“I’m not aggressive, I just don’t beat around the bush”
With tea and cigarettes Lynn Barber tells Lucy Holden all about An Education, sexual antics in 60s Oxford and exaggerated claims that she became the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Lynn Barber’s leaning towards me with an elegant black packet of cigarettes, gold paper curled around tobacco-filled tips. John Player Specials – the strongest tobacco you can buy. ‘Smoke?’ she asks, before settling herself back in her armchair and holding the flame of a lighter up to her mouth.
We are in the front room of Barber’s North London home, a tray of tea-things in front of us, books piled either side. She sets an ashtray nearby and exhales. I’ve rather bravely – or rather stupidly I suggest in a prior email – asked the queen of interviews for an interview. Barber has interviewed everyone from Goldie to Pavarotti, and most recently, Pete Doherty and Miranda for The Sunday Times, though unfortunately not together.
‘Oh it’s terrible – spectacularly terrible’, says Barber when I ask about Doherty’s acting debut into French art-house cinema. ‘Have you seen it? Do go and see it, it really is terribly bad, take somebody you can laugh along with.’ She speaks in a wonderfully-clipped Oxbridge tone made rusty by smoke, but manages to avoid pretentiousness entirely. Unhidden is a mildly damaged look in her eye which cloaks itself in distrust. ‘I was quite suspicious of his charm actually’, she tells me, narrowing her eyes and referring to Doherty’s magnetism, which she’d perhaps seen somewhere before.
‘I used to be told-off for being too judgemental, but as an interviewer you never quite know whether your judgement is right or wrong, you just have to try to make sense of the person’, she explains. Defined by a lonely childhood, Barber had very little contact with other children and grew up in the isolated world of her parents, an only-child resenting childishness because she envied it. Conscious that she could not often understand people, Barber tried even harder to work them out.
Yet she is still puzzled by the rather threatening nickname ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ that labelled her as the menacing writer of hatchet jobs. ‘I’m not aggressive, I just don’t beat around the bush and I ask very direct questions. I try not to let people be unclear about things – I’d call it “terrier-like” not aggressive.’ Barber did worry though that people would refuse to be interviewed by her and has had several desired meetings left unfulfilled. Now-deceased artist Lucien Freud was amongst them, but sent a reply to Barber’s request for lunch with the words: ‘I do eat lunch but I see no reason why I should be shat on by a stranger.’ His framed refusal now hangs in Barber’s downstairs bathroom, at once a prize and a defeat.
It is no coincidence that the rest of Barber’s un-interviewed hit-list include some of the most powerful, deceptive and dynamic men in the world: James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch. Marked by compelling elusiveness, each had multiple marriages, multiple children, multiple affairs. Barber is at once fascinated and afraid of the unknowability of other people, seeking to resolve it by questioning their motives in an acceptable form of interrogation, the interview.
Although Barber’s search for the truth is in fact rather warranted. At the age of sixteen she was picked up from a bus-stop by an attractive-seeming older man in a sports car. Simon told Barber he was in his late twenties. He turned out to be in his late thirties, and after grooming her parents with charm and attention began an affair with their Oxford-set teenage daughter that lasted nearly two years. Did she feel vulnerable? Barber believes her sense of danger was masked by a naive teenage belief that she was sophisticated, capable, in control, but realises now that she was more vulnerable than she thought. ‘I was preyed upon: he groomed my parents, got them on his side. That is classic paedophile behaviour, not that we knew it then.’
Barber was swirled into a cosmopolitan world of middle-class tastes: cocktails and concerts and restaurants and weekends abroad. Perhaps Barber’s childhood made it inevitable that she would discover adult sophistications so young. Then came a proposal, and her decision became a choice between the two great theories of learning – academia versus life experience. Anyone that has read Barber’s memoir An Education, or seen Nick Hornby’s screen adaptation, will recognise the plot. Lynn Barber chose life. But then came a discovery, not only were Simon’s commercial activities criminal but he was a married father and this was not the first affair.
Barber takes another long cigarette from a diminishing pack and lights up, her puffs occasionally interspersed with the hoarse, dragging cough of a seasoned smoker.
‘I felt an absolute fool when it ended, and that was very damaging to my confidence. The lingering result of the relationship is that it’s given me a distrust of people which I kind of wish I hadn’t got.’ Still, I ask? Yes, still. ‘I wish I could be more trusting but I think once you’ve lost it you can’t ever get it back.’
