This article titled “Confessions of a celebrity biographer” was written by Jonathan Margolis, for The Guardian on Tuesday 3rd August 2010 23.27 UTC
There can’t be many people who feel a pang of empathy for Angelina Jolie, who, along with her PR team, is reportedly upset about an unauthorised biography of her by Andrew Morton.
The assiduous Morton’s book, apparently pieced together from interviews with unnamed sources – oh, and Jolie’s childhood nanny – is a veritable juice-a-thon. In it, so it’s being said in the States, we learn that Jolie once had a fling with Leonardo DiCaprio, that she was raised for two years by nannies in a Los Angeles serviced apartment, and that she has a tattoo on her bottom in honour of her former husband, Billy Bob Thornton, written in the helvetica font.
Well, as a red-blooded hack of over 30 years’ standing (some of this standing outside the firmly closed doors of celebrities), I have something a little bizarre to say. Owing to an odd recent turn of events, I think I’m slightly on Angelina Jolie’s side on this.
In the 90s, when I was green in judgement, red in bank account, I wrote a series of unauthorised biographies of figures in comedy whom I admired. The first was John Cleese, then Billy Connolly, Michael Palin, and last – my contractual-obligation album requested by the publishers because they thought it would sell – Lenny Henry. The books were pretty good and actually did sell OK, Lenny Henry apart (wherein lies a tale I’ll mention in a bit).
But my subjects suffered a lot of grief from their unauthorised biographies. Cleese wrote to everyone he knew asking them not to speak to me. Plenty did anyway, but Cleese later commented dismissively that he found 200 mistakes in the first chapter alone. Connolly was furious and I believe remains so. Palin, because I suspect he just can’t help being nice, agreed to read the manuscript when I bumped into him at a reception. He corrected a few points, but I don’t exactly get Christmas cards from him. Henry refused any contact while I was writing the book.
A couple of years later, Henry and his then wife, Dawn French, collared me at a party. “You’ve got to get permission for something like that,” Henry said, but was otherwise quite friendly bearing in mind that I had, in effect, recently stolen his life. French was more brittle. The burden of her complaint was, funnily enough, not that I had upset the friends and family I’d contacted, but that there were key people I hadn’t spoken to, who were offended.
Towards the end of this awkward conversation – so awkward I wrote out all the details on the tube home – came the comedy bit. “So how many copies did the book sell?” Henry asked. Now this was tricky. The actual figure was a risible 4,000, partly because the WH Smith in Henry’s home town, Dudley, bizarrely failed to stock the only biography of its local hero. But I realised that if I told him this, it would compound his distress. So I said it sold 40,000. He made a face and said nothing. I got the impression that even my invented sales figure was pitiful to him. “What a horrible job you have,” French said as I was dismissed from their presence. Youch.
Writing the books – as opposed to flamming up the sales figures to flatter the subjects – was actually a job I rather relished. My research was painstaking, bordering on stalker-ish, as well as long-winded, since Google’s founders were about 12 at the time. By way of example, I once drove from London to Blackpool and back to check one Cleese fact. And I went to Los Angeles for each book because there were better press clippings libraries there.
I have always been rather smug about the intellectual justification for unauthorised biography, arguing that it is ethically cleaner than writing an authorised life. If anybody wrote a biography of me, I have contended, I would be the last person to interview, because I would lie like a hound, mislead, prevaricate, and twist everything to cast myself in the best light. I once did a stint as a gossip columnist and, dismal as it was, I began to tend towards the view that gossip – the bricks and mortar of unauthorised biography as well as most journalism – is often a more reliable source of truth than people’s own accounts of their doings.
I also took the view, and it’s not a wholly insupportable one, that by dint of voluntarily becoming celebrities, showbusiness people, like politicians, have to take a level of gossip and, frankly, intrusion and even downright prurience, on the chin. Indeed, I have often felt that my subjects’ objections are just the posturings of spoilt control freaks.
I also later did two authorised biographies, one of Bernard Manning (who I think agreed to co-operate because he wasn’t aware there was an option) and one of Uri Geller, who co-operated fully, but didn’t request any editorial input. I’m proud of both of these books, but they still seem a notch less valid, somehow, than if they had been fully independent – that it’s not altogether admirable that Uri and the late Bernard (get me and the first name terms) became good friends.
Now, truth be told, I had really wanted the Cleese book to be authorised. I had interviewed him by phone a couple of times when he was involved in the then-emerging SDP and found him fascinating. I wrote him a polite letter to request his approval for a biography, to which he replied civilly, but in the negative.
I was despondent because I was itching to write a book, and – no small factor – was convinced it would make some money. My wisest journalist friend, Matthew Norman, came up with the solution over a lunch. “So, do it unauthorised, you idiot,” Matthew said. “It’s much more dignified. Don’t expect too many dinner invitations from your hero, though.” It was a eureka moment for me.
So why, 20 years on, do I find my justification for this form of biography a little jejune and a lot plain cocky? Why am I starting to agree, just a bit, with Connolly’s reported assertion that “all gossip is scum”? And to sympathise with the likes of Jolie, as well as Martin Amis and Oprah Winfrey, all of whom are reportedly struggling against the efforts of unauthorised biographers – Richard Bradford in Amis’s case, Kitty Kelley in Winfrey’s.
