Confessions of a Ghostwriter
Andrew Crofts
HE’S WRITTEN MORE THAN 80 BOOKS. HE’S SOLD MILLIONS OF COPIES ACROSS THE WORLD. HE IS THE MAN BEHIND A DOZEN SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 HITS, SPENDING OVER 120 WEEKS IN THE BESTSELLER CHARTS.BUT YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T HEARD OF HIM.Andrew Crofts is a ghostwriter, an author for hire, employed to write other people’s stories – everyone from film stars to footballers, hitmen to hookers, world leaders to abused children. Ghostwriters are confidantes to the most famous people on earth, and they help give a voice to some of the most vulnerable and inspiring. They dip their toes into every corner of life, and inhabit worlds that are both shadowy and glamorous. They are the ones who write the books that top the bestseller charts.Andrew is one of the world’s most sought-after ghosts. In this book he confesses the truth about ghosting; how it feels to be an invisible author, to be given first class tickets to travel anywhere and permission to ask whatever questions you like. Confessions of a Ghostwriter gives an unrivalled peek into private worlds that few others gain admission to.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter
BY ANDREW CROFTS
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Andrew Crofts 2014
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Andrew Crofts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007575404
Ebook Edition © SEP 2014 ISBN: 9780007575411
Version: 2014-07-23
To my wife, Susan, who I love with all my heart.
Contents
Title Page (#u788a3b57-b17c-553e-80f2-64235934b755)
Copyright (#uec90d856-8bb2-5da6-9935-a4018656e989)
Dedication (#u9b244927-e1d0-536d-addb-d36a34a0f373)
Introduction
An eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room
A million books in an African warehouse
Discovering ghostwriting
The story of Stumpy
The glamour model versus the ‘arbiters of taste’
Secrets and confidentiality agreements
Glimpses of hell
That splinter of ice
Suddenly you’re history
Abused children find a voice
Sacked by a glove puppet
A debt to Dale Carnegie
The first questions a ghostwriter should ask
‘You need to come to Haiti …’
Tyrants and other interesting monsters
Lunching with Imelda Marcos
Afternoon tea with Mrs Mubarak
Filthy lucre
Big Brother is watching and listening
A real-life Shades of Grey
A gift for a billionaire
Rich men’s toys
The soporific brothel
An opportunist hack
A book goes global
Revenge can be bitter
The Princess speaks
Confessions of my infidelity
How can anyone write four books a year?
Waking up in the orphanage
Under armed guard in Lahore
The tentative handling of firearms
The faulty memories of rock gods
Soldiers’ tales
Win a ghost of your own
Selling your story to a magazine
Calls from out of the blue
I am an addict
Evangelists of technology
‘Mr Harris would like to quote you …’
A confession of conceit
Guilt and self-doubt
The awesome power of a tear on daytime television
Christina Foyle, queen of all she surveyed
A new breed of stars
The reality of reality television stars
A genuine talent
A real media circus
Culture clashes and other bad marriages
Clubs for gentlemen and players
A Year in Provence unleashes an avalanche
Jim Martin’s island
A Russian in hiding
Education at Madame Jojo’s
From the lips of an Iraqi child
I love supermarket bookshelves
Confessions from the British Library
‘You may just have to get a job …’
The forgotten rules of grammar
A forgotten weekend in academia
A little lone wolf
The greatest living playwright
The selling power of celebrities
The soap star who came to stay
Not everyone can be Hamlet
Discovering Jay Gatsby
‘The Principessa is throwing a party …’
A black BMW behind King’s Cross
Tales of courtesans and mistresses
Deathbed delivery
The mid-book blues
Addiction to charts
Tales from below stairs
A confession of cowardice
Writing in two voices at once
Just a single copy
Family secrets
One for the bank vaults
On behalf of my client
A movie star and her entourage
A hit-man comes to lunch
Writers as parasites
Ordinary people who do extraordinary things
Leaving London
Soft times
A pain in Baguio
Whoring myself again
The suppression of the ego
The Pope’s secret mistress
A writer’s pit
Who moved my nuts?
‘Everyone says it would make a great movie’
The strange delusions of world leaders
Authors regain a little self-control
Standing on the past
The creation of Steffi McBride
A gathering of ghosts
Meeting the daughter of God
My father’s departure by tractor
And still I know nothing
Acknowledgements
Confessions Series (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
Introduction (#u49355ab9-e449-59aa-9004-c5d82d1826e8)
‘Ghostwriter for Hire’
I placed the small ad in TheBookseller, a publishing trade magazine, simply adding my phone number, and over the following years those three words took me all over the globe.
They allowed me to meet people I would otherwise never have known existed and who would reveal to me the secrets of their worlds. I travelled from palaces to brothels, lush jungles to mean city streets and got behind the closed doors of both corporate boardrooms and the homes of dysfunctional families.
Hiding behind the title of ghostwriter I could converse with kings and billionaires as easily as whores and the homeless; go backstage with rock stars and actors and descend into the bowels of the earth with miners and engineers. I could stick my nose into everyone else’s business and ask all the impertinent questions I wanted to. At the same time I could also live the pleasant life of a writer, my days unencumbered by hours of crowded commuting or unnecessary meetings in bleakly lit offices with people who were of no interest.
I had accidentally stumbled upon a path that was paved with a constant stream of adventures and the following are some of my confessions from along that path.
An eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room (#u49355ab9-e449-59aa-9004-c5d82d1826e8)
I was having a well-earned afternoon powernap at the end of a hard working week when my wife came into the bedroom with disturbing news.
‘There’s an eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room,’ she said without even bothering to check if I was still sleeping. ‘I think you should come down.’
‘In the living room?’ I wasn’t entirely sure if I was awake or still dreaming. ‘How did she get there?’
‘She arrived in a taxi. Didn’t you hear it?’
‘I think I was asleep.’ I hauled myself up into a sitting position as my wife attempted to flatten my bed-hair. ‘Is it Geraldine?’
‘Obviously.’
‘What’s she doing down here?’
‘At the moment she’s playing Barbies with the girls, but I think it’s you she’s come to see.’
‘Did you talk to her?’
‘Of course I talked to her. You weren’t there and the girls had an attack of shyness. She’s very big and she’s wearing a full-length fur coat. They thought she was Cruella de Vil.’
‘She’s fun, isn’t she?’ I stood up, my head clearing. ‘I told you.’
My wife was exaggerating. Geraldine wasn’t anything close to eight feet tall. Without her heels I doubt that she was much more than six feet two or three. But then she did always tend to wear boots with stacked heels and liked to pile her wigs high. By the time I got downstairs the girls had spread their entire collection of Barbies out for inspection across the carpet in front of her shiny white boots and she had shrugged the fur coat down off her shoulders like she was Ava Gardner at a press conference in Cannes. I noticed there was an overnight bag beside her chair.
‘Did you get my message?’ she asked.
‘Message?’
‘I left a telephone message to say I had to see you. We need to do some serious rewrites.’
‘Rewrites?’ This was the first I’d heard of this. ‘But the publisher has signed off on the manuscript. They’re happy with everything.’
‘But it’s not right. I need to change things. It’s not printed is it?’
‘I have no idea, but I doubt they will want to make any more changes now.’
That was the moment when Geraldine started to cry and my wife managed to tear the wide-eyed, open-mouthed girls away from the show and into the kitchen to make tea. I felt a bit like crying myself. One of the best moments in the book-writing business is the one when the editor accepts the final version of the typescript and agrees to send it off to the printers. The weight of months of work and uncertainty lifts from your shoulders and there is a brief period of elation (not to mention a cheque in the post) before you have to start worrying about whether the shops are going to display the book, the papers are going to review it and the public are going to buy it. Geraldine’s panic was crushing my moment.
