Dame Barbara’s book, I Reach for the Stars, wasn’t the greatest book we’d ever published, or that she’d ever written, but it was her 600th, which gave us enough of a publicity handle to get away with it. Far better, and I think a classic of a kind, was her early memoir of the glittering ’20s, We Danced All Night, which we reissued at the suggestion of her son, who looked after her affairs. It was, I’m sure, written rather than dictated, and captures perfectly the social whirl of that post-war era.
As for John East, who died a year or so after that visit, his exit was even stranger than his entrance, and very sad, as he left strict instructions that no one was to attend his funeral and that he was to be buried in an unmarked grave. Not even a final curtain call for this most theatrical of men.
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As must be evident by now, it seems to have been my (generally!) good fortune to publish a number of women of strong character. Another, who phoned persistently and persuasively every six months or so, blowing hot and cold, was the novelist and literary grande dame Emma Tennant, and we did end up publishing a satirical ‘royal’ novel with her, Balmoral, in which the ghost of Princess Diana haunts the royal family as they dine, picnic on the lawn, hunt and frolic. A sort of modern Banquo’s ghost, it was fun and drew on a lot of royal detail, for Emma was of aristocratic lineage (her father was the 2nd Baron Glenconner). The only problem was that she was writing it with a co-author with whom she fell out, and then decided to hide behind a pseudonym, which wasn’t much help when it came to publicity. In her last call to me in 2016, about a year before she died, she proposed writing a ‘family memoir’, but since she seemed to have written several, as well as an account of the affair she’d had with Ted Hughes, we never got very far.
More down-to-earth and supportive was the striking actress Rula Lenska, a star of the TV musical drama Rock Follies, whose fabulous red hair could put even Ms Cartland’s pink into the shade. Rula’s aristocratic Polish background (her family lost everything when the Nazis came to power) perhaps seasoned her for her battles with her second husband, Dennis Waterman, and added spice to an already colourful story – one that was brought to us by Tony Mulliken, whose company, Midas PR, provides publicity services across the publishing industry. Those summer afternoons spent on the terrace of Rula’s house in Putney, drinking vodka with her and David Robson, who worked closely with her, skilfully editing and guiding her book for us, were a reminder that although she had been brought up in England, her Polish roots went deep.
Coincidentally, it was straight after Rula’s book that Andrew Sachs’s autobiography came our way via our good friend Diana Hoddinott (the on-screen wife of Jim Hacker, the minister in Yes Minister, but real wife of actor Harry Towb). Andrew’s life, too, had been scarred by the Nazis. Born in Germany to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, he’d come to England at the age of nine without a word of English. His account of those traumatic early years, when one by one his friends turned away from him, and his highly qualified father wasn’t permitted to work, was both vivid and affecting – a world away from his brilliant comic creation, the Spanish waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers, who enlivened the later pages of Andy’s book.
Andrew Sachs, aka Manuel, provided his own waiters for the launch of his colourful autobiography.
There was, though, in his later years the shadow cast by the horrendous Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga that became known as ‘Sachsgate’, which had a devastating effect on Andy and his wife Melody. The episode naturally had to be covered in the book, and it could have been tempting for Andy to use it as an opportunity to hit back, but, the sweetest of men, he was determined to remain dignified and not sink to the level of his tormentors. In writing about this painful episode, as well as the later parts of his book, he was greatly helped by the sensitive and patient involvement of the writer and film maker David Cohen, for Andy’s memory and concentration were beginning to fail him as dementia set in. He must have been relieved to get a break from it all when Dustin Hoffman cast him in Quartet, a film he was directing about a group of ageing musicians and singers living in a retirement home. Andy played the orchestra conductor of the home’s annual Christmas concert. It turned out to be the most moving of films, with magnificent performances from the cream of Britain’s senior actors.
With the account of Sachsgate completed and the addition of a little about the film, there remained just one problem: conflicting versions of a scene in Fawlty Towers in which Andy, as Manuel, was hit so hard on the head with a frying pan by Basil (John Cleese) that he couldn’t get up. According to Andy, they had rehearsed the scene several times using a padded frying pan, but somehow when it came to the recording the pan left for Basil to pick up was not the prop but a real one that came down full force on his head. I suspected that John Cleese would have a very different version, and when he phoned to discuss the foreword he’d agreed to write for the book, I brought the subject up. He was emphatic that Andy had got it wrong, that they had discussed the scene carefully but would never have rehearsed it, and that it was supposed to be only a glancing blow from a real frying pan as Andy turned away, but Andy had got the timing wrong. There was only one thing for it – we included both versions, so honours were even.
There was one real-life comedic moment when chicken was the order of the day – or rather, the eccentric and volatile Melody Sachs’s order of the day, for when one Sunday I phoned to say I was coming over with the proofs, she asked me to get my wife to go out and buy her a chicken and other bits and pieces for me to bring too. I duly turned up with proofs in one hand and a bag for life in the other containing the chicken and various vegetables Melody had requested. Now all she had to do was get Manuel to serve it! We’d always prided ourselves on looking after our authors, but this, I must say, was a first.
