Sir Christopher Meyer, who recently retired as Britain’s ambassador to the US, is the man who brought Tony Blair and George Bush together. ‘There was a chemistry between them from their first meeting,’ he tells Nigel Farndale

Dustin Hoffman is a Hollywood legend but is jealous of Hugh Grant. What other insecurities does he have? Nigel Farndale meets him

On a cloudy afternoon in London, I show Dustin Hoffman a newspaper headline. He feels in his pocket for steel-rimmed glasses, slips them on and tilts his head back. ” ‘Hugh, you’re a prick,’ ” he reads out loud in that chewy, gravelly voice.

“I hadn’t seen it. Does it hurt me?” he says.

The news story is about how Hoffman insulted Hugh Grant at the Empire magazine film awards – calling him “a real prick” when he seemed to suppress a yawn during Hoffman’s acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award. Hoffman’s reaction to the story seems chillingly self-centred, given that the insult was meant affectionately.

“I guess they took it out of context,” he says, folding his glasses away. “I just meant Hugh is so good-looking he didn’t have to get into acting to pick up girls, like I had to. All my painful adolescence I dreamed of looking like he does.”

That sounds a frivolous reason for becoming an actor, I suggest, considering that Dustin Hoffman is famously serious about what he does: the fretting over rehearsal time, the method acting, the demands for retakes. By way of an answer to my point, he embarks on a 10-minute, free-associating anecdote about a proctologist he knows, who examines rectums for a living because it pays better than any other branch of medicine.

So, I ask when he has finished, Hoffman was drawn to acting by the money, not the girls? No, that’s not it either. And off he goes on another tangent.

On the set of The Marathon Man in 1976, when Hoffman was insisting on “total immersion” in his role, an exasperated Laurence Olivier was driven to ask: “Why doesn’t the boy just act? Why does he go through all this sturm und drang?” And when the director Sidney Pollack was congratulated for winning an Oscar for Tootsie in 1982, he said: “I’d give it up if I could have back the nine months of my life I spent with Dustin making it.”

It occurs to me that one reason directors and fellow actors have found him difficult to work with over the years is that he can’t stick to the point. He has a desultory mind. He fusses over his answers, deviating, qualifying pointlessly, making even a sympathetic listener feel impatient.

“How did we get on to this?” he says eventually. I remind him.

“Right, right.” He grins. “That was why I was a bad student. I would never concentrate. Always staring out of windows, daydreaming, drifting off. You used the word ‘frivolous’ earlier. The real reason was even more frivolous than girls.

“I barely got through high school. At junior college a friend suggested I take acting class just to try and get the grades I needed, because no one ever flunked acting. It was either that or end up working at a fast food joint, or joining the army.”

So it was neither the girls nor the money, but the grades? “Grades and girls,” he corrects. “I was shy, short, had bad acne and suddenly, when I was acting, girls looked at me differently. They noticed me, for one thing. I was assigned an attractive girl to act a scene with and she gave me a look I had never gotten before. She looked at me like I was attractive. That felt good. I’d never felt attractive before.”

At 65, with his thick hair frosting at the temples, his laughter lines, his kind eyes and his warm grin, Hoffman is not, in fact, an unattractive man physically. And his personality is attractive enough: he’s friendly to the point of being ingratiating, he tells funny stories and does animated impersonations.

But before he became a Hollywood star, the first things women would notice about him were his puffin nose, his height (5ft 6in), his pitted skin – superficial things. I think that’s his point. Has he been suspicious of beautiful women who have been attracted to him since he became famous?

“Parts of it never changed for me, because if I was at a Hollywood party in my heyday, after The Graduate, say, and people like Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty were there, men who were much more handsome than me, the best-looking girls, the models, gravitated to them first. Believe me.

“The feeling I got was the same as I had in school. I would only ever attract female versions of me. Female celebrities like Janis Joplin, who no man found attractive before she became famous.”

In fact, Hoffman has said in the past: “If anyone thinks that I got laid less than Warren Beatty, they’re wrong.”

Given that he felt insecure about his looks, wasn’t it masochistic of him to want to be scrutinised on a big screen? “Absolutely, that’s why I didn’t want to be a film star, I wanted to be a stage actor. That’s why Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall and I all fled to New York [where they lived together as young, undiscovered actors].

“We didn’t believe we had a chance to make it in movies, not against all those walking surfboards. We were on the stage as character actors, so it didn’t matter what we looked like.”

Dustin Hoffman has often drawn on his own experiences for his roles. While making Kramer vs Kramer, for which he won his first Oscar in 1979, he was going through a messy divorce, as was his character in the film. He won another Oscar for Rain Man in 1988, and to prepare for that role he spent a full year getting to know autistic people.

In Moonlight Mile, his first film for three years, which is out this week, he plays a man whose daughter dies in a random shooting. I ask whether he drew on his relationships with his own children (he has two from his first marriage, four from his second) for that role. Did he try to imagine how he would feel if one of his children was murdered?

“Sort of. I’m not a physically violent person. Out of practicality. I’m no dummy – I knew I wasn’t going to win many fights. But a few things have given me the feeling that I could kill, and it’s always to do with protecting children.

“When I see a car speeding in a neighbourhood full of children, I start screaming, ‘Slow down!’ If I had a baseball bat in my hand I would be capable of whacking the driver with it. It infuriates me because bad drivers are really fucking around with the lives of children.

“And I’m aggressive verbally in Central Park. Sometimes when I see parents pull their children up by the hair, say, I find myself shouting, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop that!’ ”

I ask about a scene in Moonlight Mile in which his character breaks down and cries – it was very convincing. How did he do it?

“It was an accident. It wasn’t written like that. We were waiting for the next set-up and I was talking about a time two years ago, when my son Max, then 16, suffered his first bereavement. A friend of his had been killed in an auto accident. It devastated Max. I don’t think he has ever gotten over it. Even now I feel emotional thinking about it.”

Hoffman pauses. He sucks in air between gritted teeth. His eyes fill up. If this were the cinema I, too, would be blinking back tears. But face to face, it is an oddly unmoving performance, as if this old pro, this skilled seducer, is tweaking his one-man audience with practised fingers.

“The thing I hate most about war,” he says abruptly, his voice still wavering, “what really frightens me, is that it has become such an abstraction. You have to have gone through loss yourself to understand what happens when one country drops three thousand bombs on another country in 40 minutes.

“It kills all the powerless sacrificial goats. It is stunning that, as human beings, we can’t take that reality in. We have that mental block in order to survive. I think there is something else afoot. I think America’s collective grief over September 11 is being manipulated and politicised for nothing more than hegemony, power and oil.”

In the past couple of weeks Dustin Hoffman has become Hollywood’s most high-profile campaigner against the war in Iraq. I ask if he feels ashamed to be an American. “You can be pro-American and anti its administration.”

Hoffman’s father, Harry, the Chicago-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, wasn’t anti-American either. In fact, he tried to realise the American dream. Indeed, when Dustin Hoffman played Willy Loman in a celebrated stage version of Death of a Salesman in 1985, he based the role on his father.

“My father moved out West in the 1930s with $50 in his pocket and at first he dug ditches – shirt off, shovel in hand. But he was ambitious and got a job as a props man in a film studio, hoping to become a producer. Then he was made redundant at the time I was born. We had cornflakes for dinner a lot.”

Does Hoffman think his childhood poverty coloured his attitude to money when he became a wealthy adult?

“The first big lump sum I got was $150,000 for Midnight Cowboy in 1969 and I remember walking down a street and looking at shop windows full of stereos and cameras and realising suddenly I could buy them all if I wanted to. That was an extraordinary feeling.”

Did he feel guilty about earning a lot of money when his father had to work so much harder for so much less?

“No.” He shakes his head and purses his lips. “No, because I still bought my father’s lie then that he was successful, which he had never been. It took me years to find out that he would borrow money from friends and give it to other people just so as people would think Harry Hoffman was rich.”

The actor does think, though, that his father felt impotent when usurped by his successful son as the family breadwinner. “I remember he was very angry at me for one reason: he wanted to be my business manager when I became successful, and I refused because I knew that would be a doomed project. I don’t think he ever forgave me for that.”

Ahard edge creeps into Hoffman’s voice when he talks about his father, and this is much more affecting than his actorly tears. “My father had been a bankrupt a few times,” he says slowly. “We were always moving house, every year or so. He would start a furniture store and it would go bust, but I never heard him use the actual word ‘bust’.

“There was once a bailiff came to the house and my mother started crying and my father found out. He was a little guy, 5ft 2in, but he went down to the repo company and beat the shit out of the boss there for going to my mother and not to him. He was a proud man. Tragic, in a way. The funny thing was, it didn’t hurt his pride to accept a Rolls-Royce from me or to go on cruises which I had paid for.”

Does he ever catch his father’s reflection in the mirror? “All the time. We mock what we are to become. God, yes. I was born on his birthday. When he was 80, I was 50 and we went for a walk on a beach, and he said: ‘Half a century, kid.’ And then he said: ‘I have to leave you something.’ I said, ‘You gotta stop worrying about me, Dad, just enjoy the time you have left.’ But he had this fantasy that he would leave a million dollars to his kids. He never did, of course. He died soon after that.”

I suspect that Harry Hoffman did leave his son a legacy – his insecurity. That and the ambition of a short man who has to push himself forward; who never feels he is attractive enough, or successful enough; who, despite being a Hollywood legend, worries still that a silly newspaper story might hurt him; a perfectionist who fears being exposed as a fraud if he turns in what he believes is a second-rate performance; a man who is genuinely, not just jokingly, jealous of people such as Hugh Grant who have the natural advantages in life he never had.

I ask if his father ever did stop worrying about him. “Not really. That day on the beach, when we finished our walk, we sat down on the sand. My kids, his grandchildren, were running around. He should have been happy, but suddenly he said: ‘Dusty, old boy, it’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit.’ A whole lifetime had come to that.”

Does he feel the same, 15 years on? He grins, shakes his head and mouths the word no. “But ask me again when I’m 80.”

Graham Norton, who will be on our television screens almost every night this Christmas, is loud, camp, smutty and peurile. But can he really be that shallow? Nigel Farndale meets him

Tracey Emin’s art is self-obsessed, profane, attention-seeking and frequently funny. And the woman herself? Nigel Farndale meets the artist as she prepares to make an exhibition of herself in Oxford

 

At last the entry buzzer sounds and Tracey Emin’s face – foreshortened, pinched, small behind big sunglasses – appears on a video monitor on the wall of her 60ft-long studio, a former sweatshop in the East End of London.

As she waits for her PA to open the door she chews on her cheeks, purses her lips, looks over each shoulder in turn. It is mid-afternoon. She is sorry she is an hour and a half late. Been asleep. Jet lag. Got back from New York yesterday.

She says all this with a smile like a tenpin strike in a bowling alley. It is a disarming smile; a schoolgirl’s; a knock-jawed, snaggle-toothed schoolgirl. At 39 Tracey Emin is too fast to live, too young to die – it says so on the long black T-shirt she is wearing over jeans ripped at the knee.

Her skin is olive; colouring she gets from her father Envar, a Turkish Cypriot who says he has fathered 23 illegitimate children. Tracey, whose mother Pam, a blonde East Ender, was Envar’s mistress for ten years, reckons the real total is more likely to be 11.

A table runs almost the length of the studio, scattered with works in progress, some destined for ‘This is Another Place’, her first solo exhibition since 1997 which opens in Oxford next month; there are photographs, scraps of material, collages, spiky figure drawings.

Although Emin studied painting at the Royal College of Art – she won a place there despite leaving the secondary modern school she attended in Margate without any qualifications, having been a truant from the age of 13 – she soon became disillusioned with it. She turned instead to conceptual art, installations mostly, using a range of media including video, neon, embroidery, patchwork and the written word – her work often being based around a single punning phrase.

Her PA has said she needs to make a final selection from the photographs laid out on the table. The gallery is getting desperate. Task completed, Emin taps a couple of pills out of a bottle of Advil, pops them in her mouth, pulls the ring on a can of Red Bull and takes a swig.

She then hands a stack of letters over to her PA. One of the envelopes, she says, contains another fucking demand for payment for those fucking blood tests she had done. She has already paid the fucking bill but they keep sending reminders. Every fucking week. Some computer fucked up, probably.

Blood tests? “What happened, right,” explains Emin, “this summer I couldn’t have a holiday because of all my fucking deadlines.” She says this quickly, with dropped ‘h’s and ‘g’s, in an Essex accent undiluted by years in London.

