Disgusting Bliss (29 page)

IN APRIL 1999 A NEW COLUMNIST STARTED AT THE
OBSERVER
. His byline picture showed Richard Geefe to be dark and good-looking, and his writing revealed a cruel streak, all new laddish adventures flavoured with literary pretension. But as casually misogynistic as he was in his description of seducing women in his various cars and his modish if bland loft apartment, there was also a world-weariness alongside his emotional disconnection. His work first appeared just under two months after the final series of
Blue Jam
concluded, though there was nothing in his writing that hinted at a connection to the show, much less to the dark bruises of its monologues. There was little to connect him to anything at all, which seemed rather odd to his fellow writers on the paper. Nobody had read anything he had written prior to his Second Class Male column. Nobody knew him personally. He’d only ever been properly introduced to one person on the staff and that was the man who commissioned him, editor Roger Alton – though it was rumoured that Geefe had once delivered his copy to the offices while drunk.

Most of his adventures seemed to take place while under the influence, and for such a reclusive hack he did seem remarkably unreserved about relating his unstable lurches from one pointless liaison to the next. Titillating the liberal
Observer
readership with his determinedly non-PC attitudes, he explains that he’s given up homeless women, ‘though I still like to clock them alfresco for fantasy reference when I’m with someone dull but clean’. He follows sad-looking foreign women on the Tube. ‘I don’t bother them, you understand. I just stay on the train for as long as they do so I can bathe in the exquisite tragedy of their remote erotolachrymalia.’

Geefe claimed that he was compelled to tell the truth, which seemed to manifest itself as an unbearably bleak view of life. But if the truth brings death, he says, it is ‘better than the living death of lies. Sod it if I lose my friends, if they can’t take the truth they’re not worth half an air kiss.’ Consumed by increasing self-loathing, he lashes out at those around him, impersonating his female best friend’s date on the phone to convince her of a non-existent romantic interest. His hoax pushes the friend to the point where she turns up at his flat in the middle of the night having taken an overdose. ‘I had the sangfroid to heave her on to a couch, sit down and write this,’ Geefe reports, ‘clocking casually that I still had another hour to empty her stomach (if she had told me correctly what time she filled it).’

And then Geefe disappeared. Only six columns had been published. In the last he’d written about how difficult he was finding it to get out of bed in the mornings and that when he did eventually manage to leave his flat he lost track of what happened to him for the rest of the morning. When he returned to the paper after a week, it was explained that his absence was due to a suicide attempt. Geefe himself revealed he was still planning to kill himself, but had agreed with the editor to wait for six months ‘on the spurious grounds that some fucker (probably him) may benefit from my burbling’.

Richard Geefe had come from nowhere to being the world’s first commissioned suicide in a remarkably short period. And little more than another week elapsed before the
Independent
denounced him as a fake. Of the true identity of Geefe, the paper said only that it was a ‘much-respected’ writer. But they did report that behind the scenes at the
Observer
a ‘delegation’ of journalists had been complaining that Geefe’s creation ‘violated the trust between the paper and its readers’. Roger Alton says now there were far fewer staff complaints than reported, although he does admit that some came to see him about the column. ‘And why not?’ he says. ‘There was a bit of argy-bargy, but you would expect it. Some were baffled, some were annoyed, some amused. But that’s what happens. People disagree and that’s fine.’

So the columns continued. And on 20 June Geefe referenced the criticism when he reported that when he had second thoughts his editor responded, ‘The
Observer
has a bond of trust with its readers, who are now relying on me to commit suicide and would rightly be appalled if I said I was going to live after all. And I began to see that morally, and in every other conceivable way, the editor was actually right.’

A furious article soon followed in London’s
Evening Standard
, condemning the columns for dishonesty, but saving most of its criticism for Roger Alton and the damage it suggested he had done to the
Observer
’s reputation. It accused him of being a news snob who wanted to belittle confessional writers and pointed at Chris Morris as the real author of the columns almost as an afterthought.

But the true history of Richard Geefe was rather more involved. He had another parent, in Morris’s monologue-writing partner Robert Katz, and his story had been the subject of greater planning than his critics suggested. Richard Geefe had been conceived more than a year before he appeared in the
Observer
and made his debut in a
Blue Jam
monologue of April 1998. The narrator character is invited to join the journalist at a dinner party given in honour of his brave suicide column. It’s a gathering that is Hogarthian in its pungent depiction of gluttonous self-celebration. As the braying guests greedily consume twitching oysters, the journalist’s nihilism and contempt for his audience seem only to increase their unquestioning adoration as, ‘sousing his oysters in vodka and setting them alight before hurling them down his throat, [he] now added a cigarette to the turmoil and belched the word “Bollocks”’. Morris’s narrator, ever anxious and confused, is himself only a missed prescription away from disaster, but it is the star guest who finally does what he has written in his columns he will do, with the assistance of the narrator – ‘about an hour later I revealed that [the journalist] hadn’t just gone for a walk, he’d gone to divorce his head’.

The suicide journalist’s transition to a real newspaper came out of occasional informal meetings between Morris and Roger Alton. Their wide-ranging discussions sometimes included various ideas for articles: ‘He’s the only person around I can think of who makes us look at the way we live and the society we live in in a completely new way,’ says Alton. ‘He is a revolutionary and a visionary.’

Richard Geefe gradually moved from taking a supporting role in
Blue Jam
to centre stage, with the
Observer
’s staff kept in the dark all the while by Morris’s insistence on complete secrecy, ‘much to their annoyance,’ says Alton. That only the editor and one senior colleague knew the true identity of the (not very) mild-mannered Geefe did little to improve the opinion of him later expressed in print.

