Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is noiselessly tapping at her MacBook. Everything about her is quiet and compact, even the keyboard on her computer doesn’t whisper.
She is wearing a black fitted jacket and trousers. It is low cut and reveals a tiny womanly figure. Her hair is in soft spikes and she is wearing her trademark round glasses. Her skin is fine lined only. It doesn’t sag.
It’s hard to believe she’s nearly 80. She is weirdly ageless. Her face iconic through all these years.
After we meet she will go to open a museum in Liverpool and meet the Queen. Any excitement, just like any suffering, doesn’t seem to resonate within her.
We meet in London because she has been in talks with The Serpentine gallery about her forthcoming exhibition in June. It’s called Smile. It was conceived as a way of connecting people across the world without language, just an image of their smiles.
‘The smile is such an important thing and I actually wrote that we had to do this in nineteen sixty something. It’s taken 50 years. In the last page of my Grapefruit book I asked for people to send in pictures of their smiles. It was a big picture. I thought it might take a while. I visualised it. Sometimes you have to wait…’ she laughs. ‘Even 50 years.’
John Lennon once described his wife as ‘the world’s most famous unknown artist: everyone knows her name but no one knows what she actually does.’
This is possibly because he eclipsed her. Or at least John and Yoko the couple eclipsed them both as individuals.
Before they met Yoko Ono was an established avant-garde artist. They met at one of her shows. ‘In a way both John and I ruined our careers by getting together, although we weren’t aware of it at the time.’
She led him away from the mainstream, away from The Beatles, into more experimental layered music, and he led her further into him. Ono has never been a multi-tasker. She enjoys and demands complete focus.
I first met her in her home in the Dakota building. John Lennon’s famous white piano sat in the window. Magritte painting on the wall. And dozens of framed photographs of John and Yoko. Their past still omnipresent.
Ono is a very unusual woman. Her perceptions always have an edge and she’s never afraid to say what she thinks. She told me, ‘I love the way you’ve got one tooth sticking out. Really you wouldn’t be attractive at all without it.’ Somehow I found that amusing and sweet.
She has always had an idea that people could live for as long as they wanted and that soon scientists would make us healthy and disease free and we would choose when we died.
Right now she’s choosing work. After all the years of being half of a famous couple and somehow reviled for that she’s finally made it back to being an artist.
Before the Smile exhibition there was an exhibition in India of women’s bodies, human sculptures. And before that another in Sydney. It seems unusual to be starting again so late in life, but not to her.
‘I want to tell you this story. When I was in elementary school in Japan they had a textbook with a picture of a Japanese warrior who asked to be given seven sufferings and eight disasters because he wanted to take over everybody’s suffering and disasters. It’s a courageous thing to do and I was only a little girl and I thought that sounds good and I wanted to be like him. Do good for the world in the sense of taking everyone’s pain away.
‘I asked for the seven sufferings and my life became terribly difficult. All sorts of misery and sufferings. And when it got to around 1979 I thought what did I do wrong. So I said I’m going to change it. Give me seven lots of luck and eight treasures. My disaster became my treasure. I reversed it.’
Does she mean she did this in 1980 when John died? ‘No. My karma didn’t affect him. John’s death was the worst of everything.
‘I had to work hard to un-curse myself. Don’t you think it’s great that human beings can change luck and direction,’ she says.
We come back to the Smile exhibition. ‘Don’t you think it’s better to smile than to scowl?’ Does she never get angry? ‘Yes, I’m angry every day but I don’t hold on to it because it will make you physically sick. You don’t keep it inside. You don’t blame anybody.’
She didn’t blame Lennon for eclipsing her career. Does she think she had to choose, art or love? ‘Definitely. I was a proud person thinking my work was any good anyway. When I got pregnant I had to concentrate on being pregnant for a whole nine months, even though I knew it was ruining my career at the time.’
When she was pregnant with Sean she had bed rest for most of the pregnancy because she didn’t want to have another miscarriage. She was already 42 and had lost several babies. It was frustrating for her because first and foremost she was an artist. Her art has always been a way to cauterise her emotions and extricate herself from the anger and pain that she didn’t want to carry.
‘John got a wheelchair and he would push me around into the kitchen where there would be lunch. Isn’t that sweet?’
She has a very strong relationship with her son Sean. Is very enthusiastic about his music and his girlfriend. She became pregnant with him just after she and Lennon had got back together after his affair with their assistant May Pang.
‘I was very aware that we were ruining each other’s career and I was hated and John was hated because of me. We did everything together and we did everything publicly together. The Bed In was our work for peace but we weren’t liked for it. How come they are even working together? Many girls were upset with this. They were jealous. It was a very difficult time. How I survived at all was a miracle. I survived by thinking about my art work. That was the most exciting thing. Everybody saw a film called The Pianist. He’s going through torture, and he’s still playing the piano. That’s all he can do, to live in his mind.’
It’s very ironic that they campaigned for world peace when the world was at war with the idea of John and Yoko. ‘Yeh. It is. And that was upsetting. The affair was something that was not hurtful to me. I needed a rest. I needed space. Can you imagine every day of getting this vibration from people of hate? You want to get out of that. Also, we were so close John didn’t even want me to go to the bathroom by myself. I will come with you he would say. And this would be in public places like EMI recording studios.
‘I started to notice that he became a little restless on top of that, so I thought it’s better to give him a rest and me a rest. May Pang was a very intelligent attractive woman and extremely efficient. I thought they’d be okay.’
Didn’t she miss him when she was in New York and he was on the other coast of America in Los Angeles? ‘We missed each other. We were calling each other every day. Some days he would call me three or four times. He lived in LA, but that was fine. I was prepared to lose him, but it was better he came back. I didn’t think I would lose him.’
Does she believe that monogamy is possible in a love relationship? ‘I don’t think so.’ She pauses, always wanting to answer honestly but it’s a long time since she’s been involved with anyone at all. Although she insists she is not lonely. ‘I’m enjoying my freedom now. Men’s attitudes are very different now. When I met John it seemed old fashioned. I’m not the kind of person who’d ever pursue a guy because I was pursuing my work.’
She scrunches her nose up as she talks about men being predators. It’s been several years since she was linked to a man. Around a decade ago she was said to be dating Sam Havadtoy, an antiques dealer. Does she ever get lonely?
‘You can be lonely when you have a guy living with you. I cherish moments of not having a guy around, but my work involves being with people, usually guys. I think I’m very lucky. I’ve got so many things going on all the time.’
It seems unusual that Ono became so inextricably linked with Lennon. She has always been a rebel and fiercely independent. She grew up in a conservative aristocratic family in Tokyo. Her mother’s family were founders of a merchant bank and her father who wanted to be a concert pianist was forced to give up his musical desires to also enter the banking world. He very much wanted his daughter to live out his dream.
She was sent to a school for musically gifted toddlers and learnt to play to performance calibre. She was the first female student to be accepted on the philosophy course at Gakushuin University. She was always the rebel. Her mother told her to never marry and if she did never have children. So as a form of rebellion she married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.
When the relationship ended she met American jazz musician and art promoter Tony Cox. They married and had a daughter, Kyoko. John and Yoko were not only bad for each other’s careers but their meeting and obsession with each other caused havoc as they were both married to other people.
Tony Cox kidnapped his daughter when she was around seven and Ono didn’t see her again until she was 31. ‘It was very hard. I remembered her as a little girl and I kept buying her small beautiful cashmere sweaters. They piled up in my dressing room until someone said to me do you realise she’s now 26, she’s probably larger than you, why are you keeping those little things? It was terrible. I didn’t know where she was. It was a kidnapping and a very difficult situation. She had so much love for her father who took care of her all that time and he had said very clearly that if she searched me out she would never see him again.
‘She got married and before they were going to have a child the husband said – he’s a very intelligent guy – you have to say hello to your mother before you have the baby because the baby is going to wonder where the grandmother is. So she came.’ Now she has two grandchildren. Is she close to them? ‘In a way,’ she says.
She looks slightly pained, perhaps because her own upbringing was so lacking in love. ‘I adored my mother but it wasn’t reciprocated. She was too busy with her own life. She was a painter. She was searching for something. Her style was very precise. Incredible. She fell in love with my father and it’s the same old story, she resented the children.’
Did your mother get on with your husbands? ‘No. Of course she didn’t like the child kidnapper, although she approved of the first husband. I don’t think she cared about what I did but her pride was hurt when she heard that I had gone off with a working class guy from Liverpool. The family put out a press release in Japan saying we are not proud of Yoko Ono.’ She gasps and the gasp turns into a laugh. ‘Isn’t that amazing.
‘I would be scared if I was involved with a guy these days. Women have become stronger and there’s a backlash. Men have become terribly possessive. I find it much easier to get on with women. Whatever we fall out over I can always forgive women. ‘
She says this with some incredulity. She hasn’t always found it easy to bond with people. Her childhood was privileged but isolated. She didn’t have friends. ‘It didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to play with people.’ When she met Lennon, who had also had a lonely childhood where he lived with his Auntie Mimi. They must have connected on this level.
She tells me that being pregnant felt very alien to her. When pregnant with Kyoko she says, ‘It was really difficult for me to adjust to that. I didn’t think it was going to be the last of my career. I didn’t think of it as a sacrifice. I just kept thinking that I had a tumour inside of me.’ She laughs. I laugh. ‘I’m just being honest,’ she says now embarrassed. ‘Now I’m going to be getting flack from people saying I’m destroying motherhood. I’m told some women love being pregnant but I haven’t met any of them.
‘I had miscarriages before my daughter and after. I’ve never had an abortion. I think it was written that I had. ‘My daughter was such a beautiful baby I fell in love with her the minute she was here. Emotionally we are close, at least now we are.’
How did it affect your relationship to have her taken away for so many years? ‘I told myself that at least he loves her. Maybe she was okay with him. I was going through so much prejudice I questioned everything.’ Suddenly she becomes tense and doesn’t want to talk about it any more.
She is not afraid to look right at you. She doesn’t seem to be afraid of much. ‘DNA is a strange thing. Kyoko and Sean’s handwriting is so similar it’s impossible to tell the difference. People say Kyoko looks like me and Sean looks like John.’ Perhaps that’s why she is so close to Sean. It provides a connection.
You can see a thousand thoughts flicking through her brain at once. She processes ideas quickly. She doesn’t like to eat much. ‘Just vegetables that are light on your body. Carbohydrates that are easy to digest.’ It’s as if she doesn’t want to be weighed down by anything whilst she’s thinking.
‘I eat two meals a day that are not heavy. Once I did a 40-day juice fast with John. I felt that gave me strength and my body patience but I didn’t ever do it again.
‘After I had my daughter I just never felt like wanting liquor so I never drank again. I was smoking until ten years ago. But society is so down on smoking everywhere you looked you will get cancer. I thought I would get cancer just by reading that so I thought I had better stop. I am one of those very addictive types, so I don’t want to start it again.’
You don’t imagine Ono as vulnerable or weak in any way. You imagine that she’s wise and controlled. She smiles at that idea.

 

 

Shirley MacLaine

There’s no entourage, no publicist, no hotel suite, just Shirley Maclaine sweeping in to Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica with a big floaty scarf and lots of turquoise and diamond jewellery. Her greeting is a stare with the big twinkly spidery eyes. She exudes an aura that is powerful, certain, and a look and sharpness that can be instantly withering.
We can’t find a place to sit where our conversation is not drowned by a trumpet playing band so we go to the restaurant where everybody is extremely old school charming to her. It seems she’s well known in there. Well enough so that when she asks for cappuccino and an extra cup of just foam it arrives fast and fluffy, no questions asked.
The last time I met her she’d been wearing a wig, a good wig, but nonetheless a wig. This time it’s her own hair styled in the pixie cut that fell so beautifully into place in her Bob Fosse 1950s dancing days. Her skin looks plumped up and smooth. She had a face lift when she was around 50. The rest of the face lines have settled in around it amicably. She’s now 76 (77 April 24).
“My skin’s always been good, but I’m old now and I’m gaining weight and I hate it.” In her latest book I’m Over All That gaining weight is one of the things she’s not over. Dressing up, paying attention to fashion, scheming for film roles, feeling anger at world leaders, caring what people think of her and high heels are all part of the stuff she is completely over. Along with being polite to boring people. God forbid she thinks you’re boring. She would have no time at all, and no problem simply “meditating” right there and then or perhaps she means falling asleep.
Today though she’s very awake, very alive and animated. The voice in her book is always sure of itself; occasionally cruel, always brutal in its honesty. In the book she talks about having loved her ride and appreciating relinquishing the reins. In person though there’s none of that aching nostalgia and feeling that it’s the time to grow old and invisible.
Her book is a mixture of Hollywood gossip, sex on set, tales of Elizabeth Taylor sparking in diamonds and crying into champagne, and other such manipulations. Plane rides on Frank Sinatra’s private plane where there’d be fights with jelly beans.
Her relationships with world leaders, Pierre Trudeau, and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The night she spent in a suite that had been rented for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign and when she was sleeping a man entered and climbed into bed with her. She had no idea who he was so she rolled on the floor away from him. It happened repeatedly the same night so she didn’t know if it was one persistent man or several.
Alarming revelations are tucked in between her thoughts on religion, nature, UFOs, reincarnation, fame and ageing. She doesn’t pine for the good old days. She sets them out quite brittlely, fragmented, as if they happened to someone else. Understandably she talks a lot about getting older and fatter.
“I’m not talking vanity. It’s health wise. I don’t want to buy more clothes that are bigger. I’ve been putting together a live show because I miss the live audience. It’s a retrospective of my stuff, not just the acting but the dancing, footage from my shows and television specials. I’ve been cutting it all together and that’s what’s got me in this frame of mind. I am looking back. Look at those legs.”
When you look back at the young Maclaine she was super alluring, but not in an overt way. She had a dancer’s body and a distinctive haircut that made her look like she wasn’t trying and didn’t care. Think Sweet Charity, Can Can, The Apartment.
Did she think of herself then as sexy? “No, never, never, never. I’m a dancer. You have to be a team player and never think of yourself as a diva. And that’s held me in pretty good stead. I’m easy to work with except I’m very disciplined and I want efficiency.
“I should be doing my yoga but I can’t any more, I’ve a spine problem. Really I should pay attention to my posture.” She rises up theatrically in her chair. “I got the bad back from wearing heels and dancing in them. The things that seemed so important don’t matter now.”
I mentioned that I saw Annette Bening, her sister-in-law, at a party and she was carrying her Louboutins. “Yes, she and I talk about how hard it is to wear high heels all the time.” Does she see much of her brother, Warren Beatty. “Sure… he’s very complicated. We’re friendly. They’ve got four kids. We interact. I love Annette.”
Wasn’t there a time when she wasn’t close to her brother? “Oh yes. You know, families go in and out, up and down, I can’t remember when, just like all families.”
Annette is very thin, isn’t she. “Don’t you wish you could be like that, that thin?” I stop thinking about the fried calamari appetizer instantly. Maclaine doesn’t mean to be insulting. That’s just her way. She continues, “To do that you don’t eat much.”
She shows me her Louis heels. The highest she goes these days is a couple of inches.
In her back there’s a chapter: I’m Not Over Vanity, But I’m Trying. She talks about her body a lot. Perhaps because she grew up in the kind of Hollywood that created body fascism. Was it as harsh for actresses to be in shape then as now?
“Probably worse, because it was studio time. On the set of Trouble With Harry (1955), her first movie, Hitchcock wanted me to eat every meal with him. So I put on 10lbs in the first week.”
When she was an actress on Broadway she lived off her own lemonade made at cafes with quarters of lemon and sugar that were on the table, and peanut butter sandwiches. So obviously going from that to the multi-course Hitchcockian meal might add a couple of inches.
“The head of the studio called me in and said ‘What are you doing? We are trying to cut the scenes and you are a different person’. I had gone up to 136lbs. when you are under contract they did that because they owned you they thought, but I wasn’t owned. I didn’t stop eating for the rest of the picture. I said now I’ll have to keep eating so that I would match.”
Does she think Hitchcock had an eating disorder? “”Doh. Just look at him. He had trouble with food. He would lose 20lbs before a shoot. He knew the food would be catered by who he specifically asked to cater it and he would just eat his way through the film. It was very fine good food.”
She says with admiration, “Marlene Dietrich ate only every other day. She taught me how to put a very fine gold chain under your chin to keep it lifted.”
Maclaine talks about her own facelift and when she came home with stitches in her face she couldn’t have energetic sex. “That’s when I got into gentle sex, gentle orgasms.” She’s laughing a big dirty laugh. “Some deep emotions called don’t pop my stitches.”
Who was your lover at the time? “Oh he was very respectful, but no names babe. He’s gay now. Such a lot of people are bisexual.”
After talking about the gurgling gentle orgasm she says that she didn’t love sex so much unless she was emotionally involved. ” It wasn’t that interesting to me. I could never do it unless I was emotionally interested.”
What’s more interesting is how she stayed emotionally interested. Throughout most of her sex life she was married to a film producer turned businessman, Steve Parker, twelve years her senior. For most of that time he lived in Japan with their daughter Sachi. They divorced in 1987.
While married she had passionate, tumultuous affairs. None of which lasted for more than three years. Thus the marriage itself provided both the freedom and the barrier, the protection if you like. “It was an open marriage. A very open marriage.”
It went on for 28 years while she had what she calls “serial monogamous relationships” with many others including Robert Mitchum, Danny Kaye, Yves Montand, Australian Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
“Being married was a protection not to marry again. If I had been single then it would have been discussed with the people I was with and I really don’t agree with marriage. It’s not something I would do.”
When you she married in the first place did she think differently? “No, I felt the same way. That’s why it was an open marriage. I was 19. He was my helpmate, my friend, my counselor. When I came to California from the east he was there, so I didn’t go into the world of Hollywood single.”
Somehow not being single in Hollywood was important to her. It’s as if she were in some way vulnerable or prey. Maybe on a very basic level she feared losing herself. Her parents Kathlyn Beatty, a drama teacher, and her father Ira, philosophy teacher turned juvenile detention officer and heavy drinker, had a claustrophobic and dysfunctional marriage.
In her book she tries to explain the contradiction. “What was I doing with all my hormones and attractions and longings when I always felt so strongly the need for freedom. Most of the men I was with wanted to get married. I was already married and I stayed that way precisely so it wouldn’t become an issue.
“My husband and I had a liberal arrangement regarding each others’ lovers. We were friends. We stayed married so we wouldn’t be tempted to marry again. I don’t understand the need for the institution and I could never live a life where I felt tied down to a promise just because my love hormones were raging at the time.”
Why did she divorce from Parker? I read it was about money. “I thought that it was, but it wasn’t. He didn’t want anything. But by the time we separated it was really just over.”
For a long time though if other lovers “got serious with me about divorcing Steven and marrying me, that was not good. All of them did that, and that probably took three years. That was their cycle. When you start looking back you see your behavior patterns and you realize you unconsciously conducted yourself to give them three years.”
Does she not think she should have given them any more than that? “Huh. To do what? I don’t think so. You can’t really control or not whether you have freedom from emotional intensity. It’s just a rhythm. I was kind of shocked myself. How do people do it for 25 years? I guess I did it one year for the body, one for the mind, and one for the spirit. It started with the body, then the mind, then the spirit, then it was done. Ha.” Loud dirty laugh.
What about the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who was assassinated in February 1986? “We had broken up but we made arrangements to get back together, then he died.” You were about to break the three year rule? “No, it had been two and I thought we could add another year. He was a brilliant man, a brilliant leader. He didn’t believe in any of the stuff I believed in. we didn’t argue but he thought it was ridiculous. I liked his intelligence. Very left wing intellectuals always interest me. And they are always the most suspicious of my metaphysics. He was planning to come to New York and hoping to be Secretary General of the UN.” It must have been terrible when he was killed? “It really was. I talked to him a week before he died. We were planning on seeing each other. He was an extraordinary person. Not good looking. Not a big man, which I usually like.” We get very very sad talking about it.
Robert Mitchum was a big man. “Robert Mitchum was so complicated. My dad was complicated. And I like complicated men. But he was not exactly like my dad. He was very intelligent. He was intense, he was light, he was funny, he was impossible. Interesting to me. Good ground to plough. So much was under there.”
Did she ever get to the core of him? “Mmm, maybe. No, I would have got bored if I got to the core. Once you’ve got to the core what’s the point of ploughing anyway. I wasn’t looking for a lasting relationship, I never have.”
She speaks with sparkly-eyed fondness for Danny Kaye who came to visit her on set in Paris and flew her to New York and cooked her Chinese food. “He was a great pilot. He used to take me to dinner all over the place, not just across the Atlantic. If he wanted a steak he would fly me to Texas. He was a fabulous cook. That was three years. I can’t remember how that ended, but there was someone right after him. I think we’re all kind of cyclical. We have a rhythm and three years was mine.”
There’s an absence of sentiment and nostalgia in the way she speaks. It’s all very matter of fact. Perhaps that’s why her most intense love relationship now is with her dog, a rat terrier called Terry. Her eyes fill as she speaks of her love for her. She seems utterly contented. Certainly not lonely for any man. She chats on about her life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives most of the time. Laughing with good friends and coming home to watch DVDs in bed with Terry.
She’s working on her one woman show – An Evening With Shirley Maclaine – and has a new movie out, Bernie, with Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey “I play a woman who’s a real bitch. She’s very wealthy and everybody hates her. I love playing those parts.
“Jack plays the head of an undertaking firm. We have a relationship and I become very possessive. I make life impossible for him so he shoots me and puts me in the freezer under the frozen peas.
“I’ve got other things coming up but I don’t know if I’m going to talk about them yet.” That’s great I say. A lot of people when they reach a certain age and they’re not leading ladies any more they find that difficult. You know how that goes? “No, I don’t know how that goes.”
Did she never find it difficult to reach a certain age and get offered different sort of parts and then get offered less parts? Did she never reach a point where she felt invisible? “No,” she says loudly and defiantly. I’m not sure if she’s going to snarl at me, but then she just laughs. Moods and shapes shift with her pretty quickly. One minute she’s laughing with you cozily, the next looking at you as if you’re something on the sole of her shoe. And then she’ll do that just kidding face and we’re laughing again.
Her book swoops like that too. From serious to angry, political and metaphysical, to Hollywood insider. And she manages to talk about people with love and disdain at the same time and in equal measure. Such as how Elizabeth Taylor got diamonds to go on a lunch date. You’re not sure if she’s talking in awe or contempt. Or both. Although she says she loves Elizabeth Taylor.
Did she herself get diamonds? “Sure, I got bribes to get married. No names. I said no, but I did not give the diamonds back. They’re in the bank. They may come in handy if I want to get more water rights.”
In the book there’s a chapter called I’m Not Over Making Money. “I think it’s going to cost money for what’s coming up. I want to make a huge garden. I want to collect rainwater. Solar is expensive. Who knows who else might need help. That sort of thing.”
She has always been unafraid to speak her mind. A lot of actresses are driven by insecurity. But not her. She says that she’s never manipulated to get a part.”
“I’ve given up more parts than I’ve been afraid of losing. If an actress called me and I was up for a part but they were so in need of that part it meant everything. To me it meant something, but not that much. I’m basically not competitive. I like the idea of playing a part that required a lot of thought, so there were parts that I wanted because they were interesting.”
What were the ones you gave away? “Oh, I should have played Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More but Ellen wanted it so much. I should have played Breakfast At Tiffany, but I gave that up because of Audrey. I didn’t take these things seriously.”
Why didn’t you take Breakfast At Tiffany? Because you didn’t want to be a hooker? “Oh no. I went and did something called Two Loves with Laurence Harvey. Some terrible thing that three people saw. I liked the script. It was about a teacher in New Zealand working with Maoris.”
You got to go to New Zealand? “No, we filmed it in the studio. I thought that Breakfast At Tiffany was too souffleish. The Apartment started with 29 pages. I just liked the idea of working with Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder. I didn’t know what it was going to be about, neither did he. He wrote it based on the chemistry Jack and I had on set. It didn’t seem amazing at the time. We didn’t know anything when we started. When the first review came out it said they don’t know if they’re making a comedy or a drama.
“After the first screening Marilyn Monroe was standing outside the screening room wearing a gorgeous fur coat and leaning up against the wall. I walked up to her and she walked up to me and she opened her coat and she had absolutely nothing on and told me, ‘You were wonderful.'”
Why does she think she did that? “Well, she didn’t get along with Billy Wilder.”
So she did it to punish him? “Probably. Isn’t that interesting.”
Such a punishment. The first screening of a brilliant movie ends and there’s no attention for Wilder or MacLaine or Lemmon, it becomes not about The Apartment but about Marilyn. “Yes, it really tore up the whole place. I don’t know what that was about. He was awful with her and she was with him. That was not a good relationship.”
What was it about their chemistry? “She couldn’t act. I got along with him. He was very autocratic. He was Austrian. You don’t tell Billy Wilder his script isn’t right. I feel he always needed a strong woman character in his pictures. When he started doing them without it just didn’t have the tension.
“He used to have this editor, Dylan Harrison, and he’d see the dailies and say ‘Billy, you’ve got to shoot the whole day over because you didn’t break my heart’. With men only he didn’t break hearts. Dylan died after our last picture. Dylan was the real Billy Wilder. Without him he was too harsh. He hurt people’s feelings. Sometimes I minded it. I tended to dig my foot in – let me do this, let me do such and such. But after a while with him it’s the law of diminishing returns.
That’s what happened with Marilyn. She couldn’t remember dialogue and he’d be very harsh and she’d forget more. Although I didn’t know Marilyn, that was the only time I saw her and I saw all of her.
“There was one other time when she was doing Something’s Got To Give. She had lost weight and got into shape, but she was doing her number which was not showing up on time and Fox called me to replace her and I said ‘No, I’m in the same union as she is’ and then she died.”
Well that would have been weird to replace her. “Well, it all happened before the picture got started. They did tests. Of her in a swimming pool and Dean was cast in it. I’m not sure if they ever did the picture with anyone else. Maybe it was not made.” (It wasn’t. Marilyn was sacked from the film. She was rehired, but then died).
Her voice and entire body language softens when she talks about Dean Martin. He was never neatly packaged into a three year cycle. Martin was the one man she couldn’t get. “I had a crush on Dean. He was the funniest. His imagination was funny. His brain, I’m not so sure.
“Frank wasn’t funny. Frank would get extremely autocratic. He could and would run the show in every which way, and he didn’t want to work hard.”
MacLaine became a non-sexual mascot for the Rat Pack. One of the boys. “I never had a thing with Frank or Dean or Sammy or Joey Bishop, but I couldn’t have an affair with someone if I was hanging out with them if I wanted to. I was the one they protected, like I was their mascot daughter.”
She says that they didn’t even drink very much. “It was all a show. It was like an adult kindergarten. I was one of the boys. We all played together. But I would always clean up the trashed room.”
It’s the only moment in my whole time with her where she seems uncertain of her role, of who she is. One of the boys? Or caretaker, love object?
She talks in her book of an unrequited longing for Martin and once she even went round to his house to tell him how she felt. But his wife and kids were there and she ended up playing with the kids and had a kiss on the cheek goodnight. And the unspoken sweetness continued. Probably it meant more to her that way.
Does she ever wonder what would have happened if she’d had the affair with Martin? “No,” she says sharply. Does she ever think that about anyone? “No.” She doesn’t fill the silence. There’s nothing unrequited or lonely in your life? “No. I’d had enough. Come on. I’m nearly 77, I’m not interested in that any more…” Then there’s another pause, and a softening. “I mean if something came along.”
She smiles a crooked smile. Hard to tell if she’s serious. “I’m very content. I’m very busy and creative. I have a wonderful life. I have a lovely home in New Mexico. I come to LA and I go to New York and I have wonderful times.
“I think with someone who is as independent as me I don’t think men are all that interested. Unless a man has got a control trip going on, but I’d see that right away. This subject is boring,” she announces.
I wonder if it’s all been about her strong desire never to be controlled. Before I can formulate another question I can see she’s moved on.
She doesn’t mean to be offensive. In fact she’s very charming when she wants to be. She just wants to speak exactly what’s on her mind.
It’s getting dark in the Shutters restaurant and her twinkly eyes squint to see what’s written on my notepad. She orders more foam for her cappuccino. The waiter goes off and brings back a cup of pure foam like a cloud.
How close is she to her daughter? “You know, she’s 53, she’s doing her own thing. She’s doing a little theatre. She’d like to do more. I’m close with my grandkids. They live back east so I have to wait till they’re here.”
For most of the time when her daughter was growing up she lived in Japan with her father. It was deemed a healthier environment than Hollywood and dragging her from film set to film set. But there were long gaps in communication. Does she try to make up for lost time? “Yes, we try to, but she has her own life. She wants to be on her own. She’s going through a divorce now and I don’t want to talk about it.”
As if by magic at that moment Antonio Banderas, looking super svelte, and Melanie Griffiths, looking super baby-faced, appear to meet with her. Although it felt like me and MacLaine could have talked for hours, I realise with the arrival of this Hollywood couple she is in her true element. This is her Hollywood life and I have merely been a guest. I hope that we’ll meet again in this life or another.