I had got to know her well enough over the months to be aware that if she had decided on a course of action she would not be easily diverted; going on the game and changing your gender are both decisions that require uncommon degrees of grit and character. It seemed best to go with the flow for the moment, at least until she had calmed down a bit.
‘Are you wanting to work on it over the weekend?’ I asked, casting a quizzical look at the overnight bag.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we have to. I’ll need to find a bed-and-breakfast or something so we can work during the day.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ my wife interrupted from the door, the girls peering round her skirts, ‘you can stay here. We’ve got a spare room.’
Maybe it’s something to do with female instincts, but as usual she was ahead of me in reading the situation. Geraldine did not want to rewrite the book any more than I did. There had to be some other reason for her arrival out of the blue at the other end of the country from the streets and kerbs where she plied her trade, and we just had to wait for it to emerge. As she relaxed into the evening, with the help of a bottle of wine, she opened up with a new story about a murderous pimp who she had thought was the love of her life but who was actually making her life a misery. He had arranged for her to be evicted from her flat and was now pursuing her with a gun.
‘Sounds like you’ve got a sequel to your book,’ my wife suggested as we washed up after sending an exhausted Geraldine up to bed, which was a relief since we’d signed a two-book deal with the publisher and finding enough material for follow-ups was nearly always an uphill struggle. It may be true that ‘everyone has a book in them’, but most people definitely do not have two, however much the publisher’s accounting and sales departments may hope to the contrary.
A million books in an African warehouse (#u49355ab9-e449-59aa-9004-c5d82d1826e8)
‘You must fly down for the launch of the book,’ the Minister boomed, ‘I insist. The President will be there. It will be a great day. There will be food and speeches. I will make all the arrangements for you.’
I didn’t really want to go, but there was no arguing with him. Most clients don’t even admit that they’ve used a ghostwriter; they certainly don’t want to invite him or her half way across the world to the launch party. In most cases they don’t even let the ghost know that there is going to be a party. Once the book is written and delivered the ghost normally slinks back into the shadows and moves on to the next project, allowing the client to bask in the glory of being a published author. The Minister, however, was a man who enjoyed the limelight so much he wanted to share it with the whole world, which was one of the reasons he was such an endearing man.
His extremely efficient assistant made the arrangements through the embassy in London and a business class ticket was delivered to the house by a driver. I didn’t even bother to ask about accommodation arrangements because my previous trips had shown that the Minister was the most hospitable of men. He would have thought of everything. Often when you arrive at the borders of a country other than your own you need to provide evidence of where you will be staying. When your ticket has been arranged by someone like the Minister everything is different. Someone would have had a word in the ear of the airport officials, money or other favours would have been exchanged, minders would be waiting to take me to an SUV with darkened windows. It had happened like that every time I had been to see him during the writing process.
The launch of the book was held in a government office that I hadn’t been to before. The building must have been designed in colonial times and had a suitable air of faded grandeur, befitting a distinguished literary event. A feast had been laid out for guests on trestle tables and groups of sofas and armchairs had been clustered around the room so that politicians and business people could huddle and whisper, their conspiratorial conversations occasionally interrupted with roars of laughter and outbreaks of back-slapping. There were surprisingly large piles of books which the guests were helping themselves to, flicking through the pages in search of their own names or those of their rivals.
The arrival of the President momentarily overshadowed the Minister’s flamboyant act as host and newly published author. The pecking order took a few moments to readjust before everyone was comfortable once more.
The Minister made a speech and graciously acknowledged his ghostwriter in a remarkable display of modesty, honesty and openness. The President also made a speech praising the Minister. Conversations then resumed as one politician after another stood to tell the room how much they admired the author of the book and how exciting it was that his ideas on how to lead Africa to future prosperity were now set down in print.
The Minister smiled and nodded his appreciation to each of the speakers in turn, but he was also working the room as they talked, shaking hands and hugging everyone who came near him.
As he moved closer to where I was standing I overheard him accepting praise from a woman swathed in colourful traditional dress, a Rolex glinting on her wrist.
‘Your book will be a bestseller,’ she assured him.
‘Yes, yes,’ he grinned his acknowledgement, ‘we have a million copies printed up and ready to distribute. We want every child in Africa to have a copy.’
I caught his eye over the lady’s shoulder and smiled. I knew that it was his knack for positive thinking and dreaming big dreams that had got him where he was and might yet get him into the presidential palace. The book, I knew, was just one more step in the process of establishing himself as a future leader. Eventually he reached me and clapped a mighty arm around my shoulder.
‘Are you having a good time, my friend?’ he asked. ‘Are you glad that you came?’
‘Yes, very good,’ I said. ‘How many copies have you actually had printed?’
‘A million,’ he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
‘I thought we’d agreed to start with a couple of thousand,’ I said, still not sure whether to believe the bombast.
‘You know me,’ he winked, ‘I like to think big. I believe in the message of the book. I want copies in every school in Africa.’
‘You’ve actually had a million copies printed?’
I was trying to imagine what a million copies of a book must look like. Even if he was exaggerating and he had only printed a tenth of that figure it would still mean crates and crates of books.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Where are they?’
‘My brother has a warehouse near to the town where my mother lives. You remember going there?’
‘Of course.’
I had spent a pleasant weekend with his mother, a sunny, smiling woman who spoke no English and passed her days happily sitting in the shade inside the walls of the family compound, preparing food to be cooked by her daughters and shouting abuse at the goats whenever they strayed amongst her vegetables. I could imagine the delivery lorries arriving in the tiny town, coating the watching locals with dust from the unmade roads. In his home area the Minister was like a king and the warehouse full of books would be one more jewel in the crown of his glorious career.
As far as I know the crates are still in the warehouse.
Discovering ghostwriting (#ulink_b86a1ad0-1576-58f3-9a6b-ea9bf1c47ccc)
My first invitation to ghostwrite came from a management guru I was interviewing for Director magazine, the house journal for the Institute of Directors, which is a sort of gentlemen’s club for business people housed in one of those grand buildings in Pall Mall.
The guru and I were driving back to his gleaming white Surrey mansion in his powder blue Rolls Royce, having had a very long lunch and feeling exceedingly mellow.
‘You’re a writer,’ he said, apropos of nothing.
‘Yes,’ I replied, liking the sound of that phrase.
‘I’ve been commissioned by a publisher to produce a series of business books,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to do them because it’s good for business, but I don’t have the time. Why don’t you write them for me? I’ll get the glory and you can have the money.’
I was insulted for about five seconds and then I saw the potential of what he was offering. The books already had a publisher. It was definite money. All the information was in one place and would be relatively easy to collect. He was an interesting man with a lot to teach me. When I reflected a little further I realised that I had actually been doing much the same thing in journalistic form for clients of public relations companies, writing articles and speeches on their behalf. This was merely a protracted version of the same process.
I accepted the job and it went without a hitch. There must, I thought once it was over, be millions of people with books in their heads who don’t have the time, ability or inclination to write them themselves. I just need to find them. That was when I hit upon the idea of taking a small ad in TheBookseller – ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ – in the hope of reaching every publisher and literary agent who had a client with a great story but no time or inclination to write it themselves.
The story of Stumpy (#ulink_99fb2aeb-bd5f-58e7-9bcf-3b53e94c037d)
My ghostwriting gene must have developed early. I didn’t realise that what I was doing was going to be my life’s career but at the age of around 11 I decided, with the help of my best friend, Tom, to write the life story of Stumpy.
Stumpy was one of many mice that I had bred in the school nature society (a society of which I was voted President, I’ll have you know, largely because my mice bred with greater speed and ferocity than anyone else’s), but he was different, born with only three functioning legs. I guess this could be described as my first ‘misery memoir’.
