Though the sun is already low in the sky, the day is young for Dame Shirley Bassey. She rarely manages to get to sleep before 4am, her body clock having been irreparably skewed by all those years of playing late-night cabaret, and she rarely rises before noon: she says that as she lives alone, and doesn’t have the concentration necessary to read books, she tends to fill the small hours watching films on satellite television.
Today she is recording a song at Sir George Martin’s Air Studios, a converted Victorian church in Hampstead, north London. It is for a new album which, with a tour in June, will mark her 50 years in show business. The horn section is ‘hamming it up’, as the producer has asked them to, and in the mixing room, stretched out on a swivel chair, Dame Shirley is nodding her head and shimmying her shoulders in rhythm, while holding up a lyric sheet and singing along under her breath.
Pulled down almost over her eyes is a fur hat – very Shirley Bassey – and, as she hums, she seems oblivious to the rest of the world. She appears to be in high spirits, which is a relief because she is prone to mood swings and, though she can mock herself (consider her memorably po-faced appearance on Morecambe & Wise), she has a reputation for being aloof – alone in her bubble of self-regard. That said, I’ve been told she is feeling apprehensive about this interview, as she hasn’t spoken to the press for a few years. And this may be why I have been given some pointers: do address her as Dame Shirley, but don’t raise the painful subject of her second daughter’s death, which may or may not have been suicide, in 1985. This isn’t so much a condition as a request, but I can’t see how, given that she has agreed to talk about her life, she can avoid the subject. It is like an elephant in the room.
As well as the nodding and the shimmying, the singer is also tapping her denim stilettos against the sound console and clapping a hand against her denim jeans. Jeans, Dame Shirley, jeans! ‘I know, I know,’ she says with a warm, smoky laugh. ‘People think I wear gowns all the time but of course I wear jeans for travelling and in the studio. People still recognise me in them, though, especially when I open my mouth to talk. I remember saying to my assistant when we were in a store in America, “Whatever you do, don’t call me ‘Shirley’,” but I forgot about my voice and when I asked to look at a dress this lovely queen came from the other side of the store and said, “I thought it was you!”‘
It is a distinctive voice, deep and breathy but also nervy and slightly slurring – the sort of voice that would attract a ‘lovely queen’. To what does she attribute her gay following? ‘Oh, you know, the gowns, the glamour, the voice.’ And don’t gay men adore strong, dominant, powerful women? ‘Talented women,’ she corrects with a slow blink. ‘I suppose their mums are very powerful figures in their lives. I don’t know, I’ve never done research into it.’
Certainly her theatricality on stage, the long, expressive fingers, the closed eyes, the way she makes a big entrance and attacks those standards – ‘Big Spender’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, and so on – has made her, for drag queens everywhere, the diva to impersonate. How could they resist all those sequins, feather boas, and wild gesticulations; the split skirts, the big hair, that twisted mouth? But her appeal was always more than camp. She has released more than 60 albums and spent longer in the charts than any other British female performer. And she certainly has staying power. I ask her what that 16-year-old who began singing professionally in 1953 was like. ‘She was very stubborn. She wouldn’t listen to reason. And she was very shy. Still is, in a way. I do a lot of things to cover up shyness. I talk loudly.’
Does the 66-year-old Dame Shirley feel shy about being interviewed? ‘No, because we are in a recording studio. This is in context. I’m working today. If you came to meet me at my place, l would feel shy.’ Shyness is not an obvious condition to associate with Dame Shirley. Rampant egomania, perhaps. Extroversion, maybe. After all, she has said that she enjoys standing ovations more than sex. ‘On stage I have a healthy ego, and I sometimes wish I was like that person off-stage. I’m not. I’m very insecure. I counter my shyness by confronting it, by standing in front an audience.’
