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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Cate Blanchett’s time. The most exciting actress to emerge in recent memory, she’s now starring in no fewer than five films, including the wartime romance Charlotte Gray. So why can’t she bear to see herself on screen? Nigel Farndale meets her

IF there is a correct way to sit when heavily pregnant – finishing schools are a little hazy on this point – I would guess Cate Blanchett is sitting it, here on a sofa in the Dorchester, her pale blonde hair luminous against a black velvet suit. Her ankles are drawn together, as are her knees, which are turned slightly to one side of her 5ft 8in, straight-spined perpendicular.

The 32-year-old Australian actress has long thin fingers and these are cupped together, resting in her lap, her arms framing her bulge. Her face – angular eyebrows; pronounced, almost swollen cheekbones; a puffy curve for a top lip – is raised fractionally, her head tilted, indicating courteous, if guarded attentiveness.

Beautiful, of course, in that etiolated, otherworldly, strong-nosed way of hers. But warm and playful Cate Blanchett is not. ‘I’m not nervous about the birth,’ she says with a low, diluted Australian lilt, levelling impassive blue eyes at me. ‘Excited, but not nervous.’ It’s hard to imagine her being nervous about anything.

Spookily self-possessed, yes. Industrious, certainly. But nervous, no. And why should she be? She is starring or co-starring in five – five! – films gripping or about to grip America and Britain: the £100-million blockbuster Lord of the Rings, Bandits, The Shipping News, Heaven and, to be released next month, Charlotte Gray (based on the Second World War novel by Sebastian Faulks).

She is planning to return to work within the next couple of months, baby in arms or, rather, in maternity nurse’s arms, to star in a film about Veronica Guerin, the Irish crime reporter murdered in 1996. Did she arrange her pregnancy to fit her schedule? ‘I wish my life were that well planned,’ she laughs politely. ‘We conceived during Charlotte Gray, one of those happy accidents. On the day I found out I was pregnant I had to film a scene in which my character [Charlotte, a Scottish linguist who joins the SOE and works with the French Resistance] does an assault course as part of her training. It was a physical film but I’m very fit and, because I was working, I was being responsible – not drinking, getting lots of sleep.’

‘We’ refers to herself and Andrew Upton, the Australian scriptwriter she married in 1997. They met the previous year when she was appearing in The Seagull. He thought her aloof, she thought him arrogant. Not love at first sight, then? ‘No, I was looking in the other direction, I guess. We didn’t like each other much at all.

Then he kissed me and it was one of those, “Oh my God! What was that?” moments.’ In the same year they married Blanchett appeared in her first major film role, in Oscar and Lucinda, based on the Peter Carey novel, opposite Ralph Fiennes. Next came her starring role in Elizabeth, in which she portrayed the Virgin Queen as a warm and passionate woman who transforms herself into a chilling hermaphrodite with plucked and peeled features and chalkily phosphorescent skin.

For that role she won a Golden Globe and a Bafta and was nominated for an Oscar. She followed it with equally acclaimed performances in An Ideal Husband and The Talented Mr Ripley. Her husband’s biggest success so far has been with the script for Babe – Pig in the City.

Does he have to make compromises in his career in order to accommodate hers? ‘When you both have careers you have to negotiate and juggle,’ Blanchett says. ‘I think you have to be honest, really, take pride in each other’s successes and acknowledge each other’s failures. I try to go with Andrew whenever he has to work abroad, but that’s been difficult since I’ve been pregnant. The painful thing about when he was in Australia recently and I was in Dublin [researching for the Guerin film] was the physical distance. We were on the phone constantly; you know, three in the morning. As long as the two of us are together we don’t really mind where we live. I know couples who live apart for four months at a time but we don’t have that kind of relationship. We’re hopelessly co-dependent!’

The couple have homes in north London and Sydney (on the waterfront). ‘It has forced us to think hard about where the baby should be born. I do think of myself as an Australian. That is my identity.’ Cate Blanchett’s mother, June, a property developer, still lives in Australia, as do her brother and sister (Cate is the middle child).

Her father, Bob, a Texan naval officer who moved to Melbourne in his twenties and became an advertising executive, died from a heart attack at the age of 40. Cate was ten at the time and thinks now that she probably underplayed the psychological affect on her. ‘He died incredibly young. But children adapt. It becomes who you are. You assimilate that change, that pain. It was harder for my mother to lose her partner, so that was where my empathy lay. I didn’t think about it much then, but I did think about it when I got married, and am thinking about it again now I’m having a baby. And there are times when I see friends with their fathers and I think, “What would Dad have been like?”‘

She once said that she wished she lived in a haunted house – perhaps, she thought at the time, as a way of connecting somehow with her father. In her late teens she also developed a fascination with horror movies, and fantasised that her father had been abducted by the CIA and that she might catch a glimpse of him in the street. She doesn’t think she had any replacement father figures as a child.

‘Not consciously, anyway. But I had a strong mother figure and my grandmother lived with us, and that was just the way our family was. Matriarchal. My poor brother!’ It makes her sad to think that her father never knew what became of his daughter. ‘But that is how it is – so I accept it. He’s almost an abstraction now. My memories are only those of a child. But we talk a lot about him in my family, so I now know more about his history and background than I probably did when he was alive. Most of my memories come from photographs, they fill in the gaps. My brother made a compilation of home-made films, and on it I saw footage of my mother and father on the beach together – it really freaked me out. He’s moving! I thought, “That is so strange. There is the human being, my dad, moving.”‘

She shifts her weight delicately on the sofa, runs a hand over her belly, remains erect. ‘It was magical, and I think now I’ll become one of those obnoxious parents who constantly videos her child!’ Has she considered the possibility that she might see ghostly genetic echoes of her father in her baby? ‘Yes. I wonder. I wonder. My father had beautiful hands’

She trails off, then, returning efficiently to film promotion mode, she adds: ‘There’s a lot of that father-daughter stuff in the novel of Charlotte Gray. There is a deep level of unresolve and disquiet.’ In the film her character takes a word association test with a psychiatrist: has she ever tried anything like that herself? ‘Yes, I have, actually. I really wanted to try it before I did that scene so I went to see a psychiatrist in Hampstead. He was great. There was no preamble – he didn’t make me feel comfortable at all, just sat me down and threw words at me. The intensity of the concentration – I had to do it with my eyes closed – was quite strange. I surprised myself with my answers. I went in there feeling very clear-headed, like the character I was playing. I wasn’t going to be intimidated – but then the word that came up a lot was “fear”.’

And her fears are? ‘I’m not sure. Um, I used to be superstitious about taking certain flights, but now I quite like flying. I like the long trips home to Australia because, well, because it means I’m going home. I love it because you get to watch films and read books. With security stepped up since 11 September, I think it’s the safest time in the world to fly.’

Unexpectedly, given her fluency and dynamism in performance, Blanchett can seem a little awkward physically. It is as if she almost deliberately avoids calling upon her acting skills to help smooth out situations in real life. Perhaps this is to do with her belief that you only realise how precious your anonymity is once it is taken away. She talks of acting as shedding skin; does she want to strip away her own personality?

‘It depends. Often you start with a point of connection between yourself and the character you are playing, then you explore the differences. I’m not interested in playing myself, even though I’m sure there are parts of myself in things I do. I don’t want to reach a level of self-consciousness where I become aware of them. That is why I don’t like to watch the daily rushes during filming, for fear that I will over-analyse my performance and lose my spontaneity.’ When asked to describe this ‘self’ she is not interested in playing, she says, ‘Passive-aggressive, a very Australian quality.’

A duality seems to be indicated, certainly. In some ways she is remarkable for her ordinariness, or at least for not being as starry as might be expected. But she is also enigmatic. Her best friend is a social-worker. To relax she plays gin rummy and bakes bread. During pregnancy she acquired a craving for sardines, but she doesn’t believe in faddish diets – ‘If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work.’

She is self-deprecating, too, saying that she never feels she makes sense in conversation, drifting off instead into silence. ‘I feel there is something missing in me and so I’m always trying to find that last piece to complete the picture. Everyone loves clarity but I’m incredibly incoherent, so people will have to be satisfied with the incomplete sentence.’

She is at her most animated – and, yes, coherent – when talking about her craft. She refers to ‘energy production’, ‘spheres of concentration’ and ‘how to use your entire body to transmit ideas and feelings’. She says her theatre work taught her how space works and how to control her voice. ‘It’s about having the tools to problem-solve,’ she says. ‘It means you don’t have to be a paranoiac dredging up childhood fears of drowning in order to connect to a certain moment.’

She laughs. ‘Am I making any sense at all? Not much. Perhaps it’s to do with being pregnant.’ Affectingly, her character in Charlotte Gray tries to save two Jewish boys, orphans, from being sent to a concentration camp. When she watched the preview screening of the film – heavily pregnant and, presumably, with her hormones running amok – was she emotionally swept up in it? ‘After getting over the initial shock of seeing myself in close-up and thinking, “Oh my God, I can’t look, it’s me, me, me, me up there,” I was swept along, yes.’

Why would it bother her to see her face in close-up? ‘Think about it, it’s awful.’ For someone like me, perhaps, but she is used to it – and she is photogenic. ‘I am more used to it than I was, true, and I have become more objective. But I rarely watch films a second time, so why would I want to see myself twice?’ With a shrug, Blanchett describes herself as ‘looking ugly’ in certain of her film roles. She thinks that the greatest compliment she was ever given was when another actor said that she had ‘an actor’s face’.

Is there anything about herself she would change? ‘Sure. Can’t think what, offhand. But sure, why not?’ Perhaps, I suggest, it will be easier for her than it is for other women to accept the ageing process because she knows her youthful self is preserved on celluloid. ‘I doubt it. And I doubt they will be having a festival of my movies when I’m 60. But…’ She trails off. ‘There is an enormous pressure on actresses to stay young and beautiful. Film can be a very superficial medium but if you can overcome that and dig deeper within it you can do something worthwhile. I’m not wedded to looking a certain way. I don’t feel I’m carving, as actresses did in the 1940s, a certain niche for myself. I do what I feel is required for the role and if that means not looking particularly attractive, then that is my job. If someone said, “She doesn’t look very attractive, I don’t want to work with her,” then I’d think, “F- him, I don’t want to work with him either.”‘

She smiles widely at this thought. She has rarely if ever felt self-conscious, she adds. At school, the Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne, she was, she says, part extrovert, part wallflower. Her mother introduced her to acting when she sent her – aged 12 – to a theatre workshop. ‘I always thought I was quite shy at school, but apparently not. When I speak to old schoolfriends they remember me as the one who was always instigating things, organising things. I was probably a show-off. I went to drama classes and did a lot of drama at high school but I never imagined I would do it as a living because I thought there were two separate categories in life: fulfilment and work.’

After school Blanchett won a place at the University of Melbourne to read fine arts and economics, another duality, the one for fulfilment, the other work. She laughs at the memory. ‘God, my brain is so deeply unmathematical it’s not funny. I thought I’d do economics so I could get into international relations. But instead I travelled for a year, came back, dropped the economics and took up architecture instead. I used to love the reading side, but my essays were a mess. Scrambled. Too many jumbled thoughts, and no through-line. It wasn’t for me. I always think if you are meant to do something, you don’t need to pursue it actively, it comes about. So I didn’t actively pursue the theatre, it just came about. Finishing my degree was on my must-do-when-I’m-pregnant list, but it hasn’t happened.’

It seems disingenuous of her to take such a fatalistic view. After all, she did pursue the theatre actively enough to enrol at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. After graduating in 1992 she worked in the theatre with Company B, a loose ensemble of actors including Geoffrey Rush, who later starred in Shine.

According to Rush her prodigious gifts were obvious even then. ‘She was an emotional acrobat swinging from tragedy to comedy to ecstasy,’ he has said. Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, has gone further, calling Blanchett the most exciting actress to have emerged in recent memory.

In some ways, though, Blanchett’s fatalism is understandable. In childhood it may have been a pragmatic way of dealing with the misery of losing a father. And there was an incident not long ago which does seem strangely coincidental. She believes she was destined to play Charlotte Gray because she was chosen for the role while playing Susan Traherne, an SOE agent, in David Hare’s Plenty at the Almeida in 1999.

‘A friend suggested I read Charlotte Gray because both Susan Traherne and Charlotte had SOE encounters. I was moved by the book and felt lifted by the sense of hope and love it has, which was juxtaposed to the post-War despair that Susan Traherne experiences. Then, out of the blue, Sebastian [Faulks] sent me a copy saying it is going to be made into a film and I would make a wonderful Charlotte.’

She leans back and pats her bulge. ‘It was as much a happy accident as the timing of the baby, really.’

