A Curious Career

by Lynn Barber

  Luckily, we had some excellent in-house lawyers at the Sunday Express who took me under their wing and explained that even though I ‘felt’ that so and so was lying, it wasn’t actually advisable to say so in print unless I had some evidence to back it. Eventually we arrived at a good modus operandi whereby, instead of trying to censor myself, I would write whatever I wanted and then send it to the lawyers who would summon me for a sort of viva – a bit like an Oxford tutorial but a lot more fun. They would have my article in front of them with many words underlined and other words crossed out – this was in the days when we still had typewriters and paper, O best beloved, and lawyers had red pens. Then the interrogation would start: What is your evidence for saying this? Are you sure the quote is accurate? Are those his exact words? Do you have a shorthand record of it? (Bizarrely, in those days, judges would accept shorthand notes as evidence but not tape recordings – if I ever had been sued for libel I would have had to get someone who knew shorthand to make a shorthand transcript of the tape.) These sessions taught me the absolute necessity of keeping tapes, and making sure I transcribed them accurately, and the lesson was duly engraved on my heart.

  Then the negotiations would start. ‘Do you have to describe her hands as “withered”? Couldn’t they be weathered?’

  ‘No – they were rather pale.’

  ‘Wrinkled?’

  ‘Well they were wrinkled, but more withered, as if they had shrunk. What about “gnarled”?’ I would say, trying to be helpful.

  ‘No, “gnarled” is as bad as “withered”. Do you have to describe her hands at all?’

  ‘Yes, because that’s the giveaway [we were talking about Zsa Zsa Gabor]. Her face looks pretty good but her hands reveal her age.’

  ‘Oh all right, you can have “withered”,’ the lawyer would sigh and put a little tick by the word.

  Some of the lawyers rather fancied themselves as writers so these discussions could go on, enjoyably, for hours. ‘ “Poofy”, Miss Barber? The Sunday Express does not use the word “poofy”. Can you suggest an alternative?’

  ‘ “Effeminate”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘ “Camp”?’

  ‘I don’t think our readers know what that means. “Dandified”?’

  ‘Mm – but that doesn’t mean the same as “poofy”.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Sir John Junor, who had been editing the Sunday Express for thirty years when I joined, maintained that you could not be sued for libel if you framed something as a question. It was a practice that seemed to work for him, so I followed it, though I’m not sure it ever had any proper legal basis. Thus, I could ask my old boss Bob Guccione if he was connected with the Mafia, and put the question in the article, so long as I followed it with his denial. But it meant I could at least float the idea, which readers could ponder for themselves. People were terribly shocked in 1990 when I asked Sir Jimmy Savile if it was true that he liked little girls. He had just been given a knighthood! He was a friend of the Royal Family! He had raised zillions for charity! How could I ask him such a terrible thing? But it was a rumour that was very widespread (and subsequently turned out to be true, though not until after his death) and I felt I had to tackle it. Sir Jimmy was momentarily flustered by the question but not, I think, surprised. He obviously knew the rumour existed. And of course he denied it. But at least by posing the question, I’d alerted readers to the possibility.

  My sessions with the Sunday Express lawyers amounted to a useful libel training, and in fact I only ever landed the paper with one writ – from Frank Warren, the boxing promoter, who was a famously keen litigant – which was settled out of court. But while I was at the Sunday Express, I had an extremely lucky libel escape. I was asked to do an article about the fashion world, and happily ran round interviewing designers and attending catwalk shows. I noticed in the latter that Rastafarians seemed to be all the rage – it was a rare show that didn’t feature at least one model with dreadlocks. I mentioned this to the fashion editor who said oh yes, Rastafarians were the hot new accessory and the designer Katharine Hamnett actually lived with one. I gleefully put this in my article, thinking that the fashion editor’s word must be good enough. Alas, it was not (she had mixed Hamnett up with someone else) and we duly received a letter from Hamnett saying that she lived with her husband and didn’t even know any Rastafarians. Potentially, she could have sued us for tens of thousands but instead she wrote sweetly that, in case people got the wrong idea, perhaps we could print a small correction? Of course we did, with huge sighs of relief, but it could have been a very costly mistake.

  By luck more than judgement, I managed to get through several decades of doing interviews – and often going quite close to the line – without being sued for libel. I ascribe that largely to my habit of tape recording everything and keeping the tapes, but also to discussing potential problems with the in-house lawyers. When I did finally find myself in court, in 2011, it was over a book review for the Telegraph and I lost. The case took three years to come to court, cost something like £1 million in legal fees (which the Telegraph had to pay, thank God, not me) and meant spending literally weeks in consultation with lawyers. My day of cross-examination in court was one of the most unpleasant and exhausting days of my life – the idea that anyone, ever, should ‘look forward to their day in court’ is insane. The whole process was a nightmare, and I’m very glad it didn’t happen to me when I was younger, because it could have permanently shaken my confidence. It must be tempting for young journalists now to avoid all possible legal problems by never writing a single rude word about anyone. But how dull that would be for the readers!

