Piers Morgan (18 page)

This was followed by Anne Robinson on
You Can't Fire Me, I'm Famous
discussing her alcoholism. ‘At the very end of my drink problem, around 1977, I weighed about six stone,' she confessed. ‘The doctors gave me six weeks to live. I'd just stopped feeling – I lived in a haze and couldn't quite understand how it happened to me. But I couldn't stop drinking.' She finally managed to do so in 1978, and has remained dry ever since.

Around this time, everything Piers did made headlines and this included his sojourn in the States, as well. One
of his fellow judges on
America's Got Talent
was the
Baywatch
actor David Hasselhoff, who took umbrage at something Piers had written about him in his book. He got his revenge, too; after Piers buzzed off a country singer called Jason Pritchett, the Hoff mused, ‘It must be so hard to come out here and have some wanker buzz you off.' Stunned silence ensued.

Backstage, the Hoff remained unrepentant. ‘I usually love Brits,' he said. ‘After the US and Germany, I see the UK as my third home. They've always been supportive of everything I've done – but Piers? Well, he just takes things too far. He wrote something about me crying like a baby when I cut a nerve in my wrist. That was just not true – I was just so happy to still have my hand! I mean, I'm a single guy – I need the use of my hands, if you know what I mean! Seriously, he has crossed the line sometimes. Piers will say, “It's British humour.” I don't mind someone joking about me, my music, whatever – but don't bring my kids or my family into it. He wrote some things in his book and he thinks it's acceptable. Well, I say that calling him a wanker on TV is acceptable, too!'

Meanwhile, Piers laughed it off. He was pretty good about laughing at himself, which was just as well, not least in August 2007 when he was pictured falling off a Segway. In no time at all, an old copy of the
Mirror
– then edited by him – came to light, with a picture of President Bush falling off a Segway:
YOU'D HAVE TO BE AN IDIOT TO FALL OFF, WOULDN'T YOU, MR PRESIDENT
? ran the headline. When Piers tried it, he broke two ribs, although
that certainly didn't keep him away from the TV screens. Far from it: ebullient as ever, he was about to become even more high profile.

B
y the beginning of 2008, Piers’ profile was becoming almost as high in the United States as it was in the UK. He took part in the US version of
Celebrity Apprentice,
presided over by Donald Trump, and won this time, triumphing over thirteen fellow contestants. ‘You’re a vicious guy; I’ve seen it… You’re tough, you’re smart, you’re probably brilliant, I’m not sure. You’re certainly not diplomatic, but you did an amazing job and you beat the hell out of everybody,’ was how Trump congratulated him.

‘It’s a great day for evil, obnoxious, arrogant Brits everywhere,’ Piers said afterwards to the American radio station KIIS-FM on Friday. ‘It’s like a Simon Cowell production factory in Britain, where they create these utterly obnoxious people and we ship them over to America and you seem to lap it up.’

His tendency to sound off, however, especially when there were children around, was beginning to get him
into trouble. In January 2008, there was an altercation at a
BGT
audition when Piers told one young boy that he wouldn’t get through because there were ‘plenty of dancers like you already’. The boy’s father took exception to this, telling Piers, ‘If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.’

Piers responded coolly, ‘If you don’t like criticism, don’t let your son enter contests like this.’

This resulted in the man threatening him. ‘If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come after you,’ he raged.

Afterwards, Simon loaned Piers his bodyguard Tony until matters calmed down.

Super-busy as ever, hosting
Britain’s Got Talent
and
America’s Got Talent,
presenting an eight-part BBC1 interview on fame; writing his weekly column for
The Mail on Sunday’s Live
magazine, monthly interviews for
GQ
, and a third volume of diaries, all the while continuing to be the editorial director of
First News
(the national newspaper for children that is starting to do incredibly well), Piers was being handsomely remunerated for all his efforts. And being Piers, he couldn’t help but boast about it, as when he was asked how much he earned. ‘I don’t want to reveal too much as I’m going through a divorce, but it’s a good six figures – several multiples of the Prime Minister’s salary,’ he declared. ‘It’s far too much when you consider that most of the time I’m sitting in a large leather chair in Hollywood, judging dancing horses and Mongolian contortionists. I earn money in a
variety of ways these days – TV, books, magazine columns and interviews, newspaper articles, speeches and other commercial stuff. It all adds up to a fairly repulsive sum, but then I pay a fairly repulsive tax bill, too.’

In actual fact, this was, if anything, understating the case, for it is estimated that Piers earned £4–£5 million in the first few years after being sacked. He was becoming a very wealthy man, with a fortune estimated at about £15 million.

