Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (4 page)

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.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t quite. A waiter minced up to our table. ‘ ’Ello leddies, I leet you ’ave a look at ze luncheon menoo,’ he said.

Hadid exhaled slowly. ‘I really don’t understand a thing they say,’ she said with the easy irreverence of one naughty schoolgirl to another. ‘I don’t find this French accent in English at all charming. It is like watching Peter Sellers. I mean! Send them to elocution classes!’ She gave an eruption of a laugh.

She had chosen Aubergine because some friends had praised the food, yet so far so bad. Still, she brightened up on seeing a soup on the menu called ‘cappuccino’, and earned the unwanted approval of the waiter by choosing it. ‘C’est la grande spécialité, madame,’ he said.

Hadid rattled off the names of London restaurants that she did consider funky, though even these were not entirely to her liking as the service was poor. ‘The problem in this country is that unless you go to the very top, you get terrible service. You really notice when you land in Switzerland. In America the service is more casual but they do accommodate you.’

This was the beginning of what turned out to be a global lunch. Even the most casual remark led to a comparison with foreign countries and cities, and in the course of one meal she mentioned Shanghai, Beijing, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Vienna, Paris, Singapore, Tunis, Berlin, Switzerland, New York, Wales and, of course, Iraq.

It is most unlikely that she was trying to impress with this geographical name-dropping; instead the relentlessly international bent seems to have become part of her personality. Brought up in Baghdad, she went briefly to a minor girls’ boarding school in England, lives in London but spends much time in New York, and is now working in both Vienna and Berlin. ‘I fly twice a week and I am a doggy,’ she complained. ‘Finished.’

A waiter brought a dainty little
amuse-gueule
with a quail’s egg on top, and placed it carefully in front of us. ‘Bon appétit, mesdames,’ he said.

I tried to get her to talk about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but with little success. ‘The Gulf war depressed me because there is no need for any wars,’ she said. ‘It was a very unfortunate situation. It is sad.’ She seemed unwilling to elaborate. The fish cappuccino, which had just arrived, appeared to be meeting her approval. The soup, she said, reminded her of some dishes she had eaten in China. I felt relieved;
there is something powerful and original about her that made me want to please.