Robert Altman is a gambling-mad war hero with an eye for the girls. He’s also one of the best – and most independent – American flim-makers around. So why’s he making an English country-house drama? He talks to Nigel Farndale

Upstairs at the Café de Paris, a nightclub in Piccadilly, an unattended mobile phone is ringing. More accurately, the mobile is barking out the words, ‘Stephen, answer the sodding phone. Stephen, answer the sodding phone. Stephen…’ The velvety bass voice is unmistakeably that of its owner, Stephen Fry. He emerges to retrieve it a few minutes later – nine feet tall, jawline like the prow of a ship, a physically awkward, middle-aged schoolboy checking his side-parting with his hand – and apologises profusely for keeping me waiting. ‘The, um, photographs took longer than, er. Do accept…’ It’s wonderfully effective, and completely unnecessary. I haven’t been kept waiting and, anyway, it was our photographer he was posing for. In fact, the only reason he is in this dingy nightclub in the middle of a cold December afternoon is that we have asked him to be.
As the club’s management are busy hammering and cursing and shifting in preparation for the evening’s revelries, I lead Fry to a quiet, brothel-red backroom I have found, behind plush red curtains, lit by red light bulbs. He sits down in the corner and, even though his eyes are darkly hooded and one side of his face is bathed in a demonic red light, and though he is chain-smoking full-strength Marlboros and wearing a black poloneck and a leather jacket, he still comes across as being a big, gentle, eager-to-please bear. He does realise, does he not, that when I come to write this interview I’ll have to lie and say that he was wearing tweed, from his pocket handkerchief to his socks; that he was smoking not cigarettes but a tweed pipe? ‘Absolutely, yes, indeed. No no. Goes with the turf. Exactly. Goes with the territory. Yep.’
Since Radio 4 broadcast Fry’s eight-and-a-half-hour-long reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone last Boxing Day, the reformed juvenile-delinquent-cum-Cambridge-graduate-cum-comedian-cum-actor-cum-best-selling-novelist-cum-charity-fundraiser seems to have amplified another role he’s developed for himself: that of favourite uncle to the nation and the nation’s children. Hugh Laurie, Fry’s best friend and sometime comedy partner, once said, ‘I’ve never seen a child who isn’t thrilled to be with Stephen, probably because in many ways he is very childlike himself.’ Fry himself once said, ‘It would be lovely to turn into a teddy bear for the young, a kind of amiable eccentric.’ How can he say things like that without blushing? ‘Well being a multiple godfather and uncle, one feels that that’s one’s role, really. I’m not going to be a parent so I think to be a more or less ursine avuncular figure is my role.’
But why shouldn’t he become a parent? Being homosexual didn’t prevent Oscar Wilde – Fry’s hero and the man he played in the film Wilde (1997) – from procreating. ‘Well, that’s true, yes, I suppose. Never say never, obviously. And, um, who knows these days? You just have to leave a toenail behind and the next thing you know there are five million of you marching across the countryside like killer ants. But for the moment I’m satisfied being a godparent and some of my godchildren are getting to the age now where they need a godfather who’s not going to sneak to their parents when they confess that they’ve started smoking. I had such a turbulent teenage myself that most of my godchildren probably know that they’re never going to be quite as disastrous as I was.’
Disastrous is the word. Stephen Fry grew up in Norfolk, the middle child of well-off parents – his father, Alan, was an electronics engineer and inventor. He went to Stouts Hill, a prep school, as a border at the age of seven (where he still wet the bed and where an IQ test revealed he was ‘approaching genius’); and at his next public school, Uppingham, he developed a passion for cricket, chess and Wagner, passed all his O-levels, became infatuated with ‘Matthew’, a fellow pupil, began stealing, got expelled and saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as having ‘developmental delay’, all by the age of 14. He was expelled twice more, and, following a mad adventure with some stolen credit cards, ended up serving a three-month prison sentence. His ‘turbulent teenage’ had a happy ending, though. Pucklechurch remand centre – where he was known as ‘the professor’, not only because he could read and write but also because, every day, he would complete The Times crossword in about ten minutes – proved the making of him. After his release, he sat his A-levels at a crammer and won a scholarship to read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge (he was still on parole when he arrived there). It was at university that he met Hugh Laurie, with whom he went on to find television fame (in, among others shows, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster). And, while still in his twenties, Fry became a millionaire – thanks to the libretto he wrote for the musical Me and My Girl.
In his autobiography, Moab Is my Washpot (1997), Fry writes about his formative years in an amused matter-of-fact way, but fails to offer explanations for his behaviour. What, for instance, does he think was the trigger for his kleptomania? ‘I don’t know – and I do say at some point in my book that it’s not my business to say why – but I never believe people who explain themselves, who say they know why they are like they are. You’re in danger of sounding post-therapeutic aren’t you? You know, the kind of, “Oh, it’s because I had low self-esteem when I was this age”, or, “I was in denial” – which, as you know, is a river in Egypt.’ He sweeps his hair back from his forehead. ‘I mean, my brother Roger was fed on the same food and had the same parents and was close enough in age to have been said to have had the same upbringing, and yet you couldn’t ask for a more decent law-abiding fellow. I could sit and talk about my relationship with my parents as an explanation to some extent, but it wasn’t that different from my brother’s relationship with them.’
No? In his autobiography Fry portrays his father – who’s still alive – as a misanthropic and arrogant man with an ‘infuriatingly cold, precise ratiocinating engine of a brain fuelled by a wholly egocentric passion’. He adds that whenever his father was in the house ‘instantly fun, freedom and relaxation turned into terrified silence.’ After one argument with his father – he claims not to remember what it was about – the 17-year-old Stephen attempted to commit suicide. He took a combination of Paracetamol and Lentizol and woke up in hospital having his stomach pumped.
Frankly, his father sounds a nightmare. Formidable, to say the least. ‘Yes, he was, he was indeed formidable. Though I describe him as being like a Sherlock Holmes figure and… urm. But er… [sigh]… what you have with parents, especially when you’re kind of happy with them… when all the troubles have slid away, or just about, the past doesn’t matter. That’s the huge surprise of the past. So I don’t think either of us felt that personally involved by retelling a story [in the autobiography] that no longer had relevance – in fact, you know, we laugh at how appalling I was.’
Crushingly, his father once said, ‘Stephen spends a lot of energy doing things that aren’t worthy of him.’ Has this left him with a feeling that he’s wasted his life? He rolls his eyes and gives a mock grimace. ‘Of course, all of us feel that sometimes. I mean, whatever platonic paradigms are up there as things to be achieved are never going to be. Perfection is unachievable and we’re all going to be on our notional deathbeds saying, “Why didn’t I climb a mountain? Why didn’t I see an opera? Why didn’t I lick breast milk from the armpits of a Nepalese maiden?” And that’s just the trivial side of it. There’s the bigger side – what kind of a person was I? It’s the curse of being human.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘That sense of consciousness that animals so manifestly appear not to have. One of the nice things about looking at a bear is that you know it spends 100 per cent of every minute of every day being a bear. It doesn’t strive to become a better bear. It doesn’t go to sleep thinking, “I wasn’t really a very good bear today.” They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.’
Is this what Wilde was referring to when he said there are two forms of tragedy, not getting what you want and getting it? ‘Absolutely, yes.’ He wrings his hands. ‘I do feel a bit like someone who is returning footsore from a golden city which was appalling, cold, hostile and unattractive, and scrambling up the hill passing me are people on the way to it and one wants to say, “Why? Don’t go there! It’s pointless! There’s nothing there! Fame and money are hollow shams.”‘
Yes but as hollow shams go, they’re two of the best. ‘Well, true. We all suspect fame and money can’t buy happiness but we still want to find out for ourselves.’
There’s something else Wilde said that seems relevant here: ‘I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.’ Arguably, Fry’s best work has been as a comedian on television and radio – Saturday Night Fish Fry on Radio 4 in the mid-1980s was sublime. In his various film roles – such as Peter’s Friends (1992) and IQ (1995) – he has rarely seemed more than adequate. In Robert Altman’s Gosford Park he was embarrassing. Perhaps directors have difficulty disguising his physical appearance and tweedy voice, for he often appears to be playing himself (a criticism he hates). Though his four novels have sold well, none of them could be considered a literary masterpiece. They show his talent, not his ‘approaching genius’. Perhaps if future generations remember Stephen Fry it will not be as an actor or writer but as a dazzling conversationalist – ‘the e-mail of the species is deadlier than the mail,’ for instance. The vocabulary is PG Wodehouse with swearwords, the sentences are both finely wrought and meandering, weaving an array of subordinate clauses and philosophical and literary allusions. Does he ever wonder whether his monument will be the ephemeral conversation of a dinner-party – or worse, a talk-show – guest? ‘Perhaps, yes. Yep. Someone whom I greatly loved as a man but whom before that had admired enormously as a comic genius was Peter Cook. You could say that of him, too. When he fully achieved his Peter Cookness it was as likely to be when buying a newspaper and observing something to the person he was handing his money over to. He was in that sense profligate with his wit, he didn’t store it up for professional packaging and presentation.’
The comparison with Peter Cook is intriguing. Whereas Cook held the Establishment in contempt, Fry with his clubbable, over-English Englishness has often seemed beguiled by it – the Prince of Wales is one of his closest friends. While at university Fry said, ‘I sometimes think if I wasn’t Jewish and queer I would be the most appalling right-wing person.’ As it is he is, broadly speaking, a socialist who would like to pay more tax, but he is also pro-foxhunting and he would never dream of travelling anything other than first-class. And, as a wit, Peter Cook could be savage. Fry’s early comedy seemed by contrast safe and cosy; he could be mildly iconoclastic but seldom dangerous.
Yet Fry’s dark side is apparent in his novels. You suspect he is capable of Cook-like cruelty but holds back from it because, ultimately, he wants to be liked too much. He rarely loses his temper, he says, having inherited from his mother Marianne an abhorrence of confrontation. ‘Yes, [Fry adopts an EL Wisty voice] Peter would always speak as he found. But also he had a patrician laziness to him. You know, he would talk about writing a book or doing this or doing that but never get round to it. Whereas I have, for whatever reason, um, and again your guess is as good as mine – perhaps it’s my Jewishness – this desire to prove myself and to do things, however lazy I feel.’
Does he throw himself into work as a way of avoiding self-absorption? ‘Yes, I believe in the Socratic idea that you should “know thyself” but I also realise that to know oneself is a very strange journey. And it isn’t necessarily best achieved by sitting and thinking about oneself.’
If people want to understand him, he says, they should read not necessarily his autobiography but his first novel The Liar (1991), in which the hero is accused of living by pastiche and pretence, and having an intelligence which renders his emotional life meaningless and makes him callous. Fry, it seems, thinks of himself as a dissemblingly cheerful impostor who cleverly cons people into liking him.
But wasn’t the autobiography written at the time it was, a year after his nervous breakdown, precisely because he needed to ‘sit and think about himself’? Wasn’t it a Socratic exercise in trying to know himself? ‘An exercise and an exorcise. It’s true, I did feel the need to stop and reflect. I had a feeling of someone who’d been in an expensive and exciting car in the fast lane but who had never actually once stopped to look at the countryside around him. I had never even consulted a map to work out where I might actually be going. The ride was all and then the moment the engine went phut! I found myself shivering on the hard shoulder with the bonnet up wondering what the hell it was all about. You know, it was a, a piddling midlife crisis compared to those of many, but…’
Piddling! It was so dramatic it made front-page news. In 1995 Fry walked out on a production of Cell Mates – a play by Simon Gray in which Fry co-starred with Rik Mayall – partly prompted by the bad reviews the play and his performance received. He came close to committing suicide – sat in a garage with a duvet against the garage door and his fingers on the ignition key of his car – but decided against it because he couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting his friends and family. Instead he fled the country, taking the ferry to Zeebrugge. English tourists spotted him in Bruges wearing a black beret, they informed the press, Fry contacted his family by e-mail, and his father drove to Belgium to collect him. Fry then spent a few months in California, seeing a psychiatrist and working out in a gym. Fry grins shyly. ‘Well, yes, I suppose it was dramatic because of course I’m well known but, I mean, it’s probably happening, even as we speak, to someone somewhere. Someone saying, “I’m just off to the Post Office, dear,” and she will never see him again. You know, it’s a very common story.’
But wasn’t it harder for him than it is for most people who aren’t famous? Even if he had phoned the Samaritans, wouldn’t they have recognised his voice? ‘That’s true, and you just feel you’re not getting a proper shake at it. Not that the Samaritans aren’t very well trained – I’m sure they wouldn’t betray any confidences or, or, or say, “Ooh, what’s it like working with Rowan Atkinson?” in the middle of a conversation about how miserable one is but, erm. Of course it’s harder to some extent if you have some kind of whatever it is – somewhere halfway between a wobble and a breakdown – in public because of the intense scrutiny and the fact that so many people are aware of it. But there are compensations in terms of the warmth and kindness of strangers. I received hundreds of letters and e-mails from people making a direct emotional connection with me. The people who wrote seemed to understand I was not the supremely confident and secure person full of self-knowledge I previously seemed to be. They could see I had been in as bad a pit of despair as anyone. And that was strangely comforting.’
Presumably he didn’t receive a letter from Simon Gray? (The playwright wrote a book about the episode and said, ‘I hope I never see him again.’) ‘Oh yes! Yes! We did exchange letters, and he was very kind in his, but, um…’ He’s never really forgiven Fry? ‘I don’t know if he’s forgiven me. I think that once he knew I was sort of OK and had been discovered and was recovering it started to irritate him, the fact that his play had collapsed. And I don’t blame him.’ Pause. ‘It’s just, you know, if I could have chosen when I would have a breakdown, I’d have had it before the play started, but of course I couldn’t.’
Does Hugh Laurie understand why he felt he couldn’t talk to him before his ‘trip to Bruges’? ‘He probably found it hard at first, thinking, “Come on, what are friends for?” but I know he understood. That’s the nature of friendship. If he did the same, I would understand it, too. Most of us, if we had some weird wart growing on the end of our genitals, we would not want to show it to our best friend.’ Throaty laugh. ‘We’d be much happier to show it to a complete stranger, a doctor that we’d never met before. Otherwise I would find it embarrassing and so would the friend.’ He impersonates Hugh Laurie: ‘”Yes, yes, of course you can show me… Woah there!” You know? And one feels the same about the emotional warts, one’s unsightlinesses.’
Do Laurie and his wife now keep a close eye on Fry, looking for early signs of another breakdown? ‘Yes, and fortunately the one great saving salve, lubricant, whatever one wants to call it, of all these kinds of things, is humour. That’s sort of what humour is for. “We laugh that we may not weep.” I sometimes say, “I can see you looking at me with that sliiiightly worried expression.” And they will giggle, and I will giggle – and that makes things a lot easier.’
As of six years ago, Fry has another best friend he can giggle with – as well as share his house in Hampstead, apartment in New York and Georgian manor house in Norfolk. After 15 years of celibacy, Stephen Fry fell in love. The man – Fry prefers to keep his name out of print – is ten years his junior and not in show business. Fry’s friends say this relationship has made him a lot calmer, and Fry himself says that it has helped him discover the real root of his previous problems: loneliness. ‘Yes, indeed. Who’d have thought it? I’ve finally came on in and found the water is lovely. It’s terrific. I’m thrilled with it. Still have to pinch myself. Can’t quite believe it’s true. Excuse me.’ He blows his nose. ‘Damn, I thought I’d shaken this bastard off, sorry.’
Part of the reason for Fry’s celibacy had been his loathing of his own body – he said the thought of inflicting it on others repelled him. But he was also chronically insecure about his looks, convinced that everyone thought him an ugly Caliban. It was partly to do with his lopsided nose, which was badly broken when he tripped up at school. Was he never tempted to bolster his self-esteem by having it cosmetically corrected? ‘I was, yeah. When I was 12 I went to see an ENT specialist with my parents and he said, “Young man, we’d better wait until you’ve grown. So come back when you’re 18 or 19.” But when I was 18 or 19 it was when I was doing stuff – got into Cambridge – and it just didn’t seem to matter any more.’ He folds his arms. ‘The fact is if I straightened my nose, I wouldn’t suddenly look like Gregory Peck, I’d just be Stephen Fry with a slightly straighter nose.’
His broken nose has left him with a sinus problem which was aggravated by his heroic drug abuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At one stage he was Hoovering up £1,000 worth of cocaine a week. Did he not worry that cocaine would disfigure that beautiful alpha brain of his? ‘Absolutely! It is one of the daft things about taking coke, you know it can’t be good for your intellectual capacity, yet… In fact, in my coke-taking days, I used to do stupid things like, the next morning, I would make myself do The Spectator crossword, just to reassure myself that I could still do it.’
Has he been prescribed any medication for his depression? ‘No, I resisted Prozac because I had a few friends on it and I really didn’t like what it did to them. I took Lithium for a time, when it was quite bad, otherwise no. I mean really I’m not that bad. Many people have it – a bi-polar affective disorder, they don’t call it manic depression any more – much worse than me. I try to get through the depression by thinking that it’s like the weather. If it’s raining, you can’t pretend that it isn’t raining – “No, no, the sun is shining!” – you have to accept that it’s raining, that you are feeling really low. But you keep somewhere inside yourself the belief that, absurd as it seems at the time, the next day the sun may pop over the horizon with a joke, and a brass band may play and a bluebird may twitter and everything will be, if not perfect, better. Like the weather, it is something over which you have no control. That’s the point. You know it’s time for an umbrella but you must not lose faith in the idea of sunshine. That sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?’ He laughs and mimics himself in an American voice: ‘Do not lose faith in the idea of sunshine.’
The sodding phone rings again. ‘Stephen, answer the sodding phone. Stephen, answer the sodding phone. Stephen…’ Fry says, ‘So sorry, please excuse me,’ and picks it up. It’s about his next appointment – in ten minutes at the Groucho Club. He is casting someone there for a film he is to start directing in March, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, for which he, Fry, has written the screenplay. I walk with him, through the dark backstreets of Soho, and as I do I notice that, like a lot of tall people – he’s 6ft 5in, actually – he keeps one arm folded across the front of his body to create a horizontal that breaks up the vertical, and he stoops and bends one knee and cocks his head to disguise his height, to disguise himself, to become 100 per cent bear. But people still stop and stare at him as he passes, mouthing the words, ‘Wasn’t that Stephen Fry?’

