Ghosting Read online

  Before long he was being fêted as the man who had unlocked the mystery of half the human race for the good of the world. The Times serialised the book for a whole week, and the author embarked on a promotional tour, simpering and sashaying and emoting his way round the country. He gave countless interviews, all the while building momentum and making ever more magnificent claims for the undertaking: it was a work unlike any other, a noble enterprise representing the highest ideals of human achievement, throwing a unique light on the female sex at the end of the twentieth century; it would shatter preconceptions, it would shock and move and delight and alarm; it was a necessary book, vital for our quest into the social evolution of women, capable of filling the terrible void in our empty lives; it was a cause whose time had come.

  One or two people were more doubtful. Mark Lawson, referring to the book as Women Talking Dirty, was perplexed by the compliance of Tiger's subjects, many of whom he described as “reluctant to converse with their own mothers without an appointment.” And Germaine Greer described the enterprise as the nadir of vanity publishing. She said she was “baffled” by Doris Lessing's participation. “Normally she's totally unapproachable and I'm flabbergasted that she was taken in by the pitch that this book is an important work on the evolution of women.” But even Ms. Greer admitted that Tiger would “probably get away with it.” She put her finger on the reason in an article she wrote for the Observer magazine:

  [the author's] effrontery is balanced only by his charm. The day I went to interview him, I had a badly blistered mouth, four broken teeth and one leg hugely swollen and leaking from an insect bite. The dog-like gaze of the brown eyes gave no hint that I looked anything other than adorable.

  The French edition, Elles, followed in due course. Photographs of Tiger alongside Béatrice Dalle, Isabelle Huppert and Em-manuelle Béart appeared in the French press under lurid headlines: ELLES DISENT TOUT—300 FEMMES RENCONTRéES ET éCOUTéES PAR UN SEUL HOMME. The magazine Marie-Claire bought the serial rights, publishing pages of juicy excerpts under the banner: L HOMME QUI, DANS LA VIE, A UNE PASSION, UNE SEULE: COMPRENDRE LES FEMMES. Tiger was in heaven.

  The interview with Edith Cresson proved to be the most controversial. When she rose to become Prime Minister of France in 1991, Tiger sold the unabridged interview to the Observer newspaper. Her claims that Anglo-Saxon men were not interested in women, that they lacked the passion of their Gallic counterparts, and that one in four was gay—“something you cannot imagine in the history of France”—created a new froideur in Anglo-French relations. It even gave rise to a question being tabled in the House of Commons. “Mrs. Cresson has sought to insult the virility of the British male,” protested Tony Marlow, a Tory MP and father of five children. All the newspapers covered the furore, and fired insults across the Channel. It was another triumph for the interviewer extraordinaire.

  The Women book, as Tiger had predicted, did take my mind off things. And the £8500 bonus I received had helped to ease my financial situation. The immense workload, however, combined with lack of sleep, had taken its toll on my health. The months after publication were marked by one illness after another, and in the early summer of 1988 I was laid low for two weeks with a streptococcal infection.

  At around the same time, my mother had fallen and broken her arm—not an obvious cause for alarm. But when I visited her with the children there was an uncharacteristic vagueness about her. In response to quite simple questions she looked vacant and uncomprehending, and she seemed scarcely to recognise her grandchildren. “How long has she been like this?” I asked my father outside in the garden. But he was evasive, also defensive. “There's nothing the matter with her,” he said. “She's just tired.” When I got home I rang my mother's GP and told her the story. She hadn't noticed anything but promised to make a house call. Within twenty-four hours my mother was admitted to hospital. Tests showed that she had an abnormal parathyroid function, which in turn had released too much calcium into the blood and led to her confused state. By the time I visited her in hospital a day or two later she was completely deranged, hallucinating wildly and terribly distressed.

  “No one must know about this,” said my father. “We can't say to anyone.”

  “But she's ill,” I said. “It's not her fault.”