Every bit of free time we could squeeze from the dreary daily routine of boarding school, Tom and I would hurry off down the corridors to the school library – a permanently unpopulated, panelled room with floor to ceiling shelves of unread books, looking out over terraces to the valley beyond – to write another chapter of Stumpy’s autobiography … Even then I should probably have been taking more fresh air and physical exercise.
The glamour model versus the ‘arbiters of taste’ (#ulink_326ff71c-0ad6-5cba-b822-11afdb9ae767)
‘I’ve had a call,’ the agent said, ‘from the managers of a model called Jordan. She’s looking for a ghostwriter for an autobiography.’
‘Who?’
It was the beginning of the twenty-first century and unless you were a regular reader of The Sun newspaper, you did not necessarily know who Jordan was or what her story might be.
‘She’s famous for having had her breasts enlarged. Her management are asking publishers for a million pound advance. Do you think it would be worth meeting her?’
‘She sounds like an interesting character.’
The agent was Andrew Lownie, one of the most distinguished independents in the business. He was one of the agents who responded to my ad in The Bookseller and we had worked together very successfully on a number of projects, all very different to this one. He agreed to set up a meeting and rang back a few hours later.
‘They want to have the meeting at her lawyer’s offices: Mishcon de Reya.’
‘Mishcon de Reya! Seriously?’
This was one of the biggest-hitting law firms in London. They had acted for the Princess of Wales in her divorce. This Jordan girl was not messing about. Lord alone knew how much a firm like this would be charging for their services.
The meeting room was surprisingly full when we arrived and I couldn’t help wondering how many of the shiny male managers and lawyers around the shiny conference table were charging by the hour.
Jordan, in the sort of skimpy dress a ‘saucy French maid’ might wear in a farce, had brought a friend with her and seemed totally relaxed in the surroundings despite the fact that she can’t have been much more than 25 years old. The two of them chatted and giggled like they were in Starbucks while the men attempted to talk business. Every so often, however, Jordan would interject with a question which completely cut through all the bullshit, and hold the eyes of whomever she was talking to with a disarming – and slightly alarming – intensity. I wasn’t completely convinced that she had enough of a story for a whole book, but I was completely convinced she would be fun to work with. She too said she would be interested.
After the meeting I made a few phone calls around publishers and other agents that I knew, just casually asking if they had heard of Jordan and whether they thought there was anything in it. With each phone call I found out more. It seemed that Jordan’s management team had already been to virtually every agent and publisher in the business, leading the conversation with the announcement that they were looking for a million pound advance.
I wasn’t surprised that this request was being greeted with derision by the industry but what did shock me was the level of disdain with which they all seemed to dismiss the would-be author herself, simply because of her profession and because of the audience to whom they thought she appealed. Publishers who would happily buy biographies of courtesans, actresses and prostitutes of the past, seeing them as colourful players in the pageant of history, did not like the idea of dealing with a living, breathing woman who promoted herself to the masses as a sex object. To be frank, they didn’t want to let her across their thresholds, let alone into the hushed and rarefied environs of their editorial departments. According to John Carey in his excellent book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, Rudyard Kipling observed that ‘the masses must pass into history before they become suitable for intellectual contemplation’. Snobbery, it seems, is a constant, if mutating, presence in the literary world.
For a few months everything went quiet and Andrew Lownie lost interest in the project. I believe Jordan changed her management company and someone within Mishcon de Reya reached out to Maggie Hanbury, another distinguished literary agent, who for a while was under the impression that she was being asked to represent a Middle Eastern country. Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up Jordan worked her steely charm again and the two women found that they understood one another. Sadly for me, Hanbury decided that Jordan would be more comfortable talking to a female ghost and I fell out of the picture. I remained, however, fascinated with what was to unfurl over the following years.
Even with her new literary ally, Jordan was still not able to win over the arbiters of taste within the big publishing houses. One independent publisher, a former tabloid editor called John Blake, however, understood what he was being offered and thought that, with the addition of plenty of pictures, it would be a deal worth doing. He offered her an advance of £10,000, a hundred times less than her representatives had originally been asking for. Showing a flash of the business sense that would soon make her a multi-millionaire, Jordan instructed her agent to accept the offer.
Two things then happened, which changed everything. John Blake came up with the idea of writing Being Jordan from the perspective of the real Katie Price, and Katie herself was invited to fly down to the Australian jungle and appear in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, where she caught the imagination of the British public, particularly the women, and conducted a very public romance with Peter Andre. A pop singer whose star had previously been waning, he became her first husband and father to two of her children. The target audience was no longer limited to male readers of The Sun because millions of women were now intrigued and wanted to know more and, as everyone in publishing knows, women are the ones who buy the most books, by a very large margin.
Being Jordan reputedly sold a million copies in hardback and editors in one of the major publishing houses who had previously refused to allow Jordan through their doors, were forced to offer Katie Price a seven figure sum to come to them with Rebecca Farnworth, her chosen ghostwriter. Cross with John Blake for signing up a rival model and for refusing to match this offer, Katie changed publishers and produced a stream of books in a variety of genres, most of which became colossal bestsellers, making no secret of the fact that she did not ‘do her own typing’. At the time of writing this she and Rebecca are still a team, with Lord knows how many titles under their belts.
Secrets and confidentiality agreements (#ulink_3b2f7d61-b0c9-599f-b0c0-507b51ebfeaa)
The ever-cheerful soap star peered suspiciously at the freshly delivered cover of her forthcoming autobiography.
‘Why hasn’t it got your name on it?’ she enquired.
‘Because I’m invisible,’ I reminded her. ‘It says so in my contract.’
‘Does it?’ It was obviously the first she had heard of any such stipulation. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘The publisher thinks it’s better.’
‘Why?’
‘They think the fans will prefer to believe that you wrote it yourself. They want them to picture you sitting down at your escritoire at the end of a hard day’s filming and pouring your heart out onto the page.’
‘Sitting at my what?’
‘Your writing desk.’
She emitted a tobacco-throated croak of mirth. ‘I don’t think anyone’s that thick, are they?’
‘It’s standard practice. The publisher just thinks it’s better.’
‘I’m not sure about that. I don’t want people to think that I’m pretending I can write a book. That’ll make me look like a right knob.’
Such frankness is always endearing in an author. Most, in my experience, are quite happy to confess that they have had help with ‘doing the typing’, as Katie Price would say; it is usually the lawyers and the publishers who insist on contracts that threaten the ghost with hanging, drawing and quartering if they even tell their pet spaniel that their clients didn’t write their own books. The paid advisers are equally fond of confidentiality agreements that forbid you from ever telling anyone anything that you might have found out that doesn’t actually make it into the published book. If the client removes all their clothes during a recording session or confides that they intend to top themselves, mum’s the word.
Things have become less draconian with the passing years and with the public’s growing awareness that most people will find it hard to dash off a book if they are also doing another full-time job like starring in a soap opera, playing in a professional football team or running a country. As a result there are now some books where the ghost is openly acknowledged on the cover or the flyleaf and is free to talk to everyone including the media about their involvement in the project, and others where quite the opposite is true. Likewise there are some author/ghost relationships where a level of trust exists without the necessity of a written confidentiality contract, and a ghost would guard their author’s secrets as fiercely as they would guard those of their friends and family. Those are the best ones. It is the state that all good ghosts should aspire to.
Glimpses of hell (#ulink_5d8987c5-e813-541e-ab5d-4c445de97106)
Living, as I do, in one of the safest and most prosperous islands in the world, and being part of a comfortable and loving family, it is easy to forget or to remain ignorant of the depths of hellishness that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man, and frequently does. The collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc at the end of the eighties released a hurricane of shocking and fascinating human interest stories, carried back to the West by people who needed the help of ghostwriters to tell them.