 

 

Nuns Aloud

Last year Decca Records asked me to help them on their search to find a supergroup of singing nuns. I’m not really sure what qualified me for that particular job – perhaps because I got on very well with a group of Austrian monks who sang Gregorian chant and sold over a million records worldwide.
I was tortured by nuns at convent school and I’ve always had a fascination with them; a lifelong quest to find a different experience. Plus, who isn’t fascinated by a woman who has given up every essence of herself for God and lives in such an extreme way, cloistered in a habit among her sisters?
The search was long and fascinating and it answered my questions. Are nuns authoratitive and frightening? Or are they beatific and enlightening? Each community is startlingly different.
It took in over 70 convents in 15 countries (including Ireland, Spain, Wales, USA). The first thing we learnt was that nuns are extremely difficult to get hold of because their lives don’t revolve around everyday deadlines, and a lucrative recording contract seemed not to be of great importance.
First off we visited a remote order of Benedectines at Abbaye Notre Dame de L’Annonciation du Barroux in Provence. They are a cloistered order and may never leave their stone abbey. They are very traditional and we had to talk to them and photograph them behind a grille. No close-up photos allowed. It’s about the group, not the individual.
Also with us in front of the grille were the nuns lawyers hoping to sign an immediate contract. The Mother Abbess had a commanding presence. Immediately fascinating that this authoratitive woman would give a vow of obedience. She said, “It’s a paradox; obedience is freedom.”
The sisters range in age from 19 to 88 and they all have beautiful skin. Their sound is pristine and pure. I could tell that Tom Lewis and Oliver Harrop, A&R for Decca Records, felt that these were the perfect nuns.
My perfect nuns were in Wales – Poor Clare Colettines at Ty Mam Duw, Hawarden, north east Wales. They write their own songs, channelled from the source. There are 14 of them. They wear brown habits, are vegetarian and don’t wear shoes. They too are an enclosed order behind wooden bars, but from the minute I met them I felt no boundary.
Sister Juliana in particular draws you right in when she speaks. Although she is 55 and hasn’t heard any contemporary pop songs, the songs seem very of the moment. Mother Damien explains, “If you live a life in prayer you are never far from the world. God keeps you modern.” Their songs do not have the cool detached ambience of the French nuns who are pure Gregorian chant. The Poor Clare’s songs are intriguing, inviting and have wonderful lyrics. The sisters here write poetry and draw.
This community all had an interesting past before they joined. Some of them were not even Catholics. Sister Juliana’s conversion came when she was working for her gap year in a hostel for the homeless in Notting Hill, London. “A few houses down there was an old prostitute. Her name was Ruby. She was very ill, very drunk and very maudlin. She seized my hand and said ‘Pray for me.’ She taught me the rosary. After that I didn’t want to go on to university. I felt life was more urgent.”
I love them because they are as much of this world as separated from it. They talk inspiringly about the power of prayer. They get up at midnight for the first prayer of the day. Recently it’s been the feast of Saint Colette who you pray to if you want to have a baby. They’ve had many emails saying prayers worked better than IVF.
Their latest song Mother of Millions is inspired partly by this and partly by an underground Catholic leader, Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, in China, who has been constantly incarcerated and subjected to interrogation because he doesn’t support China’s state-sponsored Patriotic Church. Says Sister Juliana, “If you haven’t got a certificate you haven’t got the right to bring your baby into the world. If your child is handicapped it is also forcibly aborted.
Twenty years ago somebody left a badly damaged new born on Bishop Jia’s doorstep. He took it in and then others appeared.” Thirty nuns help him look after these children.
“In between prison and re-education camp and house arrest he has cared for these orphans. The Chinese authorities now demand the bishop should sign over the children or spend the rest of his life in re-education camp.”
The song is a prayer for help and to attract media attention to save the children’s lives. “In a way in our lives consecrated in chastity, we are mothers to millions.”
My final convent visit was to the west coast of Ireland in the Connemara countryside. We went to the beautiful Kylemore Abbey. It used to be the home of one of Ireland’s most exclusive convent schools. It is not an enclosed community and the sisters are very embracing, clever and funny.
They need a new roof and several of the older sisters have had to move out, some to a farm and the older ones to a retirement home. They really need a record contract. I felt incredibly touched by them. They talk about real things; relationships, depression.
Harrop and Lewis felt they simply didn’t sing well enough to be awarded the contract. I made a passionate plea that Madonna doesn’t sing well but she knows how to make people connect to her. The problem was I wasn’t connecting to anybody.
I had specifically asked that the documentary crew didn’t film any of my meetings with nuns. But if they’d filmed my meetings at Decca Records they would have had explosive television.
Decca wanted the French nuns – they sang Gregorian chant – they wanted to repeat the success of the monks. The brothers though could leave their convent and sit on a TV sofa. Plus their depth and timbre made Gregorian chant sound earthy and warm. I thought that people would not connect with the nuns who could never leave their convent walls. And not only had they taken a vow of silence – they are French!
The nuns in Boston are all about communication – make apps for iPhones and have a consistent Facebook presence. Lewis says, “Nothing ancient or mysterious about them. With them it was about how quickly can we get the next gizmo. They already have iPads. They are the complete opposite of Avignon. There is no mystery. We want a record where even if you ask an atheist you will be transported to another world
“The French nuns are a well-oiled machine. They move together and have a sense of overall oneness.” He felt their austerity and separateness was an appeal in itself.
For me the compelling hook was the paradox – being separate from this world but very much part of it – that’s real mysticism.
I have stayed in touch with the Irish and Welsh nuns because I wanted to help them. I had been in talks with another major record company about signing Kylemore Abbey.
Louis Walsh helped put together a list of great Irish songs for an album. The musical director, Sister Karole, is studying in Hungary for a year, so we await to see if the record will go ahead when she returns.
The community in Wales continue to write songs and have been asked to contribute to a record with the Welsh Guards celebrating the Royal Wedding, along with Shirley Bassey.
The French nuns record managed to do well internationally. How well remains a topic of debate. Industry insiders say that more money was spent on the record than was made. But a voiceover at the end of the documentary says they went to Number 1 in the classical charts. I am told it sold 100,000 internationally ( rumoured only about 15 per cent of that in the UK). So a happy ending, for the documentary at least.

Naomi Campbell

Towards the end of my afternoon with Naomi Campbell I ask her, ‘Do you think you are beautiful?’
“Mm, no… But I think I’m a bit of a character.”

I fall about laughing, but she doesn’t even realise she is being funny, and that kind of sums her up. She has absolutely no idea how the world sees her, mostly because she’s operating in her own universe where she is in equal parts cossetted and searingly insecure.

What protects her also destroys her. She says she’s never happier than when she’s on a plane. Puts on her iPod, shuts out the world. And her home is in fact, “an aeroplane seat, not a country.”
Two days ago she was in Brazil, yesterday New York, today Claridges, tomorrow Kenya.

If you wonder why after 20 years the woman who doesn’t think she’s beautiful is still at the top of her game, it’s because she works hard. She’s driven by not being good enough.

While her career is splendid, her love life is not even intact. A bit difficult when your home is an aeroplane seat. But she knows she’s made some terrible mistakes there and best not to be looking, best just to get on with her “recovery.” Which would all seem sensible if Naomi was the kind of girl that didn’t need a man to love.

Oftentimes people comment about meeting Naomi and you can see they are just waiting for the fireworks to go off. It’s easy to light a little sparkler or two and watch her flash with a hot line of invective or blink a kind of lunar remoteness.

Fortunately Naomi has never been that way with me. Maybe I see a different Naomi to the world as well. Sure, she’s always late. In this case, a day late because she missed a plane. But the thing is, she always makes up for it, she’s always worth it, even if she doesn’t think she is.

I see Naomi as a woman with a heart of gold always trying to explain herself and getting herself into worse trouble if people don’t get her immediately.

We first met over a decade ago after an unfortunate flight to New York. A police escort was waiting at the gate because there’d been an air rage incident, mine not hers. I was flying to New York to interview her but she was actually on the same plane. When we eventually met I think there was huge empathy just because nobody likes to be alone in their anger.

Naomi has done anger every bit of the spectrum, from righteous indignation in the case of being papped by the Mirror outside an NA meeting and called a “chocolate soldier” to mobile phone throwing at friends, assistants and the floor, now channelled into daily boxing. In a gym at 7am. She says she’s never late for that although she is late for everything else. Angry, late, gorgeous and a national treasure.

She is just out of her bath. Last night she got straight off the plane to go out with Alexander McQueen and Jasper Conran to Nobu Berkeley. Got in at 2am, woke up at 4am. She says she doesn’t need much sleep.

She is wearing dark skinny jeans, high strappy boots and a black angora fuzzy shrug and flashes with sparkly diamonds. She wants to go to Churchill’s bunker. It’s all arranged. “You’ve got to see it. He controlled World War II from there. Every hotel I’ve gone to in the world as a Churchill suite – Thailand, Morocco, Paris. I’ve just always had admiration for him, the way he lived his life was to do with what he wanted to do and live to the fullest, and he travelled.”

Do you identify with that bit?
“The travelling part.”
And the living life to the fullest?
“Mm, no.”

She’s got a day in London and she wants to fit in Louis Vuitton and Churchill and me. She was recently in St. Petersburg with Marc Jacobs which seems to have given her a taste for museums and monuments.”Catherine the Great. Her carriages freaked me out. Diamonds in the doorknobs and in the spokes of the wheels.”
Perhaps she’s more Catherine than Churchill. She shows me the pictures of the diamond wheels and of Willie Nelson’s bashed up guitar.

“I just love taking pictures, documenting everything I see. Showing people where I’ve been. I love to travel and I love planes. A plane for me is peace, no-one can reach me.”

And this is just the start of the contradiction. No-one can reach her yet she badly wants to be reached. She wants stability, but she only finds that by getting on a plane. This summer she was based in New York because she took her mother there to help her recover from breast cancer.

“I stayed put until she got in remission and we’re basically crossing our fingers. I’m very positive about it,” she says, and there’s a certain pleadingness. She needs to be positive about it.
“I lost my stepmother last November, Mary Blackwell.”

Mary Blackwell was the wife of Chris Blackwell who she calls “my dad Chris.” She has several adopted father figures and one adopted grandfather, Nelson Mandela. But more of that later.

Now she wants to talk about her loss and death and Deepak. She has a curious way of monologuing; random, urgent, and although often the thoughts don’t connect up in a linear way they are fuelled by her internal logic which is in itself breathtaking and endearing, so you go with it.

Mary Blackwell had melanoma. “Which is very rare for a black woman. She decided not to do chemo. I went to visit her in this cancer hospital and I was disgusted with the way her room was and they were telling me to put on a green mask, and I was like, I’m not doing that. I was wearing a Chanel coat. I didn’t mention the word cancer to her, we were just catching up, and then I said I hate this room, I’ll give you this coat if you can get out, you’re strong. Three days later my dad called and said, ‘She’s out.’

“She was a big fan of Deepak. I thought he was like just a fad, but she went to his retreat in San Diego and she came back so strong. And I think now I respect everyone’s decision to do what they do. I used to do kabbalah, and it’s very much like the AA to me, a spiritual programme. It helps you, you just do whatever helps you. Anyway, the Deepak helped her, and I organised the wedding for her and my dad even though they’d been together for 18 years already.

“She was shopping till two days before she died. Then boom. They took her to some funeral home and it was awful and I thought I’m not having her here. So I was like, ‘Dad, we have to take her up to Harlem. That’s where her church is, I want orchids and candles and an up service.

“The funeral home had done this make-up for her, it was awful. I wiped it off her, I redid everything, fixed her hair. I’ve never spent so much time with a body before. I knew her soul was already gone and it was a big learning experience because it made me not afraid of death any more and now I know she’s still around me all the time.. Not afraid of my own death,” she says quietly, but as if it’s a matter she’s thought about a lot.

“I was already halfway there, but this was a big confirmation for me. When it’s your time, it’s your time.”

The image of Naomi painstakingly re-doing the make-up on the body chills me because she speaks about it with such warmth. She means it to be uplifting, which makes me find it the more dark.
Can we talk about something trivial?

“I just want to say that I feel Mary is always guiding me. And you know I was with Jasper last night and he loved her energy and she had this great eye and she had a home line that she was trying to do and I’d love him to be able to put it out so that everyone could share a piece of her.”

I ran into Naomi at a party of Jasper’s and she was vulnerable and I said a few kind words and the thing with Naomi is she likes to pay you back treble, a million fold, for any act of random kindness. It was her idea to do the interview, not because she has anything to promote, although she has endless charities. It wasn’t about that, it was just about doing me a favour. She is a loyal girl.

“My mum’s doing so much better. It was the hardest thing for me to make decisions about her. The hardest thing was me getting my mother to come to America. I understand she didn’t want to leave her sisters and her brothers and her mother, but I just thought the American hospital would be better for her to recuperate in and I wanted her there and she liked it in the end. My mum’s a fighter, I’ve got that from her, I know she’s a fighter.”
Speaking of fighting.

“Oh, no, perlease.” She looks at me a little bit fierce, a little bit hunted animal. She doesn’t know which fight I’m going to bring up.
“Nicole Ritchie. That was all bullshit.”
Actually, I was thinking of your friend Yvonne Scio.
“I have no comment on that.”

This was an alleged mobile phone throwing incident after the friend turned up late and in the wrong outfit, according to the tabloids. According to Naomi, “She didn’t respect my recovery and I don’t want to go into it. I like Yvonne. She’s been my friend for a long time. I’m surprised at the angle she took on this. I would love to speak with her, I was just so surprised.”

She doesn’t actually confirm what did or didn’t happen. I think genuinely because she doesn’t want to make anything worse. She’s often said things like, “Anger comes from insecurity.” Is that what it was about?

“Not so much. I’m at a point where I won’t let people push my buttons, I just want to walk away. It’s taken me God knows how many years. I’m 35 now and it hurts sometimes to think, ‘Do you really know me. You don’t really know me at all. It’s hard.”

She raises her voice for emphasis. “But when you do walk way you feel good about it. Robbie Williams told me, ‘Always put your headphones on.’ It’s a good little trick, play music, phase it out. That’s not to say I don’t have wonderful people in my life who can give me criticism. I don’t phase that out. But if somebody I trust says lay low, I will.

“I’m not into the club scene any more, I’m too old for it. I enjoy staying home or in a hotel room watching DVDs.”

The more abnormal her life is the more normal she seems to try to be, although normal for her is deciding she needs to do a charity show for New Orleans calling her friends Beyonce and Puffy, Christy and Cindy, and putting it on overnight.

This year is her 20th anniversary. Twenty years since she was scouted as just a gangly girl from Streatham. Her mother was a dancer, all sequins and cruise ship. She went to Italia Conti. Whatever drives her round and round the world seems to be rooted in being a south London girl. She says what she thinks, she means what she says. Sometimes, especially when she’s explaining herself, you get carried away in her monologue. You detect the yes but no but. If she wasn’t Naomi Campbell she could have been Vicky Pollard.

She was brought up single-handedly by her mother and has always been attracted to older men, mentor figures. Sometimes they have been boyfriends, sometimes she’s adopted them straight away as dads. Azadene Alaia once said, “Naomi really is my daughter. She can be quite defensive, but she’s a fragile person who needs affection.”

She says, “And I’ve got my dad Chris Blackwell (Island Records founder). My dad Quincy (Jones). And I’ve got Flavio (Briatore). And I’ve got Mr Mandela, my grandfather.”
You collect them.

“I don’t know if it’s that I collect them,” she corrects, flashing a defensive face. “I love their wisdom, their business savvy, and I love to learn.”

She once said to me that what she looks for in a man was someone who is stronger than her, a bull, a fighter, someone who wore the trousers. She said that she loved to surrender herself. This is particularly piquant because she also loves to get what she wants. An almost impossible conundrum, especially when you don’t know whether you’re attracted to someone because you want them as a lover or a father.”

Flavio Briatore was her boyfriend and now her mentor. She recently introduced him to her other former boyfriend Robert De Niro. Past boyfriends have also included Mike Tyson, Joaquin Cortes, Italian supermodel Matteo Marzotto. She likes all things Latin, passionate and more exotic than herself, although she was engaged to Adam Clayton, and although that ended badly and dramatically with the interference of a tabloid. They are now friends again.

“I am friends with all of them,” she says. “I am attracted to wisdom. You can’t get any more wisdom than Mr Mandela and Quincy is on the same level. I always think why do they want to know me.”
This is a genuine question. Maybe they like to hang out with you?
“When you say hang out, it’s not a casual thing. When I go to LA I live in Quincy’s house and I call him papa, and he says anyone you want to date they’ve got to call me first. If they don’t call him they’re a coward. He’s had a few phone calls.”
Has he axed anybody?
“Oh yeh. I am blessed, you can’t pick your family but you can pick your friends.”

It seems like you’ve done a good job of picking your family as well. She carries on about Quincy’s choice of boyfriend for her. It seems that he’s looking for something different for her. But what are you looking for?
“I guess father figures, always.”
Is Quincy looking for something stable and you’re looking for something exciting.

“No,” she says urgently. “I’m looking for the stable. I don’t want excitement. I don’t even want vacations that are exciting as in hotspots. I mean I want someone who’s busy. The right person will be busy, but I’ll compromise, I will. And you know I’m not the kind of girl to have a big wedding. Weddings are not to impress anyone, it’s your day.”
You’re talking about the wedding and you don’t have a boyfriend?
She almost curls into herself. It’s as if she’s been having a random daydream which she suddenly realised was out loud.
“I am willing to change my life, you know. When I was with Flavio, when I was with Robert, I didn’t travel, I just wanted to be with them. I mean I am always going to work in some way, but I would gear my work around them.”
Are you the person in the relationship that likes to love more or be loved?

“I have given more. I also tend to wreck it for no apparent reason. When I was dating Matteo I flew home every night from wherever I was, but some men are not ready for that, and he wasn’t. We are still great friends and we still go to Valentino to shop together,” she laughs. “And I’m still great friends with Adam.”

I pick up a certain sadness here, that Adam was the right man at the wrong time. She whispers, “A lot of people say that, but Adam’s happy now. He was very upset about my mum and my stepmother loved him. He always sends them flowers without calling me to do it. He always sends my mother flowers and he doesn’t call me to do it, he’s a good man.”

She orders a tomato juice, smokes another cigarette, and doesn’t want me to forget Gianni Versace.

“He always said I was family. He never used to let us go to nightclubs, so he used to bring the nightclub to the house.”

She tells a story of how a dress she was meant to wear for the Anna Wintour Young Designers Award in Milan ripped. And she got given a Versace dress instead which fitted perfectly.

“I remember once the curtain wouldn’t open at Gianni’s last show (after his death). There was a butterfly flapping around and stuck in curtains and I knew it was like Gianni. Stop it, open the curtains. That butterfly was him and when I put on that dress I saw the butterfly.” She is not speaking metaphorically. Her eyes are dewy with pride that he’s still looking after her, guiding from a mysterious place.

You’ve had all these protective father figures – Quincy, Gianni, Alaia. Do you think it would have been the same if you had known your biological dad?
“Mm, mm,” she says. She has a habit of saying mm when she means no way.
“I can’t think about what I don’t know. My mother is my father.”
Don’t you think you collect all these other ones because there’s this huge chasm which you can’t even recognise.

“I am not someone who is tricked by sleazy old men. I don’t let sleazy playboy types come anywhere near me. I’m just blessed to have Quincy in my life. His mind is just incredible. His Listen Up foundation, it’s amazing what he’s done.”

Yes, but do you think if you had a regular father.

She interrupts. She’s gone from vulnerable and fearful to fierce. “I will tell you right now I am not a regular person and I won’t pretend to be. I’m not the girl next door. If I love diamonds I love diamonds. I’m not afraid to say I love diamonds and I don’t ever want to be like I’m down with being a regular girl because I’m not. Even without diamonds, without money, I’ve always been opinionated. I’ve always been very clear about what I will do and what I won’t do and some people get pissed off with that. They call you a bitch without even knowing you and some people they just understand. That’s why I love businessmen, they relate to you, they teach you.”

She adds, “It’s not like I’ve made diamonds the basis of my life. It’s just like some people pretend they don’t like trinkets because they’re ashamed.”

Would you say you were high maintenance?

“With a man? No, I’m very giving. But I’m also very demanding of emotions, of course I am. I’ve cracked a lot of my boyfriends emotions, but it was good for them.” She explains the cracking of Flavio. He’d given up Formula 1 but she could see he was missing it. “So I decided to have an intervention dinner with Bernie (Ecclestone), John Todd from Ferrari, and Jeremy Thomas, a producer who’s a big fan of Flavio’s. It was at that dinner where they all persuaded him that he had to go back.

“People can’t figure out why we were ever together. And when he started back with Formula 1 it seemed like in a way it was sending him away from me. There was no fight. I wanted to be in America and he wanted to be in Europe. I knew that was important to him. He was important in my life and in my recovery. He helped me through it. So you forget squabbles and things like that. He’s so smart and very good at making people feel appreciated.”

You get the impression that Naomi is a person who spends a lot of time trying hard to give back, as if to make up for everything that has gone wrong.

“I think it’s good that I’m insecure, it makes you try harder. It drives you more. If I didn’t have insecurities, I’d been worried. I wouldn’t want people to think that I think I’m the best at anything. That keeps me wanting to try my best.”

But she’s also driven by a need to explain. “I’d like to write my book. I don’t have a problem being honest. Oprah Winfrey said she’s going to help me, but I’ll write it myself. I just would like to put down everything so my kids can understand me.”

Kids, are you feeling broody?

“Yeh, I’m 35. But I want people to read it and identify with what I’ve been through. I’ve made mistakes.”

I tell her people do identify with her, even though she might seem remote and crazy and always on an aeroplane, they root for her, they understand. They might like to see her lose her temper because they might want to lose theirs. Everybody wants to be believe that you can come from Streatham to become diva grandaughter to Nelson Mandela.

“That’s nice to know. I’m 100 per cent behind Kate. I’ll do anything to help her. There is a girl that sells stories on her that used to work for me and sold stories about me. From the minute I said I wanted to have privacy in my recovery there were all kinds of stories. So you know, give Kate a bit of space to do her recovery. She was hurting herself, now she needs to mend herself, that’s why she had to go to America. It’s a damned disgrace that you can’t go to rehab in this country and have privacy.” She’s shouting now. “And you know what made me go for that court case (the Mirror). When I walked out of rehab I had this bright smile on my face, it was a nice (AA) meeting. But these things are private and then there was the chocolate soldier thing.”

She was described as a “chocolate soldier” meaning apparently a useless campaigner in the context of fur.

“I was dying and I was frightened but it was important for both those things.”

I’ve certainly never heard of anyone being described as a chocolate soldier and that phrase meaning anything. I think it was racist, she certainly took it as so.

She is also particularly sensitive to the idea of being set-up as black model fighting black model for the titillation of the tabloids. It was her idea for instance to do the Tyra Banks TV show after Tyra said she gave up modelling 50 per cent because she didn’t want to eat carrot sticks forever and 50 per cent because of Naomi.

“I never at any point in my career said I don’t want Tyra Banks on this job, even though she thought that. I would never do it. I went on the show to say I am proud of you as a black woman doing what you’re doing. I don’t want to see black people fighting against each other, there’s enough fucking fighting as there is. I’ve had to fight for so many things up against white models, I just would never do that. I chose to do her show, I don’t know if she even knows that. But I didn’t know that she’d put me on a pedestal.”

The fashion industry like any other has its moments of abject racism which is why Naomi, who spends so much time in Brazil, has been asked to find a new Brazilian black supermodel, but not on Brazil’s next top model TV show (like Tyra did for America).

“I found a girl just by going out on the street. She’s called Gabriella. Premier have signed her. She’s 16 and beautiful. Not that there’s anything wrong with Tyra’s TV show. Please don’t compare her to Oprah because you’re pitting two black women against each other, that’s how it starts.”

Once she’s relaxed though she’s a different kind of feisty. Outraged with people who’ve worked with her but have sold stories. For instance the assistant she was supposed to have hit, “made me laugh. She said I hit the right side of her face and in all the papers she was clutching her left.”

And then there was another person in her employ that suggested she’d had work done.

“Pah, I work out two hours a day, I’ve never had any plastic surgery. Black don’t crack. And ah, there’s that doctor, Dr Sebagh, who wants to sell stuff so he said I’m a client. Yes, I went for a face glow and got second degree burns. I never sued him for that because I’m with Proctor and Gamble and there’s a conflict of interest. But I couldn’t go in the sun for a year, I couldn’t work for two months. I had to travel with a make-up artist who could cover me. That was an emotional crisis. I was hysterical. I had pink skin, it was a disgrace. I’m only just able to go out without foundation. Here, feel my skin. Look at that.”

You feel for her, but say why do you think that people are constantly in fights with you and ripping you off?

“Because I’m an easy target. I have a reputation for losing my temper so people believe things. Now I think I’ve gotten better with my intuition of who to trust.”

You really hope for her sake she has. As well as her book, next year she says, “I’ve been offered a position that no other model has been offered, but I can’t tell you about it yet.”

It’s time to go to Churchill’s bunker, but there’s also the Louis Vuitton to fit in. She goes to show me a black fur coat which Marc Jacobs, designer for Louis Vuitton, made for her. It looks like a 1920s vamp coat in little strips of contoured fur which she thinks might be shaved mink.

“And as for that Heather whatshername (McCartney) saying she’d written to me and called me to complain about me wearing fur and I’d never replied. I never received a letter, nothing.” She’s outraged with Heather.

“And yes, I am still wearing fur, but I’ve made up with that guy from Peta.”

Naomi choosing not to go into the point that she did an anti-fur ad and now she’s changed her mind, but instead to say that Heather McCartney shouldn’t have claimed to have written to her when she hadn’t. It’s all a bit Vicky Pollard. She likes fur, she can’t help it. In fact she decides instead of going to the bunker or going to Louis Vuitton she’s going to get Christmas stockings for Lunar and Venus, her two rotteweillers.

“They follow me everywhere, they only listen to me. When I leave I put my perfume on their nose so they know my scent. Somehow you imagine her doing that with everybody, and that’s exactly what she does. She swathes you in her scent so you become mesmerised and enjoy even the bad things.

Your lateness is legendary, do you mean to be late all the time?

“Mm, no. Mercury was in retrograde, it finished today.”

No, it finished last week.

“No, for me it definitely finished today.”

With that, Naomi Campbell, supermodel, charity worker, author, and controller of the planets, goes to get her dogs some treats.

John Cleese

There’s no one that can do comedic rage like John Cleese. Outrage, anger, disgust, are all honed into an elemental force. You see it released in his body first. It can twist and stomp, and his eyebrows swoop and rise gymnastically.

He was brought up to beautifully contain this anger, and indeed any other emotions in the mild seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare and at various public schools. Emotional excess was forbidden. Touching was narcissistic and looked at with disgust. He would not easily express what he felt about anything or anyone except by converting his emotions into jokes.

Cleese is hyper sensitive, sharp. Can wear his skin inside out. He feels intensely. He’s always been on a quest to understand these feelings having propelled himself into hour upon hour upon hour of various forms of therapy. He even married a therapist, but he certainly didn’t find what he was looking for there. In fact his divorce from third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger, who some people call Malice, is one of the most expensive divorces of all time relative to his wealth.

He is currently doing a two-hour one-man show called The Alimony Tour. His divorce from third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger settled under California law will cost him $20 million, $13 million upfront and then $1 million a year. The show is touring Scandinavia before it comes to Britain next year. The Scandinavians find him hilarious. Restraint is in their culture.

If at 70 he had wanted to take things easier there is certainly now a financial imperative not to do so. He says that on stage. Off stage though you get the impression he’s rather enjoying it. It’s as if he’s been stripped back down to his real self once again. The show must surely be cathartic.

The first half is mostly about the divorce. It’s dark and hilarious. He talks about what else he might have done with $20 million other than keeping the botox industry alive, and there’s a pap shot of his ex-wife at a cash machine removing a giant wad of money. A small percentage of the audience thought it was unfair to his ex-wife to show her as this one-dimensional grabby creature. He says her divorce lawyer who he says is the spiritual godchild of Blackbeard the pirate and Heather Mills. That gets covert laughter from some people too.
Of course it’s cruel. That’s why it’s funny. It’s almost taboo. He talks about taboo humour illustrated best with a sketch from the Holy Grail called The Dark Knight. It’s where his limbs are amputated one by one and in the end a limbless creature that still thinks he can win the fight. When the film was tested 95 per cent of people said that was the funniest part, and 95 per cent of people said that was the part that should be censored. Cleese seems most comfortable when he’s treading that line.

The second half of the show charts a behind the scenes look at his major creative successes; Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda where he was nominated for a writing Oscar and should have won.
It all features the beautiful blackness of his humour that is a direct descendant of his relationship with his mother which was extremely complicated. They seemed to communicate best through black humour. She was extremely neurotic, had phobias about so many conflicting things – claustrophobia, agoraphobia, the dark, the light, escalators, lifts, and many more. She died aged 101 in 2001. He says she managed to go through two world wars, the Cold War, the creation of the State of Israel, the Berlin Wall coming down, and managed to notice none of it.

One day she called him to say she was depressed and wanted to end it all and he says, “OK, I’ll call the little man in Fulham and we’ll fix the funeral.” She laughed. Cruel humour was the only way to move her. That was their bond. Kindness didn’t work. And that seems to explain such a lot about the man that is before me. Even though much of the show is devoted to the divorce from Eichelberger, the woman that haunts me as I was watching it is his mother.

We have met at the bar of his hotel for drinks and wheat free tapas. The room has platinum blonde wood floors and crystal chandeliers. He looks impressively handsome. Clear skin and super-expressive eyes. He’s wearing a pale blue soft thick wool jumper, jeans and bare feet.

He gets right down effortlessly and quickly to talk about his relaitonships with women. He says they’ve all been about his mother. “I think all my wives and girlfriends have had aspects similar to my mother. I don’t think there’s any question about that. It’s probably inevitable.” Inevitable for one who’s read so much Freud, Jung and other therapists, but more of that later.
His current girlfriend is 39-year-old sculpted blonde jewellery designer Jennifer Wade. I watch them together over the weekend I spend in their company and their relationship is unexpectedly sweet. They are sweet with one another and on one another. You catch odd moments where they seem lost in their own world and then rejoin the group chatter. He seems very comfortable with her and I doubt that comfortable is what he has enjoyed in many relationships with women.