His family, in a spirit of affection no doubt, nicknamed him The Little Shit. One of his first long-term girlfriends called him Big Willy, or at least that is how he signed himself in letters to her. The players in the England rugby team he captained for eight years knew him as Bumface – it was to do with the curious shape of his chin, a firm pair of buttocks hewn with a wide chisel. But the name that seems to have stuck for Will Carling is the one conferred on him by the Sun three years ago: Love Rat.
‘I suppose it was the perfect story,’ Carling says, lowering his voice, as well as his eyes. ‘As far as the media was concerned.’ He gently kneads the velvety ears of a dark chocolate labrador, staring at his fingers and thumbs as if they were not his own. ‘It had everything.’
It certainly did. Carling had already put the press on high alert in 1996 when his two-year-long marriage to his first wife Julia ended in divorce, following very public speculation as to the exact nature of his relationship with the Princess of Wales. When two years later he left Ali Cockayne, Gary Lineker’s sister-in-law, for another woman – Lisa, the wife of his former Harlequins team-mate David Cooke – he also walked out on their 11-month-old son Henry. According to Ali’s version of events the first she knew of Will’s decision to leave was when she came across a revised draft of his autobiography in which all references to their relationship had been changed to the past tense. As far as she was concerned, they were planning to marry. She had even chosen her wedding dress. Pictured sobbing outside her house, baby in arms, she said, ‘I just hurt – I really hurt. No one could have done more damage to me than this.’
Overnight Carling went from sporting hero – he is the most capped and, with three Grand Slams to his name, the most successful captain England has had – to pantomime villain. His testimonial match was cancelled at short notice, as were various endorsements, after-dinner speaking engagements and a 19-theatre tour of An Evening with Will Carling. Signed copies of his autobiography gathered dust on the shelves of bookshops. He had expected to make £1 million that autumn. Instead he ended up having to sell his £800,000 house in Berkshire. It was a modern morality tale.
Will and Lisa Carling married on the island of Fiji in 1999. They live in a rented house – 14th-century in parts, leaded windows, beamed ceilings – on the edge of a village green in Surrey. Outside, under a light blanket of fallen leaves, a Range-Rover and a Jaguar are parked. Inside a log fire is burning, Lisa – blonde, trim, friendly – is making coffee for a BT engineer in the hope, she whispers to me, that he can be persuaded to fit an extra line which wasn’t part of the initial order, and Jack, the couple’s 15-month-old son, is asleep upstairs. Will, his eyebrows and gelled hair as black as the Devil’s heart, is sitting on a deep sofa in the drawing-room, his legs crossed.
He can do this now. There was a time when his thighs were so hefty – a build up of lactic acid in the muscle caused by punishing workouts on a Cybex exercise bike – he couldn’t. At 36, he is still a solid 5ft 10in but, if anything, he looks top-heavy now, as if substance has been transferred from his legs to his head, a balloon squeezed at one end that bulges at the other. Though he no longer plays rugby – ‘Nah, I don’t miss it. I miss the players but not the playing’ – he does still exercise regularly, mostly on his mountain bike, and he does do a little yoga, when not watching Coronation Street, his favourite programme, or listening to the Bee Gees, his favourite band.
Behind him is a stack of memorabilia which he displays in the marquee that Will Carling Management, his corporate hospitality company, runs at Twickenham: his old rugby boots in a glass case; a moody black-and-white blow-up of him leading the players out of the tunnel; framed cuttings about the ’57 old farts’ affair – the time in 1995 when ‘Greedy Carling’ was sacked temporarily as England captain for saying, off-camera, that the members of the RFU committee were old farts because they disapproved of his plans to make money by turning international rugby from an amateur sport into a professional one.
Is he still having a hard time financially? ‘Well, everything is relative,’ he says with an ambiguous smile. ‘What is a hard time?’ Losing a million. ‘Yeah, but the weird thing is, it was never about the money for me. The lost million has never bothered me. Relatively, I did go through a hard time. At one point I did wonder how I was going to earn a living. I even thought of becoming a taxi-driver. It has been hard because we have school fees to pay for Tom and Tali [Lisa’s children, ages 14 and 12] and there was a lot of pressure suddenly. But, touch wood, it’s all right now.’
How did he live with the humiliation of having his testimonial match cancelled? Long pause. ‘Personally, it was never a great ambition of mine to have a testimonial match. Other people suggested it.’ He leans forward. ‘So when it got called off, for me, it was like neither here nor there. I’d have liked to have played in it. Lots of players have said to me since that they wish it had gone ahead. I saw Jonah [Lomu] last night and he was saying it was a shame. But, yes,’ Carling sucks in air between his teeth, ‘at the time it was horrific. I mean, really horrific. For Lisa, for Lisa’s family, for my family. Unbelievable. I think back to it now and I get this horrible churning in my stomach. But, you know, you make your decision. Whether people agree with… I mean, if people want to judge… It’s the sort of decision that people make every day. The relationship is over. But the way it ended up being portrayed… The momentum behind it was just, just frightening. I’m not whiter than white, by any stretch of the imagination, but…’
Given his sporting achievements, Will Carling ought to have enjoyed huge popularity. Perhaps the public’s coolness was to do with his self-satisfied manner, his flat voice, his clichéed speech – ‘Like I say’, ‘at the end of the day’, ‘she was a special lady’. It may also be to do with the way he smiles on one side of his mouth – a manly, patronising smirk. Even as a rugby player he was never loveable. Together, he and Jeremy Guscott were great centres because they complemented each other: Guscott, the rapier, had grace and subtlety; Carling, the blunt instrument, played a more brutish game. He had, as the joke went, the hardest tackle in rugby. In post-match analyses Carling always came across as a complainer, a bit whiney, a bit aloof. He was aware of this, but put it down to his own shyness and insecurity. He was always introspective, he says, a loner.
Now, though, as he talks haltingly about the events of three years ago, his eyes water and, well, I find myself feeling sorry for him. Either he is a very good actor, which seems unlikely, or he was, is, genuinely traumatised by what happened. He tells me that when he saw the tabloid headlines getting worse by the day he felt as though he no longer knew who the real Will Carling was. But crises of identity were not so unusual for him. ‘I’ve seen that stranger since I was 22 [the age when he became the youngest-ever England captain]. A comicbook hero that isn’t me. I didn’t quite become a recluse but I became very private. The only people who come here now are very close friends, otherwise I don’t see many people.’ He declines invitations to dinner if there will be people there he doesn’t know. ‘I can’t go. I don’t want to have to spend two or three hours answering questions as people try and work out what I am really like. It’s so tiring. My heart sinks.’
He doesn’t regret his decision to leave Ali and Henry, but does he at least regret the timing? ‘Well, this is the thing. I could have been really callous and waited until after my testimonial year, after I had made a lot of money and then done it. If I’m meant to be the real shit people say I am, why wouldn’t I have thought that through? Put on a faade for nine months then run with the money?’
Well, maybe he didn’t expect as much fuss to be made about his love life as was made about it. Maybe that was what he didn’t think through. Maybe, as a comic-book hero, a captain who had squired a princess, he believed he was above criticism. But, giving him the benefit of the doubt, why did he feel under so much pressure to take such a drastic step at the time he did? ‘Because I was so unhappy.’ He was so unhappy he couldn’t stay a moment longer? ‘Yeah. You get to the point where you think this is not right. I was very, very unhappy.’
Are we automatically entitled to happiness? Don’t we sometimes have to sacrifice our own happiness for the sake of others? Is that something he thought through? ‘Er, just a bit. Yes.’ He grins ruefully. ‘But… [sotto voce] but is it better to spend years and years and years living with someone you don’t want to live with for the sake of the child? Children are not stupid. Of course they pick up the fact that mum and dad are incredibly unhappy but are putting on a front. Then dad leaves as soon as the child is 18, and when the child asks, “Why?” dad says, “Because I haven’t been happy since you were a baby.” How much guilt is the child going to feel then?’
But still, 11 months old. If he had waited until Henry was three or four, when his mother might have found it easier to cope on her own, might the public reaction not have been different? Carling eyes me narrowly, leans forward and turns off my tape-recorder. After a long sigh he tells me his side of the story. It is quite specific – eye-poppingly so – and the gist of it is that the baby was far from being planned. The word blackmail is used. We have not agreed to anything being off the record, but his turning the recorder off is a canny move. I turn it back on. Why didn’t he say all that at the time? People would have been more sympathetic. ‘Yeah, but Henry is four years old now. At some point, when he is old enough to understand, I will have to sit down with him and explain all this. I don’t want him to have to read about the specifics in the press first. I love him. It would have been a lot easier for me if I’d gone to the papers and told them what I have just told you. People would have sat back and thought, “Oh well, that’s different.” And I have all the proof. Ali’s story is that we were having a perfect relationship and I suddenly got up and went. My story is different. You’ve heard it now: which has the ring of truth? Who ever leaves a perfect relationship? You don’t just decide, “Oh I’m bored now. I don’t care. I’m off.” I can’t be quoted on the details of this because Henry’s feelings are the most important thing. Not mine. Not Ali’s. Not those of the press.’
Given that we did only hear one side of the story, though, does he understand why we were so shocked by it? ‘Yes, absolutely, and it was being stoked by people close to me. I can understand why it made a great story. Maybe you can now understand why I found it incredibly painful to watch it being played out. How come if I really don’t care about Henry… how come I have spent the past three years fighting to see him?’ He has access? ‘Yes I do, but only because I went to the High Court.’
Ali now lives with David Ross, the multi-millionaire co-founder of the Carphone Warehouse. Do Will Carling and Ali still speak? ‘Not a lot. She’s a very unhappy lady. It’s a very sad situation.’
Carling’s mouth is bracketed by grooves so deep they make his face look like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. They also make him look drawn and doleful. Has he come close to a nervous breakdown? ‘I don’t know. I did get very, very depressed. Very down. But I have some close friends. And whenever people came up to me in the street they were sympathetic. If they had spat in my face and said, “God, you’re a disgrace,” I would have been devastated, and I probably wouldn’t have kept my head above water. As it was it got very close. I felt I was the worst person in the country. That’s how I felt. My self-esteem plummeted. I don’t think it will ever recover.’
He has seen a psychotherapist, Alyce Faye Eichelberger, John Cleese’s wife: did it help? ‘Yes. It helped a bit. It helped me see that I had made a choice and I had to live with it. You said to me earlier that maybe we aren’t meant to be happy. That sometimes we have to make sacrifices. Well, possibly. But. I don’t know. I’m happy now.’
Did he consider leaving the country to go and live, say, in South Africa or Australia, rugby-loving countries where he might have felt more appreciated, less of a pariah? He props his head up on one hand. ‘To do what? I wouldn’t be able to see Henry. I couldn’t just leave him.’
Is Will Carling a moral man? ‘Apparently not.’ But what does he think? Pause. Tight smile. ‘I have the same weaknesses as every one else. But I think I have certain standards, too. When most people think of morality it is in terms of marrying one person and staying married. Never committing adultery. Well, I can’t claim that that applies to me. I’ve been married twice and have had another relationship that has broken down. But, even so, I don’t think I’m the great womaniser I’m portrayed as being. I’ve challenged the tabloids to find women I slept with on tour. It didn’t happen.’
Hang on, was that an admission of adultery? His 1994 marriage to Julia Carling, née Smith, broke down after she gave him ultimatums that he must end his close friendship with the Princess of Wales. The idea of a captain of England having an affair with a future Queen of England proved irresistible to the press. Were they? Weren’t they? Speculation became so intense Carling went into hiding in a flat in Covent Garden. He couldn’t even take a taxi to his door for fear of being followed, and only two people, male friends, were allowed to know his phone number. He has said in the past that he loved the Princess as a friend. He has also said that even if he had had a sexual relationship with her, he would never have dreamed of telling anyone. He has never confirmed that he did – equally, though, he has never really denied it. Are we to assume from this that he did have sexual relations with the Princess? ‘Ach!’ he says, shaking his head peevishly and folding his arms. ‘I’ve been over this so many times and I’ve said, you know… People want to keep bringing it up. Time after time. How many times do I have to say it? She was just a good friend.’
So that is a denial? ‘Absolutely! I don’t know why people think I haven’t denied it. It’s like, “For goodness sake. She – was – just – a – good – friend.” I felt privileged to know her. She was good fun. End of story.’
James Hewitt once told me in an interview that, before her infamous Panorama appearance, the Princess struck a deal with Martin Bashir: he was allowed to ask about Hewitt on condition that he would not ask about Carling, because she was negotiating her divorce settlement at the time. Does that surprise Carling? ‘That’s what Hewitt thinks, is it? Well, I don’t think James Hewitt is in a position to make theories about anyone. I have no idea about any such deal.’
At the time of their divorce, Julia Carling said of Diana, Princess of Wales, ‘It would be easy to say she’s ruined my marriage. But it takes two to tango, and I blame Will for getting involved in the first place.’ Why would she say this? ‘Yeah, but I don’t think Julia was in a great frame of mind at the time. If she did insinuate anything, she was out of order. I think Julia got a bit carried away about trying to have a go at the Princess. It wasn’t on. I understand she was unhappy but that wasn’t great. Not great. Anyway, this whole subject is dangerous ground because the Princess is no longer around to put her side of the case. We should be more respectful.’
Quite so. As Carling would say, it’s out of order. In 1988, after his first game as captain, when England beat Australia 28-19, Carling walked back to the changing rooms and burst into tears of relief. He cried again, this time into his socks, apparently, after England lost to France in the World Cup in 1995. In touch with his emotions then? ‘Very. I weep easily, just not in public. When Jonah Lomu was doing This Is Your Life his little sister, six years old, came on and said, “I love you, Jonah,” and I cried then. I cried when I watched Gladiator, too, that bit where the servant brings him back the miniature statues of his dead wife and son.’ He smiles the one-sided smile. ‘Doesn’t quite fit the image, though, does it? As I say, just not… Not in front of people. It dates back to school.’
When, at the age of seven, Carling was sent to board at Terra Nova, a prep school in Cheshire, he would crawl under the blankets at night to cry. He soon settled in, though, and even admits he became a bit of a bully. ‘When I first went there I knew I wouldn’t see my parents for three months. But my parents had no choice because, being an Army family, we moved house practically every year. I would never contemplate sending a child to boarding school at seven. It was hard. But I think people do use it as an excuse later in life.’ (Perhaps his therapist has suggested his behaviour in recent years points to a fear of being alone – one which often springs from childhood experiences of being abandoned, or living with the prospect of abandonment. Just a thought.)
Carling’s talents on the rugby field were spotted when, at 13, he went on to Sedbergh, a very rugby-minded public school on the edge of the Lake District. He was made to play for the year above his, which made him unpopular with his contemporaries. ‘I hated it. Hated it. I was terrified. Every game I was like, “Oh God.”‘ He, nevertheless, became captain of the First XV and carried on playing at Durham University, where he went on an Army scholarship and from which he graduated with a pass – ‘My degree was a joke. No one ever got below 2:2 in the Psychology Department and I didn’t even get a third. I think they are still debating whether I should have had a degree at all.’ While at Durham he joined Harlequins, and was selected to play for England. He was due to follow his father into the Army, as an officer in the Royal Regiment of Wales, but bought himself out for £8,000 when the Army’s demands clashed with his England training schedule. Those still being the days of amateurism, he had to make a living, so he founded Insight, a company offering business leaders advice on motivation (the company later ran into financial difficulties). The seeds of his conflicts of interest with English rugby were sown.
His father, Bill, a lieutenant-colonel in the Army Air Corps who had played rugby for Bath, was something of a martinet. ‘He is quite military. I remember when I was 13, Dad told my brother Marcus and me, “If you ever get into trouble with bullies, find out who the leader is and hit him as hard as you can in the face.”‘ In a sense, this advice stood him in good stead on the international rugby field – where his courage in taking on big brutal forwards with misshapen faces was legendary. But, he says disingenuously, he cannot understand why people still assume he must also be a hard man away from the rugby pitch. ‘They say, “Obviously I wouldn’t have a go at you, Will,” and I just look at them and think, “Why?”‘
He never shied from confrontation off the field, though, especially where RFU committee men were concerned – he once grabbed a senior administrator by the throat, and had to be restrained by Rob Andrew. He has had epic spats with, among others, the England manager Jack Rowell, the Lions manager Fran Cotton and even his mentor, the former Harlequins coach Dick Best. His career at the club ended in acrimony when Carling led moves to replace Best with Andy Keast, whom he also then fell out with. In recent weeks he has been accused of leading a conspiracy to oust Clive Woodward, the current England manager. He doesn’t see it this way, but, still, poisonous atmospheres do seem to follow him around. Wasn’t he always the common denominator in these disputes? ‘For sure. I am very difficult. I’ve never denied it. That’s what you had to be to make England successful. That was my strength and my weakness. I’m not a politician and I’m not a diplomat. I was 22 with a burning ambition. I was a bull in a china shop.’
Temperamentally, Carling reminds me of Geoffrey Boycott, of whom Dr Anthony Clare once said, ‘I thought no man was an island, until I met Geoffrey Boycott.’ Boycott never cultivated friends within his sport, indeed he seemed to go out of his way to make enemies. Like Boycott, Carling always blames everyone else. A close acquaintance of his suggests to me that Carling has a ruthless, almost delusional capacity for reinventing the past. Perversely, though, the main lesson he seems to have drawn from his therapy sessions was that he spends too much time trying to please other people, and not enough on his own happiness. He discovered that, deep down, he always felt guilty for everything. Or so he says: contradictorily, he also realised that he had developed a system whereby he would stop speaking to friends if they notched up a certain number of black marks in his book – unpunctuality, his pet hate, presumably being an example. This was the way his mother, Pam, had behaved with him. She rarely explained why she was angry or upset.
Though this self-analysis – helped by professional analysis – doesn’t deal with the possible contributions of what some might regard as his selfishness, immaturity and self-pity, it does bear out his claim that he is more sensitive than people assume him to be. He contemplates daily his own mortality, for example. ‘There are books of philosophy all over the house. I’m fascinated at the moment with religion, especially Buddhism. How you enjoy life. If you can wake up every morning and accept that one day you will die, that gives you strength and energy and you enjoy your life more. I remind myself every day. It sounds morbid but it’s the reverse.’ Carling squares his shoulders. ‘I was brought up Church of England but now I find myself asking how can you have a forgiving God who damns you for eternity in hell if you do anything wrong? How loving is that?’
How indeed. The labrador has gone to sleep in front of the fire, and, upstairs, Jack has awoken. Will goes out and returns grinning a minute later, with Jack in his arms. ‘He hasn’t got my chin,’ he says. ‘But he has got my distended belly. I bought him his first shoes the other day, and he was so excited about them. He just kept walking up and down the kitchen. It was a lovely sight.’

