52 Classic Interviews
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First published 2013
Copyright © Financial Times, 2013
Articles by Rob Blackhurst, Kieran Cooke, Andrew Davidson, Beverley Doole,
Amity Shlaes and Nigel Spivey are reprinted by permission of the respective authors.
Illustrations by James Ferguson reproduced by arrangement with the illustrator.
David Hockney, Self Portrait Using Three Mirrors, watercolour on paper 24 x 18 1/8",
2003, Collection The David Hockney Foundation. Copyright © David Hockney, 2003
Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-24-196543-6
Foreword by John Ridding
Introduction by Lionel Barber
The Lunches
ARTS
Martin Amis
Michael Caine
Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs
Gavin Ewart
Zaha Hadid
David Hockney
Angelina Jolie
Albert Uderzo
Ronnie Wood
Yu Hua
BUSINESS
Prince Alwaleed
Jeff Bezos
Anatoly Chubais
Henri de Castries
Oleg Deripaska
Stephen Green
Lord Hanson
Mo Ibrahim
Michael O’Leary
George Soros
Shaw-Lan Wang
Steve Wozniak
FASHION AND LIFESTYLE
Eden Collinsworth
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana
Tamara Mellon
Twiggy
FOOD
Jennifer Paterson
Marco Pierre White
POACHERS AND GAMEKEEPERS
Martin McGuinness
General Rosso José Serrano
Ksenia Sobchak
POLITICS
Bao Tong
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Jimmy Carter
Helen Clark
Saif Gaddafi
Paul Kagame
F. W. de Klerk
Lord Lawson
Angela Merkel
Queen Rania
Donald Rumsfeld
Morgan Tsvangirai
SPORTS
Akebono Taro
Imran Khan
David Millar
THINKERS
Jacques Attali
Václav Havel
Paul Krugman
Nouriel Roubini
Yuko Tojo
James Watson
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Lunch with the FT has long been a mainstay of the Financial Times weekend section, a consistently entertaining read, and a unique ‘seat at the table’ with the personalities and players who have shaped our times. This book is, therefore, a fitting way to mark the newspaper’s 125th birthday – rekindling memorable moments and reacquainting ourselves with the protagonists from that history.
But these interviews also tell a broader FT story. They provide a reminder of some of the guiding beliefs and objectives that have served us well over the years, and will remain at the centre of our publication and our purpose. While many in media and publishing struggle to survive amid the forces of digital disruption, the FT remains in strong shape. This is partly because we have embraced digital delivery and innovative web formats. But it is mainly because of our sustained commitment to quality journalism and our confidence in its value and importance to our readers.
That commitment to quality is matched by our dedication to a global perspective. Our international expansion from the FT’s UK roots was well under way when our first lunch guest sat across the table in 1994. Since then, our branches have extended and flourished across the US, Asia and the fast-rising economies of the BRICs and beyond.
These portraits chart the evolution and revolutions of global society, which will always be at the heart of the Financial Times.
John Ridding
CEO, Financial Times
From the very first mouthful, Lunch with the FT was destined to become a permanent fixture in the newspaper. The formula was deceptively simple: a conversation-cum-interview over an agreeable lunch. Since its debut in 1994 there have been more than 800 lunches, featuring presidents, playwrights, tycoons, film-stars, monks and more than the occasional oddball. Lunch with the FT has become an institution, as entertaining and enduring as the Lex column.
To celebrate this year’s 125th anniversary of the Financial Times, we are publishing 52 of the best of the genre – one for every week of the year. Our list is an international who’s who from the arts, business, politics and science. The selection pays due regard to gender and geography, but above all it seeks to meet the test once set out by Richard Lambert, a former editor of the Financial Times. The task of FT journalism, he reminded colleagues, is not only to inform but also to delight readers.
Lunch with the FT was conceived by Max Wilkinson, a crusty, enterprising editor of the Weekend FT with an acute sense of the absurd. He thought the new interview format would provide ‘a ray of sunshine’ in the paper. The rules were straightforward. The guest/interviewee would choose the restaurant, and the FT would foot the bill. In fact, the Wilkinson rules were broken on the very first outing.
The FT’s first guest on 23 April 1994 was Marco Pierre White, the celebrity chef-cum-restaurateur whom our interviewer (Michael Thompson-Noel) memorably dubbed ‘the wild man of English cooking’. White, who had chosen one of his own restaurants in which to be amply wined and dined, rejected any notion that the FT would pick up the tab. The principle that the FT pays has otherwise mostly held firm, despite protestations from interviewees. What we view as a declaration of editorial independence has often been taken as a cultural insult or a poor reflection of the guest’s own financial standing. ‘Now I know why the FT is so expensive’ was the barbed quip of billionaire Michael Bloomberg on failing to pick up a $96 bill in New York, where he is now mayor.
The original idea behind Lunch with the FT was to rediscover the art of conversation in a convivial setting. Good food was essential, preferably washed down with a decent bottle of wine to elicit insights and the occasional indiscretion. The combination led to some memorable encounters, notably a liquid lunch of biblical proportions at the Café Royal between Nigel Spivey, a Cambridge don and freelance FT writer, and Gavin Ewart, the 79-year-old poet. The next day, Spivey received a call from Mrs Ewart, saying that her husband had returned home happier than she had seen him in a long time. ‘The second [thing] – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.’
