The Spoiler
Page 34
The story of tabloid folly and filial greed had ricocheted round the world’s press, on the day Tamara’s cheque from The Sphere for the original story had been cleared and she sent Ross two thousand pounds to settle his debts. He could make a fresh start—or not—just as she was making a fresh start, with the obituary marking her second appearance in a week in the serious pages of The Monitor’s main paper. Her erstwhile protector, Simon, was no longer there, alas—a discrepancy over expenses had come to light, finally giving the management the excuse they had been looking for to sack him. So he was jobless as well as homeless. Jan, who had found out about Lucinda, and Davina, and all the rest, had kicked him out and taken up with the party planner who had organised their son’s eighteenth birthday celebration.
“A ‘party planner’! The guy’s sixteen years younger than her! Sleeping with my wife! In my bed! In my house! Can you believe it?” Simon said when he rang. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Get a grip, Simon,” Tamara said. “You’ve just got to move on.”
Just as she had moved on. Johnny, newly promoted as the paper’s deputy editor and tipped for Wedderburn’s job, had invited her to lunch at the Bubbles next week. She’d even been given a company cell phone, and Simon, before his untimely departure, had passed her a list of celebrity phone numbers and taught her a few useful tricks. She had already managed to access Pernilla Perssen’s voicemail. Pure journalistic gold. And now there was talk of a staff job on Features. She was on her way up. No question.
Honor Tait—Veteran Journalist, Friend of the Stars
Born Edinburgh, 2 April 1917. Died London, 25 February 1997
Honor Tait, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with a colourful private life, died alone of natural causes aged 80 in her West London flat. Born in Edinburgh into a hermetic world of wealth and privilege she was educated by governesses on the family estate near Inverness, a Belgian convent and Swiss finishing school, before defying convention, abandoning her studies and moving to Paris. There she worked as a secretary for a press agency and partied with some of the most celebrated artists and bohemians of the day, before persuading the Editor of The Herald Tribune to try her out as a reporter. She never looked back. On the many papers and news magazines she worked for, she was known for her great beauty and her insatiable hunger for a scoop. She wasn’t afraid to use the former in pursuit of the latter. Among the many stories she covered were the Spanish Civil War, the D-Day landings and the Vietnam War. Her mission, she said, was “to champion the weak and to shine a searchlight in the darkest corners of human experience.”
In Los Angeles, she was a close friend of Hollywood royalty, including Marilyn Monroe (pictured, above right) and Liz Taylor (pictured, bottom left). Her name was linked to many famous men, including Frank Sinatra, Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot and Bing Crosby (pictured, centre left), of whom she said in a recent exclusive interview with The Monitor: “He had marvellous feet. Whenever he held me, I felt like a gossip columnist.”
She married three times, firstly, in 1941, to the Belgian theatre impresario Marquis Maxime de Cantal. The union ended in divorce two years later. After several well-publicised romances, she married Sandor Varga, the Hungarian-born publisher, in 1957, who subsequently left her for the actress Bébé Blondell (pictured below, right), star of the sixties French film hits Après Vous! and Pardonnez-Moi!. In 1967, at the age of 50, Honor Tait visited a German orphanage in the course of her work and adopted a three-month-old baby, whom she named Daniel. She moved with him to Los Angeles. There she met Tad Challis, the transvestite American-born director of much-loved British comedy film classics, including The Pleasure Seekers and Hairdressers’ Honeymoon. They married in 1970.
She relocated to London with Challis but retained a shooting lodge on her family’s former estate in Inverness-shire, which she visited regularly. Seven years ago the lodge was destroyed in a fire.
In later years, following the death of Challis in 1995, Tait devoted herself to good causes and lived quietly alone in London, in a crepuscular flat full of her collection of valuable antiques and old-master paintings, occasionally entertaining a few close friends and becoming something of a recluse. A devotee of plastic surgery, she had undergone a further cosmetic procedure in the weeks before she died of a heart condition. She recently found herself the subject of unwelcome publicity when a tabloid newspaper claimed that she had been engaged in an improper relationship with a young man. The claims were unfounded and the young man proved to be her adopted son, as revealed exclusively in The Monitor this week. The Editor of the offending newspaper has since been sacked.
Tait’s funeral will be held next Thursday at West London Crematorium.
Tamara’s fee for the obituary was disappointingly small but, as a mark of respect and by way of recompense, she spent it on a large wreath of Honor Tait’s favourite pink lilies, to be placed on her coffin. The card pinned to the wreath read simply: “To the doyenne of journalists. From your greatest admirer.”
Acknowledgements
The research for this book gave me a pleasurable pretext to read, or reread, the work and memoirs of many distinguished women journalists, none of whom bear any resemblance to my fictional war correspondent, Honor Tait. Only Marguerite Higgins, the courageous and beautiful American reporter whose career path would have crossed Honor’s, might legitimately raise an eyebrow. Higgins’s description of an incident after the liberation of Buchenwald has some parallels with my story, but the details of her account, her response and the outcome, are markedly different. I am, however, indebted to Higgins’s memoirs, News Is a Singular Thing and War in Korea, and to her biography, Witness to War, by Antoinette May. Thanks are also due to Isabel Fonseca and Jane Maud, who read my early drafts and were generous and perspicacious in their suggestions; to my editor, Rebecca Carter; and above all to Ian McEwan for his unfailing support and loving counsel.