Maeve Binchy (27 page)

In the early 1990s Maeve had much on her mind. Her UK publishers, Century, had been caught up in the takeover game that typified Britain in Margaret Thatcher’s free market. Century had been so successful that they had shrewdly targeted and taken over a bigger company, Hutchinson. Now, in turn, they had been bought by the mighty American publisher Random House, who wanted to start up in the UK. Anthony Cheetham was made chairman of the new UK Random House board, while Gail Rebuck, who had been recruited to Century in 1982 from Hamlyn, where she’d been a non-fiction editor and gone on to show great management nous at Century, had also received a place on the new Random House board.

In 1991 Anthony and Gail were invited to dinner by Random House executives after their author Ben Okri had won the Booker Prize for his novel
The Famished Road
. Anthony had carried on celebrating at Soho’s Groucho Club and not made the dinner. The next morning he rolled up to breakfast at Claridge’s with his new bosses, only to find that he had been relieved of
his position in the new company and Gail Rebuck appointed in his place.

The same year, with some style, Anthony and wife Rosie formed a new company, Orion, and went on to acquire the
time-honoured
publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson as the nucleus of a new, entrepreneurial publishing group. Thanks to the singular clause in her contract that stated that if Rosie left her publisher, Maeve would have the right to cancel the contract and follow her, Maeve was able to take her next book,
The Copper Beech
, away from Random House and give it to Orion. In 1993, Orion lodged an offer with Chris Green for a £500,000 advance for both UK hardcover and paperback rights in the next novel,
The Glass Lake
(at the time known as
Loughshee
). This was the first time that hardcover and paperback publication would be undertaken by one publisher in the UK and it was a big feather in Orion’s cap.

Green wrote to Charles Nettleton at Maeve’s UK paperback publisher, Coronet, to explain that she was in negotiation with Orion for both hardback and paperback rights, which effectively meant that he was being written out of the picture – a major loss for the company but a nice deal for Orion. At this stage Anthony Cheetham had started up two successful publishing companies, both spearheaded by Maeve.

More dealings followed which indicate just how hot a
property
Maeve had become and that there was room no longer for sentiment. After the marriage of Anthony and Rosie broke down and they separated, Hodder Headline, the company that now owned Coronet, which had lost out to Orion in respect
of Maeve’s UK paperback rights, offered Rosie employment as editor in the unspoken hope that Maeve would follow her. She didn’t. Perhaps understandably, she had had enough of playing musical chairs.

‘The parting of the ways editorially was sad for both of us,’ Rosie remembers.

Resolution for Hodder Headline came when they joined forces with Maeve’s publisher Orion in 2004.

In its UK edition alone,
The Copper Beech
sold in its first two years 72,614 in hardcover and 547,384 copies in paperback. Orion’s targets over a similar time span for
The Glass Lake
were 100,000 in hardback and 800,000 in paperback. As the film of
Circle of Friends
was due to be released in 1995, the publishers would surely achieve these sales quickly.

One can begin to appreciate what an industry had been created around Maeve. But the UK wasn’t all of it by any means.

In America, the first printing for the hardcover of
The Copper
Beech
(in November 1992 by Delacorte) was 160,000 copies. It was also a Book of the Month Club main selection and a Time–Life Book Digest Condensed Book selection; magazine rights were even sold to
Good Housekeeping
. Americans were now hungry for Maeve.

Then there were the editions published in thirty-six languages other than English.

Maeve’s health, however, was under increasing stress and had been a disaster area for some time. She was overweight,
exercise
was anathema to her – other than tap dancing and tennis (she was ‘a damned good tennis player’) – and although she claimed not to have a sweet tooth, she admitted a penchant for quantities of butter, sauces, wine, curry and cheese.

After the drug-crazed 1960s, the 1970s in Britain saw a revolution in personal fitness, with jogging becoming a national British pastime. ‘Joggers’, Maeve wrote in the
Irish Times
, ‘are mad’, and revealed that her other pet hates were people
breathing
unnaturally after exerting themselves, men in tracksuits and, most of all, the ‘aura of virtue’ attached to getting fit. She was a hopeless case when it came to health. In addition to her diet of curry, wine and dairy foods, she confessed to smoking up to 100 cigarettes a day, including three before she got out of bed. In 1978 she visited the doctor with what she feared was
pneumonia
. She was ‘fat, forty and had flu’, he said. She never smoked another cigarette again.

The excess weight was less easily resolved. Maeve claimed to be a great walker as a child, for being the eldest of four there was always a pram that needed pushing. Her favourite walk took her
beyond Eastmount over Dalkey Hill, along the Green Road in Killiney and down the Vico Road, but in later years she said she couldn’t believe that there were people who liked walking, ‘putting one leg in front of the other and looking round them and things. I regard walking as an absolute torture of getting from one place to the next place.’

She claimed that more unhappiness was caused in the world by people trying to change people than anything else. It was her lot in life to be big. Her personality and creativity depended on her being herself. She no more intended to snip at her weight problem by constant dieting or exercising than she intended to edit her glorious stream-of-consciousness outpourings, which defined her writing. Enough said. Get on with life.

But the other side of that was that at fifty even her large frame (six foot one) could not sustain her body weight. Osteoarthritis was crippling her; she couldn’t walk or sleep for pain. For the battle-hardened writer, maintaining control over her life was increasingly a case of looking at a situation in a different way. On a promotional trip in Vancouver, she said:

Four years of agony later, during which she could hardly stand
and would have to drag herself from the house to the car if she wanted to go out, she was diagnosed as in need of a hip
replacement
, but was too overweight to be operated on. The anaesthetic would have done for her heart. She was told to lose six stone in a year. She managed it in six months.