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One of the major distractions of my early youth, when we still lived in Colindale, had been the girl next door, Diana, who was about two years older than me. Not only Diana, but the group of attractive young girls who were always in her garden. I was then in my Just William phase and must have been about eleven, but she was hardly a Violet Elizabeth. I’d watch them discreetly from the roof of my father’s dispensary, which overlooked the garden, eavesdropping on their laughter and far too shy to try to get close. Still, we must have got on well enough, and our parents too, since they fixed a rustic gate in the fence between our gardens so I could retrieve the tennis balls I regularly hit over as I practised for Wimbledon against our kitchen wall.
It was to lead to good things, for some thirty or so years later, out of the blue, I received a phone call from a woman with a slight American accent asking if I was the Jeremy Robson who used to live in Holmstall Avenue and whose father was a doctor. It was Diana. Now married to an American academic, and bearing the surname McLellan, she and her husband lived in Washington, where she had become a witty and feared political journalist whose revelatory book, Ear on Washington, had created a considerable stir. Friends, she told me, were giving her and her husband a party in Hampstead, and Carole and I gladly accepted her invitation to join them. It was a happy reunion which eventually resulted in our publishing the sparky Diana’s The Girls, a compelling book about the Hollywood stars who enjoyed Sapphic relationships. But although we would all meet up for a meal whenever she came to London, and we corresponded from time to time, I never let on about those clandestine peeps over the fence! However, I don’t think she could have really objected to my innocent snooping, for when she died in 2014 (and I was shocked to see she had), the New York Times called her the ‘grande dame of Washington gossip, who perforated the pretentious, skewered the powerful’. But, to me, she remains the girl next door.
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I’d met Esther Rantzen at a dinner given by our original backer, Michael Rivkin, for Harry Secombe’s Twice Brightly back in 1974. At that time, she was a BBC reporter covering the general election. When we met up again in 2011, it was to discuss a book to mark twenty-five years of ChildLine, the nat
ional helpline for children she had founded. Esther (now Dame Esther) didn’t have long to write the book, but, as I quickly learned, when she turns her determined mind to something, there’s no stopping her. Running Out of Tears was delivered on time and written with deep feeling for those who had suffered abuse and turned to ChildLine for help, and with deep anger for those perpetrators she went after, naming and shaming them. When Esther talked to booksellers or gave interviews or spoke publicly about ChildLine (as she did at a reception given in his lodgings by the Speaker of the House), she spoke eloquently and movingly, without notes, communicating her passionate commitment.
The equally feisty Bel Mooney had been an early author of ours, whose Differences of Opinion was a collection of her perceptive articles for various papers. Although we’d bumped into each other at the opening of one of Frieda Hughes’s exhibitions, we’d never had a real conversation until we met up again at a Daily Mail Christmas party in 2014. By then I was greatly in her debt for an extremely generous review she had given my recent book of poems.
Bel is one of the Mail’s star journalists, and it seemed to me that an anthology of the popular weekly advice columns she writes, in which she often draws on her own experiences, would be valuable. What she didn’t want was just a rag-bag collection of articles, but as she thought about it she realised that by extracting, shaping and adding to some of her most piquant and timeless pieces, she could make a largely original book, punctuated by her favourite quotations – Words to Help You Through, as she subtitled her book Lifelines.
Not long afterwards, Bel’s Maltese dog Bonnie died, which affected her profoundly, to the extent that she wrote a piece about her feelings for the Mail. The response was overwhelming: so many people identified with her thoughts and words. By then we were already talking about another book, and here was one staring us in the face. At first Bel was reluctant, but gradually she came to feel that she could tackle the subject at greater length and in a way that would bring comfort to other animal lovers, and so her inspirational book Goodbye, Pet & See You in Heaven came into being.
Bel is a woman of many intellectual interests, widely read and with a deep love and knowledge of poetry, and she enjoyed the friendship of Seamus Heaney, as she does of another fine Irish poet, Michael Longley, who, with Seamus, I’d included in my Young British Poets anthology many years earlier, when we were indeed all young. Consequently, when Bel and I meet for lunch, our conversation ranges wide, and I hope that before too long another book will emerge from all the ideas we’ve thrown around.
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It was in June 1997 that Christine Hamilton’s husband Neil phoned me, at Gyles Brandreth’s suggestion, to ask if they could come and see me. That was just after Neil had lost his Tatton seat to Martin Bell, ‘the man in the white suit’, following the cash-for-questions affair, and Christine had supported him like… well, like a battleaxe, as she had been dubbed in the press. She had worked in Parliament since leaving university in 1971, first as parliamentary secretary to the flamboyant Gerald Nabarro, then, for fourteen years, to Neil. Now, with them both out of Parliament and out of a job, she had had an idea for a book, and as she made tea for everyone in the office, she explained her idea: she’d been called a battleaxe, so why not come out fighting with a book of British battleaxes? She had a list of around thirty formidable women she wanted to write about. I thought it a gutsy idea, but, as we all agreed, it had to be done quickly, so away Christine went, not only writing the book while Neil helped with the research, but, as she neared the finish line, booking the Mothers’ Union headquarters for a launch party.