  “I'm telling you—no one must know, and that's the end of the matter.”

  The consultant said that it would be possible to operate, but only when she was well enough to cope with the operation—perhaps in a few weeks. She was put on an intravenous drip and her confusion gradually lessened, but not enough for my father to allow visitors from outside the family. Meanwhile, though I had recovered from the strep throat, a strange rash had begun to appear on my body—just arms and legs at first but definitely spreading. Since there was such a lot to think about—children, job, mother in hospital miles away—I more or less ignored it. There was also a new worry: the bank was threatening to repossess our house. Although I had kept up the mortgage payments, my ex-husband had borrowed against the house and it now looked as if the debt might be called in.

  Before long, my whole body was inflamed and itching and pustulous. My GP arranged a speedy appointment with a skin specialist at the local hospital and, since the school holidays had started, the children came with me. When my name was called, I left them playing with Lego in the waiting room. As soon as the doctor saw me he asked if I had recently had streptococcal pharyngitis. It turned out that my rash was a textbook case of something called “guttate psoriasis,” a form of psoriasis that can be triggered by this virulent infection.

  “Can you fix it?” I asked.

  “Yes, but you'll have to stay in hospital for three to four weeks.”

  I told him this was impossible—my mother was ill, the schools were out, and besides, I had a job.

  “If you wait till the end of the school holidays the condition will only get worse, and then it will mean six to eight weeks in hospital.”

  He said he would reserve a bed in his dermatology unit straightaway and suggested I let my husband make the necessary practical arrangements. To spare any embarrassment, I didn't enlighten him.

  As soon as I came out of the consulting room, Emily asked me what was wrong. I had told the children there was no need to worry, but she didn't believe me and was on the lookout for anything ominous. I explained what the doctor had told me.

  “You should go straightaway,” said Emily. “I can look after the others.” She was all of eleven years old.

  At home I phoned round friends but no one could take all three children, certainly not for several weeks. And the children wanted to stay together. In desperation I contacted my sister-in-law in Orkney and she heroically got on the next boat with her own two children and made the long journey to Fife to look after mine. I promised them they could come to Dundee every day to see me in hospital; there was already a rota of volunteer drivers. I then visited my mother—her hospital was miles away in the opposite direction—and told her it was perhaps best if I didn't see her for a while since I thought I had a cold coming on. Lastly I phoned Tiger to tell him the news—he wished me well and thanked God that it hadn't happened during the Women book. “Can you IMAGINE?” he said. “It would have been a TOTAL DISASTER!” I also told him about the threat of repossession.

  “How much do you need?”

  “Enough to buy out my husband and secure the house.”

  “Don't worry—we will arrange a company loan. It's perfectly legal and it's interest free. You can pay it back out of your salary each month. Just concentrate on getting well.”

  This was only one of several staggering acts of kindness during that time.

  In hospital, treatment started immediately and I was plastered from head to toe in a thick gunge, like the wretched Marlow in Dennis Potter's Singing Detective. My fellow inmates fell into two groups: scaly and scabby or, like me, red and suppurating. I passed the time gawping ghoulishly at the festering bodies of other women—mercifully this was be
fore the days of mixed wards—and comparing them with my own. But mostly I lay on my greasy bed, feeling unclean and remembering Sunday School readings about biblical plagues.

  One evening, after I had been there for about a week, I was sitting with the other patients watching horrific pictures on the television news. An oil rig was ablaze in the North Sea—the Piper Alpha—and nearly two hundred lives had been lost. As we sat in silence, transfixed by the horror of it all, a nurse appeared and told me there was a telephone call for me. It was from the hospital in Kirkcaldy My mother was dead.

  The book on women marked the beginning of my time as amanuensis. It was a move sideways from translation and seemed to me to be on the same activity spectrum—catching the voice of the author and being a conduit for his creation. From the ranks in the imperial court I had risen unexpectedly to become Minister of the Pen. Tiger and I collaborated well together and it suited my circumstances perfectly to be able to carry out my duties from home. I felt lucky to have the job and didn't mind burning the midnight oil occasionally to meet deadlines.

