A Curious Career
Authors: Lynn Barber
For Rosie and Theo
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Growing up in Twickenham in the 1950s I could never have said my ambition is to be a celebrity interviewer because that career didn’t even exist then. Of course newspapers sometimes ran interviews with famous people, generally politicians, but always in a news context: What are your plans, Mr Prime Minister? The idea of asking famous people incredibly nosy questions about their personal lives hadn’t yet been invented. I was fortunate to come along at just the right time.
My ambition as a child was to be some sort of writer, probably a novelist. But my
hobby
as a child was being nosy. I really was (but why put it in the past tense? I still am) exceptionally nosy. I want to understand other people, I want to know what they think, what they do when I’m not there, how they interact, especially with their families, and how they got to be how they are.
I used to believe that everyone must secretly be as nosy as me but that some of them were better at hiding it. I now know that’s not true. I’ve come to realise over the years that many – perhaps the majority – are not actually all that interested in others. Presumably they would
say
they are – if you gave them a tick-box questionnaire they would say, ‘Oh yes, I’m interested in other people,’ just as they would say, ‘Oh yes, I have a great sense of humour,’ but in reality quite a lot of them are lying. They don’t suffer from my compelling nosiness. They don’t really wonder how on earth A came to marry B, or what they get up to in bed. They don’t wonder if C had an unhappy childhood, or why D has fallen out with his sister. Basically, they prefer talking about themselves to listening. Their loss, I think. But perhaps I spend too much time wondering about other people. If it wasn’t that I make my living from it, it would, I suppose, be quite unhealthy.
The reasons for my nosiness are not far to seek. I was an only child, and a very isolated one, in that my parents didn’t have any family or friends, or any who ever came to the house. Of course I met girls my own age at school, but there was a whole world of other people – boys primarily, but also older children, younger children, other parents – I was eternally curious about. I wanted to see how other families interacted because I dimly (but accurately) felt there was something not quite right about mine.
Partly it was a class thing. My parents were both from working-class backgrounds but had risen through education into the middle class – Mum a teacher, Dad a Civil Servant – but I think they still felt a bit precarious, like first-generation immigrants. Dad never attempted to disguise his working-class roots and managed to retain his strong Lancashire accent all his life; he would reprimand my mother if he felt she was ‘putting on airs’. And yet he was the one who insisted that I go to a private school, Lady Eleanor Holles, five miles away when I could easily have gone to Twickenham County Grammar just across the road.
I went to Lady Eleanor Holles on a scholarship but most of the pupils were fee-paying and from affluent families. They lived in detached houses in Surrey, they talked about their fathers’ new cars, some of them even had ponies. They regularly invited me to their homes but I rarely if ever invited them to mine. Actually,
qua
house, it was perfectly acceptable, a biggish three-bedroom Edwardian job with a conservatory and long back garden, but it was No. 52 in a terrace of identical houses, not up a drive like most of my schoolfriends’. And of course it contained my father. He would sit in his armchair and shout orders intended to carry round the house – ‘Don’t make a noise,’ ‘Turn that light off,’ ‘Where’s my tea?’ – which visitors found alarming. I was so used to his shouting I barely noticed it, but I could see it was scary for other people.
My schoolfriends, I felt, came from ‘proper’ families. They had brothers and sisters and fathers (whom they actually called ‘Father’) who did something in the City, and drove a car and played golf (mine played bridge – he was a Civil Service champion) and mothers who stayed at home and cooked. Mum didn’t cook, ever – we lived on tinned food and Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinners For One – whereas she did, embarrassingly, work from home by giving elocution lessons. Unusually for the 1950s, my parents did equal shares of housework, which was yet another reason for not bringing friends home – they might find Dad doing the ironing while singing his ‘marching songs’ – ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, or ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’. We were not the sort of family you came across in Enid Blyton – or indeed
anywhere
as far as I could see.
So I was naturally curious about how proper families operated and persistently asked questions – questions that other people often found peculiar. ‘Does your brother know that you have periods?’ was a big obsession in my teens, because I couldn’t imagine the embarrassment of sharing a bathroom with a
boy
– in those days, periods meant sanitary towels and a special bin to put them in. ‘Does your mother kiss your father when he comes home from work?’ was another perennial, and – a real giveaway, this – ‘Does your father ever shout at your mother?’
