The Digested Twenty-first Century (15 page)

Digested read, digested:
The Tantric autobiography – goes on way too long and is only of interest to the writer.

Lou Levy, top man at Leeds Music Publishing, took me up in a taxi to West 70th Street. Outside the wind was blowing.

‘Columbia have high hopes for you,’ he said.

I’d met John Hammond at Columbia the previous week.

‘Howdya get to town?’ he asked.

‘Jumped a freight train.’

It was pure hokum. But who wants truth, when you can buy the dream?

I was staying in The Village with Ray Van Ronk. Outside the wind was blowing. Ray was like a wolf, living like he was hiding out. It was said that the second world war spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it. I was still in it. I’d read the stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke ... it was like I knew those guys.

I usually started a book at the middle. It was like I was looking for the education I never got. Thucydides, Gogol, Faulkner. They were like a freeway to my mind.

I wanted to cut a record. But not a 45. I went down to play a song for Woody Guthrie. ‘You brought that song to life,’ he said.

I’d been in a motorcycle accident. I just wanted out of the rat race. Journalists, promoters, fans: they were all calling me the tortured conscience of America. I never planned to be an icon. I was just a singer writing songs that made some kind of sense to me. Outside the wind was blowing.

People told me what my lyrics meant. It was news to me. One album was supposedly intensely autobiographical. Let them think so. I knew it was based on a bunch of Chekhov short stories. I just wanted to escape with my wife and raise my kids like any other American.

I was on tour with Tom Petty, but I felt I was going through the motions. I couldn’t connect with my songs or find a voice. I’m gonna retire at the end of this, I thought. I’m burnt out.

My manager told me to take time out to rehearse with the Grateful Dead, but I had reached the point when I opened my mouth and nothing came out. The terror was overwhelming, but
then, from nowhere, a sound emerged. It wasn’t a pretty sound, but it was one I recognised. My songs had come back to me.

I was having lunch with Bonio. We looked deep into each other’s reflector shades and liked what we saw.

‘God wants you to record with Daniel Lanois,’ he said.

It was the first Danny had heard of it, but we started to lay some tracks. Outside the wind was blowing. But we stitched and pressed and packed and drove.

John Pankake told me I was trying to be too much like Woody Guthrie. I changed my style. You’re now trying to be too much like Robert Johnson. The folk music scene was a paradise, and like Adam I had to leave.

Digested read, digested:
The answers are still blowing in the wind.

The first thing you should know is that I am a whore. Prostitution is steady work. I open my legs. And then I close them. It beats working in an office. After leaving university, I applied for a number of jobs that I never got and watched my savings steadily dwindle. So when a friend gave me the phone number of a madam, I decided to become a call girl. Like you do. And that’s really all there is to me, but since I’ve been overpaid to write a book I’d better witter on.

Samedi, le 1 novembre.
French is so sophisticated and sensual. It also reminds you that I’m middle-class and respectable, because no one’s really interested in working-class or foreign prostitutes.
Did I mention that I am actually rather clever? Oh, I did. Well, Martin Amis is cool.

Vendredi, le 12 décembre.
My nipples are clamped and a bald-headed man is pissing on me in the bath. I knew that would get your attention.

Mardi, le 27 janvier.
I have some wonderfully fascinating ex-boyfriends. Let’s call them A1, A2, A3 and A4. We talk about sex all the time. A2 was telling me about his new girlfriend who is into latex. ‘Must be very hot,’ I observed.

Mercredi, le 18 février.
My parents wouldn’t be very happy if they knew what I did for a living. I went to see them in Yorkshire last week and we went for a walk before watching
Countdown
on the television.

Mardi, le 9 mars.
My publisher tells me the book needs more smut. Anal sex is the new oral. My friends have been doing it for years and I scarcely raise an eyebrow when a client asks for it.

Lundi, le 22 mars.
Went shopping for lingerie with A3. I love buying knickers. Even call girls have their favourites. Had dinner with A4, and my latest lover, The Boy, walked into the same restaurant. The Boy repeatedly told me he loved me. Our relationship is over.