She seems to be very nurturing of him, very protective, often expressing concerns for his knee. He recently had a knee transplant operation and some of the moves on stage have set off pain. When he’s in one place he has a yoga instructor and an exercise regime. But when as he’s been on tour it’s been difficult. There has been no yoga instructor and the hotels have had swimming pools the size of a coffee cup. He stretches his leg out, wiggling the long toes. I’m on an armchair on one side of him, Wade on the other wearing skinny jeans and boots.

He met Wade last year, first of all in London and then by chance they were both in San Francisco where he had an apartment and she had a brother. Things moved very fast. He now wears a rose gold ring on his finger. He tells me, “She said how can I take you seriously? So I told her to design me a ring and I would wear it. I’ve never worn a ring before.”
She is also wearing a rose gold ring that he bought her. It’s a thick mesh band with tiny leaves hanging off it. Later on when she’s not there I ask him is he going to get married? “I have no idea,” he says. But then he laughs naughtily. “Jenny is just getting over the final stages of a difficult divorce that was painful for both people and I don’t think she is thinking beyond that now.” Cleese himself doesn’t seem at all reticent.

When I point out that his divorce was also difficult he says, “Well, not emotionally because it was not a relationship that I had been getting a great deal out of for quite a long time. And when I took the courage to say I don’t want to go on with this it was painful for Alyce, which was why it was difficult. But the fact was I wasn’t particularly happy and you reach a certain point in your life where you think am I going to go on not being happy just to keep someone else unruffled? Or am I going to take the risk and push forward? I don’t regret it I’m afraid at all. I don’t regret what happened.”
It’s been written that he was suicidal about the break-up, about the failure of this marriage. So was he really incredibly depressed at first? “I was not suicidal at all. It was a great relief. The trouble is journalists make stuff up and then it keeps being recycled. What is true is that I was very sad about the death of my friend David Hatch. It had nothing to do with the divorce.” Hatch was a life long friend. They met at Cambridge when they were in the Cambridge Footlights together. Sir David Hatch became managing director of BBC Radio and died in 2007.

Cleese is very keen to set the record straight that he was not suicidal about the divorce. He seems to have attracted all kinds of untrue stories that recycle around him. Most recently it was written that he was now pretending to like German culture. “I’ve always been attracted to German culture. I’ve spoken about it many times, and made the point when Basil Fawlty is goose stepping it’s not making fun of the Germans it’s making fun of Basil. In fact I had a dream five years ago in which I said to someone that my only regret in life was that German was not my first language. I realised afterwards that the five books I had been reading were all written in German including Freud, Jung and Schopenhauer.”
I tell him I’ve read another story that he’d spent several thousands on having cosmetic work done. “Oh,” he says helpfully. “That story ran because this poor little girl Barbie, who I had a very brief relationship with that lasted seven or eight days, did an interview with a newspaper. They rang her and pretended to be interested in her career. She started saying a whole lot of stuff…”

What’s interesting and so supremely gentlemanly is that he doesn’t say a bad word about the twentysomething who sold stories on him. He feels she was tricked. He’s not angry but affectionate towards her. And what’s even more accommodating is that he goes on to say “Everyone knows I’ve had several hair transplants. The first one was in 1978 and I have far worse teeth than Martin Amis, horrible teeth. I don’t have a tooth left in my head and I haven’t had one for 25 years. Everything is crowned or bridged. I had the whole thing reconstructed about three years ago.” He tells me how sorry he felt for the dentist who couldn’t fail to notice a tear rolling down his face with the pain.
Was the hair transplant painful? “No, the whole thing lasts an hour and a half and you have hair for the rest of your life. It used to look a bit cabbage patchy, but now it’s all filled in. some people have a great shaped skull. Mine is pointed and I look better in hair.”

I love the fact we can talk so openly and without any kind of embarrassment about teeth and hair and wives and mothers. That’s the one thing years of therapy has not let him get over, his need to be so blissfully accommodating.
He doesn’t seem remotely tired after his two hours on stage, but his knee is hurting from when he acted out how Graham Chapman used to go around on his hands and knees at cocktail parties biting people like a dog. It hurts him every night but he doesn’t cut it out of the show. Chapman was one of the original Pythons, but extremely wild and an alcoholic. He died in 1989.
The next morning he is up early and we talk over non-dairy cappuccinos. It’s cold and bright and I have been thinking more about his relationship with therapy. He’s always been fascinated by it. Perhaps one of the most fascinating therapists of all was Robin Skynner (psychotherapist and bomber pilot) with whom he wrote a seminal book, Families And How To Survive Them. I say seminal because I’ve given it to many people in crisis and it’s helped them understand why they chose the person/life/thing that now was driving them demented. I used to use it as character reference background to all my interviewees. For instance a youngest child, a middle child, an older child, and an only child all come with very different sets of problems and perspectives. He and Skynner wrote the book together. “Robin used to use the phrase we finish up teaching what we most need to learn ourselves.”

Immersing himself in therapy did not stop him from having a similar relationship over and over again with a different person. “I think there’s definitely a tendency to go for the same type of person again and again. I remember reading in John Mortimer’s autobiography that he was constantly in his office with couples who were about to get divorced and they were immediately getting married to somebody who seemed exactly like the one they were divorcing. And that was a lawyer with very little interest perhaps in psychology.
“I saw a therapist in Santa Barbara who told me that if you have a highly neurotic mother, that when you meet someone who most people say woops, back away, this one is neurotic, you think nothing of it after what you’ve been through with your mother. So instead of seeing it as a danger signal you think it’s something you can cope with, and because it’s familiar you are drawn to it. There is a feeling that one is drawn back to the original experience of when you tried to make your mother happy and failed so you will try to find someone else who is a bit like your mum and make them happy. So there’s repetition.”

Another therapist in San Francisco called John Pentland – he ran the Gurdjieff Movements in America, told him ‘We are not united people. We are lots of different people in the same skin and a particular stimulus will bring one of our personalities forward. For instance you’d be different to the Queen to how you are with an ex-lover. And we are all trying to seek unity.’ And I think this underlies a lot of the sacred traditions. A lot of Christ’s teaching is about this. The parables are really about different aspects of ourselves that have to be reconciled if we are to have any unity as human beings.”

We talk enthusiastically about different therapists and therapies. Cleese is a wonderful teacher because his mind is ordered and precise and he’s very non-judgmental, and he always wants to answer questions precisely, enjoying truth and revelation rather than fear of it. Although one suspects that is precisely because at one point in his life he did fear revelation.
And what was he looking for in all the many, many therapists he’s seen? “A number of things. I think affection is incredibly important. It brings out the best in us and it relaxes us.” He doesn’t mean he was looking for affection from the therapists. He was wanting to understand how affection works. These days Cleese seems a very warm affectionate person, but it’s something he’s worked on.

“Yes, but I had to learn it and because at public school if you put your arm around someone you’re immediately thought to be homosexual and beyond redemption. I remember at college there was an American exchange student. He came to Clifton College for a year on exchange and we had a cricket match at the end of term. After we’d finished he came into the changing room to say goodbye and said ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again’ and he gave me a hug and I remember being very shocked at being hugged by another man. I think touch is very important to human beings.”
Cleese these days is eminently touchable and touching. His mother of course was not so comfortable with it, but his father “was very physically affectionate. He was a kind man.”
I remember reading that his father was such a kind person he was shocked to find that the world was not so kind and the contrast was acute. “I don’t remember saying that but I would say it’s a bit of a shock to realise the world is a much worse place than I ever thought when I was young. Which is why my next show that I’m working on is called Why There Is No Hope and that we are run by power seekers.” He intends it to be a comedy. Once again finding release in all things dark.
He’s also just finished writing a stage version of A Fish Called Wanda with his daughter Camilla. He’s getting round to translating a Feydeau farce for the stage and writing his autobiography and presenting a TV show about history with Matthew D’Ancona.

Wanda may well turn out to be a musical. More interesting than the project itself was working with Camilla. “Once I thought I would be doing it with Camilla it became much more exciting. She’s come up with some great ideas. We are very similar. She was brought up in America because her mother is American.”
He is very close to Camilla now but again had to seek the help of a therapist because she had problems with alcohol addiction and he had to give her a deadline that unless she sought help herself he wouldn’t be able to help her. I don’t think the tough love concept came easily to him and he’s extremely proud of Camilla now he tells me quite a few times.

Camilla is the daughter of his second wife Barbara Trentham, an actress he married in 1981 after splitting from his first wife of ten years, co-writer and co-star of Fawlty Towers, Connie Booth a few years before. He has another daughter, Cynthia, who is also a scriptwriter from his marriage to Booth. From what I’ve heard and read, the daughters did not get on with Eichelberger. And they must be further irritated that she has severely diminished their inheritance.
Talking about his daughters leads back to talking about his mother. “If I took Cynthia down to see my mother in Weston-Super-Mare my mother resented the fact that the child was there because it meant she got less attention from me. I have a history of being rather placatory with women. If you have a mother who is very selfish and you don’t get much attention from her it sends you the message that you’re not worth it. And also that you’re not entitled to look after yourself, so you spend a whole lot of time servicing other people, making sure they don’t get cross.”

I do find it strange that he went into therapy to try and save the marriage with Eichelberger when she seems such an emotional vampire. “It’s because I had become placatory.” He says the word with special contempt.
Has she seen any of the show? “No. She always said that if we broke up we would never speak again and that turned out very well. I never took it seriously at the time but from the day we broke up and I called her to say you know the reputation of this lawyer you have hired…” He pauses just for a second as if he’s remembering the very moment where he knew there was no return. The lawyer had a fierce reputation. “That was the last and only time we spoke.”

He says that he is on good terms with one of her sons who is a vet in Hong Kong and with the other there has been silence. Not so good for a therapist who specialised in family relations. “She was always very much on about the importance of family and now the family has pretty much broken up. You know her boys, my daughters, their sisters…” If he is said about the break-up of family it is the only thing he’s sad about. Perhaps he regrets more that he stayed in the marriage so long. That he stayed placatory. For placatory read shackled, suppressed, diminished and without affection.
“I think I have a confidence now that I didn’t have before. It’s come in the last three or four years and I don’t know why it’s come.”
It seems a few forces have converged. The divorce was so expensive. He had to let a lot of stuff go materialistically and emotionally. He was able to reinvent who he is. There’s a certain freedom in that.

“That’s true. It’s very beneficial to reinvent yourself because you fall into patterns which aren’t relevant any more. There’s a lot of research gone on into ageing saying that you age according to your internal idea of what age means. Age means nothing to me now. I mean it means stuff when my body starts to let me down…”
What he means is he doesn’t feel old, he doesn’t feel trapped, he doesn’t feel that his ideas are tired, and he feels a new person with Wade. He looks after himself more, no wheat, no dairy, lots of vitamin pills, but more importantly “I laugh with Jenny in a way I haven’t since I was ten. It’s the utterly hopeless laughter of the ten-year-old and it’s wonderful to have that back.” He says that savouring the sentence.

What does he think is different about his relationship with Wade to his previous two wives? “It is that I was far too left brain about it all. In the past I was more ticking boxes, not having an immediate being in love thing which I did have with Connie.” Wives number three and four seem to be relationships that should have worked logically but didn’t. With Wade he says there was an instant connection similar to the one he had with his first wife. “Connie and I are great pals and I have enormous affection for her husband John Lahr.”
He talks about Booth both on and off stage with great fondness. There are no left over irritations detectable. They met in 1964 and got married in 1968. They wrote Fawlty Towers together. Everything seemed perfect. What went wrong?

“I think we found it difficult. Neither of us were emotionally mature. There was a great deal of love between us. Breaking up was very very painful. I was depressed about it for two years but I think it was the right decision. It didn’t quite work.”
I wonder was it too much living and working together? Did they argue? “I don’t quite remember. I’m sure we must have been arguing because if things aren’t right you do argue. It wasn’t nasty. We always functioned well together when we were writing together. Even the best relationships go through difficult periods. It’s not the world you read about in the tabloids. People fighting like cats and dogs or blissfully happy. I was very sad for two years and I don’t think I improved my choosing process when I met Barbara. And when I met Alyce I thought it seemed appropriate. But Alyce changed and I’m sure she feels that I changed too. Jenny is different to both of these women. With Barbara we had a fairly turbulent relationship because we married rather quickly and the turbulence followed.”

He never wore a ring with either of them. “Jenny is a jeweller, so I said why don’t you make me a little ring. In Weston-Super-Mare rings and after shave were considered as poofy and narcissistic.”
There are many references to Weston-Super-Mare, he both has a constant need to embrace it and escape it at the same time. He talks about one of the last times he went back there. His mother and Robin Skynner were both gravely ill at the same time and would die within weeks of each other.
“It was the summer of 2000 and I was going to spend a week with Robin who was ill and then a week with my mother, but my mother became seriously ill and I spent the whole two weeks with her. I knew Robin was not long for this planet, so I left my mother. I was only able to have lunch with Robin. Then my mother went into a coma so I went back down. Robin died without me spending proper time with him. My mother always needed my attention.”

He tells this story with great sadness, but not with any anger or bitterness. We talk some more about Skynner and his family systems exercise – a group of people are in a room and they walk round and choose one other person on the basis that they remind them of someone in their family or someone that they’d like to have in their family. They sit down and find that they have a similar emotional history. The theory is you choose partners because you automatically identify with their neurosis even if you don’t see them straight away.

“There were times when I thought I would love to have had a sister because I found my mother’s behaviour so extraordinary. I would love to have said what the hell is this about?” As an only child he had no one to share with. He had to take the full responsibility for himself and share it all with an audience many years later. His mother was 40 and his father 46 when he was born and was constantly reminded by his mother that they had never planned to have children. His mother would tell him that he was a mistake.

“My father was in the war and after that he thought only in terms of getting steady jobs. At school he made me sad if I became enthused about chess or fencing. He never took that spontaneous enthusiasm for something very seriously.” Perhaps that was after being in the First World War he didn’t want to do anything risky again. He must have seen so many people die. “I remember him talking about being in the trenches and the man next to him being shot saying it was just like Private Ryan and the man next to him was crying for his mother. It’s extraordinary Chrissy. I remember thinking, why would he cry for her?” He’s laughing but he means it.

“I was a good boy really.” He had an outlet for really bad behaviour on stage. “Yes, that’s true. I can say almost anything to audiences and get away with it.” This comes as a direct result of what he could and couldn’t get away with with his mother.
The previous night he told about a sketch he did with Chapman. Chapman was the undertaker. “I said to him my mother’s dead and I don’t know what to do. He said, ‘No problem squire. We can burn her, bury her or dump her’ and I said what do you mean dump her and he said ‘put her in the Thames or a skip.’ And I said no, no, let’s do it properly and I pull out a sack that has the body in it and Graham says ‘I think we’ve got an eater’ and I say are you seriously suggesting I eat my mother. Long pause. ‘Not raw. Cooked’. Then I say I’m a bit peckish but I’m not going to eat mum. And he said ‘tell you what. Let’s eat her neck and if you feel guilty afterwards you’ll vomit and then we’ll bury the vomit’.”

I enjoyed the story because it explains so much of Cleese. There are so many metaphors involved in that one sketch. He’s still vomiting up his mother and being nurtured by the laughter. Finally he’s with an un-neurotic woman who is nothing like his mother and he’s really happy and grateful to have escaped her.
He says he’s not doing the tour and working so hard just for money even though he needed to acquire some to pay the hefty divorce demands. “I am not super money conscious. I just want to check that I’m not going to run out. I’ve always been easy come easy go. Before I married Alyce I had one house in London and no mortgage. And after a few years of marriage we had seven properties and I was racing around spending all my earnings servicing properties. I can simplify my life now once I’ve got Alyce’s payment out of the way I can live in a much smaller way.”

He is not planning on returning to Britain full-time. “I don’t want to go through another English winter. It takes years off your life. I get terrible chest infections and the grey skies make me so gloomy. The sunshine picks me up. Rather than California I might try the Caribbean. Balminess is what I seek.” He’s less enamoured with California these days. It’s gloomier these days because there’s a recession going on.

What is his greatest extravagance? “Probably food. Not necessarily incredibly expensive restaurants. A good Indian or a good Chinese will do. I just think food is such an extraordinary pleasure.” What makes him happy? “A day off. Reading a book. And Jenny’s company. I might take a little exercise. Go for a walk with Jenny. I always felt that I had to make everyone else alright before I could get on with my life, and Jenny is like that, almost to a fault. She spends an inordinate amount of time worrying about other people.”

He doesn’t know how it’s happened. It seems not through therapy, more by coincidence, if such a thing exists, that finally he’s got someone who worries about him and he’s very much enjoying it. It seems to make him enjoy everything else more.
Is he nervous of going on stage? “Not any more. Not really. It’s more a question of energy, not so much fear. The audience have bought tickets. They wall want to see me. You get a warm welcome…

“For the first three quarters of my professional life I was much more concerned not to be bad than I was to be good. And I did most of my best work under that feeling.”
In the show he talks about all the good work that he’s done ending when he did Wanda at 50. After that it didn’t really matter. Does he really think that? “The three outstanding things I’ve done in my life were all before 50. It’s a kind of joke, but there was a time when I was racing around doing all the jobs that were offered to me because of my need for high earnings…”

He smiles knowing that his life is simpler and happier and he will only do the work that he enjoys. But best of all he doesn’t hope that he won’t be bad. He knows he’ll be pretty good.

Jennifer Saunders

I meet Jennifer Saunders just outside the theatre where Viva – the Spice Girls musical which she is wrote – is rehearsing. We are to have a late breakfast. She arrives in a camouflage jacket with diamond studs and a multi-coloured scarf, choppy blonde hair and an alarmingly fresh face and her usual slightly peering eyes. She announces, ‘I’m so hung over. I think I still have a level of alcohol in my blood. By lunchtime I’ll be tired.’
She had a weekend party and this morning has been looking after her new grandson Freddie and coos she has been in bed with the baby. ‘I had a proper little cuddle. He’s divine.
‘When he enters the room everyone starts looking at him and when he leaves the room people start looking at pictures of them on the phone. I don’t know what type of child he will grow up to be because he has people worshipping him all the time – Freddie worship. The other girls love him too.’ Freddie is the son of her eldest daughter Ella.
Saunders seems to have no worries about being a grandmother at 54. ‘I absolutely love it. People say isn’t it weird seeing your baby having a baby and it kind of isn’t. It doesn’t feel weird at all. I love having a baby around and I never had a boy child. I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he’s 16 takes his mother out for dinner. I think I once saw that in a restaurant, a boy taking out his mother for her birthday. I’m going to have to force Freddie to do that now.’
We discuss the lack of stress in the grandparent grandchild relationship. ‘I haven’t got the responsibility of sending him to school or telling him off. He’s simply there to be worshipped.’
She thinks it’s a strange time for an interview, not quite breakfast, not quite lunch (11am). We order scrambled eggs and toast, perfect hangover food, but the Café Zedel can’t cook until lunchtime and instead they offer us boiled eggs and giant pastries, pain au chocolats the size of brogues.
Saunders is amused, her face arranges itself into a supercilious giggle. She offers a similar expression when I ask wasn’t she surprised to be asked to write Viva Forever! The Spice Girls musical after French and Saunders had mercilessly sent up The Spice Girls in their spoof The Sugar Lumps and the Mamma Mia sketch they did for Comic Relief – Mamma Mia creator Judy Craymer is the impresaria behind Viva.
Craymer called Saunders’ agent to see if she was interested and that was deemed to be a very good sign. ‘It meant a) she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and b) she has a good sense of humour. I immediately thought I am the one who is going to do this. No one else is going to do this. I have to do this thing.
‘When Dawn and I were The Sugar Lumps we always used to go to Spice Girls shows. My girls loved them and I thought I don’t want someone to mess this up for my girls.
‘I don’t have a favourite Spice, I love all of them. Well, maybe my favourite is Emma because I’ve worked with her a lot, but Mel C is also delightful. When you see them now they just are that same gang, they fit into all those roles again. A little bit badly behaved, a little bit loud. You never felt they had to behave. That’s what I always loved about them.
‘Victoria is really funny. She’s the most naturally witty one. She doesn’t take herself seriously, she just looks as though she does.
‘I love Geri’s energy. I love Mel B’s refusal to say anything she doesn’t mean. And the truth is I love the songs. And they actually have their own narrative which makes it easier to write around.
‘There were certain themes, here’s me and my mates, don’t fuck with me and my mates, let’s misbehave. And then a story came.
‘Loosely the story is adopted girl, mother wants to let her go, can’t let her go, is over protective, and then…
‘She doesn’t really want to find her biological mother but she’s on a TV talent show that thinks it would be a really good idea. You see it on X Factor. They have chosen the one with the story.’
Did she conceive this idea when her own daughters were leaving home? ‘No, but I have had that empty nest syndrome. When the girls left it was a slow grieving process. you go, oh look, we’re just on our own again. It’s my husband and me. Oh, What do we do now? “Good Morning.” “Yes, good morning to you”.’ She says this pulling her awkward face. She and husband Ade Edmondson have been married for 27 years and the period of just them together in a big house has not been prolonged as he is about to tour with two different bands, The Bad Shepherds and The Idiot Bastard Band.
‘Gradually you adjust. You miss them. You miss their friends too. You miss the general hubbub of people always being there.
‘I didn’t think about empty nests when I was writing this. It was more having to let someone go out and make their own mistakes. You can’t learn from other people’s mistakes.’
Was it based on the relationship she had with her mother? ‘No, that relationship was much more old fashioned. I mean you would call your mother’s friends Mrs. Nowadays you would call everyone by their Christian name. it was quite formal and I am emotional with my kids. They see the shit as well as the good. I was brought up really well. I had boundaries where if you crossed the line you know you are in trouble. I think my kids sort of get that.
‘I don’t think I was a great rebel except in my head. I’ve never been able to do rows. I cannot do confrontation. You know that fight or flight thing? I’m flight. I just don’t want the argument.’
Eggs arrive. At first we don’t know if they are hard-boiled or soft-boiled. Saunders takes it and attempts to peel it, pauses, ‘If it cracks now we’re in shit.’ It’s a cold hard-boiled egg.
She says that after her father died of cancer eight years ago the dynamic changed in the relationship with her mother. ‘We became much closer. She is a coper. She was born to cope. She is strong and funny. She had a stroke and I was there. She forgets words and cries with laughter when the wrong ones come out. We literally laughed her way through the stroke. By the time the paramedics arrived she was crying real tears of laughter, probably to do with relief. But she said, “Will you go up to the donkey upstairs and bring down my…” The donkey? She meant draws. She just laughed and laughed. She recovered well because she’s a doer and a coper.’
Saunders moved to Devon to bring up her children and now lives mostly in London, the reverse of most people.

It is very rare for Saunders to look right at you. Most of the time she mumbles into her scarf or looks away, allowing me to get a good look at her skin which is dewy smooth, hardly any wrinkles.
The idea for Viva came up in 2009. They narrowed it down to which songs they wanted to use and she started to write the treatment.
‘I think we started in January, so I was three months into chemotherapy,’ she says matter of factly. She has never overplayed her cancer, never come over the victim. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2009. She has never used the word battle and I feel would wince if it was ever used for her. It’s one of those things that she probably didn’t like to confront, she shrugged it off because she’s a coper.
How was it possible to write on chemo? ‘I don’t know. Luckily Judy was very sympathetic. I remember struggling to organise my thoughts. When you are doing chemo you have a load of time. I just thought I am not not going to do this job and by the time I’m finished it everything will be fine. Judy would be so brilliant she would come round the house with a bottle of vodka and the tunes and we would sit and drink.’
Vodka and chemo? ‘Oh yes,’ she says jauntily. Really? ‘Oh yes. You can drink when you are doing chemo. You’ve got so much shit in your body you may as well be drunk. We sat and listened to the songs endlessly and it was so helpful.
‘Why do we need to listen to these songs again and again? She was right. It’s the only way in.’
Most people might lie down and vomit. Singing Spice Girls songs and writing a musical does sound a rather extraordinary way to get through chemo. It sounds superhuman.
‘No, not really. Some people hold down full-time jobs. I didn’t have a vomit problem. Didn’t feel vomity at all. I ha brilliant anti-sickness medication and it worked. For some people it works well and some people it doesn’t. I was very lucky. There are some days when you feel a bit grim and other days, you know, towards the end of a session, okay and you know it’s not killing you. Just makes you feel rotten.’
I note the way she doesn’t say I she says you to distance herself from it but I am struck by her strength and bravery. I just did a week of antibiotics and felt suicidal.
What is it really like? ‘You feel chemical, that’s what you feel. You feel you are part of a big chemical thing but you tell yourself it’s a cure not a disease and you’ve got to get rid of the disease. The chemo is the belt and braces. It feels shit when it’s working.
‘You think, yes I feel absolutely shit, it’s doing its job and you just get on with it, you get on with stuff.’
Did she have any paranoia moments of depression? ‘No. sometimes you feel horrible. Sometimes you feel emotional. And then sometimes when you see your skin goes to fuck you have moments where you think I hate this. But there’s always a point where you think you might as well get over it and life gets back vaguely to normal.’
Are things normal? Has she finished the meds? ‘No, you don’t finish. I’m still on hormone therapy and I’ll be on that for the rest of my life. It’s the reverse of HRT, it takes all your hormones away. It takes all your oestrogen away because what I can’t have is oestrogen because my cancer is oestrogen sensitive. You go on to tamoxifen or some other oestrogen therapy which takes the hormones our so you are basically in menopause. You are from the moment you start chemo because it kills everything.
‘In a funny way, more than the actual chemo, which I found was a grit your teeth and get through it kind of thing, I found the hormone thing a more subtle change and it was much harder to take. You are plunged into menopause. It makes you depressed. That whole side of you, what it is to be a woman, which is hormones, it just goes. You have to get through it but it takes a while.
‘It took me a year on tamoxifen to get used to it, to not be grieving for your oestrogen. It’s an odd thing but I found that much harder than chemo. It’s the thing they least warn you about. They go right, now we go on tamoxifen and everything will be fine. You have to do it. I hated the tamoxifen when I first got on it. I don’t hate it now because I’m adjusted to it. I thought there has to be something else.
‘I went to the doctor and asked him: Is there another drug? He is the most brilliant doctor and he explained to me: If you were my wife I would insist you take this. And he explained: What it needs is someone to really explain how important it is to you and the side effects. They are quite psychological but also physical. And I honestly imagined that I would very quickly turn into a very small leather handbag.’ She makes a creaking sound of a small leather thing.
Having an instant menopause rather than a gradual thing seems to be the most difficult thing for her. ‘I get very depressed and I’m still on anti-depressants. I see it as you need to boost yourself up because suddenly you have no oestrogen and your serotonin goes down, everything depletes and you start thinking…’ She makes a moaning sound. ‘So take a bit of anti-depressant and it’s fine again. It’s a juggling act, isn’t it, what to put in and what not to, but I find I am happy now.
‘I am free of cancer. I did this thing the other day where my doctor said do you want to have a big scan. You know when some people have cancer they are totally neurotic and worried about it coming back, which has never bothered actually because I just say it’s not coming back, it’s fine.
‘But he said, you know your insurance will pay for you to have a full MRI, CAT and all these other scans and it’s two years since you’ve finished your treatment. Two years is the peak of possible recurrence, so I went and did it. The weird thing is I’ve never been to a hospital in my life until the cancer thing, but I kind of like going into clinics now. Oh, I’m going into this one and that one. Do take some blood. I find it kind of reassuring.
‘I did grieve a bit when I wasn’t having the chemo any more. I was used to sitting in the little chair and then the nurse would come and do it. It was like that was your job for that long and it was reassuring. So the thought of one of these scans made me think “Oh that would be quite nice, won’t it.” You get injections, go a bit radioactive, then you get put in the big banging machine for a bit. I actually quite enjoyed it.’
I tell that is kind of weird and she must have been deprived of attention as a child in a big way. She laughs, ‘Yes. But I do love that stuff now. Bang, bang, bang, oh it’s my turn.’
Actually she is the opposite of attention seeking. She kept her cancer quiet until she had finished her chemo. She had been seen a couple of times but no one guessed she was wearing a wig. ‘I had very good wigs. Two of them. One was a real hair wig which was a lot of trouble. I was lucky in that most of the chemo happened during the winter so you could just wear hats. I didn’t mind that aspect of it.
‘What is weird is all of your hair falls out. Everything. Your eyebrows. Your pubic hair. Your leg hair, arm hair, your nose hair. The weirdest thing is your nose hair because you are constantly snivelling and you get nose bleeds a lot. You are a bald person with a nose bleed. I didn’t mind that and it’s a funny thing. Of all the things to care about my hair was the least thing I cared about. At least I didn’t have to have a wax for the best part of a year.
‘Hair grows back and it comes back everywhere. I was looking at my face and thinking it’s so hairy. Suddenly everywhere was hairy.’
We try to order toast instead of the giant pastries. Instead a waiter arrives with bread. Everything we ordered had been got wrong. ‘This is the most hilarious breakfast I’ve ever had.’
Soon she must go to the theatre for a run through. Did the Spice Girls have any changes they wanted to make? ‘No, nothing like that. They could make suggestions but generally they were enthusiastic and nice.’
After this what else does she have coming up? ‘I’m thinking about a film of AbFab on the basis that The Inbetweeners was a successful film. I don’t know about doing more telly. I’m thinking of setting it in the South of France. I always imagine the Riviera life, that search for the nostalgic idea of glamour… It’s hard for me to think beyond press night at the moment.’
She still rides horses although not as much as she used to. ‘Ade said, “You’ve had a good run, but if you fall off…” And he was like: Just stop. At the moment I’ve just started with a power plate. It’s a thing that jiggles you stand on it and do certain positions. I’ve also tried to start jogging. But I walk my dog a lot.’
Her dog is a whippet called Olive. ‘She’s the most beautiful dog in the world. Everyone knows Olive. The other day I was at the station in Devon and I had Olive and there was a woman who looked at Olive and recognised her. “Oh, it must be Jennifer Saunders because this is Olive.”‘ She puts on proud dog mother face which is very similar to proud grandmother.
Her skin does not look grandmother like. ‘It’s ridiculous that I’m a grandmother but it’s the nicest thing. Sometimes I do think a bit of Botox might be good but I haven’t done anything. I think I should really give up drinking for a bit then I’d lose weight, but then I think I can’t be bothered. It’s just so nice to have a drink.’