Less fatal twists of fate feature in this book. In 1996 Jacques Attali, the enfant terrible of French intellectual life, announced halfway through lunch in Paris with Lucy Kellaway that he had to leave – to go to a second lunch. Apparently, gastronomic two-timing was de rigueur for Attali. Another mid-lunch upset saw Ronnie Wood, the ageing Rolling Stone, excusing himself from his oysters to take a call from the Sun newspaper inquiring about his teenage mistress. But the ultimate bombe surprise came from Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of the Japanese prime minister hanged after the Second World War. She brought his remains to lunch in Tokyo with David Pilling, our Asia editor.
Many lunches in this book show the FT at its eclectic best. Naturally, there is star-power aplenty: Angelina Jolie, Michael Caine, Martin Amis and Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, the hip-hopper-cum-business-magnate, who turned up in a Seventh Avenue soup shop in New York. There are statesmen and -women: Václav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-president and father of the post-communist nation; F. W. de Klerk, who brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa; and Angela Merkel, in a revealing interview in 2003, before she became German chancellor and arguably the most powerful politician in Europe. There are fashionistas such as Tamara Mellon, the founder of Jimmy Choo, as well as a rare luncheon duet with Domenico Dolce and his partner Stefano Gabbana. And there are tales of the unexpected from General Rosso José Serrano, the Colombia police chief who cornered Pablo Escobar before the drug kingpin died in a hail of bullets.
Inevitably, lunch – like the FT – has evolved over the 18 years since its inception. In the age of the BlackBerry, the smartphone and still or sparkling water, the idea of a long boozy lunch is almost quaint. Reluctantly, the FT has occasionally accommodated the busy lives of the rich, powerful and self-important by agreeing to a breakfast, tea or the occasional sandwich. But even modest fare can produce scintillating copy. Just read Pilita Clark’s opening exchange with Michael O’Leary, the potty-mouthed boss of the no-frills airline Ryanair.
Today’s lunches reflect the FT’s global reach. We have an ABC (Africans, Brazilians, Chinese) of prominent persons which stretches all the way to Z (Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai, the battered opposition leader interviewed over sundowners by Alec Russell, formerly the FT’s man in Johannesburg).
There are also some excellent interviews which failed to make the cut: Emily Stokes filleting the ambitious author-soldier-politician Rory Stewart at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Paulo Coelho talking about prostitutes and the Pope with fellow author A. N. Wilson; Sean Parker, the tech guru, telling John Gapper in Los Angeles that a million dollars ‘is not cool’; or Roger Waters of Pink Floyd comparing himself to Shakespeare and Woody Guthrie – and ordering a £75 piece of gravadlax.
The job of an editor is, however, to choose. In this case, I would like to thank Lucy Kellaway, a founder luncher and a mistress of the art, as well as Matthew Engel, the FT columnist, for his splendid essay on the 18th anniversary of the Lunch published last year (www.ft.com/lunch). Leyla Boulton, who co-ordinated this book project with patience and skill, has been indispensable. I am also grateful to James Ferguson, the FT’s brilliant cartoonist, whose illustrations have graced Lunch with the FT off and on since 2004.
Lionel Barber
Editor, Financial Times
2 NOVEMBER 2007
The novelist and commentator has lost none of his appetite for a war of words. He talks about Islam, his father and the ‘marooned ideologue’ Terry Eagleton
By Lionel Barber
Martin Amis greets me with an uncertain handshake and a furrowed brow. He is smaller and greyer than I had imagined. Is this slight figure in a waistcoat the imperious author of a dozen novels whose trademark is sledgehammer prose? For several minutes Amis does not utter a word. He stares at the menu at Odette’s, a restaurant in celebrity-packed primrose Hill. The silence is awkward, perhaps calculated (I arrived seven minutes late). Finally, England’s one-time enfant terrible speaks: ‘The menu is very pig-oriented.’ The voice is deep and gravelled; the accent a languid Oxford drawl. Amis orders his main course (roast quail), a glass of Chardonnay and, reluctantly, a green salad; then he excuses himself to smoke a roll-up outside. I place my order (a velouté of sweet corn, and organic salmon) and another glass of Chardonnay.
When Amis returns, I ask him about his running public feud with Terry Eagleton, the Marxist English literary professor. Eagleton has accused Amis of Islamophobia, castigating him for advocating strip-searches of young British Muslims and raising the threat of repatriation to Pakistan.
‘I never wrote it and I never said it,’ snaps Amis. He does, however, admit to favouring ethnic profiling at airports after an incident at Carrasco airport in Montevideo, Uruguay. Amis claims a security guard searched his then six-year-old daughter and ‘f ***-f ****d’ her fluffy toy duck.
The novelist and his family have since returned home after two and a half years in Uruguay, the birthplace of his second wife, Isabel Fonseca. Plainly, the fluffy duck episode still pains him, much more than his spat with Eagleton, an academic colleague at the University of Manchester, where Amis has just begun teaching a popular course in creative writing.