All was arranged – caterers booked, wine bought, invitations printed and sent out, and the required deposit paid – when suddenly, without any explanation, the MU cancelled our booking. Why? In true battleaxe style, Christine marched into their offices and asked to see the director, intent on posing that very question. Nobody would talk to her directly, but it seemed that a tongue-in-cheek diary piece in the Telegraph had upset them – all very petty. We changed venue to the much nicer St James’s Court Hotel around the corner, got what publicity we could out of it, and pressed the MU to compensate us for the expenses we’d incurred, which they eventually did. It was a pity they cancelled, because they might have enjoyed the party, especially seeing Lord Longford, the campaigner against pornography, in deep conversation on a sofa with Cynthia Payne (aka Madam Cyn), who had made headlines when she was accused of running her Streatham home as a brothel where men paid with luncheon vouchers to wear lingerie and be spanked by young women. When the police had raided her house they’d found fifty-three men – including several vicars, solicitors and business directors, an MP and a peer of the realm – in various stages of undress. They were there for a tea party, claimed Cynthia. A cartoon of the time showed a vicar, in bed with a young lady, saying to a policeman who’d burst into the room, ‘I demand to see my solicitor – he’s in the next room!’
The unsuccessful cash-for-questions libel action, which Neil Hamilton brought against Mohamed Al Fayed and which we attended, proved to be not only highly dramatic, but also entertaining at times, both the Hamiltons responding spiritedly to the sharp questioning of Fayed’s legendary counsel, George Carman. At one point there was laughter in court when a seemingly exasperated Carman asked, ‘Mr Hamilton, do you have difficulty in paying close attention to anything you find disagreeable?’, with Neil responding sharply, ‘I’m paying very close attention to you, Mr Carman.’ Then there was the question of the sausages Harrods had apparently delivered to Christine, whose response to Carman’s question about them prompted a vulgar headline in The Sun: ‘I never had your sausage, Mr Fayed’, which Christine showed us with glee when we arrived in court the next morning.
The loss of this action was both costly and damaging for the Hamiltons, but it wasn’t the end of their public ordeal, for six years later, in 2003, they were arrested after an allegation of rape was made against them both. The press had been tipped off by the police and were waiting for them when they arrived at the station. The allegation was shown to be a pack of lies, Neil and Christine were completely exonerated, and the woman who made the claim was sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to pervert the course of justice. She was, surprise, surprise, a client of Max Clifford’s, who had sold her story to the News of the World (their tasteful headline proclaiming ‘CHRISTINE’S LESBIAN LUST’), and, following remarks he had made, the Hamiltons sued Clifford, receiving a healthy sum in settlement and a retraction of his defamatory comments in open court.
Characteristically, Christine opted to put some of that money towards a champagne party to launch her autobiography, For Better, for Worse, and on the invitation she put, ‘Champagne courtesy of Max Clifford’. The spirited Hamiltons even sent him an invitation, but for once he must have decided that all publicity was not necessarily good publicity and gone elsewhere.
27
CALL MICHAEL WINNER!
It was around this time that I received a call from the über literary agent Ed Victor, who put to me the idea of publishing a book of Michael Winner’s controversial Sunday Times restaurant columns. I always enjoyed dealing with the stylish Ed, for all his hyperbole, and we did a number of books together, deals that worked well for us both – the best kind. Not long before he died in June 2017, the papers were full of stories about him getting (or expecting to get!) a million pounds for a book he was selling – David Cameron’s memoirs, I believe. In an exchange of emails shortly after that, I told him to remember us if he had anything going for under a million. His response was that he would, ‘in the unlikely event of that happening’! I’m content to let him have the witty last word.
Publishing Winner was something I’d often considered, so I welcomed the suggestion (though there were times on my stormy ride with him when I wished I hadn’t taken that call!). I came to know three Michael Winners: one rude, one very rude and one impossible. The first of these I met shortly after we had agreed a deal. Ed phoned to say
Winner didn’t want to be published by someone he hadn’t met and would I call him. It was another Barbara Cartland moment, but I picked up the phone and did as commanded. ‘Come to my house at 12.30 on Wednesday,’ barked Winner. ‘I’ll take you to lunch.’ Down went the phone.
Now, at that time I had just joined up with John Needleman and Chrysalis, and our so-called offices were in a kind of warehouse in north London, just down the road from Pentonville Prison, a delightful area where you looked carefully over your shoulder wherever you walked. John had a driver called Chris, and I arranged for him to drive me to Winner’s house. Chris was late picking me up, so I asked someone to phone Winner’s office and say I might be a few minutes late, which I thought was the polite thing to do. It seemed that Winner didn’t, and we’d only been driving for a quarter of an hour when Chris received a message on his pager for me to phone the office urgently (those were still pre-mobile days). He pulled up at a phone box, and I scrambled out in the pouring rain, fumbled in my pocket for some coins, which I promptly dropped, finally getting through to learn that Winner had exploded at the poor girl who’d made the call, yelling, ‘Tell Mr Robson that if he is going to be late, he needn’t bother coming!’ Punctuality was an obsession of Winner’s, as I quickly learned.
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