A Curious Career (10 page)

Another problem when you and the interviewee have mutual friends is that you often know things about them that you shouldn’t, because you know them from private gossip, not from the press. You might know that A had a hot affair with B last year, but then went back to her husband, or that C’s friends are worried about his increasing drug use, or that D has been in therapy for depression. You have to try to banish this knowledge from your mind. But on the other hand, it would be a very unnatural interview for me if I didn’t raise topics like fidelity, drugs, depression, so I ask about them but then accept the answers given, even if I know privately that they are untrue. When I interviewed Jeffrey Archer back in the 1980s, I knew that he knew that I knew his mistress, so I felt a bit awkward asking if he believed in marital fidelity. But of course he was the master of the bare-faced lie and able to beam ‘Of course’ without even the merest tinge of embarrassment.

But this business of background knowledge is always ethically difficult. I prefer ‘clean’ interviews where I’ve never met the person before, we have no mutual friends, and all I know about them beforehand is what I’ve read in the press. Everything has to be found out by questioning, but anything I
do
find is ‘mine’, legitimately acquired and legitimately published.

The
New Yorker
journalist Janet Malcolm published a book in 1990 called
The Journalist and the Murderer
which people are fond of quoting at me with hostile intent. It starts with the claim: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’ Nothing in the rest of the book substantiates this claim and Malcolm has admitted since that it was ‘a piece of rhetoric’ but she persists in seeing something morally ambiguous in the writer–subject relationship, namely that it ‘seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.’ She says that journalists pretend to befriend their subjects and then betray them.

Many journalists worship Janet Malcolm. I don’t. She wrote
The Journalist and the Murderer
after she had been caught doctoring quotes in an interview with a psychiatrist to the point of making them mean the opposite of what was said. This would, I’m sure, induce a ‘state of moral anarchy’ in any journalist – it is axiomatic that you never alter a quote. The other point, though, is that Malcolm does not interview celebrities. Her interviewees tend to be ‘real people’, whose input she needs in order to construct a bigger story. Her recent
Iphigenia in Forest Hills
, for instance, was about a murder case among the secretive Bukharan-Jewish community in Queens, New York. In order to find out anything at all, presumably she had to befriend her interviewees and some of them might have felt she betrayed them. But she could have argued it was all in the cause of getting inside the community.

However, celebrity interviews are not remotely like that. The participants are old hands at the publicity game, and know that this is a transaction in which we both hope to get something more than we intend to give. The celebrity hopes for maximum publicity for their book or film or whatever they are plugging in return for minimal self-exposure. The journalist delivers the publicity but aims to wrest a few revealing remarks from the celebrity along the way in order to produce an interesting article. Nobody pretends to befriend anyone so there can be no question of betrayal. It is perhaps a somewhat hard-headed transaction, but not, I am sure, a morally ambiguous one. Janet Malcolm is wrong.

CHAPTER SIX

Sportsmen

I’ve always been reluctant to interview sportsmen, first because I’m not remotely interested in sport and second because sportsmen, whether by temperament or training, never seem to have anything interesting to say. They are not introspective; they are not looking for analysis or validation; they know they can do all their self-expression on the pitch or track or whatever; they regard talking as a very poor substitute for doing. Which is all fair enough. And on a purely professional level, I feel that newspapers devote far too many pages to sport anyway so I don’t want to add to them.

While I was at
Penthouse
I moonlighted by doing a series of footballer interviews – one a week – for the
Evening Standard
. The footballers were all the good-looking ones who were thought to appeal to female fans and there was a free poster giveaway with each issue. I was young and pretty then, so perhaps the theory was that I could charm the players into letting their hair down – except that the one time that I did get a footballer (Derek Possee of Millwall) to let his hair down, and talk about all the boozing and partying that went on (‘Win or lose, on with the booze’), the editor cut it on the grounds that Millwall’s manager would be upset.

While I was at the
Sunday Express
in the 1980s I was sent to interview a famous cricketer called Dennis Lillee, and was handed an envelope to give him. What’s in it? I asked (it was strangely thick, as if padded) and my editor rather shamefacedly explained that it was £500. We PAY for interviews? I squawked, shocked to my puritan core. ‘Never normally, but you have to with sportsmen,’ was the explanation. Lillee gave a stupendously boring interview and in retrospect I wish I’d made some use of the money – I should have waved a tenner at him while asking a question and paid him according to the interest of his answer.