I think my schoolfriends found all my questioning weird, but they also acknowledged its usefulness: I was always the one deputed to ask Virginia if she’d snogged the Hampton Grammar boy who took her to the cinema last night. My friends wouldn’t ask because they considered it uncool to seem interested, but it was OK to send me because everyone knew that I was nosy. They also thought I had an almost magical ability to get secrets out of people, perhaps by some form of hypnosis. But actually I found then and still find now that if you bounce up to someone and say, ‘Everyone is dying to know whether you went out with so-and-so and what he was like,’ they’re usually so flattered by your interest, they’ll tell you. Of course it’s a
bit
more difficult with people in the public eye but the principle holds good – the more interested you are, or seem to be, the more willing they are to divulge. And so eventually this became my career: asking questions that other people wanted to know the answers to but were too embarrassed to ask.
But before that, on the cusp of adulthood, I learned the damaging effect of
not
asking questions. At sixteen, I was picked up by a much older man in a red sports car who became my boyfriend for the next two years. But, because I was trying desperately to seem more sophisticated than I was, I failed to deploy my usual nosiness. So I never asked him his age, or where he lived, or how he made his money (by working for Peter Rachman and passing dud cheques was the answer – he went to prison later). Above all, I didn’t ask, because it never occurred to me, whether he was married. He meanwhile was busily persuading my parents to let me marry him instead of going to Oxford. He actually convinced them – they were on his side – but luckily I found out about his existing wife (and children) in the nick of time and went to Oxford while he went to prison. But that episode, which later became the film
An Education
, taught me about the value of nosiness and the dangers of not asking questions.
I feel the fun began at Oxford. I never took much interest in my Eng Lit course but I
loved
the social life. In those days – the 1960s – there were seven male undergraduates to every female and if you were reasonably pretty, as I was, you got asked out constantly, to punting picnics, cocktail parties, dinners at the Elizabeth. I don’t think I ate a meal in college the whole time I was there – I was royally wined and dined and of course in those days girls were never expected to pay for anything. In my second year, I was given a wonderful new invention, the Pill, and celebrated with a bout of wild promiscuity. But then, in my very last term, I fell in love. His name was David Cardiff and I
knew
from the moment I met him that he was the man I must marry.
Not for one minute at Oxford did I ever think about what I could do for a career. While other undergraduates were filling out application forms for banks, or Unilever, or the Civil Service, I was hanging round coffee bars hoping to run into David. Finding the right husband was
far
more important than finding the right job, I felt (and still feel). So I left Oxford with absolutely no career prospects. My parents had made me do a shorthand-typing course before I went to university and I’d done a lot of office temping in the vacations, so I knew I could earn money doing that. But of course it was deadly boring so I had to think of something else. While I was still at school, I’d written stories and articles for the children’s page of my local newspaper, the
Richmond and Twickenham Times
, and – this is the important bit –
been paid for them
. So I knew that I could potentially earn money by writing. How, though? Journalism seemed the easiest option but at that time newspapers were a closed shop, controlled by the NUJ, and you could only get into them via one of their traineeship schemes which meant working on a regional paper. But how could I work on a regional paper when I had to be in London to pursue David?
The only hope was magazines, though many of those were already unionised too. But, while at Oxford, I’d done an interview for
Cherwell
(the student newspaper) with Bob Guccione, an American entrepreneur who was then launching a new men’s magazine called
Penthouse
, in imitation of
Playboy
. We got on well and he said at the end, ‘If you ever want a job, honey, come to me.’ I laughed gaily, thinking things would never come to
that
pass, but after several months of writing to other magazines and being told they had no vacancies, I wrote to Bob at
Penthouse
and, sure enough, was offered a job as editorial assistant. It paid £16 a week which was not bad for those days – enough to buy a new outfit every week at Biba. I didn’t have to pay rent because I was David’s girlfriend by this time and we spent all our time staying with his friends – luckily, having been to Eton, he had plenty of rich ones.