Ghosting (12 page)

For the next few months I avoided the editorial meetings in London. The thought of being away from home for even a few days alarmed me, and leaving the children was unthinkable. But regular trips to London were part of the job, and the job was now more important than ever. Eventually I had to go. After the meeting I asked to see Tiger in private. He listened to what I had to say, and when I had finished he sighed, and then said, “Well, it's his loss entirely.” Which was kind and well-meaning, though I was still stuck at the stage of thinking the loss was decidedly mine and the children's. He also told me not to worry, that my job was secure, and that everything would be all right. I was moved by his gentleness and compassion.

“Don't be sad,” he said when I left. “The worst has happened and from now on it will get better.”

That evening he invited me to dinner with his family at Mr. Chow's in Knightsbridge—“the best Chinese restaurant in the whole of London,” he said, “where all the stars hang out.” Tiger didn't bother with menus but ordered a magnificent feast straight from Mr. Chow himself. Throughout the meal his generosity and attentiveness were unabating—“Are you comfortable? Have you got enough? Can I help you to something?”—as he filled everyone else's plate and ordered more whenever supplies ran low. Although an emotional man, he wasn't comfortable talking about feelings or
painful events, but I could tell he was trying to cheer me up, and to this end he stuffed me with food and crushed me with kindness. By the time I left London to return to Scotland I felt pampered and consoled.

A day or two later Tiger telephoned me at home. “I have been thinking about your situation,” he said, “and how I can help you.” He then spoke in a great rush about his “brilliant idea.”: a book on women that would be “unprecedented” in the world of publishing, “the biggest and best ever.” He was so excited that he was hard to understand. The words tumbled out in huge untamed gushes and, as I struggled to keep up, his sentences would suddenly turn tail on themselves. The gist of it was that he would interview fifty high-achieving, well-known personalities—politicians, film stars, aristocrats, actors and so on—record their thoughts on tape and publish the results. He spoke of his “fabulous connections,” how he was sure that he could get famous women to talk to him, and how he was the perfect person for such a book. “I
love
women—I
glow
in their company!” My role would be to help devise the interview questions, to sort out the transcripts, collate the material into different sections and finally put the book together. And to give it some weight, there would be a long introductory section on women throughout the centuries—this also would be my responsibility.

“It will take your mind off things,” he said. “You will have to work harder than you've ever worked before. But it will make you some money. This book will be
sensational.
I guarantee it.”

A batch of twenty-five letters was immediately sent out with a brief description of the project. After paying tribute to the woman's achievements, the letter ended with the honeyed words: “Your contribution to the book will be invaluable. It will also
mean that I shall have the pleasure of meeting you.” This first mail-shot resulted in twenty-five acceptances. “Can you believe it?” Tiger laughed with delight. “Not one of them said no!” Predictably, when the magic number of fifty was reached he couldn't bring himself to stop: he was having too good a time. The next target was one hundred, but even that was soon exceeded. Every time he flicked through a magazine or watched a television programme he would come across a woman he just had to interview. His enthusiasm for the undertaking was uncontainable, and it spilled over into every conversation. He described it as a drug and marvelled at his own addiction. “I adore women!” he kept saying. “I
admire
them.” Once he got to two hundred he would stop—“I
have
to stop,” he said, “and two hundred is such a nice number.” Whereupon he promptly decided that he couldn't confine himself to Britain—what about all those wonderful women in America and France and Italy?

Soon his days were measured out in boarding passes and hotel rooms and, as time went on and he became ever more wom-anstruck, he started talking about his interviews in terms of a mission, something he had been called to do. He told the newspapers: “I'm writing about women because I love them. All my life I have loved them.” He could make this love sound like a unique experience, exquisite and ennobling, not granted to ordinary mortals. Women, flattered by his love, seemed to love him in return. Surprise was expressed in the gossip columns that nearly three hundred individuals, many of them sensible with balanced personalities, were prepared to talk about themselves in such a frank way. But those familiar with Tiger's style—a lethal combination of charm and chutzpah—were not in the least surprised. His voice was silkily persuasive, and by giving each woman his complete
attention, he managed to wheedle and sweet-talk his way into her interior life. One journalist, bewitched into talking her head off, tried afterwards to work out what had happened to her. “It sounds pathetic,” she wrote, “but he made me feel special, as if I were the only woman who mattered.”