As the youngest of seven – six girls, one boy – she must constantly have been competing for attention. ‘I would follow my sisters around. They would say, “Oh please, Mum, tell Shirley to get out of the way.” I suppose singing was a way of getting noticed. No one else in my family sang. In the middle of the night, if I was unhappy, I wouldn’t cry, I would sing, and my sisters would shout down to my mother, “Please make her stop.” I was in my own world when I was singing. This skinny kid with the huge voice.’
Her mother was from Yorkshire, her father a merchant seaman from Nigeria who abandoned the family when Shirley was two. They lived in a then rough part of Cardiff, Tiger Bay, and were so poor they had to sleep three in a bed. ‘I was left to run wild. Terrible tom-boy. Always climbing trees. Maybe I didn’t feel feminine enough to be with the girls. And then, in my late teens, I learnt to become more feminine as a way of controlling men. Girls can’t help but flirt. When you wear your first bra you look down and say, “Oh, look at these.” Actually, I wasn’t very well-developed at first – slim little thing, no boobs.’ She tilts her head back; stares at the ceiling. ‘I was a loner. I didn’t really need friends. I could be among people and still be alone in my own little world. I was a peculiar child. I am a peculiar grown-up.”
As soon as she left school, at 15, Shirley Bassey went to work in the packing department of a sausage factory, supplementing her weekly wage by singing in working men’s clubs. ‘I was happy there. I had a great time. Every Thursday there was the factory club: archery, darts, dancing. I was happy until success entered my life, then it was downhill. Success spoilt me. It took away my happiness. There were so many demands put upon me. I will be happy again when I retire.’
The success almost never came because at 17, having toured with a review, Memories of Jolson, she became pregnant. She had the baby, Sharon, but instead of giving up her career she continued to sing, and released her first single, ‘Burn My Candle’, two years later. Sharon was raised by Shirley’s sister Iris for eight years before going back to her real mother, whom she’d known until then only as ‘Auntie Shirley’. ‘The baby was a secret. Not many people knew about it because I can be very private, just as I can be very public. But I could look after myself. I’m a rat. You must never corner a rat because she will go for your throat. I would punch someone out if they had a go at me. I had a reputation in the nightclubs. People learnt not to cross me.’
And yet, for all the feistiness, she did allow people to get close to her. She looked for a father figure in men, having not known her own father, and it is telling that both her husbands became her managers. Her first, Kenneth Hume, was 11 years older than her. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1965. Two years later Hume, who was suffering from heart disease, died of what the coroner, who reached a verdict of accidental death, described as an ‘incautious overdose’. Bassey had a second daughter, Samantha, during that marriage, but tests showed that Hume was not the father. In 1968, when her career was at its height and she became a tax exile, she married an Italian, Sergio Novak. That marriage lasted 13 years (they had no children, but in 1971 he and Bassey adopted her niece’s son, Mark). ‘The trouble was,’ she explains, ‘the husbands would want the social life then, after a while, I would feel suffocated. I couldn’t switch off. It was a 24-hour thing.’
Is the fact that she is still performing, still making herself unhappy after 50 years, tantamount to failure? Long pause. ‘I suppose. I have found happiness in my work but not in my private life. The one takes from the other. I had to take from my private life to make my public life successful. I had to make a lot of sacrifices.’ Sacrifices? ‘When you are a singer you are constantly worrying about losing your voice. In the old days I was doing two shows a night. I would dash off to a nightclub and do a midnight cabaret. As you get older the situation gets worse, you don’t go out as much, instead you rush back to your hotel and put your head over a steam bowl. It’s sad because all your peers are out enjoying themselves.’
She did once lose her voice, didn’t she? ‘Yes [in 1985], when my daughter [Samantha] died. I walked out in front of 10,000 people in Sydney, opened my mouth to sing “Goldfinger” and nothing came out. I tried again and nothing. It was like a nightmare. I wanted the stage to open up.’ Her 21-year-old daughter had drowned in the River Avon the previous year. Her body had been found under Clifton suspension bridge. Does Dame Shirley think the loss of her voice was psychological rather than physical? ‘We cancelled the tour and I came back to London, saw a throat specialist who referred me to a vocal coach and, after a year, my vocal chords had been strengthened and the physical problem was over.’