“I was really distressed. Herpes outbreak every 20 seconds. Lesions on my face. Eating my face away. Steroid cream. I couldn’t concentrate and was pulling my hair out. So I had some tests.”

Being persecuted by a computer for unpaid blood tests sounds very Tracey Emin. Imagine if she threw the letter away and someone retrieved it from her bin – they could claim it as an artwork, I suggest. She frowns. “No, they couldn’t. Some students sent me a letter saying they were going to come and get my bins, right? And I said if they do I would fucking kill ’em.

“It wouldn’t just be a case of taking legal action, I would grab hold of them and personally slap them. It would be a real invasion of someone’s privacy to do that – unless you were Liz Hurley trying to get a sample for a paternity DNA test.”

She laughs gummily, her dark eyes creasing into a single line.

Hey, I say, maybe art dealers of the future could solve questions of attribution that way: they could run a DNA test on the stained sheets she uses in one of her exhibits, for instance. Another frown.

“You wouldn’t have to because my signature is on my artworks. It’s like when my cat went missing and I put up posters and people started collecting them. My name wasn’t signed on them. And people stole them to try and make a profit and I thought that a bit off.

“I was really upset. If I say it isn’t art, then it isn’t art. It’s like there’s loads of stuff I want to get rid of and I thought I could go down Brick Lane and have a market stall, but people will collect a pair of my shoes and an old CD box and put it all together and say they have a Tracey Emin. But it wouldn’t be because I wouldn’t have authentised it. What’s the word?”

Authenticated? “Right.” She yawns without opening her mouth and rattles her bottle of pills absent-mindedly. Does it give her pause for thought that it would be pretty hard to tell apart a Tracey Emin that she had created and a Tracey Emin that someone had cobbled together from going through her bins?

“No, you’ve got Andy Warhol time capsules, right? He got a load of things and put the date on them. And you could say they were just things he collected and they weren’t art. But they were art because Andy Warhol knew specifically what he was doing.”

She got annoyed not long ago when someone asked their friend to write to her saying they were terminally ill and could she send a photograph with her signature. “I did and wrote them a nice letter, and they framed it with the photograph and put it in an auction and sold it as art for £2,000.”

Has she ever, as an experiment, tried to get away with calling a non-art object, her coffee mug, say, art? “No, I’m not interested in that. But I challenge all the people who paint pictures of ponies in the New Forest to call what they do art. They might paint pictures but that doesn’t make them artists. You have to have integrity about what you are doing. You have to be able to justify it to yourself.”

Good point well made. But doesn’t it sometimes feel as if she is cursed with a Midas touch when all she has to do to turn an everyday household object into a valuable art object is to say that it is a valuable art object? “No, ‘course not. The bed took a bit of persuading. Still does in some quarters.”

Ah yes, the bed; the art work of which she is most proud. In one of his recent columns Craig Brown wrote, “If Tracey Emin were put on earth for anything, it was surely to make humorists redundant.

“A few years ago, I wrote a jokey piece about her, inventing a spoof exhibition called ‘I Want To Die Now, Alone and Mouldy, Hating Everyone, Always and Forever’ in which her main exhibit was called Skid Marks on Clean Linen. A month later she exhibited her unmade bed with soiled sheets for the very first time.”

If non-gallery-goers hadn’t heard of Tracey Emin before My Bed – stained sheets, old newspapers, used condoms, ashtrays, empty vodka bottles – they couldn’t help but hear of her afterwards. It was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and bought by Charles Saatchi for a rumoured £150,000.

Some thought it risible, others said it showed Emin was attuned to her times. Is she sick of defending the bed? “Not really because I will have to carry on doing it as long as I’m alive. It’s my bed and I will defend it. Do you remember those two Chinese men who jumped up and down on it?”

Yes, very funny that. She gives me a perplexed stare. “I didn’t think it was. I should have pressed charges against them. You can’t go around destroying other people’s property. I cried. I did not think it was funny.

“Someone violating my artwork and my space for their own publicity. Fuck. You know. A lot of my income would have gone if the bed had been damaged, because people wanted to buy it. That artwork was not a joke and it wasn’t to be laughed at.”

“It depressed me because the bed was the result of a “Galileo” moment. Me thinking of the bed out of the context of my bedroom. There it was. Every time I had to install the bed I had to go back to the place where I was when the bed was like that, in my head. I was delirious. Hadn’t eaten for four days. Just been lying in the bed depressed. I was nearly dead from lack of water. Then I saw it. Boom!!”

Does she ever wake up and think the world has gone mad? “No.”

Does she ever think she has gone mad?

“I have. I think, in terms of giving up and having some sort of breakdown, yeah, that’s happened to me. Some f-ing journalist said, ‘Oh, I bet Tracey Emin will commit suicide if she doesn’t win the Turner Prize.’ What a terrible thing to say. They wouldn’t say that about a Booker Prize nominee.”

Maybe it’s because people know so much about her, things she has let them know, through the autobiographical elements in her work? And one of the things they know is that she once tried to commit suicide by throwing herself off the harbour wall at Margate, while drunk, after a botched abortion.

“Yeah, but how many other people out there have tried to commit suicide? Some people might have found it helpful that I brought that up in my art, because they would know they were not the only ones feeling suicidal. Doesn’t mean I’m a raving fucking lunatic.”

“It’s like if they see the abortion work I’ve done. So many people don’t talk about their abortions, then six months later they crack up.”

Ah yes, the abortions. A doctor told Emin she was sterile after a bad attack of gonorrhoea in her teens, but then, at the age of 26, she became pregnant and had an abortion. Not long afterwards she had a second abortion. Did holding her predicament up to public scrutiny, through her art, help her overcome her guilt about it?

“Yeah, lots. I felt so fucking guilty. The reason I did was that the doctor at the time made me feel guilty by telling me I would make a wonderful mother, refusing to sign the papers.”

Was he right, does she think, in retrospect? “No, ‘course he fucking wasn’t. He would have been right if he had signed the form as soon as I had said, ‘I cannot have this fucking baby.'”

“Then I would have had the termination after six weeks instead of waiting three and a half months, which was a million times worse. Of course I felt guilt, because I had this fucking thing growing inside me. He even showed me a photo of his child. He could have been fucking struck off. I wouldn’t have been able to look after it, you see, because I was living on 12 fucking pounds a week.”

I meant was he right about her making a good mother? She grins. “Yeah, I’d be brilliant. But not then. I am a good mum to my cat. I would be a better mother than my mum was to me.”

Would she like to have children now?

“I’m not trying. I would like to adopt. But unfortunately adoption is very difficult in Britain. I wouldn’t pass the vetting procedure, with my history. I used to reckon, when I was drinking a lot, that if I had a baby I would leave it in the pub and not realise till next morning.”

Tracey Emin’s reputation as a hard drinker was consolidated in 1997 when she took part in a Channel 4 arts programme while, as she put it later, ‘totally shit-faced’. She was so drunk she thought she was in someone’s front room, and staggered off the set with the words, “You’re all boring me. I’m off to phone my mum.”

“I’ve been drinking since I was 13. I don’t think I was ever bad enough to go to AA and that, but if I had carried on like I was, I would have been very ill. Matt [Collishaw, her boyfriend, an artist] said if I carried on drinking spirits, he was going to leave me.

“So I stopped drinking spirits in 1999. Just drink beer and wine now. I became very thin because eating is not a priority when you drink. You fill up on Guinness and have diarrhoea constantly. It wasn’t just the health, though, it was the mood thing. I was just so volatile and jealous. I got nasty.”

So when she is sober she is suppressing her nasty side?

“No, I am a nice person. How I am with you today is how I really am, nice. But I am nasty when I’m upset, or angry, or pissed off, or someone has really fucked me over.” She lights up a cigarette.

“Everything gets blown out of proportion when I’m drinking. What I think of as a conspiracy is actually just my fucked up lack of comprehension. Totally paranoid and missing the point.”

In a way, Emin’s public escapades became inseparable in the public imagination from her artistic endeavours, which were, anyway, autobiographical. In this she was indeed attuned to her times, the art world in the 1990s often appearing a triumph of publicity stunt over artistic accomplishment.

These days Emin can be seen in the society pages: posing in Vivienne Westwood, arriving at an opening, a première, a glittering party. She claims she doesn’t like having her photograph taken: is it because when she looks in the mirror she doesn’t like what she sees?

“No, not often. That’s changed because I had an eye operation a couple of years ago, and my perception of myself is better than it used to be. I was really badly short-sighted, dangerously so. Kept having bad accidents because of the vast amount of alcohol I drank. I had to go this close [she holds her hand up to her face] to a mirror to see myself so I always had a really distorted view of my face.”

Perhaps this is why she describes herself as having ‘a full moustache and a unibrow that has to be plucked regularly’. Her teeth make her feel self-conscious in public, too. They went awry due to a combination of calcium deficiency at birth and being head-butted by her twin brother Paul when she was 13. She had a plate fitted for her top ones when she was 18, but gave up on the bottom ones.

“They kept trying to put crowns in but they wouldn’t stay in so I just had these gold pegs hanging down. So horrible. So I used to cover my mouth with my hand as well as going around with really squinty eyes because I couldn’t see properly.”

Are the confessional elements in her art the equivalent of basket-weaving in a lunatic asylum, a form of therapy?

“I do feel the need to do all that but so do lots of artists. If I hadn’t found success as an artist when I did, I don’t know, maybe I would have died, that is what my mum thought. It’s a gift. I am a genuinely creative person whether it’s, like, tidying my drawers at home or doing my collaging here.”

We know the names of everyone Tracey Emin slept with up to 1995 because she sewed them on to a tent, called it Everyone I’ve Ever Slept with 1963-1995, and exhibited it as art. There were 100 names, and they included family and childhood friends as well as lovers.

We know, too, that she was raped aged 13 down an alley round the back of Burton’s in Margate because she has written about it. The autobiographical themes in her work; all true?

“How can they be? I edit constantly.” She takes a puff of her cigarette. “What is the truth when you are 20 it very different when you look back at it at 30 or 40. But the rape is true. The suicide attempt and the abortions are true.

“In my film Why I Never Became a Dancer I say that men chanted, ‘Slag, slag, slag,’ at me when I went in for a disco-dancing competition in Margate. That did happen but it also happened every day on the street. So that was actually worse than how I interpretated [sic] it in the film. I don’t lie about things. I’m an honest person.”

Emin considers the question ‘what is art?’ boring – and she may well be right – but a couple of things bother me about her art. Firstly, I’m not sure how much it has to do with aesthetic pleasure, with which, according to my conventional definition at least, art should have some connection.

Secondly, works such as My Bed aren’t particularly shockingly new: 80 years ago the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp was playing with similar ideas with Fountain (an ordinary urinal made extraordinary by being exhibited in a gallery as art), and he made it well enough for it not to have to be made again.

But perhaps neither of these things matter if Emin’s work passes the test of time; does she think it will? She draws on her cigarette, looks at me neutrally.

“We don’t know. It depends on whims. All you can do is try and make each show better than the last. And make sure more people turn up. The Tate has never had such long queues as for My Bed.”

But high attendance figures can’t be a criterion for judging whether something is art or not: large numbers of people used to go to watch the lunatics at Bedlam.

“I know, that is why the art establishment doesn’t take me very seriously.” But it does. “Oh but it doesn’t.” Surely she is surrounded by sycophantic art groupies, stroking their chins and wearing black? “No, I’m not. My friends are more than equal to me.”

Don’t they say what she wants to hear?

“No, my dealer Jay Jopling can be very critical, so can Matt.’

Her brother Paul said her work was ‘a load of old bollocks’: what did she make of this critical assessment?

“Paul just saw what I did from a distance. Now he has a different opinion and he likes what I do. Also, he didn’t like me making work about him. I said he had been in prison, which you are not allowed to talk about because people didn’t know what he was in for, and he does building and carpentry and it was affecting his work.”

What was he in for? “Fraud, I think.”

Has she ever felt like a fraud?

“Not a fake or an impostor but I know what you are saying. Sometimes I do feel, ‘Oh no, what is this in my life?’ I woke up one day and realised I had raped myself and that is the worst rape of all.”

We’re into the realm of Craig Brown parody again. Is the raping herself conclusion something she arrived at after speaking to a psychiatrist?

“Yeah, but not recently. Apart from you! Group therapy with a million Telegraph readers, eh? I did see a therapist for six months. It was to do with the fact I couldn’t cope with everything I had to do. You know, time-management. He taught me to departmentalise. Is that the word?”

