Neither did President Bush ever say ‘Mission accomplished’ aboard an aircraft carrier after the quick defeat of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. The captain of the aircraft carrier hung up a banner with those words on it, and Bush was photographed in front of it while saying something to the contrary, namely that there was a hard road ahead. Similarly with the general perception that Bush said Nelson Mandela was dead when Mandela was still alive. Bush never said it. He was saying that any Nelson Mandela figure in Iraq was already dead because Saddam Hussein had killed him: a reasonable statement. Yet even after it was established that Bush had meant the reasonable thing and not the erroneous one, Jon Stewart, one of the sharpest US television front-men, kept the joke in because it was too good to leave out. This erosion of the concept of objective truth grows more disturbing all the time, but I don’t think that our first tentative experiments in deliberate distortion back in the 1980s were the cause. Fake news was for entertainment, real news was for information, and the first thing wouldn’t even have been effective unless the viewing public had a firm grasp of the second. Our viewers got the point and we were duly rewarded with their attention. They switched the show on again to get more. Buoyed up by this response, I got better at unifying the show’s written material with a consistent style, but it was a hard task to fulfil all on my own. I might have faltered under the load had I not been so convinced that my whole multiform enterprise depended on it.
The studio show’s overheads were covered in-house, so it was a cost-effective prospect for the channel as long as enough people watched it. That being so, the studio show paid for the special documentaries like the Postcard programmes, which would have been impossibly non-profitable had they been the only thing I did. The relationship between these two main kinds of production was to hold true wherever we went in the next two decades, from ITV and Channel 4 onward to BBC2 and BBC1, and finally into independent production, by which we made programmes principally for ITV, where we had started off. We would never have had the opportunity to navigate the full circle – or, to put it more crudely, to play both ends against the middle – if the studio shows had not been there to fund the adventure. It wasn’t a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was a case of keeping Peter healthy so that he could pay for Paul, his more refined but less employable elder brother.
8. ECONOMY OF EFFORT
This capacity to finance a fragile element by building up a bank with a more robust element was equally crucial in my continuing career as a writer. Jonathan Cape, in the person of its senior editor Tom Maschler, was ready to publish my books of essays, which didn’t really make any money, just as long as I went on writing autobiographies that did. My second book of memoirs, Falling Towards England, risked queering the pitch: it was set in the 1960s, which everyone supposed to have been a fun time, but the way I told it I wasn’t whooping it up at the party, I was shivering outside in the cold with my nose pressed to the glass. Luckily the public went for my story anyway, and Cape had renewed reason to go on publishing my less profitable essay collections just to keep me happy. Maschler was no profligate, but he was canny enough to know that a happy writer might write more books of memoirs and even a couple of novels that would get on the bestseller lists as Brilliant Creatures had done. That second hope was duly screwed when The Remake came out to be greeted by universal execration. One of the London reviewers kindly said that it wasn’t a real novel but it was more enjoyable than most novels. I would have settled for that, but he was the only critic in the country who said anything like it. The critic who said that The Remake was a boundary-busting excursion into the ironic formal possibilities of the post-modern novel was working for the Jerusalem Post.
None of this would have mattered if the public’s reaction hadn’t so exactly echoed the critical reception. The book tanked. Later on I was to learn that it had taken away some of the readership I had already acquired for my first novel, so that my third and fourth novels had to start out in a smaller market, populated by those who were not afraid of experimental novels. Most people, very sensibly, were. I remain proud of all four of my novels – indeed The Remake, the infectious catastrophe, has some stretches of writing in it that I would have to pedal hard to equal now – but there can be no doubt that as a total effort they barely featured in the black ink of Cape’s account books. Still, enough of my titles had been commercially successful to convince Maschler that it would be worthwhile publishing anything more marginal that I might come up with. Both to me and Cape, however, it was important that my books of essays would earn prestige even if they earned no money, because the publisher himself is always engaged in a balancing act: he wants some of his writers to be news stories in the heavy papers, so as to protect the house against the charge that its other writers are only there to please the crowd.
From that angle I was a reasonable prospect. I couldn’t complain about the critical reception of my non-fiction books. In the heavyweight journals they were usually given to the best-qualified reviewers and almost always taken seriously, to the extent that there were polite sighs of regret that I should be wasting my time on television. But exactly there lay the problem: a serious man wasting his time can easily find himself regarded as a timewaster trying to be serious. Most of the adult papers had already grown the arts equivalent of a gossip column by that stage and in these new message boards any coverage of my work always began with the assumption that a would-be Hamlet had been stripped of his paint to reveal the clown. Obviously I would be running this risk for as long as I tried to circle the ring with one foot on each horse. But there was no quick way out of it, because the relationship which applied in television between the studio show and the filmed specials, and which applied again, in the literary field, between popular writing and serious criticism, also applied, in my total working economy, between broadcasting and literature.
