by Lynn Barber
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Extremis
I said that writing up my interview with Rafa Nadal felt like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This one with Christopher Hitchens shortly before he died was the complete opposite: I was given a silk purse and my only problem was not ruining it. The responsibility was all the greater because we both knew that he was dying.
I had interviewed him once before in 2002, for the Observer, over a typically boozy five-hour lunch. (I could barely walk when we left, but he was still going strong, in fact went straight on to speak in an Orange Word debate.) I avoided asking much about his politics but instead asked about his mother’s death – it was not a subject he had talked about before, though he did later in his autobiography – and he seemed to welcome this unusual foray into personal reminiscence. He was pleased with the article and was always friendly when we ran into each other subsequently at Private Eye lunches or at the Hay Festival.
Then came the news that he had inoperable cancer, which he wrote about in Vanity Fair. It sounded as though he was pretty near the end. But in January 2011, Sarah Baxter, the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, said, ‘Christopher Hitchens wants you to interview him – but he’s in Washington. What do you feel?’ What did I feel? I didn’t hesitate: I felt that a summons from Hitchens was one I could not refuse.
It was then almost a decade since I’d flown to the States; I had developed a real phobia about it, ever since I had a panic attack in the New York immigration hall. So when I joined the Sunday Times in 2009, I made it a condition that I would never have to fly to the States – I didn’t mind flying to Europe, but never to the States. Sarah Baxter was surprised (editors generally love flying) but accepted it. But then when she said Christopher Hitchens wanted to see me in Washington, I positively leapt on the plane. And I am so glad I went.
From the Sunday Times, 4 March 2011
Reading the Prologue to Christopher Hitchens’ autobiography Hitch-22 is a spooky experience now because it seems to say so clearly that he knows he is dying. It is even called ‘Prologue with Premonitions’ and starts with him reading a magazine article that refers to ‘the late Christopher Hitchens’. I was sent an early copy of the book and thought as soon as I read it that he must have been diagnosed with some terminal illness. But in fact he hadn’t. He wrote the Prologue in late 2008 – the news that he had inoperable cancer came in June 2010 when he was just starting the publicity tour for the book. To anyone who asked the prognosis, he said, ‘I have inoperable metastasised stage four oesophagal cancer – and there is no stage five.’ He seemed to accept that he was on the way out.
But things have changed a bit since then, and are still changing all the time. Long bouts of heavy chemo eradicated most of the nodes round his collarbone, though there is one that stubbornly remains. The big fear is that the cancer will spread to his liver and it is well placed to do so. But the chemo is over now and his hair is growing back. When he did his television debate with Tony Blair in Toronto last November he looked almost like the Dalai Lama – bald as an egg, plump and benign. This was the Hitch I was expecting to meet. But this time at home in Washington he looks different again – his cheeks are covered with grey stubble but he is painfully thin. Oddly, the effect is to make him look Jewish – which he likes. He was pleased to discover, long after his mother’s suicide, that she was Jewish – she had kept the secret to her grave.
He looks much sterner than usual, but greets me as an old friend. ‘It’s very nice to see you again. I glimpsed you at the Hay Festival, I think?’ Ah – I was hoping he hadn’t seen me – I avoided him because I had just published a negative review of his book. ‘Oh it wasn’t too bad,’ he laughs. ‘Anyway I don’t brood on reviews any more. It’s sad that a nice one no longer makes my day, but a bad one no longer wrecks it.’
He shows me round the apartment, which is vast – acres of parquet floors, a grand piano, miles of bookshelves, paintings stacked against the walls. It’s a long way from Martin Amis’s ‘sock’. And barely have I finished admiring the rolling vistas, when he says, ‘But you will want to smoke? We’d better go next door,’ and takes me to the next-door apartment which is only marginally smaller. He says he bought it years ago, for storage, but recently started doing it up, until his illness intervened. It is now reserved for smoking, the main apartment being kept smoke-free for the sake of his daughter, Antonia, seventeen. We sit at the kitchen table, he pours me a glass of red wine and himself a whisky, and settles down to talk.
