‘Blackmail?’ I asked, laughing in an attempt to take the sting out of the word.
‘Insurance,’ she corrected me, flashing a row of perfect white teeth.
It seemed that we had connected successfully.
‘We have a house in Villefranche,’ she said. ‘There’s only the housekeeper down there at this time of year so we won’t be disturbed. How long would we need to spend together?’
‘A week would be fine.’
‘And you don’t mind that I may be the only person ever to read the manuscript?’
‘It’s you I’m writing it for. As long as you are happy with it then I will be happy with it.’
Several months later, once the book had been written and safely deposited in the bank, and the lawyers had finished wrangling, I read that she had received one of the largest divorce settlements ever.
On behalf of my client
‘She said what?’ My wife’s tone of voice managed to convey both her contempt for the woman I was describing and her astonishment at my naivety for swallowing her line. Her fork had come to a halt half way to her mouth as she peered down the table at me, obviously awaiting some sort of satisfactory response.
As so often happens I had been talking without fully engaging my brain, expounding my client’s theories on why she was performing a social service by sleeping with other people’s husbands. My wife’s tone had woken me fully and I sensed danger. I paused and struggled to replay whatever I had just said in my head. The words, which just an hour or two before I had been typing out with fluent conviction, suddenly had a rather hollow ring to them.
I cleared my throat and tried putting my client’s point of view a little differently. My wife listened like a High Court judge might listen to a lawyer pleading for a client with a hopeless case, but her expression did not lighten.
‘And you believed her?’ she asked once I had burbled to a standstill.
Now I was on the ropes. I had to think why it was I was putting forward this woman’s highly immoral ideas as if they were founded in logic. Under this sort of cross-examination my client’s view of the world did seem a little ethically shaky, but as her ghost it was my job to put her case for her as eloquently and convincingly as possible, not challenge it. If I had actually questioned what she was telling me to her face she would have grown defensive and would have become more cautious in talking to me honestly. I needed her to open up and explain herself as fully as possible; I did not want to intimidate her into silence or aggressive self-justification.
Under my wife’s inquisitorial glare, however, I could feel my confidence in my client’s story ebbing away. I was still only in the early stages of the writing and I couldn’t afford to lose sympathy with the woman whose voice I was going to be thinking and speaking in for the next few months.
‘I can’t talk about it,’ I said, able to hear the panic in my own voice.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have to believe in her version of the story if I am going to be able to tell it convincingly. Once I’ve finished the book we can argue about the rights and wrongs of her philosophy of life as much as we like. I just can’t do it now.’
My wife gave a snort which could have been simply agreement but to my sensitive ears still seemed to contain a suggestion of derision. A new golden rule had just been born in our house.
A movie star and her entourage
A-listers in every walk of life, from movie stars to political leaders, billionaires to sports stars, are nearly always easy to get on with. It is the people who stand between them and the rest of the world who sometimes make life arduous.
The ferocious doctor’s receptionist has become a cliché, but there is a reason why such people are hired and vested with power; it is so that their bosses never have to fall out with anyone, never have to seem impatient or obstructive because their Rottweilers do all that for them. The bigger the star, the more ferocious the Rottweilers that stand between them and the rest of us.
If you have been hired by a big star to be their manager/agent/lawyer/publicist, then you have to make sure that you are seen to be doing something for your salary. In some cases that ‘something’ can be arranging unnecessary meetings, writing unnecessarily long letters, drawing up unnecessarily complex contracts and generally making everything take twice as long as it should.
In an ideal world a great film star would decide that she wanted to write a book and needed a ghost. She would ask someone to provide her with a few names and then either she would ring herself for a chat or she would ask her people to set up a meeting. If things went well then the lawyers could be asked to draw up a contract.
What actually happened in one case is symptomatic of the whole business. Someone junior from the star’s management team rang to enquire as to whether, in principle, I would be free to write a book for someone ‘very important’ who couldn’t be named. When I answered in the affirmative a long confidentiality agreement was drawn up before I could be told who she was. A meeting was then arranged, but not with her. Before that I had to be vetted to ensure that it was safe to allow me into her presence. On the day the people who were supposed to be at the meeting were held up at another more important one, and when they did arrive they were unable to give the matter enough time to make a decision. Another meeting was arranged and the same thing happened. Eventually they decided I could be introduced to the star.
Another meeting was arranged at the hotel she was staying at while passing through Paris on a press junket to promote a film. Getting there on time I found I had to meet first with someone from the management company, her personal assistant, a lawyer and a publicist, and a parallel team from the film company.