© Chrissy Iley 2012
I meet Jennifer Saunders just outside the theatre where Viva – the Spice Girls musical which she is wrote – is rehearsing. We are to have a late breakfast. She arrives in a camouflage jacket with diamond studs and a multi-coloured scarf, choppy blonde hair and an alarmingly fresh face and her usual slightly peering eyes. She announces, ‘I’m so hung over. I think I still have a level of alcohol in my blood. By lunchtime I’ll be tired.’
She had a weekend party and this morning has been looking after her new grandson Freddie and coos she has been in bed with the baby. ‘I had a proper little cuddle. He’s divine.
‘When he enters the room everyone starts looking at him and when he leaves the room people start looking at pictures of them on the phone. I don’t know what type of child he will grow up to be because he has people worshipping him all the time – Freddie worship. The other girls love him too.’ Freddie is the son of her eldest daughter Ella.
Saunders seems to have no worries about being a grandmother at 54. ‘I absolutely love it. People say isn’t it weird seeing your baby having a baby and it kind of isn’t. It doesn’t feel weird at all. I love having a baby around and I never had a boy child. I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he’s 16 takes his mother out for dinner. I think I once saw that in a restaurant, a boy taking out his mother for her birthday. I’m going to have to force Freddie to do that now.’
We discuss the lack of stress in the grandparent grandchild relationship. ‘I haven’t got the responsibility of sending him to school or telling him off. He’s simply there to be worshipped.’
She thinks it’s a strange time for an interview, not quite breakfast, not quite lunch (11am). We order scrambled eggs and toast, perfect hangover food, but the Café Zedel can’t cook until lunchtime and instead they offer us boiled eggs and giant pastries, pain au chocolats the size of brogues.
Saunders is amused, her face arranges itself into a supercilious giggle. She offers a similar expression when I ask wasn’t she surprised to be asked to write Viva Forever! The Spice Girls musical after French and Saunders had mercilessly sent up The Spice Girls in their spoof The Sugar Lumps and the Mamma Mia sketch they did for Comic Relief – Mamma Mia creator Judy Craymer is the impresaria behind Viva.
Craymer called Saunders’ agent to see if she was interested and that was deemed to be a very good sign. ‘It meant a) she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and b) she has a good sense of humour. I immediately thought I am the one who is going to do this. No one else is going to do this. I have to do this thing.
‘When Dawn and I were The Sugar Lumps we always used to go to Spice Girls shows. My girls loved them and I thought I don’t want someone to mess this up for my girls.
‘I don’t have a favourite Spice, I love all of them. Well, maybe my favourite is Emma because I’ve worked with her a lot, but Mel C is also delightful. When you see them now they just are that same gang, they fit into all those roles again. A little bit badly behaved, a little bit loud. You never felt they had to behave. That’s what I always loved about them.
‘Victoria is really funny. She’s the most naturally witty one. She doesn’t take herself seriously, she just looks as though she does.
‘I love Geri’s energy. I love Mel B’s refusal to say anything she doesn’t mean. And the truth is I love the songs. And they actually have their own narrative which makes it easier to write around.
‘There were certain themes, here’s me and my mates, don’t fuck with me and my mates, let’s misbehave. And then a story came.
‘Loosely the story is adopted girl, mother wants to let her go, can’t let her go, is over protective, and then…
‘She doesn’t really want to find her biological mother but she’s on a TV talent show that thinks it would be a really good idea. You see it on X Factor. They have chosen the one with the story.’
Did she conceive this idea when her own daughters were leaving home? ‘No, but I have had that empty nest syndrome. When the girls left it was a slow grieving process. you go, oh look, we’re just on our own again. It’s my husband and me. Oh, What do we do now? “Good Morning.” “Yes, good morning to you”.’ She says this pulling her awkward face. She and husband Ade Edmondson have been married for 27 years and the period of just them together in a big house has not been prolonged as he is about to tour with two different bands, The Bad Shepherds and The Idiot Bastard Band.
‘Gradually you adjust. You miss them. You miss their friends too. You miss the general hubbub of people always being there.
‘I didn’t think about empty nests when I was writing this. It was more having to let someone go out and make their own mistakes. You can’t learn from other people’s mistakes.’
Was it based on the relationship she had with her mother? ‘No, that relationship was much more old fashioned. I mean you would call your mother’s friends Mrs. Nowadays you would call everyone by their Christian name. it was quite formal and I am emotional with my kids. They see the shit as well as the good. I was brought up really well. I had boundaries where if you crossed the line you know you are in trouble. I think my kids sort of get that.
‘I don’t think I was a great rebel except in my head. I’ve never been able to do rows. I cannot do confrontation. You know that fight or flight thing? I’m flight. I just don’t want the argument.’
Eggs arrive. At first we don’t know if they are hard-boiled or soft-boiled. Saunders takes it and attempts to peel it, pauses, ‘If it cracks now we’re in shit.’ It’s a cold hard-boiled egg.
She says that after her father died of cancer eight years ago the dynamic changed in the relationship with her mother. ‘We became much closer. She is a coper. She was born to cope. She is strong and funny. She had a stroke and I was there. She forgets words and cries with laughter when the wrong ones come out. We literally laughed her way through the stroke. By the time the paramedics arrived she was crying real tears of laughter, probably to do with relief. But she said, “Will you go up to the donkey upstairs and bring down my…” The donkey? She meant draws. She just laughed and laughed. She recovered well because she’s a doer and a coper.’
Saunders moved to Devon to bring up her children and now lives mostly in London, the reverse of most people.

It is very rare for Saunders to look right at you. Most of the time she mumbles into her scarf or looks away, allowing me to get a good look at her skin which is dewy smooth, hardly any wrinkles.
The idea for Viva came up in 2009. They narrowed it down to which songs they wanted to use and she started to write the treatment.
‘I think we started in January, so I was three months into chemotherapy,’ she says matter of factly. She has never overplayed her cancer, never come over the victim. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2009. She has never used the word battle and I feel would wince if it was ever used for her. It’s one of those things that she probably didn’t like to confront, she shrugged it off because she’s a coper.
How was it possible to write on chemo? ‘I don’t know. Luckily Judy was very sympathetic. I remember struggling to organise my thoughts. When you are doing chemo you have a load of time. I just thought I am not not going to do this job and by the time I’m finished it everything will be fine. Judy would be so brilliant she would come round the house with a bottle of vodka and the tunes and we would sit and drink.’
Vodka and chemo? ‘Oh yes,’ she says jauntily. Really? ‘Oh yes. You can drink when you are doing chemo. You’ve got so much shit in your body you may as well be drunk. We sat and listened to the songs endlessly and it was so helpful.
‘Why do we need to listen to these songs again and again? She was right. It’s the only way in.’
Most people might lie down and vomit. Singing Spice Girls songs and writing a musical does sound a rather extraordinary way to get through chemo. It sounds superhuman.
‘No, not really. Some people hold down full-time jobs. I didn’t have a vomit problem. Didn’t feel vomity at all. I ha brilliant anti-sickness medication and it worked. For some people it works well and some people it doesn’t. I was very lucky. There are some days when you feel a bit grim and other days, you know, towards the end of a session, okay and you know it’s not killing you. Just makes you feel rotten.’
I note the way she doesn’t say I she says you to distance herself from it but I am struck by her strength and bravery. I just did a week of antibiotics and felt suicidal.
What is it really like? ‘You feel chemical, that’s what you feel. You feel you are part of a big chemical thing but you tell yourself it’s a cure not a disease and you’ve got to get rid of the disease. The chemo is the belt and braces. It feels shit when it’s working.
‘You think, yes I feel absolutely shit, it’s doing its job and you just get on with it, you get on with stuff.’
Did she have any paranoia moments of depression? ‘No. sometimes you feel horrible. Sometimes you feel emotional. And then sometimes when you see your skin goes to fuck you have moments where you think I hate this. But there’s always a point where you think you might as well get over it and life gets back vaguely to normal.’
Are things normal? Has she finished the meds? ‘No, you don’t finish. I’m still on hormone therapy and I’ll be on that for the rest of my life. It’s the reverse of HRT, it takes all your hormones away. It takes all your oestrogen away because what I can’t have is oestrogen because my cancer is oestrogen sensitive. You go on to tamoxifen or some other oestrogen therapy which takes the hormones our so you are basically in menopause. You are from the moment you start chemo because it kills everything.
‘In a funny way, more than the actual chemo, which I found was a grit your teeth and get through it kind of thing, I found the hormone thing a more subtle change and it was much harder to take. You are plunged into menopause. It makes you depressed. That whole side of you, what it is to be a woman, which is hormones, it just goes. You have to get through it but it takes a while.
‘It took me a year on tamoxifen to get used to it, to not be grieving for your oestrogen. It’s an odd thing but I found that much harder than chemo. It’s the thing they least warn you about. They go right, now we go on tamoxifen and everything will be fine. You have to do it. I hated the tamoxifen when I first got on it. I don’t hate it now because I’m adjusted to it. I thought there has to be something else.
‘I went to the doctor and asked him: Is there another drug? He is the most brilliant doctor and he explained to me: If you were my wife I would insist you take this. And he explained: What it needs is someone to really explain how important it is to you and the side effects. They are quite psychological but also physical. And I honestly imagined that I would very quickly turn into a very small leather handbag.’ She makes a creaking sound of a small leather thing.
Having an instant menopause rather than a gradual thing seems to be the most difficult thing for her. ‘I get very depressed and I’m still on anti-depressants. I see it as you need to boost yourself up because suddenly you have no oestrogen and your serotonin goes down, everything depletes and you start thinking…’ She makes a moaning sound. ‘So take a bit of anti-depressant and it’s fine again. It’s a juggling act, isn’t it, what to put in and what not to, but I find I am happy now.
‘I am free of cancer. I did this thing the other day where my doctor said do you want to have a big scan. You know when some people have cancer they are totally neurotic and worried about it coming back, which has never bothered actually because I just say it’s not coming back, it’s fine.
‘But he said, you know your insurance will pay for you to have a full MRI, CAT and all these other scans and it’s two years since you’ve finished your treatment. Two years is the peak of possible recurrence, so I went and did it. The weird thing is I’ve never been to a hospital in my life until the cancer thing, but I kind of like going into clinics now. Oh, I’m going into this one and that one. Do take some blood. I find it kind of reassuring.
‘I did grieve a bit when I wasn’t having the chemo any more. I was used to sitting in the little chair and then the nurse would come and do it. It was like that was your job for that long and it was reassuring. So the thought of one of these scans made me think “Oh that would be quite nice, won’t it.” You get injections, go a bit radioactive, then you get put in the big banging machine for a bit. I actually quite enjoyed it.’
I tell that is kind of weird and she must have been deprived of attention as a child in a big way. She laughs, ‘Yes. But I do love that stuff now. Bang, bang, bang, oh it’s my turn.’
Actually she is the opposite of attention seeking. She kept her cancer quiet until she had finished her chemo. She had been seen a couple of times but no one guessed she was wearing a wig. ‘I had very good wigs. Two of them. One was a real hair wig which was a lot of trouble. I was lucky in that most of the chemo happened during the winter so you could just wear hats. I didn’t mind that aspect of it.
‘What is weird is all of your hair falls out. Everything. Your eyebrows. Your pubic hair. Your leg hair, arm hair, your nose hair. The weirdest thing is your nose hair because you are constantly snivelling and you get nose bleeds a lot. You are a bald person with a nose bleed. I didn’t mind that and it’s a funny thing. Of all the things to care about my hair was the least thing I cared about. At least I didn’t have to have a wax for the best part of a year.
‘Hair grows back and it comes back everywhere. I was looking at my face and thinking it’s so hairy. Suddenly everywhere was hairy.’
We try to order toast instead of the giant pastries. Instead a waiter arrives with bread. Everything we ordered had been got wrong. ‘This is the most hilarious breakfast I’ve ever had.’
Soon she must go to the theatre for a run through. Did the Spice Girls have any changes they wanted to make? ‘No, nothing like that. They could make suggestions but generally they were enthusiastic and nice.’
After this what else does she have coming up? ‘I’m thinking about a film of AbFab on the basis that The Inbetweeners was a successful film. I don’t know about doing more telly. I’m thinking of setting it in the South of France. I always imagine the Riviera life, that search for the nostalgic idea of glamour… It’s hard for me to think beyond press night at the moment.’
She still rides horses although not as much as she used to. ‘Ade said, “You’ve had a good run, but if you fall off…” And he was like: Just stop. At the moment I’ve just started with a power plate. It’s a thing that jiggles you stand on it and do certain positions. I’ve also tried to start jogging. But I walk my dog a lot.’
Her dog is a whippet called Olive. ‘She’s the most beautiful dog in the world. Everyone knows Olive. The other day I was at the station in Devon and I had Olive and there was a woman who looked at Olive and recognised her. “Oh, it must be Jennifer Saunders because this is Olive.”‘ She puts on proud dog mother face which is very similar to proud grandmother.
Her skin does not look grandmother like. ‘It’s ridiculous that I’m a grandmother but it’s the nicest thing. Sometimes I do think a bit of Botox might be good but I haven’t done anything. I think I should really give up drinking for a bit then I’d lose weight, but then I think I can’t be bothered. It’s just so nice to have a drink.’

Click here to read Chrissy’s interview with Joanna Lumley

Demi Moore

I am waiting for Demi Moore in the lounge bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel. It’s velvety and dark. When she enters the room she takes it. It crackles with her arrival. Yet she is small alone, no entourage, no assistant, no publicist. Walking slightly oddly taking tiny steps with her legs a little too close together. She sinks to the velvet besides me. “Look. I bent over and popped a button on my skirt.” It’s a denim pencil skirt. She had to walk with a hobble because the last button, the one just above the knee was the one that had sped away leaving the skirt to open too wide and too high. She asks our waitress for a “half caff latte” and a sewing kit.

She is wearing a pretty chiffony blue and white blouse, her hair long and lustrous, her eyes small but glittering like dark diamonds. She has a presence but it’s not necessarily the one you’d expect, not in any way haughty or demanding. There’s a sweetness to her embarrassment of walking in a room with a broken skirt, not knowing who in that room was me.

She is instantly open, touchable. “I am in New York because my husband is shooting a movie here.” She uses the phrase “my husband” a lot and she shows you a soft glow as she says it. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore made big news when they got together because of the 15 year age gap. I tell her I’ve met him a couple of times and I found him very knowing, very sweet and the term old soul does not seem a cliche for him. “I agree with you on that. It’s a hard thing for me to describe exactly how he is. Who he is on a soul level has definitely lived beyond his now 29 years. There’s so much more that he just gets, even if he hasn’t had the physical experience he seems to have a knowing.” She smiles beatifically.

Demi Moore is softer, sweeter than you’d ever imagine. You sense though that she too has had a few lifetimes, a harsh upbringing, never in one place for long with alcoholic parents and a stepfather who committed suicide when she was 17. Plagued by illness throughout her childhood, driven into an imaginary world, a drive of super force that got her to Blame It On Rio. Engaged to Emilio Estevez in the Brat Pack heat of the mid-Eighties, broke it off to become one half of one of the decade’s most famous couples with Bruce Willis. In 1996 she gave up on Hollywood to move permanently to Idaho to bring up her three daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah now 18, 15 and 13. Soon after the marriage broke down but Demi did not.

Her screen persona always has something indesctructible about it. There’s a toughness, there’s a strength, drive, determination. Even when she was the object being traded in Indecent Proposal (Robert Redford’s character wanted to buy her) she was never a victim. She has done plenty of blockbusters – St. Elmo’s Fire, Ghost, A Few Good Men, and in 1996 she became the then highest paid actress in Hollywood getting $12.5 million for Striptease. In the same year she did GI Jane, the story of a woman Navy Seal, shaved head and one-handed press-ups in the mud.

The inescapable thing that she gives us is strength. She gives us steel. She gives us no compromise. What does she think of this perception of her? “Do you know what I think obviously there must be some strength because this is the response from more than a handful of people. It’s not something I’m conscious of, wanting to come across strong. But I think it’s there. It’s part of some of the tough and challenging experiences I’ve had in my life. That I’ve overcome them has created a sort of strength. But I never get the idea that I come over like a warrior. In a funny way I understand it and it’s also just so opposite of where I see myself and how I feel myself.”

She looks right at you as she talks and she’s not afraid to be looked right at herself. Her character in Mr Brooks – “a very twisted tale” – is the detective hunting down serial killer played by Kevin Costner, who is all the more spooky because of his friendly upstanding neighbourly qualities. She loves the juxtaposition of kindly Costner’s regular guy image and murderous unhinged calculating killer. Her character was in the throes of a divorce and was being manipulated by her husband for millions of dollars because she comes from a super privileged background. “So there were those aspects of this particular character that were very different to my life. Because she came from privilege she behaved differently. She had a rage that terrified me. She is someone who is out of control allowing their emotions to run the show. I have never been that, it is probably my biggest fear,” she says laughing her smoky crackling laugh. “She came from a safe place so she could go into those rages. Maybe some part of the privilege that she came from was a cushion that allowed that.”

Interesting that in her dramatically intense soap opera bad childhood that was filled with huge emotions of betrayal, loss, despair, disappointment, she felt she must contain her emotions. “There was one element in the story that got lost. It was an interesting character detail. She liked to pay for sex, which for me was fascinating. It was never really thought of as a woman’s choice so it was really twisted in that juicy kind of way.” The irony is not lost on her that this is the reverse plot of Indecent Proposal. She seems excited about how twisted this movie and her character is in the way that only someone whose life is far from twisted can.

Her first Hollywood ‘comeback’ was in a bikini in Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle. Impressive. Even more impressive was her role in Estevez’s Bobby as alcoholic nightclub singer Virginia Fallon which it has been said was based on her mother who was called Virginia, who was a drunk but not a singer. “He did know my mother. I’m not sure if it was specifically her but I think there were interesting elements. When he first sent me the script it was really to look at it, to see what I thought of it, it wasn’t necessarily to be in it.”

At that time Moore was in Idaho and didn’t know that this was to be part of her way out of there. The fact that Emilio had decided to call a fading singer Virginia Fallon gave it an extra piquancy. “The irony wasn’t lost on me,” she says drily. “It was a gift. Whatever parallels there were with me and my mother it was a really positive way for me to get more inside the pain that she was going through.” And the pain that you were going through. Your upbringing was hard. “It had some not so great moments. But I wouldn’t say hard. There are people who have had it worse and people who have had it not so bad. The one thing I can say is through all the nuttiness I was loved by my mum and my father.”

Her mother was only 19 when she had her. She didn’t grow up with her biological father. He left her mother before she was born. Until she was 15, Demi, named Demetria after a shampoo that her mother saw in a magazine, believed Danny Guynes was her father when in fact it was Charles Harman, a cocaine addicted vending machine salesman from Texas. Was she hurt not to have been told? Confused that for 15 years the man she thought was her father turned out to be not? “Yes and no. It was the norm of a certain kind. It was what I knew. Certainly not what I would want for my children but if I didn’t step out of how hurtful that was it would have been mind twisting for me. There were many insecurities and doubts but if I take a step back I know they made the best choices they could. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

She and her brother Morgan were constantly relocated. Guynes job as a salesman meant they moved 30 times before she was 15 and she was never in the same school for one year. She learnt to assimilate fast, to not make friends because she was going to lose them. By the time she was 12 she was cross-eyed and had to have an operation to correct a lazy eye. Then she got a kidney disease called nephrosis. The drugs she took caused body fluids to build up in her body so much that she couldn’t stand. The disease can be fatal.

When Danny Guynes committed suicide her mother spiralled into worse alcoholism. Moore became the parent. “You could either be trapped by what was going on around or you could find a way out. I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to register as an opportunity to help elevate and expand us as human beings. When I played Virginia Fallon it was touching a dark place that maybe I didn’t get to go to when my mother was alive, my own compassion for the pain she lived with… There was a lot of ugliness to the character of Virginia and I felt sad for that. You don’t come into this life wanting to be anything other than happy.”

It’s as if whatever unhappiness she suffered as a child she wants to touch it, understand it as an actor but never live through it. She always wants to make the choice to be happy. Sounds simple and extremely complicated. What she doesn’t want to carry with her is bitterness and she doesn’t, yet she so easily could. Bitterness would have been the easiest thing. “If I look back at my past I look at those things as my gifts. Some of my lowest points were the most exciting opportunities to push through to be a better person.” Do you mean growing up? “No, not even growing up. If I continue to peel back the layers of myself I think we all want the same things. We all want to feel loved and feel a part of but we all have self doubt no matter where we came from.” Did the extremities of your upbringing push you further away from the self doubt? “We weren’t dirt poor but we didn’t have a lot of money. I entered this career having no background or connection to acting. I had so little I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the risk.”

She was inspired to try acting by Natassja Kinski who was a neighbour.

She had little experience but a pile of determination. She married a singer called Freddy Moore in 1980, divorced him a few years later but kept his name.

“Once tasting a bit of success it’s more challenging. We have to continue to be willing to take a risk so that we don’t get too safe. Unwillingness to risk failure is always there but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose. So the better place to keep yourself in is one out of your comfort zone, willing to try even at the risk of failing. And that’s not natural to me at all.” She laughs and raises her perfect eyebrows at herself, “In fact it’s completely unnatural.”

Perhaps this reassessing herself has come through her interest in the kabbalah which teaches you to put yourself in a position to do what you least expect. Perhaps she has never known what a comfort zone is, so it is in fact completely natural to her. Looking over her life it seems it has been filled with risk, her career, her relationships, What does she think? What were the most exciting risks to her? “I don’t know,” she says trying to think. “I don’t live in what I was. What do you think have been my biggest risks?” I suggest that getting naked when she was hugely pregnant and posing for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 caused a worldwide gasp. At the time it was not deemed possible to be sexy and pregnant. She broke the taboo. She dismisses this. After all, it was one day of her life. And although it might have had a significant effect on changing people’s perceptions and others have copied it since, most recently Myleene Klass, it didn’t seem to involve personal growth for her. “I would say all of my movies were risks even if they didn’t necessarily work in a way that it was a great movie that you would have liked. I would say Striptease was a huge risk for me. It was difficult for me to do the dancing and the actual stripping, contrary to what anybody elses opinion would be. And the gain from it was different to what I would have imagined. While the external public perception was hyper focused on what I was being paid for taking my clothes off ($12.5 million), for me it was the intense focus of connecting with my body and myself in a sensual sexual way, in a way that I’ve never felt before. I was always very uncomfortable with my body. And it was to do with being female and seductive.”

It’s hard to believe that Demi Moore couldn’t have been comfortable in her perfect body. Her long delicate limbs, her pale flawless skin, are all just fleshy enough. “No, I was not. I’ve always felt much more self conscious. I felt I had to push myself to feel more feminine, a different kind of feminine. If you look at everything I’ve done before that, there weren’t a lot of highly sexual roles.”

Indeed, she was always the sweet thing or naughty thing, the vixen or victim. She was the object not the predator. “Being on stage in this character and the way in which I had to use my body made me find my sexuality. In the same way when I did GI Jane it allowed me to find a connection with the masculine part of myself.” The two films came out back to back in 1996 and indeed showed a kind of schizophrenia, absolute opposites and extremes that met in Moore. “It was fascinating. It helped doing Striptease first. I took a lot of criticism, a lot of heat, got hit really hard for both of these films, I think because there was a lot of money attached to it.” Her eyes downcast she seems embarrassed about the money rather than proud of setting a new standard for female stars. That was your gimme period I say, as in gimme more. She chuckles, a little slowly, a little uncomfortably, waits to see if I’m going to criticise. Instead I say there’s nothing wrong with asking for what you want. Hollywood male superstars were certainly being paid at least that. Bruce Willis certainly was. “Yes, having greater desire, does that make you more selfish, or does that give you more opportunity to give?”

Certainly her demands were not seen as altruistic. People were nasty, people were jealous, the bubble had burst. “Both these movies combined to give me some big lessons. I feel I betrayed women with Striptease and men with GI Jane. That wasn’t my intention but I feel that’s how it was perceived. But yes, in that sense I challenged the comfort zone. The heat hurt her. She was not indestructible. After all even now she looks sad about this. Not wanting to stay in the sadness she says brightly, “Where I am now is probably one of the moments of greatest risks in my own career. When I stepped away from working just to be with my children I never really thought about the ramifications of defecting my career.”

What was the biggest risk, going to Idaho, abandoning the career, or coming back? “When I realised I needed to be with my kids in one place for whatever amount of time it didn’t feel like a risk in terms of my career because it just wasn’t what my priority was. It was just my children were important to me. They were little, aged from about five to eleven. It wasn’t about am I giving up work it was about my children were important to me.”

What made you decide to stop and move permanently to Idaho? “We announced our separation and my mother died. I went off to do a film after this called Passion Of Mind. The film didn’t get the best of me and my children weren’t getting the best of me. I was not in the mix. The film had been an extraordinary script and an OK film, but it wasn’t about that. I was the product of divorced parents who weren’t present for me. I realised that if I wasn’t present for them I was going to have bigger issues with them later.” She did not want to let history repeat itself. She was left alone at a young age and felt she had too much responsibility too quickly and she grew up too fast. “I didn’t want to work and drag my kids with me while they were trying to cross this huge transition. I wanted them to become as stable and as confident as possible. I’m grateful that I had the ability to do that. There are people that go through this and don’t have the financial means, but I did. It wasn’t a risk, it was the right thing to do.”

Her mother was only 54 when she died of cancer. Moore had tried to help her with her alcoholism and their relationship had become frustrated because her mother didn’t seem to want the help she needed. Moore moved the whole family to a motel in New Mexico so she could be with her in the last weeks. The fairy tale marriage with Willis was over and she had not left her career on a high note. “The bigger risk was stepping back into this world that I’d left at a point where I’d faced the harshest criticism I’d ever faced in my career. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to come back. My children though kept asking, are you ever going to work again. Maybe they saw that they were missing that piece of me. It was a big part of who I am.” Were you missing it? “A little bit. I was very happy just being in Idaho. I also realised we can get too comfortable. A sanctuary becomes a hiding place and that’s not a benefit to anybody.”

Her comeback movie was Charlie’s Angels. Was that another risk? Appearing in a bikini alongside women a decade younger? “I didn’t worry about being with younger women and I didn’t have time to think about being in a bikini. I was asked if I could start working a month earlier than originally planned so I didn’t have time to obsess about that.” But wasn’t there a part of your life when you were obsessed with exercise, like running 20 miles a day? “Long ago when I did Striptease and GI Jane.” She pauses to peel back more layers. “It wasn’t just about the parts requiring it. I was much more driven and obsessive about physical exercise and dieting. It peaked. After GI Jane I was burnt out. I stopped work and I stopped exercising. I realised I needed to come from the inside and find a sense of peace. I had manipulated and created something but it wasn’t coming from a place that was really grounded. I realised being thin did not equal happiness.” Did you find it only fuelled your insecurities? “Of course, it’s never going to give us the confidence because that has to come from a connection that’s more spiritual. You can call it God, you can call it the Light, but it’s something greater than you. Greater than what is tangible because what is tangible is finite. I’ve stopped trying to control it.”

She found that the happier she was and the less she tried the better she felt and looked. Although the tabloids would have it another way. Some cite she paid $3 million for her new body. Does she find that a compliment? “No. It’s irritating. And it isn’t true. To fight it feels futile because I feel it perpetuates the myth. But really,” she says with mounting anger, “the culmination for me was that I had my knees done. When I read that I thought wow, should I have been worried about my knees, I didn’t realise they were so bad. There were multiple reports that I’d had them done.” Her knees are readily available besides me. She invites me tod examine them for the scar. She bends them and shows me how in certain positions the tiniest bit of fat pokes over her knee creating a wrinkle, but it’s not a scar. I put my finger across it to check. I can feel no ridge, just smooth skin. A couple of businessmen in the corner look alarmed why I would be stroking Demi Moore’s knees. But she seems to find it amusing. “It’s not just my knees. They say I’ve had multiple face surgeries. I was in getting a facial recently and there were reports that I’d been in there for countless hours saying I’d had surgical procedures. Am I going to sue? Do they want to examine my entire face and look for marks? Do I really care? Well, I have some ego and I think are they trying to say I can only look good if I bought it.”

Twenty years in the media have not hardened her to this. She composes and says, “Also I feel that this separates women. The media is trying to perpetuate something else saying you can’t have this because you can’t afford it.” She’s adamant she has had nothing done to her face. She allows me to stare at her very close. She has fine lines around her eyes. No evidence of any work. She also assures me she’s never had lypo. There is no steeliness. Here are the insecurities that created the steel. I tell her she has to take it as a compliment that people think that she looks so good.

