There was a good reason for that, as I was about to discover. None of the attendant bores was quite as boring as Hef himself. He gave me a lot of his time, and I have to say he spoke honestly. We filmed for hours and I never caught him fudging an issue once. I had a key question: if this wasn’t commodified sex, what was it? He had the right answer: everyone was a volunteer. But even when he spoke a useful and subversive truth, he had a way of putting it that sent you to sleep. Uniquely among all the American talking heads I ever interviewed, he couldn’t say the simplest thing in a way you could remember. You couldn’t remember it even while he was saying it. The middle of the sentence had already left the beginning of the sentence lost in the distance, and the end of the sentence was slower to arrive than a school holiday. We were in desperate trouble. This interview with the proprietor was our main event, and it was dead on arrival.
The only way to save the movie was to up the emphasis on the local colour. Hefner’s current ‘lady’ took us to the gymnasium to show us how she stayed in shape by working out. She ran slowly for two minutes on a treadmill. She lifted a couple of tiny barbells. Hefner, in a silk robe, was in attendance to tell us she favoured a ‘positive attitood’. Struck by a frightening burst of clairvoyance, I could see our audience falling senseless out of the couch as if their television sets were emitting nerve gas. Thus it was that I dived into the giant outdoor Jacuzzi to join three of the Playboy gatefold girls for an en masse interview that yielded almost no verbal information beyond the fact that they were almost as harmless as I was. On top of that, or rather on top of those, they were wearing both halves of their bikinis. One of the three was quite bright, with a sardonic streak. By no coincidence, she came from England. Even she, however, was keen to point out that it was the team that mattered, not the individual. The whole aquatic encounter couldn’t have been more anodyne to the ear. To the eye, of course, it looked as if I was offending against the most cherished tenets of a whole swarm of male television critics, paragons dedicated to the defence of civilization against the rising tide of frivolity. I was no longer in business as one of those, but there were plenty of hungry young men who were, and when they saw the finished movie they combined to give it a drubbing. I had spent the whole movie arguing that Hef’s dream of sexual liberty was irredeemably childish but here were the pictures to suggest I shared it. The sequence was used as a stick to beat me with for years afterwards. My only defence was that I had thought the whole notion of joining a trio of Hef’s glazed inflatable nymphs for a pointless plunge in the bubble-bath to be self-evidently ridiculous. When they saw the programme transmitted, even my family agreed with that. One at a time and in unison. Of all the Postcards we ever shot, this was the one most patently short of material, and we would have been better off scrapping it before it left the editing room. But that option was never open. Too much money had been spent going in, so it was just too bad if I looked stupid on the way out.
I shouldn’t give the impression that everything we did happened in Postcard form. There were other formats asking to be developed. One of them was the star interview special, filmed abroad like a Postcard, but on a far smaller budget. It was a logical development, springing, as developments so often do, from lessons taught by an earlier project that had gone wrong. While at LWT we had done a Postcard programme about the opening of a new resort called Sanctuary Cove, in Queensland. The show had been mostly a dead duck, a condition proved by the only part of it that came alive. Frank Sinatra had flown in for the opening-night concert and I had briefly interviewed him. Access was tricky. It would have been a lot easier to approach Colonel Gaddafi. Sinatra’s lawyers checked out every item in a contract an inch thick. There was a clause saying that the red carpet between Sinatra’s Portakabin dressing room and the stairs to the back of the stage had to be fastened down with fasteners not more than six inches apart. One of the lawyers got down on his knees with a ruler. My job was to do the public-address announcement just before Sinatra went on. After hours of drafting, I had a brilliantly compressed and poetically cadenced couple of paragraphs ready in which I evoked his stature and significance. Another of the lawyers read my document, handed it back to me, and then handed me a piece of paper. ‘Say this,’ he said, ‘and only this.’ There was a single typewritten line. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Frank Sinatra.’ (The lawyer was right, incidentally: as I found out much later, a solo performer, if he is introduced by an enthusiast, is robbed of the opportunity to start at his own pace.) But before I said my line I was granted entry to the star’s dressing room for an interview which, I was told, would last exactly five minutes. It was a daunting prospect but I asked him the right opening question. ‘The words of the songs have always mattered so much to you. Is that why you don’t sing many of the songs being written now?’ He said, ‘Good question,’ and he was off. It was the right five minutes and it turned the rest of the movie to dust.
15. FOCUS ON THE NAME
It took us years to realize that this hard lesson presented a new opportunity. If the whole show could be an interview at that level, we wouldn’t need anything else. At the BBC we began to put this principle into practice. With only one location, filming could be all over in a couple of days, although the format took a great deal of preparation, so as not to waste the time of the stars with any questions that they couldn’t answer, or, more important, wouldn’t. Contrary to received media opinion, there is no point in needling celebrities with awkward questions. The adversarial approach hardly ever works, because the subject can see it coming, and switches to automatic defence. With a forbidden topic, an indirect approach is more likely to work, or at any rate look less intrusive when it doesn’t. Katharine Hepburn became available for the usual reason – she had a stiff movie to push – and we flew to New York to interview her in her house in the Turtle Bay area of the Upper East Side. It’s the kind of district where Stephen Sondheim is your next-door neighbour and all the pedigree dogs hang out at the same deli. We had been told in advance that the two no-go areas were Howard Hughes, who had once loved her, and Spencer Tracy, whom she had never stopped loving. Ruling these two out left us with almost nobody to discuss except Nick Nolte, her co-star in the stiff movie. Even there, there were things I couldn’t say. ‘Have you noticed his close facial resemblance to the Duchess of York?’ It would not have been a good question.