Jeudi, le 8 avril.
I can tell you’re waiting for me to say something profound. Dream on. I don’t have any difficult feelings about being a prostitute. Everything’s just fine. Got it? I’m just as happy fucking an ugly stranger as I am a handsome lover. The only difference is that I never come with my clients, even when I’m being fisted.

Dimanche, le 2 mai.
Sometimes I lie about my age to clients. Sometimes I even lie to my friends. I guess you must be wondering whether I’m lying now.

Mercredi, le 16 juin.
More smut. I always wax. The clients prefer it and it’s much better for lesbian sex. A4 asked for a threesome when I mentioned this.

Samedi, le 26 juin.
The madam has been giving me less work, but I don’t mind because I never mind about anything. A client told me he didn’t pay me for sex. He paid me to go away. I wonder if book buyers have the same attitude.

Digested read, digested:
A new variation on taking the piss.

Introduction:
For more than 20 years I worked in Fleet Street, but everything changed on May 14 2004, when I was sacked as editor of the
Daily Mirror
for publishing hoax photographs that could have been real if they weren’t faked. Having no obvious talent, there was only one thing I could do. Become a celebrity.

August 2004:
ITV invite me to appear on
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
‘That’s just a step too far,’ I reply grandly. ‘You might be right there,’ the researcher says. ‘Forget it. You’re too much of a nonentity even for us.’

November 2004:
Michael Ancram is the first guest on my new hard-hitting political-interview TV show,
Morgan and Platell
. I think it could be huge.

February 2005:
Star-studded turn-out for the launch of my autobiography,
The Insider
, for which I was paid a £1.2m advance. Jade Goody is there. ‘I never read mine,’ she says. ‘Who wrote yours?’ I blush. ‘I did it all myself.’ Did I mention I got an advance of £1.2m? Go on to dinner at the Ivy but nobody famous is there so it is a waste of time.

March 2005:
Get drunk and name-drop some famous people. Michael Parkinson calls to invite me to lunch; on discovering I’m not Pierce Brosnan, he rings off quickly with, ‘Got to go. Some other time.’ What a star that man is.

April 2005:
Matthew Freud rings to suggest we buy the
UK Press Gazette
. ‘With you as editor,’ he laughs, ‘we can run it into the ground in next to no time.’

June 2005:
There will be no new series of
Morgan and Platell
. Take everyone famous I know to lunch at the Ivy. They all promise to be my best friend so long as I continue to pay for everything.

August 2005:
That fat, talentless fool Jeremy Clarkson has been rubbishing me to the media again. Just let it go, Jeremy. Face it, you are never going to be as famous as me.

October 2005:
GQ
editor Dylan Jones has come up with a cracking idea. He wants me to get really pissed with some minor celebrities, chat to them about sex and stuff and then write about
it as if it were vaguely interesting. First up is the ridiculously beautiful Telegraph diarist Celia Walden. ‘Why are you so utterly clever and gorgeous?’ I swoon incisively. ‘Will you shag me?’ She smiles radiantly. ‘Only when I’m really desperate,’ she slurs. I’m definitely in with a chance then!

December 2005:
Send five lorries full of red roses and 25 cases of the finest Cristal champagne to Celia. ‘You’re acting like a D-list celeb,’ she texts sweetly. ‘Keep it up.’

February 2006:
Take everyone famous I know to lunch at the Ivy. They all still promise to be my best friend, so long as I continue to pay for everything.

March 2006:
One of my best friends, Simon Cowell, tells me he is going to try and get me a job as a judge on
America’s Greatest Talent
. ‘You’re not very bright, you’re overweight and you’re hopelessly in love with yourself,’ he says. ‘You’ll be perfect.’

May 2006:
Invited on to
Question Time
and come up against Jack Straw. ‘So what about WMD?’ I deftly point out. Straw is skewered. ‘Tu es le Paxman de nos jours,’ Celia coos afterwards as we embrace. We are now an item.

June 2006:
I am now the biggest star in America. I’m on TV with David Hasselhoff and someone else and I’ve even got my own trailer. Thank God my kids got in to Charterhouse so they don’t interrupt my celebrity lifestyle.