I wonder if the focus on her looks has made her introspective. At 44 she’s too old for the bimbo role but not old enough to be the matriarch, the grand dame. Although in her next film, Flawless, which reunites her with Michael Caine 23 years after they starred in the kitschy sex farce Blame It On Rio, she plays a woman who is “Brittle. It’s a woman who’s given up on her personal life. It’s set in the Sixties where a woman striving for a career in the corporate diamond world was unheard of. It was interesting to explore her. She’s strong but not really. She’s brittle.”

It’s as if playing brittle gets rid of the brittleness in her own life. “I’d like to do something more vulnerable. People associate me with strong but that can be limiting. I suppose if I really want it I’ll have to go hunt it down myself. If you want it you have to be proactive and do the work. We hear all the complaints. There aren’t enough roles for women my age. So I think let’s figure out creative ways to find these. My goal though is to continue to grow as a human being, to find more ways in which I can be a better giver in all aspects. To be a better wife, better mother, better friend, better sister.” Do you feel more able to be loved now? “Yes, I do. I feel like I have a great gift of being with somebody who loves me and supports me. We share a connection that allows me to dig deeper within myself and look at things that I was afraid to look at.” She says this with absolute certainty, even talking about Kutcher she seems to shiver with strength and softness at the same time.

She met Kutcher when she was in New York doing a photo shoot and he was hosting Saturday Night Live. There was already quite a buzz about Kutcher. He was funny and gorgeous. successful and popular and amusing. His show Punk’d was by this time an MTV classic. He was a star of That ’70s Show and was just about to embark on a successful movie career. A group of friends went out to dinner so it didn’t feel awkward, like a set-up. At the time everyone thought she had such a good relationship with her ex-husband Bruce Willis and that they were about to get back together again. They got married by a Kabbalah rabbi in 2005. Was she looking for someone or did he take her by surprise? “I actually think I was at a point where I thought I was never going to find anybody. I don’t come with baggage I come with trunks and as the mother of three teenagers I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself but dating seems kind of silly, I thought I just don’t know how to do this.”

Yet she has learnt to deal with those trunks and unpack the bitterness and anger that makes them such a heavy load. We see happy smiling pictures of Moore, her daughters, her ex-husband, and he current husband smilingly skiing or on family days out. Kutcher never tried to be a father or replace Willis. The children call him M.O.D – My Other Dad. What’s the formula for getting on so well with her ex? “People forget that you get brought together with someone because you share a connection and that there was a depth of love and it gets buried when things go off on another path. It’s easy to forget that and stay attached to the negativity, the bad stuff, the pain. But you do have a choice. You can stay connected to what was shared and find a new form with which to share it.”

She’s done exceptionally well with her very modern family who all go on holiday together? Does she think it depends on how badly it ended on how well the relationship continues? “No. It takes too much work not to get over it. The energy it takes not to forgive is exhausting, it’s miserable. You just have to want to move on. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s lots of emotions and sensitivities to deal with. But if you hold on and don’t forgive it’s destructive. In our case we placed our children as a priority. After all, each of them was created by a piece of us and I never wanted them to think what happened to us had any reflection on them. My parents used my brother and I as pawns. I was determined that that would never happen with my family. I have daughters so obviously I support a daughter’s relationship with their father because it could dictate choices that they would later make.” She gives a haunted little chuckle. “I was the parent with my parents. I took it all on.”

So many things have been written about her getting together with Ashton. The age difference. The fact that she was 15 years older than him. The fact that she was once one half of a famous celebrity couple that ruled the tabloids long before there was Bennifer, Bradgelina or Tomkat.

“On paper if somebody had said you are going to be marrying somebody who is 25 as he was then, who sees a woman who has three kids as a bonus, I would have laughed. I would never have known that this man could have existed.” Who he was was evident very early on. That first night that the big group went out to dinner. “I stepped out of the room to call my children to say goodnight. I was on he phone to them saying I love you and I miss you guys and there he was. He stood there and he looked right at me and he said, “That is the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” He paused, then closed the door. So I knew I had encountered someone really different. I just knew. There was something really different.”
Did you feel that you knew him before in another life? (As he says of her). “I felt there was a connection. I feel like I have been with him the whole of my life. That’s how it feels. I feel so so blessed. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I asked the universe for a partner, somebody who I could really share everything with.”

When she talks about Kutcher her voice is so warm it’s almost purring. She could talk about him all the time really, and how great and solid and clever and sexy he is.

Do you want a baby with him? “We would love that. It would be just fantastic. We are doing lots of practising for that. And you can’t complain about practising with him.” She giggles a sweet girlie giggle. “I don’t know what I’ve done, what merit I’ve possibly had, that the universe could reward me by putting us together.”

I think you have a genuine happy ending. “I do, I do.” You feel happy for her. You feel happy that such love exists. In fact mesmerised.

 

 

Bono

Bono can rule the undivided attention of a sold out stadium. He can command hearts. When he works a much smaller room, say in the White House, Downing Street, or The Vatican, he is dextrous as well as charismatic. He rules that room with those who rule the world. When he put his sunglasses on the Pope that picture became iconic because of his glasses, not the Pope.
How did he do it? The short answer is he’s clever and relentless, can relate to anybody. But why does he do it? His father told him never to have dreams because he didn’t want him to be disappointed, which encouraged him to dream even bigger, but that’s only part of the long answer.

Contrariness, caring deeply, egomania, ridiculousness, it’s all in there. There’s never been a rock star who wielded so much power. There’s no one in power that doesn’t take his call. During the writing of this piece, there’s no one in power who doesn’t return my call within 24 hours. Not many people say no to Bono, whether it’s Blair, Clinton, Bush or beyond.

And at the same time, there’s no shortage of Bono jokes. Quite a few of them begin, ‘What’s the difference between Bono and God?’ ‘Bono thinks he’s God, but God doesn’t think he’s Bono,’ sort of thing. But Bono will tell the joke before the joke’s on him. People take Bono seriously, but does Bono take himself seriously? Only sometimes.

October 2008. The Women’s Conference. Long Beach, California. I have seen Bono shrink a stadium, make it intimate. But only as a singer in a rock band. When he gives his speech here it’s pretty much the same thing. It’s like being in a very small room with him. He gives great speech.

He follows Billie Jean King and Gloria Steinem, where women roared with emotional approval. But he can follow that, he can top that. “My name is Bono and I’m a travelling salesman. I come from a long line of travelling sales people on my mother’s side. Sometimes I come to your door as a rock star selling melodies. Sometimes I come to your doors as an activist selling ideas of debt forgiveness.” He knows his audience. He flatters and cajoles. He says, “Africa is our neighbour, right down the lane, when that continent burns we smell the smoke. It stings our eyes, it sears our conscience, but maybe not as much as it should. We accept it, men especially. A lot of men have developed an ability to live with this absurdity. Most women haven’t.” And then he goes on to say that the America the world needs is the America he’s always loved. Everyone is swept up.

Tony Blair told me later, “I’ve done speeches with him and there’s absolutely no doubt if he’d not been at the top of his profession he’d certainly be at the top of mine.”

When he talks about Africa, even if you’ve heard him say the same thing before, it stings you new. He talks about when he first went to Africa and a child was dying in his arms and he talks about the look in that child’s eye of innocence and no blame. He says that that’s when he became that thing he despises most, a rock star with a cause.

Then he talks about how 20 cents can provide life saving drugs and how you can do this by buying a Red T-shirt. It was a 40 minute speech, but it felt paced, like a rock concert. No boundaries, everyone part of the same beat and emotion.

Backstage, there’s Maria Shriver, the conference founder, scion of the Kennedy clan and married to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. She looks big-haired, well put together. A purple Alaia suit skims her, accessorised with pink rosary beads that signal quirky, heartfelt. I told her she looked gorgeous. She looked at me blankly, somehow insulted, demeaned. Looked at Bono with this who is this woman you brought here look. Bono refused to acknowledge the moment. Bono doesn’t waste energy on negativity, even small stuff. He moves on.

On stage he’d called Shriver a lioness, a term I see he likes to use for powerful women. Later on that’s what he called Nancy Pelosi and it seemed to make her purr.

December 2008: Olympic Studios, Barnes, London. A few days before the album No Line On The Horizon is finished. The studios are about to close down for good, so there’s a real deadline, intensity. I’m sitting next to Bono in the canteen. He’s eating spicy spaghetti. I’m eating chicken. He’s wearing a soft grey cashmere flicked with little metal bits. Hard and soft, I observe. “Yes, that’s me,” he says; he likes a metaphor, he likes to sum up who he is. He likes to be known.

I once told him once he wears his inside on his out. “You did, didn’t you.” He remembers that. He has the memory of an elephant for stupid minutiae and life saving facts. He remembers the first time I met him that we talked about his mother. She died when he was 14. Yet you’d think he was much younger because he seems to remember very little about her. He remembers her chasing him with a cane and laughing. He wasn’t afraid because she was laughing. He remembers his dad at the top of the stairs doing some DIY with an electric drill. The drill was screaming. It was going to drill him to death. He remembers his mother laughing her head off. Laughter and danger got mixed up in his head.

Bono has always loved to embrace a contradiction, in his life, and his lyrics are always mixing God and sex, poverty and romance. He himself is a contradiction; supersensitive but a bulldozer, relentless when he wants something. He is sometimes self conscious, but he never seems to have any fear. He markets mercy but he never whinges. He is self mocking rather than self pitying. Sometimes saintly, never a monk. Being a rock star and an Africa activist couldn’t be more different. The rock star bathes in excess, the activist campaigns to end poverty.

Hard and soft Bono lives in two different worlds. A creative, artistic world that’s driven with strong passions, but where life and death is rarely an issue. He exposes himself to two completely different standards of judgement. Artistically he doesn’t want to fail. It matters to him. He wants to move you. He is painfully self critical. When U2 first started off he would ask how many people were at the gig, and if it was 400 and the venue held 450 he would worry about the 50 that didn’t come. He’s still like that, although the tickets for the venues are now holding tens of thousands. Yet he can walk into a room on Capitol Hill knowing what he’s asking for is likely to be shot down, knowing it’s a for sure rejection. In a global recession people in the First World are worried about how to pay their bills, not pay attention to Africa. The man who pursues success so relentlessly has somehow rewired himself to accept failure as part of his course.

Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, who is often referred to as the band’s fifth member, agrees. “He is a bundle of contradictions, a spoilt rotten rich rock star who became successful from his own talent. He didn’t trick anyone. He enjoys life to the full, but he does a lot of good. I think he has difficulties – one day he’ll win a Grammy for album of the year, and the next he’s described as a terrible hypocrite, a force for bad. Yet the organisations that support his activism are sophisticated. ONE is extremely successful. Red is extremely successful. (Red is his organisation set up so that big brands – Gap, Armani, Apple – give up to 40 per cent of their profit directly to The Global Fund). To date it has raised $130 million.”

Red is to raise consciousness and cash. ONE is to bring about political change. Cofounded as DATA with Bobby Shriver of the Kennedy clan, and recently merged, ONE has a base in Washington DC, London, Berlin and Abuja.

Earlier that day Bono had a ONE meeting in London, Soho office which video conferenced their office in DC. They talked of plans for 2010. They talked about a World Cup campaign for mosquito nets and putting kids in school. They talked about what’s going to happen when Obama has to make tough decisions and makes himself unpopular. Could they still count on him? What Republicans should they now work on? How to encourage Cameron on side? How Sarkozy has let them down by not paying what he had promised. Bono says Carla is going to make Sarkozy change, he says he’ll have to call her and say I know who you’re sleeping with. “Obama is already beyond a rock star,” Bono said. Bush needed to be validated by a rock star. He needed help to look cool.

Back at the studio there’s mounting concern about getting the album finished. A board has got red and blue and green writing with triangles and circles, codes of what’s done and what’s not done.

“This album is all about surrender,” Bono says. “Spiritual surrender, sexual surrender. Quite difficult, don’t you think.” I’m not sure if he was expecting an answer.

He takes me into the part of the studio where he’s laying down his vocal and he sings. His voice reaches out right out. I’m sure this is not the first time he’s sung to seduce. He seduces religious leaders like Bush and Blair by giving Bibles, but singing is his other way in. He does it on stage and on record every time. It’s very easy for him to move people’s emotions. It must be addictive. He just can’t stop wanting to do that.

Early January, 2009. Dublin. It’s the last day of Christmas. Christmas lights are still outside Bono’s house, half an hour out of Dublin. It looks over a bay. It’s a big old Georgian house, wood floors, rose and crimson velvet, cosy. A picture of a nun in the hallway. Lots of pictures. Downstairs is a swirling picture painted by Frank Sinatra and a picture of Bono with half a mouth. “Shall we go for a walk? Shall I show you around,” says Bono. But it’s dark, and it’s freezing.

Down some steps we get to another building called The Folly, a Victorian addition. Ali is having a meeting with some Edun people downstairs. Upstairs is an Edwardian bed, the guest room. White crisp linen that many luminaries have slept in. On the balcony he points out The Edge’s house and Neil Jordan’s house. In the guest bathroom everyone who has stayed their has left their mark. Graffiti and scribbles from film directors, actors, writers. Bill Clinton has written ‘A+B=C’. I wondered if it meant Ali+Bono=Clinton. Later on Clinton told me that it didn’t. “It means if you make enough effort and you face the facts you can change things. There is an inherent equation to the application of effort to evidence. It was both affirming and a kind of tongue in cheek putting down the earnestness with which we ply our trade.”

Bono is very good at impersonating the people he meets. His Clinton and Blair and Javier Bardem are extremely funny in their execution. His Bush is less good. Perhaps he has to like you to be you. Not that he says he doesn’t like Bush. In fact he says his sense of humour surprised him. Bush was certainly good to him. He increased America’s foreign budget to help Africans fight poverty diseases from around $2bn when he came in, to about $8bn today, and it’s going further up.

His seduction of the American Right began in part with Jesse Helms, the then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Helms was ringleader for the religious Republican right and was said to believe AIDS as God’s retribution. It was a major turning point that Bono convinced him that it was a responsibility of human kind to treat AIDS sufferers in Africa.

President Clinton says, “I was impressed. He converted Jesse Helms and that was something I could never have done. I think Jesse found it fascinating that a man from a radically different culture would court him, and he was disarmed by the same thing that disarms everybody who doesn’t know anything about Bono. Bono knew more about the subject than Jesse did and he made an argument why it was in America’s interest that you could relate to whether you were a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat – it was conditional debt relief. They have to spend the money on health care, education or development so that those countries would be better for America and they would produce no terrorists. They would be part of a cooperative that would not throw America into conflicts down the road.

“And Bono is the genuine article, a real person. And he also pointed out that debt relief would work from a budgetary point of view, and that was back when I was there and made them run a balanced budget…” A pause. I laugh. Clinton’s always ready for a dig. “He got people to take him seriously because he did his homework.”

It’s hard to keep making an impact when there is a worldwide epidemic of celebrity charity fatigue. Celebrities manipulate. They do something shameful or vicious and undo it by lending their face or their millions to a cause. To make a real impact you have to be better than that, and you have to be convincing. Your cause has to need you more than you need it. Clinton says, “The thing is, he keeps on coming. His heart and his mind are engaged.”

Clinton has a lullaby voice. It’s warm and real, and you see how the two of them connect. He sees a lot of Bono, they have worked together on getting cheap AIDS medicine to Africa as well as on debt relief and boosting trade and investment to the region.

Clinton would have been a good rock star. He tells me he once had a three octave singing range and when he was 16 played the saxophone ten hours a day until his lips split. But he decided that if he wasn’t going to be better than John Coltrane he would go into politics.

Just because Bono could be one of the world’s greatest rock stars, it didn’t stop him going into activism, wanting to make a difference. He’s always wanted to make a difference. It started with condoms. In the 1970s contraception was illegal in Ireland. And there he was doing benefit gigs for the Legalise Contraception campaign. Virgin Records had to pay a fine for selling condoms, which he paid. Not because Richard Branson couldn’t afford it, but because he was making a stand.

Clinton says, “We care about the same things and we are fascinated endlessly by people and their stories. He lives in the stories, not just the statistics and the numbers and the policies, and so do I.”

Clinton is full of stories. He says that he’s happy to tell stories all night with Bono. “Bono has a peculiar gift of mind and emotion and has a grace and power about the way he does it that is quite a thing to behold. There is no question that the way his mind works and his powers of persuasion have been decisively important. They were in the debt relief fight and they were in getting the G8 to double aid to Africa.

“And he has done all of this without sacrificing his responsibilities to U2. But if the rest of the band weren’t on board with this and willing to adjust schedules and all the things you have to do to do both things, it wouldn’t have been possible.”

Bono and I are sitting in his study. Lots of books, tea, home made biscuits. It’s an intimate room. It’s a happy house that’s properly lived in. You wonder why Bono would want to leave it at all. In many ways I think he doesn’t. That’s just more of the conflict.

“Contradiction is just the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head. I am a family man, I am a loyal if unreliable friend, I am a rock star. If I go out I sometimes set fire to myself and others. I am an earnest activist, a reflective and a religious-ish person. The right to be ridiculous is something to hold dear and never too far away.”

The view from the window, sky and sea, is what inspired the title No Line On The Horizon. The album took 4 years to make. It suffered delays. Why did it take so long? Is it because he’s doing too much for too many and been stretched too thin.

“The whole idea of an album is in jeopardy, it is an outmoded notion. And we wanted to see if we could have ten or eleven really great songs, it turned out to be harder than we imagined. I would say we worked twice as hard to get there, and that either means we’re half as good or it took just twice as much concentration.”

The last album How To Dismantle An Atom Bomb sold 9 million. Was he finding that success hard to live up to? “It could be that, that over achieving personality.” Is it because he doesn’t like to fail? “I’m sure I have failed at things. The two things I haven’t failed in are the ones that mean the most to me, that’s my music and my family. Activism is all about failure. You think about the people who didn’t get the medicine.”

If your record goes to number one, that’s a definitive result, you can see it. If you are tackling global poverty you’re never going to finish with it. Perhaps that’s why he keeps on going. But what if the songs stop coming? What if it becomes too hard to swap the part of the brain that writes speeches for the part that writes lyrics?

“If I’m honest this is the first album where I thought that might be true. Certainly the last two albums were very easy for me. I’m not saying they were perfect. If I’m excited about what’s happening in one room I’ll generally bring it to the next.”

The danger is if your politics inform your passions you could end up with some pretty boring songs. “There’s a book called Conciliance (by Edward Wilson) that I read once. The author made up the word. It’s a theory that he developed that all disciplines meet at some point and wrap around each other; maths, music, science, cooking. It taught me to separate everything, into top line melody, counterpoint, rhythm and harmony. I learned to do that in every single situation. In economic theory I would be the guy in the room that would find the top line melody because I am a singer. But I also understand the counterpoint is necessary.”

He finds a way in and a way through. His voice on the latest collection of songs speaks in different characters. “I was getting bored with my own point of view and thought I might be able to express more about myself by disappearing into other people.”

There’s a song called Cedars Of Lebanon. It’s the voice of a war correspondent sitting on his hotel balcony. He says that could have been him if he hadn’t been a rock star, because he is attracted to conflict and to danger. Another song, Stand Up Comedy, is about small men with big ideas. “Totally me.”

There are books everywhere. He likes to read about three at once. Currently there’s one about a tribe of pirates from the Barbary coast who took 130 Irish people from a town in County Cork and sold them as slaves in Algeria. And he’s reading Richard Dawkins’s The Devil’s Chaplain. An edition of Seamus Heaney is never far away, and beside it is the Koran given to him by Tony Blair.

U2’s Larry Mullen Jr does not have much time for Blair. He’s branded him a warmonger. Paul McGuinness says that Larry and Bono are like brothers, so they are bound to have arguments

Says Bono, “That’s why I would never want to be in politics. I would never want to be in that position where you have to make that decision, sending people into battle, knowing there will be fatalities but believing you are saving more lives.

“But because of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, millions of people are alive that would have been dead in other far off places through their interventions in HIV/AIDS.”

Later on Tony Blair would call me from Rwanda. He speaks about Bono with some devotion and certainty. Why did he give him the Koran? “We’d been talking about Islam, so it seemed like an appropriate thing to do.” Was religion the thing that really connected them? “Africa connected us primarily. He is completely sincere in what he says and people in power respect him not because he is nice to them but because he really does understand the complexities of our business. He’s not been a fair weather friend to me. He disagreed with me strongly over Iraq.”

Bono and Blair first met about 14 years ago. “I was the Leader of the Opposition and it was an awards bash. He was receiving an award and for some bizarre reason he spoke in Spanish. He said of me, ‘This guy wants to be Prime Minister. You’ve got to have big cohones to want to have that job’. It was a surprising introduction. But since that time he is one the people I like most and respect most in the world.”

Even if I have a theory that rock stars and politicians are interchangeable and the reason that Clinton and Blair are enthraled by him is that they want to be him, Bono doesn’t want to be them. Yet he has made them love him. He has made Bush do things that seemed totally out of character. When he’s told someone’s going to be difficult, he refuses to see it that way. He talks about it coming from a punk rock foundation. It doesn’t matter if you can’t play your instruments, do it anyway. He worries, “Maybe this is a dangerous trait because if you have some skills in one discipline you think they can be applied to others.” It’s hard to know when self belief and passion become arrogance. But arrogance has no charm and Bono has a ton of it.

Ali comes in with a glass of white wine for me and red wine for him, remembering that the last time she saw me that’s what I was drinking. Ali has pale skin, big dark eyes, black hair, is fond of wearing black. She is the kind of woman who amazed President Clinton when she turned up at a gala dinner that was held for him in Dublin when Trinity named an American studies programme after him because of his contribution to the Irish peace process. It was a day after she had given birth to John, their youngest son.

Clinton said, “You would never have believed she had g given birth just the day before.” She’s always struck me as being strong, but with a naughty streak. Bono says, “People always think of her as so graceful and elegant and butter wouldn’t melt up in her mouth. How did she end up with him? I happen to know she’s messy and fun. I don’t trust people that have no joy. I go back to music and people that have joy. Miles Davis’s Blue may not be joy for a lot of people, but for me it’s a sexy place to be in. This house has had a lot of laughs for sure. Probably more than the missus would like, but at the same time she’s got more mischief in her than people think.”

We talk some more about how darkness can be a sexy place, but how his favourite combination is “rage and joy.” We talk about self consciousness. “Some people put me on the defensive and self consciousness of course makes an ugly face. As soon as you put a camera on someone, if they’re self conscious it makes them ugly. I know it’s happened to me. The human face changes just by the act of putting a camera in front of it. I had to learn that – I wasn’t necessarily built for rock and roll. There’s a certain narcissism that every writer must have. But there’s another kind which a performer has and I’m not sure I have the second one. I have to work up to professional vanity. Just right now I’m having to be a rock star again. I had to do a photo shoot the other day. I took off my glasses, but I put on black mad eye make-up. It was like I needed a bit of a mask to step into being rock star again because I felt a bit of a charlatan, a bit of a part-time rock star. Speak to me in a few months and the problem will be trying to put rock star back in the box.” I used to think he wore dark glasses to hide some kind of inspirational fire behind his eyes, now I think that he needs them as a barrier.

I’m not sure if he dreads the idea of a full-on stadium tour. “Yes, I suppose leaving here, leaving this house, leaving these five people who I love so much, and the safety of the place. It’s like a cave.”

Do you feel more fearful about stepping outside your cave these days? “It happens every time really. It’s always been like this. You wouldn’t be a performer if you weren’t insecure. There’s always that feeling, will the crowds turn up?”

Fear and desire are never far away from each other with him. “We’d like to do another album very quickly. We’d like it to have more of this intimacy because this one has real intimacy.”

Do you think you used to be more afraid of intimacy? “Maybe… I suppose the thing about this album is it has a spectrum of emotions, from swagger and defiance to brokenness and playfulness and self heckling.” He’s probably more comfortable in the self heckling. He’d rather be the one that’s putting himself down, it gives him a sense of control.

A few years ago he met Andrew Lloyd Webber at the Ivor Novello Awards. He does a good impersonation of Lloyd Webber saying that for so many years he’d had musicals all to himself. “I went and met him one night and he was very generous and said I think other people should have a go at this. So I mentioned it to Edge and he said I will be in. The first musical we had in mind was Faust set in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra as the man who does the deal with the devil.”

He first met Frank in 1987, and they became friends. He recalls a moment with Frank at dinner where he pointed to the colour of a bright sky blue napkin and Frank said that he remembered when his eyes used to be that colour. He said it without nostalgia or self pity.

The Frank musical didn’t work out. They had another idea for a Rasputin musical. “I asked Pavarotti if he would sing in it, although he was the wrong shape for Rasputin, but he had the right eyebrows. And then Marvel came up with an idea, would you like to write a musical around Spider Man? Julie Taymor is directing it. And it hurts me to say this, but she is tougher than we are in terms of her art. She is a master story teller. I met her on Across The Universe.” I don’t tell him but Across The Universe is the only film in my life that I’ve ever walked out on. It was Beatles songs set to a nonsensical non-story. Bono is enthusiastic though. It’s set to open on Broadway in November.

What would his super power be if he could choose one. He puzzles. Maybe he wants to fly or have X-ray vision, see inside people, make people do things? “I can do all that already.” He laughs.

He tells me he’s never had a journalist in his home before. I tell him that I’m flattered and he makes small of it. We go to eat dinner joined by Ali and the two directors of Edun, all childhood friends that know and trust each other. We eat chicken, vegetables, but no potatoes. Then cheese, chutney, and fancy crackers. Bono is at the head of the table, very much the performer now. A brilliant mimic, he treats us to his repertoire but disappears early for a conference call with LA leaving the rest of us drinking.

I spoke to The Edge who is in New York working on Spider-Man songs. “I’ve never written a waltz before,” he says, feeling pleased to have risen to a challenge.” How does it affect him, Bono not being there much of the time? “It works pretty well. Ideas come to him quickly. In a funny way it might work better for us to have him coming and going. If you are working on a project for a long time you probably struggle with it because I’m the guy working most closely with the music, initially on my own. So what I really love is being able to hear it through Bono’s ears.”

The Edge and Bono are that close. It’s not a problem for him to hear through his ears. In France they live in a house next door to one another and in Dublin they can see each other’s houses. They choose to spend time together, even though they get to spend less time together now.

“He always relishes coming back, which is another good thing. U2 gave Bono the opportunity and a platform, so in many ways Bono’s work is just an extension of the band. Our life informs our music. It’s a natural development. The interest in civil rights was there from the beginning. We don’t necessarily agree on every single aspect of his work. For instance when he did his photograph with George Bush I was set against it because photographs speak so loudly. There was some disquiet from U2 fans, but ultimately I think what he did turned out to be right.” Would you say your relationship with him has changed? “No. We are very close. He is my best friend.?

Adam Clayton doesn’t worry that Bono’s campaigning could ever jeopardise U2. “It’s hard to see into the future, but there’s no reason why Bono’s activism would mean he would give up the band. I think he couldn’t campaign without the band. It’s much less of a proposition for him to be a campaigner without the weight of the band behind him. His writing is very much informed by what he learns in the political arena. It’s not enough for him to watch the News at Ten on a daily basis and form his views from that.” Has it changed the dynamic though? “I think he would always find things to occupy himself. Back in the days when we were loading gear into the back of a Transit van and everyone was pulling together, he would always be off finding somebody to talk to rather than unload the van, and I don’t think it’s really changed.

January 2009. I meet with Jamie Drummond, cofounder of ONE. He has a clear eyed intelligence. “The crisis that is enfolding in the financial world is not dissimilar to the crisis of poverty or climate change. It had to get worse and worse and worse. It seems it is in no one’s interest to take it seriously until it feels like it is almost too late. Wouldn’t be great if human nature were better at anticipating crises. At least on extreme poverty, we hope groups like ONE can help encourage the public to get ahead of the crisis”

Doesn’t the world financial crisis seriously affect all arguments for fighting extreme poverty? Listening to Drummond, he switches it all around to make it make sense. “If Africans were wealthier they could buy our products. With more wealth, people have fewer kids, which can mean amongst other things lower carbon emissions. There will be fewer immigration problems and that is something southern Europe is really worried about. So at a time where simple moral value based arguments might not resonate, these are the hard headed arguments that get through to people.”

DATA – Debt, Aid, Trade, Africa – was the original organisation, it did just advocacy. It helped give birth to both Red and ONE. Red to take care of the private sector and raising money to fight AIDS and ONE to persuade the public to get money and better out of governments to beat poverty, especially in Africa.

Drummond, who is 38, worked for Christian Aid in the mid-nineties in Ethiopia, increasingly aware that Live Aid had made very little difference, all the money that had come to Ethiopia from Live Aid was only servicing the debt run up by the immoral dictatorship.

It was Drummond who helped promote the idea called Jubilee 2000, which set about giving Africa a new start by cancelling billions of dollars of debt. He didn’t know Bono but tried to enlist his support as a way to help sell his idea to the White House. When an Irish voice came on the phone he thought it was a friend playing a joke, but Bono is prone to just picking up the phone to people when they least expect it.

Drummond recalls, “We got involved in the first place because of a grassroots jubilee movement for global justice, and specifically because the great moral leaders of our time, Mandela and Tutu, asked that Bono and others who had supported the anti-apartheid campaign, get back involved in the campaign for justice and against poverty. We’ve been working for them and that mandate ever since. Tutu’s our international patron and Bono is in regular contact with Grace Machel and Mandela.