The only remotely interesting sports interview I’ve ever done is with the tennis player Rafael Nadal when he was at the height of his career. I think of it as my best ‘silk purse out of sow’s ear’ effort – which is a term I often use to myself but perhaps needs explaining. A good interview, I believe, is one in which the subject says so many interesting things that my only problem is deciding which quotes to leave out. Obviously I have to do a certain amount of writing to frame the quotes, but the quotes take precedence. That is, if they’re good. A sow’s ear, on the other hand, is when the subject has said almost nothing of any interest, and very few of their quotes are usable. It is then up to me to concoct an article, a silk purse, out of thin air. I don’t like doing it too often and, as I say, I would always prefer to start from the quotes, but once in a while it allows me to vent my opinions on a wider subject.

With Nadal, it gave me a chance to vent my deep distrust of the whole sports management industry. It is now as tightly controlled as Hollywood in its heyday, or possibly even more so because it is run by a near monopoly, IMG. If a sports writer writes anything disobliging about any of IMG’s players, they can have their press passes withdrawn, so they are pretty much forced to be tame. (Actually Nadal left IMG at the end of 2012 to set up his own management company, but IMG still controls most of the other top players.) I often wonder whether sports commentators know a lot more than they’re letting on, whether they can see when a player is fixing a match or a game. But of course they could never say it because – quite apart from fear of libel – they would never get a press pass again.

The net result is that it’s easier for an outsider like me to barge in and upset the apple cart, as I did with Nadal, than for an insider to tell the truth because it’s no skin off my nose if I’m never allowed into a tennis match again. And, actually, I’d be terrified of going to a tennis match again because, judging from the furious emails and tweets I got from Nadal fans, they’d probably lynch me.

From the
Sunday Times
, 5 June 2011

If anyone else tells me what a lovely lad Rafa Nadal is I shall scream. He is not a lad – he has just turned twenty-five, which is admittedly young, but he is in his ninth year on the professional tennis circuit, has won nine Grand Slam titles and is worth at least £68 million. And I didn’t find him lovely at all. When I finally met him in his hotel suite in Rome (he was playing the Rome Masters) he was lying on a massage table with his flies undone affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many sponsors, natch.

No doubt at this point all his millions of fans will start screaming with envy and resolving to kill me but honestly, kiddos, it was a bit rude. He just lay there glowering at me while I perched awkwardly on a nearby table until eventually his PR, Benito Perez-Barbadillo, fetched me a chair. Benito remained in the background and whenever Rafa didn’t like a question (which was pretty much every time I asked one) he asked Benito to ‘translate’ which meant they conferred in Spanish till the PR delivered some smooth PR-y answer. Nadal’s command of English seemed highly variable but never great.

Everyone kept telling me that Rafa was so tired and had had a bad day. But then I was so tired and had had a bad day too, traipsing round the boiling Foro Italico stadium, surviving on bottled water, watching his boring match, waiting for his press conference and then hanging about with mobs of screaming fans waiting for him to emerge from the players’ entrance. He eventually came out with a posse of security men, signed a few autographs, had his photo taken with a baby, and was whisked off in his car. I was told to follow and meet him at his hotel, which turned out to be some characterless sports/conference complex miles outside Rome – it could have been in Croydon.

HIS bad day only consisted of playing one short tennis match and signing a few autographs, which I thought was what tennis players were paid to do. He admitted at the press conference that he had played badly, dropping a set to a completely unknown Italian player, but he offered no excuses. However other people were quick to offer them for him: it was the day of Seve Ballesteros’ funeral and Rafa was very fond of Ballesteros. When he had to sign his name on the television lens (apparently one of those rituals they do at tennis tournaments) he signed ‘Seve’ instead of ‘Rafa’. And, according to David Law, a radio commentator and media director for Queen’s Club who very kindly served as my guide to the tennis world, Rafa was definitely below par the day we met, and two days later was diagnosed with a virus. He then went on to lose the Rome finals to Novak Djokovic, having lost the Madrid Masters to him the Sunday before, so his position as world number one was already beginning to look shaky.