Eventually I was shown into a room that the star would soon be passing through on her way from one appointment to another. I was not the only one waiting in the room. There was also a journalist who had been promised an interview, a hairdresser, a make-up artist and a team from one of the couture houses who had some frocks for her to try on in preparation for a premiere later that night. She would not be actually watching the film, merely walking up the red carpet for the benefit of the assembled media cameras and then walking straight through the cinema to be let out of a back door, where a car would be waiting to whisk her away, which was just as well since some of the dresses did not look like their elaborate folds would respond well to being crammed into a cinema seat for a couple of hours.
When the lady herself eventually swept in several hours later, surrounded by a number of other people with earpieces and clipboards, the grooming squad fell into place around her, working on her hair and her face and showing her dresses as she listened to the people with clipboards, one of whom brought me forward for an introduction.
If she had ever known that she was going to be writing a book, she had forgotten, but that did not dent her charm or her politeness. She chatted for as long as she could before she had to try on a dress and it was suggested that I should wait in another room in order to continue the conversation later. By the time they remembered that I was in the other room our star had swept off to the premiere.
From that short exchange, however, she had decided that it would be fine to go ahead with the project, but that required me to be passed back into the hands of the managers and lawyers so that everything could be finalised. Over the following months I spent more hours in meetings and on phone calls with assistants than I would have needed to write the entire book if I had just been engaged for the job on day one. The star herself, however, was a joy from start to finish but the book, being micro-managed as it was by everyone who had a public relations stake in the lady’s career and image, was never going to catch the imagination of the book-reading public. It sold to fans in the same way that a poster of the star might sell and no doubt it did exactly the brand reinforcement job that they required.
A hit-man comes to lunch
I prefer to travel to the authors rather than have them coming to me, mainly because it puts them more at ease if the
y are on their own home territory. It is also easier for me to concentrate on the job of questioning and listening if I am not thinking all the time about whether I am being a good enough host. On this occasion, however, the author in question was between abodes and didn’t have anywhere suitable for us to meet.
My wife, who had some sort of domestic crisis under way, had not had time to ask any questions about who it might be with me in the front room that morning and was out when he arrived, returning in time to pop her head round the door and enquire if we would like a little lunch.
By the time we got to the kitchen she had laid everything up very prettily, being something of a domestic goddess in these matters, never able to do anything less than perfectly, and I introduced her to the amiable old man who followed me into the room.
I could see she was only half listening as we continued to chat, her mind on other matters until certain phrases seeped through whatever else she was thinking about and brought her eyes into focus. Gangster family names such as ‘Kray’ and ‘Richardson’ were being mentioned, as they so often are by Londoners of a certain age, and then our lunch guest made the casual comment, ‘so I had to clip him’, and her puzzlement seemed to clear.
I swear I could see a light coming on in her eyes before she quickly looked down at her plate and collected her thoughts, piecing together other things I had told her over the previous few weeks about a client who had been involved with the criminal gangs of south and east London; violent men who ruled Soho and much of the West End during the fifties and sixties. There had been a spate of these gangster stories being published after the success of a book called The Guv’nor by Lenny McLean, which came out at the end of the nineties. None of them came anywhere near to matching the sales of The Guv’nor, including the tale that we were working on that day. It found a publisher but it did not catch the reading public’s attention.
Fortunately our guest was happily launched on a string of stories and my wife had time to compose herself before she needed to ask if he was ready for some pudding.
Writers as parasites
There is something of the parasite about all writers, but ghostwriters particularly. I have always been more comfortable being a spectator at life’s feast rather than a participant, allowing other people to have the adventures and face the dangers and horrors that I then write about from the safety of my own home.
It was always thus. At school I did everything I could to avoid team sports, as horrified by the socialising that surrounded them as I was by the pointlessness of the sports themselves. How can you think freely, daydream and ask questions in the middle of a game of rugby when you are in imminent danger of being brought painfully to the ground? Once, while batting in a school cricket game, I was actually hit on the head by the oncoming ball because my mind had wandered in the few seconds it had taken the bowler to run up to the wicket and launch his missile in my direction.
Upon arriving in London at 17 I wanted to see and hear everything that was going on in the adult world which seemed to be changing so fast, poke my nose into as many corners of life as possible, while at the same time always being nervous about actually participating. Luckily I had a school friend who shared my curiosity but not my reticence. Born with no apparent ability to assess risks of any sort, he was willing to try everything and happy for me to tag along and observe. With all the merry amorality of a male teenager he would steal brazenly from the shops where he found employment, went begging on the London railway stations when short of cash and cheerfully sold his services in fetid little amusement arcades around Piccadilly Circus, despite having developed rabidly heterosexual preferences. I fear I may have egged this real-life Artful Dodger on in all his interesting endeavours simply to collect more information and experiences that I would later be able to draw upon for writing.
In the end he took one risk too many and died dramatically before even out of his teens, falling from the window of my fourth floor flat while apparently under the drug-induced impression that he could fly, while I lived on. It was my first brush with the sobering finality of death.