“When we negotiated the Millennium Challenge Account – giving more money to countries that were democracies, fighting corruption, with no linkage to the war on terror – we got Bush’s support. I think they realised that development could be part of winning the war on terror. By the end of 2002 after negotiations had happened at the Monterey summit, President Bush appeared in a photo with Bono.”

It was a picture that took negotiation and positioning. It’s one thing to appear in a picture with Clinton when there was no war and they are like minded individuals. But in the picture that aligned himself to Bush, Bono risked alienating many people. It is not just Larry Mullen Jr who has no respect for warmongers. To appear with Bono played to Bush’s advantage. It put him in a position as a compassionate conservative when the rest of his agenda was not compassionate. Although at this time Bush was popular he was certainly not popular with the left or centre, and giving aid to Africa is left or centre territory. Bono knows if you want aid you can’t pick sides, but yet you have to make everyone feel you are on the same side.

When Bush first announced $15 billion was being given to well-governed poor countries for the Millennium Challenge, Bono agreed to be in the picture with him. “People were saying how could you be in a picture with this person and we said, ‘But it gets us billions of dollars for poor people in Africa, it’s a price worth paying’. It was billions of dollars. He’s not a cheap date. This opened the door to more. The AIDS initiative helped Africans put 3 million people on life saving drugs. This stuff is effective and in part it flowed from tough decisions like hanging out with President Bush.”

How do you think he won over Bush to get this money? Was it charisma, was it charm? “If he had just charm but he didn’t have a credible grounding in policy it would only get him so far. It’s charm, passion, credibility together. It’s often the case that a prime minister or president doesn’t read the briefing before meeting with a rock star because they don’t expect to be challenged on policy details. Our goal is to get them to read the briefings on our issue in the first place. Then they start to own the issue, and Bono is reminding people why they got into politics in the first place. With most politicians there is an idealistic kernel, a seed, that sets you on your way, Bono goes back to that original DNA that is in every politician, that wants to do good, and he nurtures it with a few facts and a bit of charm, and a feeling like if you team with this guy you can make a disproportionate difference.”

Why do you feel people feel so connected to him? “It’s an amazing talent, and it’s an understanding of the opportunity that you can make a difference. You can try and change the world. It’s an exciting obligation and a pretty powerful potent thing. But it would be unsuccessful if he didn’t make it fun. I find this grim do-gooding portrayal of him quite irritating because he is a fun loving character, a very good mimic, and is quite happy to get salty mouthed, and he notices things that you haven’t noticed about yourself.”

Not only is it more of a challenge to get money for Africa in a world financial crisis, when you’ve spent eight years targeting Republicans, suddenly they are out of power and you have to make new friends with Democrats. Of course you can’t pick sides, but you can also lose allies. Obama doesn’t need extra charisma or a photo with a rock star, he has everything that a rock star has already.

Says Drummond, “It would have been easy to imagine that Obama was finally our dream candidate, let’s just support him all the way. But that wouldn’t do him any favours and for our issues to get through we need the support of the Republicans and of everyone and we need never stop working both sides. In that sense he has taken celebrity advocacy to a new level.”

Partly because he never stops and partly because of his belief if you really want a big thing to happen why bother with a medium sized thing. If you can call the President of the United States, why not.

March 2009. We are in Nancy Pelosi’s office, a symphony of peach and beige, as is the woman herself. She is glowing, tangibly excited to be with Bono. As Speaker of the House of Representatives she has invited chairs of various caucuses, special campaigning interest groups within the party, to sit with her to discuss the aid budget and how to defend it. She introduces him. “The one good thing President Bush did was to increase the aid budget for Africa. That was the only good thing he did and you were the transformer, you persuaded him to do that.”

There follows a sometimes tense discussion going on about a proposed $4 billion cut to Obama’s aid budget. It’s a powerful group of about twelve that includes people who write the laws that govern foreign policy and people who write the cheques. Jan Schakowsky ,influential Democrat from Illinois gets a buzz on her Blackberry, it’s a campaign email from the ONE organisation urging her to restore the cuts, a complete coincidence. Bono sees it as a sign, not a mystic sign, evidence that THE organisation is absolutely connected.

Bono and Pelosi work the room together, sparking off one another. Pelosi sending people out to vote. They need to vote but they need to come back. It could have been a very distracted meeting that lacked momentum but it didn’t. It aroused hope, dispersed the grimness of the situation.

The Senate House is stone cold, echoy corridors. We head to Patrick Leahy, Senator for Vermont. Bono says, “This man is like John Wayne.” It’s his birthday. Bono will give him a cup cake since gifts of more than a few dollars have now been banned. Leahy says, “I’ve seen him win over diehard conservatives. A couple of members of our congress have an almost dismissive attitude to AIDS in Africa, yet he gets in touch with them and they get back on the programme. He has walk-in privilege to this office any time. Only Audrey Hepburn, Bono and my grandchildren have had this privilege.”

Leahy first met Bono 20 years ago and they have since worked on various humanitarian issues. “There are millions of people in this world who will never know who you are and will never know your music because they’ll never have the money to buy it. All that they know is that their lives are immeasurably better because of you.” Leahy is twinkly eyed, all passion and heart. No surprise that Bono connected with him.

A connection with Josh Bolten was less obvious, but as Bolten was Bush’s chief of staff, and before that the budget director, it was essential for Bono to find one. When they met 12 years ago, when Bolten was Bush’s campaign director, Bolten had never seen a U2 concert. In a gamekeeper turned poacher sort of way, he is now on the board of ONE.

“Over the years that I have had interaction with Bono you could never say that he was unreasonable in his ask, but he was going to ask you for more than you were reasonably planning. He was always very well calibrated in his ask. Asking us to make a stretch, but not ridiculously.”

Does Bolten think the aid budget that Bush so dramatically increased is in jeopardy? “It may be. It may be rebranded so it has Obama’s stamp on it to attract more Democratic support.” He was there the first time Bush met Bono. “He was wearing a black suit, black shirt, sunglasses, his Washington outfit and he brought with him an Irish bible as a gift. The president was shocked that there was this crazy rock star who is also a person of faith. The president’s faith is exaggerated as a factor in his daily life. His faith was very private, but it’s a deep faith. Bono is also a person of faith, so he wasn’t untrue to himself, he wasn’t faking but he chose the right element of himself to present, so they hit it off.”

Did they have a special bond? “I think it took a while to build a bond. They didn’t agree on everything. They had a negotiation about the announcement of the Millennium Challenge initiative. Bush was announcing a programme and therefore there would be a photograph of Bono with Bush. Bono was reluctant. A lot of people on the left did not like President Bush, so Bono was courageous. Bono is a charming, persuasive man. He’s very good at all this.”

David Lane, the President and CEO of ONE, used to work the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation. Bono and Bobby Shriver approached Gates in 2002 for funding to start DATA. “The idea of Bill Gates funding a lobby and Bono was pretty far out.”

Although they have known each other for several years, and are friendly they are not super close, yet “It’s kind of shocking. He remembers every conversation we’ve ever had.”

April 2009. Bono and I are in a car on the way to Dulles Airport, Washington DC. He’s wearing jeans, a purple shirt, a black tie undone, pink lenses and a grey furry coat. He says he saw dogs in the street, not dissimilar to the coat, taking an interest in him. He smelt expensive and seductive, like a wooden cigar box.

The meetings in Washington have been partly tense, partly euphoric. There is a threat that the billions will be decreased, but Nancy Pelosi thinks she’ll be able to make it alright. Everybody I have talked to has applauded Bono for his knowledge and charm. The common thread is that he remembers everything about them, their birthdays, their children’s birthdays. His brain for detail is exemplary. How come?

“When I was very young I used to play chess and I was good at it. I can learn useless minutiae, but actually I can forget my way home, or I’ve been known after the tour is long over to come downstairs and get in the back of my own car. But I think you remember what’s important to you. I remember asking Seamus Heaney’s wife how did he remember so many other people’s poems and she said, ‘Words are very important to him.'”

I tell him that I have been thinking about his mother and why I find it strange that he can remember so many inane details, so many facts, but almost nothing about his mother. Is that because he has to live in the present? “Maybe, that might be the answer. And that there is only a certain amount of real estate. The brain is no different to the body. A couple of press-ups and a few weights and it can reshape. My curiosity in all these different directions has been a boot camp for my brain. People who I would have thought of as much faster on their feet, you suddenly seem to jog past after these kind of gruelling days. Every meeting is a monkey puzzle.”

Are your memories of losing your mother so painful that if you carried them with you, you think it would slow you down? “Are you suggesting I have baggage?” I tell him I’ve been puzzling about it for weeks. That I feel I know as much about his mother as he does. He laughs, not nervously or self consciously, but tells me in all his memories she’s laughing. “Yes, maybe it is about not wanting to slow down. With U2 we don’t think about an album as soon as we finish it, we’re on to the next thing. We’ve always been like that.”

This fits in with the idea that he can’t stand people who moan. “I can’t stand cranks and whingers. My favourite quality is lack of self pity. I really like people who have none. I know people with just a tiny fragment of difficulty and they spend the rest of their life walking with a limp. And actually I don’t think I’ve had much to overcome in my life, the odd black eye, the odd broken tooth.” What about a broken heart? “Heart… You only know you have a heart when it’s broken. When you are a singer in a band you stick your neck out for a living, you get used to knocks. And I’ve noticed that the spleen and ire of your enemy usually takes them out, not you, so you don’t have to do anything, almost. There is nothing more attractive than energy moving forward. I think our band has it, our movement has it, and it’s exciting to be on that train.”

Does it never make you feel schizophrenic? “I think I’m more and more myself in every situation. On the surface I can be insecure. You wouldn’t be a singer in a band if you didn’t need a chorus of voices to call your name. But deep down I am really not. I feel I am on solid rock. On another level I feel a strong foundation, so you can take an inordinate amount of thumps and I’m not knocked off my feet.”

As an artist he’ll feel criticism sorely, but as an activist if he’s turned away he just keeps on coming back. That’s part of the train. Bono knows how to make it a special ride. Charm is an overwhelming factor, even though he doesn’t acknowledge he has it. “I have got manners. I try and look after people. Maybe it’s insecurity because you’re trying too hard, trying to please people.”

What he has is an ability to connect on a really deep level really quickly.. “If people are open to be connected with that’s the kind of people I want to be with.” Many people feel that strong connection with you. “But I might not feel it back. I’m a man who sees friendship as a kind of sacrament. I take friendship very seriously and as a result I have some extraordinary friends, in the band, in my marriage, in all the spheres that I move in.” Never at any point does he take credit for doing this all on his own. He’s always thanking people loudly. “I have a day job, I do this part-time. There is a huge network from Oxfam to Concern to Civicus and Taso, people like Kumi Naidoo, Wangar Mataai, John Gitongo, who work on these issues in every waking moment. They are the rock stars, I am the fan.”

I wonder does he see Ali as a lioness, he so often references lioness energy as being powerful and dangerous. “Very much so. Our relationship has changed a lot. For a while I thought I was in charge, I was the hunter protector. A few years ago it became clear there was somebody else in charge and I feel like I hold on a lot tighter to her than she does to me, and that slightly bothers me. She is so independent and I sometimes wish she wasn’t.”

Of course you warm to him because he fesses up to his insecurities. His insecurities make his self belief engaging, human. At the airport we say goodbye. I’ve been following him around for so long it feels a sad separation. Everybody who’s lives he moves in feel they have rights over him, that he is their special friend. He may know nothing about this. I wonder could Clinton and Bush, Blair, Obama, the Polish Pope, Frank Sinatra, all feel this connection. The connection is what it’s all about. If you feel you own a piece of him you also feel an obligation to him, to change the world, and that’s how he does it.

Tom Freston, Chairman of The Board for One and on the Board of Red, first met Bono 20 years ago when he was running MTV. He was responsible for seminal television like Beavis and Butthead, South Park, and The Real World on which all future reality shows were to be based. He was fired from Viacom, the parent company, two years ago. “Bono rang me right away. They had started ONE when I was head of Viacom. It made sense that it was something that all the networks, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, VH1 should be involved in. We were always looking for good pro social things to tie in to. He called me the day after I was fired and said this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you.” This informs my theory Bono doesn’t see negativity.

“He sees the good in everybody. He has a force within himself that’s slightly different from him, bigger than him. He’s aware of it and he can align himself to it to convince people to do things with a sense of urgency. He does this with great poetry, to be able to take this force and somehow make great things come from it. He’s irresistible in a way when he asks people for things. He has a sense of purpose that you can find yourself wanting to align yourself to. He can talk to almost anybody in their own language. He’s friends to the rich and poor. He seems extra human when you see him in action. I know that’s not a proper word, but I don’t know where it all comes from. It’s some spirit, this force in him, maybe even apart from him.”

I have seen this force in action and it is indeed as messianic as Freston describes it, but it’s not saintly. The Washington trip was days that started at 7.30am, maybe 13 meetings a day, then a business dinner. Freston says, “Some nights I’ve seen him be up drinking all night long and the next morning he’ll address 200 freshman representatives with Nancy Pelosi. I couldn’t get a word out of my mouth, but he just lets them have it meeting after meeting.

Like when he calls someone a lioness, that person feels they are a lioness. It’s endearing. But it’s also smart and smart aid seems to be the new buzz word , the kind of aid that’s proven that it works, for instance malarial nets, antiviral drugs, given money to governments who are not corrupt or wasteful. In a recession you want relevant statistics, you want to see results. How Bono does what he does might be mystical, but the results are real.

Click here to read Chrissy’s U2 interview

Anjelica Huston

We meet at Shutters Hotel on the beach in Santa Monica. Lovely views of the bright blue sky and pale sand. We order lobster salad and white wine. Almost unheard of at lunchtime anywhere in California. Anjelica Huston has never been a conventional woman, one that fits in easily or accepted convention. She’s always been attracted to the dark side, the gothic, most at home playing Morticia in The Addams Family, chopping the heads off roses or being a witch or a mafia bad girl in Prizzi’s Honor for which she won her Oscar.
She’s known for having an alpha presence, yet men in her life have cast heavy shadows: her father, the macho director John Huston, for whom the term hellraiser seems too weak a cliché, and for being involved with Jack Nicholson, larger than life womaniser straight out of the same mould.
She has always had a dangerous presence, edgy. Her face has been called imposing, imperious, corvine. She herself joked it was the kind of face that was only ever seen on old coins.
Today it’s the same interesting face, although the eyes look a little surrendered. She looks well put together, blue Palazzo pants, black patent leather, Tori Burch mules, a soft white T-shirt with net inserts that reveal pale flesh, although perhaps not as vampiric as it once was.
She smells exotic, the scent she’s always worn, Patou. But there’s something that’s very much not the same and no matter how light she might try to make the conversation there is a profound sadness. Two years ago her husband of 18 years, Robert Graham, the sculptor, died. The year before that he was sick in hospital. It’s been an extremely grueling time for Huston. First of all a period of reevaluating love and what it meant, concluding that this was the man she has loved most in her life. And then losing him.
Her hair is still striking, lustrous, but not as dark as it used to be. And her mouth still looks like it was drawn on. A cartoon mouth that turns up and down at the edges as she expresses pain or joy. Intense brown eyes that are not afraid to look right through you.
She talks about death with a disconcerting familiarity. Ostensibly we are here to talk about Horrid Henry, a rather sweet 3D children’s movie where she plays the cruel teacher wearing a prosthetic nose, mouth and wrinkles.
Somehow odd to be talking about something flimsy after we go into the year she spent hoping her husband was not going to die and how it’s taken her a while to accept “widowhood”. She makes me shiver inside every time she mentions the word “widow” it comes with such pathos. It hurts every time she describes herself thus.
I mention in an attempt to be cheery that I came across an interview with Jack Nicholson, her long time love, where he referred to breaking up with her. He said ‘Anjelica annihilated me.’ Her mouth doesn’t quite turn up at the edges. She already knows what he said by heart. She says that he rather spoilt it by in the next sentence saying that he wouldn’t like to change anything, he’d just like to deal with it better.
“I think he recovered quite well. I’ve seen that quote floating around for a bit and the caveat being would you like to go back and make things work and the answer being no, I’ll let that one rest. I paraphrase.”
Interestingly she paraphrases in a slightly more negative way. He actually said, “I have made a mistake, but I don’t want to go back and correct it. I would rather deal with it.”
She says, “You can’t go back in time but you can move forward. I talk to Jack. I don’t speak on a day to day basis but we keep in touch. It’s a nice relationship, mature.”
Quite nice that you were able to annihilate. “Well particularly if they deserve to be annihilated.” A small smile. “At least he let that be known. I remember after we broke up there being a kind of photo layout of him and his new paramour in Life or People magazine with testimonies from his friends as to how he’d found the love of his life. I found that incredibly…” She’s searching for the words, and then just laughs. “There have been so many paramours since then.” She instantly changes the subject.
There’s something dismissive though in the way she speaks about him. Yes they still speak. Yes they’re still friends. It’s not so much that she’s dismissive of him but dismissive of that adrenalin fuelled passion, the intense uncertainty of their relationship where infidelity didn’t necessarily mean betrayal until Nicholson very publicly had a one-night stand that turned into a few weeks, Rebecca Broussard got pregnant, and there was no turning back.
Huston had already been trying for a baby. She remembers the photos in the lifestyle magazines of Nicholson and girlfriend and baby. It was all too public. It’s as if she’s seeing the magazine spread in front of her still.
Perhaps she can take a small delight in the fact that if she was the love of Nicholson’s life he was certainly not the love of hers. She talks about how hard it was. How she couldn’t think straight or do anything except look after her husband.
“When my husband was sick it was impossible for me to work. I dedicated my time to him and now for the first time I’m having the opportunity to look outside. Oddly nothing came to me at that time. I had very few offers. Perhaps people knew what was going on. Perhaps it was just luck that I had enough time to devote myself entirely.”
In the last year I did three movies. There was one called The Big Year with Owen Wilson and Steve Martin. I’ve got to know Steve Martin a lot more and I don’t mean in the biblical sense. I’ve been around him for many years and I never thought that he particularly liked me. But on The Big Year I suddenly saw this other side of him. Compared to the Steve Martin I’d known all those years before he was practically emollient. He was jovial, arranging dinner dates. I think it was because he’s happily married and I found him to be an inventive actor, quite clever. The Big Year is about competitive bird watching and I play a sea captain and Owen Wilson and I have an ugly past where I forced him off the boat with a knife.
“I did another movie. The title keeps changing although it’s being alluded to as a ‘cancer comedy’. It’s a movie that emphasizes the crazy things and emotions that surround a serious illness.”
So she did a movie dealing with serious illness and death just after she’d experienced it. That was harsh. “Life is harsh. My life has always reflected my work. My life, my work. I don’t know which comes first. I don’t know if that’s just what I’m sympathetic to or it’s fate.”
The waiter seems over attentive, very keen to listen in. she says she doesn’t know why she chose this restaurant. It’s always been unlucky for her. Once she fell over, slipped on the floor by the bar, was on the ground and nobody came to help her.
She grew up in Galway, Ireland, in the guest house of a big rambling house called St. Cleran’s Manor House. Her father loved Ireland. He loved hunting. He loved the freedom. He hated McCarthyism, control. She too has adopted Ireland. It’s in her heart. She was very moved by the Queen. “How fabulous was the Queen’s speech,” she says with pride.
Her father got rid of the house when her mother died and his new wife didn’t like it. Something that also causes an ache.
Has she been back to Ireland much? “I’ve been back a couple of times since Bob died and that’s been good for me. I’ve been back to the house. It’s in a bad state. It was a hotel. Merv Griffin of all people bought it. It had a sushi restaurant in it. It was a very strange experience when I went back there. it was like being Alice down a rabbit hole. If you could imagine going from a home with very functional rooms to everything being displaced, every door I opened went into a room or bathroom and some of it not so beautiful. They chopped a lot of the woods down and you could see big mansions to the right and left uninhabited and some half finished. I guess that had been the Germans that were visiting. The cook and the housekeeper sweetly offered me cup cakes and some booklets of St Cleran’s Manor House when it belonged to Merv Griffin. You want to see the place functioning and the fire burning.”
Perhaps she should buy it? “Ha. I’d have to be in a very different place. Those places cost so much to keep. If there were any rich Irishmen who wanted to marry me that could go together quite easily. Even if they were gay that could be arranged.”
The food arrives and she smiles at the waiter. This time he leaves. She talks about the director of Horrid Henry. “He’s such a nice man. He came all the way to California and asked me to play Miss Battleaxe. When I saw her she had purple hair and a pointy nose, so I asked for prosthetics and he said no, no, no one’s going to be using prosthetics and I said I don’t know how to go about this part unless you let me have a little pointy nose and a little pointy chin. They didn’t stick on very well but I thought it was integral to her character that she be pointy. I got fixated with this one nature programme that they have on the BBC where a couple set a trap in the shore lands of Cornwall and they caught a common shrew and he had a very long nose, a plaintive look but a hateful shrewish little face, so I thought I’ve found my template.”
She demonstrates the look. “Exactly like Miss Battleaxe.” Conspiratorially she says, “She gets kindlier. She redeems herself in the end.”
Sometimes her voice is like a cat’s purr. A cat who’s been sipping cognac and had a few cigarettes, warm and crackly. It wasn’t her worse experience with prosthetics. It took only a few hours to get on and off. “Witches took five hours to get on and three hours to get off. At the end of the day you wanted to tear it off but you had to do it piece by piece.”
Was she worried at the way she would look as Miss Battleaxe or in Witches. “No, I knew what I was letting myself in for. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s a kids movie. You’re not looking for subtlety. And I have less and less vanity.
“I don’t like looking bad accidentally. But if it’s my choice to play a hideous looking witch I should be able to do that. But that’s not to say if I see a horrible looking picture of myself I won’t cringe ‘How could this happen?'”
I remember she told me she tried botox once and her husband told her a sad story and she couldn’t react to it so he got upset. She laughs at the thought of it completely impassive to his tragedy. I’m wondering does she really find it still funny or perhaps it’s too sad. Her face doesn’t betray.
“That was the last time I did botox, but one of the oddest things about my present moment is that right now there is no one in my life to tell me what I shouldn’t do so I find myself relying on what people have told me in the past. I don’t know if I should rush out and do all the things that were forbidden. I’ve seen some really good looking women in their sixties with not a line on their face and it’s a different kind of look, a certain amount of not so haggardness, smoothness. I looked very tired after that year and a half is what I’m trying to say. (When she was looking after her dying husband). I don’t know that a little lifting, a little botox, is such a horrible idea this year as it was last. I don’t feel adamant about it any more.”
Isn’t botox quite detrimental to acting as it promotes expressionlessness?” “That’s true and that’s a reason for not doing it. But a few of my friends have had little lifts here and there. I wonder if I go in and have a face lift that in the next few weeks they’ll have an innovation. I just don’t like the idea of pain. It’s not much of a priority in my life.”
Is there another man in her life? She shakes her head looking more relaxed, less savaged by grief. She perks up. “It’s strange I’ve never had a period in my life since I was 15 that I didn’t have a boyfriend or several. It’s taking some getting used to. There are some moments where yes, I have been lonely. You come home after a night out and you go, what’s missing? Oh yes, there’s no one to talk to about it. So you certainly feel that emptiness, but at the same time I don’t feel compelled to fill that space. The first thing I did when Bob died was I couldn’t stop digging holes. I made a garden behind my house feverishly. I went up to my ranch and planted trees. I think that was a healthy thing for me. But I haven’t met anybody that I would want to be with in that sense.”
Maybe it’s too early. “Maybe. I don’t think I’m putting out the signals. I don’t care really. I’m still living in a house I shared with my husband. I can’t imagine establishing a life with somebody in that house.”
Is she comfortable living in that house? “Not only comfortable. I think it’s beautiful. There is a studio that he built that he was going to work in for ever and ever. It’s a very big property. Venice is where I moved for Bob. Venice has been good for me, character building. If it hadn’t been for Venice I’d be behind some gate on Mulholland Drive. I’d be a recluse and afraid of mixing with the public. Venice takes the starch out of you. There’s a very immediate sense of living that you have down here. Positive character building but not altogether easy. When I first came I was jumpy because I was overly recognised and I thought that would infringe on my freedom or my security. And that’s what happened to a lot of celebrities. The next thing you know you are a prisoner. It’s pretty easy to stay behind your gates and stay away from the rest of humanity. Much better to deal with being alive.
There is a sense of sadness when she says that, as if something without Graham is not alive. She’d always been attracted to bad boys and risk takers and taking risks. All of that shifted when she married Graham.
She was 39 and felt “as you go through life people reflect what you need. “Great love affairs don’t necessarily make great marriages or even great friendship. Robert, he was kind to me. I got married because I finally met someone who told me what they were going to do and did it. He was single-minded in his pursuit of me and a genius in his own right.”
All her life previous to this she had been the pursuer. “Pursuing is not a happy place,” she shudders. The pursuing seems lifetimes ago, but still too close.
I remember when I met her before we ended up crying. She had said that losing Jack was “like experiencing a death in the family. It was terrible abandonment and loneliness. He symbolised a whole life for me. He was my family.”
Thinking about it now, their relationship was very fractured at the time. The fact that he was family was perhaps a projection. Now she has lost her actual family, her husband. She’s very aware that her father was the first imprint, a vibrant character who was cruel to actors when he directed them to test them, and was scant with his praise. She would have to make do with a wink or a nod. When he first directed her in A Walk With Love And Death it was a harsh experience. Yet when she won his love it was worth winning.
It seems that all her life, until Graham, she had to pursue, win over, challenge. With Graham the love was just there. Does she feel his presence? “I had one thing happened shortly after he died. I have a shrine to him and I asked him a question and it was answered immediately in a way I can’t be specific about. I have a sense of him everywhere. That he could just walk through the door and I won’t be particularly surprised. And then there’s the knowledge that he’s not going to.
I’ve been following a poet, a Mexican poet whose son was killed by the cartels. He said the effect of the death is so profound that he’s never going to write poetry again. ” She said it as if she has complete empathy.
” He talks about God and the afterlife and the questions that only get answered when we die. …. So I don’t think I’ll know until then. It’s already an act of faith that people think they will know at that moment.”
Her voice is soft, a profound sadness radiates.
Is she religious? “Sometimes. I’m mostly pragmatic. I search less because I know the answer is more remote. It’s like when you chase something it runs away more. If you chase a horse you never catch it. One has to have a lot of energy for those things.
“In terms of spirituality what you put out there is what you attract. The object is to get yourself to a place where you can be receptive, where you can be kind, where you don’t have to be defensive, where you can be at ease in your own skin.”
The dessert menu comes. We decide to share a chocolate tart. “If you’re going to have dessert why go for the fruit.” Good to see she’s all or nothing.
“I have just got a TV series (Smash). For the next half a year at least I’ll be in New York. If I’m going to spend half of what’s left of my life in New York I may as well enjoy it.” It’s a series about Broadway with Jack Davenport and Debra Messing and Katharine McPhee, an American Idol contestant. “A sweet thing. It’s very well written. I’ll put my dogs in cages and just go. I wish I could do the same with my horses. I have two dogs now Mecha, who’s a hairless Mexican dog but she has hair, and another one I think she’s a lhasa apso. I’m taking them on a boat at the weekend to Catalina island. We in California never go to Catalina island. In the olden Los Angeles days people used to make that trip to go to a ballroom, to gamble and drink too much.”
I think it was a boat off Catalina island that Natalie Wood fell overboard and drowned. “I am determined to gather my rosebuds, especially if I’m going to be in New York. I want to make the most of California.”
She says that since she wanted to fill up space with doing lots of movies that’s when offers came in. “You say it’s weird but if your life always works that way it doesn’t seem weird. The question is do you choose the work or does it choose you?
“Sometimes we attract things that are darker. Sometimes we chase rainbows because we think they are going to transform our lives. So many girls go after guys because they think it’s going to transform them. It doesn’t make life easier. Perhaps it makes life harder. Perhaps it just makes you be able to feel. Or perhaps you feel you’re going to go after some other people and see how that feels.”
Did she do that? “Yes. Absolutely. As soon as I got as I wanted I was like, is that all there is?” These days she says she’s not in pursuit of anyone. “Just my friendships and my affections with my animals and with people who are already on my side. Another very strange that happened in widowhood which I never expected is that people can react very negatively to you and be very nasty. That somehow you haven’t done enough. Or they’re owed something. I think that happens all the time around death. There’s an expectation perhaps of money or inheritance. You think people are going to wonderful and comforting and empathic, but they’re fucking greedy. That’s all I have to say about it. So you get a nice dose of human nature and it can take the sterm and drum out of you. In a way whatever can get you through this, even if it’s anger at a person or two for you to plight your sorrow, it will get you through it. It will get you through the pain because the pain is something that gnaws away at you and it’s like an affliction. Whereas at least with anger you can strike it out and get it out of you. That no suffering pain is very difficult. So in a way finding myself in a position where I had to be self-protective was good.”
She takes a fork full of salty caramel chocolate tart. “People don’t want you to be needy. They want nothing to do with a needy person. They want you as strong as an ox. People who have known you strong don’t like to see you needy. Eventually you get a little hardened. It’s not an easy time for women right now. Men have never been more shrill or more feminine. I’ve never known so many gay people. perhaps it’s the opposition. Everyone wants to settle in with people who are more like them.”
Does she? “Do I want to be a lesbian? No. I think when you undergo the loss of a mate sex is the least of it. It seems trivial. I look around right now if I’m in a restaurant or waiting for someone or on the street. I look at men and I think, how old are you? What kind of man would want a woman my age? Would it be a man with salt and pepper hair and a pinstripe suit? Who would it be? Would it be some sort of artistic type that would want to have a shag on the beach? Would it be Rupert Murdoch or Warren Buffet or Donald Trump? Is there a template for the perfect man now? At one point it was Brad Pitt wasn’t it. But who would it be now? I suppose Jack was a universal template.” A pause. A smile. She had Jack the universal template. “I don’t know where the template is now.”
We discuss that everyone’s template is perhaps based on some kind of psychological father figure. Her father was a womaniser who lived only in the pursuit of passion in that moment. He never thought of consequences. No surprise then that Nicholson and her father loved each other.
“I read another book about my father. Every time I read about him he’s making love to more women. This man has a more active love life than I do and he’s been dead 20 years. And then I read about my poor mother waiting around for him and tolerating his stuff. That’s not something I’d be tempted to do now.”
Has she ever done that? “I think I was doomed to replicate that kind of thing. But now, no. My type was, he’s out the door, he must be good. A gorgeous deep-voiced flatterer. The bad dad. I understand now that you don’t have to jump into anything. There’s a certain period of widowhood grace. I completely understand the way you would wear black clothing for a few years, to keep you away from the world. And that’s not unhealthy. You need it. When you’ve been administering to someone who’s incredibly sick, trying to be everything to their nothing, you pour so much of yourself out, you are vulnerable, you are shaky after that. You need a period to rebuild.
“There is this constant reminder that we are alone and there’s no mistaking that. It’s not really a deception. Once in a while you will leave yourself to be part of a couple. You stop making decisions on your own and for yourself. As part of a couple – I’ve been in that position where someone has said, what are you doing this summer? And I say I’m going to do this and that. And I get that sidelong look from my partner who’s like, what about we? You’re going to do what? What about us? And I think it’s not about us, it’s about me.”
In her relationship with Graham she never felt dominated. She was able to be her own person and be with someone else. She wouldn’t know how to do a relationship as one half of a couple. “My relationships haven’t lasted as long as myself, so as a single entity I’m going to own it. Going to New York scares me, but I’m going with it. Where I’m going to be, who am I going to be with, who I’m not going to be with – I don’t even have a child to make those decisions around. It’s all about me now.”
She talks about her horses that are upstate on her ranch. She is sad they won’t be going to New York. “They are extremely intuitive. They can tell by the feel of you if you are tentative on their back.” She talks about CeCe a big strong piebald mare with a big head, the horse that had been given to her by her father’s last wife.
“I’ve got to my ranch and said I’m going to ride all my horses today. I started with the ones I knew best and saved her to the end. I got on top of her and within seconds I was sailing back to the ground on a cloud of dust. I looked at her immense buttocks. She was an incredible animal and I was like a spider scurrying away from her and then I thought I really don’t need to kill myself this way. I used to take risks all the time to really really risk, but now I don’t stand up on the back of motorways going 80mph on an Italian autoroute. I was an athlete and a daredevil, I always took emotional risks, I always put myself in at the deep end.” Has she stopped? “I’d think twice before I took big risks now whereas I never used to think that way.” Does she regret any of those risks? “Not at all. Some were fun and some a bit hurtful. I got over it a lot of love poems later.”
She talks about the shift in her and the shift of her whole family to the east coast. Danny will be going east working on some projects and nephew Jack is in Boardwalk Empire. He used to go out with Cat Deeley. “I think they were both too big for the relationship. They both wanted big careers as well.”
Briefly there’s a look of nostalgia. You see her or you feel her reminiscing about big relationships with big characters, tumultuous ones. Now those love poems? “Thrown away or in the trash.”
Now and again you get a glimpse of a naughty look, a sense of adventure. She may not be wanting to ride the big bucking horse but gradually she’ll work out a new ride.

