A Curious Career (5 page)

CHAPTER THREE

On Interviewing

There’s a wonderful scene in Jennifer Egan’s
A Visit from the Goon Squad
in which an experienced hack called Jules Jones is sent to interview a nineteen-year-old film star called Kitty Jackson over lunch. He has been allotted forty minutes with her of which she spends the first six on her mobile. ‘Then she starts to apologise . . . Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.’

That phrase – ‘the erosion of a subject’s self-control’ – pretty much sums up the whole celebrity-interviewing game. But what makes the Jennifer Egan scene so delicious is that it’s the reporter who loses his self-control. He gets so irritated by the film star’s bland boring niceness that he suggests they go for a walk in Central Park, in the course of which he jumps her, and tries to rape her. He ends up in prison (of course Kitty writes him a sweet letter) charged with attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault. A bit extreme, you might say, but the feelings he goes through while ‘trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice’ are ones that I entirely recognise. I have never wanted to rape an interviewee but I have occasionally fantasised that someone else comes in and shoots them. At least then I’d have something to write about.

People often say, ‘Oh it must be great for you meeting all these famous people,’ and I have to resist the temptation to bang my head on the wall and howl. I dare say it’s nice
meeting
famous people but the trouble is I have to interview them which is a completely different kettle of fish. In fact the interview is the part of my job I enjoy least, so fraught is it with anxiety, impatience, frustration, and often disappointment. It’s like sitting an exam with not enough time – the clock in my head is ticking so loudly I’m surprised the interviewee can’t hear it. I love preparing for an interview, and then writing it up afterwards, but the hour or two I spend with my subject is pretty much pure hell.

The best bit is definitely the research beforehand, especially reading cuttings. It’s the perfect combination of limitless displacement activity with what one can tell oneself is work – ‘I’m sorry I have to lie on the sofa all day but I have to read all these cuttings.’ Nowadays I have to read them on my laptop which is not nearly so much fun, but I used to love getting real yellowing cuttings in real dusty brown files from the Tasiemka Archive in Golders Green. Edda Tasiemka, a German émigré, used to help her journalist husband by cutting out articles she thought might be useful for him. When he died she went on cutting out articles till her entire house was crammed floor to ceiling – not just the sitting room and bedrooms but hall, bathroom, kitchen, landing, garage – with bulging brown files. She’s still doing it, aged ninety, but alas now editors balk at paying her fees and say you can find it all on the internet. You can’t, actually. You can’t hold in your hands the actual
Sun
front page that screamed ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ whereas you can at Mrs Tasiemka’s. I still sometimes go round to her house just for the joy of riffling through old cuttings.

The point of background research is that you don’t waste precious interview minutes asking for information you could have found out beforehand, such as where they grew up or went to school. But it’s also useful to read previous interviews because they give you a clue as to what you’re in for – if your subject has
never
produced a good quote, you know you’ll be ploughing stony ground. And if you find the same anecdotes recurring in interview after interview you know these are the ones to avoid.

But the most valuable part of reading the cuttings is looking for the lacunae – the things that
haven’t
been talked about. Researching the actor Dan Stevens, I was struck by how little he’d said about being adopted. He had a short standard answer to the effect that he didn’t want to know about his ‘real’ parents, he was not interested, because his adoptive parents had been so wonderful. In fact he resented the suggestion that they were less ‘real’ than his genetic parents. But, now that he is a father himself, I felt he
must
want to know about his genetic parents, and asked if he’d found out anything more. He said no – he’d been too busy to do any research – but then admitted that he knew more than he was ever willing to divulge. Fair enough. To say yes, I know the facts but I’m not telling is an honest answer whereas I’m not interested is not.

Again, doing background research for an interview with Piers Morgan, I wondered why he’d never talked about his real father. He was a dentist, name of O’Meara (Piers switched to his stepfather’s name), who died when Piers was a baby. But why did he die so young? Piers said it was ‘nothing sinister’ but flatly refused to tell me the cause of death. I suppose you could say that this was an interviewing failure – I drew a blank – but I certainly felt it was worth including in the article. On occasions like this, I often feel that I’m marking the spot for future interviewers to dig.

Reading cuttings is such a pleasure I can easily do it for days. There might also be a biography or autobiography I have to read, or films I have to watch, or records I have to listen to, not to mention YouTube and Twitter and a million other distractions that I can tell myself are necessary for my research. I like to feel I am thoroughly prepared – it gives me confidence on the day. But, come the day, I wake with a racing heart and a feeling of doom. I always try to arrange interviews for the morning so I have less time to worry. I do all the routine stuff – checking my tape recorder, checking the batteries, rereading my notes, rereading my questions, checking the address, but then there is nothing to do except panic and wonder whether I will screw up.

There are a million ways of screwing up and I must have done them all at one time or another. Arriving late is the most obvious one though I’m such a punctuality freak it has very rarely happened. Having a tape recorder break down is another horror but nowadays I always take two recorders just in case. The worst breakdown ever was with Sir David Attenborough – I saw the light flickering and realised my batteries were fading, but he was NOT sympathetic. Consequently while everyone else reveres him as a national treasure, I can only remember the cold glint in his eye, the drumming fingers, while I fiddled cack-handedly with my batteries.

Of course, I always fear a physical crisis and it’s happened a couple of times – once with Oliver Stone, when my front tooth (crown) fell out, but actually he was very kind and sympathetic, and another time with Robert Redford when I had a coughing fit so bad it sounded like retching. He sat there with a bottle of water beside him, failing to offer me any – his stony face indicated that he was furious I might be giving him germs. I remember sweating hideously in a conservatory with the actor William Hurt and him passing me ice cubes to cool my bright red face. He meant it kindly, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t have known my face was bright red unless he’d drawn my attention to it.