I was no economist, but even I could do the sums. Taken for all in all, my books did well enough, but if I had done nothing else then they would all have had to do well, and even better. Failing that, I would have been up against it, and my family along with me. My wife was a respected academic who would always be in demand from the leading universities, but an academic salary weighs only so much on the property market. The same is true for books, even when successful: getting overcommitted to property is one of the standard financial mistakes those writers make who get an early hit, and then discover, when the tax bills come in, that they are under fatal pressure to write another. It was television that made a civilized life possible for my family, and made it possible for me to write only from inner compulsion, and never to a market imperative. As a clincher, it was television that made it possible for me to go on writing poetry, ever and always at the heart of my desire. If I had done nothing except write books, there would have been no time for poems, because any poem pays less than nothing even when it earns you a cheque. In 1982, with the kind encouragement of Karl Miller, I had serialized a long ottava rima poem in the London Review of Books, of which he was then the editor; and Cape later published the poem as a slim hardback under the title of Poem of the Year; but the advance for the book would barely have bought me a sack of apples, and the royalties added up to a resounding zero. I still rate it as my best long poem and have never begrudged the months it took to compose, but financially it was less than a dead loss. Money and time are forms of each other, and there is no poem that does not cost the poet a hundred times what he gets paid for it. Poetry, the centre of my life, has always been the enemy of my material existence, and even now, after fifty years of writing it, it is still trying to put me out of business.
The foregoing disquisition might make it seem that I had everything weighed up. The opposite was true. I was working from instinct. Nowadays I sometimes get the credit, and often the condemnation, for having invented the idea of a multiple career, but I had no such idea in my mind, or even the time to think about it. Empire-building was the last thing I aspired to. For an empire you need a central stream of r
oyalties and residuals, like Dolly Parton, who could never have built Dollywood if she had not already sold millions of records, and would not now be giving gazillions of dollars away to charity if she had not first built Dollywood. Television paid well, but the era when programmes would go on selling forever on tape and disc had not yet arrived, and we were all paid upfront in what amounted to a permanent buy-out of our rights. (Benny Hill got rich from foreign sales because some condescending executive decided there would never be any, and tossed him the rights as a sweetener.) So it was a good deal but a limited one, and anyway, there was never any question of my having got into television by calculation. I got into it because I loved it, and I was well aware that I had been lucky to be given the opportunity. After all, I didn’t look the part.
Despite a rigorous programme of pounding myself into the floor at the gymnasium three times a week, I was permanently overweight by at least a stone. I was never really overweight enough for the journalists to call me ‘fat’, but when they called me ‘portly’ I had no comeback. The kind of journalists who think a word like ‘portly’ has a sprightly, irreverent ring to it haven’t really got any opinions worth bothering about, but I did my best not to give them an easy target. Also I thought I owed it to younger viewers not to scare them to death by the way I looked. I was working, however, with intractable physical material. Even had I slimmed to the proportions of Clint Eastwood, nothing would have coaxed my eyes out of their deep cavities: when I smiled on screen, it was the silent agony of a man facing a sandstorm. My hair, thin on top, had to be cut close if my head were not to look like a hard-boiled egg being squeezed in an astrakhan glove. Thus shorn and shaved, my features had the general air of belonging to a bureaucrat whose idea of a thrill might be to install a new accounting system in a regional office. This appearance was reinforced by the blue suit that was introduced for Clive James on Television and continued into the studio show. Not through inertia, but from inspiration on Richard’s part, it was decided to retain the blue-suit look for the Postcard programmes. Later I coined a term for them – ‘blue-suit documentaries’ – but as usual there was no defining plan going in, only a descriptive term that we applied later. Wearing the blue suit on location simply made sense. If I wore it in every scene, any shot could be cut into any sequence, thereby providing a useful reservoir of coverage. In hot locations, when I had to abandon the jacket and roll up the sleeves of my blue shirt, we maintained that look in as many scenes as possible, for the same reason. Wittgenstein once told his new landlady that he didn’t mind what he ate as long as it was always the same. For the presenter of filmed documentaries, the same rule applies: it doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you don’t change it. Two identical copies of the blue suit went with me to Dallas.
Of the several American cities we made films in during our first decade, Dallas undoubtedly was the least interesting, but it was a hot prospect for the network, because the executives had not forgotten that I had made a running gag out of the American television soap opera of the same name when I was a critic, and the time was not far in the past when even the BBC made a news story out of J. R. Ewing getting shot. By the time we got to the real Dallas, however, it had left the television Dallas looking like a hick town. There weren’t many men wearing cowboy boots like J.R. and there were absolutely no women staggering around sloshed like Sue Ellen with her lipglossed mouth working away as if she were giving oral sex to the atmosphere. Instead there was business efficiency on all sides. Here was a sunbelt city as a new model for globalized America. Clusters of tall glass buildings hummed with computers processing electronic money. Everything was highly organized except us, partly because Terence Donovan was in charge.
