Piers Morgan (20 page)

‘I spoke to Susan Boyle the other day. She said, “Everyone keeps telling me I am cracking up? I am – but with happiness!” Susan practised singing for a very long time before she became famous and she deserves her success at forty-eight, so, while most young people think they can be famous overnight, the fact is it is very hard work.’

Meanwhile,
Life Stories
was not just attracting interest in Britain; it was playing pretty well over in the US, too. Around this time, it was announced that the veteran television journalist Larry King was retiring and CNN needed someone to take his place. Of course, as a
talent-show
judge Piers was already famous across the pond but, over in the UK, he was also proving himself an accomplished interviewer, securing emotional admissions from his guests and even managing to pull in the then British Prime Minister. CNN could not fail to be impressed.

When the offer was made, with a reputed £5.5 million annual salary, Piers immediately agreed. It would mean leaving
BGT
, but how could you turn down an opportunity like that? He’d have a global audience of 300 million and he’d be able to keep the remainder of his UK television interests as well as
America’s Got Talent.
At any rate, although
BGT
had now enjoyed four hugely successful
runs, there’s a knack in knowing when to leave the stage. To turn down a chance like this would have been madness and so he promptly signed up.

With excellent timing, given his recent good news, Piers and Celia married at the end of June. He was forty-five, she thirty-three. The event was a world away from the circles Piers usually moved in; there were no celebrity guests at the simple ceremony in St Mary’s Church, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, followed by a small reception at a nearby pub. Celia wore a simple white dress and a handmade
daisy-chain
headband; the one moment of flashiness involved the couple leaving the church in a Rolls-Royce. Piers had earlier stated he wanted ‘a small wedding followed by a big,
big
party,’ which is certainly what he got, although guests suspected that Celia might have had something to do with the simplicity of the proceedings, too.

‘I hate to admit it but I’m absolutely thrilled for the two of them,’ said Simon Cowell (who wasn’t present on the day). ‘Having met Celia, I have no idea how he managed to pull this one off!’

Of course, a ‘big,
big
party’ indeed followed, and was held at Piers’ country home in Newick, East Sussex. Amanda Holden, resplendent in a peacock dress, was present with her husband Chris Hughes; so were Emily Maitlis, Andrew Flintoff, Christine Bleakley and Frank Lampard. Sarah Brown (wife of the former Prime Minister) and Alastair Campbell were also there. Guests dined on hog roasts, fish and chips, and kebabs. Although the hospitality was lavish, again, it was not over the top.

And so Piers began his transatlantic life: married once more, but this time with a flourishing career to pursue on either side of the Atlantic. August 2010, he travelled to the States to stand in for Regis Philbin, co-host of
LIVE! with Regis & Kelly
and stunned viewers with an act of generosity. Contestant Christina Novelli was taking part in a quiz to win a Caribbean holiday; she correctly answered the question that Kevin Kline’s first film was
Sophie’s Choice
but ran out of the allocated time and so lost the vacation.

‘Wait a minute, can I just say something?’ said Piers. ‘I just got married right? I am supposed to be a
dream-crusher
; I would like to be a dream-maker. Why don’t I pay for you to go? I am not going to have three seconds ruin your dream; I am going to pay for you to go.’

‘Is this happening?’ asked co-host Kelly Ripa. ‘I am going to kick in the sun-tan lotion.’

The cost to Piers in cash was $6,100 but, in terms of his reputation, it was inestimable.

Appropriately, as 2010 drew to a close, another guest on
Life Stories
was Susan Boyle. As usual, Piers drew his guest out, in this case talking about the disappointment she’d experienced in not winning
BGT
and her conviction that her good fortune was over before it had really begun. ‘I was exhausted, I needed somewhere to go to recuperate,’ Susan said. ‘Everybody knows that I went to The Priory – it was very scary. I wasn’t allowed to see a television, or make a phone call. I just felt as though I’d been dumped. It was probably the most frightening experience I’d been through.’

There were also interviews with Elton John and Cheryl Cole.

