KEY POINTS:
Only a fool would set off to interview Clive James without some degree of trepidation - he might be the brainiest bloke in the world, remember.
Yes, that old gag: Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys. I knew he was supposed to be genial, or grumpy; charming or cantankerous. Possibly all of these at the same time. Hard-nosed too, I would have added, having been told I could have an interview if, earlier in the week, we also ran a few pluggy pars about his show.
"You drive a hard deal," I grumped. He liked this. "Do I? Ha, ha. What did I do? What did my people do?"
There are no "people". He has, I point out, a person. "My person, my people. I have a one man entourage, look at the size of it! The hotel bills of the entourage can ruin your bottom line."
Very nifty. He has neither denied nor confirmed that he struck the hard deal. I am pretty sure he did. He's mean with money too? "Of course I am. But I'll pay the tab today." Why is he mean? "That's the poor boy habit. Your instinct is not to tip and you have to overcome it and I do. I spend a lot of time overcoming my instinct."
He didn't have much money for a long time. "The only reason I've got it is because I was mean with it. I never really had any until I sold my television company at the turn of the millennium. I usually worked on fees all of my career. You only make real money if you own things. If you're not exploiting anybody, you're not making money. Ha, Marx was right."
Anyway, the Auckland show sold out. I expected to be dumped. He no longer needed me. "Oh, no, no, no. I'm after you. Because I don't just want you for the shows, I want you for the book. The book's important to me."
The Book or, The Bloody Book, as I have come to think of his wonderful but whopping great work, Cultural Amnesia. It is 876 pages, counting the index, which I did, having lugged it from home to bus to work and back again for a week. And I'm only up to M, I tell him, while itching to get to W for Evelyn Waugh.
"So you're actually reading it in sequence? You can start anywhere."
I wouldn't dare.
"Ha ha ha. You read the way my wife reads. She starts reading the New Statesman and she keeps reading until she finishes it."
Can I cheat?" "Yes, you can. It won't hurt you, the themes are sort of circular."
Yes, sort of. If you can remember what you read in D, on, say Sergei Diaghilev when you are reading F on F. Scott Fitzgerald ("Fitzgerald's self-schooling in prose style consisted mainly of eliminating arabesques" - lovely, that.)
I tell him what a mate of mine said when I boasted casually, "oh, I'm reading Clive James' Cultural Amnesia," and waved it around the pub, risking my wrist. "I've read that, but I've forgotten it."
"That's a very good joke," James says, "I use that onstage. 'It's a book about ... I've forgotten."
You are not about to trump James in the joke department. He knows them all. "I get more deaf all the time. The specialist in London said: 'You're getting progressively deaf,' and I said, 'what?'
"That," James says, "is a bad routine, isn't it?" Only one of the worst.
"Low grade stuff," he says, which in no way stops him from enjoying it as heartily as he did the idea of himself as hard-nosed deal striker. Don't ask how we got on to this. I do know, sort of, because the themes of the interview were, sort of, circular. By which I mean we went round and round and ended up nowhere in particular but had, or so I thought, a jolly time.
Or he did. When I came to transcribe the tape, I realised that after asking about the deal (he let me off) in the first minutes it took almost an hour before I got in anything that resembled a fully formed question.
He let me have a go. Did he feel - and this is where you end up after reading the fourth instalment of his unreliable memoirs, North Face of Soho - he was still struggling to resolve the question about the importance of popular culture and his place in it.
"I probably never will resolve it. I'll croak without having resolved it." But it is "somebody else's problem. It's always been a problem for what I laughingly call my career. On the whole, journalism ... would like to tell one story, to give one description for each thing and I don't fit into that ... so yeah, I'm stuck with it."
I wondered whether that was a complaint. "No, look at me. I'm a man who can eat a plateful of chips anywhere in the world. Do I look as though I'm complaining? These are good chips." He had already suggested that I might end up reviewing him eating his tempura battered bluenose and chips.
