A Curious Career

by Lynn Barber

  For Rosie and Theo

  Contents

  1. The Value of Nosiness

  2. As Good As It Gets

  3. On Interviewing

  4. Actors

  5. Ethics

  6. Sportsmen

  7. In Extremis

  8. Pop Stars

  9. Sex with Michael Winner

  10. Writers

  11. Artists

  12. On Being Interviewed

  13. Age

  14. What I’ve Learned

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Value of Nosiness

  Growing up in Twickenham in the 1950s I could never have said my ambition is to be a celebrity interviewer because that career didn’t even exist then. Of course newspapers sometimes ran interviews with famous people, generally politicians, but always in a news context: What are your plans, Mr Prime Minister? The idea of asking famous people incredibly nosy questions about their personal lives hadn’t yet been invented. I was fortunate to come along at just the right time.

  My ambition as a child was to be some sort of writer, probably a novelist. But my hobby as a child was being nosy. I really was (but why put it in the past tense? I still am) exceptionally nosy. I want to understand other people, I want to know what they think, what they do when I’m not there, how they interact, especially with their families, and how they got to be how they are.

  I used to believe that everyone must secretly be as nosy as me but that some of them were better at hiding it. I now know that’s not true. I’ve come to realise over the years that many – perhaps the majority – are not actually all that interested in others. Presumably they would say they are – if you gave them a tick-box questionnaire they would say, ‘Oh yes, I’m interested in other people,’ just as they would say, ‘Oh yes, I have a great sense of humour,’ but in reality quite a lot of them are lying. They don’t suffer from my compelling nosiness. They don’t really wonder how on earth A came to marry B, or what they get up to in bed. They don’t wonder if C had an unhappy childhood, or why D has fallen out with his sister. Basically, they prefer talking about themselves to listening. Their loss, I think. But perhaps I spend too much time wondering about other people. If it wasn’t that I make my living from it, it would, I suppose, be quite unhealthy.

  The reasons for my nosiness are not far to seek. I was an only child, and a very isolated one, in that my parents didn’t have any family or friends, or any who ever came to the house. Of course I met girls my own age at school, but there was a whole world of other people – boys primarily, but also older children, younger children, other parents – I was eternally curious about. I wanted to see how other families interacted because I dimly (but accurately) felt there was something not quite right about mine.

  Partly it was a class thing. My parents were both from working-class backgrounds but had risen through education into the middle class – Mum a teacher, Dad a Civil Servant – but I think they still felt a bit precarious, like first-generation immigrants. Dad never attempted to disguise his working-class roots and managed to retain his strong Lancashire accent all his life; he would reprimand my mother if he felt she was ‘putting on airs’. And yet he was the one who insisted that I go to a private school, Lady Eleanor Holles, five miles away when I could easily have gone to Twickenham County Grammar just across the road.

  I went to Lady Eleanor Holles on a scholarship but most of the pupils were fee-paying and from affluent families. They lived in detached houses in Surrey, they talked about their fathers’ new cars, some of them even had ponies. They regularly invited me to their homes but I rarely if ever invited them to mine. Actually, qua house, it was perfectly acceptable, a biggish three-bedroom Edwardian job with a conservatory and long back garden, but it was No. 52 in a terrace of identical houses, not up a drive like most of my schoolfriends’. And of course it contained my father. He would sit in his armchair and shout orders intended to carry round the house – ‘Don’t make a noise,’ ‘Turn that light off,’ ‘Where’s my tea?’ – which visitors found alarming. I was so used to his shouting I barely noticed it, but I could see it was scary for other people.

  My schoolfriends, I felt, came from ‘proper’ families. They had brothers and sisters and fathers (whom they actually called ‘Father’) who did something in the City, and drove a car and played golf (mine played bridge – he was a Civil Service champion) and mothers who stayed at home and cooked. Mum didn’t cook, ever – we lived on tinned food and Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinners For One – whereas she did, embarrassingly, work from home by giving elocution lessons. Unusually for the 1950s, my parents did equal shares of housework, which was yet another reason for not bringing friends home – they might find Dad doing the ironing while singing his ‘marching songs’ – ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, or ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’. We were not the sort of family you came across in Enid Blyton – or indeed anywhere as far as I could see.