  Libel, of course, is the most obvious hurdle you confront as an interviewer, but there are other, much less straightforward ethical questions that have to be decided by your conscience rather than the law. I believe that an article should give an accurate account of what happened in an interview, but some journalists (especially on the Daily Mail) don’t seem troubled by this rule. They find it alarmingly easy to distort what transpired – for instance, they will give the impression that the interviewee has talked non-stop about their evil ex-husband when in fact they’ve been trying to plug their pet charity, but have foolishly been lured into uttering a few sentences about their failed marriage, leading to headlines like ‘My husband soaked me dry’. I think that’s dishonest, but there is no way you could legislate against it. It is up to the individual journalist’s conscience.

  I remain adamantly opposed to ‘copy approval’ – the practice of letting interviewees see the article before publication – but it is now routinely demanded by nearly all A-list stars, along with ‘photo approval’. I think it is betraying the readers to agree but, as a mere writer, one can only say no – while knowing that some other journalist, probably a freelance, will grab the opportunity. It is up to editors to hold the line but I’m not sure that they can do much longer. ‘Copy approval’ started creeping in from magazines like Hello! in the 1980s but has now spread to other magazines and, I fear, newspapers. It is invidious.

  I need to feel, when I go to interview someone, that I am completely free to like them or dislike them and write as I find. But sometimes that freedom can be compromised. Once or twice editors have let me know that the person I’m interviewing is a friend of theirs, or of the proprietor. I try to nip this in the bud by saying, ‘So what happens if I can’t stand him?’ They always say, ‘Oh I’m sure you’ll love him,’ which can sound like an instruction. I remember when I was at the Telegraph Magazine, Emma Soames, the then editor, sent me to Los Angeles to interview Michael Chow, the restaurateur. I found him gloomy, oppressive, and his house the same, full of sinister black-lacquer furniture. His much-loved wife Tina Chow had died in tragic circumstances, of Aids. And there was that notorious Helmut Newton photograph of her, in vestal white, being tied up like a roped steer by Michael Chow. So I gave a pretty sour account of the man. Only then did Emma reveal that he had offered to host a Telegraph par
ty at his Mr Chow restaurant in Knightsbridge. But too bad – I couldn’t rewrite the piece saying he was all sunshine and light.

  Another increasing awkwardness as I get older is that I often have friends in common with the people I am interviewing. The writer India Knight, for instance, is a friend and got me an interview with her friend David Baddiel. I’d met him at a couple of her parties and liked him a lot, so I didn’t anticipate any problem. And indeed I liked him again when I interviewed him – except that he wanted to talk about a film he’d just made called The Infidel which I thought was dire. I put a hint to that effect in my piece, and Baddiel was upset – as he relayed to India. I didn’t mind upsetting Baddiel but I did mind upsetting India – though fortunately she was very brisk about it, and told him he couldn’t possibly be hurt by one sharp word of criticism – especially as he’d soon be getting hundreds more from real film critics who hated the film as much as I did.

  Another problem when you and the interviewee have mutual friends is that you often know things about them that you shouldn’t, because you know them from private gossip, not from the press. You might know that A had a hot affair with B last year, but then went back to her husband, or that C’s friends are worried about his increasing drug use, or that D has been in therapy for depression. You have to try to banish this knowledge from your mind. But on the other hand, it would be a very unnatural interview for me if I didn’t raise topics like fidelity, drugs, depression, so I ask about them but then accept the answers given, even if I know privately that they are untrue. When I interviewed Jeffrey Archer back in the 1980s, I knew that he knew that I knew his mistress, so I felt a bit awkward asking if he believed in marital fidelity. But of course he was the master of the bare-faced lie and able to beam ‘Of course’ without even the merest tinge of embarrassment.

  But this business of background knowledge is always ethically difficult. I prefer ‘clean’ interviews where I’ve never met the person before, we have no mutual friends, and all I know about them beforehand is what I’ve read in the press. Everything has to be found out by questioning, but anything I do find is ‘mine’, legitimately acquired and legitimately published.

  The New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm published a book in 1990 called The Journalist and the Murderer which people are fond of quoting at me with hostile intent. It starts with the claim: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’ Nothing in the rest of the book substantiates this claim and Malcolm has admitted since that it was ‘a piece of rhetoric’ but she persists in seeing something morally ambiguous in the writer–subject relationship, namely that it ‘seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.’ She says that journalists pretend to befriend their subjects and then betray them.

  Many journalists worship Janet Malcolm. I don’t. She wrote The Journalist and the Murderer after she had been caught doctoring quotes in an interview with a psychiatrist to the point of making them mean the opposite of what was said. This would, I’m sure, induce a ‘state of moral anarchy’ in any journalist – it is axiomatic that you never alter a quote. The other point, though, is that Malcolm does not interview celebrities. Her interviewees tend to be ‘real people’, whose input she needs in order to construct a bigger story. Her recent Iphigenia in Forest Hills, for instance, was about a murder case among the secretive Bukharan-Jewish community in Queens, New York. In order to find out anything at all, presumably she had to befriend her interviewees and some of them might have felt she betrayed them. But she could have argued it was all in the cause of getting inside the community.

