Authors: Lynn Barber
How many Anna Wintours might there be? ‘Oh I wouldn’t like to say, but enough to get in the way of what I wanted the book to be about.’ Couldn’t he have omitted the girlfriends but written something about his wives and children? ‘You don’t know these women! No, not to go near it, just to stay completely clear of it. I don’t want to read it from other people, and I don’t want to do it myself.’ Carol says she’s fine with it. As for the children, he says they don’t read his stuff anyway.
He has finished making his will, and appointed his agent, Steve Wasserman, as his literary executor. But unfortunately, he has no great literary archive to leave – no manuscripts, no letters from Amis and Rushdie and Fenton – because he always throws everything away. ‘What I’ve got,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t fill a box.’ But luckily he has still got – because Carol kept it – the very nice letter he received from George W. Bush after he’d talked about his cancer on television. She digs it out for me – handwritten, in a hard-backed envelope, embossed with a presidential seal. ‘Thank you for sharing your battle with cancer in that remarkable interview. There’s no telling how many folks you will inspire whether you think it works or not. I truly will pray for you. Fight on. You contribute meaningfully to our country’s discourse. God bless.’ As Carol says, it’s not very exciting, but it’s not illiterate either, and Hitch was pleased to get it. He got hundreds of letters in the first few weeks after his diagnosis, from famous people and strangers, and still gets three or four a week.
I wondered if he’d had any letters from people he’d fallen out with, but he said no. ‘I can’t say there’s been any sort of moist reconciliations. Sidney Blumenthal has not written but in a sense I don’t mind; I think he feels wronged by me and I think he’d feel a hypocrite writing. I did actually write to him when he got stomach cancer but for all I know that only irritated him.’ He fell out with Blumenthal in 1999 when Blumenthal, who worked at the White House, testified that he had not been spreading smears about Monica Lewinsky and Hitch said oh yes he had, and offered to give evidence that could potentially have put Blumenthal in jail for perjury. Several of their mutual friends have not spoken to Hitch since.
What about his brother, Peter – any
rapprochement
there? ‘Well there’s nothing much to
rapproche
. We’re very different types and we’ve never been close. If it wasn’t for our political coloration, no one would be interested.’ For decades, Peter tub-thumped for the Right, Hitch for the Left, but Hitch of course has moved rightwards and their main area of disagreement now is God. Does he know whether Peter is praying for him? ‘He’s had the decency not to say so, but I suppose he is. It’s some kind of obligation, isn’t it? But he did something very nice which hadn’t occurred to me: he said if I needed a bone marrow transplant, he would be happy to give it. Which I thought was very good of him.’
After demolishing the Chinese supper, Hitch announces that next day we are invited to lunch with the British Ambassador. Is that normal? I ask. ‘Oh yes, I’m forever rubbing shoulders with the quality!’ he laughs. What about the White House? Does he get asked to lunch there? No, he says sorrowfully – he once gave a lecture at the White House (and had his shoes shined for the occasion) but he has never met Obama, though he voted for him. ‘It’s annoying. It’s like living in Washington and not going to see the Lincoln Memorial.’
The funny thing is that we British journalists still think of Hitch as one of our own – but he has lived in the States for over thirty years and became an American citizen in 2007. He no longer follows British politics and says he doesn’t recognise half the names in
Private Eye
– he doesn’t know who Ed Balls is for example. But his fondness for England is still strong. When his appetite returned after the chemo, he asked for Marmite and Oxford marmalade and Branston pickle, and told Jeremy Paxman to bring him the memoirs of George MacDonald Fraser. One of Hitch’s great fears is that he might never see England again. He wants to revisit not just his usual haunts – London and Oxford and Hay – but Dartmoor and Cornwall and parts of Sussex where he grew up. Carol says eagerly, ‘Could we go in the spring?’ but he makes no promise.
Next day I go to collect them for the Ambassador’s lunch. Hitch has clearly made an effort – he is newly shaved, and wearing a blazer. Carol is still getting dressed – he complains that she has a horror of being early, he of being late – but eventually emerges in stilettos and jeans, plus a huge fur hat and a jacket with a gap at the back to show her thong. While we are waiting for a taxi, I ask if she will tell me her age but she says, ‘Nah. Why should I? Some of my greatest chums, like Melina Mercouri, would never tell their age. You can say early fifties if you must.’