So. How does he feel? ‘Today I feel . . . normal. I hope it will be true tomorrow too. But I don’t really know till I wake up every day. Some days this terrible lassitude, chronic fatigue, comes and nothing can be done. But I’m not puking any more for example, which was the worst thing – and I had months of that. I can eat again.’ They had to stop the chemo, he explains, because his bone marrow packed up and also his gall bladder, which they removed. And anyway by then he had ‘junkie arms’ from all the needles, and they could no longer find a vein. So now he is on a different treatment, just a pill, which might or might not work.
Is he still writing 1,000 words a day? ‘No. Can’t do that. There are days when I can only really read.’ However, he has been delivering his Vanity Fair column every month, and also regular book reviews for Atlantic Monthly and odd pieces for Slate. And he is thinking of doing a short book on what he calls ‘The Malady’. He was wary of writing about his cancer at first – ‘I wanted to be very careful to avoid a certain kind of sentimentality’ – but Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, pressed him and he found that, ‘at least to begin with, it was quite easy. I didn’t exactly think: Whoopee, I’ve got a whole new subject! But there seems no point in NOT writing about it. And so I have done, and will do, if I am spared.’
The interesting thing, he says, is that his cancer has given him entrée into a whole new world of experimental medicine, thanks to Francis Collins. Collins is not only a top scientist – he ran the human genome project – but also a leading evangelical Christian and Hitch did some debates with him when he published his book God Is Not Great. ‘He contacted me when I got ill and said, “Is there anything I can do?” And I’m now one of the very few people who’ve had their whole genome sequenced. And just last month, they told me that they’d found a little mutation and there is a medicine – a very rare and rather expensive medicine – designed for this mutation, which I am now taking. I’ve been on it for two or three weeks and I will soon find out if it works.’
Do any of his doctors hold out hope of a cure? ‘The word cure has not been used, no. But they can maybe keep me alive till better treatments come along. When they run tests on my heart, my liver, my blood pressure, they all come out very strong for someone of my age [sixty-one], and they say if we can keep you going, there are things we might be able to try really quite soon. So that’s the way I’m living now. It’s a bit vertiginous, but it’s not dull!’
Enter Carol Blue, his wife, a dramatic figure with a wonderfully gravelly voice, a huge mane of black hair, pencil-thin black trousers and fuck-me shoes. She is apt, I learn later, to refer to herself as a ‘broad’ and it seems appropriate. She wants to know if she should order a Chinese takeaway for supper. Yes, says Hitch, reeling off an enormous list of food, after checking that I will pay. She disappears to phone the restaurant.
But, I go on, it’s so extraordinary that he wrote that Prologue as if he knew he was dying. He must have had SOME inkling? ‘No. I constantly got clean bills from the quack – rather undeservedly, given that I don’t take much exercise . . .’ [I can’t suppress a snort at this point – lack of exercise is hardly the most obvious of his damaging habits.] But I did realise that I was getting tired very easily. I remember when they showed me the schedule of my book tour, thinking quite calmly: I won’t get to the end of that.’ He also remembers that when he drove past Tintern Abbey on his way to Hay last summer, ‘I had this thought that I was looking at it for the last time. So I think w
ith a part of myself I may have known I was wasting.’
He was just embarking on the American leg of his book tour when he collapsed. He woke in his New York hotel room and thought he was having a heart attack – he couldn’t breathe – and summoned an ambulance. He had a busy day coming up – an appearance on the Jon Stewart show, a debate with Salman Rushdie at the New York Y, and also a debate with his brother Peter Hitchens about Peter’s book, In Defence of God. Carol was flying up from Washington to attend these events, but when she phoned the hotel, they said Hitch had gone.
The hospital quickly diagnosed the immediate problem as fluid round his heart, which they drained, and discharged him. But they also said he should make an urgent appointment to see an oncologist – the first hint that he might have cancer. Meanwhile he trotted off to fulfil his speaking engagements. Carol eventually found him standing outside the back entrance of the Y Theatre having a cigarette with his agent. She recalls, ‘We saw each other from two blocks away and I went running towards him, I was just so happy to see him! And then we went through the whole night, smiling and socialising as if nothing was wrong. But I remember I was seeing him for the first time as someone who was under a big shadow.’