When Romanian President, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was toppled from power and executed in 1989 his country was released from a quarter of a century of oppression. What horrified the outside world the most, however, was what was discovered inside the walls of the ‘orphanages for the irrecuperable’ which littered the country. Thousands of children who had been deemed to be of no use to Romania, or who had been ‘inconvenient’ births, were found locked up in these asylums, tied up in cots, starved, abused, driven insane and beaten until they eventually gave up living. This was what medieval Bedlams must have looked like. Western cameras went in and recorded scenes the like of which we had not seen in Europe since the liberation of the concentration camps after the Second World War.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia stories of war crimes and ethnic cleansing emerged daily as different factions and nationalities struggled to fill the power vacuum, committing any atrocities they deemed necessary. Soldiers, doctors, diplomats and charity workers all came out of the area with tales of unbelievable barbarity and many of them also needed ghostwriters to help them put into words horrors that had left them speechless.
The symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall seemed like a new beginning. Although the stories that had been hiding behind it were more prosaic than we had been led to believe by the propaganda of the Cold War, at a personal level they were both shocking and awe-inspiring. Individual stories of endless, grinding poverty, cruelty and darkness emerged into the light. Each story that was brought to me seemed more gruelling and shocking than the one before.
Out of that darkness, however, it was possible to make out glimmers of hope as good people made huge sacrifices and put their own lives on hold in order to help. A variety of ghostwritten books followed. There were tales of hopelessly crippled and apparently mad orphans being saved by Western surgeons and by the love of patient foster families. Bombed orphanages were rebuilt by soldiers, charities were set up and families who had been separated for a generation were reunited. There was so much to do but no shortage of people who wanted to help, and who then wanted to tell the stories of the horrors and the miracles they had witnessed.
For a writer it was a Pandora’s box: scenes of unspeakable evil and personal struggles, often leading to happy endings. I wrote the story of a small boy who had been tied up and imprisoned in an orphanage cot for the first four years of his life, condemned by the authorities as sub-human because he was believed to be both physically and mentally handicapped, who was saved by a volunteer and given a full life in the West. I did one for a soldier who rebuilt a bombed orphanage for a local town in his own time and went on to create a full-scale charity, and another for an English woman who had been trapped in Eastern Europe as a teenager just before the Second World War, not escaping back to her family in the West until the Iron Curtain finally fell just over half a century later. I also helped tell tales for some of the pioneering business pirates and ex-politicians who built vast fortunes as communism crumbled and a new frontier-land of opportunities opened up for those bold and ruthless enough to grab them.
These stories were the absolute stuff of life, horrifying and inspiring, sickening and uplifting, frightening and dramatic. I seldom cried while I was actually there in the orphanages, or actually listening to the stories (as Graham Greene once said ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’), but I confess that when I came to write the stories the ice would inevitably melt into tears. The goal then was to ensure that the readers would be equally moved to tears at the same time as being unable to stop turning the pages.
That splinter of ice (#ulink_33fad92a-b4cd-59f8-ab73-6653f564feee)
That ‘splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’ Greene talked about helps a great deal when listening to stories that have the potential to break your heart. Ghosts, like other authors, need to be able to remain objective, slightly distant, hovering above the emotion, watching and noting what it looks and sounds like. But at the same time we need to understand what it feels like in order to convey it to the reader.
If the person who is telling you the story is crying, then you need to be able to make the reader cry too when you reproduce the story on the page, but you won’t be able to do that if you get too close. You need to be interested in the story, amazed by it, moved by it, but you cannot let it cloud the clarity of your own thoughts while you are interviewing.
Sometimes I have sat with people who are in floods of tears when they tell their stories. More often they struggle to hold in those tears, their chins trembling, their eyes and noses running involuntarily, their voices cracking as they battle bravely on with the memories that cause them so much pain and which they want so much to exorcise. It is a cliché that many of the soldiers who had the most traumatic times in the trenches of the First World War never wanted to speak about their experiences once they got home. The same rule has applied to others who have suffered since in different ways but times have changed. The medical profession came to understand about post-traumatic stress and people are now encouraged to talk about their traumas in order to learn how to cope with them. It is still never an easy thing for most damaged people to do.
My role is to sit and wait, quiet and encouraging; never criticising them, never comforting them, never rushing them, just passing the tissues, assuring them there is no problem and waiting for them to feel able to continue.
Readers want to be moved to tears by stories, just as they want to be moved to laughter or to shrieks of fear. They want to ‘feel something’. A ghostwriter must catch the elements that produce that effect and reproduce them later on the page, not during the interview.
I guess therapists and analysts must work in the same way because often when I get to the end of the interviewing process the subject will say they feel like they have just been through a course of therapy. They are nearly always grateful to have been able to unburden themselves but still the fact remains that there was a splinter of ice required in order to achieve it – and that troubles me a little.
It isn’t only once work is under way that a ghost has to remain detached. Often the people who make initial enquiries about hiring a ghostwriter have heartbreaking tales to tell. To have to warn them that the fact that they have lost a child in appalling circumstances or been tortured for months by an oppressive regime does not necessarily mean that they will get a publishing deal, can seem unbearably cruel – but to give them false hope would be far crueller.
I suppose it’s the same in many other professions. A paediatrician must spend a large proportion of his or her time having to give heartbreaking news to parents. A press photographer sent to a war or disaster zone, a policeman dealing with the victims of a terrible crime or having to break the news of a death to a family. All these people can only function effectively in their jobs if they become detached in some way, deliberately inserting Greene’s cold, hard, necessary splinter of ice.
Suddenly you’re history (#ulink_66da1af1-9a23-5bcb-8dbb-f2c810506f1b)
Since these are my confessions, I guess I must reveal that I was more than a little in love with Twiggy when I was a schoolboy in the sixties. Although she was about four years older than me she did not seem as intimidatingly mature and grown up as the other models and film stars that my generation of boys were busily lusting after. In fact, she didn’t look that different to some of us when we were made-up to appear on stage in school plays. It was quite possible to imagine yourself on a date with her, despite her extraordinary and unusual beauty – not to mention her enormous global fame and iconic status.
So, when a publisher rang in the mid-nineties and asked if I would come to the office for lunch with Twiggy as she was looking for a ghostwriter, it set all my nostalgia glands tingling.
The lunch was delightful. Twiggy was delightful, and even though I didn’t get the job (again I was told they had decided a woman would be more suitable), I felt I had an anecdote that might at least interest, and possibly even impress, my children.
‘I had lunch with Twiggy last week,’ I announced casually over Sunday lunch.
‘Twiggy?’ my eldest daughter exclaimed, looking just as stunned as I thought appropriate for such a momentous event. ‘That’s amazing. We’re doing her at school, in history.’
Abused children find a voice (#ulink_108547ec-a748-58c8-8b15-c19430a6e8c5)
At the beginning of the nineties I started to receive phone calls and letters from people who wanted to write about abuses they had suffered in their childhoods. These were not people who had had the misfortune to be born in countries that were enduring brutal dictatorships, civil wars or ethnic cleansing campaigns, these were people who had been born and brought up in democratic, peacetime Britain, a country that prided itself on being civilised, with developed social welfare services.
Their calls seemed to be cries for help and as I talked to them I became aware of just how much courage it had taken most of them to pick up the phone in the first place. These were people whose experiences did not lead them to expect to be listened to or believed but they had the courage to keep on trying to tell their stories. Many of the things they told me tore my heart out and I felt sure there would be a readership for them if I could just get them out into the bookshops.
I wanted to find out more about their lives and I wanted to help them to tell their stories as movingly and dramatically as possible. It seemed likely that if these stories were moving me then they would move other people as well.
When, as a teenager, I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell I had been particularly struck by a scene in Paris where Orwell reports meeting a man called Charlie, whom he describes as ‘a local curiosity’. Charlie tells of visiting a girl who is being kept prisoner in a cellar which had been tricked out as a bordello-style bedroom and was guarded upstairs by an old crone. Charlie told how he gave the old woman a thousand francs, which he had stolen from his drunken brother.