Richard had forgiven Donovan for his slapdash approach to our film about the Paris catwalks because the results had been so wonderfully glossy. For Dallas, Donovan, shuffling hugely on Richard’s carpet, promised that he would put a clapperboard on every shot, so that the editor would not be once again reduced to dementia as he tried to synch up sound and picture. Donovan remembered that promise but he forgot all the others. He wasn’t dishonest, he was simply inspired, but you don’t want a director to be inspired until after he has done the housekeeping, and this elementary requirement was one that Donovan could rarely bring himself to meet, because he was so easily bored. About fifty floors up in a glass skyscraper freshly built by the magnate Trammel Crowe, we interviewed one of the sons of Trammel Crowe in his office, which looked out on a panorama of other skyscrapers, many of them also built by Trammel Crowe. The skyline thus provided the perfect backdrop for interviewing the favoured heir of a man who was building a city, but when I looked back to see what Donovan was up to I could tell by the angle of the camera that it wasn’t pointing at the buildings. After the first change of magazines, I took a squint through the eyepiece and found out that it was pointing at a bare stretch of Arkansas. While the son of Trammel Crowe took the kind of phone call in which phrases like ‘Meet you in Geneva’ crop up with no artificiality at all, I whispered to Donovan that we needed the buildings.
‘Nar, we don’t want that.’
I tried to tell him that we did want that.
‘Nar, everybody does that.’
Thus was the problem laid bare, loud and clear. Donovan didn’t like shooting anything ordinary. When the footage of the son of Trammel Crowe interview got back to England, Richard took a look at it after it came out of the bath and he went off his head. Donovan got the news down the phone and behaved better after that, but he was always better at capturing the look of the thing than at getting the story. Luckily the look of the thing was a local form of hard currency. The fine women of Dallas spent much of their lives being ‘best dressed’ for charity events, which took place at the rate of three or four per week. Some of these best-dressed women, notably the beautiful Nancy Brinker, who was married to the inventor of the Chili’s chain, had started out as models anyway. But they were all classy numbers and their frocks were beyond belief: Chanel, Givenchy and Dior couture originals were their equivalent of combat fatigues. (Armed with my experience of the Paris catwalks, I got a lot of traction with the women by being able to name the designers without asking, but any advantage was offset by the effect on the men listening in, who automatically assumed that I was a faggot.) The preposterous intensity of it all made for terrific pictures, and satire could not have improved on the endless speeches, in which everyone at the event was thanked individually for her donations to charity, as if people with billions giving away thousands were running Jesus Christ a close second in the magnitude of their sacrifice. I have always tried to be suitably respectful of the way the elite in any American big city centres the whole of social life on charity. A great deal of money flows towards good causes. But those involved, when they are not attending the fund-raising events in the evening, do nothing else with the day except get ready to attend, and there is little energy left over for what you might call the life of the mind.
Most of the conversations were about hair. Radiantly well-groomed women talked strident balderdash about what was happening on top of their heads. Being American instead of English, they talked it louder when the camera was on them. Donovan got the shots. But at a society party held in the hospitality room of the hotel where we were staying – which just happened to be Dallas’s number-one boutique hotel, the Mansion on Turtle Creek – he forgot to get the shot which would tie me together with the visiting film star, who just happened to be Sophia Loren. She was in town to help the Crystal Ball Committee judge their best-dressed competition. Her advice could have been obtained in no other way except in return for an astronomical fee, and now here she was at the Mansion doing the social bit that always goes with the paid appearance and helps to make the fee seem smaller by taxing it with tedium. All the women present were dressed at least as well as she was but none of them were making any sense whatsoever as they yelled into her face, updating her on the latest news about hair. We got a few hundred feet of Sophia looking
alarmed, as well she might have done. What we didn’t get was a single shot to prove that I was at the same party as she was.
The Mansion on Turtle Creek had a hex on us. We were staying there at a discount, but the discount was the only thing that went right. It wasn’t Donovan’s fault. It was the fault of whoever had decided that Dallas needed a single-storey Hollywood-style hotel of unbelievable luxury. Unbelievable luxury, even when tasteful, is for Arab princes, Russian racketeers and other people with more money than sense. Normal human beings are uncomfortable when the en suite bathroom has enough towels for a symphony orchestra. The hotel was owned by the daughter of Caroline Hunt Schoelkopf, the richest woman on earth. The daughter, who was in town for precisely one day before she flew on to open a new hotel in Bogota, was the one responsible for making the Mansion’s dining room the top spot for the best-dressed women to get together for Sunday brunch and eat half a strawberry each while the harpist played ‘Stardust’ and they discussed whether Trammel should buy Lichtenstein. But it was my idea to interview the daughter beside the hotel’s swimming pool. I couldn’t blame Donovan for that.