But the question I did ask proved to be the right one. I put it in the form of a statement, which she could take or leave. ‘I’m not going to try to draw you on the subject of Howard Hughes, but some people say that falling in love with you was the only sane thing he ever did.’ She liked that, and told me some of the story. I was the first ever to find out that when he took off under the bridges of the East River in a seaplane with only one passenger, she was at the controls. ‘Did you know how to fly?’ ‘No, but he told me what to do.’ She also told me why Hughes was so defensive. ‘Howard was deaf.’ Privately I thought that Hughes had been a particularly noxious freelance fascist, but Hepburn’s insistence on his qualities was touching. After that, a direct question about Tracy seemed only natural. ‘Tracy had everything, including you. So why did he drink so much?’ Her answer – ‘Tracy found life difficult’ – was the start of something fascinating, a description of how the high living standards of the star system were designed to hold people prisoner. She expatiated without effort on the whole subject of how the declining bargaining power of an actress, due to age, could be offset only by the kind of leverage she was the first to achieve by actually owning the rights to the Broadway version of The Philadelphia Story, so that it couldn’t be filmed without her. Katharine Hepburn was a very interesting woman. At that stage, the possibility that Marlene Dietrich and Mercedes de Acosta had been among her lovers was not generally known, and I wouldn’t have asked her about it anyway. While people are alive, their private life is private if they wish it to be: it’s a principle that was already vanishing from the world, but I believed in it, and still believe in it now. The great lady had be
en generous with her time and thought. We had enough to go on. While we were packing up, she finished making a batch of chocolate brownies and gave me a paper bag full of them to take away, having once again judged her man well. How lucky they all were to have been loved by a woman so brave, brilliant, funny and still beautiful even as the last of her youth melted into time.
Katharine Hepburn was a study in how to age gracefully. Roman Polanski was a study in what not to do when you never want to grow old at all. Still preferring domicile in Paris to the stretch he would have had to serve in jail if he had returned to Los Angeles, Polanski had just brought out an autobiography which stated explicitly that he had indeed had sex with an underage girl, but that it had been consensual. It was interesting that he seemed unable to get his clever head around the concept that if someone is under the age of consent it doesn’t matter if she consents or not. But it was much more interesting that this man had directed a string of important films, one of them being Chinatown, which I had judged to be a political vision of the modern world. I couldn’t help feeling that we were all better off if a man like that was living in comfort near the Avenue Montaigne rather than bouncing off the walls in Chino prison. There was plenty of anecdotal evidence to warrant his billing as the five-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. But his pint-sized frame was packed with talent, and – a rare thing, this – he had a mind to match his gift. (The memorably tragic ending of Chinatown was his idea, not the writer’s.) We flew to Paris to set up the interview in L’Amis Louis, a tiny bistro much favoured by Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and others among that intellectual elite of Hollywood stars who never flew in a commercial airliner and always regarded the menu as an incitement to order something it did not contain. Interviewing Polanski over lunch was, as I remember, my idea. If it was, I was dead wrong. Always at the least desirable moment, different dishes arrived for hours on end. Polanski was very funny when he showed me how to hold a snail with the tongs provided. I sort of knew, but it was more fun to pretend I didn’t. ‘Would you like me to eat it for you?’ He was directing me. What he couldn’t do was follow the movie into the cutting room, where, predictably enough – so why hadn’t I predicted it? – the order of our conversation had to be rearranged to make sense. So all the action was rearranged along with the conversation, and we ended up with a sequence of events in which the audience didn’t have to be eagle-eyed to notice that the great director and his interviewer had begun a meal with coffee and ended it with snails for dessert.
But Polanski played the awkward question straight. ‘I knew you were going to ask that,’ he said, and very plausibly argued that if I had seen the girl in her make-up I wouldn’t have believed that she was under age either. He rather spoiled things, however, by further contending that all men are switched on by under-age girls. Speaking as one who isn’t, and who doesn’t like the men who are, I have to say that I found him hard to admire for that. But unless the results were on the public record – which his California case most decidedly was – then his feelings were his business. I felt able to say, though, on air, that I could quite understand how anyone who had seen, as he had seen as a child, his own mother being taken away to be gassed, might be quite likely, in adult life, to be on the lookout for all the love he could get. But the idea that his personality might be entirely determined by his past was not one he seemed ready to entertain. (At this distance, having been subject to the attentions of a few amateur psychologists myself, I am inclined to think he was right.) I didn’t think, however, that there could be any doubt that his childhood had affected his creative outlook. I had no idea that Polanski would one day make one of the great films on the subject of the disaster that had formed his vision. Neither had he. But you can be sure that The Pianist, a towering achievement for both him and its writer, Ronald Harwood, would never have happened in such a magisterial form if Polanski had stayed put in California to face the music. At best, he would have resumed his interrupted Hollywood career, and the man playing Chopin in the Warsaw ghetto would have been Keanu Reeves. Competent no doubt, but not quite the same thing.