Compartmentalise? “Yeah. When I stopped drinking spirits I had a massive boredom in my life. Boredom like you would not believe. If you’re pissed a lot of the time your problem is finding your keys or not falling over things. Without drink, life becomes your problem.”

“Yeah, I find that life is OK. I don’t cry easily and I laugh a lot, until I wet myself. I’ll be 40 in July. Being a women I’m aware of that clock. I look in the mirror and think, ‘I wish that girl of 20 was here now.’ I was in such a mess at that age.

“Up until then I was so naive I thought the sun went round the earth. I really did, because I was never at school.”

And this, ultimately, is why we should forgive Tracey Emin her success. Her solipsism – ‘It isn’t art unless I say it’s art’ – is understandable given that she has become famous for, as she puts it, ‘making things out of bits of me’.

Her seriousness on the subject of herself – ‘I am clever, you know,’ she tells me with a frown, at one point – can seem comical but it is also endearing, and is just one of her many contradictions. Here, after all, is a woman who insists upon her own dignity, yet is careless with it; a guileless person who lives in a bubble of self-regard; a witty artist who seems to have no sense of irony.

Emin compares herself to Warhol, for example, but he wouldn’t have cared less if someone had jumped on his bed. She lacks his nonchalance and sense of absurdity, and, unlike Warhol, she doesn’t seem to get the joke she earns a living from making.

She shows me round her studio; points out some collages on the floor with misspelled words stitched on and then, wryly, crossed out. She doesn’t misspell on purpose, she says. In fact she is learning to spell at the moment – and she shows me her dictionary to prove it.

It’s a sweet gesture and it makes me want to like Tracey Emin. As a person she is likeable – and, yes, as she herself says, she is nice. But as the most famous British artist of her generation, I can’t help feeling, she did get rather lucky.

Everyone seems to have a soft spot for Matthew Parris – apart from Matthew Parris. So why on earth has the Tory MP turned star columnist written an autobiography? Nigel Farndale finds out

The soundcheck over, Paul McCartney –  he rarely uses the Sir –  stares out across the empty seats of the ice-hockey stadium, eyebrows raised in that way of his, lost in thought. In two and a half hours these chairs will be filled with Americans waving the Stars and Stripes; holding up lighters; crying, singing, hyperventilating; greeting the latest concert of his 19-city tour with what the press have been calling ‘Maccamania’. He hands his guitar to a roadie and picks up his jacket, flipping it over his left shoulder in the same movement. Taking the stairs two at a time, he steps down off the stage and greets me with a cold, dry handshake. ‘Art,’ he says bluntly. ‘You’re here to talk about art, right?’
‘Here’ is Long Island, New York, and it’s news to me that I’ve flown all this way just to talk about his paintings. ‘Among other things,’ I answer, trying not to show the alarm in my eyes. What about the juicy stuff? His children’s feelings about his marriage in a few weeks’ time to a former swimwear model who lost a leg and became a charity campaigner? His bitter feud with a dead man, John Lennon? What about George? Linda? And, of course, what about the Beatles, a band ‘bigger than Jesus’ that broke up more than 30 years ago and yet still sells as many records each year as it ever did, a billion at the last count? At least he didn’t add ‘and poetry and classical music’, the other art forms in which he has taken to dabbling.
As he leads the way along a corridor, a crowd –  road crew, hangers-on – mills around him briefly, jostling for position like petitioners in a Tudor court. When we pass through a door at the end, their progress is blocked by a security guard and I notice Paul McCartney’s walk: it is loose, swaying, almost a swagger. He will be 60 next month but, apart from a few crow’s feet around his bovine-big eyes and an interesting chestnut tint to his hair, he shows little sign of it. ‘I think someone must have falsified my birth certificate,’ he says, his flat Liverpudlian vowels softened by 30 years of marriage to an American. ‘Joke! It’s just I feel as youthful as I’ve ever felt. And pretty fit. I used to have to wring out my shirts after shows. Now I hardly sweat at all.’ He is indeed looking lithe, tanned and moisture-free –  and a little shorter than I’d imagined. I’ve read that he is 5ft 11in; but we all remember that conspiracy theory about how he died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a taller double, only to give the game away by walking barefoot –  a Sicilian symbol of death –  on the zebra-crossing outside the Abbey Road studios.
Backstage we sit on sofas in an ashram-like room draped with black curtains, lit by candles, heavy with the smell of joss sticks. McCartney scoops up a handful of nuts from the coffee-table. ‘Excuse me if I eat these while we talk,’ he says between crunches. ‘I usually nibble at this time before a concert.’ We have an hour before he has to change for the show –  less if he feels the talking is putting a strain on that golden voice of his.
Alongside the bowl of nuts are copies of the Sun and the Daily Mail, just arrived from England. Both carry full-page features about how, after 11 September, Americans are saying McCartney is ‘healing’ them, just as the Beatles did in 1964 after Kennedy’s assassination. Healing, Paul? Healing? ‘I know! I know!’ McCartney says, the puffy curves of his lips smoothing out into a grin. ‘Better than bad reviews, I guess. Actually, I don’t read them, because they have an affect on me: I either think I’m too great or I get paranoid.’ The glowing reviews in the American press may have something to do with the fact that he has not toured for a decade; also that the show includes 21 Beatles songs; in the past McCartney has refused to play more than one or two of them at his concerts. ‘I used to get pissed off when people called me “ex-Beatle Paul McCartney”,’ he says, tossing another handful of nuts into his mouth. ‘Now I’m more comfortable with it.’ He chews and swallows. ‘JFK had died a few months before the Beatles’ first tour and there was a sense then of America wanting to get back to normal after a world-shocking event. The same is happening now, though I feel more connected with it this time because I was in New York when the terrorist attack happened.’
Entering into the spirit of the thing, I ask if this tour is also about ‘healing’ Paul McCartney –  after all, he has said that he ‘cried for a year’ when his wife Linda died of breast cancer in 1998. ‘Yes, there is a lot of that for me. And I have a new woman in my life who I’m going to marry, so that’s part of that, too. Heather has made me feel more at ease with things. After two full years of horror and doctor’s offices and scares and diagnoses…’ He trails off. ‘In truth when you have been through that and come out at the end…’ He trails off again. ‘I’m grateful not to have to spend my days doing that any more. And I’m lucky to have found a good woman who is strong like Linda and beautiful and positive and funny.’
He found it odd dating again after so many years of marriage and he felt guilty, too, but soon rationalised that it would be what Linda wanted. With the 33-year-old Heather Mills, he tells me, it was ‘big attraction at first sight’. Then, ‘I really started to fancy her.’ The marriage will take place at his home in the Hamptons, near New York, on 6 June, three days after he performs at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace. His daughter Stella, a celebrated fashion designer, won’t be designing the wedding dress. And there are rumours that his other children –  Mary, James and, from Linda’s first marriage, Heather –  are not wildly enthusiastic about the union either. ‘I think a second marriage is hard for the children,’ McCartney says, nodding gravely. ‘No matter who it is: people in my position are told not to worry, that time will heal. But it’s very difficult. It’s difficult for all of us. They find it difficult to think of me with another woman. But it’s how it is and how it must be, and I think that, more than anything, they want me to be happy –  and this is what makes me happy.’
It’s a steely remark, as cold and dry as his handshake. McCartney once said, ‘I’m not really tough. I’m not really loveable either.’ He was half-right. You don’t stay at the top for as long as he has without being pretty tough and single-minded. His comment about how his children will just have to lump it seems to reflect this, as do his thoughts about his reaction to George Harrison’s death last November. Looking distraught, McCartney went before the cameras to pay tribute to his ‘baby brother’. Was he wanting to make amends for the flippant comment he made in 1980 when John Lennon was shot? ‘It was definitely to do with that, yeah. I was conscious of that. I was just as distraught when John died, probably more so because it was a shocking murder. I knew George was going to die. I’d seen him and I knew. He had terminal cancer…’ He shakes his head at the memory. ‘But you’re right. When John died I didn’t know whether to stay at home and hide or go to work. I decided to go to work, as did George Martin, and at the studio we talked about John and cried and when I was leaving that night, in the dark, in the London traffic, I had the window slightly open and someone pushed a microphone in and asked me what I thought about John dying. I said, “It’s a drag.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. And, in print, it looked so heartless. When I saw it written down I thought, “Jesus Christ.”‘
It was not just in print. He said it with a shrug, as if in an attempt to be cool. And the callousness of the comment seemed to confirm what many suspected McCartney really felt about Lennon. When the Beatles broke up in 1970 the world blamed Yoko Ono. But John, George and Ringo blamed Paul, partly because he had, they thought, become too bossy, partly because he refused to work with the band’s sinister new manager Allen Klein (later imprisoned for tax fraud), partly because he was the first to tell the press –  much to the annoyance of John Lennon, who had already told the others in private that he was planning to leave the band and wanted to break the news himself. Feeling angry, unemployed and bewildered, McCartney retreated to his farm on the Mull of Kintyre, grew a beard, drank too much and had what he later described as a nervous breakdown. Eventually he recovered his composure, became a vegetarian, sued the Beatles, recorded the gorgeous ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, formed Wings –  with Linda on keyboards and vocals, much to everyone’s amusement –  and had a long run of chart-topping singles and albums. He also wrote ‘The Frog Chorus’.
Lennon, meanwhile, moved to New York, became a junkie and revealed himself to be the borderline psychopath many had always suspected him of being. He embarked on a hate-campaign against McCartney, comparing his former partner to the cabaret artiste Engelbert Humperdinck. McCartney would try to patch things up and have ‘very frightening phone calls’ with Lennon which always ended with one telling the other to ‘fuck off’ before slamming the phone down. In 1976 Lennon said of McCartney: ‘He visits me every time he’s in New York, like all the other rock ‘n’ roll creeps.’ McCartney felt hurt, not least because, as he said in 1987, ‘I always idolised [John]. We always did, the group. I don’t know if the others will tell you that, but he was our idol.’
If George was his baby brother, was John his big brother? McCartney smiles, causing crinkles to arc downwards from his hazel eyes. ‘Yes, definitely, although not in the Orwellian sense. John was older than me and, in the good sense of the phrase, he was a big brother. He was a lovely guy. But we were very competitive. Looking back on it, I think it’s…’ He purses his lips. ‘It’s awkward. You don’t always say to people what you mean to say to them when they are alive. And with John, we had a guy relationship, loving each other without saying it. We never looked at each other and said, “I love you,” but people would ask us, “What do you think of the rest of the Beatles?” and we would say, “I love them.” So we knew indirectly, peripherally.’ He rubs his hands together to brush off some crumbs. ‘We were brothers. Family. Like an Irish family. It’s not unusual to get brothers fighting, but we did it in the spotlight –  everyone got to look at the O’Malleys arguing. We gave and took a few good blows. But with John, we made it up by the time he died and I was very thankful for that. We were talking normally about baking bread. And cats –  he was a cat man. He would talk about going round his apartment in his “robe” as he called it by then, dressing-gown to us. So, ordinary stuff.’