  So I was naturally curious about how proper families operated and persistently asked questions – questions that other people often found peculiar. ‘Does your brother know that you have periods?’ was a big obsession in my teens, because I couldn’t imagine the embarrassment of sharing a bathroom with a boy – in those days, periods meant sanitary towels and a special bin to put them in. ‘Does your mother kiss your father when he comes home from work?’ was another perennial, and – a real giveaway, this – ‘Does your father ever shout at your mother?’

  I think my schoolfriends found all my questioning weird, but they also acknowledged its usefulness: I was always the one deputed to ask Virginia if she’d snogged the Hampton Grammar boy who took her to the cinema last night. My friends wouldn’t ask because they considered it uncool to seem interested, but it was OK to send me because everyone knew that I was nosy. They also thought I had an almost magical ability to get secrets out of people, perhaps by some form of hypnosis. But actually I found then and still find now that if you bounce up to someone and say, ‘Everyone is dying to know whether you went out with so-and-so and what he was like,’ they’re usually so flattered by your interest, they’ll tell you. Of course it’s a bit more difficult with people in the public eye but the principle holds good – the more interested you are, or seem to be, the more willing they are to divulge. And so eventually this became my career: asking questions that other people wanted to know the answers to but were too embarrassed to ask.

  But before that, on the cusp of adulthood, I learned the damaging effect of not asking questions. At sixteen, I was picked up by a much older man in a red sports car who became my boyfriend for the next two years. But, because I was trying desperately to seem more sophisticated than I was, I failed to deploy my usual nosiness. So I never asked him his age, or where he lived, or how he made his money (by working for Peter Rachman and passing dud cheques was the answer – he went to prison later). Above all, I didn’t ask, because it never occurred to me, whether he was married. He meanwhile was busily persuading my parents to let me marry him instead of going to Oxford. He actually convinced them – they were on his side – but luckily I found out about his existing wife (and children) in the nick of time and went to Oxford while he went to prison. But that episode, which later became the film An Education, taught me about the value of nosiness and the dangers of not asking questions.

  I feel the fun began at Oxford. I never took much interest in my Eng Lit course but I loved the social life. In those days – the 1960s – there were seven male undergraduates to every female and if you were reasonably pretty, as I was, you got asked out constantly, to punting picnics, cocktail parties, dinners at the Elizabeth. I don’t think I ate a meal in college
the whole time I was there – I was royally wined and dined and of course in those days girls were never expected to pay for anything. In my second year, I was given a wonderful new invention, the Pill, and celebrated with a bout of wild promiscuity. But then, in my very last term, I fell in love. His name was David Cardiff and I knew from the moment I met him that he was the man I must marry.

  Not for one minute at Oxford did I ever think about what I could do for a career. While other undergraduates were filling out application forms for banks, or Unilever, or the Civil Service, I was hanging round coffee bars hoping to run into David. Finding the right husband was far more important than finding the right job, I felt (and still feel). So I left Oxford with absolutely no career prospects. My parents had made me do a shorthand-typing course before I went to university and I’d done a lot of office temping in the vacations, so I knew I could earn money doing that. But of course it was deadly boring so I had to think of something else. While I was still at school, I’d written stories and articles for the children’s page of my local newspaper, the Richmond and Twickenham Times, and – this is the important bit – been paid for them. So I knew that I could potentially earn money by writing. How, though? Journalism seemed the easiest option but at that time newspapers were a closed shop, controlled by the NUJ, and you could only get into them via one of their traineeship schemes which meant working on a regional paper. But how could I work on a regional paper when I had to be in London to pursue David?