Almost four hundred letters were sent out, and the refusal rate was less than ten per cent. One of the more interesting rebuffs—in view of subsequent revelations—came on House of Commons notepaper:

The diverse list included Marina Warner, Olivia de Havilland, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, Janet Suzman, Soraya Khashoggi, Doris Lessing, Isabelle Huppert, Gloria Steinem. There were women with names that sounded both absurd and paradoxically grand: Marie-Hélène de la Howarderie, Christine Bogdanowicz-Bindert, Ariana Stassinopoulos Huffington. There were socialites, actors, designers, writers—even a rabbi and a couple of nuns. Most of the interviews took place in the palace dining-room
where, after quails in chocolate sauce washed down by the grandest of
grands crus,
the tape recorder was switched on and the women given enough tape to hang themselves.

Each interview was recorded on a microtape, about the size of a matchbox, and immediately dispatched by special delivery to Scotland in the smallest jiffy-bag available on the market. The Royal Mail guaranteed delivery before noon, and nearly every day, around mid-morning, the postman would arrive in a van with a tiny package, sometimes several. Everything had to be signed for. After a while I could tell that the postman was desperate to know what the packages contained and why I got so many of them. When we reached around the two hundred mark, he asked me outright, saying that his colleagues in the sorting office had told him to find out. “Oh, they're audio-tapes,” I said. “For playing on a tape recorder.” I could tell he didn't believe me. He obviously thought it too dull for words and knew it would go down badly back in the sorting office.

True to form, Tiger was in a perpetual state of anxiety about the possibility of tapes getting lost in the post. The agreement was that I would telephone him as soon as a package arrived, but he was always too fretful to be able to wait for the call and would phone me repeatedly throughout the morning. “Is there any news? Has it come yet?” On being told that no, there wasn't, and no, it hadn't, he worked himself up to full-scale-emergency pitch every time. “Oh my God! It must have gone missing! Isn't it? This is a
disaster!
It's
irreplaceable!
” I never really understood this behaviour—it was such a waste of everyone's time and energy—and although anxiety was unquestionably part of his make-up, the constant high levels
had a touch of artifice about them; they were more a way of imparting to others a proper degree of urgency and respect for the importance of the project.

“You really have to stop now,” I said when he reached two hundred and fifty. My side of the project was becoming unmanageable. The historical account of the treatment of women in literature and mythology was well advanced, but with all the extra interviews the workload was expanding while the deadline remained the same. Everything was geared to publishing in the autumn of 1987 in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. “Just a few more,” he said, affecting to be chastened. “I
promise
I'll stop at three hundred.”

It turned into a book of biblical dimensions: 1200 pages in all, and weighing in at three and a half pounds. It was wrapped in a cover of dazzling blue—a photograph of lapis lazuli marquetry from the emperor's private collection—and on the back flap there was a picture of the author, tastefully
chiaroscuro,
by Koo Stark. Tiger had travelled over 35,000 miles, mainly in Europe and the USA, and collected over three million words on tape. This was reduced to 600,000, all in an upstairs room in a tiny village in the East Neuk of Fife. I was helped in this mammoth task by my good friend Norma, secretary in the university Russian department at the time, a completely reliable and cheerful woman, salt-of-the-earth and Old Labour through and through, and not in the least perturbed by celebrity or the orgy of confession that she typed up night after night. We worked for long stretches side by side, often all day and into the small hours. Every so often Norma lay down on the floor between the stacks of paper and fell instantly and deeply asleep. Absolutely nothing could wake her, but in ten minutes she would be conscious again and ready for work. It was like
a party trick, and the children sometimes asked her to do it so that they could watch her comatose. They loved to pinch her flesh and check her vital signs, and since she was dead to the world it seemed harmless. As soon as she completed a transcript I edited it and marked up selected passages for inclusion in the various sections: Early Influences, Creativity, Motherhood, Relationships and Sexuality. After that it was a scissors and paste job, quite literally, cutting up cartloads of confidences and sticking them into the relevant sections. Even the children helped with this stage.