‘Voilà,’ the woman said, ‘go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand – perfectly free.’
Orwell reports Charlie’s experiences in the cellar as if they make Charlie an interesting and colourful character, but it struck me that it was the girl whose story was actually the most mysterious and interesting. How had she got there? Who had betrayed her? What was the rest of her life like? What was she thinking? What were her dreams? What became of her? Her story seemed more intriguing than the story of the narrator (Orwell himself), an Old Etonian playing at being a ‘plongeur’ for a while (a bit like an early version of the student gap year), before becoming a literary legend.
The stories that I was now hearing seemed just as fascinating, coming from a dark world that was unknown to me and that I wanted to understand better. I couldn’t understand how so many people could be getting away with abusing children and I had difficulty imagining what it must feel like to be one of those children. It seemed to me that it would be a good thing to shine some bright lights into these dark corners of the human experience, so that everyone could understand more. They also seemed to me to be perfect fairy tales; good versus evil, innocent little heroes and heroines fighting back against terrible villains.
Filled with optimism I kept listening to the stories, writing synopses and sample material and trying to persuade publishers that they should publish them. The reaction was always the same: ‘No one,’ the publishers all informed me, ‘wants to read such gruelling and depressing stories.’ Child abuse, they believed, was all too horrible to contemplate. Even amongst the most liberal of them I could detect scepticism; was it possible that such terrible things could be happening in our own country? Surely not.
But what, I kept asking, were pantomimes like Cinderella and Snow White about if it wasn’t child abuse? And what about Dickens’s tales from the workhouses and back streets of Victorian England? Do we really believe that the Artful Dodger and his pals were required to do nothing worse than steal a few pocket handkerchiefs and watches on behalf of their violent, thieving, drunken masters? Even the orphaned Harry Potter starts out abused by the aunt and uncle charged with his guardianship.
I truly couldn’t understand how the same publisher could produce so many books about war, genocide and murder, creating bestsellers by glamorising, stylising and fetishising serial killers and rapists, mafia bosses and military leaders, and at the same time think that genuine, original stories by children who had been victimised were somehow too tasteless to be told.
Then in 1993 Dave Pelzer self-published his memoir, A Child Called It, in America, and it became a word-of-mouth bestseller, filtering up into my consciousness via my children and their friends, who were passing it around in the school playground, much to the consternation of some of their parents and teachers.
A few years later I received email from a man who wanted to write something similar about his own childhood with a violent and abusive mother. I warned him that my experience told me I might not be able to sell the book to publishers. He said that he was willing to take the risk and wanted to commission me to write the book anyway.
It was a good story. Once it was completed I sent it to Barbara Levy, an exceptionally discreet and gentle agent, who I knew would be sympathetic when it came time to break the bad news to the author that it was unsaleable. I had reckoned without the ‘Pelzer-factor’.
Within a week Barbara had three publishers making offers and the book went for a six figure advance. It then sat at the top of the bestseller lists for weeks and eventually went on to be made into a movie. The game had changed entirely. Other publishers saw this success and remembered that I had been in to see them in the past. They started ringing to find out if I still had any other stories that could be packaged in a similar way. On one memorable day editors from three different publishing houses, all having just come from editorial planning meetings, rang within a few hours of one another with the same request. I had plenty of stories ready and waiting, all I had to do was introduce the people with the stories to the people who now really wanted the stories, and then write them.
The demand seemed insatiable. Supermarkets started to stock the resulting titles in massive quantities and kept asking the publishers for more. I was in a publisher’s office introducing one of these clients when another publisher, whom we had been to see earlier in the day, rang my mobile. I excused myself and slipped out of the room to take the call.
‘If you leave that building now,’ the other publisher said, ‘I will give you quarter of a million pounds.’
I felt like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. The client and I then spent a surreal afternoon taking calls from the two publishers, finally clinching the deal before putting her back on her train home. Three months later exactly the same thing happened with another client’s story of abuse. (I will be explaining later in the ‘filthy lucre’ chapter how sums like this will soon be whittled away by reality to become far less dramatic figures, but these occasional episodes of apparent largesse on the part of publishers do at least provide temporary doses of adrenaline and optimism to any writer’s life.)
Books that I wouldn’t have been able to interest anyone in a few months before were now the objects of ferocious bidding wars between the publishers with the biggest cheque books. I ended up writing about a dozen of them, selling some in conjunction with agents such as Barbara Levy and Judith Chilcote and some under my own steam. For a while they virtually all became bestsellers. There was one week when there were actually three of them in the Sunday Times charts at the same time. In some cases I was contracted to remain anonymous, but several of them graciously put my name on the flyleaf, such as The Little Prisoner by Jane Elliott, Just a Boy by Richard McCann, Daddy’s Little Earner by Maria Landon, Cry Silent Tears by Joe Peters and Please, Daddy, No by Stuart Howarth.
So, who was reading these books that the publishers had been so sure would be too terrible for anyone to bear? Initially there was the ‘tourist trade’; people who, like me, could not imagine what it must be like to live in such a world and wanted to understand it better. Then there were the actual citizens of this ‘hidden’ world; the children who had suffered or witnessed abuse and were wanting the comfort of knowing that they were not alone. There is no way of ever quantifying how many people suffer some sort of bullying or abuse in their childhood which leaves them scarred in some way, but let’s take a guess that it is around 10 per cent of the population. That includes those abused in the home, in care, or by authority figures like priests or school teachers. That is 6 million people in the UK alone.
Then there are those who simply want to read scary, tear-jerking tales about little heroes and heroines overcoming monsters; the same people who want to see Cinderella go to the ball and Oliver Twist escape from the clutches of Fagin and Bill Sykes.
People who had been keeping their own stories of abuse secret due to a mixture of fear and shame, suddenly saw that it was all right to speak out. The stories I was being brought grew more and more extreme and horrific. No one was going to be able to pretend that child abuse was not a problem in society any longer. The misery memoir phenomenon became a bubble, with all the big publishers rushing onto the shelves with look-alike products. Within a few years the market was saturated and books that would previously have been given advances of hundreds of thousands of pounds were having trouble finding publishers once more.
The genie, however, was now out of the bottle and it wasn’t long before abusers and bullies were being named and shamed in any number of previously inviolable institutions from schools to churches, orphanages to mental hospitals and even the BBC, to a point where it started to look to some like a witch hunt.
Some time later I heard a highly distinguished publisher on a podium being asked by a member of the audience what he thought of the ‘misery memoir’ genre. He was not one of those who had joined in the gold rush and I assumed that he was going to say something dismissive.
‘I think they changed the art of autobiography for ever,’ he said. ‘They forced authors to be much more open and revelatory. It is no longer good enough to tell anecdotes about the day you “met Prince Philip” or “danced with Sammy Davis Junior”; if you want to capture the hearts of readers you have to open up your emotional life as well and talk honestly and from the heart. I think they did the genre a great service.’
Sacked by a glove puppet (#ulink_74366910-b86b-5eda-a037-8a7124d68d5e)
Everyone around the boardroom table was entirely in agreement; at no stage and no time was anyone allowed to admit out loud or in writing that our celebrity was not a real person. Never mind that the celebrity in question was made of felt, this was the merchandising business, there had to be rules. The lawyers insisted.
My job, as the chosen ghostwriter, was to produce an autobiography which would fill in this celebrity’s back story, his early life before he found fame, and exactly what happened to him in the ‘wilderness years’ before his comeback as a potentially money-making merchandising vehicle. There were many careers resting on the outcome of this exercise, most of them sitting round that table in their shirtsleeves – brainstorming and sipping mineral water.
I had been hired by the distinguished publisher who had agreed to bring the eventual book out under his distinguished imprint. It was a nice job for both of us. For me it felt a bit like being given a licence to write fiction (although, of course, it wasn’t fiction because the lawyers said so and the story must, therefore, be spoken of at all times as non-fiction, even though I was going to be making it up).