Damaging too, was the cold sexual contract of wining and dining and flowers that Barber became entwined in. ‘It was “codified” in the sixties. Once a boy had taken you to the cinema say, three times, he was allowed to put his hand on your breast, and after five cinema dates he could put his hand under your bra. They were unwritten rules but people actually spelt them out for you – told you that you couldn’t be kissed until he’d bought you a hot dinner.’ It was illicit prostitution made socially acceptable – women were exchanging their bodies for material produce. ‘It was just done, but it was quite damaging because in order for it to work you had to believe that women didn’t want sex and that it was just a route to an engagement ring. There was one girl at my school who confessed to enjoying sex and she was considered a slut. It was a real sexual downer.’ But oddly, neither was Simon that interested in sex. Barber describes the sexual experience as a horrible, unsatisfying routine of creepy baby-talk. His interest appeared to be in paedophilic fantasy rather than the sexual opportunity it afforded.
Did Barber not ask questions? ‘My instinct was always to ask lots of questions but I went through this French pseudo-intellectual phase in which all conversation was enigmatic; you never apologised, never explained anything, you’d just drop remarks into conversations which might or might not suit them’. She’s smiling: the idea of her teenage sense of sophistication now humorous. A distrust of elusiveness, and an insistence on asking questions, was to power Barber’s style as interviewer; a tempting role which allowed the interrogative power she’d previously been denied. But Barber doesn’t like my analogy – makes a huffing sound – that makes it sound too easy, romantic even.
Interestingly, the story continues at Oxford, where Barber did eventually attend. She thought the experience in a world outside of academia might have actually helped. Without it Barber still believes she would have been ‘slaving over the work like George Eliot or something.’
Again, she reaches instinctively for a cigarette, smoke still hanging in the air above us.
It’s probably safe to say that Barber got slightly more action than Eliot did too. Trying to fix a second heartbreak with frequent sexual liaisons, Barber slept with nearly fifty men in two terms. ‘In Oxford in those days it was a status thing really, there were so many men – and half of the girls could be immediately discounted’ – the sides of her mouth are tugging into a sly smile – ‘even if you were vaguely pretty you had to beat off invitations.’
But everything changed when Barber met David, a wonderful man with a taste for lobster who Barber knew to be the one as soon as she saw him. ‘David made me a better person’, she says sweetly. ‘Plus I’d had so many fine-dining experiences with Simon I was perfectly happy to go to the local café.’
What does she think of the term ‘University of life’ then? Barber mockingly sticks two fingers down her throat and makes a little retching sound. But there is consideration at least. ‘One of the things I’ve noticed about all the particularly interesting people I’ve interviewed is that their educations started when they left school or university. It’s striking how many people are pushed to do something brilliant because they were despised, or did very badly at school. It’s very important to be yourself. I think young people these days are often pressured to be part of a social group, to be similar to everyone else, and I sometimes worry about the degree of gang mentality: we’re all doing this or we’re all watching that. There isn’t room for the kind of odd-ball teenagers who don’t want to do those types of things. Often the most interesting people have come on very long journeys: from poor backgrounds, council flats, crap education, so everything they’ve learnt has been through adult life and they seem to go on learning.’
Barber herself had decided she wanted to write, and made her way to an incredibly exciting but incredibly sexist Fleet Street. ‘I had long legs so I was sent to do interviews. The chaps had “conferences” and “meetings” all day long, and the few women in the building were wheeled through only if there was a film-crew in. The Independent on Sunday was the most sexist place I’ve ever worked in my life, it was astonishing. I never met a woman who wanted to be an editor, but if one had I imagine they would’ve found it quite hard.’ Still, Barber’s immensely proud of being a writer and says she was ‘maddened’ by The Leveson Inquiry, in which ‘buckets of shit were poured over the journalists’.
She is also tremendously proud of An Education and believes it did her a lot of good, although her feelings towards Simon haven’t exactly changed. There is still a bubble of rage and a heavy dose of self-embarrassment. When the book came out not only did Barber have to dodge his attempts at contact but she began to notice a similar type of woman loitering sheepishly at the back of book-signings, eventually meeting a handful of women he had persuaded into affairs like theirs. One woman had worked out that there were at least four or five children fathered outside his marriage, but by then Barber wasn’t even surprised. ‘The Daily Mail claimed to have tracked him down and offered to fly me out to where he lived for a reunion – I thought it sounded like all my nightmares rolled into one.’ Now she waits only for a phone-call to say he has died.
This is Lynn Barber. A self-confessed chain-smoker, who drinks like a fish and told Desert Island Discs she’d slept with ‘probably 50’ men at Oxford because she had. It is difficult not to admire her. She cuts through all the bullshit-confines of socially-acceptable behaviour and lives with an honest individuality that many people fear. Her interview style might be coloured by personal experience but her belief in the ultimate unknowability of a person is more an intelligent social truth than a paranoid distrust. She says it how it is, and why would you want to say it any other way? It is the reason Barber admires Caitlin Moran, why she and Tracey Emin became close friends, why she pulled out of Richmond Literature Festival when they refused to use a publicity photo of her holding a cigarette. After all, she said: ‘If a pic of me smoking is such a threat to the good burghers of Richmond, imagine what my presence would do’.