In Paris, even with such a short schedule, there were still a few hours of downtime. Sitting outside my favourite cafe in the Rue de l’Université, where I still write at least part of all my books, I found myself working on the opening chapter of a novel about a young man from Tokyo having his life wrecked by a wild young woman in London. Perhaps Polanski’s story had something to do with that, but really the hero, as usual, was myself. The best way to disguise yourself when creating a fictional hero is not to play down his abilities but to play them up. Give him prodigious abilities and nobody will believe it’s you. The hero of Brrm! Brrm! (bad choice of title: in America it was called The Man from Japan, which didn’t help either, but at least people had some idea of what they weren’t buying) had prodigious abilities in martial arts, which I definitely have not, although I once chopped a milk bottle in half by accident. A key theme in the book was the role played by sexual desire. The plot turned on the fact that every attractive woman in London wanted the hero. I have no direct knowledge of what that’s like, but I do have direct knowledge of what it’s like wishing it to be true. I think most men have, and especially when they physically don’t look as if they should. One such man was Luciano Pavarotti. In his earlier incarnation he had been built like a footballer and the girls had gone for him. In his later incarnation he was built like a housing development but he was still going for the girls.
This was common knowledge but nobody sane thought less of him. For one thing, the continuing power and beauty of his voice made his amatory pretensions very plausible: intelligent women fall in love through their ears, not through their eyes. For another, he was a charming man. When he appeared on television he converted viewers to opera fans by the thousands, just from the way he sang, and millions more loved him just for the way he spoke. He was especially adorable when his command of English showed its limitations. Broadcast to the world, his personal tribute to my compatriot Dame Joan Sutherland was characteristic. ‘Thank you, Joan, from the heart of my bottom.’ But there was nothing approximate about his intelligence. Full of stories and self-deprecating wisdom, he made a perfect talk-show guest if you could get him. Getting him, however, took strategy on a military scale. We booked him as a guest on the weekly show by conceding to a set of requirements that made sense only if you saw the question of his bulk from his angle, i.e. from the inside.
Pavarotti happened to be in the UK at the time so he wouldn’t be needing a private jet. But he would be needing to get to the studio. A BMW 8 series was specified. (He could get in and out of a 7 series but he thought he didn’t look good doing so.) The dressing room would have to be of the stated dimensions at least. (A blueprint of an aircraft hangar was duly appended.) Since he was currently on a diet, no food except fruit would be required for the dressing room, but there would have to be enough for a regiment. (From my own experience of dieting, I recognized the foible by which, restricted to certain foods, one eats twice as much of them, so as to diet more seriously.) When on set to be interviewed, he would have to be seated behind a table. We tried to get around this last part by making it a glass table but Pavarotti’s minders spotted the trick and demanded a table of full opacity, the assumption evidently being that if the bottom half of their client’s bulk were to be concealed, the upper half would take on a closer resemblance to Mel Gibson. But when we finally got him into position he was terrific. His fellow guest was the maestro Zubin Mehta, an equally sharp intelligence and fully articulate in English. Mehta did an entertaining job of helping Pavarotti answer questions about the opera business, and I could have listened to them both all night. Judging from the ratings the audience felt the same. This was a long time before Mehta conducted Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and José Carreras in the first Three Tenors concert, so we were in at the start of the whole thing. It was a festival. It would have been an even bigger festival if the star guest had sung something but you coul
dn’t have everything. ‘Clivay, I enjoy it various much.’ That went down well at home, where my family were mad for the man.
Pavarotti had the invaluable gift of making you believe that he was giving you everything anyway, even when he wasn’t deploying the attribute which made him famous. The soul of his art lay in his generosity and he gave you that every time. In a social role, I was actually present at Covent Garden for the Joan Sutherland farewell gala. My younger daughter usually makes a point of having me ritually slain if I drag her into the story, but I forgive myself in advance this time because the story is more about Pavarotti than about her. Justifiably daunted by the very idea of a big starry night out, she had agreed to attend on the understanding that she would see her hero close up after formative years of worshipping him from afar. During the intermission Pavarotti was behind a table in the Crush Bar holding court. I took my daughter over to meet him. He held up his hand for a handshake and she made the shy, nervous young person’s response of failing to notice where her own hand was going. It knocked over a glass of red wine into his lap. He had a lot of lap to soak but there was more than enough wine to do the job. At that moment the great man would have had to show only the slightest sign of impatience and he would have destroyed her confidence for ever. But he did more than merely not doing that. He smiled like a happy grand piano and said that in the town where he was born, having wine spilled on you brought good luck. Then he kissed her hand. In what prayers I have left to me, I always make room for him.