But there’s more to it than that. For years now Lennon’s role in the Beatles has been talked up and McCartney’s down. Lennon is portrayed as being deep and cool, McCartney shallow and cheesy. Yoko Ono has played a large part in this. Most witheringly she said four years ago, ‘John was the visionary and that is why the Beatles happened. Paul is put into the position of being a Salieri to a Mozart.’ McCartney has been trying to counter this, to make his version of the Beatles story the official one, most notably in an authorised biography, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. He wants it to be known, for instance, that he, not Lennon, was the one who introduced the Beatles to Stockhausen and the avant garde.
Does he feel he has finally set the records straight? ‘I became more comfortable that my contribution was being recognised, yes. And George’s. Sad that he had to pass away before people really saw it… There was a re-writing of history after John’s death. There was revisionism. Certain people were trying to write me out of the Beatles’ history, as well as the other two. George was reduced to the guy standing with his plectrum in his hand, waiting for a solo and, as John would have been the first to admit, George was very much more important than that, as a character, as a musician. And Ringo is now being sidelined because he wasn’t a composer. We all needed each other. We were four corners of a square. There were people close to John, saying, “Well, Paul just booked the studio,” –  which was galling. The trouble is’, he says, scooping up another handful of peanuts and speaking indistinctly through them, ‘I became worried that the John legend would totally wipe out any of our contributions. I’m sure I got paranoid about it, but, hey, that’s normal for me.’
Such was McCartney’s paranoia he even tried to have the Beatles songs he wrote retrospectively credited to McCartney-Lennon (as oppose to Lennon-McCartney, a brand as revered as Gilbert and Sullivan, or Rodgers and Hammerstein). Yoko Ono, who inherited Lennon’s estate, refused to give permission for this. ‘I didn’t want to remove John,’ McCartney tells me, ‘just change the order round. I don’t mind Lennon-McCartney as a logo. John in front, that’s OK, but on the Anthology (1996), they started saying “Yesterday” [a tune that came to McCartney in a dream] by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and I said, “Please can it be Paul McCartney and John Lennon for the sake of the Trade Description Act? Because John had no hand in that particular song.”‘ He jiggles his knee up and down in agitation. ‘I recently went to a hotel where there was a songbook and I looked up “Hey Jude” [another McCartney song] and it was credited to John Lennon. My name had been left off because there was no space for it on the page. Do I sound obsessive?’
Just a bit. Everyone knows who wrote which Lennon-McCartney composition because the songwriter always took the lead vocals. And he’s Paul McCartney, for goodness sake. His boyhood home has been preserved for the nation by the National Trust. According to the Guinness Book of Records, he’s the most successful songwriter in history. Bigger than Elvis. Bigger even than John, now. How can he possibly feel insecure about his reputation? ‘I know! That’s what people say to me. Because I’m fucking human. And humans are insecure. Show me one who isn’t. Henry Kissinger? Insecure. George Bush? Insecure. Bill Clinton? Very insecure.’ It’s a curious crew to compare yourself to –  the model for Dr Strangelove, a Texan to whom English is a second language, a philanderer –  but perhaps it makes sense in light of something McCartney said at the height of Lennon’s war of words: ‘John captured me so well. I’m a turd. I’m just nothing.’
Improbable though it may seem, Paul McCartney appears to have suffered periodically from low self-esteem. Linda McCartney once said: ‘I don’t dwell on what people say about me. I dwell on what people say about Paul, for some reason. Maybe it’s because he can’t handle it.’ For all his chirpy optimism, mannered blokiness and double thumbs-up gestures, he is, it seems, prickly about his reputation. As Private Eye discovered when he reacted with cold fury to the inclusion of one of his poems in Pseud’s Corner recently, he takes himself very seriously. His ‘fucking human’ comment is intriguing in another respect: it suggests that, in his professional life at least, he suffers from Paradise Syndrome: having a perfect life he needs to find something to feel anxious about. It’s not enough that he’s credited jointly with writing the soundtrack to our lives, he wants his name to come first. It won’t suffice that, since he was 20, millions of his fans have been calling him a genius –  he needed to hear it from his ‘big brother’, his musical equal, his idol, John Lennon.
But you can’t help feeling that he should be, that he can afford to be, a bigger man. He shouldn’t rise to Yoko Ono’s bait. It looks so petty. Worse than that, his attempts to control not only the Beatles’ history but also their mythology have come across as boastful, petulant and self-serving. Perhaps it is just that, for all his gifts as a lyricist, he frequently expresses himself badly in conversation, often hitting the wrong note, not saying what he means. His mother died when he was aged 14: his first response? ‘What are we going to do for money now?’ He has regretted that line all his life. Even his heartfelt tribute to his ‘baby brother’ George seems a little patronising and ill-considered. He must have known that Harrison always hated being thought of as the baby of the band, not least because when the Beatles first formed Lennon used to refer to ‘that bloody kid hanging around’ –  and Harrison, long after the Beatles broke up, said he thought that was how Lennon still regarded him.
Perhaps McCartney’s insecurities only seem undignified –  even indecent –  because in so many other ways he is such a dignified, decent man. He pays his taxes, he doesn’t wear leather shoes on principle, he sent his children to the local comp, he was faithful to his wife for 30 years (something almost unheard of in the priapic world of rockstardom), he does his own shopping at Selfridges, he travels on the Underground. The superstar next door image he has tried to cultivate may seem like a tragic affectation given that he is worth £713 million, but at least he tries. ‘You said I have this thing about wanting to be seen as an ordinary man: well, I’m sorry but I am,’ he tells me. ‘It’s just too bad –  I can’t be anything other. I’m a lucky ordinary guy, it’s true. I’ve done a lot of things and fulfilled a lot of my dreams, but it doesn’t mean…’ He smiles ruefully. ‘I assumed, like you, that when I met someone who had done well that they would be saintly and just say, “Thanks, I know I am OK now.” But it doesn’t work like that.’
Yet, to the outside world, he seems so positive and well-adjusted. ‘Yeah, but my worst fear is being found out… I don’t want to elevate any higher than I am now. Sir Paul McCartney is as elevated as I ever wish to go –  in fact, it is a little too high. It was a great honour and all that but… I need the people around me to know I am still the same and I want to feel the same, because I like who I am. A bit insecure. So I don’t go, “Fuck you! How dare you tell me that. I’m better than you.” It would be easy to do but I don’t want to get like that. Know why? Because I’m working-class [his father was a cotton salesman, his mother a nurse, and he grew up on a council estate]. If I got like that now, people, the crew out there, would be doing this [he flicks the V-sign] behind my back as I walk past.’
He checks his watch pointedly. ‘Now,’ he says. ‘The Walker Gallery, Liverpool.’ There is an exhibition catalogue for it on the coffee-table and as we flick through the paintings –  bold colouring, some abstract, some figurative –  I nod approvingly. Pretty disturbing, though, some of them. ‘Oh. Yeah, a lady friend once walked through my studio and said, “Paul what would a psychiatrist make of all this?” Here,’ he says stopping at one. ‘It’s red, so I suppose you could say “demonic, red, hell,” but I just like red. In the Rorschach test, some people see a butterfly, some see a devil. You are supposed to betray yourself in painting. But that’s OK. I don’t try and hide anything about myself.’ He turns to a warmer image. ‘These beach paintings aren’t disturbing, though. That was just a memory. Shark on Georgica is somewhere I used to sail. I knocked the paint pot and a shark appeared. I like that accident. Perhaps it betrays some hidden fears.’  Freud said there are no accidents. ‘Exactly.’ He flicks on a few more pages. ‘The curator picked this one out and says it’s very sexual. I’m not sure what he means but I’ll go along with that. That could be phallic.’ He gives a thin laugh and moves the page round to view the painting from a different angle. ‘When I was a kid I used to draw nude women and feel guilty. Now when I look at nudes in photographs and paintings I don’t giggle. I had to get over that block, get over the smutty stage. I started painting seriously when I was 40, when I had children, and that was when I got over it. To have babies we do have to do certain things…. Here’s a nude of Linda. Why not? I was married to this woman for 30 years.’
Has he painted any of Linda since she died? ‘No, I haven’t painted too much in the past couple of years. Well, I’ve done one or two and they are a bit disturbing. But they would be, wouldn’t they? I was disturbed.’ He grieved properly for Linda, he says, something he didn’t do when his mother died from breast cancer. ‘I certainly didn’t grieve enough for my mother. There was no such thing as a psychiatrist when I lost her. You kidding? I was a 14-year-old Liverpool boy. I wouldn’t have had access to one and I do now. I saw one when Linda died and he said, “A good way to grieve is to cry one day and not cry the next, alternate days so as you don’t go down one tunnel.” I took his advice.’
McCartney has said that in the months following Linda’s death he thought he might die from grief; did he mean he considered taking his own life? “No. I was very sad. In deep grief. But never suicidal. I’m too positive for that. After a year… It was as if the seasons had to go right through, as if I had to feel like a plant. A couple of months after the end of that cycle I began to realise I was also having other feelings, that I was emerging…’
That all you need is love? ‘Mmm. I am a romantic. I like Fred Astaire.’ Me, too, I interject. ‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘Now I feel I can open up to you. I always say to young guys, “Be romantic,” because not only do women love it but you’ll love it, too. English men are so reserved, though. The idea of being caught with flowers on the bus! You hide them under your jacket.’ He mimes hiding a bunch and looking nervous. ‘Well, I’m not like that any more.’
McCartney looks at his watch again. Nearly time to go to his dressing room. Presumably the big difference between touring America in 2002 and 1964 is the seats; audiences today don’t wet them quite as much. ‘I think the main differences is the age range of the audience,’ he says with an easy laugh. ‘The Beatles audience was essentially our age or younger, a lot of screaming girls. Now the audience is layered: people the age I am now, but also their children and grandchildren. They were holding up babies the other night, which was like, What?’
I say I imagine people bring their babies along because they want them to have a stake in history –  like watching the Queen Mother’s funeral procession. ‘Yeah, there’s probably something in that. People want to be able to say, “I was there.”‘
Later I make my way upstairs to take my seat for the concert. The excitement of the crowd is palpable and infectious. And when a giant silhouette of Paul McCartney’s violin-shaped Hofner bass appears on a screen on the stage, everyone goes nuts. The screen lifts, the crisp, heavy, opening bars of the Beatles song ‘Hello, Goodbye’ are heard, and thousands of hairs on the backs of thousands of necks stand on end, mine included.