‘This is very minor stuff. He is a marooned ideologue who can’t get out of bed in the morning without guidance from God and Karl Marx. This makes him very unstaunch in the struggle against Islamism because part of him is a believer.’
Amis employs a linguistic defence: ‘I said quite clearly I am not an Islamophobe. What I am is anti-Islamist. “Islamistophobe” would be the right word, except that it’s not the right word because a phobia tends to be an irrational fear and it’s not irrational to fear people who want to kill you. So I’m anti-Islamist.’
I joke that the Amis–Eagleton feud is the equivalent of Manchester United versus Manchester City. Amis declines the opening. A tall, blonde Russian waitress arrives with the Chardonnay. I note that my last Lunch with the FT – with an Irish politician in Washington DC – turned into an epic drinking session. For the first time, Amis smiles.
It is time to switch to highbrow. I want to explore the relationship between Amis and his father, Kingsley, the distinguished comic novelist. What was it like trying to write great prose, knowing that every word was likely to be scrutinized?
‘I never felt any kind of particular pressure. He wasn’t an invigilator. It was nice having a kind of a lazy father, a very soft, sweet father. But lazy, jealous of his time …’
But while Kingsley liked his son’s (award-winning) first novel, The Rachel Papers, he did not think much of his second, Dead Babies. ‘That was a physical shock, like a blow,’ he confesses, before switching the subject to his new creative writing course at Manchester.
What has drawn Amis to teaching? He picks at his quail and admits to ‘a bit of paternal influence’ (Kingsley taught English at Swansea University for 12 years). But the other two attractions are ‘a vulgar curiosity about youth’ and being forced to read great books.
In Amis’s literary pantheon there is no place for younger writers, with the exception of his buddies Zadie Smith and Will Self. ‘There’s something humiliating about reading younger writers. You’re more likely to be on to something if you’re reading V. S. Pritchett, Saul Bellow … But any young squirt, you’re not going to read except out of a kind of sociological curiosity.’
For Amis, the authors that really matter are Saul Bellow and Nabokov, followed by, among others, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. The novel he most admires is Nabokov’s Lolita. ‘I must know it as well as I know any book. But it’s always different … You’ve got to read it every decade of your life because you are a different person.’
Amis’s elder daughter is 10, but he still finds the novel enchanting, particularly the last 100 pages whose pace he previously thought tailed off. At about page 220, when Lolita leaves Humbert, there’s a huge influx of energy, he says.
‘Nabokov might have ended the novel around there, instead of having those three years trying to find her and finding her. That marvellous scene where Humbert goes to see her and her beauty’s all gone, she’s pregnant … I cried quite a lot towards the end. It’s morally very complicated and very unreassuring.’
Morally complicated, unreassuring: that’s Amis in a nutshell. His novels are savagely comic and unsentimental; his literary criticism uncompromising; his choice of vocabulary rich to the point of self-indulgent. (Over lunch, ‘jocose’, ‘palpating’ and ‘adulterous assignation’ trip off the Amis tongue, leavened by a stream of four-letter words.) The result is usually enlightening, invariably entertaining.
Feeling outgunned on English literature, I mention that I studied German at Oxford, his alma mater. Amis is intrigued and asks me if I have read Kafka in German. When I reply in the affirmative he embarks on his own aphoristic literary tour.
The shorter Kafka works best. The dream logic in The Castle is staggering but ‘nothing odd works long’. The other literary rule: ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader.’ Joyce’s Ulysses is a noble, beautiful book. And borrowing from Nabokov, Finnegans Wake is a snore in the next room.
According to Amis, the relationship between writer and reader is a love affair. Sometimes the writer falls out of love with the reader. It happened to Henry James, it happened to Joyce. But if it really is a love affair, then why is Amis so keen on impressing the reader (and me?) with his command of the English language?
‘I am not a great user of obscure words,’ he replies, with a straight face. But he admits to writing prose which is ‘packed’, ‘slightly goading’ and ‘sort of in-your-face’. I want to ask Amis about male friendship, but he excuses himself for a second cigarette break, leaving his green salad untouched.
Male friendships are a vital part of Amis’s world. His closest pal is perhaps Christopher Hitchens, the US-based author and polemicist. Their friendship goes back more than 30 years to when both worked at the New Statesman magazine.
Amis cites his father’s friendship with Philip Larkin, the poet. Except between man and wife, there are fewer limits to candour and intimacy between male friends than between men and women, where sex has a habit of intruding on friendship. ‘Sadly I reached the conclusion that Larkin didn’t really reciprocate this love.’
I suggest Larkin was a bit of a cold fish. ‘Yeah, and an envious bugger,’ replies Amis, noting that Larkin was jealous of Kingsley’s ability as a novelist, his metropolitan life and mainly his women. ‘Larkin was a sexual sloth who hated spending money on women, though there were many poets who splashed their way through women, like today’s footballers.’
Our conversation turns to ‘The Hitch’ and life in London in the late 1970s, the subject of a novel which Amis is working on. ‘What we talked about was women and it was all very carnal, in incredible detail about encounters, but serious … And very clear about feelings that were not to be trifled with, and quite moral, given it was low-bohemia promiscuity, but certainly not heartless. Dirty but not heartless.’
