing, work them like slaves and decide when they are going to be killed off by scriptwriters or reality television judges. The ones that the media decides to love never know when the editors are going to turn on them, withdrawing the airbrushing services that made them look so desirable in early photographs and pointing out their cellulite on the beach at the same time as exposing their private lives to ridicule.
It is certainly true that these celebrities put themselves up for fame by auditioning and giving interviews and frequenting the places where the paparazzi will find them easily, but most of them have little or no conception of what they are letting themselves in for when they set out on this road as bright-eyed young hopefuls. The clever ones exploit the system (step forward Victoria Beckham and Katie Price as the most fabulous modern-day examples), but most are no match for the business and media manipulators who make them and break them at will.
Simply being famous is never going to be enough to make an interesting book. There must be another story going on unless it is going to be a picture book for fans, like the titles that hit the shelves within a week of a boy group winning, or maybe losing, the final of The X Factor. In those cases the book is no more than a memento of the moment, like a very thick fan magazine or concert programme. It is all part of the merchandising campaign and intended to be ephemeral. In some cases the producers have manuscripts prepared for all the finalists in the last weeks of a competition so that they are ready to start printing the winner’s story, and any others that the publisher believes to be sufficiently commercial, the moment the results are known.
To create a full-length book which people will actually read, however, the ghostwriter has to find another, deeper story. It might be overcoming a difficult illness, an abused childhood or an abusive relationship, a controversial court case or a high profile divorce, a drug habit or a criminal record – anything that adds another level to the story. Merely appearing in a programme in front of millions of people may well get you into a meeting with a publisher but it won’t necessarily get the public to shell out their hard-earned cash or tempt them to devote the time needed to reading it.
A highly regarded literary novelist of my acquaintance was once commissioned to ghostwrite the autobiography of one of the stars of EastEnders, only to find that she had no real back story at all.
‘There is a limit,’ he sighed over a large glass of wine, ‘to how many different ways you can describe the sound of Bow Bells.’
If a celebrity has a long career of genuine achievement, of course, and has been particularly skilful at keeping their private life private, managing to retain an air of mystery (as with stars like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie), then there may still be enough of an appetite amongst the general public for more information to make a book a bestseller, as Keith Richards demonstrated when he finally wrote his autobiography Life with ghostwriter James Fox (the author of White Mischief). In 2013 Morrissey and Penguin were very successful at managing to pique the interest of fans as to what new things their idol might still have left to say.
Haters of the celebrity world are always quick to point out when sales of celebrity books dip, but the truth is that whenever someone famous who is also interesting steps forward with something new to say, whether they are a bad-tempered football manager or an allegedly drug-soaked rock star, then large numbers of people will always pay to read the result.
The soap star who came to stay
It was her mother who made the call, struggling not to cry. ‘He’s been round again, Andrew,’ she said, ‘and he’s made a right mess of her this time. She’s terrified he’s going to come back.’
She didn’t have to tell me who it was she was talking about. Her daughter was a current hot property in a soap opera, much loved by the tabloids that hounded her constantly for stories about her private life, which was why the publisher had been willing to buy her autobiography. Her biggest problem was an ex-boyfriend who liked to foster an image of himself as a gangster and all-round hard-man. The couple had a child together and she had gone on to have another with her current boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend didn’t like the idea of his child being brought up by another man and had taken to coming round and threatening her. The threats sometimes became reality. Once or twice the tabloids had commented on black eyes that she had not managed to cover up in front of their photographers, but this time it sounded like he had gone further.
‘I don’t know how to ask this,’ her mum went on, ‘but she needs somewhere safe to go for a few days. She can’t come to me because he knows where I live. Could she and the kids come and stay with you for a few days while she works out what to do?’
‘Sure,’ I heard myself say.
My wife took the news pretty well. Our biggest worry was how our children would react to seeing their first badly beaten woman, but that didn’t seem like a good enough reason to turn away someone who appeared at that moment to have no one else to turn to. What her mum had forgotten to mention was that the current boyfriend would also be coming, as would their hyperactive dog. Our children adjusted very quickly to the new family in our midst, enjoying looking after younger children, but our Labrador had something close to a nervous breakdown at having her home space so boisterously invaded.
After a few days of countryside peace and calm our heroine was refreshed and ready to return to the fray, bravely facing down the lenses of the paparazzi and the threats of the ex-boyfriend. Our children returned to their normal, safe, predictable routines with a lot to think about and the Labrador was able to sleep with both eyes shut once more. I’m not sure which family benefited the most from the experience.
Not everyone can be Hamlet
If there is one skill needed to succeed in life it must be the ability never to allow disappointment or rejection to stop you from trying again. Everyone has to face those twin demons from time to time, but if you choose to follow a profession like writing then you are going to be coming up against them most days.
To find the energy and patience to write a full-length book you have to believe in it wholeheartedly, you must b
e filled with optimism and enthusiasm, despite the fact that everyone knows the odds against any book being a success, or even finding a publisher and an audience, are enormous. The more you love the story and the more time you dedicate to perfecting it, the more disappointed you are likely to feel if it is rejected. You know you shouldn’t take the rejection personally, but inevitably you do. Each rejection takes another small bite out of your soul; wounds which even the greatest triumphs will never quite heal.
In my last two years at school I was fortunate to have a tutor, Dave Horlock, who was only 10 years older than me, although 26 seemed enormously ancient to me at the time. He became famous within the school for producing spectacular school plays to what seemed to us to be almost professional standards. He became a friend as well as a tutor, introducing me to the wonders of Oscar Wilde (I was already spending much of my time doing imitation Aubrey Beardsley posters in the art room, so it wasn’t a hard sell) and Lord Byron, and tasking me first with the creation of the sets and scenery for his productions and then giving me acting roles after seeing me perform as a bored ‘Bottom’ in a classroom dramatisation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He helped me pass many long evenings in conversation when I probably should have been working for my exams, having escaped across the quadrangle from my study and climbed the stone spiral staircase to his rooms in the turret of one of the Gormenghast-like towers, collapsing onto the sofa with his dog.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 13