The autobiography of Fay Weldon, published this week, is a spiky read. Its author talks to Nigel Farndale about sex, psychiatry, self-loathing and her early career as a hostess in a Soho clip joint

To meet Woody Allen in London is to meet a man violently out of context. Imagine stubbing your toe on the Statue of Liberty while out walking the dog on Tooting Common and you grasp the scale of the incongruity. He belongs in New York, he’s synonymous with the place; as he says at the beginning of Manhattan (1979), it’s his town.
I once saw him there, wearing a baseball cap and a lumberjack shirt, marching towards me across a bridge in Central Park. It was six in the morning – I couldn’t sleep – there was no one else around and I was nonchalant about the encounter until the moment he had passed, at which point I began stalking him. A film crew appeared on the opposite side of the lake, he joined them, and so, surreptitiously, did I – and spent the next few hours staring at him, slack-jawed, as he set up shots, played chess with his sound engineer and ate corn muffins. How could I not? For the past three decades he has made a film a year and I, anorak that I am, have them all on video, in chronological order. I even have that series of wilfully beige and morose films he did in homage to Bergman – September, Alice, Another Woman, Interiors – the ones which nobody likes, including me.
In Central Park he was focused and energetic, but cold in the way he directed his actors. In London, by contrast, sitting on the edge of a large sofa in the Dorchester, his 5ft 7in frame seems almost out of focus: slight, spavined, his edges blurred despite the neatly pressed creases in his cream trousers, blue shirt and white vest. It is to do with the paleness of his eyelashes, his freckled skin, his thinning wires of hair and his right eye which, behind black-rimmed glasses, looks lazy and sore. It’s also to do with the way he holds himself. When I ask a question, he cocks his head to one side and leans forward so far he almost slides off the cushion. ‘I-I-I’m sorry,’ he says softly, with that cracked, reedy, much-impersonated Brooklyn-accented stutter. ‘My hearing is dropping a little in my left ear. This is hereditary. I listen keenly and I read lips. If people’s lips are covered, or I take my glasses off, I don’t hear as well.’
I’d been asking him about the ills the flesh is heir to. He is 66, a good age, presumably, for a hypochondriac? ‘Yes, everything falls apart. You, er, you lose your hair and your faculties, and you eventually get a disease from which you do not recover.’ He folds his arms defensively. ‘I’ve always thought [pronounced to-wart] I was falling apart anyway, but as I get older it becomes a more realistic fear.’
Fear: it’s been said that since September 11 we’ve all become Woody Allens. He and Soon-Yi, his wife, live with their two adopted children in a $17 million, five-storey Georgian town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was in his kitchen when the planes crashed into the towers. As he has always rhapsodised about the New York skyline in his films, did the attack feel almost personal? ‘It was a shock,’ he says with a wheezy, nervous laugh. ‘Such random slaughter. But not a surprise. We always thought that terrorism would show up in one of our cities. But the government was caught napping when it did.’
Before he began shooting his latest film, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, he sued Jean Doumanian, his producer and one of his oldest and closest friends. Allen claimed Doumanian cheated him out of profits – thought to be about $15 million – from his last eight movies. In July she counter-sued, claiming that a ‘self indulgent’ Allen squandered her company’s money by demanding a large salary, chauffeur-driven cars, rooms at five-star hotels, private jets and a 50 per cent slice of his films’ profits. Hasn’t he been put off going to court after his ordeals in the early 1990s (when he and Mia Farrow were involved in a bitter, bitter custody case)? ‘Er, no. No, I’m a normal citizen and if there are matters that have to be solved in court I go to court. No.’
When Mia Farrow, his leading actress in several films and his long time companion, came across pornographic Polaroids he had taken of her (not his) 21-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi, she went berserk. According to Allen, Farrow had threatened to kill him and commit suicide – she had also sent him a Valentine’s card pierced with knives and skewers. Vindictively, it seemed (or protectively, depending on your sympathies), Farrow brought a child abuse charge against Allen (relating to another adopted daughter, Dylan). The police were compelled to investigate, they put together a 200-page report, and Allen took a lie detector test. He counter-sued, ran up legal fees of $7 million and eventually won and lost: all allegations of abuse were dismissed, he married Soon-Yi in 1997, but was banned from seeing Dylan and his natural son Satchel. The judge said Allen was ‘the most opaque of narcissists’, and added that ‘you don’t have a clue about the needs of your children.’ Since the separation, Farrow has adopted four more children – she already had 11 – and has damned Allen in her autobiography (recording that his neurotic solipsism was such that he needed weeks with his analyst before agreeing to change the bedsheets from polyester satin to cotton).
Does he now regret the scorched earth policy he adopted with Mia Farrow in the courts? ‘I, I, I wouldn’t know what you meant by scorched earth policy.’ I elaborate. ‘Ah, OK. It was big and messy and it could have been handled better and had better consequences. But I didn’t have any choice. I was put in that position and I had to respond. Normally I like to handle everything quietly and discreetly and I’m a, you know, a friendly and forgiving private type. But I will always… There are certain situations where you are forced to act.’ He shakes his head. ‘It was a terrible, terrible, terrible situation. My not having access to the children is completely cruel and unfair. Not in their best interests. But these dreadful things happen in life. To balance that I had parents with good longevity [his father lived to 100, his mother 95]. I’ve been healthy. I’ve been blessed with a talent.’
What effect did the scandal have in terms of his commercial success? ‘None! I’ve never had any success commercially! Never.’ Now, now. It’s not quite true. He had box office successes with his two Oscar-winning films Annie Hall (1977) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). ‘No. Annie Hall was the smallest earning Oscar-winning film in the history of the movies. People always ask me, “Why don’t you do any more of those early funny films?” Well, my first, Take the Money and Run (1969), I made for $1 million and it got great reviews and ten years later it still had not broken even.’
Woody Allen’s films may go unnoticed in America, but in Italy, France and Britain they have a devoted following. ‘In Europe I’m idolised, it’s true. I walk down the street and they shake my hand and throw flowers and kiss me. In the United States I’m a bum. It mystifies me.’ He rubs his hands together; hunches his shoulders; gulps. ‘I’ve had this conversation a million times with my producers. They sit me down and say, “What is it? Is it that you are in these films?” Then I would make The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and not be in it and it would still not do any real business. And they would say, “Maybe it is that they only want to see you as this neurotic New York intellectual type.” So I would make a film like Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and it would not do great business and then they would say, “Maybe they want to see you in something different, your films are too alike.” So I would make Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and I still don’t get a decent sized audience.’ He blinks repeatedly and nods to himself. ‘Maybe the problem is that my films are like Chinese food. There is no real similarity between an egg roll and spare ribs but in the end it is all Chinese food.’
In 1998 Allen said to Newsweek: ‘If my films don’t make a profit I know I’m doing something right.’ Doesn’t he take a perverse delight in the fact that they aren’t commercial? ‘No, I don’t delight in it. It would make my life a lot easier if they made money. But I do feel that if you are succeeding all the time you are doing something wrong.’
He claims that failure has dogged his career. But after dropping out of New York University, where he studied film, he found early success as a gag writer for Sid Caesar. He then became a successful cabaret comedian, one of his jokes being that he was kicked out of NYU for cheating in a metaphysics exam. He had looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to him. ‘When I was a nightclub comic I used to get these great reviews and club owners would pay me a very substantial salary,’ he says. ‘But then they would see that half the house was empty. They would have to move these big, potted palm-trees around so that the room looked fuller.’
Dr Johnson believed that all censure of a man’s self is oblique praise and this seems to apply to Woody Allen. He talks himself down but only as a strategy, because he so clearly has confidence in his own abilities. And though he has often cast himself as a self-doubting loser in his films, it has always been as an endearing one. He claims his films aren’t autobiographical, of course. Yet the characters he plays invariably share his neuroses and phobias – most of which are genuine, apparently. He prefers darkness and rain to sunshine. He is so claustrophobic he has on occasion taken a 100-mile diversion rather than cross a bridge or go through a tunnel. He has a morbid fear of dogs and deer and a thing about bright colours – which is why he, and the characters he plays, nearly always dress blandly, in green and brown corduroy. And there are enough examples of his own life overlapping with his characters’ to make his claim seem disingenuous. In 1973, for instance, he became convinced he had a brain tumour, as his character does in Hannah and Her Sisters. Or consider the grimly ironic Husbands and Wives (1992) in which his character leaves Mia Farrow’s character for a 21-year-old. Tellingly, he slips into the first person when talking about the characters he plays: ‘I never went back to Hannah.’ Or: ‘Julia left me in that movie.’
Can he understand why people assume his films are autobiographical? He coughs into his hand and grins crookedly. ‘Right, right. I think what it is is that the sensibility is me. The character I am playing has hypochondria and he obsesses about his life and his mortality and he fails in his relations and, in that respect, it is me, because that is what I do in my off-screen hours. But the details of the movies are, 99 per cent of the time, made up. Once in a while there will be something that comes up, like the concept of the brain tumour you mentioned, but that is so exaggerated compared to my real life that it may as well be made up. In real life I’m productive. I’m not totally incompetent. I get up in the morning. I’m not a little weakling – I was a good athlete when I was younger. I work at the typewriter. I practise my clarinet [he still plays with his New Orleans jazz band every Monday night at The Carlyle Hotel in New York]. I’m able to make films and run my film company.’ He smiles wanly. ‘You know, I-I-I I’m not the character in Deconstructing Harry (1997). This guy had a writer’s block, I’ve never had a writer’s block in my life. I wouldn’t know what it meant. This guy was seeing whores, he can’t stop his alcohol, he kidnapped his child. These are things I couldn’t and wouldn’t do, but people think, “So that is how he lives”.’
What about when his character contemplates suicide in Hannah and Her Sisters? Was that based on experience? ‘Not really, no. I would be too afraid to kill myself. I would never contemplate suicide.’ He touches his glasses. ‘No, that’s not quite true. I have contemplated it in the sense that the thought has occurred to me, but that would never have translated into action. I would be too frightened – that is the only reason – to buy a gun and shoot myself.”
I only ask because he is a notorious pessimist and depressive who has been visiting psychiatrists for most of his adult life. ‘I have stopped seeing a psychiatrist now,’ he says nasally. ‘It’s very hard to have a good relationship, and I didn’t for most of my life. Now, though, I am very very happily married and that has been a wonderful thing for me and I’ve got great kids. But, for me, when you get happy then you start to get these awful existential thoughts. When a guy is lonely or miserable he just thinks, “What will I do to meet a girl tonight?” But when you find you are happy with a lovely wife only then do you realise what is in store for you – it is going to end somehow. You are going to die.’
So the trick is to keep yourself as miserable as possible? ‘No, my antidote is always to rush to work and blot out these thoughts by distracting myself. Film-making for me is like therapy, like basket-weaving or finger painting in a mental institution. When I’m not doing that I make sure I watch baseball or basketball or I play my clarinet. If I don’t distract myself I know I will get depressed and anxious and give in to morbid introspection.’
He is terrified of being left alone with his thoughts? ‘Yes. There have been times when I would buy a newspaper or a magazine prior to a five-flight elevator ride because I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts in the elevator for 30 seconds.’
Must be exhausting being him. ‘Let me tell you, when I go for a walk in Central Park on a beautiful day I have to set myself mental tasks, prepare a speech, think about casting. Otherwise I know I will want to run up to people and shake them and say, “Why are you bothering to sunbathe? What is the point of your pregnant belly? Why are you walking your dog? Toward what end? We’re all going to die one day. Am I the only one who sees it? Am I the only person in the concentration camp who knows what is going on behind that big hedge?”‘ He spreads his arms, fingers splayed. ‘I will look around the park and think, “We can cut to this scene 100 years from now and all these people will be dead.” Every 100 years a big toilet will have flushed and a new group of people will be in their place. The Islamic fundamentalists, the baseball players, the beautiful models, everybody who is here now will be gone. All gone. You and me. It is hard to combat this thought. It’s constantly nagging at me. Our seemingly busy busy lives ultimately mean nothing in this cruel and hostile universe.”
Poor Woody Allen: he sounds sincere but, because he has had so much comic mileage from his angst over the years – bleak despair combined with Jewish wisecracking – it is hard to take him seriously on the subject. Does he find this reaction frustrating? ‘Look, I, I, er, I don’t make jokes about these things deliberately. I just saw one day that that was my response to them. I don’t think, “If I make people laugh or make myself laugh that will alleviate the problem.” I can make jokes, that’s all. I’ve always been able to. It is an awful gift.’
One of my favourite Woody Allen lines is: ‘If only God would give me a clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.’ I ask him why he can’t take Thomas Carlyle’s advice and just ‘accept the universe’? ‘If I tell you that someone at some point is going to come and shoot you and your wife it’s hard to live with it. It’s a very disquieting feeling. It’s unnerving. You can’t breathe easily and relax. I find it impossible to do.’
We’re all born astride the grave but surely he has a form of immortality through his films. ‘Yes, but as I have said before, it would be nice to live on in the hearts and minds of my audience but I’d rather live on in my apartment.’
I tell him I find his gloomy disposition in real life at odds with the tone of his films, which is often funny, romantic and charming. He presents his audience with these dark existential dilemmas then offers a diversion from them, a consolation: love, he often seems to be saying, is the answer to the question, ‘What meaning can there be to life when death is the end of it?’ ‘Yes, that is the best you can do. I agree with you. To say, “I love you” is the nicest thing, the most meaningful thing you can do in life. That is why my priorities in life are my children and my wife, not my movies. But this is cold comfort. When I’m with my wife and children I think, “This is so impermanent. There will come a point where we have to say goodbye. Love is the best you can do but it’s just not good enough! It’s too little too late. People should be angry instead. Angry at the whole deal.”‘ He pats my arm and grins lopsidedly: ‘I hope I’m not depressing you.’
Even as a child, Woody Allen – born Allan Konigsberg – was visited by what he called the bluebird of unhappiness. ‘Even as a young child, yes. There was a dark cloud over my head in the cradle.’ He was a lonely boy – his sister Letty was born when he was eight – who usually ate alone. His earliest memories are of Nettie and Martin, his volatile parents, arguing. ‘They stayed together out of spite. Did everything short of exchange gunfire.’ Their arguments were usually about money. Martin, who worked in a poolroom, was a spendthrift, Nettie was frugal. The young Woody would escape the tension by sitting in his room teaching himself conjuring tricks (he became an accomplished amateur magician and at one point considered making a living as a card sharp).
He got married for the first time when he was 20 – to Harlene Rosen, who was three years younger. After six years, the marriage ended in acrimony. Allen had taken to joking about Harlene in public: ‘It was my wife’s birthday, so I bought her an electric chair. Told her it was a hair dyer.’ His second marriage, to actress Louise Lasser, lasted three years, ending in 1969. His longest friendship/relationship has been with Diane Keaton, the Californian actress who monopolised the female leads in his early films. She was his live-in companion for three years in the 1970s and when they split up they remained close friends. They still speak on the phone nearly every day and she is, he says, the only person whose critical opinion he really cares about.
He once joked that he never trusts a woman until she rejects him, yet he has always been successful with women, beautiful women at that. Why does he think this is? ‘I never have been.’ Do I have to list them? ‘OK, but very few. I had a wonderful wife in Louise Lasser and I’m friendly with her to this day. And Diane and I remain very close. Mia I had a bad time with but I had some very nice times with her, too.’ Does he speak to her now? ‘No, I don’t, because it ended too sourly. But I thought she was beautiful and a good actress and in many ways a good person, too. In other ways I had bitter disagreements with her. So, yes, I have had some good relationships in my life but I always thought that when I finally became what I always wanted to be, which is attractive to women, it was too late.’ He laughs a laugh that turns into a cough. ‘It was only after I was married, happily married and devoted to Soon-Yi, and older, in my sixties, only then did I sense that when I met beautiful women I could, you know, think, “Gee, I could really have a chance with this woman. I could really have an affair with her or go to bed with her.” And I never had that feeling before. It’s when you’re off the market, I guess.’
I’m sure it is, but could it also possibly be because he is a powerful figure in the film world? As Henry Kissinger said, power is the great aphrodisiac. ‘Yes, it’s possible that all that melds together. I’m a film director and there might be a reason to cultivate a relationship with me because they will get something out of it. But really, you know, I have had a below average record with women.’
A sense of humour, of course, is also a great aphrodisiac. Is there anyone he hasn’t been able to win over, eventually, with his relentless joking and banter? ‘Yes, the American people.’ And on a one-to-one basis? ‘I think when people meet me and talk to me they find me a reasonable person. Not a nasty egomaniac. Interesting on arts and sports and on the good side politically – liberal, you know. I don’t think I put people off one-to-one, just on a mass scale.’
Some who have worked with Woody Allen might disagree with his analysis. ‘Manipulative’ and ‘self-centred’ are two descriptions that have cropped up when his former colleagues have been asked to describe him. ‘The last person to accept blame’ is another. And, though he has seemed cheerful and engaged enough in this interview, the words which are most often used about him are: reclusive, melancholy, and detached. For his part, he considers himself to be drab and once said he felt sorry for his analyst because, ‘Whenever I am on the couch, I bore on like an accountant.’ Self-loathing, of course, is not incompatible with self-belief and tellingly, in the biographical documentary Wild Man Blues (1997), he talked of a chronic sense of dissatisfaction with himself: ‘I don’t want to be where I am at any given moment. When I’m in New York, I want to be in Europe. When in Europe, I want to be in New York.’
He never watches his old films and claims he hasn’t read any of the 40 or so books written about him. ‘I don’t want to waste time thinking about myself,’ he says. ‘And if I watch my own movies I only see what I could have done better.’ Most directors take about four years to make a film. Allen is able to bring out one a year because, in the past at least, he has always managed to find indulgent patrons to back him – and give him complete autonomy over scripts and production. Also it only takes him between one and three months to write a script. This is followed by eight weeks of pre-production and three months’ shooting. To his regret, though, he feels he has never made a great film – by which he means a Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thieves, or Wild Strawberries – and some of his films, such as Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, he actually hates. Has he considered taking more time over his film-making, devoting five years to one project, say, in order to make what he might consider to be a great film? ‘I don’t think I could do it because when I finish with a script, even if I’ve written it in six weeks, I think it is the best I can do. I don’t think, “If I coddle it for a year I might be able to improve it.” I think, “This is great.” I’m completely uncritical of myself as a writer. But when I translate the script to the screen my slovenliness takes over. When I see what I wind up with I think, “Where did it go wrong? I missed by 90 per cent.” It’s maybe lack of perfectionism or dedication. When it gets difficult I give up. I don’t do enough takes and I only do these long master shots all the time because I don’t have the patience for close-ups. People think it’s a deliberate style of mine, but it’s really just laziness.’
He’s praising himself obliquely again. An indolent man could not make a film a year. Nor would a lazy man be rushing round the world promoting his latest film – he has just flown in from Venice, to be out of context here in London, and is just about to fly off to Paris. He looks around the room, points at himself, raises his eyebrows and says: ‘Me?’ He grins. ‘Know something? I’m so lazy, if I get a really good idea but it has to be shot in Texas I throw the idea away – just because I live in New York!’

