CENTRE POINT
There is no greater fool in Christendom than somebody being flattered by the press
SIMON JENKINS
Jackie Kennedy Onassis never gave interviews. Period. From the moment of her first husband's death she was silent. She became a private person. She never know- ingly spoke to the press. Photographers might steal her image. She might be seen, but she would not be heard. How wise.
I was once consulted by a newly elevated political wife. She had been asked for an interview and wanted advice on how to handle it. I said that was easy. Don't. She explained that the interview was not about `life with X' but about her decoration, entertaining, charity work and so on. Don't, I repeated. She persisted: the writer was known and had assured her she could check all the quotes. It would not be one of `those awful hatchet jobs they normally do on wives'. I pleaded, Don't. But she had `sort of promised'. She clearly yearned for the interview. The prospect mesmerised her. Thus I watched the old familiar car career out of control and crash into the old familiar tree, with the old familiar tears and recrimination.
Newspaper interviews are concoctions. Mostly they are preordered, precooked, take-away journalism. Good ones are at least not made up until after the event. Masters of the genre — which means writ- ers with sovereignty over their editors may even get the quotes correct. But the majority of interviewers have written their pieces in their heads beforehand and are merely seeking confirmation. All interview- ing is selective, and therefore subjective. It is an act of public psychoanalysis, with the boring bits cut out.
My wife was once interviewed for an excruciating feature along the lines of `My Day' or 'My Relative' or 'My Loo'. The so- called interview opened with quotation marks and closed with them and thus pur- ported to be a verbatim monologue. I am sure the interviewer began with the best of intentions. The finished product was a remarkable work of fiction, rewritten and subbed and hacked and reassembled to produce what the editor had 'meant' when he commissioned it. Semper eadem.
A tabloid newspaper once specialised in the love lives of young women whose deaths had recently been in the news. Whatever a reporter might glean from friends, the 'interview' was always written by a particular sub-editor in the office. His unchanging signature was 'She wore noth- ing but a T-shirt and a smile', and the phrase was given to every interview. Had the sub-editor been asked to rewrite an article about the Queen, his fingers would have trotted across the keyboard, 'She wore nothing but .
The modern public relations interview is a duel. The journalist feints and jabs and looks for openings. The subject comes armed with seconds, publicity agents, some- times a spouse. The journalist — almost always a woman if the subject is a man wants the dirt or at very least the spice. She wants her byline in lights as the 'killer inter- view'. Why else bother? For their part the subjects have persuaded themselves that they are doing this for the ministry, the firm, the book, the film or some charitable cause. This is rubbish. They are doing it out of vanity. They crave the publicity. What has the interviewer gleaned about them from others? Perhaps they could put a stop to rumours, set 'the record straight' after some previous disaster. Let them work their charm on Fleet Street's finest. Their children will be proud of them. No, they all say, I of course despise the idea, but 'it must be done'. Every Johnson must have his Boswell.
Public figures can at least justify their love of self-exposure on the grounds that they have a `democratic duty' to be inter- viewed. There is honour in a duel, even if only one pistol is loaded. As to why their spouses should want to be interviewed, I can only assume a similar vanity. The risk is appalling. Nobody wants to know that the great man is married to an adoring wife, who just happens to be a good mother, hostess, gardener and supporter of Save-a- Panda. The world wants to read the worst of the great, not the best (until they die). That is why they consume gossip columns. Newspapers trade on schadenfreude, not generosity of spirit. The wife may feel she is helping her hus- band's career. She is not. The slightest slip will be on file for life, recorded in a thou- sand retrieval systems, indelible, ever quotable. One wife, interviewed as part of a Times business profile and chided with her husband's greyness, coyly confessed that he had in his youth once thrown a plate of meat in her direction. Next day his compa- ny rang to cries of `Food-hurling chairman abuses wife'. If a wife, or a husband, agrees to an interview and fails to come up with a titbit for a headline or puff, then gossip and the cuttings will have to do. Hence that familiar wail, But the girl seemed so nice, almost a friend.' Which is why the first draft was spiked as 'unusable' and sent for a rewrite. Behind every interviewer is an editor and behind every editor a stereo- type.
There is no greater fool in Christendom than somebody being flattered by the press. He is in the grip of a narcotic. He has made a pact with the Devil. 'Going public' is like going to law. The more publicity people get, the more they need. The Princess of Wales appears to be addicted, at present recklessly using one tabloid (the Daily Mail) against the rest. This is suicidal. Her husband is trying to keep up by granting `serious' interviews (with the Mail on Sun- day). He too is risking his dignity.
Our image of the famous is never as they wish it to be. It is made up of shattered fragments, quotations, pictures, images of them off their guard: Lord Tebbit's bike, Sir Norman Fowler's 'more time with fami- ly', Lady Thatcher's 'We are a grandmoth- er', Norman Lamont's basement tenant. These references are tattoos. They are for life. Interviews cannot erase them. Quite the opposite, they incite their repetition.
My impression of Jackie Onassis was gleaned from just such fractured images of a woman of plutocratic tastes, a little naive, but a devoted mother. I once entered a shop in Paris as she was leaving it. The staff were stunned and unable to serve me: they thought she had ordered roughly half the stock and were closing to work out which half. But what is that impression worth? Only her friends knew her after 1963. Before then she was publicity-voracious. Afterwards, she was a monument to privacy.
Nobody has so completely renounced such a powerful drug. Mrs Onassis could not stop the photographs. Photographers remain the great intruders. But there would be no quotes, no silly remarks, no sound- bites to be taken down and used in evi- dence. She never yielded to the Hello! mag- azine seduction, the saccharine interview off which a dozen catty profiles could be `bounced'. There was not one paragraph granted as hostage to journalistic fortune. This woman became nobody's business but her own. Of all the examples she set, her silence was the most admirable. It will be the least imitated.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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