August 2006:
How come no one in Britain apart from Sharon Osbourne has heard of
America’s Greatest Talent?
Simon Cowell
invites me to lunch at the Ivy where someone recognises me. ‘Aren’t you Diarmuid Gavin?’

October 2006:
Bump into Michael Winner in the toilets. He tells me what brand of sweets he likes. What a scoop for Celia’s award-winning diary.

December 2006:
Celia rings to invite me to Tatler’s Brain-dead, Nonentity Couple of the Year Awards. I remind her we don’t have a ticket. ‘They’ll let us in anyway,’ she simpers. Hooray. I’m now officially a celebrity.

Digested read, digested:
Yes, but we still don’t care.

On May 6 1960, Antony Armstrong-Jones, known as Tony, stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to the cheering crowd. He was at the peak of his powers and yet there was only one thought on his mind. Why had he married the Queen’s dwarfish sister when he could have had the fabled society beauty and sometime Daily Mail feature writer, Anne de Courcy?

There was nothing in Tony’s upbringing to indicate the extraordinary and unselfish life that he himself would lead. His parents, both commoners, divorced when he was five and it was only Tony’s resilience and talent that carried him through the hardship of his early years at Eton. ‘Tony was a spiffing chap,’ says his old school friend, Freddy Cholmondely-Bowles-Binkerton. ‘He always made us laugh in Latin lessons.’

Tragedy almost struck when Tony was diagnosed with polio when he was 16. Without his strength of will and exquisite good looks, he might have succumbed to the disease, yet Tony pulled through, and vowed to dedicate his life to helping the handicapped.

Tony decided to become a professional photographer and with no help at all from his favourite uncle, the celebrated designer Oliver Messel, or his extensive network of upper-class dilettantes, he soon made a name for himself as the most pre-eminent artist of the London scene. He was also wonderfully tolerant in his attitudes. When the Kabaka of Buganda booked a sitting he told his assistant, a cheerful cockney, that although the Kabaka was black, he was royal and therefore should be allowed to use the toilet.

Tony moved in a fast set in the 50s, and his animal magnetism made him irresistible to both sexes. I wouldn’t want to be so vulgar as to say categorically that he might have been a homosexualist but I’m happy to infer that his relationship with the gloriously effete Jeremy Fry might have strayed beyond the bounds of normal aristocratic platonic idealism. And if it did, it was far removed from the vile buggery of the lower orders.

Women also threw themselves at Tony’s perfectly chiselled body, and his sense of noblesse oblige led him into a lifelong string of affairs, one of which continues to this day. In order not to cause any distress to the living, I have chosen not to reveal this woman’s name, though once she has croaked I will be happy to expose her in the
Mail
.

Princess Margaret was overwhelmed by Tony’s physicality. ‘I’d have shagged him a great deal sooner,’ she once joked over a pint of gin and 60 Gauloises, ‘if I hadn’t thought he was queer’. They became the golden couple of the jeunesse dorée de leurs jours and no social gathering was complete without Ken Tynan or Peter Sellers fawning at their feet.

Tony’s talents were etched deep into the global memory with his timeless handling of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. Possessed of such gifts, Tony was forced into more affairs with some of the world’s most beautiful women. Margaret had no such excuse for her squalid cavortings with Robin and Roddy, and Tony was deeply hurt by her betrayal. ‘I’ve only ever wanted what’s right for my children and the Queen,’ he said when the separation was announced.

Enduring the pain of the title forced on him, Tony sought solace in his second wife Lucy and any other woman lucky enough to meet him. Sadly, Lucy failed to understand how Tony’s artistic genius and tireless work for the handicapped excused his affairs, and the couple separated. Melanie Cable-Alexander, a journalist half his age, tried to trap his restless creativity by getting pregnant. ‘I’m extremely proud to be Jasper’s father,’ he said through gritted teeth, after being forced into a DNA test. Another DNA test revealed that Tony had also fathered a daughter with his best friend’s wife more than 40 years before.

Yet, despite these trifling annoyances, Tony remains the gentlest, most handsome and greatest of living Englishmen. And as he moves serenely towards his 80s, he continues to shag anything that moves. Except me. Sadly.