Andre Rieu

The second I enter Andre Rieu’s Hollywood hotel suite a camera is pointed at me. A reality TV camera crew follows him at all times. There’s something about Rieu that enjoys to be always on, always the showman, and the man who never stops.
It is that specific drive that’s turned him from just a man with a violin to a kind of high priest of the waltz. Last year when he toured with his Johann Strauss Orchestra his shows outsold any other male touring artist in the world including Bruce Springsteen. His last album Forever Vienna reached Number 2 in the pop chart; in all he has sold over 22 million albums.
He started off as a violinist in a classical orchestra in Holland. Now he has an empire of which one of his sons, Pierre, is vice-president and here with him today.
The show is quite a spectacle. He plays his violin and conducts an orchestra that contains ladies in full crinolines. There are always thousands of flowers and hundreds of balloons. Once he performed with an entire castle which was rebuilt for each performance. But more of that later.
He’s Dutch, 61, with long flowing rock star hair. No comb over or transplant involved. He’s got this weird trick of seeing everything, missing nothing. Always remembering you, even if he only met you for five minutes. His eyes are beyond piercing. They can look at you from the stage and find you in an audience. And he can make people waltz. Unexpectedly rows of normal people find themselves swaying and mesmerised pied piper style into waltzing.
I persuade the cameras to go away. Rieu looks a little crestfallen as he tells me how much his popularity has soared even more in his native Holland and Australia since he engaged them. “They see me on the road, they see me on stage, they see in fact he’s a nice guy, somebody they can relate to. And they see me how I relate to my orchestra, a bunch of friends.”
Rieu loves to be seen, to connect. But he also loves to be in charge. “The tape is mine, the camera team is mine and I decide what’s in it.”
Rieu is so warm you imagine him always dipped in sunlight. He lives in a castle in Maastricht where the real D’Artagnon, who Dumas’ fictional character was based on, was said to have had his last breakfast before he died in battle serving Louis XIV. As a child he used to take piano lessons in that castle, but he dreamed of living in it and filling it with chandeliers. And this is the other extraordinary quirk: he’s the god of positive thinking; if he imagines it happening he somehow makes it.
“I think I told you once before I’m an unhealable positive optimist.” So what happens when things go wrong, he must feel not just disappointed but devastated? “That depends on what’s gone wrong. I had this huge financial crisis when I made a castle to tour with and sent it to Australia a few years ago. We copied it room for room from a Viennese castle. It was so beautiful. Playing in it I thought Strauss must have felt like this.” He raises his head and opens his arms like a lion taking the sun.
His son Pierre was the architect for the castle. He looks just like him, younger, without the wild hair. “Without him it wouldn’t have been done,” says Rieu. Pierre interrupts, “Without me there wouldn’t have been a financial crisis trying to build an exact replica of a castle to tour with.” Rieu says, “No, no, no. Without you it wouldn’t have existed. It brought us a financial crisis and it gave us media attention that you couldn’t pay for. Without it we wouldn’t be sitting here doing this interview. After the castle incident we were so famous in Australia we were able to get a record deal in the UK.” Indeed they are signed with industry giants Universal.
So what exactly happened with the castle? “We started to build one but it had to be scrapped because the fire people wouldn’t pass it. We started another one and discovered that the ticket sales were so huge that we had to build another one to play back to back otherwise we wouldn’t have time to take it down and rebuild it. So we had three castles: the scrapped fire hazard one and the two because of the ticket sales.
“So, when things go wrong there is always a positive side. The bank people were very concerned, but also very helpful and I was on the front of Billboard and sold more tickets than any other male artist. So that was no so bad. That was in 2008.
Last summer he had another crisis. He had to postpone his sold out UK arena tour because he had a sudden illness. A viral infection of the vestibular nerve which left him unable to stand up. “Yes, it was a real crisis. I was lying in my bed and suddenly the whole room started to shake. I couldn’t stand up. It was a shock to everybody. And now I’m here again standing on the stage. I see it as a positive thing because immediately the night it happened I started to change my life. My wife and Pierre’s as well (Marjorie, his wife of 37 years, works for him managing the concerts, creating the sets and costumes, as does Pierre).
“From the moment the doctor came immediately and said it’s a virus, there’s no pill, there’s only one thing for Andre to do and that’s rest. Rest is a strange word for me. I was at home for three months and had to cancel a British and Australian tour, or rather postpone.”
He spent three months in his castle – a beautiful place. He has an orangerie where he likes to sit in and relax and watch his collection of rare butterflies flutter. He designed and built the butterfly house himself.
“That was always a dream. Other people might want to buy a Ferrari, but I wanted a butterfly house. I’d built it together with a blacksmith. We designed it together.”
The virus made him lose his balance. “It was work pressure. It suddenly happened because I was very overworked. So I’m going to do much less. For example I made German television shows for five years in a row in the summer. That means everyone goes on holiday while I jump into a studio and sit in a dark hole editing. No vacation. And I was proud I never had a vacation.” He shakes his head.
Despite his constant touring the world he would will himself never to have jet lag. “Relaxing for me was sleeping.” The virus was a wake-up call. Perhaps enough of one, but he still seems fairly unstoppable. “On stage I feel much better. Somebody up there told me I needed a rest. It was a shock. I’ve never been ill in my life. I mean I might have had a cough or something, but when I went on stage I was always OK. Maybe I believed that I could go on and nothing ever happened to me. Perhaps it was a warning that I could have had a stroke or something much worse. So it was something telling me, ‘Andre, come back to your roots and just do what you like to do, and that’s making music’. I stopped all the rest.”
The rest included building projects, public speaking, public appearances at launching new businesses, “For me listening to music could never make me relax. It makes me alive. The waltz is a very important part of my life. It’s a very important way for me to express my positiveness, bringing humour to the world. The waltz can be sad, at the same time uplifting. You have to see life from both sides, and the waltz encapsulates that. If you’re in my audience you give yourself to me and the waltz will grab you.”
If he wasn’t making music what would he do? “I’d be an architect because I feel that building and music are similar. I’m building on stage. Not like a priest that wants to educate, but I’m building up an audience that loves music and I’m building in my way which is through the heart. I’m not against people sitting and listening to beautiful classical music. I sometimes feel something is missing and it’s the interaction that you will see tonight and me wanting to be together with them. That’s my job, I know what I’m doing. I can guide them.
“I think as long as you build you live. I think the Emperor Hadrian said that, and he built a very long wall. In Maastricht we are building the whole time. I have carpenters and construction people on my payroll. We have just finished a little house for Pierre around the corner from the castle. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world for me to visit my grandchildren. He has twins.” Pierre tells me they are 13 months and eight days.
“I think my whole crisis was due to them.” Being away from them? “No. They were born on the day I arrived in Australia and I was completely overwhelmed by emotion. He sent me a picture by text of the first and then the second. I was crying the whole day and I just wanted to go home.”
Pierre shows me pictures, very cute, Linda and Lyeke. He tells me that this morning he’s installed a webcam so that if they are on tour they don’t miss anything and this morning they saw their first steps.
“I am serious. The twins are what changed me. The birth of these two girls was so essential and so pure, I felt that this is life and I should leave the whole other shit behind.”
Did he not feel that when his children were born? “No, I tell you it is different.” He has two sons, Pierre and also Mark, who is a painter. “If Mark would run the company there wouldn’t be a company. He lives in the sky he paints.”
Why does he think having grandchildren is so much more affecting? “I suppose when you have children you are in the middle of your life. You’re young and you’re building up your life. Somehow having them now it has overwhelmed me, and perhaps because they are girls. We had two boys and all the dogs we had were males and suddenly – girls.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with his relationship with his sons. Pierre tells me, “We never argue.” Rieu says, “It’s not like I’m the father, you’re the son.” Indeed Pierre doesn’t even call him dad, he calls him Andre.
He is a strange mixture of a laid back person and one who pays excessive attention to detail. Most of all I love his eccentricity. He told me once before he planned to play a concert at the North Pole. He wanted people from all over the world to come to get attention for global warming. “I would earn no money but I’d very much like for the polar bears to waltz. They do dance, you know.” He is an avid conservationist and peace lover. He wants Israelis and Palestinians to waltz together to his tunes.
His optimism is indeed relentless. He tells me when he was first starting out he got invited to a meeting with a promoter in New York. They flew to New York to meet him “and then we got a call saying could we do a conference call with him which we could have done from home and he was two blocks down the road. A lot of people would say why weren’t you angry. I would say, why would I jeopardise nice concerts and disappoint my audience and I didn’t want to feel I’d wasted the money on the ticket. So I took the call and it was the best thing. It worked out really well. I suppose it takes a belief in yourself, something that no one can take away so you don’t feel diminished by these things.”
Growing up he always felt slightly displaced, different from the rest of his family. His father had been a conductor of classical music and believed in its traditions.
Perhaps the source of his passion comes from rebellion. “My father was a conductor and I would stand in the window and play melodies and my mother would try and make me play scales. There was a conflict. There were six children and I was the black sheep. The others were all white.”
Musically what he’s doing is not classical traditional, it’s changing time signature slightly to make everything waltzable. His background was straightforward classical. “I was convinced that this was not the life and it must be possible to play music with more feelings and more love. They always said ‘poor Andre, he’ll never be anything’.
“My mother would always say to me don’t look people in the eye. And that’s what I do every single night on stage: I communicate. I don’t see my mother very often. She met her great grandchildren for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Pierre contacted her and asked her. I don’t blame her for anything. My father died 14 years ago. He saw me in the beginning of the Strauss orchestra. But from the first moment we had success. He wrote me a letter and said there’s only one person who can do this. He didn’t tell me he wrote it, I heard it from other people that he was proud of me. You ask yourself why. I mean, I’m sitting here. What was the problem?”
Rieu was always different. “When I was a little boy lying in my bed I was convinced I wanted to marry a girl whom I worked with, and that’s true.” His wife, a former teacher, who financed the start of his orchestra, still works alongside him. “I wanted an equal. When Marjorie gave birth to Pierre I can still remember it was two in the morning and at nine she was there with her agenda and her phone.
“I met Marjorie when I was 11 and she was 13. She was in a class with my sister. We met again when we were 22 and 24 and went on our first date. But I think I really knew when I was 11 that she was the one.” Of course he did because that’s in keeping with his magical thinking. He’s very interested in space travel and other universes. When I was a little boy I would always look at plants in the garden and think of what other worlds go on in this plant. I knew then there was not just one universe.” We debate infinity for a brief moment in time.
“It’s cosy here I admit. But yeah, of course you think about death. I’m afraid of death. Everybody is. I want to stay here with my wife and children and grandchildren. I want to be on stage. I want to live as long as possible. In Oxford there’s a professor who says in five years we will be able to stay alive forever. Not us, we are too old, but future children can decide how many thousands of years they want to live for. You can still be young, you won’t be old and ill. I would definitely do it. Imagine the wisdom you’d have with 2,000 years experience. But more importantly, I like it here now. People tell me I’ve changed since the crisis I’ve had. Marjorie says I’m back to the boy I married. I take it as a warning.
“An Indian healer came to my concert and told me I was a very old soul here for thousands of years. People have said perhaps I’m the reincarnation of Strauss. I don’t know about that. But my whole youth I felt that something was not right. That I was here in this family but I was different.” Does he feel a bit of an alien? “Yes, perhaps.”
Perhaps it’s that feeling of being dislocated or distanced from the world that pushes him to be an uber communicator with his eyes always looking like they’re burning from within.
That night at the concert he was fully himself. His long hair flowing. His violin zig-zagging passionately. He strides an incredible line – sentimental but heartfelt. He does look you in the eyes. I watch him watch me arrive late and see exactly where I’m sitting amongst 40,000 people. Giant screens flank him upon which band members are highlighted. It’s all inclusive. He tells us that one blue crinolined lady has fought and won her battle with breast cancer; applause; music saved her life; more applause. Then a few tears. The waltzes keep on coming along with Michael Jackson tunes turned into waltzes. In the background an American flag. By the end of the concert the half of the audience that is not weeping is out of its seats waltzing. Even those who have never waltzed before.

Dominic West

Even my lesbian friends think Dominic West is hot. Maybe it’s because there is something about him that is so purely, ridiculously Male, charming yet flawed. They love him in ‘The Affair,’ the series for which he was Golden Globe nominated. 

He plays Noah Solomon, a teacher and failing novelist. His wife is hugely rich and his father-in-law a hugely successful writer. Classic. He’s undermined, therefore available. The series is dark and gripping, told in separate episodes from the man’s point of view and then the woman’s. There’s lots of sex in it and it’s quite odd to be going to meet somebody who you’ve last seen on screen in just their boxers. 

I’m going to meet him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush, London. When I arrive only his wife and youngest daughter are in. He hasn’t told her about the interview. She gets on with making her daughter breakfast, unphased by the stranger in her kitchen. Catherine Fitzgerald seems unflappable, capable. It’s not long before he arrives and he’s instantly attentive and makes me coffee. A very good cup of coffee. He did it nonchalantly, like he didn’t care about making me the best cup of coffee, but he did it anyway. 

He’s just come back from the school run dropping off his three children. Only the 2 year old, Christabel is on her mother’s hip.

You can’t see where the charm ends and the bad boy begins or perhaps he is just very good at playing bad boys or at least men who are flawed.

His wife Catherine you can tell instantly suffers no fools. She’s busy getting things done, looking after 4 children and running her landscape gardening business.  Their garden is beautiful, it manages to look wild yet perfectly manicured, a riot of happy colours and an oasis of calm. 

I’m not sure why actors invite journalists into their homes. It seems to be asking for trouble. Who doesn’t want to know what their bathroom’s like, what books they read, if they’re tidy or chaotic. We’re in the garden because the garden is remarkable. The house inside looks like a busy family home, a big wooden table in the kitchen, it’s lived in, not self-conscious. It’s his work that’s been extraordinary. 

His Richard Burton in Burton and Taylor was magnetic, as the alcoholic Detective Jimmy McNulty in ‘The Wire’ he was sensational. In his latest film the animated ‘Finding Dory,’ he’s reunited with his Wire colleague Idris Elba. They play lazy, bad boy sea lions with English accents, their scenes together are the funniest in the movie. How lovely to see British humour in the midst of PC-PG Disney. 

‘Finding Dory,’ the sequel to Finding Nemo. Dory, played by Ellen DeGeneres, is the fish with short term memory loss. “Anyone who’s got kids must have watched ‘Finding Nemo’ 50 times. Idris Elba and I played two British sea lions who like to sit on a rock and carp on about things. We live in Ocean World, somewhere in the West Coast of America, we get fed sprats every day. It was great being fed Sprats and being with Idris. We had very few scenes together in ‘The Wire,’ he was my antagonist, so it was only in his last season that I was observing him, surveilling him that we got to hang out. It was very nice we got to reunite.” he says smiling and for a minute looking like his smug, lazy sea lion character. 

He’s looking very whiskery today. A dark beard seems to scribble out his distinctive features. I feel it’s even etched out his trademark wicked grin.

He’s often summoned to play really dark characters,  he was Fred West in ‘Appropriate Adult’. Even the real Fred West’s daughter thought the likeness was uncanny and he captured a spirit of evil. His wife was revolted by it. His sisters freaked out that people would think they were related to Fred West because they shared the same surname.  More recently he was super creepy Walt Camby, the greedy gazillionaire banker in ‘Money Monster’ with George Clooney and Julia Roberts. How is it that he does evil so well? 

“Errrr don’t know, just got an evil face” he smiles sweetly. He’s charming, that’s for sure, but he’s not in the least bit flirty. I thought he loved all women and flirted with all of them. I blame the beard. It’s an instant barrier. In a recent interview he said, “I think women should be more indulgent of affairs, I really do. It’s daft to kick someone out over a fling. Isn’t it? Everyone should turn a blind eye to men’s behaviour between the ages of 40 and 50. Let it all blow over.” 

He doesn’t want to elaborate on that today. He look a little embarrassed. Maybe because we’re in the family home. Maybe that’s why we’re here. So he can guard his own mouth. The Dominic West who shouts his mouth off and says the first thing that comes into his head is not around today. 

He was born 46 years ago in Sheffield, the sixth of seven children. His Irish father owned a plastics factory that did rather well. Being the sixth of seven perhaps made him feel anonymous, like he had to try harder to be centre stage, perhaps that’s why he became an actor. He has four children with Catherine, Dora, nine and Christabelle two and sons, Senan, seven, Francis, six and a daughter, Martha, who’s now 17, from a previous relationship with the aristocrat Polly Astor (granddaughter of Nancy).

He’s got five sisters and he thinks that this knowledge and being surrounded by so many females makes him somewhat of a feminist.

Much has been made of the fact that he went to Eton. He’s a couple of years older than Damien Lewis, you begin to wonder if Eton had a really great Drama department. Did he feel that he was a bit of an outsider as everyone else was so posh? 

“No, it wasn’t like that at all, it’s such a big school. And a great school actually. It helps you find what you’re good at and once you’ve found it, life becomes easier and I found acting almost immediately. Damien Lewis was a few years below me, so I didn’t know him at school, he was a very good footballer, I wasn’t but I was quite good at Rugby and when I was cast as Hamlet aged 16 the director said I had to choose between the two, no more Rugby.”

Was that because he didn’t want Hamlet on crutches? “Yes, and also the training took rehearsal time.” He wasn’t homesick at all? ” Yes, very much so for the first year but acting saved me, I became known for it and respected for it.”

Accepted or respected? “Respected. Maybe this is with rose tinted hindsight, it’s not a bullying school or a particularly tough school, it’s a place that respects people’s differences. I would want my kids to go to a school where their passions were brought out.”

Will he send his boys there? “We haven’t decided, they are only 6 and 7. My inclination is I don’t want them to leave home, I want to keep them here as much as possible.”

He really loves being at home, he loves hanging out with his children and being in the lovely garden his wife created.  You can tell he’s the sort of man that likes a solid base. It allows him to be flighty when he needs it. He met his wife at Trinity College, Dublin, they were together until he went to drama school and then it ended. 

Was it a painful break up? “No, it was geographical, it was just that I was moving away. We always kept in touch, then we found we were both living in London and things had moved on… Meaning that I wasn’t with the mother of my daughter anymore and she wasn’t with her husband. So we hooked up.” 

He makes it sound very practical but I ask him getting back with the woman he was together with at college is very romantic? “Yes” he says not wanting to be drawn in. They got married in 2010, in Ireland in the grounds of her family estate. He wore a shamrock coloured waistcoat and their children were baptised the next day. The family castle Glin Castle in West Limerick has been in the Fitzgerald’s family for 700 years.  It was recently sold for £4.6 million, which must have brought a great deal of family sadness. Catherine is the daughter of the 29th and last Knight of Glin. Desmond Fitzgerald died in 2011 with no male heir. Glin Castle hosted Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful back in the day. Catherine said at the time that they couldn’t afford the upkeep of such a place. Shorty before her father’s death he said, “It is my greatest hope that Glin will remain in the family and be enjoyed and cherished long into the future. 

And it seems sad that that’s now not the case but all he will say is that he can’t talk about his wife’s family.

He grew up catholic, is he still catholic? “Culturally more than anything else we were brought up going to mass every week. I don’t do that anymore but I enjoy the liturgy, the music, the culture.” He enjoyed a period of closeness with his father when his parents separated and he moved back to Ireland. “My parents had seven children and were married for 26 years and when they split up it turned out to be a great opportunity for me to spend the last 10 years of my father’s life getting to know him very well. I became very close with him. We still have his house, a little bungalow in Ireland that he lived in there. He left that to all of us to enjoy and we go there often. It’s a bungalow by the sea.” Do you go there to check in with your Irish heritage? “No, it’s just that it’s a really nice spot.”

There’s quite a few pauses where you feel him reeling himself in. He’s wary with the interview process because he’s been lured into talking too much and then regretting it. Indeed, when I first met him at a jazz evening at the Caprice a few years ago, he spent a whole evening talking about how he had been filleted like a kipper by an interviewer. He felt that he’d been trapped and he’d had sleepless nights worrying about it. Not that he cared about being a target but he cared very much about the other people who were embroiled. There’s no doubt there’s been pain and passion shared in his life, he couldn’t be such a precise actor, drawn to characters known for their complexity. 

For me his portrayal of Richard Burton was thrilling, so flawed, so vulnerable, so nasty, so amazing, “He was a hero of mine from an early age. I read Melvin Bragg’s book ‘Rich’. It’s not an objective book it’s a paean. He was obviously deeply in love with Burton, who was a rather tragic man but a wonderful actor. When it was first suggested that I might be playing him it was daunting for me because I loved him so much. There are probably only two or three people in the world that could play Liz Taylor and Helena Bonham-Carter was probably the best of them. I didn’t know her before we met on set, she was so completely possessed by the character, I was never quite sure where Elizabeth ended and Helena began! Until afterwards and we became good friends.” 

In the past he said it was he who initiated the break up with the mother of his eldest daughter (Polly Astor), because he just wasn’t ready to settle down .Whatever other complexities surround the issue is not what he wants to talk about. He is very proud of Martha his daughter, now 17. When she was young she played Paul Bettany’s daughter in ‘Creation,’ but he’s even prouder of the fact that now she’s taking her studies seriously. 

Soon, he’ll be going to upstate New York for another series of ‘The Affair’. For someone who loves his home so much, he certainly spends a long time away from it. He corrects me . ”It’s the most important factor in my decision about work, I don’t spend a lot of time away from home. This year I’ll do ‘The Affair’ and my family will come out for the summer and Autumn half-term and then I’ll be at home for the rest of the year. It’s all very carefully thought out because they are at an age now where I don’t want to miss any of it. It’s the most important thing in my life at the moment.”

It’s interesting to me that his work schedule is so carefully choreographed as he doesn’t want to be away from his family. Probably because we think of him as being like the shiftier characters he likes to play. ‘The Affair’ is the kind of show people get really obsessed with and love to binge watch. I heard recently that his wife had never even watched it. Is that because she didn’t want to see him naked and shagging? “No not at all. She just hasn’t got time. She’s so extremely busy. She runs a very successful career and four kids. She’s involved in a 9-year project to redo the gardens at Hillsborough Castle in Ireland, it’s a massive job and the plan is to attract 50,000 visitors a year. She really IS amazing.”

Catherine has been wafting in and out, getting things done, managing to look beautiful with not even a hint of make up or a hairbrush. She has now managed to catch an episode. It was on a plane and her attitude to all the sex is it’s just his job. “And that’s my attitude too. If you’ve got 30 people standing around sticking microphones in your face, it’s not an erotic experience at all.”

He pulls a face and goes on to tell me how much he doesn’t like being on top. “If you’re on the bottom you don’t have to take your clothes off.” He doesn’t think  should take their clothes off for sex scenes either no matter how it’s sold to them about the part requiring it. “Of course there are circumstance where that is the case. But often it’s just not true and that’s why from the age of 45-50 is difficult for women, Hollywood is no longer interested.”

You see he is a feminist. Of course that’s not true for 46 year-old males!

A few years ago he walked to the South Pole with Walking Wounded Soldiers. “There was a blind guy, a Scottish soldier with no legs, a couple of American women soldiers with only one leg. The great thing is if you are with walking wounded, you can’t complain, it spurred me on to see them.”

Prince Harry went on the same expedition. He has described Prince Harry as hilarious, his still for making lavatories and when his team arrived at the Pole he drank champagne from a prosthetic leg.  “Very few people get to go there and that’s why I went. It’s a vast frozen ocean, there’s nothing there, not even bacteria. Every footprint, every time you go to the loo, it’s there forever.”

It does seem to be a pretty diverse team? “I think it was for TV profile that they had me, but they had Prince Harry so they didn’t need me and in the end I wasn’t really used at all but it was a way of getting publicity for a charity that aims to get work for ex-servicemen, particularly wounded ones. I’m also doing a walk across the Western Front. My grandfather was blown up there in 1916, not many people my age are close to the first world war. My brother sent a picture of him dressed in rabbit furs aged about 20 and somehow that was really affecting for me. Lads of 19 and 20 being so cold and hungry that their infantry uniform was supplemented by rabbit furs.” He’s doing the walk for the same charity and our moment of sadness is punctuated by his little girl now gurgling and laughing. 

“What amazes me is how my parents managed with 7 of us. My mum always said once you have three they look after themselves, which I’m yet to witness because at the moment they are all just trying to kill each other. I’m amazed at what my parents managed. They gave us a very, very happy childhood and I’m hoping to do that with mine as well. “

I had expected West to be a whole lot darker.  Who knew that he was hiding such sweetness?  Domestic is that last thing I would have imagined him as.  Before I leave I watch him playing with his daughter, who stopped crying at last in her father’s arms. I hadn’t expected to be ‘Finding Daddy’. That just adds to his allure.  Dominic West, charming man, bad boy, good dad.

Mariah Carey

There are a lot of people in Mariah’s house – a grandiose mansion in a gated community in a suburb of Los Angeles. There’s a camera crew, sound guys, make-up people, photographers, photographer’s assistants, housekeepers, manager, manager’s assistant, bodyguards and people who carry things around.

Outside it’s blackly dark and deathly quiet, inside it’s intense buzzing tour preparation and all of this must be filmed for a documentary.  For a person who is notoriously private, it seems strange but not as strange as the hours she and the cast of many seem to keep.

She brushes past me in a black laced up gown and vertiginous Tom Ford heels. Everyone else in the house, including her glamorous manager, seem to be wearing Louboutins. The glamorous manager has reptile Louboutins, drips exquisite jewllery and long thick curls. She tells me I may have to wait..  Mariah has just come back from an event and there is all kinds of filming and I am sure not what else has to be done.  A hundred things .So I wait.

I wait in the house that arrived pre-furnished with its over-stuffed couches, mahogany twirly bits and endless chandeliers. The bathroom with its black velvet walls and its black diamond monogrammed hand towels.

I inspect the silver-framed pictures of Mariah and her twins Monroe and Moroccan: they’re at the beach, they’re on a boat, they’re in the sea.  They look relaxed in some other life that is the opposite to this bubble of chaos. It’s always just Mariah and her beautiful babies – there’s no man involved. There’s not even a photographic hint of her former husband actor-rapper-entrepreneur-TV presenter Nick Cannon or a hint of her new fiance James Packer, son of the billionaire publishing magnate. He is described as businessman, investor and philanthropist but even Mariah seems unclear about what he actually does.