Desperate measures, a diet of Ryvita and the occasional slice of smoked salmon, so harmed her that she needed a blood transfusion as well as the hip replacement.

How she cut down on her beloved wine – an essential sacrifice in order to lose weight – is a story in itself. She developed a system whereby she would restrict herself to one evening of wine each month. The problem was that she looked forward to the
evening
so much, and her body’s susceptibility to alcohol increased so dramatically, that each monthly outing became a spectacular hiatus which would take days of self-recrimination to get over.

Two glasses of wine at a restaurant to celebrate her wedding anniversary and she was holding forth listing the shortcomings of every man that she’d had a relationship with before meeting Gordon, sobbing great oceans of tears before the assembled throng, which included the kitchen staff who had come out to see what was going on.

That took her three days to get over.

The next time, one glass of red wine was enough to bring her close to passing out. Then followed the ‘glass of champagne’ on the flight to Chicago from New York when she spent the whole time trying to convince that stewardess not to marry the man she didn’t love and ended up breaking her nose and a toe. She felt so ashamed that she cancelled the next evening of wine altogether.

But in the end she lost the weight – and in turn became
terrified
of the operation.

The harsh reality of it dawned on her when she was warned that her bones were so brittle that she might well have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. To prepare for that she made all her friends learn to play bridge, something she had never wanted to do, thirty years after writing about Elizabeth White’s elderly father looking upon bridge ‘as some kind of survival raft’ after his wife leaves him. So now it was for Maeve, except that she made sure to enjoy it. In reality, Mary Maher remembers, Maeve and her circle of friends developed their own version of the game which didn’t adhere to the rule of silence which
virtually
defines bridge. They called it ‘riverboat bridge’, and it was a lot more fun.

Ahead of the hip operation Maeve was given an epidural and was conscious throughout. She felt nothing but couldn’t understand why the hospital didn’t call a stop to the building work going on outside – an incessant, dull cracking of hammer, she thought, on stone, unaware that it was in fact the surgeon’s mallet going to work on her hip bone.

Thankfully, the operation was a great success. Maeve said that it changed her life. She spent seven weeks in hospital
recuperating
, reading thrillers, as she had loved to do as a child, and talking to the other patients, of course.

Studying the hip replacement manual with a group of them around the water dispenser one day, she noticed that it said that after eight weeks patients should be able to drive. ‘That’s great,’ one of the group said drily. ‘I always wanted to know
how to drive but I never had the time to learn, it will be a huge advantage to me.’

What the massive loss of weight reveals about Maeve is an ability to turn willpower on and off like a tap. Unfortunately, once she’d had the operation, she turned the tap off and put four of the six stone back on again, saying that if she had to have the other hip replaced, so be it, she would simply lose the weight again.

Incredibly, it was during this period of great upheaval that she produced one of her best novels,
Evening Class
. She was in such pain that she had to call on Gordon more than usual, asking him to read back what she had written very carefully to check that it wasn’t ‘all mournful and dull and depressive’.
Evening Class
became one of her most popular and funniest books.

The mid-1990s was a pivotal time for her for other reasons. Ireland had changed and Maeve had played her part in effecting that change. Ireland was not only more prosperous, but more confident and tolerant. You could even get divorced now. The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland repealed the constitutional prohibition of divorce in 1995.

Maeve wanted to write novels that reflected the
new
Ireland.
Evening Class
(1996) and
Tara Road
(1998) were the first to be designed to do just that. The idea for
Tara Road
came from
overhearing
a woman say to her friend in a restaurant, ‘I’m divorced. I always thought we had been happily married, but my husband said we hadn’t been happy for years.’ It so took Maeve aback that she set to wondering what she would do if such an awful thing happened to her.

Tara Road
tells the story of Ria, who has been abandoned in a marriage that she had thought was happy. It put Maeve’s sales in America into overdrive, thanks to a telephone call she received one evening out of the blue. The voice at the other end claimed to be the American chat show host Oprah Winfrey. ‘Come on now, who is it really?’ asked a stunned Maeve.

The Oprah Winfrey Show
, the highest-rated talk show in American TV history, surely did not approach its interviewees this way. You would expect first to hear from a producer and probably via your agent. But here, on the telephone, was
someone
claiming to be the star of the show, the biggest star on American TV. In a firm voice came the words ‘It is Oprah’, and at that moment Maeve realised that yes, it was, and they began to chat.

Oprah told Maeve that she had selected
Tara Road
for her book club, which there and then, because Oprah’s show went out all over the world, really guaranteed it enormous success. Maeve was ‘delighted’ and suggested that her publishers would be ‘very pleased’. Her delight had nothing to do with sales or money. She didn’t need them. What delighted her was that a condition of selection was that large quantities of the book would be going into American libraries, where people who couldn’t afford to buy the book would be able to read it for nothing. That was the deal if you signed up with Oprah. ‘She’s brought reading very much into the public domain,’ Maeve said, ‘much more than people often realise.’

Six weeks later, Maeve went into a small studio with Oprah and four women who had read the book and had experienced
similar problems to the characters in it. Maeve described Oprah as ‘terribly natural and very nice and very easy to talk to’, but there was quite a heated discussion among the women about whether Ria’s friend Marilyn should have told her that her best friend Rosemary was having an affair with her husband – the great betrayal, with which Maeve continued to be so
preoccupied
. Oprah said she thought that in a situation such as this your friend should tell you; that truth always sets you free. Maeve did not disagree, but added that she often thought ‘the truth can drive you mad’.