I nod in mock comprehension. My peppermint tea arrives, alongside an espresso for Amis. It is time, again, to move away from boys’ talk to politics. Next year Amis will publish a compilation of his writing on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The Second Plane. ‘If September 11 had to happen, I am very pleased it happened in my lifetime because it’s just endlessly riveting and couldn’t be weirder.’
The crisis of Islam, he argues, is a crisis of masculinity. He speaks of ‘centuries of humiliation’, first by the west, latterly by Israel. ‘How do you get back God’s favour? You come to a T-junction: one says “less religion”; the other says “more religion” and you turn to the right. Absolutely desperate.’
The west must speak out. ‘When we declare we are morally superior to the Taliban, we’re declaring ourselves morally superior to the 15th century.’ Still, it is no mystery why moderate Muslims are reluctant to follow suit. ‘They (the extremists) have the monopoly of violence, of intimidation.’ Slowly, the Amis invective gives way to sober reflection. He confesses to feeling guilty about being absent from England during the July 7 bombings. One of his sons had a holiday job which, if extended, would have seen him at Edgware Road tube station at the time of the bomb.
Shortly afterwards, a journalist came to visit Amis in Long Island. He had been on a transatlantic flight where passengers were not allowed to carry a book. Amis exploded in anger at this ‘hideous symbol of humourless literalism’. He spoke about having to make the Muslim community suffer.
Now he regrets those words – a rare retreat for the macho wordsmith. Maybe Amis, 58, is mellowing. Odette’s, he reveals, was where he and Kingsley lunched together in his father’s final years. He looks at his watch: ‘How are we doing?’
As an opening chapter, pretty good, I say to myself.
1 OCTOBER 2010
The actor talks about class, cholesterol, Jack Nicholson and becoming a ‘Google freak’
By Peter Aspden
Disappointingly, Sir Michael Caine does not, when we are introduced, look me firmly in the eye and declare, ‘My name’s Michael Caine.’ Nor, during the course of our tea together, does he at any stage say, ‘Not a lot of people know that’, or – and this admittedly asked too much – ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.’ Is there a greater deliverer of catchphrases in the history of cinema than Michael Caine?
He is, at 77, still an impressive figure, standing tall and possessing a rich baritone with which he fires jokes with deft and natural comic timing. The accent is much imitated and inimitable. ‘They’ve got scones and clotted cream here,’ he offers, and somehow makes it sound funny. I am not sure about the word ‘clotted’, I say. It doesn’t have good connotations. ‘That’s just what I thought,’ he replies. ‘If it had just said “cream” I’d have had it.’
A shared concern for cholesterol levels established, we settle on smoked salmon and cream-cheese sandwiches and cups of tea, English breakfast for him and Earl Grey for me. We are in a suite at the slightly soulless Wyndham hotel in Chelsea Harbour and there is a barrage of helicopter noise outside, as if there is a nationwide search for a runaway spy going on. ‘It is because we are next to the Thames,’ says Caine knowledgeably (he has a flat just round the corner), the kind of thing Harry Palmer might say to put me off the scent.
Now that dates both of us. Harry Palmer – star of The Ipcress File, Caine’s breakthrough role – hit the screens 45 years ago. The longevity of Caine’s career is not the least remarkable thing about him. In his new autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, there are poignant personal recollections of two movie stars who were brought down by the pressures of stardom: one is Heath Ledger, the other Rita Hayworth. That is some chronological range. But Caine is still going strong.
Next year he once more reprises his role as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie. He won critical acclaim for last year’s Harry Brown, a hard-nosed vigilante movie shot in his native Elephant and Castle – a tough inner-London district (hence the title of his book). These are high-profile roles, in challenging and/or lucrative films. That is a rare feat for any actor, let alone one in the latter part of his eighth decade. How do you keep getting such great parts? I ask him. ‘I dunno,’ he deadpans. ‘I sit back and wait for my agent to ring.’
But it wasn’t always like that. The autobiography starts at an awkward moment for Caine. It is the early 1990s, and he is shooting a belated sequel to the Harry Palmer films, Midnight in St Petersburg, in the Russian city. He goes to the toilet. It is, he recalls, ‘the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. No one had cleaned it out. And I suddenly thought, “What am I doing here?” ’ He makes the existential crisis sound as desolate as Beckett. It sounds like a forlorn experience, I say. ‘It was just after the communists had gone. When we had lunch on location they gave us Geiger counters, to test the food for radiation. And of course the first thing we did was test the batteries!’ He laughs loudly. ‘You don’t want a duff battery!’
‘It was a low moment,’ he confesses, turning serious again. ‘But I was quite philosophical about it.’ He saw the incident as a turning point. He was preparing to wind his career down, getting increasingly involved with his restaurant businesses and enjoying the easy life in his new apartment in Miami’s South Beach. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Jack Nicholson called. ‘He was the catalyst,’ says Caine. ‘I had got to that stage in life when you wouldn’t even send me a good script. I had done a couple of duff ones. And then Jack was doing a movie with Bob Rafelson in Miami, and asked me to come. He said, “Get off your ass and just do it.” And that changed everything. Jack is the nicest and kindest person, it was such a joy working with him.’