  Tiger had developed a taste for interviewing. He decided the next book would be a collection of in-depth interviews with prominent men—Harold Acton, Edmund White, Raymond Carr, Yehudi Menuhin, John Updike, Derek Hill, André Deutsch and about twenty others. “Of course, it's women I love, but I want to show I can do men also.” In some ways men proved to be more troublesome than women. Lord Goodman had agreed to be interviewed, but only after vetting Tiger over a sumptuous breakfast and hearing about other distinguished celebrities who would be appearing in the anthology. Just before the book went to the printers, however, he wrote to Tiger withdrawing his permission for publication on the grounds that Richard Ingrams was to be in the same volume. “It is inexcusable to have lured me with a number of respectable names, such as Lord Alexander and Lord Rees-Mogg,” he wrote, “only to withhold the fact that Mr. Ingrams was to be included in the book.” Evidently he had not forgiven the former editor of Private Eye for an alleged libel of him in the magazine. A placatory letter was sent to Lord Goodman reminding him of his avowed opposition to censorship and questioning the wisdom of bowing out in a pique. It worked, but his reply was designed to put Tiger in his place. “In view of your pathetic plea, I am prepared, albeit reluctantly, to allow the interview to appear.” As an example of staggering pomposity, Goodman's letter is on a par with Mr. Collins’ epistle to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, about which Elizabeth asks her father, “Can he be a sensible man, sir?” He answers, “No, my dear, I think not…”

  Read no history, said Disraeli, nothing but biography, and that's what I did to prepare for the interviews. Most of the interviewees had written autobiographies and I gorged on them. I loved formulating the questions, whether based on the research material or simply my own curiosity. We always prepared for an interview by going over the questions beforehand. I told Tiger what I had discovered about the person's life, explaining the reasoning behind some of the questions, and pointing out any sensitive or no-go areas. I always wanted more discussion time, but he was impatient to get it over with. These briefings became a form of jousting in which we both jabbed away, trying to get the edge on our opponent. “Let me just explain,” I would say, but would be cut back immediately with a side wound. “No, no! It's not necessary. I understand. You don't need to tell me.” Another lunge. “But it's important—there's something you really should know.” Then the counter-lunge: “It's OK. I know everything now. I'm very quick, you see.” And so it went on. I always had butterflies when I knew the interview was taking place, the sort of feeling you get when your children are sitting exams. I wanted him to do well and hoped he wouldn't fluff his lines. But I needn't have worried—he was always supremely confident. He gave the impression of having done his homework, and most people, flattered by his knowledge and interest, opened up to an astonishing degree.

  Over time we both got better at it. “We really are a fantastic team!” said Tiger. In the Telegraph, Bill Deedes compared his technique to that of a safebreaker, calling him “a dab hand with the skeleton keys” and “the smartest burglar in the business.” Tiger was ecstatic. “He called me a burglar!” he trilled. Certainly he had the knack of inspiring trust, and the results were often remarkable. On the technical side, as it were, I learned how to shape and pace the interview, and also to insert into Tiger's text certain typographical aids to help things along. He had difficulty with words ending in ism or asm—they came out as imsi and amsi—so I was careful to avoid any socialism or idealism or spasms or fanaticism. Inevitably the questions sounded “scripted,” too scrupulously prepared, but the formula seemed to work. Once the question had been asked, Tiger was content to sit back and listen, something the subjects seemed to like and readers found refreshing.