But isn’t ‘living on’ one of the features of a parasite? My dictionary defines the word as: ‘any organism that grows, feeds and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host’. That seems about right.
Ordinary people who do extraordinary things
One of the privileges of ghostwriting is getting to meet people who achieve extraordinary things in circumstances that I believe would leave me utterly defeated. You only have to think of some of the athletes who compete in the Paralympics to get what I mean, but it isn’t always a physical obstacle that sets the challenge and forces people to achieve superhuman feats of courage and determination, it can just as easily be an emotional one.
It never ceases to amaze me, for instance, how anyone copes with the loss of a child, particularly if that loss happens under exceptionally traumatic conditions. In 2006 I was introduced to Ann Ming, a former nurse who discovered the decomposing body of her murdered daughter, Julie, three months after the police had given up searching for her.
A violent local man was then arrested and tried for Julie’s murder but a series of blunders allowed him to walk free. Knowing he could not be tried again under the law of ‘double jeopardy’, he callously bragged about his ‘perfect crime’. But he had reckoned without Ann who set about campaigning to overturn the 800-year-old rule, which had been enshrined in the Magna Carta. She managed to confront the highest in the land and eventually succeeded in having the law changed, ensuring that her daughter’s murderer could be retried and punished for his crime.
It has been an honour to meet several people like Ann and to help them tell their stories. People who have resolutely refused to allow the great cruelties of life to defeat them.
Leaving London
I never really wanted to leave London once I got there, but I guess everyone has to grow up and buy a house and a washing machine sometime. I’d been living in the city for more than a dozen years and had ended up renting a flat beside the river in Chiswick, the waters at high tide lapping just yards from the window where I stationed myself and my typewriter every day.
The flat was in the home of an elderly widow whose husband had been curator of antiques at the Victoria and Albert Museum and one of whose sons was a Cabinet Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Our flat had once been the family’s ‘nursery wing’ and the surrounding house was a wonderland of cobwebs and curiosities. I would quite happily have sat there, watching the waters flow by, for the rest of my life.
Our landlady, however, turned out to be mortal and passed away after we had been there five years. The family needed to sell the elegant old house to someone who would then brush away the cobwebs and make it worth millions, and there was little chance that we would ever find somewhere comparable in London for the money we had been paying. (I suspect the family had deliberately and discreetly allowed our rent to remain low in exchange for the peace of mind of knowing that there were sympathetic young people around the house as their mother grew increasingly frail.) The thought of moving back into the world of damp basements in rundown areas was now less appealing than it had been during the earlier stages of my adult adventure.
It was time to get serious, move to the country, become a property owner, start a family and worry about things like the roof blowing off on windy nights or passing herds of deer stripping the shrubberies.
There are huge compensations to bringing up a family in the country but I have to admit I still feel a sort of peace descending on me when the train back to London crosses over the waters that I used to watch flowing past my window, and releases me into the familiar streets of my youth. New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Sydney: they all have their different charms and excitements but it is London, the city that I first read about and dreamed about and visited on steam trains with my mother, that eventually draws me back.
Despite all the developments to
the east of the city, the West End and its surrounding areas stay remarkably unchanged. The influx of the global wealthy, initially from the oil-rich states of the Middle East, followed by oligarchs from Russia and the rest of the world, has cleaned up streets that were once mean, turned mews houses into property goldmines and breathed life into mansions that had become shabby office spaces. The great spending booms have revived some shops, while the internet has crushed others, and the growth of 24-hour café culture has given many of the streets a continental feel, even on chilly English evenings.
My parents set up their first married home in the city at the end of the forties, in the aftermath of the Blitz. By the time I arrived there from school in 1970 there were still bombsites in evidence and Covent Garden was still the Dickensian fruit and veg market that George Bernard Shaw had depicted in Pygmalion, and which the film version, My Fair Lady, had just started to glamorise and sanitise. The dark, abandoned warehouses that loomed over the river from its southern banks had become the haunt of squatting artists and would not start to be converted into multi-million pound apartments for at least another 10 years.
As a freelance journalist I wrote a newspaper for St Katharine Docks, the first of the docks to be gentrified by property speculators, and chronicled the changes as one of the greatest historical cities in the world adapted and regenerated from its sea-trading, bomb-battered past, moving towards its digital-trading future. From the squalor of Dickens’s East End to the grandeur of Byron’s Piccadilly, from Bertie Wooster’s Mayfair, Peter Pan’s Kensington and Paddington Bear’s Notting Hill to today’s city as depicted by authors as various as Jake Arnott, John Lanchester, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, London’s magic continues to haunt the pages of books and my children are now able to live comfortably in areas of the city which were virtually derelict in the seventies, while the areas where I lived have become too expensive for most young people to even contemplate.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 16