  The only hope was magazines, though many of those were already unionised too. But, while at Oxford, I’d done an interview for Cherwell (the student newspaper) with Bob Guccione, an American entrepreneur who was then launching a new men’s magazine called Penthouse, in imitation of Playboy. We got on well and he said at the end, ‘If you ever want a job, honey, come to me.’ I laughed gaily, thinking things would never come to that pass, but after several months of writing to other magazines and being told they had no vacancies, I wrote to Bob at Penthouse and, sure enough, was offered a job as editorial assistant. It paid £16 a week which was not bad for those days – enough to buy a new outfit every week at Biba. I didn’t have to pay rent because I was David’s girlfriend by this time and we spent all our time staying with his friends – luckily, having been to Eton, he had plenty of rich ones.

  My duties at Penthouse included, among other things, interviewing people with unusual sexual tastes for an everlasting series called ‘Parameters of Sexuality’. These people were definitely not celebs – they were foot fetishists, voyeurs, transvestites, dominatrices, men who liked wearing nappies – you could say that, as an interviewer, I started at the bottom.

  But actually it was all good training – learning to use a tape recorder, learning to ask open-ended questions designed to draw people out, learning not to seem shocked or disapproving of the answers, learning to press for more detail and not be content with generalities. It was easy in one way, in that my interviewees were volunteers who were only too eager to talk for hours (anonymously of course) so I never suffered from the celebrity interviewer’s twin bugbears of limited time and limited personal revelation – my problem always was getting away. If, nowadays, people are sometimes surprised that a nice respectable lady like me can ask such embarrassing questions, that’s only because they don’t know about my seven-year apprenticeship at Penthouse.

  It was Penthouse, too, that gave me my first big celebrity interview, with Salvador Dali, in 1969 when I was twenty-five. Bob Guccione growled at me one day, ‘You speak French, don’t you, honey?’ I made some non-committal noise. ‘Get over to Paris and interview Salvador Dali – he’s at the Hotel Meurice.’ At the Meurice I was met by a short dapper Irishman who introduced himself as Captain Moore, Dali’s secretary, and took me along miles of corridors to Dali’s suite. He advised me to address Dali as ‘Maître’ which I found quite easy when I met him – he was so tall, so old, so grand, I almost wanted to genuflect. Guccione had told me to ask Dali his views on sex (I hardly needed telling) and I struck gold with my very first question, about his habits. ‘Ha-beets! Ha! First masturbation. Le mast-urb-ation, you know? Zee painters are always zee big masturbators – nevaire make love, only watch, and some-times masturbation! Zat is one good habit. Zee other is foot.’ What? ‘Foot! Zee heating.’ He gestured to his mouth and I realised he meant food, eating. ‘I lika very much the crayfish and ortolan because I lika very much food with faces. No food I eat without faces. I like to look at everything and then eata the everything. When I see people with limousine, with rings on hand, I want to eata everything.’

  Dali enjoyed being interviewed so much that he kept shouting ‘More! More!’ so I asked about his daily life in Cadaques. ‘My day the most regular possible. Wake at nine, in bed working till eleven. Lunch. Go for leetel swim, making no movement [he demonstrated floating on his back]. After a siesta of twenty-five minutes, then working, then nude girls come for me to watch – no touch – then some drawing. At six o’clock make peepee and at eight many pederasts arrive, because Dali like zee androgyne people. No lika de sex – one man, one woman – like better confusion, you know?’ He also told me, ‘Every big artist, every important people – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Napoleon – is impotent and this is good. Because if you work too well with your sex you never produce nozzing. Only childs. But for artist, le libido and le sexual instincts sublimate in the artistic creation.’