Next day Hitch made an appointment with an oncologist, had a biopsy, and then carried on with his book tour while waiting for the results. But then he collapsed again at Boston Airport, on the way to giving a talk at Harvard, and was taken to hospital where they finally delivered the verdict – stage four oesophagal cancer. ‘I asked if I was going to die, and they said no, not immediately. But one of them said you’ve got a year. And you don’t forget the first time you’re told that.’ His publishers issued a press statement cancelling his book tour, and explaining why.
The chemo was exhausting, but in breaks between sessions he was able to keep some of his speaking engagements – including the Toronto debate with Tony Blair on ‘Is religion a force for good in the world?’ He was feeling very ill on the day and worried that he would be sick on stage, but he wasn’t, and easily won the debate against an unusually nervous Blair.
But then there was a crisis at New Year when Hitch very nearly died. He’d spent Christmas with Carol’s parents in California (her father is a theoretical scientist at Stanford) but was feeling ‘beyond exhausted’ and was taking enormous quantities of painkillers for a terrible pain in his abdomen. Eventually he was rushed to hospital, ‘And I could tell from the expressions on their faces that they were very frightened – my normally unflappable oncologist exclaimed to Carol, “He’s crashing!” What had happened was my bone marrow had gone south and both the red and white cells had collapsed at the same time and my gall bladder had gone rancid. But they got me just in time, gave me a huge blood transfusion, and took out the gall bladder. That was what you might call a dress rehearsal, very unpleasant.’
The worst thing now, he says, is being housebound by fatigue. He used to travel three or four times a month and made a point of going at least once a year to countries in turmoil – normally he would have been on the first plane to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. But now he barely leaves the apartment. ‘Just going down to the bank is becoming an adventure.’
Why was he always so eager to fly into dangerous situations? Was it to show he was a tough guy, to prove his physical courage? Partly, he admits, it might have started as a need to impress his father, ‘the Commander’, who was a genuine war hero. But mainly just, ‘The flight from ennui. I hate being bored. I’d rather go to a collapsing country than just sit around. But also I think it’s a responsibility to go out and see what is happening elsewhere, to be an internationalist.’ Still, it leaves him open to the charge of revolutionary tourism. ‘Sure. And voyeurism. One is aware of that. But it’s better than not going at all.’
Carol returns with mountains of Chinese food and we move to the dining room. Hitch falls on the food and starts guzzling. ‘It’s like having a teenage bulimic in the house,’ she growls. I ask how they met, and he recalls that it was at the United Airlines baggage reclaim at LA Airport in 1989. He was doing his first ever book tour and his publishers said they could afford to fly him to LA but they couldn’t afford a hotel, but they knew this girl, Carol Blue, who worked at the LA Times and liked having writers to stay. Hitch: ‘I’d left a message saying that she should look for an Englishman who was past his best and when she arrived I thought: Well I bet it’s not her, but she came towards me . . .’ Carol: ‘He went on and on about being past his best – he was only thirty-nine years old. And then he took me to Romania – he was so clever – just as Ceaus¸ escu was being shot, and it was really wonderful, because it was like being in a scene from Potemkin or something . . .’ Hitch tries to interrupt – he can see me thinking revolutionary tourist – but Carol is unstoppable. ‘There was all this sniper fire and we were in the back of a pickup truck, and we’d been given stacks of newspapers with the headline “Ceaus¸ escu Killed”, and there were peasants cheering us on and we were throwing the newspapers off the truck and it was extraordinary – we were bringing the news of the revolution. We saw dead soldiers on the road and we ended up touring the morgue.’ And this was like their honeymoon? ‘Exactly! I found it FASCINATING. I’d studied political theory and I felt I was finally experiencing a key moment in history.’ Hitch emails me afterwards to say it wasn’t actually their honeymoon but it was the first time they’d travelled together, and, ‘The timing was perfect in that Ceaus¸ escu was killed that week. Whenever I see (or, now, read about) moments of liberation, I always find myself thinking: What a great time this would be to be in love!’