"You're going to get munching sounds. You can write them in." At this point he spat a tempura " ... You find you do get to the point where people start reviewing your eating habits, your general appearance.
"The serious answer to your question is equally frivolous. No, it's not a complaint, it's my material. What would I have written about if I'd just been a writer? I'd have been as boring as any writer who lives in an ivory tower. My material is in show business."
Well, yes, but he is in show business; he is also a celebrity. "Are you?" I say. "Mmm, it's getting tricky already, isn't it?" he says, enjoying this. "Journalists ... will start getting angry the minute they say: 'What are you?' What they're saying is: 'You're making my job hard.' And I can't answer the question. Do I have to? In a free society I don't, thank God. But it is a tricky question, yeah."
He is a character in his unreliable memoirs, obviously. "You're right on. I invented a character called Clive James." And does he like him? "Well, I like him better than the real one. He's funnier than the real one; the real one does a lot of brooding." As do most writers. "Aah, but you should always suspect a man who lays claim to melancholy. You should suspect him of indulgence."
I DO suspect him of another kind of indulgence: it involved flattering me for an hour and a half. So I am hardly likely to complain. And I did learn a lot. About "the importance of what Madonna is doing right now. She's in Tel Aviv with her fellow maniacs talking about the Kaballah. Did you know that?"
I got a free session from "an expert quitter" in how to give up smoking.
"I've quit several times. If you ever want to, and the day might come, the trick is to smoke the memory. You'll never get rid of the memory, so smoke that. When a sweet memory comes over you, don't try and repress it, because it'll taste almost as good as a real cigarette."
I learned, and what an odd thing to learn, how he, "of all people, came to have a can of Calvin Klein's Obsession on my bathroom shelf." This has to do with his obsession with the tango and learning to do it and "flop sweat". Which is what you do when you're learning to tango, or, incidentally, when you die on stage. You sweat so much "it goes down the trousers into the shoes and you can hear it hit the floor".
How attractive. "Ha ha. Nice to be near! A lot of deodorants get sold to male tango dancers, prescribed by the women."
He said: "I believe in privacy. It might seem like a strange thing for me to believe in. I lead such an apparently public life. Most performers do."
Now he's telling me things I never wanted to know. "Exactly," he says triumphantly, "it's more information than you require." I asked who he dances the tango with and he said, "that would be telling. Ha ha ha." His wife, then? "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew a man who danced with his wife in Chicago. Good line, isn't it?"
He hates anything to be written about his wife, and he grizzles mildly that she is mentioned in a Listener piece. "I'm in there! I look quite thin in the photograph." He is carrying the piece in his inside jacket pocket along with assorted other bits of paper he pulls out like magicians' rabbits. A flyer about a nasal spray that guarantees "Sex For Life". A note to self: "Rachel Hunter and fashion week."
He likes bits of paper and has kept every scrap he's written a word on. He peers at the bits of paper I've stuck in Cultural Amnesia. "I like this." They say Taste, Celebrity, Albert Einstein. And, "that little note there," I say, "is the one I'm not going to say because it'll make your face go like a cat's bum." It reads: Diana. Who he loved.
"Diana, Ah! Some coffee maybe? You won't get a cat's bum face, you just won't get much out of me."
The reference is: "One of the loveliest women I ever knew was a believer in colonic irrigation as an aid to beauty. She was mad enough to think that it worked for her. But she wasn't mad enough to suggest that it might have worked for me."
"I don't say that it was her. No, it was her, of course ... I just haven't got any more to say about her. I said it all in a long piece I wrote for the New Yorker which is usually accused of being a piece of intolerable gush but for me it seemed restrained." He says: "She lit up. She had this terrific wattage."
He looked a bit brooding, but only for a fleeting moment.
He came downstairs and politely saw us off the hotel premises.
What he really wanted was to stand downwind from my cigarette and get a passive fix.
This was endearingly daft and not at all the behaviour of a celebrity. It also seemed a fair sort of deal. I had, after all, just spent an hour and a half using him for another sort of fix.