One of the golden rules of writing both fiction and non-fiction must be to be fundamentally truthful in your writing, and if you aren’t going to be truthful then you’d better be as entertaining as hell. But, of course, truthful was the option to go for here, because the lawyers said so.
Our hero had found fame in the seventies and we all know how badly celebrities were allowed to behave in those days. Now, it seemed to me, was the time for him to ’fess up to every little indiscretion (this was before the really heinous and unamusing revelations of the period started to emerge). I was also sure readers would understand exactly why he went off the rails during the wilderness years – wouldn’t everyone if subjected to the pressures of sudden fame and fortune? To hold on to the readers’ sympathies I felt we must come clean about the addictions and the dodgy business deals that he had become involved in during those years at the same time as dropping the names of all the celebrities he had mingled with.
Once the manuscript was finished and both the distinguished publisher and I were happy that we had done full justice to the whole Greek tragedy of this celebrity’s rise and fall and resurrection, there was another meeting in the same boardroom. We arrived, feeling extremely pleased with ourselves, but now the men and women in shirtsleeves were no longer smiling. The celebrity, apparently, was not happy with the way he had come across. The ghost was going to have to be replaced by someone who understood what was expected of them.
‘The thing we have to remember,’ the distinguished publisher sighed as we stood on the street outside, forlornly scouring the horizon for a taxi to whisk us away from the scene of our humiliation, ‘is that nobody around that table has ever commissioned anything bigger than a fridge magnet.’
I felt better for his wise words.
A debt to Dale Carnegie (#ulink_5e51629a-147e-507a-b286-fc62d79edd5c)
‘You’re like a human Hoover,’ my wife complained as we drove home from the dinner party. ‘That poor woman …’
‘What poor woman?’ I truly didn’t know what she was talking about. I had been basking in the afterglow of what I thought had been a pleasant evening out.
‘The one you were cross-examining about her love life.’
‘I wasn’t cross-examining her,’ I protested, ‘I just pressed the button and everything poured out. She was a human Nespresso machine.’
‘You do it all the time. You’re like the Spanish Inquisition. Some people like to preserve a little privacy, you know.’
She was right, of course, I do it all the time, but in my experience most people love talking about themselves, and those who don’t pretty quickly clam up or tell me to mind my own business. It was a secret I learned at the age of 17 when I was heading for London in search of streets paved with gold with virtually no social skills at all.
How, I wondered as I watched those around me socialising with apparent ease, did people find things to talk about to strangers at parties? How did you find things to say to young women on first dates? (Bearing in mind that my early romantic education had come from the regency novels of my mother’s Georgette Heyer collection, since when I had been incarcerated in single- sex boarding schools.) The adult world seemed a daunting, if exciting, place and I was desperate to discover the secret of all the grown-ups who seemed so self-confident in every social situation.
In my search for a magic formula I came across How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The book had been written in 1936, so was already more than 30 years old and more than 40 years later I can still remember the key message. Mr Carnegie explained that virtually everyone loves to talk about themselves and about their pet subjects. If you keep asking them questions they will keep answering them and the more they talk the more material you have for follow-up questions. The vast majority of people will come away from the conversation thinking you are the most charming and interesting person in the world, even if they have not asked you a single question about yourself (and it is my experience that a shocking number of people will fall silent the moment you stop asking the questions, even at private dinner tables where you would assume they wanted to be polite).
For a self-conscious teenager setting out to enter the adult world this one piece of advice was priceless; for someone wanting to make a living as an author and ghostwriter it has proved invaluable.
Over the years it has become such an ingrained habit that there is more than a little truth in my wife’s fear that the technique can be intimidating for those who might be unused to talking about themselves. Of course, it should be applied with some sensitivity, but at the same time there are so many questions which are so fascinating they are irresistible, even if they are considered impertinent: how much do you earn? Why did you divorce your husband? Are you having an affair with that man over there? Why do you suppose your children hate you? … It’s amazing how many people reward straight questions with extremely full and revealing answers.
The first questions a ghostwriter should ask (#ulink_0838311d-b5cb-5c3e-84a8-da9a9692c5c2)
The first questions you ask in any relationship are always the hardest. The answers you receive are going to become the signposts for the journey the conversation is going to take from then on.
I receive three or four enquiries a day from people who want to write books, mostly via email in recent years. The first things I ask for are a brief synopsis of the story (the sort of thing we might eventually see on the back cover), and some explanation of what their expectations are for the book. Are they hoping for a bestseller, for instance, or do they want to self-publish a few copies for friends and family?
Most are able to respond to those questions, however unsure they may be of their own ability with words. If they find writing even that much is beyond them then we might try opening the dialogue in a phone call.
Once I start the actual process of listening to the story it is always a good idea to begin at the beginning and work forward chronologically, even if the early days of someone’s life appear irrelevant to the story they actually want to tell. The ghost needs to get to know them in order to recognise what questions to ask later. Only by knowing what has gone before will the ghost be able to gauge how they will think, feel and react in certain situations. Starting by talking about their earliest memories and perhaps their relationship with their parents, is nearly always going to break the ice nicely. Once the ice is broken and they feel comfortable the conversation will flow quite normally, with the ghost simply steering the chronology like a sheepdog herding memories instead of sheep, ferreting out the details as and when they are required in order to be able to visualise and understand the stories that are being told.
In many ways a ghostwriter is merely asking all the same questions that a reader would ask if they were in the room with the author rather than reading the eventual book.
‘You need to come to Haiti …’ (#ulink_bcb87509-5f82-5847-bf23-cfd2754989ba)
I have to confess that there have been many times when I have accepted an invitation to a destination simply because I have read and loved a book about the place (The World of Suzie Wong for Hong Kong, Breakfast at Tiffany’s for New York, Death in Venice for Venice, Myra Breckinridge for Hollywood, Don’t Stop the Carnival for the Caribbean islands generally, The Great Railway Bazaar for the art of travel itself, and so forth).
I must have read Graham Greene’s The Comedians pretty soon after it was published in 1966, when I would still have been in my teens (I had probably seen the film too, which was produced as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton the following year).
Greene had already caught my attention with both his stories and his own life, taking my imagination to some of the darkest and most frightening places on earth. The Comedians painted a picture of Haiti under the tyrannical ‘Papa Doc’, who used the fearful power of Voodoo and his private army, the Tonton Macoutes, to control the people. It seemed like the most exotic and dangerous place a man could ever hope to travel to and Greene’s story was filled with the sort of damaged characters who roam to such places in search of quick fortunes and adventure, always living on the outside.
In the early eighties I was hawking my services as a travel writer to anyone in a position to dole out a free flight or a bit of board and lodging. I had been spending time on a number of Caribbean islands like Jamaica, St Lucia and Barbados, where it was not hard to find tourist authorities and hotel owners who were willing to entertain a freelance writer for a while in exchange for articles about their islands and their facilities. Haiti, however, was going to be a harder nut to crack and I lacked the nerve to simply turn up at Port-au-Prince and take my chances.
By that time Papa Doc’s son, ‘Baby Doc’, who was only a couple of years older than me, was President and the darkness of tyranny that Greene had depicted so chillingly had, if anything, deepened. The only news stories that came out of the island were bad ones, making it all the more intriguing. I had written to the island’s consulate, making preliminary enquiries but not holding out much hope of a reply, when I received a phone call from a British businessman who had made his home in Haiti and was extremely keen to promote the place.
‘You need to come to Haiti,’ he told me, ‘everyone has opinions about it but no one really knows it. You can stay with us and I’ll show you the real island.’
It was an invitation I was definitely not going to turn down. It was a chance to experience first-hand how an ex-pat lived in such a place, and I would have someone to guide me in Greene’s footsteps. Perfect.