From his father, as Sir John Mortimer cheerfully tells everyone, he inherited bronchial asthma, glaucoma and a tendency for his retinas to become detached. He was also bequeathed a number of walking-sticks. On an autumnal Tuesday morning, as I approach the house his father built on a wooded rise near Henley-on-Thames, Sir John waves one of these sticks at me from his study window, which proves that his sight can’t be as bad as he makes out. His father went blind in middle life, though that was never spoken of, and his sticks were clouded malacca with large rubber tips – never white, as that would have been a demand for sympathy.

The study is capriciously arranged: bulging with books and photographs of Sir John’s children and his wife Penny, a pig farmer’s daughter and languages graduate 25 years his junior (he has been married twice, both times to Penelopes, and has eight children, half of them stepchildren from his first marriage). Alongside are children’s poems and painted daubs on yellowing paper; a framed letter written by Dickens; sticks on the window sill, the cupboard and hanging from the filing-cabinet drawer. Mortimer hobbles across this room to greet me, his shoeless feet shrouded in two enormous balls of dressings and socks, like a boxer’s fists beneath the gloves. With a snaggle-toothed grin, he explains that he has unfaithful legs, the result of falls in garden centres and down flights of stairs. I notice splashes of bright turquoise paint on his jumper. Has he been decorating? This tickles him. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I’m very active around the house.’ He lowers himself on to a creaky wooden chair, and props himself up with both hands folded over the top of his stick. He has a kindly face: heavy-lidded eyes small beneath large owlish spectacles; a crooked mouth with jutting lower lip; an occasionally lolling tongue. He hasn’t been active around the house, of course. As he explained to great comic effect in his third and most recent volume of autobiography, The Summer of a Dormouse, at the age of 78 he spends large parts of every day just planning strategies for standing up. No one should grow old, he writes, who isn’t ready to appear ridiculous. ‘When I do readings from that book,’ he says in a fey, crinkly Old Harrovian voice, ‘people do laugh about my not being able to put on my socks. The effort of having to pee all the time, descending precipitous restaurant steps [to the lavatory], that all goes down rather well, too. The laughter is a form of release. No one really wants to face up to what happens in old age. Even when you are old you don’t think about dying. You proceed as if you’re not going to.’ He laughs wheezily. ‘Very irritating, death.’ This is a typical Mortimer formulation.