The party to launch the book was held at the beginning of October in the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was a grand and glitzy occasion awash with blue cocktails perfectly matching the book cover and seeming to phosphoresce under the lights. Tiger stood at the entrance beside a blue mountain of books, beaming seraph-ically as his girls floated around in long tight velvet dresses the colour of lapis. Each guest was greeted separately with a personalised effusion, and special guests—the stars of the book—were hugged and caressed and wrapped in love. “You look beautiful tonight. Just
amazing.
I'm
so
happy you could come.” Paparazzi clicked their shutters, and reporters queued up for quotable quotes. “It's like the
Hite Report
,” he told them. “I have unearthed the secrets of women.” He was wearing a fine wool
gallabiya
trimmed with gold. “Women are softer than men,” he said, embracing a soft young beauty in a Chanel jacket. “Much nicer.” He praised women's qualities—their capacity to forgive, their vulnerability, their fortitude—and he rhapsodised on their bodies. “So much mystique,” he purred. “You know, even their sexual organs are on the inside.” There was a kind of innocence about all this, as if he had just happened on an eternal truth.

Before long he was being fêted as the man who had unlocked
the mystery of half the human race for the good of the world.
The Times
serialised the book for a whole week, and the author embarked on a promotional tour, simpering and sashaying and emoting his way round the country. He gave countless interviews, all the while building momentum and making ever more magnificent claims for the undertaking: it was a work unlike any other, a noble enterprise representing the highest ideals of human achievement, throwing a unique light on the female sex at the end of the twentieth century; it would shatter preconceptions, it would shock and move and delight and alarm; it was a
necessary
book, vital for our quest into the social evolution of women, capable of filling the terrible void in our empty lives; it was a cause whose time had come.

One or two people were more doubtful. Mark Lawson, referring to the book as
Women Talking Dirty,
was perplexed by the compliance of Tiger's subjects, many of whom he described as “reluctant to converse with their own mothers without an appointment.” And Germaine Greer described the enterprise as the nadir of vanity publishing. She said she was “baffled” by Doris Lessing's participation. “Normally she's totally unapproachable and I'm flabbergasted that she was taken in by the pitch that this book is an important work on the evolution of women.” But even Ms. Greer admitted that Tiger would “probably get away with it.” She put her finger on the reason in an article she wrote for the
Observer
magazine:

The French edition,
Elles,
followed in due course. Photographs of Tiger alongside Béatrice Dalle, Isabelle Huppert and Em-manuelle Béart appeared in the French press under lurid headlines:
ELLES DISENT TOUT—300 FEMMES RENCONTRéES ET éCOUTéES PAR UN SEUL HOMME.
The magazine
Marie-Claire
bought the serial rights, publishing pages of juicy excerpts under the banner:
L HOMME QUI, DANS LA VIE, A UNE PASSION, UNE SEULE: COMPRENDRE LES FEMMES.
Tiger was in heaven.

The interview with Edith Cresson proved to be the most controversial. When she rose to become Prime Minister of France in 1991, Tiger sold the unabridged interview to the
Observer
newspaper. Her claims that Anglo-Saxon men were not interested in women, that they lacked the passion of their Gallic counterparts, and that one in four was gay—“something you cannot imagine in the history of France”—created a new
froideur
in Anglo-French relations. It even gave rise to a question being tabled in the House of Commons. “Mrs. Cresson has sought to insult the virility of the British male,” protested Tony Marlow, a Tory MP and father of five children. All the newspapers covered the furore, and fired insults across the Channel. It was another triumph for the interviewer
extraordinaire.