Baby Doc would be ensconced in the white folly of a presidential palace for only a few more years before he was overthrown and fled into exile on the French Riviera. The palace now lies in ruins, as uninhabitable as the rest of the city around it, but then it still gleamed like a heavily guarded wedding cake amidst the squalor as I stood outside the gates staring in, trying to imagine the domestic life of the tyrant and his family, wondering how they managed to justify their actions to themselves and to one another. It was a curiosity which would later tempt me to accept invitations to the palaces of other tyrants, wanting to see what made them different, wanting to understand how they had found themselves in such extreme situations, able to exert their terrible will over whole populations.
The exotic Grand Hotel Oloffson, where Greene had set most of his story (calling it the Hotel Trianon), still stood on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince and one of Greene’s original characters, Aubelin Jolicoeur (the gossip columnist, Petit Pierre, in the book), still propped up the bar.
‘He has made himself one of the country’s leading characters,’ I wrote at the time, ‘affecting cane, monocle, cravat and a theatrically camp manner which makes many unaware of just how much influence he has at the presidential palace and in ministerial offices.’
In one of those ministerial offices I met the island’s then director of tourism, ‘a Gucci-clad minister by the name of Theo Duval’.
‘Why do we travel?’ he mused. ‘To feel in a pleasant way, to make a loop in the straight line of our existence, escaping into timelessness, a dreamlike state in which we are not reminded of our servitude.’
It was the first truly poor place I had ever visited and I was shocked to see how close to the brink of chaos people can survive, and frightened to see how fragile a veneer civilisation actually is.
The Comedians ends with one of the departing characters throwing a handful of coins from a car window, causing a dangerous riot amongst the scrabbling horde of street children – an image which we would later see magnified and repeated nightly on the news after the island was repeatedly hit by natural disasters.
‘When people come to Haiti,’ Aubelin Jolicoeur told me in the hotel bar as the tropical night-rains crashed down on the roof of the veranda outside, ‘they always try to make the story funny. They never take it seriously. All through the centuries we have been ostracised by the world because we were the first black republic. Always we are misunderstood and misinterpreted. There is a bad spell on Haiti.’
Tyrants and other interesting monsters (#ulink_5c05efe4-4d98-56c7-9fbe-90a9b94c7747)
I have to confess that the first (and sometimes only) criterion that I apply when deciding whether I want to do a book is whether I find the author and the story ‘interesting’. The most ‘interesting’ people, however, are not always the ones you would trust to care for your children, your grandmother or even your favourite puppy.
The people who are interesting are the ones who, at the time you come across them, inhabit a world you know nothing about and who know things that you want to find out. Sometimes those things can dwell on the darker, more secretive side of life.
Even before I tipped into my teenage years and became entranced by dark and complex characters like Lord Byron and the occultist, Aleister Crowley, I was intrigued by the horrific and indefensible. On a holiday to Spain with my parents I read Ernest Hemingway and became obsessed for a while with the glamour and horror of bullfighting and the matadors who seemed to me as dashing as real-life Scarlet Pimpernels. I nagged my parents into taking me to see El Cordobés (who was to bullfighting at the time what Elvis Presley was to popular music) and others fighting, and collected their autographs afterwards as if they were rock stars.
Before that Russell Thorndike’s series of books following the adventures of Dr Syn (alias ‘The Scarecrow’) made being a smuggler on the Romney Marshes seem like the most romantic pastime possible. Before that I dare say I formed my strong attachment to the sharp tang of marmalade thanks to the influence of Paddington Bear, who seemed to me more interesting and complex than Pooh Bear, who lusted after honey and lived close to where I was born. The familiar scenery of Ashdown Forest in Sussex could not compete in my imagination with Paddington’s mysterious past in ‘Darkest Peru’.
These days I guess it might be Grand Theft Auto or internet porn that first introduces impressionable young boys to the other side of good.
To me, ‘interesting’ still means people the like of which I have not come across before, or people who have lived lives that I do not yet know anything about.
Had a charismatic young German leader contacted me in the twenties and asked me to help with a book he was planning, tentatively entitled Mein Kampf, I might well have skipped over as naively as a Mitford sister to see what the fuss was all about. Lord knows how long it would have been before the penny dropped and I realised the full horror of what this strange little man was actually talking about and I would then have ended up as deep in the soup as the unfortunate P. G. Wodehouse. I might have been equally tempted by a ticket to China to volunteer to help Chairman Mao knock his thoughts into shape for the infamous Little Red Book.
Extremes of evil are as interesting as extremes of goodness. Extremes of wealth are as interesting as extremes of poverty. Without the bad guys there would be virtually no drama and no storylines strong enough to hold anyone’s attention, no vampires or zombies or serial killers. Life is indeed a bitch.
Lunching with Imelda Marcos (#ulink_c5f7fa83-2626-5712-bcde-8515c207aec7)
Imelda Marcos was the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the President of the Philippines, but she had a vacuous glamour all of her own, which was shored up by a glossy public relations machine designed to distract attention from the fact that she and her husband were allegedly fleecing their already poor country of record-breaking sums of money.
She arrived for lunch at one of Manila’s showiest restaurants in a swirl of media attention, immaculately groomed and empty behind the eyes. Just the fact that she was taking lunch in public would be enough to ensure that all the local news programmes would carry the story. One of the many titles she had been awarded by her husband was Governor of Metropolitan Manila (along with Minister of Human Settlement, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary). Her husband’s health was known to be failing and it was said that she was effectively the acting President. There was also speculation at that time that if he were to die, she and her husband’s trusted military adviser would seize power together.
The organisers of the lunch, and indeed of the whole trip, had been a little vague about what they hoped would come from this meeting. Their brief seemed to be to promote the Philippines as a destination and the first couple as glorious, benevolent rulers.
During the lunch, with every spoonful of food being filmed for the edification of the hungry viewing public, she said absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever and it was entirely unclear whether anyone had actually managed to make her understand that they were thinking of asking her to write a book. Her face was as devoid of expression as it was of wrinkles or blemishes. It was like sitting opposite a lovingly carved and polished religious icon, reverentially draped in designer clothes.
The Marcos family were overthrown a few years later and although it was found that they had stolen many billions of dollars from the people it was the discovery of Imelda’s collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes which stuck most vividly in people’s minds, an almost comic illustration of the superficiality of those who seek power and wealth for its own sake.
Afternoon tea with Mrs Mubarak (#ulink_db224eca-8202-562c-8ca8-55a635725497)
The man from the embassy insisted that it would be worth my while coming to London to meet his Minister of Information. He wouldn’t tell me which embassy he was from or why this minister wanted to talk to me, but he managed to make me curious to find out more. The Minister was going to be staying at the Grosvenor House, one of the biggest and grandest hotels in Park Lane. I was scheduled to join him in the lounge for morning coffee.
The Minister and his officials were holding court around a large coffee table in front of a flaming log fire. His children, who were also staying as part of the entourage, drifted back and forth behind the sofas with family messages from the rooms upstairs as he cautiously revealed details of his mission. He had two books that he wanted written: the autobiography of President Hosni Mubarak and the autobiography of Mrs Mubarak, who had been at the President’s side throughout his years in power as well as his time before that as Egypt’s Air Chief Marshal and then Vice President.
I had a number of projects on the go at the time and didn’t think that I would have the capacity to take on the President’s life story with all the political sensitivities and complications that would be bound to bog everything down. I was also pretty sure that he and I would find it hard to form a good working relationship. I didn’t know all that much about him personally at that stage but I knew enough about military rulers in general to be able to guess that we would not have much in common. I did think, however, that Mrs Mubarak’s view on life in power would be interesting. She was half Welsh and half Egyptian, her parents having met while her father was a medical student in Wales, where her mother was a nurse. She had been with her husband on the podium in 1981 when President Sadat was assassinated beside them, at which moment she was catapulted into the role of First Lady of Egypt.