The resulting film – the noir thriller Blood and Wine – didn’t change the landscape of motion pictures, but Caine’s appetite was refreshed, his career revivified. Along came Little Voice, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, Baftas, Golden Globes and an Oscar. He says one of the aims in writing the book is to inspire readers of a certain age. ‘As they get older, people think, “It’s over.” But it isn’t. It doesn’t have to be.’
The food arrives. The sandwiches are triple-deckers. ‘Blimey! They give you a lot, don’t they? We will weigh 400lb by the end of this!’ He offers to serve the tea but is flummoxed by a designer teapot. ‘I can never pour these bleedin’ things. Either nothing comes out or it all goes all over the table.’ Between us, we crack it. Caine dutifully removes one of the slices of his sandwich and tucks in with relish.
Caine has a habit of saying nice things about everyone. He makes Hollywood parties sound like village green fêtes. He doesn’t even have a bad word for Frank Sinatra, for goodness’ sake. I am suspicious of this. When he first travelled there in the 1960s, was Hollywood not full of predators trying to shaft this presumptuous Limey?
‘No, truly not. And you know why? Because I wasn’t their idea of a Limey. I wasn’t posh. I didn’t have this superior English attitude. And I was all for them.’ His love affair with things American started during the war. ‘There were American soldiers parked in the local recreation ground and we used to make their beds in exchange for chewing gum and Coca-Cola. I didn’t actually go there until Alfie.’ His maiden voyage happily coincided with an Oscar nomination. ‘But then I saw Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons and thought, “There’s no point in turning up.” ’ (Scofield duly won the award.)
Was he an innocent when he went to Hollywood? ‘I was an innocent by Hollywood standards. What surprised me was the hospitality, how kind people were. Even the lawyers and agents were the nicest people.’ I raise an eyebrow. ‘Remember, I wasn’t really competing with anyone. You weren’t going to lose a part to me if you were Jack Nicholson.’ And then, in 2000, there was the knighthood, which helped. ‘They like a bit of King Arthur.’
Never mind that, this was a town that famously spat people out for its own entertainment, I say. ‘It can do. But I wasn’t successful until I was 30. And I was a very tough 30, not some giddy little girl.’
The toughening of Michael Caine is the most sobering part of the book. Born Maurice Micklewhite to a working-class family in south-east London ‘with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets’, he was evacuated during the war to a couple who would lock him in the cupboard for the weekend while they went socializing. That’s the kind of thing you read about in the Sunday papers, I say.
He shrugs it off. ‘A lot of children had a very bad time.’ But to be locked in a cupboard for a whole weekend? ‘They weren’t wicked people. They took in the children for the money, and then didn’t want to look after them. They wanted to go away for the weekend and didn’t want to cart these dirty tykes from London around with them. Of course, when my mother came, she nearly went to prison for assaulting the woman. She beat her up.’
He is unsentimental about the war. ‘I benefited from it. For a start I ate nothing but organic food for six years. We had no sugar, no biscuits, no fizzy drinks.’ He went on to serve in Korea. ‘It was a nightmare at the time. But I saw the world, and mixed with people from all classes and societies.’
He speaks movingly of his parents, particularly his father, whom he describes as a ‘hero’, a market porter at Billingsgate, who read voraciously and had an aptitude for technology, building his own radio from scratch. ‘He was a symptom of this country losing out on talent because of class,’ he says. ‘They never knew they had it, they never knew they lost it. But today computers will compensate for any bad education there is.’ He pauses for a second, and free-associates. ‘I’m a Google freak.’
What do you google? I ask.
‘Everything. It’s a wonderful thing. I had a gardener who didn’t know much about gardening.’ (Read this out loud in a Caine voice and it is somehow hilarious.) ‘Every time I bought a plant I googled it to find out how to look after it, and gave it to him and said, “There you go.” ’
It can be a terrible distraction, I add. He evidently agrees. ‘I was looking for a penthouse once. And so I put in “Penthouse”. Oh my God.’ I quickly wonder to myself how many people who hit the Penthouse website are actually after a penthouse. ‘And it’s a funny thing – you can’t switch it off. I had to take it out of the wall. I had to take the battery out.’ There is something endearing about this techno-porno nightmare. Perhaps Jack Nicholson should have been around, I almost say.
He says in the book that 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, the third Harry Palmer film, featured an early version of the internet. ‘I read that in the paper,’ he says. He remembers an adviser on the set trying to explain it to him. ‘I said, “What a load of bollocks. Just tell me which knob to turn.” I thought it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard.’
Like many people, I say, I became fully converted to Caine’s acting talents by his performance in Educating Rita, for which he gained weight, looked permanently drunk and gave a startling portrayal of vulnerability. ‘I had never been offered parts like that. But it is the proudest piece of acting I have ever done. An English professor in a college – it was the furthest thing from me that you could get. It was the first time I completely disappeared.’ Was it hard to let his ego go like that? ‘I realized that I didn’t have that kind of ego, worrying about looking great. I didn’t care about that.’ He reminds me that he was in repertory theatre for nine years before his big movie break. ‘A different role every week. I love being an actor. And I love not being me.’
