Confessions of a Ghostwriter

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

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

‘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

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 …’

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

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

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

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.