Suddenly everything was a rush and I was instructed to be on the next flight to Cairo. I’d never been to Egypt, even though it was the scene of my parents’ first meeting during the Second World War. I owe my very existence to the hostess of a dinner party in Alexandria who decided to seat the young infantry Captain and the Wren (as members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service were known) next to one another that evening.
‘I don’t have a visa,’ I warned the embassy official.
‘Don’t worry,’ I was assured by my new friend, ‘everything will be taken care of when you arrive.’
Upon touchdown men in dark glasses and ear-pieces met me off the plane and I was whisked through separate channels at the airport and into a waiting Mercedes, which forced its way at speed through the clogged streets of the city, its siren wailing threateningly.
‘Don’t be scared,’ the man in the front passenger street grinned, ‘he is a highly trained police driver.’
‘I expect they said the same thing to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed that night in Paris,’ my wife said when I rang her later.
The driver certainly was very skilful and all through the ride I was uncomfortably aware of the glowering resentment emanating from the pedestrians forced to jump out of our way and the cars forced to pull over. It seemed like I had accidentally allowed myself to be recruited to the bullies’ gang in this hot, angry, overcrowded urban playground.
The hotel I had been put in was a fortress beside the Nile. Filled with cool air and wide open spaces it was a million miles from the heat and the crowds and the smells outside.
It was a couple of days before Mrs Mubarak was ready to receive me. More men with mobile phones and dark glasses arrived at the hotel in another limousine and as we drew closer to the palace the armed guards waved us through one layer of security after another, until we eventually arrived in a secluded courtyard outside a private front door, where a butler and the Minister of Information were waiting to usher me the final few yards.
The Minister seemed to have lost all the expansive self-confidence that he had shown when holding court at the Grosvenor House as he nervously briefed me on how I should behave in the presence of his First Lady. Tea was laid out in an elegant salon, served by a team of waiters in white jackets and black bow ties. Mrs Mubarak arrived as if borne on a fragrant cloud of graciousness and made conversation with all the non-committal charm of a woman who has been socialising at diplomatic levels for all of her adult life, groomed in much the same immaculate international style as Imelda Marcos.
The scion of a South American dictator’s family, who had reached the zenith of their powers in the sixties, was once trying to paint a picture for me of his mother and the other women in the family at that time. ‘They all wanted to look the same,’ he explained. ‘They all wanted to look like Jackie Kennedy.’ So many of our greatest visual historical references are created by the momentary whims of great fashion designers and hairdressers.
Inside Mrs Mubarak’s gilded salon it was impossible to imagine that we were still in the same hot and angry city that I had been exploring for the previous two days. She didn’t hesitate to give spontaneous answers to the stream of questions that I had, despite the fact that the Minister was squirming with discomfort next to me on the slippery silk of the sofa. There was so much that I wanted to know. It seemed like a story that a lot of women married to ambitious men might well be able to identify with, while at the same time giving a glimpse of what life was like behind palace walls for the edification of the billions who would always remain locked outside.
A few months later the green shoots of the Arab Spring started to break through and Mrs Mubarak and her husband would prove to be two of its most conspicuous casualties. From the palace he and their sons were put first under house arrest before being taken to a prison and then on to a courtroom. It was not at all certain that they would be allowed to live through the process. Eight months later neighbouring Libya’s transparently evil and increasingly demented ruler, Gaddafi, was stabbed to death by his people, his sons and other followers also executed, the full horror of their crimes exposed to the world, followed by the full horror of what would come after their falls.
In Egypt accusations flew that the Mubarak family had salted tens of billions of dollars away in places like Switzerland and the UK and that the President had failed to stop the killing of peaceful protestors. Tales of torture and oppression billowed out from the inferno of accusations. The world hailed the Egyptian ‘revolution’ as the most successful and democratic of processes. There was a general feeling of euphoria and hope that the whole area might be on the verge of new levels of personal freedom. Democratic elections followed but two years later there was a backlash. Terrible bloodshed erupted in Cairo once more and Hosni Mubarak was freed from jail with some talking of a return to power. It would have been interesting to have got to know the family better before their spectacular fall from grace.
Filthy lucre (#ulink_ce11f129-0004-586c-b4a5-3213c06fa69d)
It’s vulgar to talk about money, I know, but it’s so interesting to know how other people manage and to draw comparisons, which is invidious, but we’ve all got to earn the stuff somehow and if no one talks about it how do we ever learn what’s going on?
The first criterion for considering any project is always whether I find it interesting enough to spend several months of my life thinking and writing about it. But there always has to be a second criterion too – can the project be made to pay in some way?
The moment you decide that you are going to earn your living as a freelance writer (or a freelance anything for that matter), you condemn yourself to a lifetime of thinking about money. Every day you will find yourself frantically doing sums in your head when you should be thinking about something more productive, trying to reconcile the money that you think you are going to be earning in the next month or two with the bills that you know for sure are going to be coming in.
You have only a limited number of hours in every day and so you cannot waste too many of them on speculative projects that don’t work out. But at the same time you know that it is often the speculative projects, the biggest gambles, that produce the most dramatic results. But which ones? There is no way of knowing. Can you afford to do ten speculative books in the hope that one of them will prove to be a bestseller and compensate if the other nine fail to earn a bean? These are the questions that will be haunting you as you try to get to sleep at night, and will still be there when you wake up in the morning, and linger around in the background for most of the hours in between.
As you get older and take on family responsibilities the calculations grow more urgent and more hours of work have to be found at just the moment when other demands on your time are increasing. Sometimes you must choose projects with good commercial potential over those with more literary appeal. Sometimes you must tilt the telling of a story in ways that might not be to your personal taste in order to appeal to as wide a market as possible. You can blame the commercial demands of the publisher for such lapses if you like, but the truth is you stand to gain as much from increased sales and happier readers as they do.
Some writers escape from the financial treadmill when they hit upon an unexpected seam of gold (Harry Potter, Fifty Shades, etc.), others supplement their writing with earnings from broadcasting, journalism or university teaching. Yet more treat writing as a sideline, being primarily professors, chefs, actors or television presenters. If you do none of these things, concentrating on the writing of books as your sole source of income, you are going to have to grow ruthless in your self-discipline both in the projects that you agree to take on and in the hours that you work. It is a fabulous way to earn a living, but keeping the money coming in is grindingly and relentlessly distracting.
One of the sums that I used to use to try to cheer myself up on bad days was to extrapolate out possible future earnings by assuming they would continue to rise at the same level as in the past. Quite early on I had a particularly good year in which I managed to make twice as much as the year before. To avoid writing whatever it was I was meant to be writing, I immediately wasted my time drawing up a chart showing how much I would be earning in the future if I continued along the same line, doubling my income every year. By doing that you can go from £20,000 a year to over £20 million a year in just ten years.
I managed to remain quite excited by this prospect for some time, despite my wife’s scepticism as to whether I had any grasp at all on the economic realities of life. The following year, however, I was back down at a figure somewhere between the previous two years and new graphs had to be thought up in order to remain optimistic.
The sums that publishers sometimes bandy around as advances can also be deceptive. If a publisher offers a quarter of a million pound advance it sounds like a lottery win, and feels like one for as long as it takes before you actually go away and do the sums. If the project is ghostwritten then that figure is going to be divided between two people and probably an agent will be taking 15 per cent as well. It will then be pointed out that the publisher wants two books for that money, so the money halves again and will be paid out in bits and pieces over the next two years, which comes out at £50,000 a year each for two years before tax. It’s certainly a nice wage, but no longer looks quite so much like a lottery win. If the book then takes off there may well be royalties down the line, but more often than not the advance is the end of the story.
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