A Curious Career (6 page)

I want my questions to be as open-ended as possible. The aim is not to produce tick-box answers – Happy childhood? Yes. Good relations with mother? Yes. Father? Yes. Siblings? Yes. The open-ended version would be: Who were you closest to during your childhood? The answer is usually mother or father, but if it’s not – if it’s sister or granny or auntie, it is worth probing a bit more. And of course I
am
like a therapist in that I always ask about childhood. I feel if I can picture what my interviewee was like at seven, at fourteen, I am much closer to understanding who they are today.

It goes without saying that I am entirely reliant on tape recorders – having no memory and having long forgotten my shorthand, I couldn’t have been an interviewer if they hadn’t been invented. Some people argue that recorders make interviewees nervous, but I think that only lasts for the first five minutes provided you maintain eye contact. And I like the formality of producing my recorder at the beginning of an interview, choosing the right place to put it, testing it, all as a way of demonstrating, ‘Right. This is an interview. We are now on the record.’ And then, at the end, a sign-off whereby, hand hovering above the recorder, I say, ‘Well thank you for that. But is there anything you would like to raise that I haven’t given you a chance to talk about?’ Usually the answer is no and then I ostentatiously click the recorder off and put it in my bag. If it’s yes, then obviously I carry on recording till they’ve said whatever they wanted to say. But the whole business of displaying the tape recorder is for me an important way of reminding the subject that we are not having a chat, we are doing an interview, for publication.

Even so, people sometimes want to say something off the record and this is a dilemma. I really hate being told things off the record – it makes life difficult when it comes to writing the piece. Jeffrey Archer, who I interviewed back in the 1980s when he was Conservative Party chairman, kept issuing instructions – ‘This is off the record’; ‘You can say this in your own words but not in mine’; ‘You can say “friends of Jeffrey Archer told me” ’. All these supposedly off-the-record revelations were entirely self-serving, designed to convey what a wonderful chap he was without too obviously boasting – though I must say boasting was not normally a problem for him. Journalists who feel flattered by being told things off the record are wet behind the ears. Nobody ever tells you anything that would harm them. They never say, ‘By the way, I
did
murder my wife’; they say, ‘Off the record, my wife was mad as a snake and a complete lush. I nursed her devotedly for many years until she had that unfortunate fall down the stairs.’ I often say at the beginning of an interview that
everything
is on the record – by which I mean including anything they try to tell me off the record. I would simply rather not know – or find it out myself by other means.

The great disadvantage of recording interviews is that you then have to listen to your own voice when you play them back, and oh, how agonising that is! You come to recognise, all too well, your own verbal tics and mannerisms and of course this is the moment when you think of all the questions you forgot to ask, or the points where you should have butted in and asked for more explication. Younger, cleverer journalists tend to save themselves this agony by using a transcription service or one of the wizard computer programmes that can convert speech into writing, but my attempts at both have been useless, and anyway I quite value the time spent transcribing the tape. It’s when I really think about the subject and what I want to say about them. It’s also when I identify the quotes I will definitely use in the piece, and others that are good but not essential.

Given my devotion to recorders, I am amazed when I encounter journalists who don’t use them. However brilliant their shorthand, there must be one or two points where the shorthand is ambiguous, when it would be helpful to have a recording to check. Also I think editors should insist on recording – it’s good insurance, if anyone ever claims they’ve been misquoted. Actually, I think
interviewees
should use recorders as well – why not? Michael Winner and Tony Benn always did, but I wish it were general practice. I get fed up with interviewees telling me they were misquoted, when I read them something from the cuttings. If they were really misquoted, then why didn’t they complain at the time? And if not, then why are they slandering a journalist by saying that they were?