As soon as we arrive at the Residence, Hitch starts shimmering like Stephen Fry, greeting the butler by name, asking for his ‘usual’ (whisky) and smoothly introducing me to Sir Nigel and Lady Sheinwald. We are only five for lunch, but it is formally served, with footmen and printed menu cards. Hitch had warned me beforehand that our conversation must be strictly off the record. It was unfortunate to say the least, therefore, that while they were all chatting away about plays they had seen, my handbag suddenly started chatting loudly too. In all my years using tape recorders, this has never happened before – the bugger somehow managed to turn itself on and launch itself into replay at full volume – and there were an embarrassing few minutes while I violently attacked my handbag and the Ambassador stared.
Afterwards we went back to the apartment for Hitch to be photographed and Carol talked movingly about how good he has been throughout his illness. ‘He has been without any self-pity, any despondency, but just absolute realism, and almost a kind of poetry in explaining his condition. And he’d get up and try and write and hold conversations – imagine having the worst flu you’ve ever had and getting up every day. And our dinner table when people came round – I mean Hitch at his illest is still a scintillating conversationalist.’
He is indeed. I was expecting to find him stoical, but what impressed me even more was the sort of gallant bravado he brings to his situation. Why does he feel he needs to fly into collapsing countries to prove his courage? He is proving it now, every day. Only once, in all our conversation, did he seem near tears. He told me that he thought his right vocal cord had gone and, ‘If I did lose my voice I would feel that that was . . . No, actually, I can’t bear to think about that. That would give me depression which I have not yet had.
‘But if I were ever threatened with morose moments, the thing that would cheer me up is that some people who I admire for being very courageous and for having helped free their countries still keep in touch. This is my answer to your question about revolutionary tourism – I didn’t just do it for that reason but to try and clarify the situation. And it does make me proud, the friendship with those people who I knew when they were dissidents.’
*
He died on 16 December 2011 – having lived a few months longer than his doctors predicted. The obituaries were wonderful, full of real love as well as appreciation. Ian McEwan’s description of their last days together at his cancer clinic in Houston was particularly moving – Hitch insisting on being helped (with all his drips) to his desk and writing an essay on G.K. Chesterton he had promised.
But the BBC
Today
programme struck a sour note when it described him as ‘a journalist, an atheist and an alcoholic’. Hitch used to get furious if people called him an alcoholic and I remember this was an issue when I first interviewed him for the
Observer
. I saw him, over lunch, drink three or four whiskies and at least one bottle of wine but he insisted that he had never missed a deadline, never slurred his speech, never at any point been incapable and therefore could not be an alcoholic. Kingsley Amis used to make the same argument, equally unconvincingly. But of course the definition of an alcoholic is infinitely flexible – Californians consider anyone who drinks more than one glass of wine an alcoholic. I remember once interviewing the actress Ali MacGraw who talked at length about how she’d been in rehab and was now a ‘recovering alcoholic’ and had turned her life around. How much were you drinking at your peak? I asked. ‘One evening I drank a whole bottle of red wine!’ she confessed wide-eyed. It was all I could do not to guffaw.
The most jarring reaction to Hitch’s death came from my younger daughter. I was raving on about how brilliant and witty he was and what a loss to journalism, and asked if she’d ever read any of his articles. She said no – but she thought he was brilliant on
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
. Hitch on
I’m a Celeb
? It was one of those moments when the earth tilts on its axis. It took quite a lot of hard interrogation to establish that she meant the actor Christopher Biggins, and I wondered, not for the first time, how I could have so failed to educate my daughters.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I love, love,
love
interviewing pop stars – I wish I’d done more of them. Obviously I mean the ones who write their own stuff and are mad as snakes – I’m not keen on squeaky-clean members of manufactured boy bands who do what Simon Cowell tells them. The ones I admire are those who started writing and composing in their teens, pouring their hearts out alone in their bedrooms, often with no encouragement at all. And who then had the guts to go out and expose themselves to the ridicule of their schoolmates by getting up on stage. So brave, so young! I think they’re heroic.
