by Lynn Barber
There’s a type of person – the opposite of bullshit artists – who I’m intrigued by. They are people who never advertise what they do, who never boast, who can enter a room or a restaurant without drawing attention to themselves and would never in a million years say, ‘Do you know who I am?’ But there’s a quiet confidence about them that I have learned to recognise over the years. They know that the people who matter know that they matter, and they have no interest in impressing the others. Unfortunately such people rarely give interviews. But they’re the ones I’ve learned to look out for.
The interviews that most often fail, I feel, are those between young, childless interviewers and older subjects with children. The young never understand what a difference parenthood makes. Thus they can blithely write that someone ‘flits between homes’ in London, New York, Los Angeles without ever asking the obvious question – Yes, but where do the children go to school? Once you have children, you have to be anchored somewhere, you have to have a base. In general, young interviewers never seem to ask enough questions about family – not just children but aged parents. They tend to believe that career is all. But even stars, however mad and self-obsessed, do actually have family commitments – or if they don’t, I assume they have psychological problems. Young interviewers only want to know about the glamorous bits of their lives but I’m much more interested in the unglamorous stuff – what they do if they’re alone in a hotel room; who, if anyone, they phone with good news or bad; how often they speak to their mums.
So I think being old is quite useful for an interviewer. But there is nothing else good about it. I suppose I slightly prefer my sixties to my fifties in that there is none of that pressure to stay young and ‘not let yourself go’. I was always dying to let myself go, to stop pretending to be younger or fitter than I was. There was a particularly nasty patch in my fifties when friends were always recommending HRT. I never considered it for a moment: I’m far too frightened of drugs. Also I noticed, but didn’t like to say, that it made my friends mad. Luckily, they’ve all calmed down again now.
I suppose I could pretend there is a sort of wisdom in age. Is there? I certainly didn’t see it in my parents, and I don’t think my daughters see it in me. I have a bit more knowledge of how the world works but am still shockingly naïve in many ways. I wish I understood economics, or business, or anything to do with money. I reckon I am quite a good judge of people, but how does one ever know? And I remember how impatient I was, when young, with the supposed wisdom of older people. I just thought: You dinosaurs, don’t you realise that the world has moved on?
I’m guiltily aware that I had the best of it, that I enjoyed the golden age of interviewing. I came along at just the right time, the 1980s, when newspapers were suddenly keen to have their own star interviewers, and when it was still possible to spend enough time with celebs to make the interviews worth reading. But that is hardly the case now. My friend Deborah Ross recently had to fly to New York to interview Bruce Willis for The Times. She had just fourteen minutes with him which she worked out (clever girl!) meant she flew 600 miles for every minute of interview time, and then had to produce 3,000 words in two days. I couldn’t have done that even when young, and I certainly couldn’t begin to do it now.
I was lucky that I started in a seller’s market so I was able to set my own rules. I wouldn’t agree to interview anyone unless I had at least ninety minutes with them. I needed two days to prepare and at least a week to write the piece. I would never do phone interviews. I would never willingly jump on a plane unless there was a really thrilling interviewee at the end of it. Someone in the office, not me, would have to make all the arrangements and deal with PRs. No word of my copy – or punctuation – could be changed without my permission. And I had a right of veto over whom I was willing to interview.
I still get away with most of those demands, but only, I think, by virtue of my great age. If I were starting my career now, and tried to insist that I wouldn’t do phone interviews and wouldn’t let anyone change my copy, editors would laugh in my face. Rightly, perhaps. But someone has to set some standards, and editors won’t. If you treat interviewers like junior reporters, if you expect them to dash off to a film publicity circus with no preparation, interview an actor for fifteen minutes and write a 2,000-word piece the same day, is it any wonder that readers start complaining that interviews are boring?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
What I’ve Learned
What have I learned from doing all these hundreds of interviews? Not much, you might say. But I’ve certainly come a long way since Twickenham. I retain my core belief that other people are essentially unknowable – that however well you think you know them there are always undercurrents you will never understand. I only learned when my husband was dying that he had always believed (wrongly) that he was not his brothers’ brother. That’s a pretty big discovery to make after thirty years of marriage.
Going out with a conman in my teens taught me not to take people at face value, and not always to believe everything they say. My conman announced his engagement to me and celebrated with my parents while he was living with a wife and children half a mile down the road. That experience scarred me for life. Once you have had an early lesson in distrust, it is very difficult to unlearn it. I wish I could. The habit of distrust, or scepticism, has been useful to me as a journalist, but I would be a much nicer person without it.