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Of course I know her name isn’t pronounced ‘Lisa’. Everyone does. She even had a television show in the 1970s called Liza with a Z. But the moment I learnt that she gets stroppy when people anglicise (or anglicize) her name, that was it: the word-gremlin began its evil work in my brain. I’m not sure what the technical name for this condition is, but it’s that thing that makes you mention the War to Germans, or that happens when you ask a man with enormous, sticking-out ears to pass the salt and instead say, ‘Can you pass the ears, please?’
But this is yet to come. For now I’m waiting in a hotel suite – yellow silk curtains, 18th-century landscape paintings, vases of roses – a few blocks away from where Liza Minnelli lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is only an hour late, which is pretty unstarry of her, considering. Her fiancé David Gest, a music producer who specialises in multi-star extravaganzas, has phoned, introduced himself as ‘Mr Gest’ and told me that his intended is on her way. I hear a raucous laugh – ‘Hah!’ – in the hallway and, when I open the door, I almost get flattened against a wall as Liza with a Zee barrels in and starts pacing around the room signalling for her entourage of two – there are normally half a dozen – to come in and join us. ‘Hello old boy,’ she barks at me in a mock plummy English accent. ‘I need an ashtray.’ The curtain is up. The performance has begun.
She is wearing black, from her jacket to her high-heeled boots (which make her seem taller than her 5ft 4in). Her spiky hair – ‘I call this my wet hair with toe stuck in electrical socket look, hah!’ – is very black, bottle black indeed, as are her Cleopatra eyeliner, long false eyelashes and thickly drawn-on eyebrows. The blackness of her expressive, bulging eyes, though, is all genuine 100 per cent Liza Minnelli.
She is 56 this month but, apart from a few crow’s-feet and liver spots, she doesn’t look much different from how she looked in 1972 when she first became an international superstar after winning an Oscar for her high-kicking, big-voiced performance in Cabaret. She did look rather different this time last year, though. She was in a wheelchair and, after months of binge-eating junk food, she was five stone heavier than she is now. Having survived three broken marriages, chronic drug and alcohol addiction, rehab, depression, failed comebacks and three miscarriages she had, it seemed, finally hit her lowest point. In May 2000, suffering from arthritis and pneumonia, she had cancelled 14 concert appearances. This followed two hip replacements, three bouts of knee surgery and an operation on her throat. While convalescing she had been rushed back to hospital where she was treated for a life-threatening bout of encephalitis, a viral infection carried by mosquitoes.
Today the only physical intimations of this troubled past are a slight shake in her hand, a crack in her voice and an occasional tendency to make connection jumps and lose the thread of her thoughts in conversation. She is sipping cold, sugary coffee from a giant Starbucks cup; taking agitated drags from a Marlboro Light. ‘Know something?’ she says in a muscular, chewy voice. ‘It’s my last vice.’ She holds up the cigarette, turns up one corner of her pursed mouth and raises an accusing eyebrow. ‘And it’s going within six months. I stopped smoking for a while then I thought I’d have one, then half an hour later I found myself lighting another and I thought, ‘Son of a bitch.'”
She is getting married for the fourth time on Saturday. Does her bridegroom smoke? She widens her eyes. ‘No! Heavens no!’ So that is going to be a bone of contention? ‘I have smoking areas in the house. Yes I do! Hah!’ She touches my shoulder. ‘Marriage is about compromise, honey.’ I imagine she is busy doing all those last-minute things a bride must do: making sure there will be enough vol-au-vents to go round at the reception, ordering the flowers, wondering whether the best man will be bringing his monkey to the service. It is true that Michael Jackson is best man, isn’t it? ‘Well, yes. David grew up with Michael so he knows the family really well. They are partners in business.’ And Whitney Houston will be singing as Minnelli enters the church? ‘Sure.’ Her attendants will include Petula Clarke, Gina Lollobrigida and Martine McCutcheon, but Elizabeth Taylor will be maid of honour, correct? ‘Yes. But Elizabeth can’t bend down – her back is so bad – which I why I asked the others to help.’ Am I right in thinking that since Liza Minnelli’s mother, Judy Garland, died of a drug overdose in 1969, Elizabeth Taylor has been her surrogate mother? ‘Yes. No. She is more like a sister. I met her so many years ago when she was working with my father [the Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli] on Father of the Bride, the first one I mean. And she was nice to me. She loved me.’ From the nursery onwards what was ordinary life for Liza Minnelli would be extraordinary to other people. The first visitor to see her, just hours after she was born, was Frank Sinatra. No‘l Coward, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe were regular guests at her parents’ house. When she was seven, Ella Fitzgerald taught her how to sing ‘Embraceable You’, when she was 11 she made her television debut with Gene Kelly. ‘Yes,’ she says, blowing out smoke. ‘But you must bear in mind that these people were just the neighbours. It was all I knew. Hollywood was much more of a community then. Everyone stuck together. It’s like our wedding. Our friends are coming, that’s all. We’re all in the same business. If you were getting married, wouldn’t you invite journalists?’
No, they’d get drunk and cause trouble. ‘Well, you know what I mean. We’re a clan.’
‘She hasn’t been put off marriage? She didn’t think she should maybe just live with him? ‘But we’ve been doing that. Hah! No, David is so…’ She trails off. ‘It’s so different this time. I really waited. A long time. And I thought I’d never get married again. And he thought he would never get married.’
As did quite a few people. Indeed there was insinuation in the American press that David Gest, who is 46 years old, has a collection of Lalique crystal and hasn’t had a girlfriend since he was 29, might not be the marrying kind. David and she became engaged three months after she appeared on a Michael Jackson special he had organised last summer. Was it love at first sight? ‘No, because we had met each other several times over the years. It was always, ‘Hello Mr Gest,’ ‘Hello Miss Minnelli.’ But for this last show Michael said, ‘I want Liza on it.’ And David was sceptical. David knows every rock and roll act in the world but he didn’t know ‘Liza with a Zee’. So he sent his conductor over and I sang for a while and afterwards I could hear the conductor on the phone to David saying, ‘Yeah, three octaves! I’m telling you, she’s got her voice back. You’ve gotta come down here and hear this.’ So he did.’
David Gest has, it seems, been a good influence on Liza Minnelli. ‘I lost all this weight because David wanted me to. But I also did it because I don’t want to take any medicine. Nothing mood-altering. I have two crushed discs and two rotated vertebrae in my neck. If I’m carrying any extra weight, it hurts. I don’t want to be in any pain. I don’t want to take painkillers. So there’s the inspiration.’
Is she following a particular diet, such as the Hunza? ‘Yeah, it’s called the Hunga Diet. H-u-n-g-a. Hunga! Hah! You get used to eating healthy. I have half a banana for breakfast. Yogurt for lunch and fish and steamed vegetables for dinner. I went to Bob Mackie who is designing my wedding gown and he said: ‘Oh Liza, you look great. Did you have a nip and a tuck? Liposuction?’ And I said, ‘No, darling. Hunga!”
She disapproves of cosmetic surgery? ‘No, I don’t disapprove of it, but it hurts! That’s why I don’t want to do it, it hurts. Some people are more sensitive than others and I get a little claustrophobic with all that stuff.’
Is there anything about herself she would change? Long pause. ‘My attitudes.’ What’s wrong with them? ‘I’m in constant change now every day because I realise I have a choice. I don’t have to be a slave to anything. I have healthy fear.’ She embarks upon a long analogy about being bumped by someone and turning round angrily to find it’s a blind man. ‘Alcoholics and those of us with compulsive-obsessive disease get bumped on the street and I’ve got to turn round and see who it is before I open my mouth because I know the guilt of what I have done will keep revolving in my head.’
Riiight. But even as a recovering compulsive obsessive, she must perhaps feel she has no choice. It is inescapable. Indeed, in her case it has been suggested that her mental and physical problems are genetic. Judy Garland was notorious for her mood swings, her nervous breakdowns, her 23 suicide attempts, her five marriages, her violent weight fluctuations and her various drug addictions. And so far Minnelli seems to have crashed through life repeating the same mistakes her mother made. ‘Honestly, it is not inevitable because of one woman,’ she says in a hazy drawl. ‘It’s inevitable because of my family history on both sides. It skips generations, but it’s there, like cancer, like any other disease, that’s just the way it is.’
So she does think it was inevitable that she would go off the rails? She puts on her serious face. ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past. I like moving forward. But… Here’s something I’ve learnt. Whenever you get two people talking about me the conversation will follow the same pattern. ‘I saw Judy Garland’s kid in an off-Broadway show, I didn’t think she was very good.’ And the other person says, ‘Of course.’ Or it might go: ‘I thought she was terrific.’ ‘Of course.’ Or another conversation: ‘Liza Minnelli is out of the business, she has adopted children, she is working with brain-injured people and she is going to college.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Did you know Liza Minnelli just jumped out of a window and died?’ ‘But of course.’ Do you see what I’m saying?’
Of course. Whatever she does, people will say it’s inevitable? ‘Yeah, it’s as if I can’t do anything by myself.’ She lies back on the sofa. ‘Look, my momma told me: ‘Give the people what they want, then go get a hamburger.’ Or several. She mentioned her compulsive-obsessiveness, has she turned to a psychiatrist for help with it? ‘I’ve reached out for help to all sorts of people all the way down the line and never kept my mouth shut. You need to know as much as you can about your condition. It’s like you can’t expect to know how to do a Broadway show from watching it. You have to practise.’ She stands up and starts dancing. ‘You have to learn: step, shuffle, tap, shuffle, hop, hop, take it slow. You gotta rehearse.’
And life is a cabaret. Does she think she would have been a successful singer if she hadn’t been Judy Garland’s daughter, in the sense that her trials and tribulations, her traumatic childhood, gave her performances, her torch songs, an added depth and poignancy? ‘I don’t think you can communicate from the stage with people unless you can identify with them, with their suffering. You know, if I am walking down the street, spinning, saying I have to do this, I have to do that, if I just perform a citizen’s arrest and say halt and look around I will inevitably see someone with one leg. Someone suffering so much more than I am. I have high-‘N’ [neuroticism] problems.’ Meaning? ‘I was never in the gutter. Up here [she taps her head] I was, but not in reality.’
But she grew up knowing about financial problems. Judy Garland was often in debt and died owing $4 million. Liza once joked that before she could read or write she learnt how to check out of hotels without paying. True? ‘Yes, well, there’s lots of stories.’ Aren’t there just. ‘Yeah, but it’s not my problem. I know how I grew up.’ She lights another cigarette. ‘It is strange. So many times I’ve been, say, visiting my half-sister on my father’s side, in Mexico where she works with the Church, and I’ve read that I’m drunk somewhere in some club and I’ve just thought, ‘Hello?’ And I’ve just kept on doing what I was doing, washing the dishes with my sister.’
So she just shrugs it off? ‘It’s not like any of this is new to me. For anyone who was not born into this, though, it is hair-raising. I grew up with it.’ Does she think ‘normality’ only came into her life once she became famous in her own right? ‘Well, my parents were so proud of me and supportive and wonderful. When I was 16 they said you can go to New York and Momma gave me $100 and my father gave me an airline ticket and another $100 and I went to New York and I never took another cent. Never. Not one.’
On the contrary she began sending money home to help her mother out. Judy Garland only realised that her daughter had become a star when Garland invited her on stage during a concert she was giving at the London Palladium in 1964. Was that when the world first recognised Lisa Minnelli in her own right?
‘Liza. It’s Liza with a Zee.’
I must look mortified because she laughs her maniacal laugh – ‘Hah!’ – and says with a shaky, lopsided smile: ‘It’s all right honey, people get it wrong all the time.’ Realising that I am now speechless with shame at my mistake she pats my knee and grins. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really. What were we saying? Yes, the first time I was recognised as a performer in my own right wasn’t on that London stage: it was in an off-Broadway show. I won all the awards there were to win. I was 16. I earned my stripes. So by the time I went to sing with Momma in London she had no idea I’d done all this work and she was quite surprised.’
Recovering my composure slightly, I ask if her mother became competitive. ‘She had to. My mother wasn’t dumb. She was one of the smartest, funniest women I’ve ever known. But, boy, after being on stage with her when she turned from Momma into Judy it was…’ She stands up again, puts her hands on her hips. ‘Well, she sang her five songs and then she introduced me and I came on and sang a song and she applauded. Second song she was still applauding. Then when I did my third she was pacing up and down and by the fourth she had her hands on her hips and was staring at me like this.’ She scowls. ‘By the fifth she was no longer looking at me but re-doing her lipstick, and I thought, ‘Yikes!”It must have been odd for Judy Garland to recognise that her reign was nearly over, that she was being usurped by her daughter. And of course just eight years later, Minnelli realised her full potential with Cabaret. It must be strange for her being preserved on celluloid as she is in Cabaret, this wisecracking coquettish young thing, practically a baby. Does she look at herself in that film now and think, ‘If only you knew what was in store?’ ‘No, I don’t see this baby dancing around. I see a ballsy performer.’ Is she any different from that ballsy performer now?
‘I can turn into her at any minute – so watch out! It’s a stage presence. I was taught all that. What I was never taught was how to live. Momma didn’t know. She’d been working since she was 13 years old.’ Live as in ‘living in the real world’? ‘Yes. Rather than this artificial world. They [the studio, MGM] protected Momma from the time she was so young right up until she had me. They got her addicted to pills, kept her on a starvation diet, and then they kicked her out. That’s not a good thing. There is help now in studios so anyone who is flailing around just has to raise a hand.’
Liza Minnelli mothered her mother. By the age of 12 she was her mother’s nurse and dresser and was even hiring and firing staff – interviewing applicants to assess whether they could deal with her mother’s erratic behaviour and addictions, and asking the police to check their references. As children, Minnelli and her sister Lorna, the daughter of Sid Luft, Garland’s second husband, would replace their mother’s sleeping pills and refill them with sugar, in case she overdosed. By the age of 14, Liza had taken the precaution of acquiring a stomach pump.
Some childhood. ‘Look, my father did his best to give me a normal upbringing. He really did. He’d see me and say, ‘What do you want to be, Liza?’ And I’d say: ‘A Spanish dancer.’ And he would go and buy crpe paper from a drug store and wrap it round me and he would then stretch it and put safety pins in and I would have a train and ruffles and he’s say, ‘What does a Spanish dancer do?’ And I’d say, ‘Dance?’ And he’d say, ‘Then dance, Liza, dance!’ And he’d watch me for hours.’
It’s a touching story. Clearly she felt closer to her father, who died of cancer in 1986, than to her mother. What objects of his does she still keep around the house? ‘I have his viewfinder in a glass case alongside my lucky five-dollar bill – the first money I ever earned. The two things remind me of who I am.’ Liza’s father was bisexual, as was her grandfather and her first husband, Peter Allen. Indeed, on their wedding night, she caught Allen in bed with his boyfriend (‘When we got divorced he got my wardrobe, that’s all he took!’ Liza said later.) Why does she think she has always been attracted to gay men? ‘Well, who else is in the theatre? Know what I mean? Are you going to meet a lot of basketball players when you’re performing on Broadway? I think not.’ In some ways she has continued in her mother’s role as a gay icon, a ‘Friend of Dorothy’ (the name of Judy Garland’s character in The Wizard of Oz) being an early idiom. How does Liza Minnelli account for her own gay following? ‘There is a difference in the genes with gay people. I find that gay people relate to women like me because I’m sensitive like they are. I describe what they are going through.’ Perhaps so: she was an ornament of Studio 54, a true bohemian, frolicking with Andy Warhol and taking many lovers, among them Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Sellers. By all accounts she could be immature, petulant and shallow but her quixotic, excitable, likeable personality always seems to have compensated for her flaws. And, as she says, fame breeds insecurity, and she was born to it.
It is time for her close up now. Her make-up man goes to work. ‘This is my best side, honey,’ she tells the photographer, presenting her left profile. Endearingly, she keeps absent-mindedly bursting into song – ‘Mr Saturday Night’ – and she keeps trying out dance steps, too, seemingly oblivious to other people in the room. At one point she wanders through into another room, and I can hear her say loudly: ‘What’s that English guy’s name again?’ When she comes back out she says: ‘It’s blaady cold, don’t you think, Nigel, old boy? When you lose weight you really feel it.’ She takes a sip from my coffee cup by mistake and nearly chokes on it. ‘Ahhh, no sugar! Yuk!’
Pictures taken, she gives the photographer and his assistant a big hug each, but sensing my English terror of such tactility she slaps me on the back instead and says: ‘Ta-ta’. Her mobile rings. It is Mr Gest. She ends her conversation: ‘I love you, sweetheart.’ A minute later Mr Gest walks through the door: 5ft 9in, dimple in chin, shaped eyebrows, permatan, neat little scarf around neck and, though the room is dark, sunglasses. ‘How did it go?’ he asks. Liza links her arm through his and says: ‘He called me Lisa! Hah!’

