Interviewing celebrities, genuine or otherwise, is an art which, in my old age, I have largely discarded, or at any rate lost much of my interest in.
This is not only because life has changed but because the act of interviewing people has grown so utterly different, just as today’s celebrities themselves have done, accepting, as they are said to do, the presence of agents, minders, or timers, who control the confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, monitor every word that is spoken, and decree when the meeting must end.
Thus, as a journalist, you are briefed beforehand about what you are allowed to ask, and what topics you are forbidden to mention. Any encroachment of what is permissible involves instant intervention.
Since I seldom interview people now, I cannot say from experience how true these restrictions actually are, though I am glad to report that I have never been a victim of them and would resent having to be thus hemmed in. But it is easy to feel suspicious about such things. In my time, arranging an interview tended to be the simplest of procedures, though its outcome did depend on luck. Sometimes an interviewee had simply nothing to say, though at least in my experience everybody - with the exception of the playwright Ronald Duncan, librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, who was memorably rude - welcomed the chance to talk about themselves and were generally generous, sometimes over-generous, not just with their time but with their money, for they would insist on paying for lunch or dinner and rarely complained even if the outcome of our talk was not quite what they expected.
In my day everything was pre-arranged between us, however improvised the written result may sometimes have seemed. I have interviewed Simon Rattle on a train, Vladimir Ashkenazy in an airport arrival hall (I had flown to Heathrow to meet him off a flight, just before he gave a concert), Antal Dorati in a chauffeur-driven car between a recording studio in Watford and his London hotel, Neeme Jarvi while squatting in the aisle of an aircraft in which he was flying first-class to Rome, Anton Mossimann in the kitchen of a Park Lane hotel, Benjamin Britten while strolling in the grounds of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, Hans Werner Henze while squashed between him and his male partner on a sofa, and Leopold Stokowski on the telephone (I asked him a single question, and his reply in a single sentence lasted half an hour).
Sir Michael Tippett once drove me around the Cotswolds, talking all the way. Sir William Walton smoked in his dressing-room before a London concert, and Alexander Goehr drank a mug of tea while chatting in a Cambridge university canteen, CP Snow lay in bed, his wife (Pamela Hansford Johnson) at his side, with his eyes bandaged after a cataract operation; the young Kingsley Amis merrily eavesdropped on a pair of pompous Cambridge dons who were talking about him in Miller’s Wine Bar, while in our interview we were discussing Mozart piano concertos.
But mostly my interviews have taken place in restaurants, hotels, or the interviewee’s home. In this respect, Sir Alec Guinness stood out as a glorious example of the pre-arranged interview that seemed not to have been planned at all.
He had invited me to lunch with him in Prunier’s more than half a century ago to talk about some of his latest films. Arriving early, and somewhat flustered, I went straight to the toilet to spruce up, and found him standing there alone, beaming at himself in the mirror like Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit or Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I introduced myself and he ushered me to our table for portions of Dover sole and glasses of white burgundy that he paid for with a crisp £10 note (those were the days).
On reporting back to the London editor of The Scotsman afterwards, and telling him what it had cost, he replied, with a sigh of relief, “Thank God we were not paying for it.”
22 April 2016
This is not only because life has changed but because the act of interviewing people has grown so utterly different, just as today’s celebrities themselves have done, accepting, as they are said to do, the presence of agents, minders, or timers, who control the confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, monitor every word that is spoken, and decree when the meeting must end.
Thus, as a journalist, you are briefed beforehand about what you are allowed to ask, and what topics you are forbidden to mention. Any encroachment of what is permissible involves instant intervention.
Since I seldom interview people now, I cannot say from experience how true these restrictions actually are, though I am glad to report that I have never been a victim of them and would resent having to be thus hemmed in. But it is easy to feel suspicious about such things. In my time, arranging an interview tended to be the simplest of procedures, though its outcome did depend on luck. Sometimes an interviewee had simply nothing to say, though at least in my experience everybody - with the exception of the playwright Ronald Duncan, librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, who was memorably rude - welcomed the chance to talk about themselves and were generally generous, sometimes over-generous, not just with their time but with their money, for they would insist on paying for lunch or dinner and rarely complained even if the outcome of our talk was not quite what they expected.
In my day everything was pre-arranged between us, however improvised the written result may sometimes have seemed. I have interviewed Simon Rattle on a train, Vladimir Ashkenazy in an airport arrival hall (I had flown to Heathrow to meet him off a flight, just before he gave a concert), Antal Dorati in a chauffeur-driven car between a recording studio in Watford and his London hotel, Neeme Jarvi while squatting in the aisle of an aircraft in which he was flying first-class to Rome, Anton Mossimann in the kitchen of a Park Lane hotel, Benjamin Britten while strolling in the grounds of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, Hans Werner Henze while squashed between him and his male partner on a sofa, and Leopold Stokowski on the telephone (I asked him a single question, and his reply in a single sentence lasted half an hour).
Sir Michael Tippett once drove me around the Cotswolds, talking all the way. Sir William Walton smoked in his dressing-room before a London concert, and Alexander Goehr drank a mug of tea while chatting in a Cambridge university canteen, CP Snow lay in bed, his wife (Pamela Hansford Johnson) at his side, with his eyes bandaged after a cataract operation; the young Kingsley Amis merrily eavesdropped on a pair of pompous Cambridge dons who were talking about him in Miller’s Wine Bar, while in our interview we were discussing Mozart piano concertos.
But mostly my interviews have taken place in restaurants, hotels, or the interviewee’s home. In this respect, Sir Alec Guinness stood out as a glorious example of the pre-arranged interview that seemed not to have been planned at all.
He had invited me to lunch with him in Prunier’s more than half a century ago to talk about some of his latest films. Arriving early, and somewhat flustered, I went straight to the toilet to spruce up, and found him standing there alone, beaming at himself in the mirror like Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit or Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I introduced myself and he ushered me to our table for portions of Dover sole and glasses of white burgundy that he paid for with a crisp £10 note (those were the days).
On reporting back to the London editor of The Scotsman afterwards, and telling him what it had cost, he replied, with a sigh of relief, “Thank God we were not paying for it.”
22 April 2016
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