Muriel Spark believed that many people lead double lives – she often used the expression ‘living a lie’ – and this was something that was confirmed at Penthouse. We used to get dozens of letters from men – often on expensive stationery – saying that they had to have a bit of bondage now and again, or a quickie with a rent boy on the way home from work. Apparently much of it went on around Pimlico – so convenient for commuters from Victoria. Their wives would never know. And sometimes elderly, distinguished-looking gentlemen would come to the office asking for the phone number of the Pet of the Month, saying they thought she was their long-lost niece. They might pick up some Penteez Panties while they were about it. There was a brothel – a pink bungalow called I think the Love Cottage – quite near Penthouse in Baron’s Court, and I once interviewed the madam there who kept me in stitches for hours with her stories of judges and MPs, and their need to be told they were naughty boys. Consequently, whenever some pinstriped pillar of society is droning on, I can’t help wondering: What’s your kink? At least it keeps me amused.
Thinking that other people are unknowable might seem like a handicap in an interviewer but I believe it’s an advantage. It means I always feel there’s more to discover, more to understand, more to be curious about. I don’t take anything for granted. And I’ve learned what again should have been obvious – that other people are very different from me, and very different from each other. I find this reassuring. I want there to be the widest possible variety of individuals in the world. I would hate everyone to be the same and I loathe the media tendency to lump people into types or classes or stereotypes – northerners versus southerners, middle-class versus working-class, introverts versus extraverts. One I’m particularly infuriated by these days is anything to do with the ‘over-sixties’. The over-sixties, to take a random selection, include Mick Jagger, Charlotte Rampling, Janet Street-Porter, me – do you see any obvious similarity? Me neither. What politicians mean when they talk about ‘the over-sixties’ is people who are over sixty and vote entirely from financial self-interest – i.e. they vote for bus passes and winter-fuel allowance, and against, say, better schools or maternity services because they are too old to benefit. But of course the majority of over-sixties have children and grandchildren whom they might also be expected to care about. It is a mistake to picture them all as the sort of money-crazed Scrooges who care more about their bus passes than their grandchildren’s schools. Sorry about that little rant. But the point I was trying to make is that interviews are valuable because they cut across the media tendency to lump us all into stereo
types.
I notice that women, more than men, are uncomfortable with difference and seem to want to assert similarity. ‘Oh I’m just the same,’ they cry delightedly as if they were playing Snap. Snap, I go to Cornwall for my holidays, snap, I have a wood-burning stove, snap, I prefer Nigella to Jamie. But how boring! Life would be intolerable if everyone were really just the same. I have friends who get agitated if I say I hate the theatre. They love the theatre, they feel obscurely threatened or undermined if I say I hate it, they want to convert me. But I’m not, absolutely not, trying to undermine them. I want them to enjoy the theatre, and even to tell me about it – I just don’t want to go myself. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? I have one group of friends in the country who are mad keen on fox-hunting and a much larger group of friends in London who think it’s barbaric. I probably think it’s barbaric too (or I do, sitting here at my desk in London, watching the foxes stroll around my garden) but I love seeing my hunting friends in their kit and asking about their day afterwards, and admiring their impressive bruises. Also, in an overcrowded island it is important that different people like different things – if everyone wanted to spend their Saturdays in Westfield shopping mall, or everyone wanted to spend them visiting National Trust houses, there just wouldn’t be room for us all.
Likewise, one must accept that other people have different ideas of what personal qualities are important. I was brought up to believe that intelligence was everything, that the world was basically divided between clever-clogs (like the Barbers) and thickos. I no longer believe that. I don’t denigrate intelligence – it’s a useful thing to have – but I now know it’s not the be-all and end-all. Emotional intelligence is far more important. It’s one of the first things I look for in interviewees, trying to assess whether they have any self-awareness and any awareness of me. I remember an interview with the late Lord Rees-Mogg where he told me at length ‘what mothers want’ without seemingly at any point wondering whether I might be a mother and might have some views on the subject. It was as if he was giving a lecture on Kalahari Bushmen to the National Geographic Society. There are plenty of men (invariably men) who talk in this way, as if addressing a public meeting. They don’t seem to notice I am there, let alone ask themselves why I am there, and I often wonder if I could slip out and go to the loo and come back to find their peroration rolling on. Such people are quite fun to interview because you can suddenly prick their balloon with a rude question and watch them deflate. Sometimes I don’t even ask a rude question, I ask a completely random question like: Were you breast-fed? just to bring them back to earth.
A category of people I admire but still find difficult to understand are the risk-takers, who tend to include most politicians, entrepreneurs and actors. Being very risk-averse myself, I used to assume that everyone really wanted security, and that they’d just been unlucky if they hadn’t achieved it. But now I know that some people thrive on risk and get bored without it. As soon as they are comfortable in a job, or a house, or a marriage, they get itchy feet and head off to fresh fields and pastures new. Such people often achieve great things, and have adventurous lives – I envy them in some ways, but I could never emulate them because it would cause me too many sleepless nights.
Another way in which I differ from many (probably most) of my interviewees is that I am slow whereas they are fast. Some people simply have a lot more energy than others and can pack more into each day. I often ask my interviewees what they’re doing for the rest of the week and feel positively faint when they tell me their schedule. I’m thinking I couldn’t do all that in a month, never mind a week. I’m also amazed by the way artists like Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas can seemingly produce work like an apple tree produces apples, without worrying about it. I wish I could be the same.
