A Curious Career (23 page)

An Education
gave me my first glimmer of what it must be like to be famous. Until then, I’d believed that I was entirely a private person. Other journalists probably knew who I was, but I was not a figure of public interest. But then, through the book and, even more, the film, people I didn’t know seemed to know about
me
, which I found disconcerting. Often they addressed me as if we were old friends so I’d be racking my brain the whole time thinking: Who is this person? and feeling guilty about my bad memory. It must be a million times worse for really famous people when everyone they meet seems to know them. It gives me a bit more sympathy with my interviewees than perhaps I had before.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Age

I’m writing this on my sixty-ninth birthday so the question of age looms large. Next year it will be three score years and ten which I’ve always believed, and still believe, is quite enough. I suffered from having parents who lived to ninety-two and wouldn’t wish the same on my own children. But I’ll have to have a seventieth birthday party! And see this book published! Maybe I’ll stick around a bit longer, or lie about my age.

Not that lying about my age will fool anyone. I have a friend, same age as me, who gets terribly hurt if she
isn’t
asked for proof of her age when she requests a senior concession at the cinema. I’m always amazed if they do. I know I look old because three times recently people have offered to help me with my luggage on the train. The first two were men – foreigners of course – but the last when I was coming back from a party in Hastings, and maybe looking a bit extra shaky from a hangover, was a woman, and not a young woman either, but a woman of about fifty with bleached blonde hair and tattoos. And although I declined her kind offer, and said I was fine, thank you, I realised I must look very old indeed and I could either cry about it or decide: I don’t mind and thank God there are still a few people – not many – who feel inclined to help old people with their luggage. I suppose someone soon will want me to do an oral history about how it felt to grow up in the dark ages of the 1950s without a television or computer, and did we have gas lighting and keep coal in the bath? But OK, I’m up for it, I’ll do old if that’s what’s required and I certainly don’t want to pretend to be young.

It strikes me that there are two basic stereotypes for women my age and older. You can either be a sweet old biddy, patting kiddies on the head and saying how you long to put your feet up and have a nice cup of tea. Or you can be a wicked witch who scares people stiff. I’ll go for the latter. I already own a black cat, and sometimes talk to it; I could easily advance to muttering in the street, and waving a walking stick at irritating children. Basically it’s a choice between do I want to be feared or do I want to be patronised and frankly I prefer the former. My father managed to terrify people even when he was ninety and blind, which I found admirable. It required a lot of shouting, though, which I’m not very good at.

Sixty-nine is pretty old for a journalist – of course it’s pretty old for anyone, but particularly for someone in what is supposedly (though not really) a young profession. In my thirties I assumed I would retire at sixty, but when I got to sixty I was still enjoying work, so there seemed no good reason to stop. Also, I was newly widowed and desperately needed work to distract me, to get me out of the house. Maybe I should warn my employers that I will never voluntarily retire. They will have to prise my gnarled fingers from the keyboard and I will kick up an almighty fuss. That is assuming newspapers still exist by then.

I’m probably the oldest still-practising interviewer, which is quite an odd thing to be. Whenever interview scenes are portrayed in television drama or films, they usually consist of a young, pretty woman interviewing an older man. And of course that’s how it was when I started. Interviewing was seen as a form of flirtation; it was assumed that a younger woman could winkle out secrets merely by batting her eyelashes. Actually, I don’t think I ever flirted with my interviewees, but I suppose I capitalised on the fact that I
was
young, and pretty. Quite likely I giggled a lot, and crossed and uncrossed my legs a few times – I had
fabulous
legs in those days, I once came third in a national Lady Cantrece Lovely Legs competition (Lady Cantrece was a brand of tights) – so it is not impossible that some of my interviewees fancied me. But I was already in love with David, so I certainly never went on a date with an interviewee.

When I started, my interviewees were always older than me, and nearly always men, and it felt very natural (probably because of my relationship with my father) to be asking cheeky questions of an older man. I was much more inhibited about interviewing women. If they were great beauties, or famous actresses, I felt in awe of them; if they were not beauties – if they were writers for instance! – I felt that my own prettiness put me at a disadvantage and that they were bound to hate me. The upshot was I avoided interviewing women as much as possible.

But in my late twenties I suddenly came up against the question of age. As I mentioned before, the
Evening Standard
commissioned me to do a series of interviews with footballers and it came as a terrible shock one day to realise that I was interviewing someone younger than me. The footballer was maybe twenty-five to my twenty-nine but it still felt obscurely wrong, humiliating. On the one hand, he was thick as two planks, but on the other he was married, with two children, and owned a substantial house. He felt like a grown-up, albeit a stupid one, whereas I still felt like a student. I thought: Is this what my life is going to be from now on, trying to wring a few interesting remarks from morons who are younger than me? If someone had told me then that I would be interviewing a tennis player (Rafa Nadal) when I was old enough to be his grandmother, I might have packed up my career there and then. Luckily, my footballer series didn’t last long, but it was the first hint of something that would become a problem later on.

Apart from the footballers, nearly all the people I interviewed in my twenties and thirties were older than me, which was fine. But when I was at the
Independent on Sunday
in my mid-forties, it occurred to me that, if I only interviewed older people, this would be an ever-diminishing field and probably quite a boring one. If I wanted to stay current, if I wanted to be a contender (which I did), I would have to interview younger people. I found it hard at first. I remember going to Jonathan Ross’s gorgeous house overlooking Hampstead Heath and thinking: It’s not fair. I could accept that pop stars and film stars became very rich very young but to find someone who was ‘only’ a television presenter (sorry, Wossy) living in such glamour was quite a shock. (I’m often asked if I ever envy the people I interview and I can answer truthfully no. But I do sometimes envy their houses.)