Caine spends his time today between his Chelsea flat and his 200-year-old converted barn in Box Hill, Surrey, spending part of the winter in Miami. His days in Hollywood are over (he lived there for eight years, as a vociferous critic of Britain’s tax regime). There is a touching account of a mournful farewell to his press agent on Rodeo Drive. ‘I went straight to Ermenegildo Zegna [he mangles the name magnificently] and bought a shirt.’ Did the retail therapy have the required effect? ‘I was all right. I got on a plane and went home.’
Home is where his heart is. He is ‘besotted’ with his three grandchildren, a strength of reaction that surprised him, and reveres family life. Both in the book and our conversation, he repeatedly pays tribute to his wife of 37 years Shakira, ‘the nicest person in the world’, with whom he has a daughter (he also has a daughter with his first wife, the actress Patricia Haines). It is because of his family, he says, that his book is studiedly discreet about all those Hollywood parties. ‘When you fall in love, that becomes part of your past. Like mumps and measles. I didn’t want to go into all that. Not like Kirk Douglas – he named them all, Marlene Dietrich, bleedin’ Marilyn Monroe, everybody!’
As for the films, he says, touching every piece of wood in the vicinity, they keep rolling in. As well as the next Batman, he is preparing for a part in a version of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, about which he is unexpectedly rapturous. ‘I have grandchildren now. And I get to fly off on a giant bumblebee. I want them to see that.’
29 OCTOBER 2004
The rapper, model, actor and king of bling tells the FT’s Washington bureau chief (aka cat daddy) that come election day, the youth of America will have their say
By James Harding
When I go back and listen to the tape of my conversation with Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, I can hear myself launching into loud, uncertain guffaws and then stopping the laugh short, because I am not altogether clear whether he is joking.
Take his response to the question of which man he wants to win the election: ‘I don’t answer. It would sway people. If I endorse a candidate right now, I mean the race would probably be over.’ I laugh, then wonder if he is being serious. Does he genuinely think that?
The hip hop magnate is just saying that for fun, he says, and then pauses. ‘No,’ he reflects. ‘I could. I think a couple of people could: I think Russell Simmons [the founder of Def Jam records] could, I think Jay-Z [a rapper] could, I think Eminem could. There are a lot of people who have a lot of power that could. I think Oprah [Winfrey] could.’
Or, for example, his answer when asked about running for office. ‘No … This is me doing my good thing. I like to party a little bit too hard to be in public office,’ he smiles. ‘I don’t think I would be the best person to be in politics, because I would feel so passionately about something, they would probably have to pull me off somebody’s ass in the Senate.’ I suggest he would do well in Seoul’s wrestling ring of a parliament and he agrees: ‘I would be a champion there, I would get a lot of things done in South Korea.’
Even his assessment of his effort to get black people and young people to the polls is half jest, half earnest: ‘This is the thing right now, cat daddy … this is like a pair of bellbottoms. You know what I’m saying, your parents are just looking at you and they’re not looking down and then one day they’re like: “Oh shit, everybody has on bellbottoms,” ’ he says. ‘You were late. In this world, it is going down. On November 2, it is going down and the revolution will be televised.’
And, I guess, that’s the point: at the end of our lunch, I was left wondering whether he may, in fact, be in the thick of the most significant phenomenon of the 2004 election or just an entertaining sideshow.
I had dropped off the campaign trail for a day to talk to Combs about the Vote or Die campaign, his drive to get generally poll-shy young Americans to vote on Tuesday. And, to begin with, it seemed more glitter than power.
A beefy man in a black suit, black shirt and black tie escorted me up to reception at Combs’s Broadway office, where I waited for a while in a meeting room adorned with racks of the ultimate ‘bling bling’ accessory: chrome hubcaps engraved with the Sean John signature logo. Sophie, his miniature Maltese, wearing a magenta bow in her hair and a diamanté dog collar, trotted in, sniffed my feet and left. When I was shown into Combs’s modest, cluttered office, he was on the phone, complaining about being ripped off by a building contractor. He finished the call, got up and shook my hand: ‘Hey, baby,’ he said.
From there on in, it was all politics and some soup. Me talking to Combs about voter mobilization is a bit like sending Donald Trump to interview Dr Ruth about gardening: a white Englishman boasting a sizeable Van Morrison collection and biting at the ankles of middle age talking to an icon of black youth in America with a résumé of rap music hits and enviable lovers about one of the more obscure areas of political science.
Combs is known by many names for many things: Puff Daddy, party promoter, music producer and former boss of Bad Boy Entertainment; P. Diddy, rapper and friend of the late Notorious B. I. G.; Puffy, ex-boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez and successful defendant in a bizarre criminal saga involving shooting in a nightclub and charges of bribery and illegal gun possession; Sean John, model and marketing man for his own fashion label; Sean Combs, Broadway actor; Mr Combs, salesman of an ever-expanding circle of selves, and frontman of Vote or Die.