Up until now, he had divided his time between a penthouse riverside flat in Fulham, where he moved after his marriage broke up, and a place in Sussex, near to where he grew up. But he was finally getting divorced, not least because his relationship with Celia Walden was now serious, and he had to start thinking about somewhere else to live. And so he came up with an ingenious solution: it had been widely reported that Celia’s father, former Tory MP George Walden, was none too keen on his daughter’s new beau, but his stance must have softened, because Piers was to buy George’s house. The Grade II-listed mansion in upmarket Kensington, West London, cost £4 million, a figure that Piers could now well afford, which must have endeared him to the man who was about to become his father-in-law. And, although he and Celia did not become engaged until the divorce had gone through, it was no secret that an engagement was now on the cards.

Despite the break-up of his marriage, Piers remained typically irrepressible. When asked what had been his best investment in life, he replied: ‘Buying Simon Cowell
dinner at Cipriani about three years ago. He had spaghetti bolognese, I had the veal, and it cost me about £126. It ultimately landed me lucrative judging roles on
Britain’s Got Talent
and
America’s Got Talent.
’

And the worst? ‘The day I decided to purchase shares in Viglen will probably go down as the least well-advised business decision made by a journalist. I sold all the shares and gave the proceeds to charity. I also lost about £250,000 on
Press Gazette,
the trade publication I bought with Matthew Freud in 2005; we revitalised the magazine and transformed the British Press Awards into a great event again. The only problem was that many of my old Fleet Street mates decided to knife us squarely in the back, for which I will be eternally ungrateful.’

Piers was by now doing plenty of television work too; he continued to present documentaries about people and places, including the millionaire’s favourite in Dorset: Sandbanks. Meanwhile, his
GQ
interviews continued to set the agenda. There was widespread hilarity after he interviewed Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, in April 2008. Clegg was asked how many lovers he’d had. ‘How many are we talking: ten, twenty, thirty?’ Piers asked him.

‘No more than thirty. It’s a lot less than that,’ Clegg replied. ‘I don’t think I am particularly brilliant [as a lover] or particularly bad.’

So are reputations destroyed in an instant: Clegg became a national laughing stock and was branded ‘Cleggover’ by the political hacks, while Piers himself expressed surprise that Clegg had even answered the question. He would have
been perfectly within his rights to say a gentleman didn’t talk about such matters – but then Piers displayed a near genius in catching people off-guard. It was not until a full two years later, when Clegg put in a far more impressive performance in the run-up to the General Election than had been expected of him, that he regained his status as a serious politician. Piers, meanwhile, was frequently asked the same question in interview from then on; he routinely told his interviewers that he had no intention whatsoever of being drawn on the matter.

The editor of
GQ
, Dylan Jones, was pretty pleased with his star interviewer, too. He’d hired Piers ‘on a whim’ but even he had no idea how well the decision was going to turn out. ‘The features team thought I’d gone mad. They said no one will want to have anything to do with him, [but] Piers is one of those journalists who can tap you on the arm and ask, “You did, didn’t you? Come on, you can tell me.” And he gets away with it.’

And Piers certainly elicited some startling revelations, such as the time Billie Piper admitted to lesbian sex fantasies and said she liked ‘dirty straight porn’.

But the life of an international celebrity entails constant attention and Piers was now coming under scrutiny, too. He was not an exceptionally vain man, but he was spending a lot of time in Hollywood, the land of the perfect people, and beginning to worry about his appearance. Although he point-blank denies Botox (unlike the extremely
image-conscious
Cowell), he started working out with a personal trainer and had his teeth whitened.

‘I had my teeth whitened in Beverly Hills,’ he revealed. ‘It’s my one and only failure to resist vanity. I got so fed up doing interviews in America where they were banging on about how awful my teeth were that I paid £300 to have it done. What no one tells you, though, is how painful it is. You get them done, they’re bright white and you think, fantastic! And then the pain sets in.’

Celia, fortunately, was a very striking woman who could more than hold her own in the environment in which the couple now lived.

Paul Potts, incidentally, had also had his teeth sorted out, something Piers commented on when he went to interview him for the
Sun
.

The next series of
BGT
began, prompting a great deal of attention and, at the same time, Piers started another interview series:
The Dark Side of Fame with Piers Morgan.
He was now becoming so famous as an interviewer as well as a judge on reality TV that it was a selling point to have his name in the title of the show. Guests were to include Mickey Rourke, Tracey Emin and Nancy Dell’Olio. He remained coy about it, though, saying he had no plans to sit in the chair vacated by Michael Parkinson.

‘I don’t want to be the next Parky,’ he said. ‘He’s a living legend, as is David Frost, and if I could get anywhere near their standard I’d die a happy man. But I’ve spent twenty years building up to this and, yes, I want the big chat show because I love meeting famous, iconic people. But I don’t want to be the next Parky – I want to do it my way.’

He was about to get his wish. Meanwhile, a sign of
quite how far he’d come emerged at a charity auction for Leukaemia Research in May 2008. One of the lots was a day editing the
Mirror,
and Piers and the current
Mirror
editor, Richard Wallace, both made bids. Piers won after coughing up £12,000. Later he said he’d been drunk, which is why he put in a bid, but it was a pretty good way of demonstrating that he was now in a different league.