  Occasionally he fell on his face, usually when he bungled one of the questions, but generally he didn't know that he had and was therefore unaffected. It was I who cringed when I heard the tape. Once, in an interview with Julian Critchley, he misread “John Buchan” and asked a question based on the writings of a certain John Buchanan. “Buchanan?” said Critchley, taken aback. “Buchanan,” repeated Tiger in a fancy-not-knowing-who-Buchanan-is tone. Another time, as I listened to the interview with Lord Amery, I remember curling up into foetal position and rocking back and forth. At an exquisitely moving point, Tiger is speaking about Lord Amery's brother who had been hanged for treason in 1945. He quotes the words of the famous hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, who said that, of all the people he had executed, John Amery had been the bravest by far.

  “Did that make the pain all the harder to bear?” asks Tiger.

  A long pause.

  “No, I think it was appropriate. He was an Amery.”

  “He was a what?”

  Another pause.

  “He was an Amery.”

  “What did you say he was?”

  But the rough spots didn't greatly matter. What mattered was that Tiger had the talent for getting people to talk, and newspapers and magazines were keen to buy. There seemed to be no end to the number of people willing to put themselves through the Tiger treatment, and no one ever asked to censor the material or objected to anything that was published. Which was surprising in view of some of the eye-wateringly frank confessions.

  The more interviews I edited, the more I noticed that even when the subjects didn't know the answer to the question being asked—had clearly never even considered it—they invariably felt obliged to give an account of themselves, and perhaps a more definite account than they genuinely felt. Someone who might have had no particular position on marriage and fidelity, for example, could actually sound as if his mind was made up. Tom Stoppard says somewhere that interviews should come marked with a warning: This profile falls in the middle truth range. By which he probably meant that the whole truth, the nothing-but that we swear to tell in the witness box, is a rare sort of beast. In interviews, perhaps even in most of our day-to-day dealings, we put forward versions of ourselves that are short of the whole truth.

  The versions are interesting nonetheless. This is Enoch Powell describing how it felt to be a politician:

  It was rather like Luther in his reformation hymn: “I hear the nightingale in the dark hedge, the dawn is coming …” That is to say, I sing in the hedge to my fellow countrymen in case the song I want to sing is a song which they also want to hear.

  And here is Lady Soames, the only one of Churchill's children whose marriage survived, on the subject of infidelity:

  I'm always very sorry when I see that lack of fidelity has caused a marriage to crash to the ground. Fidelity seems to me to be a very important ingredient in marriage; it's part of the commitment. But equally I think it's in certain people not to be able to be faithful, and one must hope then that they are married to partners who can sustain that. For my own part I would have hoped not to know about it; and if I had, I would have hoped to keep it in proportion.

  Tiger was drawn to people who had
been involved in Hitler's Germany. He interviewed Diana Mosley at her house in France and corresponded with her for years afterwards. During the interview she managed to reduce the scourge of Nazism to fond, jaunty reminiscences about Hitler—“He may have been cruel, but he wasn't mean.” She also said that the Jews behaved “very badly” towards her husband, Oswald Mosley:

  In the end they practically made him into an anti-Semite. He never was one, it just wasn't in his nature, but he did think they were a perfect pest.

  Tiger also travelled to Dublin to interview the writer Francis Stuart, who had spent the Second World War years in Berlin, from where he broadcast to Ireland on behalf of the Reich.

  The basis of his hostility to the British was

  … their attitude of moral superiority. At one stage the Allied leaders, including Churchill, met in mid-Atlantic on a battleship and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” That to me was so shocking.

  Tiger was spellbound by him and afterwards searched for first editions of all his books. His keenest fascination, however, was reserved for the controversial film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl. After meeting her at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1991, he bought the English language rights to her memoirs. “She has such charisma,” he said. “She hypnotised me.”

  The German edition was over a thousand pages long, and had to be reduced by about a third to make it financially viable. Tiger asked me to work on the cuts and agree them with Leni Riefenstahl. At this stage a serious problem came to light. We had been told that there was an English translation—Riefenstahl herself had commissioned it—but it turned out to be deeply flawed, so full of clichés and mistakes and infelicities that it was virtually unpub-lishable. There was no budget to do a new translation, and the work would therefore have to be done in-house.