When I tease him about accepting a knighthood, despite being an unreconstructed lefty, he says, ‘I just thought it was rather sweet of them to ask.’ Later, when I ask whether his first sexual experience, aged 17, on a common, was a disappointment, he says, ‘No, I thought it was fine. A bit surprising.’ And as an atheist and a liberal he has gone through life, he says, finding potentially unpleasant things, such as churches and Norman Tebbit, ‘unexpectedly charming’. His public insouciance about death, though, conceals a private terror of it. Timor mortis, as he puts it, is for him a vague but constant and unexplained anxiety. Work, as a QC, novelist and playwright, has always helped take his mind off it. (He is the author of 13 novels, including Paradise Postponed and Summer’s Lease, ten books of ‘Rumpole’ stories, ten plays, four translations of libretti, three volumes of autobiography, and several screenplays and television adaptations, including Brideshead Revisited.) Now, though, when he takes on long-term projects, such as writing a film, he wonders whether he will still be around by the time they cast it. ‘I do them anyway to save myself from total boredom. If I just sat here and vegetated I wouldn’t keep alive. I need people rushing around me.’ Next month he is publishing Rumpole Rests His Case, a new collection of short stories about Rumpole of the Bailey, the character who first appeared in 1978 and who has since accounted for a quarter of a million books sold in paperback. Mortimer was, he tells me, up at five this morning writing, as he usually is. I ask if he sees an element of failure in his still needing to write as prolifically as he does, when he is so far past retirement age. Hasn’t he got it out of his system yet? ‘But you could say that about anything. You could say it about sex. You’re never satisfied with sex. You still want to go on doing it. Any activity which is important to you, you have to go on doing. It’s all you have left. Dear old Muriel Spark said the young should just sleep around and look beautiful and not do any work. Work is for the old.’ Is that what he did when he was young? ‘I didn’t look so beautiful.’ But wasn’t he an aesthete, first at Harrow, then at Brasenose College, Oxford? My question is, inevitably for someone who has written so much about his past, a cue for an anecdote. I know it, he knows it, and he does not disappoint. ‘The future Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie was on the same staircase as me and he once asked one of the college staff why I wore purple corduroys and always entertained young ladies to tea. “Mr Mortimer,” he was told, “has an irrepressible member.”‘ He chuckles at the memory. ‘I read law at Oxford, which is the most useless thing you can read. I should have done history or English, then a second degree in law. I read law to please my father. It was predestined that I would become a barrister.’ This seems strange coming from one who is naturally rebellious: from a pillar of the permissive society; from a libertarian in favour of penal reform, fox hunting and promiscuity (he once said the trouble with orgies is that you have to spend so much time holding your stomach in); from a barrister who defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 and the underground magazine Oz against obscenity charges in 1971. Mortimer has spent his whole career rebelling against the Establishment. Why didn’t he rebel against his father? He stares wanly out of the window. ‘Isn’t it funny I didn’t? I suppose it was because I was fond of him and because he was blind. Being a barrister, I thought, would be a good day job for a writer, like waitressing.’ At Harrow Mortimer wore a monocle, carried a cane and, to amuse the other boys, grew mustard and cress in his top hat. But he wasn’t a typical dandy; he was, was he not – and I smile in anticipation at the anecdote I know is coming – a Communist dandy? ‘It’s true,’ he says obligingly. ‘I had a one-boy Communist cell. It was the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and I got instructions to slow down production on my factory floor. So I told my fellow pupils to translate Virgil more slowly.’ He found the idea of the Spanish Civil War, ‘of bouncing around dusty olive groves with machine guns’, incredibly romantic. ‘Then came the War and I went into a film unit instead of the Army, and went to union meetings where the sparks called me “brother”. I, having had an upper-class education, was deeply moved. They didn’t judge me, they just thought me comical, I think.’ Where did his libertarianism come from? ‘It came from my dad. The big political moment in his life was the Liberal landslide of 1907. His God was Darwin, so I was never christened. And my mother was an artist who taught painting. She was an Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism type. Much more serious than my dad. I feel guilty about her because I’ve never really written enough about her.’ But he also felt guilty because he wrote too much about his father. ‘She hated that. Thought it ghastly. A lot of things I’ve done she would have thought ghastly. Like building a swimming-pool here. The pit of vulgarity.’ Clifford Mortimer, immortalised in the play A Voyage Round My Father, was by his son’s estimation an irascible, unreasonable and, in many ways, impossible divorce lawyer who drowned earwigs to amuse himself. John’s mother, Kathleen, was a snob. She said of his first wife that she had ‘really nice eyes; not at all the eyes of a divorced person’. She didn’t believe in expressing her emotions and never praised her son. When she heard that he had been made a part-time judge she laughed so much she dropped the phone. Is this why he can never take himself seriously? ‘Yes, perhaps it is. I hadn’t thought of that.’ It’s worse than that, though, isn’t it? Didn’t she leave him with low self-esteem? ‘Yes, but she was very nice to me. I remember one thing she did which was incredible, actually. My father loved Shakespeare [he could recite nearly all of it from memory], and I did all these plays for my dad and my mother, like Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, with only one actor, me. So I was doing The Merchant of Venice, and my mum suddenly painted on herself a beard and moustache and became Tubal, which is a very minor role in the play. So we had a scene together, my mother and I, in front of my blind father, it was a very silly idea.’ He smiles fondly. Does he regret not having kept such memories private? His parents have become public property; and because he – an only child – still lives in their shadow, in their house, it could be argued that he has cannibalised his own life as well. ‘I have imitated my father. I followed him into the legal profession, I live in his house and I look out at a garden he designed. Maybe the character my father is now in my imagination has replaced the real one. When I wrote Voyage Round My Father I couldn’t remember which were lines he actually said and which I put into his mouth. He has been fictionalised and given to the public. He is rather like Rumpole now. They’re equally fictitious. He went away into a book. I lost him.’ He looks wistfully around the room, as if for a ghost. ‘When Lawrence Oliver did Voyage it was all filmed here. I watched my father dying in the bed upstairs here and then, years later, I watched Lawrence Olivier re-enacting his death in the same bed, with Alan Bates sitting beside him playing me, the whole place full of cameras.’ His father would never allow anyone to come to the house in case they dared to sympathise with his blindness. Having had such a lonely childhood, John was, he says, attracted to the idea of a ready-made family. Penelope the First (as he calls her) was the author of many books, including The Pumpkin Eater. She was aggressive, intense and pessimistic, often introverted and sometimes suicidal. She poured scorn on her husband’s writing, once boasting that she had never managed to finish any of his novels, and in her autobiography she painted a picture of her husband as a mentally cruel and manipulative man ineptly shambling through numerous affairs. She said that she felt like a day tripper to hell being married to him. For his part, John Mortimer said his marriage was bloodstained but never boring. They divorced in 1972, after 23 years, and, when Penelope the First died in 1999, Mortimer found he could remember only the happy times: their first visit to Venice, the No‘l Coward-style songs they wrote and performed for their children. In Summer of a Dormouse, he wrote of her funeral, ‘It is hard to believe that so much talent, anger, humour, dash and desperation could be shut in a long and slender box. The mere act of being alive seems somehow selfish, a cause of guilt.’ Now he says, with a sigh, ‘Although we had a tempestuous time, I can’t say anything but good things about her. I think writing what I wrote was, in a way, cathartic.’ Does he think his character has changed, in that he was faithless in his first marriage and faithful in his second? ‘Well, they were very different types of wives. I think I always thought in those unhappy times that I was going to meet somebody and it would all be much nicer. Which I did. Also, I think that achieving some of the things you want to do doesn’t do you any harm, does it? Or does it?’ He chuckles. ‘You become more comfortable with yourself. I think there was a time in my life when I was much more showing off, much more abrasive.’ Maybe he didn’t like himself that much as a young person, because he hadn’t proved himself, to himself or to his parents? ‘I think that’s true. I was probably this young barrister who was quite conformist, conforming outwardly with the law to begin with. Then I was more seething within. Then there came a time when I could be myself as a lawyer, too. I suppose that’s what you do, you fit into yourself. Also I think all humour, everything, depends on people taking themselves very seriously, having high opinions of themselves. It’s all about puncturing people’s image of their own importance. If my characters were Swedish undergraduates in a steam bath, there would be nothing funny about them.’ In his books he has often found humour in death. Has he thought of his own last words? ‘”The defence rests” would be good. But it’s always something more mundane in real life. My father had this beautiful one. I said, “Do you want to have a bath?” And he snapped, “No.” And I said, “Don’t get angry,” and he said, “I’m always angry when I’m dying.”‘ Sir John has a reputation for not being angry – he has spent years cultivating the genial buffer image – but there is a dark, bitchy side. He has always known that there is a great well of aggression inside him. He can be intolerant, he concedes, but he is better mannered than his father. Also, he has a low boredom threshold, is fickle in the way he drops people, and has never had many close male friendships. Penelope the First suggested he shied away from self-examination, turning everything into anecdote as a means of avoiding unhappiness; gossiping as a defence against introspection. Penelope the Second says that his public urbanity hides a professional insecurity; he is constantly worrying about going bankrupt, or never writing again. Is his reputation for niceness and politeness, his usually thinking the best of people, informed by a fear of making enemies? ‘I think I am a conciliator in arguments. My dad did shout and yell at people, so I don’t like that at all. I didn’t like it when I was young. But actually I think I’m genuinely curious about people, and they do tell me extraordinary things. I think that’s because all my niceness is directed towards [he laughs] pumping them for some ridiculous confidence. People like to confess things to me. They tell me anything. There’s a great division in life. You either think people are fundamentally ghastly and therefore need Draconian treatment and discipline and ordering about otherwise they’ll go mad and rape the traffic warden. Or else you think they are fundamentally decent and rather nice but sometimes they will stray and do misguided things – like trying to become leader of the Conservative Party – through no fault of their own. I definitely belong to the second lot of people.’ He must have met some really unpleasant characters in court? ‘My murderers weren’t real gangsters. I didn’t really do those cases. My murderers were husbands, wives, lovers, best friends – quarrelling, you know – an instant quarrel and then suddenly it goes too far. Those were not particularly nasty.’ Was it that he could relate to them because of his stormy first marriage? ‘I don’t think I was ever really well, I don’t know. We did have fights, physical fights.’ And he knew the weaknesses of the flesh? ‘Yeees, I knew that. I suppose that’s what is disconcerting about these Tories one thinks of, you assume they must be hypocrites or that they’re not fully rounded human beings, because they’ll pronounce upon other people’s moral values as if they are completely without never been unfaithful, which they always are, of course. Either that or they’re like William Hague – sexless men – so you don’t trust them for that reason. I’m quite tolerant on hypocrites, though. I don’t think it matters too much to your beliefs if you can’t live up to them.’ This seems an extraordinary moral code. Does he consider himself to be a moral person? ‘No, not especially. I am, in a way, too detached to be moral. I really regard myself as an observer, someone on the sidelines watching it all. Not judging.’ It’s to do with his being an only child, he thinks. He always wanted to describe his view of the world. At the moment he is writing a play about a hard-hearted judge who says that if you believe that everyone is fundamentally good, then there’s no point in being good. After all, if you forgive all the people who behave badly because they’re fundamentally good, all the decent people don’t deserve a reward for behaving well. ‘I thought it was quite a good point to make.’ Sir John thinks that prison is largely futile, and probably makes people worse. Rumpole Rests His Case contains an attack on Labour’s management of the criminal justice system. ‘My real bogeyman was Michael Howard. His views were poisonous. And then Jack Straw appeared and proved to be an identical twin. I don’t think Mr Blunkett is going to be any better.’ A phone rings. There are two on the table beside him, a black one, and a white one that only rings in the house, so that he can summon help. ‘Is that a white phone? No, I think it’s black. I’ll leave it.’ He returns to his theme. He has become not exactly disillusioned with politics but disappointed with it. ‘The idealism has gone out of it. It is sad. There is nothing left but efficiency, and Labour are not particularly efficient. Politics has become dull and silly. We were much happier in Thatcher’s time – it was comforting to have someone to really hate. I’ve never met her but I did hate Thatcherism, which is now a prevailing creed for this Government. All this idea of education solely for turning out middle managers in computer firms. There is no sense of education as a means to enrich your life or to become more interesting to yourself.’ Although the poignant and wry Summer of a Dormouse is written in the style of a journal – ‘A year of growing old disgracefully’ – it is short on self-revelation. Does he keep a private diary in which he purges himself of his dark thoughts and angst? ‘Oh God, I have angst! But no, I don’t keep a diary. I can’t think of writing as a private performance. What I think of is performing on a page. I think it’s a public showing-off.’ He craves applause? ‘Yes, I don’t know why. I think it does have something to do with being an only child and wanting to be noticed all the time.’ A slight, dark-haired young woman pops her head around the door. ‘Do you have Nick’s number, Dad?’ ‘This is my daughter Rosie. Green’s? No I don’t. If you ring directory enquiries’ She smiles and leaves. Mortimer thinks Rosie, who is a teenager, finds him totally embarrassing. For his part he says the thought that he might not be around to see her grow into her twenties makes him appreciate her more. ‘She went through a bit of a bad patch at school [Bryanston] because she does very little work but is very very good at exams, which irritates the teachers incredibly.’ He can’t have found being an Old Harrovian such a burden in life if he sent his daughter to a public school. ‘Harrow was a big disadvantage in my life in that I was writing in the John Osborne era when to have been to Harrow was, well, I had to keep deadly quiet about that. I’m not proud of having been to Harrow because I didn’t think it was a very good school.’ He has written about how the headmaster had a very laissez-faire attitude to homosexuality. Was he ever seduced by the idea? ‘I never felt that there was anything very wicked about being homosexual, though it didn’t appeal to me; it was about the only thing on offer at the time. I really didn’t meet any girls until I was at Oxford. But the common [near his home] was a great haunt of lesbians. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a lesbian – should you have wanted to hit a lesbian with a stone. My lesbian friends used to change into mess jackets for dinner. They were nice to me. Very sweet.’ His career as a womaniser began at 17, and his infidelities from then until his second marriage he now puts down to a delayed adolescence. He thinks Penelope the Second, Lady Mortimer – Penny – has made him less aggressive and sarcastic and much happier. They shout at each other occasionally, but it doesn’t last. As Sir John leads the way through to the kitchen, where a farmhouse lunch of cold meats, salads and pies has been prepared – and, of course, a bottle of Italian wine opened, Mortimer being the man who coined the term ‘Chiantishire’ about his beloved Tuscany – his wife appears and asks if ‘Hezza’, one of their neighbours, is now a lord, because she wants to write and ask him to sponsor her on a charity bike ride across Turkey. He is, I say. Sir John looks thoughtful for a moment. Lady Mortimer and I talk about hunting, her great passion. As a spokesperson for the cause, she has had many telephoned death threats and even razor blades and excrement posted through the letterbox. But she knows no fear – indeed, not long ago she agreed to be photographed wearing just her wellies, while feeding her chickens, for a photography exhibition. Sir John, no longer lost in his thoughts, turns round again and begins shuffling off in the direction from which he just came. A visit to the lavatory before he sits down for lunch, he explains, just to be on the safe side. Such are the amusing indignities of old age.