There are roughly 42 million Americans aged 18 to 34. Combs has reach well beyond African American young men, pointing out that nearly 80 per cent of hip hop is bought by white people. And what is true for both young white and black people is they have a lousy record on election day: 36 per cent of 18-to 24-year-olds voted in 2000, compared with 72 per cent of 65-to 72-year-olds. (Not that voting statistics are Combs’s forte – ‘I can’t fuck with you on that,’ he told me.)
The political apathy makes simple sense when Combs explains it in his part-fumbling prose, part-street poetry style: ‘We come from the community of people that is like, “Politics is bullshit, politicians are full of shit …” Just growing up in Harlem and seeing nothing change,’ he says. ‘You have a lot of people in those communities, whether it is Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, Detroit, Watts, wherever; they don’t feel connected. There is a disconnect.’
Combs spent his early childhood in Harlem. His father was killed when he was three. His mother, a former model, moved the family to the more well-to-do New York suburb of Mount Vernon, where Combs went to private school. He went to Howard University, dropping out to get into nightclubs and the music business. The rest is not quite history, but, certainly, fame. He admits he has had his ‘ups and downs’, a reference, among other things, to the deaths of nine people who were crushed in a stampede at an event he organized in 1991. But, he continues, ‘God has blessed me with a talent to be able to communicate, to energize and synergize, like, my people, young people and minorities.’
Combs, who has ranted against George W. Bush before, says his current effort is non-partisan: ‘If you just relinquish your power to one party, then you lose your power,’ he says. ‘I can’t necessarily say that Democrats have made things better than they can be.’
At this point, the phone rings for perhaps the fourth, but not the last, time and our meeting turns into lunch. ‘You want some soup?’ I say, ‘Yes please.’ ‘Bring an extra one for my man.’
And for the better part of an hour, we slurp soup bulked up with pasta in big cardboard cups from the local fast-soup store, Hale Hearty Soups. We agree it is good soup.
Back to the election. Combs voted for the first time in 2000. A couple of years ago, he ran the New York Marathon; it was called ‘Diddy runs the City’. Really? Where’ve you been?’ he asks back. I apologize: ‘Washington.’
Anyway, Combs’s point is that he raised money – a lot of it – for New York public schools and got fired up about the failure of government to address the youth constituency as it does the elderly, the unions and the veterans.
He is selling the ballot box much as he would a movie or an album. ‘In the field of entertainment, right, people have said I’m a marketing genius. I didn’t say it,’ he says. I let out a laugh, halt and point out that he is happy to repeat it. ‘No. No. No,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to understand my sense of humour. I don’t take myself seriously like that. I’m strong on marketing, though, that’s one of my strengths.’
Certainly, his case for luring young people to the polls has more life in it than the extraordinarily unimaginative schedule of stump speeches to partisan crowds that is the A-Z of electioneering in the last weeks before polling day. ‘All of the political bullshit, statistics, numbers and all of the corny slogans,’ he says. ‘I give it to them real and raw. That the time is now. This is how serious it is. And you have the power.
‘I’m on a different campaign trail. While Kerry and Bush are in fields with a bunch of white people waving flags, I’m in areas, I’m reaching out to people of more diversity – white, black, Latino, Asian. How am I doing that?’
He has no time for CNN or Fox News Channel; he promotes the vote through MTV, Black Entertainment Television and Clear Channel radio stations. ‘I’m going to go into his nightclubs, I’m going to go into the areas politicians don’t go. I’m going to go into the barbershops. I’m going to be on the mix tapes.’ And he has recruited fellow stars, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Yoko Ono to Alicia Keys, to spread the same message.
The results, he says, are below the radar of the mainstream media, but will be felt on Tuesday night. ‘It is not going to be regular. Voting is up in these communities … it is going to be staggering how much it is up.’ I point out that others have tried to do the same before and failed. ‘Nobody does it like me. There is a certain passion, it is a certain way to relate.’
As we near the end of our conversation, Combs leans back in his black executive chair and pulls back the curtain. From his window, he can look down Broadway and see a towering image of himself on a billboard sporting own-branded Sean John casualwear, his Mohican-tufted head bowed and his arm raised in the black-power salute. He will have an even better view in a few months, when they have finished constructing his office upstairs: ‘I’m building the biggest office in the United States; 6,000 square feet,’ he says, explaining that we have actually been talking in his temporary office.
There is something fitting about this, not simply because Combs has an ironic though vivid self-regard. Nor is it because this reticent 5ft 9in guy in sweatpants and a T-shirt seems like a man dwarfed by his own persona. Combs’s image looms huge over Times Square, as if, facing uptown, past the chi-chi neighbourhoods that flank Central Park, he is summoning the ranks in Harlem to stand up and be counted. ‘That’s black power right there,’ he says. ‘Black power.’ He grins, looking at the giant picture of himself. ‘Right there.’
4 NOVEMBER 1995
The bard’s death, last week, was hardly the consequence of lunch with the Financial Times. But, with hindsight, the FT gave him a grand send-off
By Nigel Spivey
Gavin Ewart is dead. The poet’s death, last week, was hardly the consequence of lunch with the Financial Times. But, with hindsight, we gave him a grand send-off.
He had just recovered from a prostate operation when we met in high summer. But intimations of mortality were not apparent. Far from it.