What do we know about Rafa Nadal? Only what his minders want you to. He was born in 1986 in Majorca. His father is a businessman but the whole family is sporty – one uncle was a professional footballer known as the Beast of Barcelona. Another uncle, Toni, a former tennis pro, taught Rafa to play tennis from the age of three, and encouraged him to hold the racquet in his left hand, even though he is naturally right-handed. Rafa played in the Spanish juniors and was urged to go to tennis school in Barcelona but he chose to stay in Majorca with his family – Uncle Toni has been his only coach throughout his career. He started playing professionally when he was just fifteen and won his first Grand Slam at nineteen. He lost his first two Wimbledons but finally won against Roger Federer in 2008. At that point he seemed unstoppable – but then a string of knee injuries (tendonitis) meant he didn’t win a title for almost a year and commentators started saying he might have to retire. He missed Wimbledon in 2009 partly because of injury but also because his parents had just split up and he was very upset – ‘For one month I was outside the world.’ But he bounced back in 2010 and there has been no talk of tendonitis recently. However, he is now under threat from Djokovic.

Despite his vast wealth – £24 million in winnings, probably twice that in sponsorship – everyone agrees that he is unspoiled, unchanged. His best friends are still the friends he made at school; his hobbies are football, golf and fishing. He goes back to his home town, Manacor, in Majorca whenever he has time, and shares a big apartment block with his mother, sister, grandparents and Uncle Toni and his family. He also has a beach house at Porto Cristo, Majorca (not Ibiza as the press sometimes says) where he likes to go fishing. Two years ago he bought a £2 million beachfront house with its own golf course in the Dominican Republic, but he has never stayed there. I asked if there was some tax reason for choosing the Dominican Republic but he said no – he pays all his taxes in Spain – but he has some property investments in Mexico and thought it would be good to have a base near there for when he retires from tennis. He also has a charitable foundation, run by his mother, which has already opened a school with three tennis courts in India.

Anyway, back to the interview. Since I was perforce staring at his underwear, I decided to ask about it. Frankly, I’m amazed that any underwear company should want to sponsor Nadal, given that his on-court behaviour always screams, ‘My pants are killing me!’ He can’t go five minutes without fiddling with them – they seem to get stuck between his buttocks and then he has to pull them out. I remember the first time I saw him at Wimbledon thinking: Gosh he’s supposed to earn millions – you’d think he could afford some decent underwear by now. Anyway I asked whether his contract stipulated that he should wear Armani underwear on court and he said, ‘I don’t have to but I am very happy to wear Armani because their underwear is fantastic.’ But then why is he always fiddling with it? ‘That is something I am doing all my career, something that I cannot control.’ Has he ever tried to stop? ‘It is difficult for me because it bothers me all the time and I play with different underwears – long, short – but it is impossible to stop.’

Perhaps it’s just another of those rituals that all his fans adore. Every time he comes on court, he waves at the crowd, sits down, gets his water bottles out of his bag, takes a sip from each, and then carefully lines them up so that their labels all face precisely the same way. It takes a long time and his opponent is meanwhile standing by the net, waiting for the coin toss, getting quite irritated I imagine. Eventually when Rafa has faffed and fiddled enough, he leaps to his feet and does a sort of Superman swoop across the court and starts jumping up and down in his opponent’s face while the umpire tosses his coin. Then he races to the baseline as if he is dying to start the match and his opponent has been cruelly delaying things. The fans love it. What can I say? I asked if he suffered from OCD but of course this required translation and much conferring with his PR and produced the eventual answer, ‘It is something that you start to do that is like a routine. When I do these things it means that I am focused, I am competing – it’s something I don’t NEED to do but when I do it means I am focused.’ Does he have other rituals, perhaps in the locker room, before the match? ‘I always have a cold shower.’ And any particular rituals last thing at night before he goes to sleep? ‘No. I have to have the TV or computer on, but I turn it off if I wake up. What I normally do is have dinner, do some work with Rafael my physio, then sleep.’ Gripping stuff.