The other great virtue of recorders is that they allow you to quote someone’s words
exactly
and not just the gist. In fact this seems to me the whole joy of interviews – to capture people’s way of speaking. Do they speak disjointedly, or do they form complete sentences? Do they repeat themselves? Do they have favourite words they use far too much? (‘Basically’ is a big offender here.) Do they use those giveaway phrases ‘to be perfectly frank’ or ‘I must be honest with you’ which always suggest they’ve been lying the rest of the time? Or, worst of all, do they say ‘know what I mean’ because if they say it at all, they will tend to say it in every sentence. The boxer Frank Bruno was a nightmare in that respect; ditto the musician Goldie. I usually cut most of the ‘know what I mean’s because they are too boring to read, but it’s important to include a couple to convey their ubiquity.

‘Fucking’ is another problem. Actually it’s a really acute problem for me now I work for the
Sunday Times
because they insist on following the antique practice of filling the word with asterisks. It didn’t happen before, when I worked for the
Independent on Sunday
and the
Observer
, but the
Sunday Times
considers itself a ‘family newspaper’. This is of course insane because if children ever scan the paper, it’s the word with asterisks that will first catch their eye. When I interviewed Lady Gaga, she discussed, among other things, the size of her clitoris, but nevertheless it was her one use of the word ‘fucking’ that had to be bowdlerised.

How can you accurately quote people who use ‘fucking’ every other word? With Liam Gallagher I was able to make it ‘fooking’ because that was the way he pronounced it, but with David Bailey I had to cut nearly all his ‘fucking’s out, which I thought was a loss. I did an interview with Norman Mailer in 1998 (luckily, for the
Observer
, which had no silly rules about asterisks) which almost hinged on his use – no,
my
use – of the word ‘fuck’. He’d been a bit torpid before, very deaf, very old, very arthritic, but he was
thrilled
when I asked him if he thought women should have babies as a souvenir of a great fuck. Obviously he got a kick out of hearing that word on the lips of (he thought) a genteel Englishwoman and from then on he kept using the word ‘fuck’ in almost every sentence – ‘Great fucks are very rare! Great fucks are rare enough that they have to be respected!’ And, yes, he did think that women should have babies as souvenirs of great fucks.

I go into interviews armed first and foremost with a recorder but also with a long list of prepared questions. I don’t often refer to them but they are vital to cover those moments, which happen in every interview, when my mind goes blank. And I put an asterisk by the questions I absolutely
must
ask, because I will be a wimp if I don’t. An interviewer can’t afford to be shy about asking questions – it’s what you’re there for. I always tell my interviewees beforehand that they mustn’t mind if I ask an intrusive question – they can always shake their head and say ‘No comment’. I won’t press it – I won’t do a Paxman and repeat the question twelve times. But it’s daft not to ask.

A question I am fond of is: What do you think is your worst fault? Nobody ever, of course, really admits what their worst fault is (nor would I) but there is a difference between people who say, for instance, unpunctuality or forgetting names, i.e. they admit to
some
fault although not by any means a serious one, and people who turn it into a self-compliment by saying, ‘Oh my worst fault is that I’m too giving!’ Yeah? At this point I always want to ask: How much do you pay your cleaner (I always want to ask
everyone
how much they pay their cleaner) but I have to fight back the urge, and ask something more anodyne like: Could you give me an example?

Asking for examples is always fruitful. It’s no good talking in generalisations when what you desperately need is detail. I do believe that detail is everything. Detail is evidence. When I interviewed the novelist Lionel Shriver, she obviously thought I was mad to keep asking about her central heating. But I was trying to nail my hunch that she was frugal and ascetic to the point of masochism, and I needed the evidence – which indeed she delivered. She told me that she prefers to wear a coat and gloves indoors rather than have the heating on, even though she suffers from Raynaud’s disease which means her hands and feet are always cold, and she will only let her husband switch the heating on if it is actually freezing outside, but then not until 7 p.m. That surely should be enough to convince the reader. Shriver told me off afterwards for being so obsessed with her heating and emailed, ‘The frequency with which I turn on the central heating may not loom large in the world of letters years hence!’ True – but as an insight into her character, I think her central-heating habits are quite significant.