I’m in a corner perched on a window seat.  I email her manager who is somewhere else in the  cavernous house to say I need to leave by midnight, knowing there’s very little chance I will.

Every aspect of Mariah’s life is to be filmed and therefore I must be filmed. I resist. This does not go down well.  No one seems to understand why I am not thrilled. When a lens the size of a small television looms in, I reach for my jacket to go. Mariah says in her velvet purr: “why don’t you want to be filmed Chrissy?”

Because I want to talk to her not worry about a camera.  Because I want cozy, intimate not a performance.   She gets it, she asks them to go away. She seems relieved too, that she’s not being scrutinized.

Why does she have all these people in her house? “I want people to see the whole thing, it’s a busy time right now and I happen to be on a night schedule.” (Indeed, communicating with her in the day has been impossible, not because she is a diva but because she was simply asleep). “I do sleep in the daytime but not all day because of the kids so it’s a little bit sporadic. I need to sleep and so I do. I’ve always been a night person. When I was six years old I wasn’t able to sleep. It started then. I was up all night and that was the precedent.”

I am sitting on a velvet cushion on the floor beside her who is in what can only loosely be described as a chair.  It’s a multi pillowed arm chair that is halfway between a couch and a chair for a giant.  She looks tiny, whatever diet she has been on has clearly worked.

When I look up it’s into her mesmerizing dark eyes, soulful, vulnerable, shy eyes. You imagine her as that child who couldn’t sleep, who felt she didn’t fit anywhere with a white Irish mother and an absent African-Venezuelan father. She was three when her parents divorced. But still, a determined spirit whose only catharsis was singing and writing songs and who never really considered she would do anything else. I am overwhelmed about an incredible sweetness about her.  The fact that she’s not confident or showy she doesn’t carry herself as a woman who knows she has the five octave range voice, one of the single most identifiable voices of her generation.  The last time she toured Europe was 2003 and she wants to make sure everything is right. After that she will come back for a residency in Vegas  which, she says, is an entirely different show.

“I love everything to do with music, I love the creative process, my favourite place is the studio. I love writing songs – to me that’s the best gift.”

She’s been writing songs since she was six and she used to sing them underneath the table because she felt that was the only way she could express herself.

She nods. “t was cathartic. Suddenly I’d come up with a melody. It would come from out of the blue, like a gift, nothing like it.” Prepping for the tour with its endless rehearsals and dress fittings seems less creative. She nods.

Does she have a special diet? An exercise regime? “Yes. My diet is very bleak.” Bleak is one of her favourite words. She giggles. “I overuse the word because there is a lot of bleakness going on. My bleak diet is horrendous but I don’t want to tell anyone about it because it’s none of their business.” I tell her the bleak diet is working well. She sinks further back into her pillows. “I just don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want people commenting.” It seems like she gets hurt if there are nasty comments and a picture where she looks fat but this Mariah in before me is super svelte and even much photographed magnificent breasts are reined in. She’s losing her voice a little. She is rasping.  I read that she sleeps with ten humidifiers. She nods. “I need them. At least four or five around my bed. I want them in the bedroom, a group of them. I also like to have a steam.”

Her children will be going on tour with her. “My son keeps asking can we go on an airplane. They’ve been traveling since they were three months old.” Her daughter Monroe, named after Mariah’s long-time girl crush Marilyn, likes to sing.

“She was singing last night with her friend. I can tell she’s got a really good ear – she can mimic what I can do. But she’s only four-and a half and it’s not fair for me to push it on her, so I am allowing her to be who she is. At the moment she’d rather just be silly with it. She knows she’s named after Marilyn and she can recognise her in pictures but I haven’t shown her the movies yet. They are into Disney and Halloween. It took a lot to get them to transition into Christmas.” So she has mini Goth twins? “No, I’m gonna nip that in the bud.”

She had a difficult pregnancy. Pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and it was suggested that the twins should be induced at 33 weeks. She refused because she didn’t want to be separated from them by an incubator when they were born. “I wanted to keep them with me as long as I could which was until 35 weeks and that worked out good.

There’s a flutter of her luscious eyelashes and I admire the diamond butterfly ring and then I notice the engagement ring. It’s not so much a rock, it’s a brick. It’s a mini choc-ice.

I wonder if she met Packer when she toured Australia. “No. I met him in Aspen where I go every year for Christmas. My friend Brett Ratner (film director and producer) are partners in business. So he invited me over. I didn’t feel like leaving the house but I went anyway. This was about two years ago and I didn’t see him again until I was at a movie premier, we started talking, joking around – stuff like that.” What’s his business with Brett Radner? I don’t want to talk too much about what he does but they produce movies. That’s not his entire job but that’s one of them.”

She once said that growing up without a strong male figure in her life on a day-to-day basis affected a lot of her decision making. It perhaps made her see her first husband, record company boss Tommy Mottola, as a stable father figure. He ended up being stifling. Does she still crave that kind of stability? “My perspective on that has changed. I don’t think it was because I was without a father figure, I think there were lots of elements about my childhood that made me who I am. Some made me stronger, some made me more vulnerable. It’s was a combo plate.”

So what’s on her combo plate now? “Oh my gosh it’s just way too full.” Does she feel happy? “Sometimes.”

“Do you feel happy?” Rarely I tell her  “Really? We have to change that. You just have to find the comedy in everything. There’s just so much nonsense that’s just not worth spiraling over.

She oozes empathy. I bring it back to her. Does she work compulsively?

“I had the whole summer off. I was relaxing with the kids. Right now, there’s a lot on. I do really enjoy performing. I like having an experience with people trying to make them feel that they are not just watching an untouchable person. I want them to feel like they are in my living room. I like to talk to them a lot. I want to give them something different.”

Is the dress she’s wearing, a figure-hugging black maxi dress, a tour outfit or a lounging in the house outfit? “I am wearing it because I went to an event but I can lounge in this – it’s stretchy.” Although her high heels have been cast off, she still walks on her toes. “Ever since I was a little girl I liked to walk on tippy toes like a Barbie. My babysitter used to say I was walking like a Barbie. I only had one Barbie and I cut its hair.  Then I went to beauty school but dropped out. I was singing and working in Manhattan and I didn’t have time for those early morning classes. But I feel that I’ve learnt in life because I’ve worked with almost every great hair and make-up person there is. My tips? I never will wear red lips – they just don’t look good on me. My ideal day? Lying on the beach without a camera or a phone surrounded by pink sand and the water.” That’s sounding a little honeymooney.

Do you have your wedding planned?  “It’s a secret.” It’s really happening? She waves the brick at me and says: “I’m not doing this for laughs.” That ring is pretty hilarious in the way that if you’ve got that ring on your finger you will definitely be grinning. “I enjoy it. When you grow up without a lot of things… I try not to take things for granted.” Why does she like the idea of marriage as opposed to just being in love- she has two failed ones behind her so she is not burnt from the experience. She looks at me very seriously. “I am very traditional. I have babies, it’s more appropriate. I don’t know if most people can relate to that but that’s just how I feel”

Did you know straight away that he was the one or was he a slow burn? “Oh we’re not going to talk too much about this part?” she says sounding a little tortured. “If I start talking about this relationship people will interpret it in their own way, so I think it’s safer for everyone involved to just not talk about the very personal aspect of this relationship.” But is she happy? “Yes. And content but I am also very busy.” Her voice is now cracking with exhaustion. “I am a private person.” And that brings me back to why the cameras are here. “We can’t announce what it’s for yet. It’s a very big thing for me.” A very private person who now has no privacy. “Yes, it’s annoying. I wanted to document this tour because I don’t know when I am going on tour again. I wish I could have documented other tours. I am documenting it for the fans, they’ll love it.”

Much has been made of the fact that Mariah would like to do some more acting. She was extremely well received in the movie Precious, which was hugely applauded but won’t be drawn any further on if she would ever swap singing for acting. She doesn’t enjoy being snapped by the paparazzi and quizzes me when I say I saw a photo of her online recently eating ice-cream. “Ice-cream? Not on the bleak diet. That must have been very old.”

So many contradictions. She feels invaded by the paparazzi and yet there are cameras in her house at all hours.

“I am a pretty insecure person but I have to get over that because this is the reality of my life. I look better than I looked a few months ago but I am definitely not one of those people who says ‘i look amazing today’. I have to point out this is a rented house – I would never have overhead lighting. High hats, they call them. In my apartment in New York it’s all recessed lighting, chandeliers, candles. This lighting is abusive.” I tell her I interviewed Dita Von Teese recently at her house where she insists all walls should be pink with no overhead lighting so you can feel you look good when you walk around naked. “That’s my thing about the pink. I rarely walk around naked in the areas that are pink. You still want to look good with clothes on! When I was pregnant, I had a house with lots of antique mirrors on the walls so as I walked around I couldn’t help but look at myself – this huge pregnant woman. I hated myself for decorating the house with all these mirrors. I was so mad at myself.” She laughs and there’s a real lightness to her laugh.

Her manager tells me that Mariah’s light is infectious and now my whole life is going to change because she shed her light on me.  Her fairy dust has been showered.   There is something so unexpectedly intoxicating about Mariah. The eyes…the giggles….the empathic being. Definitely wasn’t expecting those. You get why people go to her shows to bathe in her glow.

Neil Diamond

Mr and Mrs Neil Diamond look strangely similar even though he is 71 and she is 42. The same eyes, the same slightly wary nature, sensitive and warm. And when they smile they smile with their whole face.

Katie has an obvious kindness about her. She looks after him both as a manager and as a wife. They met when she was working for the management company to whom he had recently signed. It was not love at first sight, it was business, until gradually she wove her way into his heart. They got married earlier this year.

He too has an almost puppy like desire to please her. Both of them seem to carry a kind of emotional weight.

He has spoken before about his life as a solitary journey – how he was lost in the creative process.

Diamond talks with his slow gravelly voice, it’s almost a purr. He’s talked before about being a loner, about how his past relationships have suffered because he was driven by his music and his songwriting.

With time and maybe love he’s realised he doesn’t have to enjoy only solitude and that he likes people as well. ‘There was no eureka moment where I went hey, I’m going to be with people and have fun. It was a gradual growing up, a gradual self-awareness. I always liked having fun with audiences.’

We are seated in a badly lit New York hotel room. Katie takes charge of pouring decaffeinated coffee. They seem extremely comfortable together. They met a year or so after he ended his long-term relationship with Australian production assistant Rae Farley. He met Farley the year after his divorce from his 25-year marriage to Marcia Murphey who he married the year he divorced his first wife, high school sweetheart Jaye Posner.

He felt a lot of guilt about the failure of his 25-year-old marriage. So much so that he didn’t bother to correct rumours that said he paid his wife $150 million, said to be the highest recorded alimony settlement at the time.

‘It wasn’t true,’ he says as he casts his eyes to the floor. He claims that newspapers simply made up the sum and he didn’t bother to correct it. Even his wife asked him about it. Was she happy with the settlement she did get? ‘She was. She got enough to live on for the rest of her life.’ Was he so generous because he felt such guilt? ‘Somewhat.’ He almost winces. ‘It’s true. I did feel bad.

‘I don’t have many feelings about my divorce  now because we’ve been divorced for 20 years. I do have some feelings of guilt about my life. Guilty that I wasn’t with my kids more because I was travelling. But I’ve spoken to all of them a number of times about it. They all have good memories of growing up and I loved them completely when I was back in town. I was theirs full-time.’

Maybe it makes it more special and intense to have a father that works on the road. Maybe if you’d been around all the time there would have been more bickering?

‘That’s right,’ his eyes lighting. ‘I have never bickered with my kids. I was always happy to see them and they were always happy to see me. And I think they still are.’

He has had a lifelong relationship with guilt. ‘I see a therapist. She is very useful. I learned to express myself and I learned about myself with the help of a psychologist. She didn’t make me a better songwriter but she made me an easier person for me to live with. She had nothing to do with my songs – that’s a solo effort. She’s made my life a lot easier because I understand things a bit better, because I’m not torturing myself.

‘I used to blame myself for everything. I have moderated my feelings over the years. Guilt and achievement and responsibility, all of these things…’

You felt guilty for achieving? ‘No. Achievement is one of the things you have to deal with. Your self-achievement, your self-image. I never felt guilty for achieving anything because I always worked for it. but sometimes I feel I am worthless, useless. What am I here for, what am I doing?’

Does he still feel like that? ‘Sometimes. And somehow you have to deal with it. My psychologist has been very helpful in opening the doors to my mind and help me understand myself and the reality of life. I see her once a week, face to face. Occasionally I’ll call her on the phone if I’m out of town. But it’s almost always face to face and I have been doing it for ten years.’

There must have been an instant knowingness when he and Katie first met. ‘No, there was nothing. She was just another business person handing me work to do and another business person I was trying to get away from. I stopped trying to get away after a year or so, once I got to know the person she was, and I liked that person very much. Katie’s got a big heart and she’s very transparent. I can read her heart from a mile away. She does a terrific English accent which makes me laugh every time she does it. Katie, remember where we were staying last time we were in London, darling?’

‘Dawchester,’ says Katie, in a very strange cockney posh. But it’s a valiant attempt. Did it take Katie a year for him to weave his way into her heart? ‘No, she loved me immediately,’ he laughs, a very low naughty laugh.

Katie says, very politely, ‘I took my work very seriously. And when we first started working together it was work on both sides. I wanted to work with him. He was one of the biggest iconic singer songwriters of all time and as a manager I was thrilled to have him as a client. We worked very closely for that first year because he was on tour and we spent a lot of time together. When we first met neither of us were interested in each other. He was work as far as I was concerned.’

They were both single and available? They both nod. I wonder if he’d resigned himself to being alone for the rest of his life after his two marriages and long-term relationship had fallen apart.

‘No, I had not resigned myself to being single, but I wasn’t looking. I was busy doing my work and Katie appeared. It was totally unplanned and unexpected.’

How does he make sure that their relationship keeps working? In the past he’s said that music was his main mistress. Music demands from him emotions that are intense. His second marriage is said to have failed because he didn’t have enough time emotionally or physically left over for his family.

Is it complicated working together having a business relationship as well as a romantic one? ‘We are still working on that because there are times where the work will interfere with our personal relationship. There are times I want to talk about something and we might be in the middle of having breakfast together. I’ll want to talk about something coming up and Katie doesn’t want to talk about that. She wants to do the crossword puzzle and have breakfast, so she’ll say “Can we talk about this later or can we set up a meeting to talk about it?” And I have to say, OK. We’ll talk about it another time.

‘We’re still in the process of working this all out. It requires some give and take on both our parts. I respect her a lot. She’s a professional. She’s very experienced. She knows the business and that allows me to not be drawn into the business part so much. It allows the creative part of me time to blossom, time for me to write songs, time for me to do what I do best.’

Does he write songs more easily when he’s happy in love or more miserable? ‘Misery has never been a productive stimulus. I’d rather be in a good frame of mind because then you’re energetic, you’re outgoing. Although I have written some of my best songs when I’ve been down and not particularly happy.

‘I get unhappy if I get stuck on a song, if I can’t get a line that is satisfactory to me or if I’m working on an idea all day and it’s not working out. That can really preoccupy and distract me. If one of my kids is sick I’m unhappy. If I get a cold I’m unhappy. If I’m underworked I’m unhappy. If I’m overworked I’m unhappy.’

He says all of this with a sense of irony. Most of that severe unhappiness seems to be in the past. He actually strikes me as a very happy man.

Diamond’s many moods from dark to exuberant, can be found on his just released The Very Best Of Neil Diamond featuring all beloved classics like Solitary Man, Sweet Caroline, Beautiful Noise, Hello Again, and You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, the duet with Barbra Streisand. He is working on songs for a new album and that is going well.

‘I’m happy because I’m occupied with something that I love doing. Keeping busy is the most important element of me being happy and of course having a wonderful wife makes me happy, to know that I don’t have to go through my life and bear it alone. That’s a happy thought for me. I have someone to talk to about it.’

Was he lonely when he met Katie? ‘I think I was probably lonely. I don’t like to be alone. I’d much rather be in a loving relationship with a woman any day than being alone.’

Did his last long-term relationship (with Rae Farley) end unhappily? ‘I’d say it did end unhappily. It wasn’t a serious relationship. It was going nowhere. There were no marriage plans. It was difficult. It lasted too long.’

Did it last too long because it’s hard to end things even though it’s hard to be in them? ‘I think so,’ he nods earnestly, still troubled by the thought of it.

On stage he has always been a flamboyant performer, over the top, fantastical gyrations that would seem impossible for a man of his age who today walks a little stiffly and places himself in a hard backed chair. He’s wearing dark jeans and a dark sweater, his face craggy and hair more salt than pepper, but he’s extremely magnetic. His eyes draw you in to their suffering and his need to connect.  He has over 60,000 followers on Twitter and he follows no one.

‘I believe I am allowed to be over the top on stage and I enjoy that part of myself. Tweeting is expressive, I wouldn’t say therapeutic, I wouldn’t put it that deeply, but I like to share what I’m thinking. Here’s a picture of my dog. It’s funny.’

The Diamonds live in LA where they love walking their dogs Poker and Shamrock and Katie likes to ride horses and spend time with her rescued cat Brigitte. Diamond is particularly close to the dog he calls Pokey who he rescued from being put to sleep. They never buy animals, only ever rescue them.

‘There was something about his eyes that got to me. He was a funny looking guy (part spaniel part something else). I looked at him and he looked at me back. There was a little bit of communication. So I asked this person who was in charge of adoption do you mind if I take this dog for a walk so I can get to know him and see if we like each other. He said sure, so I took a leash and Pokey and I went for a walk and we had a heart to heart. I asked him how he was doing and where he lived before. He was a grown-up dog, mature, and he said, “I don’t want to talk about that right now” so we talked about life and he was enjoying the smells. This is all mentally. And we got to know each other and I got to like him. I think he got to like me. So I said I’m going to take this dog home because I think we can get along and I did just that. The guy in charge of the adoptions was called Chance so that’s why I called him Poker.

‘He’s a great dog and we’re great pals. I talk to him all the time. Don’t people usually talk to their animals? Our conversations are quite abbreviated. We haven’t discussed the Bible yet or the meaning of life, but we have discussed, “No Pokey it’s not a good idea to jump on the couch right now.” And he goes, “Oh okay.” He’s a very reasonable dog. That’s one of the things I appreciate about him.’

Shamrock was a golden retriever puppy who Katie fell in love with when she ran into him at a farm where she rides horses. ‘He’s a very affectionate dog and somehow you have to put a little control over his affections. He will climb up on your lap and sit there, but he is as big as a person.’

Possibly Shamrock is Katie and Pokie is Diamond. ‘That’s exactly right,’ he says. I’m wondering was Shamrock the first significant present he gave Katie and was this the gift that established their relationship? ‘I was her first big present. I’m not taking second place.’

When you decide to get a dog with someone it’s making a statement that you are getting domestic, that you are moving in a permanent direction.

‘Yes, I’ve heard that but I never thought that. I have given puppies as presents before because I love dogs and I thought it would be nice. Katie wanted Shamrock. ‘

Katie was at a friend’s farm where she rides horses and she discovered one of their dogs had puppies. She fell in love with Shamrock, a golden retriever puppy.

‘I didn’t really want another dog, I thought Poker was just fine. But Katie’s got a big heart so I grudgingly in a way said alright, Shamrock it is. And he turns out to be a good guy.’

He is quite a contradiction. On the one hand he loves to make people laugh and loves nothing better than to charm an audience. He is warm, easy to connect with, yet he has spent most of his life in his own head, even if he was in a relationship. His best friend is the one he met at high school who is waiting downstairs to have lunch with him.

He met Herb Cohen when he was 17 and Herb was the captain of the high school fencing team. They had an instant connection and Diamond joined the team. ‘He was the best, I was the worst. But scouts offering scholarships for college came to look at Herb, so they took me as well. We went to NYU together.’

He once said that he didn’t make friends like normal people. ‘I do have other friends. I made a point of opening myself up and allowing myself to make friends. Before that all I had was my work, my family and that was it. The only people I had contact with were the people that work for me and my kids. I’m in touch with my kids all the time.’

I imagine there was an unfathomable void in his life when his 25 year marriage disintegrated. Is he in touch with his ex-wives? ‘I am but not on a regular basis. When it is called for. When it is necessary. To talk about the kids. Sometimes to talk about other things.’

‘My first wife was Jewish. My second wife was not Jewish. My third wife is Catholic. There will not be a fourth wife by the way. I’ve been warned by Katie.’

I ask Katie what exactly did she do to warn him? She blushes. ‘I haven’t warned him anything.’ He interrupts. ‘She hasn’t. I just don’t want ever to lose her. She is too fantastic.’

What is being in love like for him? ‘Being in love completes the perfection of my life. If there was anything missing in the last 20 years it was that I was not in love with anybody and I am in love with Katie. I am in love and I love her.’

I ask Katie is she in love? ‘Absolutely.’

Does she think that’s different to loving somebody? ‘Yes, I do. And I both love him and am in love with him. I love him with all my heart.’ They look at each other. Their eyes lock. You believe them’.

The Very Best of Neil Diamond’ is Out Now

Tom Jones

I had heard about Tom Jones’ animal presence. In the Sixties when he was performing someone observed, ‘I’ve never seen anyone so male in all my life.’ 
      This holds true today. He walks into the room, his book publisher’s office, and his sheer charisma sets it on fire – tall, larger than life, black jeans, black polo, black soft jacket. 
      I meet him just as his autobiography Over The Top And Back comes out. It is a great read and funny. It charts his youth in the grim coal mining town of Pontypridd. It captures his Welshness.
      He got tuberculosis for a year. His mother refused to send him to a sanatorium in Scotland so he was a virtual prisoner in his bedroom where he pined for his girlfriend Linda. 
Linda’s presence is a haunting one throughout the book. Now his wife of 58 years he says that she is the only woman he has ever loved. You feel the love when they are kissing in the phone box at the end of their road. 
You feel it when she becomes pregnant when they are both 16. They marry but don’t live together straight away. He works 12-hour shifts at the paper mill to support his wife and child. He didn’t want her to get a part-time job. He didn’t want anyone to flirt with her. ‘But most of all she didn’t like it. Linda is a very private person. She’s not a people person.’
When he goes to London to work on his singing career he sells his beloved leather jacket for the train fare back to Cardiff so he can see his  wife and baby. In many ways he’s the traditional man. In many ways not.
The book is filled with anecdotes and encounters with Elvis, Paul McCartney, John Lennon – who tried to hold Jones’ hand at a curtain call for a performance in honour of Lew Grade. Jones dropped his hand. That was all too gay. It is something that he regrets now.
That and not standing his ground when Paul McCartney offered him The Long And Winding Road but his record company wanted to go with another. Other than that he is not big on regret. 
Both his parents were ‘dressers’. They looked like they were going to a ball when they went down the club. Jones has always been a dresser. That image of him in the white open shirt, the hairy chest, the tuxedo trousers, is iconic. He says it came about because he was simply too hot to perform in a suit and when he took his tie off his then manager Gordon Mills knew that was the look – a raw macho look in the face of drippy hippy things. Jones recalls being on the same bill as The Rolling Stones once. ‘They turned up in suits and changed into their jeans to perform and I turned up in jeans and changed into my tuxedo.’
When Gordon Mills wrote the song It’s Not Unusual  with Les Reed he was going to give it to Sandie Shaw but Jones had an instinct and that song changed his life. He could move out of Mills’ apartment in Notting Hill and buy a house, be reunited with his wife and have a red Jaguar. What’s New Pussycat?, Green Green Grass Of Home were the smashes that followed.
Jones moved to Los Angeles because of the tax imposed by the Labour Government in the late Sixties and has never come back to live. In the late Seventies through the Eighties he had a kind of identity crisis. He had put out some country albums and was playing Vegas-style shows in towns in the middle of nowhere around America where the most exciting thing about the show was going to the nicest restaurant in town afterwards.
Jones didn’t want to sign for another country album at Polydor. He might have got into a fight with his manager about that but Mills had been hiding the fact he had colon cancer and was drinking heavily. He died aged 51 in 1986.
Jones’ son Mark, who had been on the road with him since he was 16 took over and instantly brought him back to being authentic and current and being a voice. In 1988 he performed the Prince song Kiss on Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort. It was The Art of Noise arrangement of this song that made it a world hit. Another iconic Tom Jones song and his career was reborn. In 2006 he was made a knight of the realm and he also established a new fan base when he appeared as elder statesman in four series of BBC1 talent show The Voice from 2012 to 2015.
He was always known as The Voice and on his new album Long Lost Suitcase that voice is richer and deepened. Darkened. It shakes the senses with its power. Its title came from the fact that “ I have still got a lot of stuff in suitcases. Being on the road all the time you sort of half unpack or three-quarters unpack and you think, oh, I don’t need that right now so I can leave that there. So a lot of stuff accumulates in suitcases. Old records and old pictures. I found a picture of my grandfather, he died in the First World War and it’s the only studio shot that I have of him. He is standing Edwardian, with his leg crossed and his hat is on a plinth”
He is very much about paying homage to his roots. Is that what made him think it was time for a memoir? ‘So many  books have been written about me by people that have never even met me so I wanted to talk about what it was like before fame, all those people in Wales that moulded my character.’
What he doesn’t talk about so much is how as a knicker strewn sex god there were many extra-marital temptations which he didn’t resist. He does say, ‘None of it meant anything.’ 
We meet on the day of Sparkgate. A paper had reported him saying, “Linda has lost her spark.” He corrects, ‘I didn’t say that. I said SHE FEELS she’s lost her spark. It’s not the same thing. She has emphysema and she’s not happy with the way she looks. I did not say she doesn’t look as she did before. I carry a young picture of her wherever I go because it’s a wonderful memory. I remember when she had that picture taken. But not because she looks better on it. I’ve asked her if I can take a new picture and carry that around, but she doesn’t want me to. I did say I love talking to her on the phone because when we talk on the phone we’re young again. Age doesn’t matter on the phone.’
Just like when he was on The Voice. That was about turning the chair at the sound of the voice, not because of the looks. But more of that later. 
‘Linda is the only person with whom I’ve been in love. We fell in love as teenagers. We were lustful as well, but it was love. And the longer you are together the more you realise when the sex gets less important in a marriage the love is even stronger because that’s what you’ve got left. That and the same sense of humour and coming from the same place. 
‘People have said to me do you ever think about getting a divorce? I say no. We are family, a family that I could never separate from.
Linda is a strong woman. She didn’t exactly condone his extramarital activities, because she knew that she was loved. 
‘I don’t condone it. It was just something that happened. It went along with my career. I felt it was just fun and games and it didn’t hurt anybody. We came through it. My wife loves me, my son loves me, my grandchildren love me.’
Did he ever think that Linda would leave him when she found out about his affair with Marjorie Wallace? ‘No, but I didn’t like the fact she didn’t like me. I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed that she knew about something that was not important via a newspaper.
‘If I had said to her that it was happening she would have said, “You’d better stop that now or there’d be trouble.” And that’s what would have happened. I would have stopped it. Definitely.’

In the book he talks about how Linda got colon cancer and how he could never perform without her. ‘Every song I sing is to her. They cut out a foot of her colon. They also took a foot out of my colon some years ago because they found a growth (benign). I used to say to Linda, “I’m a foot short.” And now we’re both a foot short.

‘When they are at home she doesn’t like hairdressers and manicurists coming over because she doesn’t like to talk to them. She likes me to do her hair and her nails.’ 
Whatever you might think about Tom Jones you don’t imagine him doing hair and nails. I like this devotion. It dispels the chauvinism myth completely. 
He is really easy to talk to and we laugh a lot. In his book he talks about his surprising dismissal from The Voice. He writes, ‘What a cold place the BBC is. Sometimes you wonder if it is run by humans or a machine.’ He refers to the Controller of BBC1 Charlotte Moore thanking him personally for his services, but in a press release. 
Mark, his son and manager, got a call saying that Sir Tom, the stalwart of the show, would not be returning. This call came at the very last minute possible. He was expecting to start rehearsals as he had done for the last four years in mid-August. Instead the call came that he would not be needed. ‘Apparently someone told Mark, “We don’t think Tom is going to like what it’s going to become.”
‘I like The Voice in America. That’s what got me interested. I did a show called Imagine with Alan Yentob and he said the ratings were so wonderful would I do The Voice UK. 
‘Will.i.am said in the beginning that he did The Voice because of me. This season Paloma Faith said the only reason she signed was because she thought she was going to work with me. I’m curious to see what they do with it. I will watch it, of course.’ Will he miss it? ‘No. But I want to see how it does and how the ratings go. 
‘They kept telling us we needed to turn our chairs more. And I said no, it has to be real. I don’t want to be lumbered with somebody I don’t like. I have a reputation for picking good voices. But they were pressing on me, and that’s exactly what happened. I ended up with this red haired girl that I didn’t like. They hate it when we don’t turn but I kept telling them it has to be real.’
It doesn’t seem very real at all. ‘The real coaches are singing coaches who keep us informed about how far the contestants can stretch themselves. We talk to them daily and discuss songs, can they handle it, that’s not working let’s change it. But they are the ones who do the real coaching work. We are just the faces. We pick them and they work with them.
‘I loved the blind auditions where you had no cloud what the person is like, you’re just getting the voice. And now they want to put in more backstories.’ Isn’t that making it more like The X Factor? Perhaps you can be a judge on that next year? ‘Nothing is out of the question,’ he says with a smile. And you really believe that is true.