I was lucky in that I just caught on to pop music at the last minute, when so many of my contemporaries missed it. Pop music while I was growing up in the 1950s was terrible, you have no idea. At school, we listened to the Top Ten where the choice was between Liberace, Lonnie Donegan, ghastly Bill Haley, and soppy Paul Anka. (I know there were great people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard performing in the States, but we never heard of them at Lady Eleanor Holles School.) Consequently my friends and I preferred trad jazz and took the ferry over to Eel Pie Island every Saturday to listen to Acker Bilk. What is maddening in retrospect is that we could have been taking the bus to the Station Hotel in Richmond, a couple of miles down the road, to listen to the nascent Rolling Stones, but, again, we’d never heard of them.
So, aged sixteen, I believed that pop music was rubbish and trad jazz was what you had to listen to if you aspired to be a beatnik which I did. And then the situation got complicated because my much older conman boyfriend introduced me to classical music and I realised I had an awful lot to catch up on. I think this is what happened to most of my contemporaries – they graduated very quickly from pop to jazz to classical music and never went back. Luckily, I did.
What saved me was that a friend of mine called Lizzie had a younger sister who, for some reason that I still don’t understand, ‘discovered’ the Beatles before most of the world had heard of them – i.e. in 1962 rather than 1963. Lizzie’s sister’s bedroom was entirely covered with posters of the Beatles and she played ‘Love Me Do’ on her Dansette all day long. Of course she was younger than us so we pretended to despise her tastes and asked patronisingly how her ‘insects’ were coming along, but it meant that when the Beatles did finally arrive, with
Please Please Me
in 1963, I already felt I owned them. And, like anyone who followed the Beatles’ career from start to finish, I learned through them to take pop music seriously.
Unfortunately being so keen on the Beatles meant I missed out on many of the other great pop groups who emerged in the 1960s – there were just so many of them! I saw the Animals at an Oxford commem ball but I never saw the Kinks or the Small Faces and I stupidly still ignored the Rolling Stones till years later. (Mick Jagger is second top – Rupert Murdoch is first – on my perennial wish list of people I want to interview, though he is well known to be a useless interviewee – he claims not to remember the past.) And I missed nearly all the pop stars who emerged in the 1970s because I was deep in nappies. David Bowie still remains a complete blank.
But I did catch up with some of them later, interviewing Rod Stewart, Boy George, Morrissey, long after their peaks. Morrissey was a weird one. I interviewed him in 2002 when he was touring the States, trying to establish a solo career but without much success, and I met him in a most unlikely army town called Colorado Springs where I would have thought they shot people like Morrissey on sight. He was staying at a sort of golf-spa hotel a few miles out of town, and cut a lonely, miserable figure. He was obsessed at the time with a lawsuit brought by one of his former bandmates, and he was so busy telling me chapter and verse of this lawsuit I could hardly get him to talk about music at all. I got the impression his career was washed up but (as so often) I was wrong.
I also had a very funny experience in the 1980s, watching a group called Tears for Fears shoot a video in the California desert. Actually I should call them ‘Tear for Fear’ because only one of them, Curt Smith, was present – the other one didn’t like flying. Curt had to ride around on a quad bike lip-synching ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’. I and a couple of other journalists were meant to follow around in a Winnebago caravan, together with the PR, Mariella Frostrup. I must say that much as I admire Mariella’s subsequent career on radio and television, I have never admired her as much as I did then. We journalists were all jet-lagged and grumbling, the driver kept getting lost, the Winnebago developed engine trouble, the temperature was in the high thirties, we seldom if ever caught up with Tear for Fear but Mariella bubbled on. We were running so late that we didn’t arrive at our final location till after midnight. It was by a lake, called Salton Sea, but because it was dark we couldn’t see it. My God, we could smell it though – an extraordinary smell which was revealed in the morning to come from heaps of rotting fish all round the lake shore. Mariella kept exclaiming, ‘Isn’t it picturesque!’ But it was hard even to see, our eyes were streaming so badly from the poisonous fumes.