A Curious Career (2 page)

My duties at
Penthouse
included, among other things, interviewing people with unusual sexual tastes for an everlasting series called ‘Parameters of Sexuality’. These people were definitely
not
celebs – they were foot fetishists, voyeurs, transvestites, dominatrices, men who liked wearing nappies – you could say that, as an interviewer, I started at the bottom.

But actually it was all good training – learning to use a tape recorder, learning to ask open-ended questions designed to draw people out, learning not to seem shocked or disapproving of the answers, learning to press for more detail and not be content with generalities. It was easy in one way, in that my interviewees were volunteers who were only too eager to talk for hours (anonymously of course) so I never suffered from the celebrity interviewer’s twin bugbears of limited time and limited personal revelation – my problem always was getting away. If, nowadays, people are sometimes surprised that a nice respectable lady like me can ask such embarrassing questions, that’s only because they don’t know about my seven-year apprenticeship at
Penthouse
.

It was
Penthouse
, too, that gave me my first big celebrity interview, with Salvador Dali, in 1969 when I was twenty-five. Bob Guccione growled at me one day, ‘You speak French, don’t you, honey?’ I made some non-committal noise. ‘Get over to Paris and interview Salvador Dali – he’s at the Hotel Meurice.’ At the Meurice I was met by a short dapper Irishman who introduced himself as Captain Moore, Dali’s secretary, and took me along miles of corridors to Dali’s suite. He advised me to address Dali as ‘Maître’ which I found quite easy when I met him – he was so tall, so old, so grand, I almost wanted to genuflect. Guccione had told me to ask Dali his views on sex (I hardly needed telling) and I struck gold with my very first question, about his habits. ‘Ha-beets! Ha! First masturbation.
Le mast-urb-ation
, you know? Zee painters are always zee big masturbators – nevaire make love, only watch, and
some-times
masturbation! Zat is one good habit. Zee other is
foot
.’ What? ‘
Foot
!
Zee heating.’ He gestured to his mouth and I realised he meant food, eating. ‘I lika very much the crayfish and ortolan because I lika very much food with faces. No food I eat without faces. I like to look at everything and then eata the everything. When I see people with limousine, with rings on hand, I want to eata everything.’

Dali enjoyed being interviewed so much that he kept shouting ‘More! More!’ so I asked about his daily life in Cadaques. ‘My day the most regular possible. Wake at nine, in bed working till eleven. Lunch. Go for leetel swim, making no movement [he demonstrated floating on his back]. After a siesta of twenty-five minutes, then working, then nude girls come for me to watch – no touch – then some drawing. At six o’clock make peepee and at eight many pederasts arrive, because Dali like zee androgyne people. No lika de sex – one man, one woman – like better confusion, you know?’ He also told me, ‘Every big artist, every important people – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Napoleon – is impotent and this is good. Because if you work too well with your sex you never produce nozzing. Only childs. But for artist, le libido and le sexual instincts sublimate in the artistic creation.’

As I was bowling questions at Dali, and he was shouting his answers in increasingly fractured English, I noticed other people gathering in the room, listening in. Then a very hirsute man backed through the double doors dragging a lifesize human dummy and Dali spent some time laying it out on the floor with a cushion under its head, a stringless lute behind, and a map of Brest and one of La Rochelle under each shoulder, while the retinue clustered round admiring it. Nobody, including me I’m ashamed to say, asked what it was meant to represent, but we all oohed and ahed at this work of genius. But then Dali’s wife Gala walked in, and the retinue fell silent and gradually drifted away. Everyone, it seemed, was terrified of Gala. She looked very chic in a red-and-white Chanel suit and I would have guessed her age at fifty but Captain Moore told me later she was eleven or twelve years older than Dali, so probably seventy-six.