Gone are the bloated and waxy features of the career inebriate; gone the grey beard, the lank and lifeless mullet, the shell suit, gone, all gone. Indeed, as George Best steps out of his dark-windowed Range Rover he looks lean, tanned and casual in black jeans and a black T-shirt. Sunglasses hang from his neck. At 55, the sculpture of his cheekbones, dimples and sulky lips is dramatic once more.
It’s lunchtime on a flat and sunless day in Belfast. Alex Best – blonde, lithe, 29 years old – is by her husband’s side and, as the couple enter the hotel where we’re meeting and walk through its Victorian-Gothic hallway, they acknowledge with nods and shy grins the guests who stare at them. George Best coughs raspily to clear his throat and, with a tight Ulster accent, orders a pot of tea. Alex says she’ll leave us to it and heads off to read a newspaper.
On closer inspection, I see a vestige of George Best’s former fashion sense – a gold bracelet – and I note the mysterious absence of laces in his lace-up shoes. I also see that his skin is not so much sun-tanned as sallow; that below those distinctively long and dark eyelashes the whites of his eyes are yellow; and that, presumably because chronic liver damage stops you absorbing protein, he is not so much trim as thin.
Whenever John Diamond was asked how he was feeling – and people always did ask – he would smile and answer, ‘I’ve got cancer.’ It seems a similarly daft question to ask Best, but I find myself asking it anyway. ‘I’m feeling good, thanks. Yeah. Really good. I’m starting to…’ He doesn’t finish the sentence. ‘The longest problem has been with jaundice. It’s been showing in my eyes a bit. Well, a lot. But the last couple of weeks it has started to clear up. You can try and help it along, but it decides when it goes.’
We are sitting by a window overlooking Belfast Loch. A ferry is sailing past on its way out to the Irish Sea. In 1961, when he was an ‘unbelievably skinny’ 15-year-old, George Best boarded a similar one. Matt Busby had invited him to join Manchester United as an apprentice after one of the club’s scouts had telegrammed from Northern Ireland: ‘I think I’ve found you a genius.’ Wee Georgie from the Cregagh Estate, as he was known, felt so homesick he returned to Belfast two days later.
A fortnight passed before he summoned the courage to go back to Old Trafford. There he remained for the next 11 years, scoring 137 goals, mesmerising the crowds with his repertoire of skills, becoming a pin-up, a superstar, a legend before abruptly, it seemed, announcing his retirement, two days before his 26th birthday. His team-mates weren’t that surprised. For some time, Best’s playboy life had been getting in the way of his football – he had been missing training sessions and even matches. The transition from heavy drinker to alcoholic followed swiftly. He came back from retirement every so often to play for any club, however lowly, that would pay him – Dunstable Town, Stockport and, for a year, the Los Angeles Aztecs. He gambled heavily, dated actresses, pop-singers and two Miss Worlds. In 1978 he married Angie Macdonald Janes, who was Cher’s personal fitness trainer, had a son, Calum, went bankrupt and, in 1984, after driving drunk and assaulting a police officer, spent two months of a three-month sentence in Pentonville Prison and Ford Open Prison (where the warders asked for his autograph). Angie grew tired of George’s drinking and philandering – in one furious row she stabbed him in a buttock with a carving knife – and, after eight years of marriage, the couple divorced. In 1990 Best appeared on Wogan as a giggly, boastful and, above all, pitiful drunk. In 1995 he married Alex, a public-school- educated air stewardess for Virgin Atlantic. The reception was held at a pub near Heathrow Airport, and one guest recalled that Alex’s parents ‘stood in the corner, looking shell-shocked’. In March last year George Best made the headlines again when he was rushed to the Cromwell Hospital, west London. He had barely eaten for ten days, drinking wine with brandy chasers for breakfast instead. He remained in hospital for six weeks and was told that his liver was so severely damaged one more drink could kill him. Four months later, after a row with Alex, he went on a binge and, according to news reports which he has since denied, was found at 7am lying on a bench in Battersea Park clutching a champagne bottle. In February this year he was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia and admitted to Belfast City Hospital, where he was constantly disturbed by autograph hunters. When he got out he went on another binge, this one lasting for three days. He then took the drastic measure of having Antabuse pellets – which will make him violently sick if he touches alcohol — implanted in his stomach. So far they seem to have worked. The tea arrives, and Best pours it with a steady hand. ‘I found it hard not drinking at first,’ he says with a nervy smile, wide enough to show the boyish gap between his front teeth. ‘But the longer it goes the easier it gets.’ He gives a short, soft, sad chuckle, a tic of his. ‘This is probably the first time I haven’t felt like a drink, whereas before, when I’ve been getting better or recovering, I’ve always thought that at the end of it I would have a drink. I once went a whole year without booze and then, with the logic only an alcoholic could understand, I went out to celebrate with a bender. Even in AA meetings I would be looking at my watch wondering when they would end so I could get out and get the drinks in.’
He and Alex are here because, in October, the couple rented out their Chelsea flat and moved to a four-bedroom house on a hill overlooking the beach at Portavogie, near Belfast. Dickie Best, George’s 82-year-old father, still lives in Belfast – he was an iron-turner in the Harland & Wolff shipyard – indeed, he still lives in the same house, on the same Protestant estate where he has always lived. ‘Dad’s got himself a bird now,’ Best says. ‘His “lady friend” he calls her. He goes dancing once a week.’ Two of Best’s sisters live on the estate, too (he has two more sisters, and a younger brother who is in the Army). ‘My sisters have been, suuportive. They have never preached to me, even though one of them is very religious.’ Does he think, in retrospect, that perhaps they ought to have preached a little? ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’
When Best became ill last year strangers began offering him advice – and they haven’t stopped since. ‘It drives me nuts, to be honest. Most of them haven’t been through what I’ve been through, so how can they know how to help me?’ The soft chuckle again. ‘I’ve been told to try deep-sea diving, jumping off bridges, and eating a melon in the morning to stop the craving.’
Best believed he was almost indestructible. Given that he once went without food for 30 days, surviving on drink alone, and that, with the grandiosity of the true alcoholic, he will boast that he has outdrunk every hard drinker he has ever met, this seems an understandable delusion. But in 1998, he tells me, planned to commit suicide by taking a bottle of Nurofen tablets but didn’t go through with it because be couldn’t bear the thought of Alex finding him dead. ‘Yeah, when I’m on my own I do get depressed,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t last long, though, and things always look better in the morning. But when I was in hospital last year I did feel suicidal.’ If someone had offered him a cyanide pill, would he have taken it? ‘Yeah. The pain was dreadful, as though a knife was being twisted in my stomach. When Alex took me to hospital I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t move. I was coughing up blood. And when I came out, for a long time I couldn’t do things like get out of the bath. When you’ve been fit for most of your life, that’s hard to deal with.’
Ann Best, George’s mother, drank herself to death in 1978. She had worked in a cigarette factory all her life and died at 54, almost the same age George is now, having turned to drink only ten years earlier. She is still a sensitive subject for her son. Although she could become vicious when drunk, she was, for the most part, a shy and private woman who felt threatened by her son’s fame and later notoriety. ‘She couldn’t handle it. Found it very difficult when strangers came up to her. My dad could fob them off – he found it easy to adjust. But my mum found it impossible. At first her death affected me terribly because I thought it was my fault. It’s a terrible thing, guilt.’ Why didn’t the shock of his mother’s death put him off alcohol? ‘Even then I didn’t know I had a problem as well.’ George Best’s fame meant he couldn’t see as much of his parents as he wanted to – whenever he came home to Belfast he would be mobbed. His sister Carol once said, ‘We always loved it when George came home but found it a relief when he went away again.’ Best shakes his head at the memory. ‘I tried to get them to move to England, but they didn’t want to leave home. My visits became a nightmare. We were just a normal, quiet family, and whenever I arrived that would be disrupted – people would be banging on the door, there would be cameras flashing, reporters shouting questions.’ In the 1960s George Best was often called the Fifth Beatle. He wore stripy flares and velvet Nehru jackets. He was pictured at parties surrounded by mini-skirted models, filling pyramids of champagne glasses from foaming bottles. He opened his own fashion boutiques and nightclubs, drove an E-Type Jaguar, was screamed at by teenage girls at airports, and employed three full-time secretaries just to answer his fan mail, as well as a hairdresser to blow-dry his hair. His dark hooded eyes, grooved chin and mischievous grin became framed by long sideburns and a mane of luxuriant black hair. On the field, he cultivated a distinctive look – socks rolled down, shirt untucked, face unshaven – at a time when footballers were still soberly turned out, on and off the pitch.
Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of manchester united, says of George Best that he was ‘unquestionably the greatest’. So do Pele and Maradona. And when you watch footage of George Best in his glory days – the two goals he scored in the first 12 minutes when Manchester United beat Benfica 5-1 away in 1966; the crucial second goal he scored in extra time when the team again beat Benfica two years later, this time 4-1 in the European Cup Final at Wembley; the six goals he scored in one match, against Northampton in 1970 – you can see why. His elasticity was freakish, his balance and control of the ball almost supernatural. One commentator compared him to a dark ghost because of the way he could start a shimmying run from the halfway line and glide past half a dozen men before gracefully sliding the ball into the net. The Manchester United midfielder Pat Crerand remarked that one of Best’s markers, Ken Shellito, had been turned inside out so often he was suffering from ‘twisted blood’.
Was Best’s skill down to hard work or does he think he was born with a gift? ‘I can’t analyse it. It was just natural, not something I ever had to work at. When I coach kids and they ask me how I did it, I can’t tell them. I cheat a little and say it is just hard work, but I know it’s not. Maybe I was blessed.’ He’s talking about genius, isn’t he? He takes a sip of tea before he answers flatly: ‘Yeah.’ On one level this is a remarkable boast, but from Best it sounds banal. George Best is an intelligent man. He has an IQ of 158 and was the only child in his class to pass his eleven-plus. But this ‘yeah’ is clearly, understandably, a tired answer to a question he has been asked far too many times. He has, after all, been told he is a genius so often that it seems unremarkable to him. Other players of his generation, such as Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, had great skill but you would hesitate before using the word ‘genius’ to describe them. The fact that Best combined his genius with glamour, as a well as a raft of all too human flaws, perhaps explains why he was deemed a superstar, and why his fame, unlike that of many of his sporting contemporaries, has lasted.
The years of being analysed by other people, as well as his own occasional attempts at self-examination, have left George Best with a singular lack of curiosity about himself. People who have known Best a long time often comment upon his detachment. He will become lost in his own thoughts; seem remote and self-contained, as though on autopilot. ‘Whatever I do,’ he has said. ‘I can always find a way to be there but not there.’ He doesn’t really want to know why he has been so self-destructive, he just accepts that he has been. Even so, he will trot out theories for you about how he was a lonely and introverted child who always played truant from school, and about how he always ran away from his problems, he will tell you, never confronted them. His nervousness about speaking in public was such that he would sometimes avoid having to make an after-dinner speech by climbing out of a lavatory window and running away. He even missed his own birthday party once, and his own wedding (Alex forgave him, and the couple were married a few weeks later). Shyness may be one explanation for his drinking. He also cites escapism, guilt and boredom. The boredom theory is the most convincing. Though he felt inspired on the pitch, he found football too easy and the routine of football life – the training, the team politics, the travelling – boring. Life after playing for Manchester United seemed like a dreary anticlimax to him. It must have been hard for him to adjust to normal life after the vertiginous heights he has scaled. ‘Well, that is why so many footballers struggle when they retire,’ Best says, taking a sip of tea. ‘Because they can’t replace it. You feel empty. I’ve never replaced it.’ Was it the applause he missed, the approval of the crowd? ‘Success I crave. Funnily enough, I teach my son the opposite. I tell him there is nothing wrong in coming second. But I don’t actually believe it.’
Best also became tired of seducing women, probably because he found that became too easy as well – in one night alone, he once told a tabloid reporter, he slept with seven. Does he think his promiscuity was a way of filling the vacuum left by football? ‘No, nothing ever comes close to scoring goals.’ Did sex become meaningless for him? ‘No, I was a normal healthy male and I enjoyed it as much as the next man. Well, I say the next man but nowadays you don’t know, do you?’ He grins. ‘It was still a challenge because woman didn’t always throw themselves at me. It could be the opposite of that – because of who you were, even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t.’ Did he keep count? ‘Nah. There was no way you could keep count. Well, I certainly didn’t, anyway.’
He never became bored with drinking, but did he really enjoy it? Did he like himself more as a drunk? ‘I can’t analyse it in those terms. It’s like, why can my dad go out with his pals for a drink and have two drinks and stop? Whereas someone like me has to stay out with his pals till three in the morning?’ Best’s wife says he did most of his drinking on his own. Was it that he feared facing reality again when the night ended? ‘No. I don’t know. There are no easy answers. I’ve tried everything – private sessions, meetings, pills. I’ve gone through it all. Alcoholics Anonymous might have worked for me if I had been anonymous, but I wasn’t. People kept asking for my autograph.’ Even a charitable assessment of George Best’s character would have to allow that he has been immature, self-centred, vain, bloody-minded and possibly cynical in the way that he has made a lot of money out of talking about his illness – ‘I use the press as much as it uses me,’ he says. But if he has behaved like a spoilt child at times, it is only because people have always spoilt him. And low self-esteem may be as much a part of his alcoholism as the lying, the stealing cash from handbags and the blackouts, but he never seems to have felt self-pity.
Meeting him is disconcerting because he is like a ghost from a different era. He is the man on the faded posters, in the history books, on the black-and-white television screens. It seems like a corruption of folk memory that he is still with us. I tell him that I remember singing songs about him on the bus on the way to primary school: ‘Georgie Best, superstar…’ He finishes it: ‘Walks like a woman and he wears a bra.’ He laughs and then starts coughing. ‘Hopefully those are two things I’ve never done.’ But he did once advertise a bra, didn’t he? ‘Yes.’ Grin. ‘Playtex. I’ve done everything. Aftershave, chewing gum, Spanish oranges, milk, Sausages…’
Why does he think his fame hasn’t faded? ‘Apart from the sporting side of it, I don’t think I’ve ever been’ Pause. ‘Nasty to anyone, or hurt anyone, except myself. I’ve never beaten anyone up or molested somebody. I just got drunk!’ It’s not quite true. In a fit of jealousy he once dangled a girlfriend from a third-storey window, and he was once found guilty of hitting a woman in a nightclub (she was drunk and abusive and ended up with a hairline fracture of the nose). His wife Alex has also said that while he is loveable most of the time, he can have a Jekyll and Hyde personality when drunk, becoming vindictive and even violent. Isn’t this the case? ‘Well, drink does change your character. Aggressive people become subdued and subdued people become aggressive. But I only ever got aggressive with people who were aggressive with me.’
There is a story that George Best tells when he is giving an after- dinner speech. One night, while out with his girlfriend Mary Stavin, who was Miss World 1977, he won £15,000 in a casino. Later, in his room, with his girlfriend down to her underwear and the notes spread on the bed like a counterpane, he rang room service and ordered a bottle of champagne. When the waiter arrived he looked at the money and the semi-naked Miss World sprawled on the bed, shook his head and said: ‘Where did it all go wrong, George?’ At the time the waiter was making a good joke. But later… Where did it all go wrong, George? ‘Well, people still think I’m struggling, apart from the illness. People think I’m begging and going out and doing things for money, well, I don’t have to. I don’t have to work again for the rest of my life if I don’t want to. I do it because I don’t want to get bored.’
The Antabuse pellets only last for three months at a time and this is the fourth time George Best has tried them since 1981. Though he doesn’t drink at the moment, he says he cannot imagine going the rest of his life without another drink. ‘I’ve started sketching again,’ he says, changing the subject. ‘Alex and I are talking about moving to the sun somewhere. It would be nice to sit and paint. I could knock ’em out. I could sell them for 100 quid a go because they would have my signature on them.’ I point out that he could probably charge more, given that his first pair of football boots are now thought to be worth at least £50,000. He smiles. ‘The boots and the medals and so on are for Alex and Calum. Eventually. That will be their legacy. But they are not going anywhere yet. They are stuck in a bank. I often thought about selling them but I know what people would say.’
Alex rejoins us. They are planning to have children, she says. ‘For the moment though we have an 18-month-old red setter as a child substitute.’ George touches her hand. ‘We’d love to have children,’ he says. ‘But that’ll be, well, we’ve decided that that is for when I get fit again.’ With this he stands up to leave, and a hotel guest, who has clearly been waiting for his moment, approaches and asks for an autograph.