But not only was Piers interviewing the A-list, he had now become an A-lister himself. The future looked exceedingly bright.

A
t the beginning of 2011, it was becoming clear that Piers’ transatlantic schedule was becoming too much. As his career continued to gain pace in the States, he simply couldn’t put in the hours in the UK, and so he decided to leave
Britain’s Got Talent
to concentrate on his exceedingly lucrative new world in the US, and on taking over from Larry King. The producers of the show were going all out to promote their man. ‘Even I’m fed up of the promos saying how good my interviews will be,’ quipped Piers.

He was certainly kicking the show off in style – his first interviewee on the new show,
Piers Morgan Tonight,
was to be none other than Oprah Winfrey. And it turned out he’d employed a high-risk strategy to get the job, telling the producers at CNN that the show had become boring.

‘But what I do know is, when you edit a newspaper for ten years you have to sit through so many boring meetings, and meet so many boring people, and do so
many interviews where you literally want to rip your eyelids out you’re so bored by what’s going on,’ he later said about his first meeting with the top CNN brass. ‘If you know that, then you realise they’d obviously been sitting through a lot of boring meetings. So I just thought, OK, it’s time for the high energy. And I went for it.’

By this time, Piers’ reputation as a newspaper editor had all but disappeared. The common consensus was that he’d turned out to be an interviewer of genius, prompting the great and the good to reveal things about themselves that they had never made public before, and displaying a surprising amount of empathy in the process. The same applied to the book of memoirs that Piers had written: they were full of indiscretions, but somehow he managed to pull it off in a ‘friendly’ way, without being overly treacherous.

‘I don’t hurt people,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I’ve never had a single complaint; no one has ever complained to me about appearing in that [
The Insider
] book. I have my own personal bar, and I think it’s very well judged. I think to myself, is this person going to be made genuinely uncomfortable if I report this information? And if someone says this is off the record I would honour it completely. Bear in mind all the stuff I know. I spend my time with people like Simon Cowell telling me incredibly indiscreet stuff about themselves. If I was genuinely indiscreet about him, it would end our relationship. But I appear to be indiscreet, because I know him so well, it’s stuff he’ll read and laugh at, and we’ve never had so much as a wobble.’

And people still continued to tell him their secrets.
‘You’d be amazed,’ he went on. ‘People are shockingly indiscreet to me. They come up to me at parties and tell me absolutely everything. I had to leave half of it out. Seriously! I bring a bit of mischief to their lives – we have a laugh! There are so many boring people out there. But also I think they know they can trust me. That’s why there’s this weird thing about me being untrustworthy; it doesn’t really exist. I only have two or three – how many enemies have I got now? Cherie Blair, Heather Mills – the rest of it’s just banter.’

Underneath it all, he was convinced that the new show was going to work. ‘I feel that every single part of my career to date has geared me to this show,’ he said. ‘I think the combination of twenty years in Fleet Street, in a ferociously competitive place, and five years on
America’s Got Talent,
with the amazing pressure of live TV in front of 25 million people, and
Britain’s
Got Talent
and ITV’s
Life Stories
– you put it all together, and I look at myself, and I think this is the right time, right show, right forum. You can do this.’

In any event, he did well in the highly anticipated interview with Oprah, even getting her to talk about the occasion when she found herself pregnant, aged just fourteen. ‘I thought, I’m going to have to kill myself,’ she said. Did she try? ‘No. I did crazy things like drinking detergent and all that kinda crazy stuff that you do when you’re trying to get attention.’ After the show Oprah was magnanimous: ‘That was one of the toughest interviews I’ve had in twenty years,’ she said.

The audience was 2.1 million – CNN bosses could relax, although the reviews were a little mixed. He was, ‘
high-energy
, enthusiastic, effusive, playful, fascinated,’ said one, but the
Boston Globe
said Morgan was ‘by turns charming, vain, well-informed, and fawning – but mostly just fawning.’ As for Larry King himself, he couldn’t help observing, ‘It’s like watching your mother-in-law going over the cliff in your new Bentley – the agony and the ecstasy.’