Well, in a very, very small way, someone has done it to me, and to my wife. And, it turns out, we don’t like it a whole bunch. Indeed, I am starting to feel the time may have come to apologise to Cleese, Connolly, Palin and Henry for writing their life story against their wishes.
OK, nobody has written a biography of either of us. But we have cropped up – been gossiped about, in effect – in someone else’s bestselling autobiography. And while we’re not at all angry about it, we don’t feel violated or anything, we do feel kind of . . . well, unheard.
It’s unbelievably weird reading about yourself in a book you’ve bought online – and weirder still not recognising the incidents you’re reading about. Sure, in comparison to the hurricane I unleashed on my subjects, we are experiencing a light breeze, but it’s still a bit unsettling. Tony Blair, turned over lightly in Peter Mandelson’s memoir, and Mick Jagger, supposedly boshed about a bit in Keith Richards’ forthcoming book, probably feel the same way.
But why would microscopic fry like Sue and me end up in someone’s autobiography? I’m a journalist and author, my wife is a novelist in the US; we’re hardly gossip fodder. Well, my wife’s younger sister, Louise Wener, was a rock star in her day, the singer with the Britpop band Sleeper, and her new memoir, Different for Girls: My True-life Adventures in Pop, is riding high at the moment.
The reason we had to buy Louise’s book online was that, due to a pyrotechnic and utterly regrettable family schism before she became a star, we have had barely any contact with her since she was in her early 20s. Previously, we had been very close. I had known and been fond of Louise since she was six, had taken her up to university, picked her up at Gatwick at midnight one New Year’s Eve when she came back from her kibbutz gap year, been along to loads of her gigs when she was establishing her career. She was our bridesmaid when we got married in 1976.
But suddenly, Sue and I were strangers to her. It was unsettling and horrible. Our children would see Louise on Top of the Pops, aware that she was their aunt, but knowing nothing about her. Oddly, even though they were told they were welcome to see her, and that the fallout was entirely our silly adult affair, no one showed much interest in doing so. My youngest daughter now lives round the corner from her aunt, has met her, likes her – but has made no attempt to build the relationship.
So in the circumstances, we were dealt with quite affectionately in Different for Girls, which I have to say is a very good read and quite an emotional one for us, since it describes years of her life of which we knew nothing. Sue got a few pages but nothing unpleasant. I rated one mention as “her husband”, which I suppose could have been worse. We were rightly peripheral to the meat of the book, delightfully written and observed revelations of rock’n'roll, Michael Stipe and Damon Albarn et al.
So what’s the problem? Well the thing is, a lot of the stuff about Sue – and a couple of odd bits about their mother while we’re at it – just don’t match up with stuff as we both clearly (at least, we think clearly) remember it. It’s not important stuff, but it’s in a bestselling, critically lauded book and we have no statutory right of reply – and, no, I can’t believe I’m saying this like some touchy celeb, but that’s the feeling that wells up.
So when Louise relates the story about how her best friend, Bernice Cohen, comes with her to our house 25 years ago to babysit and how, when we get back, I (“her husband”) go upstairs to bed and Sue, “claps her hands together and says, ‘So, girls . . . are both of you still virgins?’” we are just . . . baffled. Louise then apparently remembers Sue asking the pair, then aged 16, if they had started masturbating.
She should have expected this of her sister, Louise says, because “she has always been loud and uninhibited”. Not untrue, granted. This is further illustrated, though, with a story about my wife singing in the bath the Monkees’ Daydream Believer but changing “Cheer up, sleepy Jean” to “Cheer up, have a wank”. Sue doesn’t greatly mind this. Tellingly, perhaps, my wife finds the anecdote hilarious and only wishes she had done it. But she has an elephantine memory for such things and truly doesn’t recall it.
A paragraph later, Louise describes us having videotaped one of our children’s births and showing it to anyone who came to visit, our more traditional Jewish cousins included. This would have worked as an anecdote, except home video didn’t yet exist then. “She may be a stay-at-home mother for the moment,” Louise concludes, “but my sister has ambitions to become a radio journalist.” Well, up to a point; Sue was already an established Radio 4 reporter at the time. And as for the later mention of their mother (whom Louise adores) being in the habit of singing religious music and hymns as she pegs out the washing it . . . well, Sue was there too and has no memory of this. Perhaps she drowned it out with her trademark “cheer up, have a wank” song.
None of this matters a lot, apart from sowing this seed of concern in my mind that perhaps everyone – me, my wife, Angelina, Tony Blair, Mick Jagger – should have the right to put their side of things when gossiped about publicly. Because maybe, just maybe, contrary to all the squawks of journalists and unauthorised biographers, a person’s own version of events does have validity. And even then, perhaps a person’s words shouldn’t be taken – to use that expression loved by politicians, but perhaps true after all – “out of context”. Perhaps Dawn French was actually right, and an unauthorised biographer is less of a white knight and more of a volunteer sewage worker.
When I was writing my Connolly book, I had access to 30 solid hours of the comedian talking about his life on a Glasgow radio station that my publisher happened to own. It was a biographer’s goldmine, and I shovelled it into the manuscript. The problem I now realise is that when a comedian is relating funny things that have happened to him, they may not necessarily be true. They make stuff up. It’s their job. If I had reflected some of his anecdotage back to him, perhaps he would have said, “Don’t be a big numptie, it’s a joke.”
My good friend Bernard Manning, after all, used to say that about his racist stories.
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