  However, celebrity interviews are not remotely like that. The participants are old hands at the publicity game, and know that this is a transaction in which we both hope to get something more than we intend to give. The celebrity hopes for maximum publicity for their book or film or whatever they are plugging in return for minimal self-exposure. The journalist delivers the publicity but aims to wrest a few revealing remarks from the celebrity along the way in order to produce an interesting article. Nobody pretends to befriend anyone so there can be no question of betrayal. It is perhaps a somewhat hard-headed transaction, but not, I am sure, a morally ambiguous one. Janet Malcolm is wrong.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sportsmen

  I’ve always been reluctant to interview sportsmen, first because I’m not remotely interested in sport and second because sportsmen, whether by temperament or training, never seem to have anything interesting to say. They are not introspective; they are not looking for analysis or validation; they know they can do all their self-expression on the pitch or track or whatever; they regard talking as a very poor substitute for doing. Which is all fair enough. And on a purely professional level, I feel that newspapers devote far too many pages to sport anyway so I don’t want to add to them.

  While I was at Penthouse I moonlighted by doing a series of footballer interviews – one a week – for the Evening Standard. The footballers were all the good-looking ones who were thought to appeal to female fans and there was a free poster giveaway with each issue. I was young and pretty then, so perhaps the theory was that I could charm the players into letting their hair down – except that the one time that I did get a footballer (Derek Possee of Millwall) to let his hair down, and talk about all the boozing and partying that went on (‘Win or lose, on with the booze’), the editor cut it on the grounds that Millwall’s manager would be upset.

  While I was at the Sunday Express in the 1980s I was sent to interview a famous cricketer called Dennis Lillee, and was handed an envelope to give him. What’s in it? I asked (it was strangely thick, as if padded) and my editor rather shamefacedly explained that it was £500. We PAY for interviews? I squawked, shocked to my puritan core. ‘Never normally, but you have to with sportsmen,’ was the explanation. Lillee gave a stupendously boring interview and in retrospect I wish I’d made some use of the money – I should have waved a tenner at him while asking a question and paid him according to the interest of his answer.

  The only remotely interesting sports interview I’ve ever done is with the tennis player Rafael Nadal when he was at the height of his career. I think of it as my best ‘silk purse out of sow’s ear’ effort – which is a term I often use to myself but perhaps needs explaining. A good interview, I believe, is one in which the subject says so many interesting things that my only problem is deciding which quotes to leave out. Obviously I have to do a certain amount of writing to frame the quotes, but the quotes take precedence. That is, if they’re good. A sow’s ear, on the other hand, is when the subject has said almost nothing of any interest, and very few of their quotes are usable. It is then up to me to concoct an article, a silk purse, out of thin air. I don’t like doing it too often and, as I say, I would always prefer to start from the quotes, but once in a while it allows me to vent my opinions on a wider subject.

  With Nadal, it gave me a chance to vent my deep distrust of the whole sports management industry. It is now as tightly controlled as Hollywood in its heyday, or possibly even more so because it is run by a near monopoly, IMG. If a sports writer writes anything disobliging about any of IMG’s players, they can have their press passes withdrawn, so they are pretty much forced to be tame. (Actually Nadal left IMG at the end of 2012 to set up his own management company, but IMG still controls most of the other top players.) I often wonder whether sports commentators know a lot more than they’re letting on, whether they can see when a player is fixing a match or a game. But of course they could never say it because – quite apart from fear of libel – they would never get a press pass again.

  The net result is that it’s easier for an outsider like me to barge in and upset the apple cart, as I did with Nadal, than for an insider to tell the truth because it’s n
o skin off my nose if I’m never allowed into a tennis match again. And, actually, I’d be terrified of going to a tennis match again because, judging from the furious emails and tweets I got from Nadal fans, they’d probably lynch me.

  From the Sunday Times, 5 June 2011

  If anyone else tells me what a lovely lad Rafa Nadal is I shall scream. He is not a lad – he has just turned twenty-five, which is admittedly young, but he is in his ninth year on the professional tennis circuit, has won nine Grand Slam titles and is worth at least £68 million. And I didn’t find him lovely at all. When I finally met him in his hotel suite in Rome (he was playing the Rome Masters) he was lying on a massage table with his flies undone affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many sponsors, natch.

  No doubt at this point all his millions of fans will start screaming with envy and resolving to kill me but honestly, kiddos, it was a bit rude. He just lay there glowering at me while I perched awkwardly on a nearby table until eventually his PR, Benito Perez-Barbadillo, fetched me a chair. Benito remained in the background and whenever Rafa didn’t like a question (which was pretty much every time I asked one) he asked Benito to ‘translate’ which meant they conferred in Spanish till the PR delivered some smooth PR-y answer. Nadal’s command of English seemed highly variable but never great.