On a cliff-top high above the Amalfi coast an awning flaps lazily, stirred by a welcome breeze, and then is still once more. It shares the temperament of the aged American bachelor standing under it, on his balcony, pondering the cobalt-blue sea half a mile below. ‘You know,’ Gore Vidal says with a heavy sigh, ‘every morning at ten a tourist boat sails past and I have to listen to a woman telling my life story over a Tannoy.’ Pause. ‘It is followed by another boat which tells the same story in Italian.’
Quite useful, though, should he ever forget who he is. ‘Yes.’ The sigh again, a wan stare into the middle distance. ‘There are such mornings.’
For all the affected world-weariness, it is safe to assume that Gore Vidal is secretly delighted to find himself, at the age of 75, a tourist attraction. He is, after all, a man given to Olympian, if usually wry, displays of condescension and arrogance – ‘There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise,’ he once half-joked. For 30 years, he and his companion, Howard Austen, have divided their time between a house in Los Angeles and this place, a five-storey palazzo in Ravello, a place once considered sacred to the god Pan and now a shrine to Gore Vidal; it is a museum in which he is the prize exhibit, a reminder to himself of what he might have been and who he is. The house was built by an English peer in 1925 – ‘the same year [sigh] I was built’ – and is set in terraces of olive trees, grape vines, cedars and cypresses. It is not accessible by car, but approached along a corniche path, through three sets of security gates.
Inside, hanging on the walls, there are dozens of caricatures, photographs and magazine covers featuring Vidal’s saturnine face and what he calls his ‘flaring Gore nostrils’. On the bookshelves in his study there are more than 40 different volumes with his name on the spine – collections of essays, plays and screenplays, 24 novels, and an autobiography. By the window is a hand-carved chessboard, at which he and Howard sit down to play every day. Pass through a hall hung with 17th-century Neapolitan canvases and into a high-ceilinged drawing-room, and the eye takes in tapestries, a Greco-Roman head of Zeus, a flaking Buddha and a first-century mosaic floor mounted as a wallpiece. Among the framed photographs on the table by the door is a serious-looking image of the woman he claims he introduced to dark glasses, his step-sister, Jackie Kennedy – ‘whose boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice were a great joy to me’. There are other pictures, ones that chronicle Vidal’s life as a failed politician but transcendent political observer and gossip: Vidal on the stump with Harry S Truman; Vidal sharing a joke with his friend John F Kennedy; Vidal with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, taken when they came to stay and inscribed with the words: ‘To Gore, with thanks for letting us trespass’.
Though the writer does occasionally hold court here – entertaining a circle of friends that includes Sting, Princess Margaret and Paul Newman – visitors probably do feel as if they are trespassing, because this is where he comes to write, on a chestnut-wood table, in longhand. For the past three months he has been working on an essay about the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man who, in 1995, killed 168 people when he blew up the FBI headquarters in Oklahoma. The two men began a correspondence. Vidal found McVeigh to be intelligent and sympathetic. McVeigh invited Vidal to attend his execution, in one of the seats reserved for his friends and family; in the end Vidal stayed in Ravello.
Il Maestro, as he is known locally, is wearing green linen trousers and a pink gingham shirt, the buttons of which strain against his paunch. He shuffles in from the balcony, eases himself into an armchair, and crosses his legs stiffly, causing the bottom button to give up the struggle. The pleats of skin on his cheekbones smooth out as he raises his eyebrows, a prompt for a question.
Doesn’t it worry him that many Americans find his sympathy with McVeigh offensive and traitorous? ‘Fuck that,’ he says with a mirthless laugh. ‘I know how opinion is manufactured in the United States,’ he adds. He speaks slowly, languidly, with an oaky, vowel-rolling Ivy League accent. ‘The New York Times is for us what Pravda was for the Soviets. McVeigh was part of a much larger conspiracy, but they wouldn’t go after it. They wanted to demonise McVeigh as a madman who killed children. They wanted another lone, crazed Lee Harvey Oswald.’
So why didn’t he go to the execution? Had he caught a diplomatic cold? ‘Well, I tried to go. I was all set to go to the first one: just as I got off the plane there was a stay of execution so I came back. His lawyers had 4,000 documents to go through and I assumed they would allow at least a month for that, but they didn’t – they were so eager to get him off the scene. So I had three days to get from here to there and couldn’t manage it.’ Wouldn’t it have given him nightmares to watch McVeigh die? Long pause. ‘I don’t think old people get these nightmares. Old people are nearer to death themselves. Most of one’s friends are dead.’ He doesn’t suffer from mortal panic, then? ‘It depends on your nature. Those of us who went into the army at 17 expected to be killed. Half the boys I trained with in the infantry were killed in the Battle of the Bulge.’
Vidal’s first love, Jimmie Trimble, was killed fighting the Japanese at Iwo Jima in 1945. The two met as 12-year-olds at St Albans boarding school in Washington, DC. Vidal likens Jimmie to Rosebud in ‘Citizen Kane’, the secret that explains everything. He also compares their relationship to that of Achilles and Patroclus and describes Jimmie’s sweat as smelling like honey, ‘like that of Alexander the Great’. When he heard the news of Jimmie’s death did he feel suicidal? ‘It confirmed what I suspected would happen to all of us. At the time I was not the least stoic about it. But no, I wasn’t suicidal. And love is a very evasive term. Let us say we identified with each other. I don’t want to put it in romantic terms. It was stranger than that. More like a twinship. That sort of thing is numbing but you must remember I had heard of a dozen other deaths before what happened on 1 March 1945, at four in the morning.’
Did it harden his heart? ‘I have never checked my heart for morbidity of any kind.’ Has he been in love since? ‘I don’t know what the phrase means.’ Pause. ‘That is a question to ask people who really care about themselves. I’m more interested in the present-day crimes of the Supreme Court. In American history.’
I’m not convinced, I say: his memoirs, his novels, all are an exercise in self-analysis. He is, after all, his own best subject. ‘That’s nice to hear but it’s not true. Philip Roth writes about Philip Roth. I write about Lincoln.’
And yet it seems he never did fall in love again. He has a giant picture of Jimmie, aged 17, in his bedroom here and he still has recurring dreams about running through the woods to the Potomac river, where he and Jimmie used to play. By the time he was 25, he had given up hope of finding the other half, the twin, that would make him whole again and so had settled for ‘a thousand brief anonymous adhesions’. Vidal has an ecumenical approach to sex and believes that only acts, not people, can be described as homosexual or heterosexual. When asked by a journalist once whether his first sexual experience was gay or straight, he replied, ‘I was too polite to ask.’ He has written of a woman in his life, an actress with whom, off and on, he has ‘kept loving company’. And, in 1950, he met Howard Austen, a raspy-voiced Jewish boy from the Bronx who was working in a soda store to put himself through New York University. The two have lived together ever since, but, according to Vidal, sex has played no part in their relationship.
Vidal always portrays himself as emotionally remote – ‘There is no warm lovable person inside,’ he says. ‘Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water’ – and yet he and Austen have reserved themselves a plot at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, yards from the spot where Jimmie is buried. Isn’t this evidence of a sentimental streak? ‘I don’t feel self-pity. I inherited my stoicism from having spent my youth with a blind man, reading to him. By the age of ten my grandfather [TP Gore, an Oklahoma senator] had lost both eyes. You don’t feel very sorry for yourself when that is your role model.’
When Gore Vidal was ten years old his parents divorced, and he went to live with his grandfather. His father, Eugene, was a national sporting hero who became an aviation pioneer, a founder of three civil airlines, including TWA, and a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet. His mother, Nina, remarried the millionaire financier Hugh D Auchincloss, who then left her to marry Janet Lee Bouvier, Jacqueline Bouvier [later Kennedy]’s mother. His father was, he says, charming and serene, but his mother was a ‘perfect monster – a lush Twenties flapper prone to thunderous rages’. He cannot remember a time when he loved her. At seven he began setting fire to things and stealing watches in protest. At 11, he would vomit when he saw her. For the last 20 years of her life he refused to see her. Vidal is something of an autodidact – he never went to college, and has always read books fanatically. His mother didn’t like him reading. Does he see the connection? ‘She would rather have had a Martini than read a book and I must say I would too, now, but not at 10am. No, the most important figure in my life was my grandfather, and my mother was scared to death of him. There was a terrible genial coldness that you sometimes find in masterful politicians. He started to turn to marble before your eyes and I used to enjoy that when he did it with my mother.’
He has, I suggest, been unforgiving in his portraits of her. ‘I don’t think unforgiving. Accurate. I don’t think about her. She was a comic character but she also had enormous charm. She was better-looking than Tallulah Bankhead but they were the same girl. Politicians’ daughters.’ She would answer the door naked? ‘Oh yeah, and receive you on the john. It didn’t embarrass me. I was used to her doing it. She had no self-consciousness.’
Which parent is he more like? ‘I don’t think I am like either, I’d like to think I am more like TP Gore. He was a sharp observer. Great comedian. He always gave good advice. He said, “When someone does you an injury, turn the other cheek, bide your time and one day he will put his head on the block; then you get him.” I wait, too.’
He certainly does. Gore Vidal is as well known for his feuds as he is for his writing. Among others, he has done battle with Bobby Kennedy, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer (on one occasion Mailer head-butted Vidal, on another Vidal bit Mailer’s hand). His reputation as an acid-tongued provocateur was made during a televised debate in 1968: Vidal called the journalist William F Buckley a crypto-Nazi, to which Buckley shouted in reply, much to Vidal’s mocking pleasure, ‘Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.’
Are these feuds his lifeblood? ‘Of which there have been practically none. Mostly they come from journalists and writers. I used to keep the company of writers when I was young but I try not to now because in this age… [sigh]… everything is about, oh, prizes and reviews and fellowships, all of which bore me. You must remember I have had to deal with a lot of freaks. Imagine being a contemporary of Truman Capote. He was a pathological liar. The bigger the lie the darker the pair of sunglasses he would wear. The Gores are an extremely combative family, with the exception of cousin Albert [Al Gore, the presidential candidate] – sadly, he was the only one who did not inherit the family love of a fight. People who engage in feuds tend to take everything personally. If someone attacks me, I shall attack them back.’
Like many arch-teasers, Gore Vidal doesn’t like to be teased back. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in New York in 1960, and for the Senate in California in 1982. Absurdly, he claimed he could have won California had it not been for a homophobic article Auberon Waugh wrote for the Spectator. ‘Teased is not a synonym for insulted,’ Vidal says. ‘But I never took Auberon Waugh seriously, aside from… did I kick his ass in the Spectator?’ Sort of, having been given the right of reply. He uses the word ‘insulted’: given the insults he has dished out over the years, isn’t that a bit rich? ‘Give me one line that you regard as vicious. Just one…’
He has a point. Vidal might have described Ronald Reagan as ‘a triumph of the embalmer’s art’, but that was pretty playful stuff. Most of the epigrams for which he is known have offended not because they were genuinely insulting but because they were annoyingly well-timed. When the novelist Richard Adams accused Vidal on television of being meretricious, he retorted: ‘Mere-tricious to you and a Happy New Year’. On being asked what would have happened if Khrushchev, rather than Kennedy, had been assassinated in 1963, he said: ‘I think I can safely say that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev.’