Some beginner journalists, especially men, I think, have difficulty with the ‘stance’ of interviews – they find it obscurely humiliating to be taking all this interest in someone else without getting any reciprocal interest back. They hope that an interview will be a meeting of minds, or, alternatively, a debate. It should not be. An interview is not the time to show off, or to express your own opinions. You are there to draw someone out, to get
their
views,
their
memories, hopefully
their
confessions, and the less you talk yourself, the better. Outsiders often don’t realise how constrained by time most interviews are. Nowadays you’re lucky to get any more than an hour with your subject. So any minute spent talking about yourself is a minute wasted. I remember years ago Julie Andrews, being friendly, asked if I had children and I said no. I knew that if I said I had two daughters she’d start asking their names and ages and five minutes would have gone. But also I think you are more effective as an interviewer if you divulge as little of yourself as possible.

To be a good interviewer you have to know yourself pretty well, and obviously age is an advantage here. To some extent I use myself as a sounding-board. I know how I normally feel, so if I come out of an interview feeling atypically depressed, or humiliated, or elated, I know it must be something my interviewee has said or done to make me feel that way. So when I transcribe the tape, I try to identify the moment when my mood changed, and what triggered it. I believe that emotions are to some extent catching, so I know that a depressed person will make me feel depressed, and an angry person will make me angry. The reason my interview with Martin Clunes (see next chapter) ended so badly was, I think, because he was seething with repressed anger from the beginning, and increasingly his anger transferred itself to me.

You can never hope to do a ‘definitive’ interview because interviews, by their very nature, are of the moment, and at the mercy of happenstance. You can convey what someone was like on the day you met them, but they can be very different on different days. When I interviewed the actor Rhys Ifans in 2011 I found him amusing, pleasant, sharply intelligent, and willing to talk candidly about his love life and his hopes of fatherhood. But Janice Turner interviewed him for
The Times
two years later and found him boorish, foul-mouthed and unwilling to answer any questions at all. Her Rhys Ifans was the exact opposite of mine. So was I wrong and she right? Was he putting on an act for me? Or was he, as his publicist said, suffering from ‘a bad reaction to antibiotics’ on the day Janice Turner met him? I don’t think there’s any clear-cut explanation. Rhys Ifans no doubt has different moods on different days – as we all do, but perhaps actors more than most – and I caught one mood and Janice Turner another. But that’s the joy of interviews – their infinite variety.

CHAPTER FOUR

Actors

Oh God, actors are difficult to interview. The trouble is they’re so fluent. They babble away unstoppably and you think you’ve got some quite interesting stuff, but when you transcribe the tape, and strip out all the funny accents, and the expressive gestures and the whole actory
business
, you realise you’re left with some very stale old anecdotes, which might work fine on a television chat show, but not on the page.

I should also confess that I have some psychological ‘issues’ with actors, stemming from my childhood. My mother had dreamed of being an actress but trained as an elocution teacher instead, so all her hopes of a thespian career were loaded on to me. She dragged me round poetry reading competitions from a very early age – I always hated them because I never won. But whereas she kept hoping I’d win next time, I recognised quite early on that I didn’t deserve to win, that there were people who were better than me and far more committed. But still my mother wouldn’t give up.

She was a big cheese in Richmond amateur dramatics and often found small parts for me in her productions so I spent a lot of time as a young teenager sitting quietly in the dressing room while actors carried on – and they did carry on – around me. It was almost like bird-watching – I could see these dramas unfold without ever being expected to participate. I observed then, and believe still, that actors almost by definition have to be self-deluding. They live in this strange optimistic bubble where they are still hoping to play Juliet in their fifties (of course in Richmond amateur dramatics circles they sometimes did) or believe they will be discovered by a great Hollywood producer while they are playing fourth spear-carrier from the left. They keep the whole bubble afloat by telling each other they are wonderful, darling, when quite patently they are not. I hated the whole falseness of it and it upset me that my mother fell for these delusions. I wanted to say, ‘Look, why can’t you be realistic like me and Dad, why do you fill your head with this mush?’ Theatre was like a lover who lured her away from us and I resented it. So that is why I have a problem with actors.