Read A Curious Career for Free Online

to the forest, you tiresome old Fabulous Beast.
     
    *
    This interview had a strange afterlife in that almost every time Faithfull was interviewed subsequently, the interviewer would mention Lynn Barber and Faithfull would make various disparaging remarks about how aggressive she found me. But then , in an Irish interview, she expanded this to claim that I’d asked if she’d ever had sex with a dog. I did what ? It would never occur to me in a million years to ask if she’d had sex with a dog, because it would never occur to me in a million years that she might have had sex with a dog. Where would I get such an idea? I know I asked about the Mars bar – she said there was no Mars bar and I believed her – but where was this dog supposed to have come from? I was pretty annoyed but I thought: Oh well, she’s batty and left it at that. But then she repeated it in another interview and it was in danger of becoming an accepted fact. So I wrote to the editor and said they must print a correction and also warn Faithfull that, if she ever said it again, I would sue her for libel. That might sound a bit heavy, but it could seriously damage my career if it was thought I went around asking people if they had sex with dogs.
    Faithfull went silent for a few years – she split from the horrible François, and also suffered breast cancer – but I notice she told the Irish Times in February 2011 that she was ‘very wild and emotional’ when she did that interview and ‘I think I might write Lynn a letter to apologise, a letter of amends, for being so rude.’ Her letter has yet to turn up, but anyway, no hard feelings, Marianne. The one thing you can say for sure about Marianne Faithfull is that she is not boring.

CHAPTER THREE
    On Interviewing
    There’s a wonderful scene in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in which an experienced hack called Jules Jones is sent to interview a nineteen-year-old film star called Kitty Jackson over lunch. He has been allotted forty minutes with her of which she spends the first six on her mobile. ‘Then she starts to apologise . . . Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.’
    That phrase – ‘the erosion of a subject’s self-control’ – pretty much sums up the whole celebrity-interviewing game. But what makes the Jennifer Egan scene so delicious is that it’s the reporter who loses his self-control. He gets so irritated by the film star’s bland boring niceness that he suggests they go for a walk in Central Park, in the course of which he jumps her, and tries to rape her. He ends up in prison (of course Kitty writes him a sweet letter) charged with attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault. A bit extreme, you might say, but the feelings he goes through while ‘trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice’ are ones that I entirely recognise. I have never wanted to rape an interviewee but I have occasionally fantasised that someone else comes in and shoots them. At least then I’d have something to write about.
    People often say, ‘Oh it must be great for you meeting all these famous people,’ and I have to resist the temptation to bang my head on the wall and howl. I dare say it’s nice meeting famous people but the trouble is I have to interview them which is a completely different kettle of fish. In fact the interview is the part of my job I enjoy least, so fraught is it