Given that Carol is a considerable character in her own right, I find it astonishing that Hitch barely mentions her in his autobiography, nor his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, nor his three children, Alexander and Sophia by his first marriage, and Antonia. The omission is all the more marked because he gushes away about his male friends, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, like any besotted lover, but wives and children don’t get a look-in. He says I was not the only reviewer to complain about this – ‘I began to think there must be some reviewers’ central committee that said you have to keep saying he should have written a different book, about his wives.’
So why didn’t he? ‘If you do it properly, you have to do it at considerable length, and the book was already much too long. And – I suppose I have to say this but I don’t know how it will sound – if you do it for one, you have to do it for all. I mean I’ve been married more than once and there were girlfriends before and I know from friends that it’s a very easy way of creating a huge pile of bad blood. So I decided not to do it at all. I don’t mention Anna Wintour’s name, for example, though my publishers wanted me to. [He went out with her in the mid 1970s, when she was fashion editor of Viva, owned by my old boss Bob Guccione, in New York.] She’s contacted me I forget how many times, asking me not to cooperate with unauthorised biographies or profiles of her, to the point where I’m not mentioned in her unauthorised biography at all. Anyway, this has gone too far . . .’
How many Anna Wintours might there be? ‘Oh I wouldn’t like to say, but enough to get in the way of what I wanted the book to be about.’ Couldn’t he have omitted the girlfriends but written something about his wives and children? ‘You don’t know these women! No, not to go near it, just to stay completely clear of it. I don’t want to read it from other people, and I don’t want to do it myself.’ Carol says she’s fine with it. As for the children, he says they don’t read his stuff anyway.
He has finished making his will, and appointed his agent, Steve Wasserman, as his literary executor. But unfortunately, he has no great literary archive to leave – no manuscripts, no letters from Amis and Rushdie and Fenton – because he always throws everything away. ‘What I’ve got,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t fill a box.’ But luckily he has still got – because Carol kept it – the very nice letter he received from George W. Bush after he’d talked about his cancer on television. She digs it out for me – handwritte
n, in a hard-backed envelope, embossed with a presidential seal. ‘Thank you for sharing your battle with cancer in that remarkable interview. There’s no telling how many folks you will inspire whether you think it works or not. I truly will pray for you. Fight on. You contribute meaningfully to our country’s discourse. God bless.’ As Carol says, it’s not very exciting, but it’s not illiterate either, and Hitch was pleased to get it. He got hundreds of letters in the first few weeks after his diagnosis, from famous people and strangers, and still gets three or four a week.
I wondered if he’d had any letters from people he’d fallen out with, but he said no. ‘I can’t say there’s been any sort of moist reconciliations. Sidney Blumenthal has not written but in a sense I don’t mind; I think he feels wronged by me and I think he’d feel a hypocrite writing. I did actually write to him when he got stomach cancer but for all I know that only irritated him.’ He fell out with Blumenthal in 1999 when Blumenthal, who worked at the White House, testified that he had not been spreading smears about Monica Lewinsky and Hitch said oh yes he had, and offered to give evidence that could potentially have put Blumenthal in jail for perjury. Several of their mutual friends have not spoken to Hitch since.
What about his brother, Peter – any rapprochement there? ‘Well there’s nothing much to rapproche. We’re very different types and we’ve never been close. If it wasn’t for our political coloration, no one would be interested.’ For decades, Peter tub-thumped for the Right, Hitch for the Left, but Hitch of course has moved rightwards and their main area of disagreement now is God. Does he know whether Peter is praying for him? ‘He’s had the decency not to say so, but I suppose he is. It’s some kind of obligation, isn’t it? But he did something very nice which hadn’t occurred to me: he said if I needed a bone marrow transplant, he would be happy to give it. Which I thought was very good of him.’