What about the mental one? ‘I was grieving. The trouble was, I had nobody to talk to about my daughter’s death. I couldn’t even talk to my other daughter about it. I was guilt-ridden. By not being able to talk to anyone I hadn’t been able to come to terms with it. The shock had been too much. Even when I got past that stage and went back to work, I thought, “Don’t talk to anyone about it because they really don’t want to listen.” Which was true. People didn’t want to know. I would start talking about it and they would always interrupt with something that happened to them, as a way of comforting me, I suppose. But no one had an equivalent story to mine. My only option was to go to a therapist who I could pay just to listen. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to get hooked on that. I know too many people who get hooked on therapy.’
She had become reclusive in the months following her daughter’s death, moving to her home in Switzerland and spending her days comfort-eating chocolate and cheese. After a year she checked in to a health clinic, took on an exercise regime to lose weight and went back to work. ‘My instinct had been to hide behind my mountain. But after a while the mountain got closer. The place was getting smaller. Peter Finch [the award-winning actor with whom she had had an affair] told me when he was leaving Switzerland that every morning the mountains were getting that much closer. It was chilling. It came true for me. One morning they had come closer.’
Shirley Bassey blamed herself for Samantha’s possible suicide, partly because she had always gone away on tour and left her children with a nanny. ‘I never disciplined my children and I suppose that made me a bad mother. I was never disciplined by my mother. I never knew what discipline was. My mother never told me off or spanked me. As I grew up I began to fear that the men in my life would try and tame me. If you tried to discipline me now you would just get abuse. It’s too late. Come to think of it, there was no contact of any kind in my family. There was not a lot of love. We were not tactile.’ Was that reflected in her relationship with her own children? ‘Yes, though I probably cuddled them more, but not much more. If you’ve had that as a child, you will have it as a grown-up. I’m not demonstrative. I have to pretend on stage. Pretend to be the tactile person I would like to be.’
Bassey admits she had a tendency to spoil her children, buying them extravagant presents as a way of compensating for her prolonged absences. Her adopted son Mark nevertheless fell out with her, sold his story to a tabloid – about his mother’s drunken rows and strings of lovers – and went to live in Spain. Her sister Marina also sold her story, claiming that Shirley had sidelined her family in Wales. ‘My success became a barrier with my family,’ Dame Shirley now concedes. ‘They couldn’t relate to me and I couldn’t relate to them. But then I never could. I was just in the way.’
Although she’s close to her first daughter, she doesn’t seem to need other members of her family. What about friends? ‘I can count my friends on one hand. I’m not very comfortable with people around. I suppose it goes back to being a loner as a child. Lonely, basically. I would go to the matinée with friends, or to the thruppenny hop, but I was always basically alone.’ Another problem was that her fans were always telling her they loved her. ‘If someone can declare their love for you just because you sing a song, it devalues the words. And it was as if lovers became fans when they said that. The whole business is freaky and I’ve had 50 years of it. But what was the alternative? To be married at 17? I would probably have had 12 kids by now. But then I had the voice.’
She often talks of her voice as if it were separate entity. ‘I don’t know where my voice came from. It was like some gold dust went down my throat one day. Maybe I am an alien. Maybe my mother never gave birth to me. Maybe I dropped out of the sky.’ She nods to herself, her hands shake. ‘I’m going to find love one day and then I will never sing again.’ She has never found love? ‘No. Not enough to make me stop singing. I was young when I married. My first husband was in the business so it was more like a partnership. I didn’t learn from my mistake, I did it again and, second time, it was even worse. We were talking about contracts in bed. Maybe I’m not meant to find love. Maybe I’m meant to be tormented.’