But even without any physical crisis, or tape-recorder crisis, there are still a million things that can go wrong – often just pacing things badly, or failing to follow up an interesting lead, or forgetting to ask a crucial question. My problem always is impatience. I’m prone to rush the early stages, desperate to get on to the meat of the interview. But it is vital to let the interviewee settle down and relax before asking anything that might alarm them. Which means that you must let them do the plug – and nowadays there always IS a plug – for their film or book or record, before you get on to the interesting stuff about why they’ve just split from their fifth wife. I tell myself I mustn’t push for
anything
in the first fifteen minutes; I must let them fulfil their agenda and say the things they have probably been reciting in the bathroom mirror before I make any attempt to steer the interview.

I used to devote a lot of thought to what to wear to the interview because I wanted to ‘blend in’. If I was interviewing an Establishment figure, I wore a Sloaney suit; if I was interviewing an actor, I aimed for something more bohemian; if I was interviewing a footballer – ah, there was the rub, because how do you dress to fit in with a footballer? I think it was probably wasted effort anyway, and nowadays my clothes are so much of a muchness I don’t have the wardrobe to dress like a Sloane. Anyway, how on earth would I dress to ‘blend in’ with, say, Shane MacGowan or Lady Gaga? Shane MacGowan had vomit encrusted all down his trousers, Lady Gaga was wearing a black silk wrap that kept falling open to show her bare boobs.

My only rule is not to wear anything that looks too expensive because I don’t want to seem to be showing off. I remember the first time I interviewed Sir Alan Sugar (at his hideous house in Boca Raton) he pointed to my emerald ring and asked, ‘How much did that cost?’ I said rather snottily that it was my engagement ring so I had no idea, but he said, ‘Go on – guess.’ ‘Five grand?’ I ventured. ‘They wouldn’t give you five hundred for it down Hatton Garden,’ he told me in my first full blast of the famous Sugar charm.
He
obviously thought I wore it to show off.

Actually my engagement ring had drawn attention once before, when I interviewed Ronnie Biggs the Great Train Robber in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. I was waiting for him at his flat and talking to his girlfriend Ulla when she suddenly seized my hand and said, ‘My dear, I must tell you: you must never ever wear a ring like that in Rio. The thieves here are terrible. They would cut off your finger to get it. And there are thieves everywhere here in Rio.’ Just as she said it, Ronnie Biggs, the most famous thief in Rio, walked through the door!

Ideally, you should always interview people at home because you can learn so much about them. Are they super-neat or chaotic? Do they have more photographs of their family or of themselves? A trip to the loo is often instructive – it’s where people put their awards and cartoons – things they’re proud of and want visitors to see but without too obviously showing off. Of course if you can go to their own bathroom, rather than the guest cloakroom, better still – look for the pills! Liz Jones, the
Mail
columnist, told me that she always headed for the bathroom – she also went through David Cassidy’s wheelie bin when she interviewed him in Los Angeles but then she is a far more committed journalist than me.

Nowadays, of course, the question of smoking looms large. Even before the smoking ban, I made it a rule not to smoke in people’s houses unless they were smokers themselves, but at least in those days you could smoke in restaurants. But now my preparation for any interview includes donning the hated nicotine patch – and then great whoops of delight if the person turns out to be a fellow smoker. I remember interviewing Simon Cowell at his headquarters and thinking even
he
won’t be allowed to smoke in this immaculate building, but he immediately produced cigs, lighter, ashtray from his desk drawer and we both merrily puffed away. Some of my friendliest interviews have been done on the smoking pavement outside restaurants – I did one with Rhys Ifans supposedly over lunch where we spent maybe twenty minutes in the restaurant and two hours outside.

An interview is an odd transaction – just two people alone in a room, with a tape recorder. It looks like an intimate tête-à-tête but you both know that it’s ‘on the record’, intended for publication. On the other hand, you don’t
speak
as if to an audience. It feels – or should do – as if you are having a rather intense private conversation. That’s one reason why I think it’s so important to maintain eye contact at all times. I’m baffled by interviewers (invariably men) who ask questions while flicking through their notebook, or glancing round the room.

Outsiders inevitably derive their idea of what interviews are like from watching them on television without realising that press interviews are completely different. Broadcast interviews have to include lots of information in the questions, because there is no other place to put it, therefore the questions have to be to some extent pre-planned. But press interviews aren’t like that because the questions don’t need to carry any information. They just have to be as effective as possible at getting the subject to talk. Hopefully, the questions will always be much shorter than the answer – my absolute favourite question is always: Why? If an interviewee says that he decided to move away from London a couple of years ago, this is not of any great interest until you interject ‘Why?’ and it all comes tumbling out – ‘Oh you know, because I was spending too much time getting pissed in the Groucho and ending up in bed with people whose names I couldn’t remember in the morning.’ So that’s a cue to ask: What was the worst occasion? And then, with any luck, the interview has moved from mildly interesting into riveting.

People sometimes claim that doing an interview is almost like psychotherapy. That’s obvious nonsense because there is no therapeutic intent. But I have sometimes been accused of coming on ‘like a therapist’ – most memorably by Anne Robinson who was very contemptuous of the vagueness of my questions. She would have rattled them out rat-a-tat-tat, each one spikier than the last. But then would she have got such a good interview? By slowing things down, refusing to engage in the sort of verbal sparring Robinson wanted, I think I got more out of her than she meant to give. She was more rattled by soft questions than by tough ones.