In her latest television incarnation Joanna Lumley brilliantly portrays a lonely gentlewoman with nothing to do all day but stare at herself in the dressing-table mirror. Nigel Farndale asks her what she sees

 

AFTER half an hour of desultory conversation, Joanna Lumley lowers her shoulders a notch, takes a thoughtful drag on her Rothmans and says, ‘Maybe one was less adorable than one should have been when you arrived.’ What! Hang on. I thought I’d been getting the full Lumley treatment: the red carpet, gold-star-plus service. I feel so cheated.

She laughs the Lumley laugh: short, low and breathy. ‘We all act all the time and sometimes we could do it better, Nigel, that’s all. I could have done it better when you arrived.’ (Before I arrived, she goes on to explain, she had been ‘rather thrown’ by having her picture taken by our photographer in a public bar. When she saw there were other people drinking in there she thought ‘rats’, a very Lumley word to think.)

Her comments, made across a restaurant table overlooking a wind-raked Hyde Park, are intriguing on two counts. First, she thinks ‘one should’ be adorable, at all times. It is expected of her, as it might be expected of royalty or labrador puppies. Second, if she is acting ‘all the time’ this implies she is being manipulative most of the time. ‘No, no,’ she corrects softly. ‘Though I am prone to exaggerated courtesy, huh huh, a weakness of mine.’

In 1986 she married Stephen Barlow, a conductor and pianist eight years her junior: does she ever catch herself acting with him? ‘He sees through me as though I were a very shallow puddle. I can’t fool him at all.’

Leaving aside for the moment what I can now plainly see was a shameful lack of adorability on Joanna Lumley’s part when I arrived, my first impressions of her were as follows: yes, she looks younger than her 55 years; yes, her cheekbones are like elbows; yes, when she smiles she displays an alarming number of teeth and looks like a friendly barracuda. And yes – of course, yes – that mellow, silken voice with its immaculately rounded Pony Club vowels does leave you with a tingling sensation at the nape of your neck.

But the most striking thing about Joanna Lumley OBE is her deportment: she glides in a straight-spined, square-shouldered way, making herself seem taller than she is (which at 5ft 8in is still pretty tall). Asked to describe herself she shrugs and says, ‘Tall and good-natured.’ Her height contributes that much to her sense of self-identity? ‘Yes. And being tall affects the way other people look at you. They think: aloof, snooty, commanding – all things that aren’t necessarily there at all. That is what “tall woman” means.’

She taps a matchbox against the tablecloth. ‘I have an extra vertebrae, that is why I am tall. It’s probably why I have a bad back, too. But, really, I’m titchy compared to models today.’ Lumley became a model after leaving St Mary’s, an Anglo-Catholic convent in Hastings, with one A-level. (She was, she says, ‘bumptious’ as a schoolgirl, as well as spotty: ‘If you had seen me in my teens, Nigel, you would have bolted for the door without picking up your coat.’)

Having failed to win a place at the Rada she enrolled at the Lucie Clayton Modelling Agency and Training School in London. ‘They trained me how to get out of an E-type Jag without showing my knickers,’ she recalls. ‘That is all young blonde women were supposed to do at the time, get out of E-type jags with their knees together while pipe-smoking men held the door open for them, huh huh.’

She soon became one of the top ten most-booked models in London – and, with her hot pants, mini-skirts and flares, became a symbol of the Swinging Sixties, too. Did her oneness with the spirit of that age extend to drug-taking? ‘I did smoke a bit of dope, but not much, of any of it, because I hadn’t got the money. When I read about young people today getting off their heads every night of the week, I wonder how they afford it. It brings out the Tunbridge Wells woman in me – you know, old tights and a moustache.’ (Although she was born in Kashmir – her father was a major in the 2nd 6th Gurkha Rifles – Joanna Lumley moved to England with her family at the age of eight, and lived in a village not far from Tunbridge Wells.)

She did, though, embrace the counter-culture to the extent that, in 1967, she became a single mother (declining to name the father) and, three years later, after a five-day courtship, agreed to marry the comedy writer Jeremy Lloyd, of Are You Being Served and ‘Allo ‘Allo! The marriage, which marked a splendidly kooky period in Lumley’s life, was characterised by her ‘visions’ and his out-of-body experiences. It lasted four months, after which they both had nervous breakdowns.

Lumley’s came during a long run of a Brian Rix farce. She became so depressed she walked out on the show and lay sobbing on her bedroom floor. ‘Nervous breakdown? Didn’t really know what it was at the time. With hindsight I think it was a bad case of stage fright. Terribly common.’

She says this neutrally, talking in clipped sentences. ‘Came from boredom. The repetition. You go mad. I’d been in that play for ten months, eight shows a week. I’ve been in many plays since and it has been fine but I’ve made sure I’ve never done long runs again. I like new things. Which is why I like filming. I only started in acting because I was interested in film. I like the lie.’ She shakes her matches. ‘The fibs the camera tells.’

Her first big film role came in 1971 in a soft porn movie, Games That Lovers Play (she bitterly regrets her early screen nudity now, dismissing it as prurient and exploitative). The film was made around the same time that she had a two-month fling with Rod Stewart (she left him after he failed to turn up on a date, having, as he put it, ‘got caught up with some tart’).

