Confessions of a Ghostwriter

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

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

Copyright

Dedication

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

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘Ghostwriter for Hire’

I placed the small ad in The Bookseller, 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

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

‘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

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 The Bookseller – ‘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

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’

‘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.