The Captain explained that Dali and Gala always lunched alone but he would take me to lunch with his fiancée, Katherine, and – an unexpected bonus – Dali’s ocelot. Luckily the other people in the Meurice dining room seemed quite happy to have an ocelot in their midst. After lunch, the Captain and Katherine took me back to their flat and suggested I might like to join them for a threesome (one of the hazards of working for
Penthouse
was that people were
always
asking me to join them for a threesome) but I gave my usual answer that it was ‘not the right time’ so they showed me their fascinating collection of Dali artefacts instead.

Dali had said he would see me again for five o’clock tea but when I went back to his suite a Japanese journalist was already battering him with questions and soon a troupe of actors called the Living Theatre led by Julian Beck walked in. They fell on the drinks trolley and all the pyramids of bonbons scattered round the room. One of the girls took a bite of one of them and spat it out – ‘Jeez-us, what the hell is this?’ I told her it was a marron glacé, a crystallised chestnut, and she put her face very close to mine and hissed, ‘Listen, baby, don’t try to get smart. I seen chestnuts, and they don’t come all slimy like that godawful crap.’ Retreating from her, I thought I’d introduce myself to Madame Dali because she was sitting alone, so I said I was a journalist from London and she screamed, ‘I never give interviews. Never. Never. Never,’ while simultaneously patting the sofa to indicate I should sit beside her. ‘Are there always so many people here?’ I asked, trying to make conversation. ‘Listen. They are very interesting people. Why should Dali see you and not them – you think you are better?’ Agh. I could see why people avoided Gala.

By this time I was desperately worried about my flight – I was supposed to fly back the same night – but Dali said we would talk again in the morning. I explained that I had nowhere to stay in Paris, so he told the Captain to find me a room at the Meurice, which he did. So then I interviewed Dali the next day, and the next, and the next, and in the evenings I went to parties in his suite, and gobbled my way through all the pyramids of marrons glacés dotted round the room. I was present one morning when the Captain brought in a French couple carrying two enormous packets of thick paper and I watched Dali signing each sheet ‘Dali 69’. When I asked what he was doing, he said, ‘I am manufacturing money’ – apparently he signed them and the publisher later added a doodle and sold them as Dali drawings. Eventually Gala started giving me the evil eye and Dali said regretfully that he thought we had done enough interviewing. But he presented me with a wonderful gift – a conical hat made of wax flowers and butterflies that he had designed for Gala to wear to a fancy dress ball in the 1930s. When, years later, I lent it to a Dali exhibition in Stuttgart, they insured it for £15,000. So that was my first celebrity interview, which naturally made me want to do more.

I kept dropping hints to Guccione, so eventually he sent me to Ravello, Italy, to interview Gore Vidal. Alitalia lost my case on the way, so I arrived in a rumpled dress and terrible plastic shoes but again my subject was kind and said I must stay while Alitalia found my luggage. Vidal virtually interviewed himself, telling a well-honed string of anecdotes – but I noticed that, when the tape ran out in the middle of an anecdote, he stopped and waited while I turned the tape over – no point in wasting a good anecdote on a silly girl when it was intended for the world. He and his companion, Howard Austin, took me out to dinner (still in my plastic shoes) in Ravello that night, and got very loud and jolly on crème de menthe. I have never, before or since, seen anyone drink crème de menthe right through a meal. Rather to my regret, Alitalia returned my suitcase the next day so I had no further excuse to linger.

Soon afterwards, I left
Penthouse
and spent several years as a full-time mother. (There was no question of maternity leave in those days.) David and I were married in 1971 and had our first daughter, Rosie, in 1975 and our second, Theo, in 1978. We lived in Finsbury Park which was considered a dangerously rough area in those days, though I notice that nowadays it counts as ‘desirable’ and has been renamed Stroud Green. I did the usual rounds of mother-and-baby club, playgroup, nursery, and made some good friends. David was teaching media studies (a brand-new subject in those days) at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and I had some residual income from two sex books,
How to Improve Your Man in Bed
and
The Single Woman’s Sex Book
, that I wrote while I was at
Penthouse
. During these playgroup years, I wrote a very different book,
The Heyday of Natural History
, on a subject that then interested me, Victorian popular naturalists. It got rapturous reviews when it was published in 1980 and gave me a sort of respectability but I look at it now and think: What a waste of time. I dedicated it to my mother, thinking it would make up for my sex books, but she only said she liked the illustrations! Weirdly, it is still in print in Japan and brings me an annual royalty cheque of £60 or £70.