I settle for something he said on hearing that Truman Capote had died – ‘a good career move’. Whatever Capote’s own last words might have been, they were certainly overshadowed by that. Vidal smiles. ‘Well, first he was dead, so he didn’t care. And it was a good career move because he had been dying in public for a long time, collapsing with drugs and so on. Besides, it was a private comment.’
Has Vidal considered his own last words? ‘We all have last words but we don’t know what they are. How about: “To be continued…”’ Doesn’t quite square with his atheism, though. He smiles and mouths the word ‘no’. But he has thought about his own exit. ‘All of you will go with me because I’m a solipsist. I’ve just imagined you. When I go, all will be blank.’ Maybe he thinks there’s immortality in books? ‘I would doubt it now. Do you see anybody reading anything in the near future? The book is almost irrelevant. Poetry has the best chance. Fiction, I’m not so sure. I see the essay as probably the last necessary form of prose. I can imagine Montaigne outlasting Shakespeare, who will become too difficult.’
It is hard to judge whether Gore Vidal’s own books will stand the test of time. As a novelist he is respected but not revered. A sequence of seven historical novels, which began with Washington DC (1967) and ended with The Golden Age (2000) – a chronicle of American public life from the Revolution to the present viewed from the perspective of one family – has earned him the unofficial title of the nation’s biographer. But none could be said to be required reading in the way that novels by John Updike, Saul Bellow, even his old sparring partners Mailer and Capote, are. He is philosophical about this: ‘For those who haven’t read the books,’ he says, ‘I am known best for my hair preparations.’
Has he thought about gaining immortality through having children, a condition many aspire to? ‘Aspire and perspire,’ he says without missing a beat. ‘They have my sympathy. We are programmed to replicate in order for the species to survive. But what happens when there is no more planet and no more human race? The arrangement of atoms that makes up you and me will one day be disarranged.’
In the early Fifties, it is said, Vidal had an affair with a waitress at Key West – she became pregnant and had an abortion. If this is true, does he now brood upon what might have been?
‘Ask me about the euro.’
Hypothetically then, would the thought of his genes continuing not be a comfort in old age? ‘You mean having someone to challenge my heirs and assigns?’
There is little evidence today of Vidal’s legendary vanity – ‘a narcissist,’ he once countered, ‘is someone better looking than you’ – and his carelessly shaven face is grizzled with patches of white hair. As a young man he was considered something of a dish: Harold Acton found him ‘aggressively handsome’, and the novelist Elaine Dundy said, ‘Just the sight of Gore had the effect of instantly cleansing my palate like some tart lemon sorbet.’ Does he look at photographs of himself as an epicene youth and weep for his lost beauty? ‘No. I was never my own type, so I see no great loss. I was hardly epicene. That was Evelyn and Auberon Waugh.’
He shows me a photograph of himself shaking hands with a grinning Jack Kennedy. ‘He’s probably saying to me [he bares his teeth and adopts a Kennedy voice], “Find out who that girl is in the yellow dress over there.” He could talk while smiling, you know.’ It’s a funny impersonation, doubtless a party piece. In terms of Kennedy’s place in history, does Vidal think it was almost a kindness that he was assassinated before his promiscuity and drug dependence were exposed? ‘It is the United States of Amnesia. No one is remembered. I should think half the people don’t know who he is now.’
According to Vidal, Kennedy liked to have sex in the bath with the woman on top, because he had a bad back. Once, with an actress, he suddenly pushed her backwards until her head was under the water, causing a seizure for her and an orgasm for him. ‘She hates him still.’ I tell Vidal I shall never be able to look at a picture of Kennedy again without thinking of that story. ‘He was promiscuous, it’s true. There was a different woman every day. He was pretty candid with his friends. The artist Bill Walton was a great friend of his – as indeed was I – and Bill and I did worry about him the first year, we were worried someone was going to shoot him. Not Lee Harvey Oswald but an angry husband while Jack was escaping down a drainpipe. Jack said to Bill, “They can’t print any of this while I’m alive. And when I’m dead I don’t care.” He didn’t expect to live long and there was speculation among his friends that he wouldn’t get through the first term because his health was so bad. He was on so much medication, especially cortisone which affects your judgement.’
Has he been following the Senator Condit case? A nod. What is it with these politicians? Why can’t they keep it in their trousers? ‘I think that is true of most males who have the opportunity. My father thought otherwise. He found politicians sexless. The difference now is that the press feel they have every right to know about private lives.’ Don’t they? ‘Of course not. What has sex got to do with the administration of the country?’
Well, if you have an impulsive leader who is incapable of controlling his sexual appetites and is unfaithful to his wife, the logic goes, how can you trust him to act responsibly and truthfully toward the country? ‘So there goes Julius Caesar, right? I guess he was a bad leader. Closer to home, yours not mine, Lloyd George wasn’t too bad.’
Is a sexual appetite a prerequisite for good leadership, then? ‘It’s irrelevant. It’s as if you’ve got someone who has a tendency to overeat. It has nothing to do with anything, except in peculiar countries like England and the US where there is so much hysteria roiling around. Have you ever had the slightest interest in the sex life of any politician of your time?’
Absolutely!
‘How morbid.’
The Monica Lewinsky affair was the most riveting political drama to have unfolded in the past ten years.
‘I assure you it wasn’t, and I spent quite a lot of time attacking Mr Starr for the sting operation he pulled on Mr Clinton. Perjury in a civil suit means nothing. The whole system was poisoned in the process, ending with the crash of the Republic last fall. The electoral system has got to change or we may see a Pentagon committee governing – preferable, I suppose, to the Supreme Court.’
He must be very, very proud to have George W Bush as his president. He laughs. ‘I wouldn’t wish my country that much ill,’ he says. ‘That he’s ridiculous is humiliating for the United States. But things are stirring. There is even talk that Bush may not serve out his term. It has become a lawless country. The constitution has broken down. We have no enemies except those we elect and select and direct toward the nearest nuclear bombs. They need an enemy to provoke, a diversion. This is the mentality of these tenth-rate people who are now in politics because corporate America likes them. They are malleable. They give them contracts to build missile shields that will never work. It’s deeply corrupt. The un-bright Bush was born into a system he takes for granted. His father was equally corrupt. At least with Kissinger, the world-killer, you had a very brilliant man who knew how to tiptoe in and out of a room. These people just fall on their faces.’
Writers, Vidal believes, must tell the truth, or try to, and politicians must never give the game away. As a writer he has been consigned to the fringes of power; he was never the one in the White House making the decisions about the Cuban missile crisis, or Vietnam, or the oil crisis. Does he think he didn’t realise his potential? ‘Every now and then. It crossed my mind two days ago: my grandfather’s last secretary sent me some letters. One was about Senator Gore’s plan to establish me in New Mexico, get my name on the ballot and have a conventional political career. When I published The City and the Pillar [a novel about homosexuality] that was the end of it. I had made a choice. I haven’t regretted it. Writers can actually influence history if they don’t confine themselves – as many journalists do – to [writing about] private lives.’
He would probably have been hopeless as a politician anyway, because he has a dangerous addiction to revelation. ‘Like Portillo, eh?’ He pronounces it the Spanish way, Por-tee-o. ‘No, I like to think I have depths of insincerity as yet unplumbed.’ Was it homophobia that did for Portillo? ‘Maybe. Maybe it’s just that old thin-lipped Conservatives don’t like full Iberian lips.’
Norman Mailer once described Gore Vidal as being shameless in intellectual arguments. ‘He is absolutely without character and moral foundation,’ he said. Does Vidal think he is a good man? ‘I never think in those terms. “Useful”, I would like to say.’ Is he happy? ‘Oh yes, very serene.’ He doesn’t suffer, as one has been led to believe, from bouts of melancholy? ‘You do as you get older. It’s the medicine we have to take. Five pills a day. [He suffers from diabetes.] They are mood-altering. Doctors have no idea how one pill is affecting the other pill. I’ll give you a little tip, never trust one doctor.’
***
In the palazzo on the promontory overlooking the coast, five hours have passed. The evening air now carries the scent of lavender as well as the sound of cicadas and the peal of bells from a nearby monastery. Howard has appeared in his dressing-gown to say hello and disappeared again. An offer to use the swimming-pool – ‘We have no need of bathing suits here, it is very private’ – has been made. A full bottle of scotch, VAT 69, has been brought out, two glasses have been poured with a shaky hand, two more, and two more, and now it stands empty. With the tape recorder off, another side of Gore Vidal has been seen: less imperious and self-regarding, more bohemian and mischievous.
Sitting in a cool steady light, he has told me about how he once tried opium but it made him nauseous; how he enjoys pornography, but only as fiction (he wrote the screenplay for Caligula, then, when he saw Tinto Brass’s film, demanded to have his name taken off the credits); how he used to go cruising with Tennessee Williams and Tom Driberg and once had a fling with Jack Kerouac, but only for the sake of literary history; how he held his own against the Mitford sisters amid the ‘savage dialogues’ at Chips Channon’s dinner-parties.
In many ways Gore Vidal is everything you hope he will be: the garrulous, supercilious gadfly. His manner is Augustan, his tone amused, his pursuit of urbanity strenuous. His conversation crackles with sardonic humour, as you would expect from the man who once said, ‘Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television,’ and, most famously, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ But I can’t decide whether he is at ease with himself. I suspect not. He has, he says, met everybody, but not really known anybody. There seems to be a gnawing discontent to him, or at least a restlessness. Perhaps it is to do with his, as he once put it, not having caught his own attention.
The actress Susan Sarandon, a friend, believes he was ‘devastated’ not to be elected either to Congress or the Senate because, if he stands for anything, it is a belief in the purity of the Republic. The disquiet may also be because he still feels like an outsider – this is perhaps why he is so drawn to Timothy McVeigh. In a way Vidal has become everything he despised in his youth: a snob, a puritan and the epitome of the settled ‘family’ man. He will tell you shocking stories about JFK in the bath, but then add loftily that what people get up to in their private lives, his included, is no one else’s business.
I ask about his feud with Charlton Heston. Vidal claims to have re-written an early scene of Ben-Hur to give it a gay subtext, one that would explain the stormy relationship between Ben-Hur (Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd). Boyd was in on the subtext, but William Wyler, the director, told Vidal not to say a word to Chuck or he’d ‘fall apart’. When Heston heard this story for the first time in 1996 he took the bait and growled: ‘It irritates the hell out of me.’ He called Vidal ‘a tart, embittered man’.
I interviewed Heston shortly afterwards. ‘Poor Gore,’ he told me, ‘I think he must have had a passion for me. Perhaps that was the subtext.’ When I mention this to Vidal, his face clouds over. ‘Such an unattractive man,’ he hisses. A lot of teeth, I agree, but surely the barrel chest, the oiled muscles, the height – 6ft 3in – qualified him as a pin-up. ‘He wasn’t that tall,’ Gore says with a peeved expression. ‘We are about the same height.’ We change the subject, but later return to it. Vidal picks a photograph off a table by the door. It shows a beaming, towering Heston, his arm around a shorter, more brooding Vidal. ‘Now,’ he says triumphantly, ‘tell me, who is in love with whom in this picture?’