She has certainly had a strange effect on men – in 1957, for instance, a jilted boyfriend forced her at gun-point to strip naked in a hotel room, and armed police had to break down the door and rescue her. ‘In my past I’ve had boyfriends who liked what they saw onstage,’ she says. ‘They wanted a trophy. They wanted “Shirley Bassey”. Then they would get jealous if another man came up to talk to me, and I started behaving like “Shirley Bassey”. I would say, “Make up your mind.” No wonder I have a split personality.’
Does she worry about not having companionship as she approaches her eighth decade? ‘I’d hate to be alone as I get older. If the singing was to stop tomorrow, I would hate to go on on my own. I still have a lot of romanticism, or how would I be able to sing a love song with conviction?’ She could fake it. ‘No, it is genuine and I have to keep a tight rein on it because if I let my emotions go when I was singing, then…’ She trails off, examines her fingers. ‘I’ve been so close to tears on stage. But it is fatal because your voice box closes up. I cried once before opening at the Pigalle [restaurant in London]. It was nerves. And frustration. I’d gone up to the nursery to see my daughter [Samantha] and she was so independent, doing her own thing, and I was trying to play with her and she was, “No, no, no.” And she was only three! She didn’t want to know and I couldn’t stop crying. I was in a terrible state.’
Does she take anything for her nerves? ‘That time I did. A doctor gave me something for that particular time because I said if it ever happens again, I won’t go on. He gave me a tranquilliser but it left my nerves dead and you need your nerves. You need the adrenaline. If the adrenaline doesn’t flow, the nerves take over. Your hands go like this [she exaggerates shaking her hands]. After that, I took to sipping cognac before I went on. I developed a taste later for champagne instead.’
The champagne drinking, like her love of furs and diamonds and big houses, became part of the Shirley Bassey legend. But after her daughter Samantha died she became less hedonistic and materialistic. She sold her houses in Switzerland and Sardinia. ‘I didn’t want property abroad again. I didn’t want staff abroad again. It had lost its magic. I had become possessed by my possessions. When you are travelling and wanting to be free your possessions start crowding in on you. The more things you own, the more you have to look after them. I rent a place in Monte Carlo now and I have a place in London. I still like my jewellery and my shoes. I’m a serious shopper – I have a black belt in shopping. But the houses and the cars in every place, that’s all gone.’
Has she ever tried writing a song about that dark time in her life? ‘No, never. I’ve never written my own material. I don’t even write poetry or keep a diary. I will never put down anything intimate again, even in love letters. Because it can be used against you.’ Not only did she become suspicious of men declaring their love for her, she also found it difficult to articulate her own affection for men. ‘I’d heard so much of it and seen so little success. All these people professing their undying love,’ she sighs. ‘just words, just words. But I think I’m getting there.’ She hesitates. ‘I met somebody.’
Really? ‘Yes,’ she says with a throaty giggle, her hand covering her mouth. ‘Yes, yes. It’s early days yet but can you see the glint in my eye? Can you see this smile on my face? Everyone who knows me says, “You look different. What are you up to?” Well, it’s this. Quite new, but it could be it.’ Given what she said earlier about never finding love, that is quite a declaration. ‘I know! I know! And I’m old enough and wise enough to say this is what I want this time and to go with my feelings. Whenever I’ve ignored my feelings in the past it has been a disaster.’ Does he work in her business? ‘Indirectly.’ Her voice softens. ‘He has a great sense of humour. I like being with him. He makes me feel comfortable. It’s early days, though, so I shouldn’t really be saying this. I mean, he might say, “Sorry, I don’t want to settle down.”‘
At this point, Dame Shirley’s assistant enters the room and the mood is broken. ‘He’s convinced I’m mad!’ the singer says with a laugh, nodding at me. ‘He’s been analysing me! But he hasn’t seen the funny side of me yet! When I’ve had a couple of glasses of champagne the stories come out, that’s when you see the funny side. Ah well, another time.’ Yes, another time. I’d like that.

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!’