Not that Piers couldn’t dish it out himself. He was happy to keep old feuds going: when reports emerged that Jeremy Clarkson had been having an affair, Piers promptly invited him to appear on
Life Stories.
‘I want to offer him a sympathetic ear at this difficult time,’ he said by way of explanation.

But it was in the States that Piers was really making an impact. He got Simon Cowell to come on the show, in an interview that received attention on both sides of the Atlantic, not least when Simon talked about his father’s influence on him. ‘He said to me – because he was successful, my dad, when he ran his company – he said, “Everybody around you has an invisible sign on their heads which says make me feel important.”’

He went on to recall when his father died: ‘I can’t lie, [it was] the worst day of my life, [a] horrible, horrible time.

‘Then, over the years since, you know, I’m thankful for all the support and guidance he gave me, and it gives you a sense of perspective. What I understood from that is that you’ve got to recognise that everyone around you wants to be recognised, wants to be appreciated. You can
get very “one degree”, where you just forget everyone around you, everyone that’s worked hard. What I try and remember is that when I make a show, everyone has played a part in it. The show is created, truthfully, by 500 people every week.’

But he was still very close to his mother. ‘I drove down there recently because I really wanted my mum to cook me lunch,’ Simon said. ‘I said, “I’m going to come down tomorrow for lunch.” She said, “Great, we’ll book a hotel”. But I said, “No, I want your lunch”. So eventually she did cook for me. But I like those days.’

Back in the UK, Ann Widdecombe became the latest to be lured on to
Life Stories.
Piers got straight to the point. ‘Do you miss the fact that you haven’t had kids?’ he asked.

‘If you phrase that question, “Would you rather have had children than not?” then my answer to you would be, well, yes, I’d rather,’ she replied.

Piers then asked if her boyfriend Colin Maltby had been the love of her life. ‘Yes,’ said Ann. ‘I think for a while we both thought it [marriage] might happen. But it didn’t and it was right that it didn’t. It would have been a mistake but one doesn’t necessarily see that at the time. I don’t regret that I didn’t marry Colin. I mean, Colin went on to marry and had great happiness and he’s had a hugely successful career and a nice family and all the rest of it. I’m not necessarily so certain that his life would have been so happy if he’d married me. So I think it is a good thing that we didn’t marry and I don’t regret it.

‘There was never a point when I said, “I’m not going to get married.” It just didn’t happen. Now the fact that I don’t much regret that it didn’t happen means that was probably the right thing as well. I couldn’t have had the life that I’ve had if I’d had a family and responsibilities.’

But was she upset when they broke up? ‘Yes, I felt very sad when it ended, but in a way it was a bit like losing a general election, because it feels absolutely terrible at the time and then you actually start to enjoy the new life,’ Ann revealed.

She was similarly honest when asked why she hadn’t run as leader of the Conservative Party. ‘A lot of things stopped the ambitions being realised and I think, actually, the most prevalent sentiment in Westminster was just that I was a bit odd,’ she admitted. ‘I mean I really think that’s what colleagues thought, so they weren’t going to take the risk. And it didn’t matter how good a speaker I was or how good a debater I was or anything else, as far as they were concerned, “Ann’s a bit odd.” I just happen to have views and stand by them. Now if that makes me bonkers, then British politics could do with a lot more bonkers people.’

It revealed a side of her that the British public had never seen before, and Piers pulled off a similar coup when he went to the opposite end of the political spectrum and interviewed John Prescott about the former deputy prime minister’s affair with his secretary and his bulimia.

‘It was stupid, I’ve got no excuse really,’ Prescott said. ‘People talk about midlife crises but I think it’s part of an
opportunity that developed. I don’t want to cast aspersions on anybody involved in it, it was a stupid act. All I could say was sorry and my wife was prepared to say “Daft old bugger”, and, she’s not forgiven me, but we have a wonderful life from our family and that’s the nature and quality of that woman that she can say that. There’s no excuse; it’s just an opportunity that presented in a limited way, and that happened. As soon as the press rang me, I didn’t deny it. I just said, “That’s it” and I had to go home and explain it.’

