A Curious Career Read Free Page A

illustrations! Weirdly, it is still in print in Japan and brings me an annual royalty cheque of £60 or £70.
    Once both daughters were settled at school, I was desperate to get back into journalism. But it is hard – and I feel great sympathy for young women today – to apply for jobs when you have known nothing but playgroups for several years. I’d forgotten what office clothes even looked like. But by the happiest of happy chances my original boss at Penthouse , Harry Fieldhouse, who taught me to be a journalist in the first place, had moved to a newly launched colour supplement, the Sunday Express Magazine , and asked me if I’d like to do a series for it called ‘Things I Wish I’d Known at 18’.
    This was one of those ‘back of the book’ features, like the Sunday Times’ ‘Life in the Day’, which entailed interviewing a celeb, and cobbling their answers together into a single long quote. It was a boringly narrow formula, but it did give me a very wide experience of dealing with celebs and getting over the inevitable beginner’s problem of being star-struck. Finding celebs was easy in those days – you could often get their addresses, or even their phone numbers, from Who’s Who – there was none of the nonsense of having to pre-negotiate everything with PRs. And I soon learned that actors who were stuck in long West End runs were desperate to be interviewed – after the first-night excitement died away, they often felt forgotten by the world.
    In 1983 a new editor, Ron Hall, joined the Sunday Express Magazine , and promoted me to writing ‘big’ interviews – no longer back of the book, but proper 3,000-word profiles. My breakthrough came when he sent me to New York to interview my old boss, Bob Guccione. Up till then, I’d been writing all my profiles in the third person, as was the custom then, but I thought: I have to say I used to work for Guccione, it would be mad not to. So I wrote the piece in the first person and felt that at last I was writing without constraint. It was a really joyous, liberating moment, the point at which I found my writing voice.
    I won my first British Press Award in 1986, and my second the next year, which reassured me that I was on the right track. Older, stuffier journalists lectured me about ‘objectivity’ and told me it was wrong to put myself in my articles, but, with two Press Awards under my belt, I was happy to ignore them. In 1990 the Independent launched a Sunday sibling, the Independent on Sunday , and hired me as their interviewer. It enabled me to write very long (5,000-word) interviews, which I preferred, and won me a couple more Press Awards. But I also acquired the nickname ‘Demon Barber’ which was a pain for a long time. It gave the impression that I only wrote hatchet jobs, which was unfair – I probably only wrote one or two a year, but they tended to be the ones that stuck in people’s memories. And, for all the glittering company at the Independent (Ian Jack, Zoë Heller, Sebastian Faulks, Blake Morrison, Nick Cohen, Alexander Chancellor, Francis Wheen, Michael Fathers), I found it an unhappy ship, riven by internal feuds and institutional sexism. So I was glad to move on to Vanity Fair , and then the Telegraph and the Observer , before settling into my present home, the Sunday Times .
    People sometimes ask why I’m still doing interviews as I approach my seventieth birthday, in a tone which suggests I could be doing something more respectable like – oh! – writing books. To me that’s a bit like saying to a good cook, ‘You don’t still need to cook meals, do you, when you could afford to go to restaurants?’ But why give up something you adore doing? Once in a while, when it’s my third actor in a row, I might start grumbling, ‘This is a waste of my time,’ but basically that phone call from my editor – ‘Do you want to interview Pete Doherty? Miranda Hart? Eddie Izzard?’ – brings a little leap of excitement to my