Her first big role in television came in 1973, on Coronation Street. She played Ken Barlow’s girlfriend. But it wasn’t until she played the karate-chopping Purdey in The New Avengers three years later that she became a household name. Fashion-conscious women everywhere would turn up at their hairdressers clutching a picture of Lumley’s pageboy haircut and ask for ‘a Purdey.’

A starring role in the sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel (1979-1982) followed, as well as odd cameos in films such as Shirley Valentine (1989), but it wasn’t until 1993 that Joanna Lumley again found superstardom, this time as Patsy Stone, the beehive-wearing, chain-smoking, self-centred alcoholic she played in Absolutely Fabulous.

The character – right up there with Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty in the pantheon of great British comedy archetypes – was invented after Ruby Wax pretended to break into Joanna Lumley’s home to do a ‘surprise’ interview. Wax found the seemingly demure and fragrant actress surrounded by – Lumley’s idea this – empty whisky bottles and dirty laundry and on the point of a nervous breakdown.

Wax, who was to become the script editor on Absolutely Fabulous, suggested Lumley should get in touch with Jennifer Saunders, who was to be the writer, and sitcom history was made.

Lumley’s work since Absolutely Fabulous has been mixed. She acquitted herself well enough in Cold Comfort Farm (1995) and A Rather English Marriage (1998) but Dr Willoughby (1999), a comedy series in which she was the star, proved to be a turkey. Critics panned it as ‘unfunny, badly written and hammily overacted.’

Now, however, Joanna Lumley seems to have found the role she was born to play, that of Madison Blakelock. Up in Town, a six-part series of ten-minute dramas to be shown on BBC2 in the spring, has been written especially for her by Hugo Blick, who wrote Marion and Geoff. Madison, who lives in genteel poverty in a one-room flat in a converted mansion, has nothing to do all day except sit at her dressing-table doing her make-up, staring into the mirror (the viewpoint of the audience), waiting for her rich husband to leave his mistress and come back to her.

Two things struck me when watching a preview. First, it is very good indeed, the stuff of Bafta awards, with a tragi-comic ‘talking head’ style script worthy of Alan Bennett. Second, the dignified and whimsical character Lumley plays seems to be eerily similar to her own. All makes sense when Lumley explains the writing process: ‘We had weekly meetings to invent the character because that is how Hugo works. He sits there with his Mekon-sized brain and talks to you and the character changes shape. The script isn’t even like a script – I wish I’d brought a page along to show you – there is just one thin strip of dialogue. Occasionally Hugo would say, “I would like this sentence to be exactly as written.” The rest is assimilated and delivered. A fantastically freeing way of working.’

Madison copes, she soldiers on, she doesn’t do things which might appear unseemly or immodest. That is what Joanna Lumley is like, is it not? ‘Yes, she has no self-pity. But in a strange way there has been arrested development with Maddie.’ Was Lumley drawing upon her own rituals for applying make-up when she played this character?

‘Maddie loved the full laborious make-up process, what women’s magazines call one’s “beauty regime”. I’m not like that at all. My regime is to saw off the bits of nail I’ve broken in the garden.’ Oh come now. Modesty. ‘Well, I do try to look nice for things where people expect me to look nice. For you, Nigel, I cut my hair this morning. I did it with a mirror and scissors behind my head. And I dye my own hair.’ She leans forward and lowers her voice. ‘I met a woman the other day at a rather grand lunch and she said something spiteful about another woman: “She looks like the sort of woman who washes her own hair.” Isn’t that awful? I’ve never heard that before! Huh huh. Are you sure you don’t mind me smoking? I don’t smoke very many.’

She strikes a match. ‘This is only my second today.’ Does Joanna Lumley wear make-up as a form of mask, a way of stepping into character whenever she goes out in public? ‘No, no. I don’t think about it at all. I don’t think I look very different without make-up. I realised long ago that if my life was so hedged about that I didn’t dare go out without make-up, it would be miserable. What’s the worst that can happen? A photographer from a magazine might catch me out buying my groceries, big deal.’

Can she identify a moment of invention when Joanna Lumley became ‘Joanna Lumley’ the answer to quiz questions, the actress who has Oxbridge Junior Common Rooms named after her, the gay icon who inspired a float of transvestite lookalikes at a Sydney carnival? ‘l think if you have an acting strain in you, if you enjoy being other people, then inventing yourself comes naturally.’

What about her voice? After she appeared on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1994 Lumley asked Dr Anthony Clare if he would see her sister Aelene (older by two years) for a private consultation. Aelene was furious and, in a newspaper interview, she claimed this was the latest in a series of humiliating digs Joanna had had at her over the years. She even accused Joanna of talking to her family in a stage voice, as though they were fans. Does Lumley think her voice evolved? ‘You don’t hear yourself.’ But if her 15-year-old self heard her now would she think her voice was affected? ‘I’m sure it must have been higher. Because the 15-year-old didn’t smoke. Smoking fattened my voice. A lot of voice actors smoke and very few sopranos do.’ Does that apply to musicians too? What about her husband? ‘Yes, he smokes, huh huh. We live in a nice yellowing house.’

Joanna Lumley seems a controlled person, seems to have what a psychiatrist would call a well-defended personality. ‘Only in public. I unburden myself to my friends. I have very understanding friends. I’ve never talked to a psychiatrist, other than Professor Anthony Clare. I used to confide in journalists, really open my heart to them. But I learnt not to.’ Damn. ‘Huh huh.’

She must have very trustworthy friends. Her son Jamie was born when she was 21 – she didn’t realise she was pregnant for six months, having been told by doctors she was infertile – and she and her friends managed to keep the secret of who the father was for 30 years. Press speculation was fevered, with Lord Lichfield being odds on favourite at one point.

In her 1989 memoirs Stare Back and Smile, Lumley described the secret as becoming ‘like one of Aesop’s fables – with an impenetrable moral.’ She eventually revealed – in a newspaper announcement at the time of her son’s engagement in 1997 – that the father was a photographer, Michael Claydon.

Was it a strain keeping schtum? ‘Well this is so long ago, Jamie is 34 now. It was a different world then. My small boy growing up was no one else’s business. I really thought and I still think now that my family is nothing to do with my job as an actress. I really don’t feel the need to herd my family in and have them speculated upon and photographed and named and paraded, I don’t think that’s right. I really don’t think that is right. The only reason anyone is interested in me is I appear on television. It’s not because I’m doing a good job – you are not interviewing a nurse here.’

Modesty again. Much of Lumley’s time is devoted to her charity work – she is a patron, trustee or director of 44 charities – that and Compassion in World Farming, the pressure group against factory farming. She first took on a high-profile campaigning role for this cause in 1994 when she broke down in tears while launching a video about live animal transport.

Last year she let it be known that she was ‘furious’ with Tony Blair when he failed to reply to her letter calling for vaccination against foot-and-mouth in livestock. Is there an element of her making amends for her lightweight day job by embracing so publicly this heavyweight cause? ‘Acting is a bit too fey, you mean? I see. Mm. Possibly. I did worry about that. As an actress you are often seen as a lightweight. Journalists use this phrase luvvie to describe people who simper about comparing costumes, kissing each other and carping about lack of money.’

But actors do do that. ‘True, but it’s exaggerated to the point where people are almost affronted if actors have any interest other than acting. How could Joanna Lumley be interested in farming? Doesn’t she live in London?’ AN Wilson once wrote: ‘Joanna Lumley’s air of complete seriousness, her self-righteousness in the name of a cause, makes me giggle.’

Does she worry that people might think she is self-righteous? ‘People have said that, yes. Like most people in my profession we are approached because of our links with television. People might think you are doing it for publicity but I’ve become used to that because I started doing it when I was 19, for children’s charities, and I knew that for the rest of my life that accusation would follow me. But I just think, so what? Let it go.’

When she goes on to talk of the ‘burden of scrutiny’, I point out that at least she is used to it, having lived with it since she was 19. Being married to someone who is constantly scrutinised must be altogether harder. Stephen Barlow once said how depressed he felt when a tabloid asked to interview him about Glyndebourne only to find the article was about his being fed up with everyone thinking of him as Mr Lumley. ‘I have to say, um…’ Long pause. ‘I’ve never known him identified as Mr Lumley. I don’t think anyone has ever called him Mr Lumley. But what does happen is the other way round. Always when we are going somewhere I book us in as Mr and Mrs Barlow, which is our name, and people go into a back flip and feel I’ve cheated them in some way, that I ought to have signed in as Miss Lumley.’

Has Mrs Barlow become an expert on classical music since marrying Mr Barlow? ‘I’ve always loved it. Expert, absolutely not. I don’t play. At the moment Stephen is playing a lot of harpsichord and organ and piano, but when he is studying an opera the house has to be silent. You are allowed talking, Radio 4, but not music because that would interfere with the score he is running through in his head.’ And is she easily moved by music? She takes a sip of coffee and stares wanly out of the window. ‘I cannot get through The Marriage of Figaro, the part where the countess sings, “Where is my happy life?”, without weeping.’ She turns back to me and smiles. ‘I always cry when I watch ET, too.’

Though she has a terror of going mad and thinks about death in a calm, almost abstract way, every day, she is content, she says. Marriage especially has made her happier and more confident than she ever imagined she would be. She sleeps well – and always tries to have a 20-minute nap after lunch – but she has a recurring anxiety dream that she is about to go on stage and she doesn’t know what play it is she is performing in. ‘And no one will tell me, and I get locked out of my dressing-room, and there is no possible way of finding out who I am supposed to be playing. It’s about a fear of letting people down, I guess. Awful anxiety. Most of us are afraid of being found out. That we’re not really up to it. That some awful, godlike voice will pick us out.’

Given her early experience of stage fright, acting does seem to have been a rather masochistic choice of profession for her. Did she consider any other careers? ‘I’ve always thought how interesting it would be to be a teacher. To influence lives. That Jesuitical thing. Everything I’ve learnt I learnt before I was 12. Everything. I’ve learnt nothing since. Nothing that’s stuck anyway.’

Is that why she was so good at the Common Entrance Examination (she along with a number of other celebrities was asked by a newspaper to take the Common Entrance in 1984 – only the historian AJP Taylor came out with higher marks)? ‘Yes, huh huh. Because it was only for 13-year-olds.’ More modesty: Joanna Lumley has been a Booker Prize judge, she wrote a column for The Times in the 1980s and she has a photographic memory. ‘My memory is much worse now. I used to have a photographic one, yes. It was horrific.’ Why horrific? ‘Because one couldn’t forget stuff. It was like imprinting it on Plasticene.’

She mimes an imprint on the palm of her hand. ‘So I almost didn’t have to take things in because I knew it would be imprinted and I could look at it later. Isn’t that odd? I could read it.’ She stubs her cigarette out. ‘A question would come up about, say, the population of Abyssinia and I would think, ah yes, and flick to the page in my head. It would stick for about five days, as long as I needed it before a test. Not forever.’ While her modesty and droll self-mockery are sympathetic traits, there is something remote and – pace her character Maddie – almost arrested about Joanna Lumley.

She has a very low blood pressure, she says, and is ‘placatory and nice’ because she hates competing and fears confrontation – but she also says that she is afraid of losing her temper because she would be ‘so hugely unpleasant’ and say things she regretted.

Evelyn Waugh’s phrase about ‘creamy English charm playing tigers’ comes to mind when she says this. But it is also, I think, a matter of her hiding behind make-up, smoke and mirrors. ‘When I’m with someone I am trying to get on with I catch myself mirroring their movements,’ she says as we are about to leave. ‘I lean forward when they lean forward, fold my arms when they fold theirs. Human empathy. If I was talking to you like this,’ she turns her shoulder to me, three-quarter profile, ‘you would know there was something wrong. But I hope you’ve noticed, Nigel, I’ve been sitting face on.’

Her car is waiting outside. Hugging her coat to her, sheltered by a tall doorman with an umbrella, she looks smaller and more fragile than she did when I arrived. As we live about a mile away from each other in south London, she offers me a lift home. When we reach Vauxhall the roads narrow, cordoned off with bollards. ‘This makes me so angry,’ she says, tapping the window. ‘Heart attacks are caused by narrowing of the arteries and that is what is happening here. They keep narrowing the roads, narrower and narrower, and one day this whole area will just stop moving. Dead. It fills me with so much rage I fear that one day I will have a heart attack myself just thinking about it. If I die suddenly in a car you, Nigel, will be the only one who knows the real cause.’

We pull up outside her ‘nice yellowing house’ – which turns out to be a rather grand white stucco villa in a square – she says goodbye, the driver opens her door and, knees together, she gets out of the car.