Asked what he would like to say to his wife now, Prescott said, ‘I love you like I’ve never done before and I should have done before, a lot more, and been a lot more considerate, and that’s what I’d like to say to her.’

Lady Prescott was shown talking in a video about the episode. ‘The doorbell rang and I thought, “Gosh, I wonder who that can be” and I saw it was John and I said, “What on earth are you doing home?” He said, “Go upstairs.” I said, “What’s all this about?” So I went upstairs and he sat me down. I said, “You’re not going to divorce me, are you?” and he said, “No, but I think you might be divorcing me when you hear what I’ve got to say.” And it was then that he broke the news. I was completely devastated. We talked it through and realised what we had, we didn’t want to lose it.’

Prescott also talked about his bulimia. ‘Three, four times,’ he said when asked how often he’d make himself sick. ‘My wife used to notice it and she would say to me, “You’ve got to stop this”. And it doesn’t go away, you’ve
got to learn to discipline yourself. My love is fish and chips and you’ve got to get around to saying, “You can’t have as many, keep it down to one a day.”’

Piers’ wife Celia was also in the news. She was still commuting between the US and the UK, although it would not be long before she went to live in the States with her husband full time. In May 2011, she brought out a book called
Babysitting George,
about a week she’d spent with the football legend George Best, which received a lot of publicity but also prompted accusations that she’d exaggerated both how much time she’d actually spent with him and the events she’d related.

One person in particular who was irritated was Gina Devivo, Best’s former girlfriend. She threatened to link up with the footballer’s widow Alex, estranged at the time, while lashing out at some of the things Celia had written. In an interview with the
Guardian
Gina said, ‘It just didn’t happen that way. George would be absolutely livid. He only ever spent a few days with Celia and had no rapport with her at all. I did tell Celia it was wrong before publication and she told me she would put something in the front of the book saying it had all happened “to the best of her memory”. In the end, though, she thanks me for my “continuing friendship” in the first pages even though she hadn’t seen me for eight years. The way she has portrayed me is really bad, too. I did my best to help
George. I would never have in any way encouraged him to drink. It is totally unfair and it is not fair on my children either. They are grown up now and know what they are reading is not true.’

Celia and George met when the
Mail on Sunday,
for whom she was working at the time, sent her to Malta in August 2003 to look after George, who was drinking again. He’d split up with Alex and got together with Devivo, and the
MoS
didn’t want anyone else to get the story.

Cheryl Pursey, Alex’s mother, was also annoyed. ‘I never had an argument with George. He was ill, we all knew that,’ she said in an interview with the
Guardian
. ‘Alex should never have left him alone in Malta, but she was a young woman then and we make mistakes. We all understood his illness and we had a very good relationship. It was such a horrible time in our lives. I remember everything absolutely vividly and it is not just timings that she has got wrong, it is lots of the events she describes. George was just a member of the family to us and we actually had to move out of our house for three months because of all the press attention. You don’t do that lightly. Celia came into our house with George’s ghost writer on the column and so I thought she was trusted.’

Devivo also disputed certain events in the book. ‘I was never in the pub with both Celia and George,’ she said. ‘She says that Manchester United was playing on the pub television screens, but it wasn’t even supposed to be during the football season. It is a totally unbelievable version of
the summer of 2003. I really can’t stress enough that I just wasn’t in those places.’

Indeed, she was so angry that she buried the hatchet in her war with Alex, and was planning to support her if she took legal action. ‘I have spoken to her,’ she said. ‘We were only guilty of loving the same man and are both intelligent enough to know that.’

Alex had been particularly angered about speculation that she might even have relished the violence in the marriage. ‘The book has upset everyone,’ she told the
Guardian.
‘And the worst thing is this is all going to go down as a piece of history. What if my grandchildren get to read that version of me? It scares the life out of me. I have never objected to anything Alex has said about me or anyone else, but I have to make a stand now. It hurts but I can’t even say it brings back painful memories because it never happened.’