Indeed, although he tried not to talk about money, it was widely reported that when he signed a deal with ITV in mid-2008, it was worth £2 million, a figure that was never denied. And these sorts of opportunities would continue, with
BGT,
fronting documentaries and interviews of all kinds.

Over at
GQ
, another Lib Dem MP, Lembit Opik, was offering himself up; he was at the time engaged to the Cheeky Girl Gabriela. How did she challenge him intellectually? asked Piers.

‘One evening, we discussed the concept of a perfect circle, as a geometrical challenge,’ Lembit replied.

Piers was loving his new life and he himself was now the subject of interviews. One interviewer flew to LA to see what his life was like over there. Piers picked her up in an Aston Martin and he was off immediately. ‘Firstly, well, you’ve got to have a nice car to be taken seriously in this town,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got to have at least an Aston Martin, and then you get treated well by the valet boys, and that’s half the battle. They can ignore you for days in a valet park. You can be left there from Monday to Friday. Literally.

‘Secondly, you fly from Heathrow to LAX, first class, BA, and you get seat 1K. 1K’s great, because your
eye-line
naturally goes this way, which means other people can’t see you, or they can see you, but you can’t see them seeing you. Show-offs sit in 1A, because they want to see themselves being seen. I didn’t [get it] once, got 2K – I was spitting blood – but then I realised Michael Caine had got it, so that was OK. I sat behind him and Shakira, and they were very sweet. He called her “Sha”, and he was talking exactly like, “Not a lot of people know that” – really enjoying going through the magazines, going, “Here, Sha, look at this car in this advert. Here, Sha, have you read this article?” Sweet. They’re clearly madly in love – you could tell she just gets him.’

Like the mega-celeb he now was, Piers had groupies chasing him, too. ‘Yes, the best one I got was when I won the 2008
Celebrity Apprentice,
’ he recalled. ‘At the party afterwards, I was talking to my mum and my sister – they’d flown out for it – and a very attractive blonde came up to me, and touched my hand, dropped a piece of paper into it: she’d written her phone number on it. And she said, “Give me a call later, we’ll hook up. And trust me – I’m no apprentice!” And my mother went, “Did she just do what I think she did?” I said, “I’m afraid so, Mother. They’re called ‘groupies’.” I loved the moment – and she was bloody hot, too! But then to walk over to the bin and go, kacha!’

That kind of attitude makes it hard not to like Piers. He might have been a world-class feuder in the past, but now
he was simply revelling in his life, enjoying it and getting on with everyone, while admitting to being arrogant and pompous before anyone else could accuse him of it. He was shameless, but in a somehow likeable way. ‘That is the benefit of becoming famous in your forties,’ he said. ‘You see the funny side of it, the absurdity. You find it endlessly entertaining, you don’t take it seriously; you know there’s a real world out there. And you know, however bad things get, there are people on sink estates in Glasgow, watching you on TV, dreaming that one day, they’ll have the glamorous life you are lucky enough to enjoy, and you know they will never experience it. You’ve got to remind yourself of that every single time you go on TV: how lucky you are. I can’t stand whingeing celebrities, who whine about paparazzi and intrusion, and the hell of being famous.’

But he could be serious when necessary, too. Reality-TV star Chantelle Houghton, who’d shot to fame as the only non-celebrity in
Celebrity Big Brother
a couple of years earlier, appeared on
The Dark Side of Fame
and talked about her disastrous marriage to the pop singer Preston. ‘A month after we were married Preston told me, “I knew I didn’t want to marry you on our wedding day.” It was weird on the day,’ she said. ‘He was pulling silly faces when we took our vows; he took the pee. I tried to keep a straight face but I thought he was being weird. I thought, you shouldn’t be doing this, you should be looking into each other’s eyes on your wedding day. I wondered what was going on. But I just went along with it. After he told
me that he never wanted to marry me, we did interviews where we told everyone how happy we were. I lied about being happy.’

‘I am shocked,’ declared Piers. ‘This is every bride’s nightmare, being told your husband never wanted to marry you in the first place.’

He meant it, too. Piers had developed empathy – and it was taking him all the way to the very top.

At the start of 2009, Piers and
BGT
were in the news again, although this time it was due to the machinations of Simon Cowell. Much excitement was generated when it was announced that the curvaceous model Kelly Brook was to join the show as a fourth judge and rival to Amanda Holden; even more excitement ensued shortly afterwards when she was dropped. Rumours abounded as to what had gone wrong (possible reasons cited were that Kelly’s performance was said to be wooden, the balance of the judges didn’t work as well and she’d upset hosts Ant and Dec), but it was all welcome publicity for a show that was going to throw up a singing sensation to rival Paul Potts.