  As I was bowling questions at Dali, and he was shouting his answers in increasingly fractured English, I noticed other people gathering in the room, listening in. Then a very hirsute man backed through the double doors dragging a lifesize human dummy and Dali spent some time laying it out on the floor with a cushion under its head, a stringless lute behind, and a map of Brest and one of La Rochelle under each shoulder, while the retinue clustered round admiring it. Nobody, including me I’m ashamed to say, asked what it was meant to represent, but we all oohed and ahed at this work of genius. But then Dali’s wife Gala walked in, and the retinue fell silent and gradually drifted away. Everyone, it seemed, was terrified of Gala. She looked very chic in a red-and-white Chanel suit and I would have guessed her age at fifty but Captain Moore told me later she was eleven or twelve years older than Dali, so probably seventy-six.

  The Captain explained that Dali and Gala always lunched alone but he would take me to lunch with his fiancée, Katherine, and – an unexpected bonus – Dali’s ocelot. Luckily the other people in the Meurice dining room seemed quite happy to have an ocelot in their midst. After lunch, the Captain and Katherine took me back to their flat and suggested I might like to join them for a threesome (one of the hazards of working for Penthouse was that people were always asking me to join them for a threesome) but I gave my usual answer that it was ‘not the right time’ so they showed me their fascinating collection of Dali artefacts instead.

  Dali had said he would see me again for five o’clock tea but when I went back to his suite a Japanese journalist was already battering him with questions and soon a troupe of actors called the Living Theatre led by Julian Beck walked in. They fell on the drinks trolley and all the pyramids of bonbons scattered round the room. One of the girls took a bite of one of them and spat it out – ‘Jeez-us, what the hell is this?’ I told her it was a marron glacé, a crystallised chestnut, and she put her face very close to mine and hissed, ‘Listen, baby, don’t try to get smart. I seen chestnuts, and they don’t come all slimy like that godawful crap.’ Retreating from her, I thought I’d introduce myself to Madame Dali because she was sitting alone, so I said I was a journalist from London and she screamed, ‘I never give interviews. Never. Never. Never,’ while simultaneously patting the sofa to indicate I should sit beside her. ‘Are there always so many people here?’ I asked, trying to make conversation. ‘Listen. They are very interesting people. Why should Dali see you and not them – you think you are better?’ Agh. I could see why people avoided Gala.

  By this time I was desperately worried about my flight – I was supposed to f
ly back the same night – but Dali said we would talk again in the morning. I explained that I had nowhere to stay in Paris, so he told the Captain to find me a room at the Meurice, which he did. So then I interviewed Dali the next day, and the next, and the next, and in the evenings I went to parties in his suite, and gobbled my way through all the pyramids of marrons glacés dotted round the room. I was present one morning when the Captain brought in a French couple carrying two enormous packets of thick paper and I watched Dali signing each sheet ‘Dali 69’. When I asked what he was doing, he said, ‘I am manufacturing money’ – apparently he signed them and the publisher later added a doodle and sold them as Dali drawings. Eventually Gala started giving me the evil eye and Dali said regretfully that he thought we had done enough interviewing. But he presented me with a wonderful gift – a conical hat made of wax flowers and butterflies that he had designed for Gala to wear to a fancy dress ball in the 1930s. When, years later, I lent it to a Dali exhibition in Stuttgart, they insured it for £15,000. So that was my first celebrity interview, which naturally made me want to do more.

  I kept dropping hints to Guccione, so eventually he sent me to Ravello, Italy, to interview Gore Vidal. Alitalia lost my case on the way, so I arrived in a rumpled dress and terrible plastic shoes but again my subject was kind and said I must stay while Alitalia found my luggage. Vidal virtually interviewed himself, telling a well-honed string of anecdotes – but I noticed that, when the tape ran out in the middle of an anecdote, he stopped and waited while I turned the tape over – no point in wasting a good anecdote on a silly girl when it was intended for the world. He and his companion, Howard Austin, took me out to dinner (still in my plastic shoes) in Ravello that night, and got very loud and jolly on crème de menthe. I have never, before or since, seen anyone drink crème de menthe right through a meal. Rather to my regret, Alitalia returned my suitcase the next day so I had no further excuse to linger.