Once both daughters were settled at school, I was desperate to get back into journalism. But it is hard – and I feel great sympathy for young women today – to apply for jobs when you have known nothing but playgroups for several years. I’d forgotten what office clothes even looked like. But by the happiest of happy chances my original boss at
Penthouse
, Harry Fieldhouse, who taught me to be a journalist in the first place, had moved to a newly launched colour supplement, the
Sunday Express Magazine
, and asked me if I’d like to do a series for it called ‘Things I Wish I’d Known at 18’.

This was one of those ‘back of the book’ features, like the
Sunday Times’
‘Life in the Day’, which entailed interviewing a celeb, and cobbling their answers together into a single long quote. It was a boringly narrow formula, but it did give me a very wide experience of dealing with celebs and getting over the inevitable beginner’s problem of being star-struck. Finding celebs was easy in those days – you could often get their addresses, or even their phone numbers, from
Who’s Who
– there was none of the nonsense of having to pre-negotiate everything with PRs. And I soon learned that actors who were stuck in long West End runs were
desperate
to be interviewed – after the first-night excitement died away, they often felt forgotten by the world.

In 1983 a new editor, Ron Hall, joined the
Sunday Express Magazine
, and promoted me to writing ‘big’ interviews – no longer back of the book, but proper 3,000-word profiles. My breakthrough came when he sent me to New York to interview my old
boss, Bob Guccione. Up till then, I’d
been writing all my profiles in the third person, as was the custom then, but I thought: I
have
to say I used to work for Guccione, it would be mad not to. So I wrote the piece in the first person and felt that at last I was writing without constraint. It was a really joyous, liberating moment, the point at which I found my writing voice.

I won my first British Press Award in 1986, and my second the next year, which reassured me that I was on the right track. Older, stuffier journalists lectured me about ‘objectivity’ and told me it was wrong to put myself in my articles, but, with two Press Awards under my belt, I was happy to ignore them. In 1990 the
Independent
launched a Sunday sibling, the
Independent on Sunday
, and hired me as their interviewer. It enabled me to write very long (5,000-word) interviews, which I preferred, and won me a couple more Press Awards. But I also acquired the nickname ‘Demon Barber’ which was a pain for a long time. It gave the impression that I
only
wrote hatchet jobs, which was unfair – I probably only wrote one or two a year, but they tended to be the ones that stuck in people’s memories. And, for all the glittering company at the
Independent
(Ian Jack, Zoë Heller, Sebastian Faulks, Blake Morrison, Nick Cohen, Alexander Chancellor, Francis Wheen, Michael Fathers), I found it an unhappy ship, riven by internal feuds and institutional sexism. So I was glad to move on to
Vanity Fair
, and then the
Telegraph
and the
Observer
, before settling into my present home, the
Sunday Times
.

People sometimes ask why I’m
still
doing interviews as I approach my seventieth birthday, in a tone which suggests I could be doing something more respectable like – oh! – writing books. To me that’s a bit like saying to a good cook, ‘You don’t
still
need to cook meals, do you, when you could afford to go to restaurants?’ But why give up something you adore doing? Once in a while, when it’s my third actor in a row, I might start grumbling, ‘This is a waste of my time,’ but basically that phone call from my editor – ‘Do you want to interview Pete Doherty? Miranda Hart? Eddie Izzard?’ – brings a little leap of excitement to my heart. Even when the name is someone I’ve never heard of (Lady Gaga, shockingly, but it WAS the very start of her career) my reaction is always to say yes, and then to do some frantic Googling later.