Luckily this dilemma eased when I left the
Independent on Sunday
to join
Vanity Fair
and they only ever asked me to interview older people. But in fact they very rarely asked me to interview anyone at all. This led to another dilemma. I was under exclusive contract to
Vanity Fair
which meant I was not allowed to write for anyone else, but they only gave me half a dozen interviews in two years. I was fabulously well paid but I was stuck at home twiddling my thumbs. I suppose in retrospect I should have learned to play the piano or something, but I mainly spent my time reading British press interviews and grinding my teeth that it wasn’t me doing them. A whole new crop of interviewers – Ginny Dougary, Jan Moir, Deborah Ross – had arrived to steal my thunder. So by the time
Vanity Fair
dropped my contract, I was so hungry for interviews I would have interviewed children, cats, dogs, footballers, anyone, and my qualms about younger people had disappeared.

My preference now, in old age, is to interview
much
younger people – so much so that I get a bit sniffy if anyone offers me Sir David Attenborough or Diana Athill. I feel I’ve done old people: I know a lot of them as friends and I am one myself. Whereas young people are a whole new world. Often I don’t know what they’re talking about but they’re quite pleased and amused when I ask them to explain. It reminds them of talking to their grannies. I still feel a bit goatish asking young people about their sex lives but it’s much easier now than when I was in my forties – they know I have no evil designs on them and they are often surprisingly frank. I think there are advantages for the reader too.

The trouble with young interviewers is that they’re wet behind the ears. They believe what PRs tell them! They are thrilled if a record company flies them out to Croatia to watch a British group perform. They don’t ever wonder why they couldn’t have watched the group in England (answer – because they might not seem so exciting in a half-full hall in Paignton). They are grateful for the free T-shirts PRs give them – especially nowadays when they are so badly paid they probably need all the free clothing they can get. They don’t ask why a film has been ‘in the pipeline’ for three years (answer – because it is so bad it will go straight to DVD) or why an actor has not been seen on screen for over a decade (numerous answers – but often because he’s become uninsurable either through drink, drugs or general seediness). Journalists are often told off for being cynical. They don’t have to be cynical but they do
always
have to be sceptical, and this is harder for the young.

The young don’t have that automatic bullshit detector which I think only comes with age. If they meet someone who says he’s a successful entrepreneur they believe him without even asking any back-up questions (What is your company called? What does it do? Can I look it up in Companies House? Are you in the
Sunday Times
Rich List?). That is why it’s so easy for conmen to con people. If someone is supposed to be rich it should be possible to establish how they made their money, otherwise alarm bells should ring. This was a lesson I learned the hard way from Simon.

There’s a type of person – the opposite of bullshit artists – who I’m intrigued by. They are people who
never
advertise what they do, who never boast, who can enter a room or a restaurant without drawing attention to themselves and would never in a million years say, ‘Do you know who I am?’ But there’s a quiet confidence about them that I have learned to recognise over the years. They know that the people who matter know that they matter, and they have no interest in impressing the others. Unfortunately such people rarely give interviews. But they’re the ones I’ve learned to look out for.

The interviews that most often fail, I feel, are those between young, childless interviewers and older subjects with children. The young never understand what a difference parenthood makes. Thus they can blithely write that someone ‘flits between homes’ in London, New York, Los Angeles without ever asking the obvious question – Yes, but where do the children go to school? Once you have children, you have to be anchored somewhere, you have to have a base. In general, young interviewers never seem to ask enough questions about family – not just children but aged parents. They tend to believe that career is all. But even stars, however mad and self-obsessed, do actually have family commitments – or if they don’t, I assume they have psychological problems. Young interviewers only want to know about the glamorous bits of their lives but I’m much more interested in the unglamorous stuff – what they do if they’re alone in a hotel room; who, if anyone, they phone with good news or bad; how often they speak to their mums.

So I think being old is quite useful for an interviewer. But there is nothing else good about it. I suppose I slightly prefer my sixties to my fifties in that there is none of that pressure to stay young and ‘not let yourself go’. I was always dying to let myself go, to stop pretending to be younger or fitter than I was. There was a particularly nasty patch in my fifties when friends were always recommending HRT. I never considered it for a moment: I’m far too frightened of drugs. Also I noticed, but didn’t like to say, that it made my friends mad. Luckily, they’ve all calmed down again now.

I suppose I could pretend there is a sort of wisdom in age. Is there? I certainly didn’t see it in my parents, and I don’t think my daughters see it in me. I have a bit more knowledge of how the world works but am still shockingly naïve in many ways. I wish I understood economics, or business, or anything to do with money. I reckon I am quite a good judge of people, but how does one ever know? And I remember how impatient I was, when young, with the supposed wisdom of older people. I just thought: You dinosaurs, don’t you realise that the world has moved on?

I’m guiltily aware that I had the best of it, that I enjoyed the golden age of interviewing. I came along at just the right time, the 1980s, when newspapers were suddenly keen to have their own star interviewers, and when it was still possible to spend enough time with celebs to make the interviews worth reading. But that is hardly the case now. My friend Deborah Ross recently had to fly to New York to interview Bruce Willis for
The Times
. She had just fourteen minutes with him which she worked out (clever girl!) meant she flew 600 miles for every minute of interview time, and then had to produce 3,000 words in two days. I couldn’t have done that even when young, and I certainly couldn’t begin to do it now.

I was lucky that I started in a seller’s market so I was able to set my own rules. I wouldn’t agree to interview anyone unless I had at least ninety minutes with them. I needed two days to prepare and at least a week to write the piece. I would never do phone interviews. I would never willingly jump on a plane unless there was a really thrilling interviewee at the end of it. Someone in the office, not me, would have to make all the arrangements and deal with PRs. No word of my copy – or punctuation – could be changed without my permission. And I had a right of veto over whom I was willing to interview.