One real problem with interviewing is that it is hard to judge whether your subjects are self-centred. On the one hand, you want them to talk only about themselves, you encourage them to do that, and feel the time has been well spent if they do. But then it is difficult to identify whether they would always talk only about themselves, whether they are truly self-obsessed, or whether they are just being good, dutiful interviewees. So I usually try to put in one question like: Who helped you get started? or: What colleagues have been most valuable? to give them at least an opportunity of talking about, and hopefully praising, other people.
I like to ask about people’s attitudes to money – whether they prefer spending on themselves or on others, whether they resent paying income tax, whether they remember their first pay cheque or wage packet – businessmen like Alan Sugar always can – and what was the first big purchase they ever made. I ask when they first paid out of their own pocket to fly business- or first-class – something I still haven’t been able to bring myself to do. I ask women what’s the most they’ve ever spent on a dress or handbag, and men what they’ve spent on a car.
A question I often ask is: Do you prefer being a guest or a host? Some people can hardly bear to be guests because it is so important to them to be in control. Being a guest means having to abide by someone else’s tastes and preferences whereas being a host means you can make the rules. I doubt if Madonna often goes to stay with anyone. An alternative question is: Do you prefer giving presents or receiving them? Tracey Emin is wonderfully generous in giving presents but absolutely hopeless at receiving them. You are expected to give her something for her birthday, but then she often unwraps it and puts it down with no comment at all. After she’d done this for several years, I said, ‘Look, Tracey, what should I give you for your birthdays because you never seem to like what I bring,’ and she said, ‘Oh no, oh no, I like everything you’ve given me.’ It was tempting – but too cruel – to ask, ‘So what do you remember that I’ve given you?’ I once spent hours in a specialist doll’s house shop, choosing a fabulously expensive antique miniature teapot because I knew she collected them, but she never said thank you. For her fiftieth, I gave her a pen.
Sense of humour is easy to assess: if someone tells you they have one then you can take it for granted that they don’t. Or ask them to tell you a joke – that usually shuts them up. There are some questions that are not worth asking. If you ask someone if they’re snobbish they will invariably say no. But if they volunteer, unasked, that they are not snobbish, you can take it that they are. Racist ditto, sexist ditto. Then there is the weird business of people who tell you that they love their children. I never ask if someone loves their children because I always assume that they do, but if they tell you they do, alarm bells start ringing.
When I started as an interviewer I was often told off for being ‘too judgemental’. But surely you have to exercise judgement? We do it in real life after all – decide that we like so-and-so’s new girlfriend on the basis of a very short meeting and without the real grilling that I would give her. Anyway I notice that readers are disappointed if I don’t offer some hint of a verdict on whether I liked the person or not. Sometimes I simply can’t because I’m unsure myself, but I always think of those as ‘failed’ interviews. I know it is unrealistic to believe that you can arrive at a judgement on someone on the basis of merely an hour or two’s conversation but I am probably better at it than most, simply because I’ve been doing it so long. And most of my verdicts – though not all – have stood the test of time. Sometimes, years later, someone will come up to me at a party and say, ‘You know, you were right about so and so. I worked with her for a year and she was a monster.’ It’s always funny when PRs do it. At the time, they utter indignant complaints about how you traduced their client, but once they’re no longer working for her, they’re happy to tell you all the horrible things she did.
I’m sounding smug now. Must stop. One of the many reasons I miss David was because he was very good at telling me when I sounded smug. Anyway, I’ve had a wonderful life being an interviewer. It’s kept me entertained; I hope it’s kept the readers entertained. And who would ever have thought that I could make such a long, curious caree
r out of being nosy!
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Georgia Garrett, my agent, and Alexandra Pringle and all the team at Bloomsbury for making this book happen. And a special thank-you to Della Fathers who encouraged me to keep going when I was inclined to give up.
I should also like to thank the many editors who enabled me to flourish as a journalist all these years – Ron Hall on the Sunday Express, Ian Jack on the Independent on Sunday, Graydon Carter on Vanity Fair, Roger Alton, John Mulholland, Nicola Jeal and Jane Ferguson on the Observer, and John Witherow, Martin Ivens and Sarah Baxter on the Sunday Times. But the one who taught me most was dear departed Harry Fieldhouse of Penthouse.
A Note on the Author
Lynn Barber is an award-winning British journalist. Several collections of her interviews have been anthologised. She read English Literature at Oxford, worked for Penthouse magazine for seven years, then for the Sunday Express, Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, Observer and Sunday Times. Her books include two collections of interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber, as well as two sex manuals and a study of Victorian naturalists. Her memoir, An Education, was made into an award-winning film starring Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike. She lives in north London.
@lynnbaba
By the Same Author
An Education
Demon Barber
Mostly Men
The Heyday of Natural History
