Confessions of a Ghostwriter

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

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

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

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

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

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.