Aiming to arrive on good time at the Café Royal, I found him already settled at the bar, fondling a large pink drink. ‘Ah,’ he said, without guilt. ‘There you are.’
‘I say,’ I said, with anguish. ‘That can only be a Negroni.’ It was indeed a Negroni, the gin and Campari mixture with a velocity of intoxication that is both feared and loved by those who know it. This lunch would be, in the poet’s own phrase, ‘a thick one’.
Once upon a time the Grill Room of the Café Royal was a bohemian place. When Ewart came there in his youth, it was packed with chess-playing intellectuals.
The ripe Edwardian decor still gleams around the tables, but the earnest beards have disappeared. No wonder. A Negroni or three later, two bottles of Rully, and a wander into à la carte territory, and we had no trouble in running up a plump three-figure bill. At the time I was horrified. But glossed as a funerary banquet, it now seems fitting.
In fact, our chat began on the topic of the death of another poet, Stephen Spender. While W. H. Auden was Ewart’s mentor, Spender was his first hands-on helper in the literary workplace.
‘Hands on?’ I queried, pruriently.
‘Oh no, he never fancied me. He was a very decent man, too nice, probably, for his own good. You could tell from his face. He looked angelic from youth to the grave. Whereas Auden …’ he paused.
‘Had a face like an old potato,’ I suggested.
‘Exactly. Pure debauchery,’ concluded Ewart. ‘But always the superior craftsman. You know his lines, “For what as easy / For what thought small … Who goes with who / The bedclothes say”, and so on. They’re what my old English master used to call “poetry in pyjamas”. Light, funny, sensuous.’
As it happens, Ewart’s English master, T. C. Worsley, was for many years the FT’s drama and then television critic. The poetry in pyjamas that Worsley encouraged Ewart to write had its own success, even notoriety. And it was perhaps natural that he turned his skills to copywriting, with the Walter Thompson agency. He spent 20 years in the business. What, I asked him, were his triumphs there?
He mused. ‘There was something for Andrews Liver Salts. We needed to convince women to take them. I think we succeeded. Then there was my new name for Bulmer’s cider, “Strongbow”. I just thought it was a good strong name, but it turned out that Strongbow was also a local hero of Herefordshire, where the cider is made. That tickled Bulmer’s no end.’
He went into a reverie, perhaps induced by foie gras, which was an evident treat for him. ‘You’re too young for this one. But it was quite a hit.’ And he began to croon: ‘We must give them lovely Cheeselets, Twiglets must be on the scene. Do you get me, Mr Peek? You’ve said a mouthful, Mr Frean.’
Even when an aged bard is reciting his most banal work, it is enchanting. For a moment, the Café Royal returned to its inspirational heyday. Heads turned to catch the rhyme.
‘Then,’ he resumed, gloomily, ‘they put me on to GKN screws. Technical copy. A screw is a screw is a screw. You can’t write poetry about screws.’
This was a distinct admission of failure. For it was the singular hallmark of Ewart’s work that you could indeed craft a poem from any subject whatsoever. I asked him if he were still turning them out.
‘Oh yes. In fact I’ve just finished one. A paean of praise to the recently retired captain of the Scotland rugby team.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘What rhymes with Hastings?’
‘It’s a wee ballad,’ said Ewart, ‘about how he and his team gave the Ivory Coast one of time’s most tremendous pastings.’
I had to remind him that his collected works were out of print. ‘But the good news,’ I said, ‘is that you’ve made the official grade. You’re listed in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon as one of the essential writers of the 20th century.’
A naturally modest man, he permitted himself an expression of enormous satisfaction. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I noticed that. Up with Auden.’
It was, as I now see, the declaration of a life fulfilled: proving that good light verse has a place with good heavy verse in our lives.
Eventually we departed the Café Royal, in a moderately straight line; and when I saluted him on to a bus home, Gavin Ewart had the aura of a very happy traveller.
18 NOVEMBER 1995
The architect was a controversial choice to design the Cardiff Bay opera house
By Lucy Kellaway
In the rag-rolled and marbled interior of Aubergine, a French restaurant in Fulham, the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid looked all wrong. Too large for one thing and too flamboyant in a brilliant-lime-green pleated silk housecoat with a gash of crimson lipstick.
This woman is the queen of avant-garde architecture. For over a decade she has travelled the world winning competitions with her far-out, asymmetrical creations. Last year she beat nearly 300 architects in a contest for the Cardiff Bay opera house, submitting a design that has variously been described as a row of jewels, a freeze-framed explosion and a deconstructed pigsty.
But unlike her other work – most of which has never been built – the opera house may actually become a reality if the Millennium Fund decides during the next few weeks to pay £50m towards it.
‘I like more funky restaurants,’ she said in a husky voice, lighting the first of many cigarettes. I asked what she thought of the decor. ‘It’s not terrible, but I find it too fussy.’ This was an understatement, judging by the look on her face.
Hadid knows something about restaurants, having recently designed one in Sapporo, Japan. ‘The theme was ice and fire,’ she said. ‘Monochromic. The ground floor is ice, with one enormous sheet of glass suspended very low. Upstairs is the fire, with rubber sofas and fibre-glass – it is as though a tornado had started in the bar and hit the ceiling.’