The criticism was that Geefe parodied journalists who wrote about personal suffering. The
Evening Standard
article had been written by India Knight, whose friend Ruth Picardie had reported for the
Observer
on life with terminal cancer, bringing her experiences into her weekly articles and dealing with the miserable daily realities of pain, suffering and humiliation with the self-deprecating wit of the confessional journalist. But though Richard Geefe was usually unsympathetic as a character, he never seemed to be more than a rather helpless spectator of his own life. The real monster was the editor – he had, after all, commissioned a writer to kill himself. He is a Mephistophelian character haranguing from the sidelines, phoning Geefe to remind him of the importance of keeping to his decision to wait for a few months before killing himself and warning of the possible legal consequences of not doing so. He even provides a housemate to keep Geefe company – and ensure he doesn’t make another attempt at going before the columns have been completed. Sometimes he appears in his own right in the columns, in introductory paragraphs justifying his decision to keep the story going as Geefe’s mental state deteriorates. Each point on the journey had been mapped by Morris to mock the way in which Geefe’s sadness and darkness were ruthlessly exploited. The emotional disintegration was sensitively realized – it was the absurdly morbid commission which was the target, highlighting the uneasy relationship between the plight of the writer and his worth to the paper.

‘A very flattering picture of myself . . .’ says Alton. ‘No, it’s a joke. He is making a serious point about the media being a voracious and often manipulative thing. Of course it applies to me. I’m always saying to people in extremis, “Oh, you must write about that.” I don’t know any journalist who doesn’t.’ It was, as one colleague of Morris imaginatively puts it, ‘cool’ of Alton to ‘willingly lube up’. And perhaps it was altruistic or maybe even some form of masochism – though in interview Alton betrays a more straightforward reason for taking on Morris. As the talk turns to the best lines from a classic
On the Hour
newspaper hoax, his composed front of journalistic neutrality melts into hoots of compulsive, wheezing laughter and he has to take his glasses off to wipe away the helpless tears before he can continue. Alton was just delighted to have one of Morris’s creations in the paper and left Morris and Robert Katz alone for what he describes as the ‘delicate process’ of crafting Geefe.

The journalist’s byline picture came from Barnaby’s Picture Library – taken as inspiration for the archive in Stephen Poliakoff’s
Shooting the Past –
near Talkback. Katz found an Austrian ski instructor who looked as if he would be suitably anonymous to British readers – though it was later used as evidence against Geefe when a sharp member of the
Observer
’s picture staff questioned its provenance. It was also Katz who delivered the copy to the offices, but even after it had been filed Morris would continue refining.

Morris set up a fake book deal with Fourth Estate, a publisher of
Guardian
and
Observer
books. Morris already knew editorial director Clive Priddle, who liked the character and the idea, although he had to be reassured by Morris that he wouldn’t find himself forced to honour his bid on the proposed collection of columns. Morris phoned the book trade journal
Publishing News
pretending to be a ‘media insider’ outraged at the news that an unknown journalist such as Geefe should be given a book deal with Fourth Estate on the strength of just a few columns in the
Observer
. Clive Priddle obligingly provided a quote to back up the story, and to his intense relief it prompted another publisher to top his offer.

‘It was a classic pop culture bid for the memoir of this tortured soul,’ says Priddle now, less surprised at the interest of the book trade in a non-existent author than he was at the reaction of some of his freelance copy editors when the truth was revealed. A number wrote to say they were long-time
Observer
readers and thought it was cruel. For Priddle it was ‘slightly sobering’ to see the joke cause such offence. He’d seen the point of the deal to be the relationship between publisher and market. When Ruth Picardie and fellow columnist John Diamond were approached in 1997 about collecting their writings on their illness, one publisher explained, ‘Cancer is hot.’

But any reader of Richard Geefe might well have felt that they had been deliberately taken in in a way that was different from anything Morris had done before. This time his target unambiguously included its audience. With
Brass Eye
the viewer was always in on the joke, even if the celebrities never guessed. Geefe was different. It hit both sides – those in the newspaper office and the Sunday-morning readers. It was the hoax in which Morris was at his most solitary, only the tightest circle around him aware of what was really going on. More people might have seen his television shows, but proportionally Richard Geefe was the character who caught out the most, as if Morris were determined to eliminate the last suggestion that his comedy was on anybody’s side. You could only be on Morris’s team if you were sharp enough to spot the clues. But he himself would claim there were as many for Geefe’s readers as there had been for
Brass Eye
interviewees.

‘How could anyone have seriously thought that the editor of a national newspaper would hire someone to commit suicide?’ he said to the
Sunday Times
. ‘What I found disturbing was the number of people who said they felt betrayed when they realised it wasn’t true. What are they saying – that they wanted him to die?’
¹¹⁸
It was a somewhat disingenuous response. Readers invested considerably in the words of their favourite columnists. Writers such as Ruth Picardie articulated what readers felt, and you didn’t have to wish someone dead or approve of the paper’s editorial policy to connect with the way they articulated their situation. It was this that gave a greater meaning to what were often called ‘ego columns’, as
Guardian
media journalist Roy Greenslade had observed of Picardie’s work some two years earlier. Though even there, as he describes praise for her column, there is something ambiguous about the relationship between reader and journalist, an undercurrent of sympathy becoming sensation: ‘One woman told me that reading Ruth was both unbearable and compulsive,’ he wrote in August 1997. ‘Every week, she tells herself not to look and, having done so, tells herself again not to go on.’
¹¹⁹
Morris felt uneasy about something so personal being consumed by complete strangers: ‘I could understand somebody who’s close to someone who is dying of a terminal disease being emotionally racked by it,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand how a reader can feel they can connect with a thousand perfectly polished words under a picture. That’s putting a dramatizing gloss on a real situation. People reading someone’s grief story demand that their relationship with that column is treated with the same respect as someone whose best friend is dying.’
¹²⁰