Barbara Taylor Bradford

Rich and famous she certainly is, and, as staff writer MICHELE HEWITSON finds so early in the morning, bedazzling too.

A magazine writer, Barbara Taylor Bradford complains, once profiled her hair. Meet her and you see how this might have proved irresistible.

The hair -- carefully coiffed, teased and sprayed at 9 in the morning -- is a golden helmet many a country-and-western singer would trade in her sequins for.

But there`s so much more: this early in the morning the 65-year-old writer is wearing a pale blue pants suit; two-tone, beige and brown stilettos.

And enough sparklers to give any HRH you care to mention a run for her money: she has sapphires, rubies and emeralds on her fingers; diamonds and pearls on her ears; gold on her wrists.

Goodness, you can't help but think, how early the very rich must get up to bedazzle one so.

At the literary lunch later in the day, a fan confides that she'd expected BTB to have a few right royal airs and graces: "I thought she'd be a bit like the Queen Mum."

On the rear-ends of the book jackets of the 15 best-selling blockbusters she has pumped out at the rate of one a year and 56 million copies world-wide she actually looks more regal, more imposing and much more glam than that. Think Princess Margaret with a dye job turned romance writer.

That would be your first mistake, because there's nothing remotely haughty about Taylor Bradford.

And although her books get "shoved into the romance sections in bookstores" she prefers to say, "I write contemporary fiction for women."

It's a fair bet that her predominantly female readership don't give too much of a toss which section they uplift their volumes from.

Since the publication of A Woman of Substance in 1979 (it has never been out of print and was made into a six-hour mini-series in 1984 -- produced, as have been all of the eight translations of BTB books to screen, by husband Bob) her books have become something of yearly fix for Taylor Bradford junkies.

The media fixation, however, tends to be with what's in the bank account of the phenomenally successful husband-and-wife team of 35 years rather than what's sprinting off the book shop shelves.

Here's why. In 1994 BTB signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins for 20 million quid -- then the biggest deal struck in publishing history.

And author biogs inevitably begin with the staggering information that, according to Harpers and Queen, in 1997 BTB was the highest earning woman in Britain.

Taylor Bradford has heard it all before. And despite that outwardly intimidating facade (why do lashings of jewels imply power?), it's the only time she puts on so much as a pout.

"Well, I don't know where they get their figures actually, I don't know how they compute all this [which is rather an odd comment for somebody who worked as a journalist for 20 years.]"

"Because," she continues at a volume which suggests the writer is now talking in capital letters, "I never told them anything!

"And," emphatically, "I don't ever discuss money."
She is, you see, incredibly superstitious. If she talks about the money, she reasons, the gods might overhear her boasting and come and spirit it all away.

The money has, though, made life almost as comfortable as that of the rags-to-riches heroine of that first novel, Emma Harte.

Emma, who began literary life as a kitchen maid and ended it as a richer and more power-suited, shoulder-padded dame than dear Maggie Thatcher, might have, had the author thought of it at the time, owned a 22-room house in Connecticut with a pond with a swan upon it.

A heated pond, no less, it was reported.

Taylor Bradford tells about Caroline, her famous swan, in the context of the proof of omens in her life.

The time had come, she says, to sell the circa-1760 colonial-style house when the mysterious disappearance of the swan tied into two other portents.

On the surface, it all sounds rich and daft, but in the telling the robust nature of the lass formerly from Yorkshire (she has lived in the United States since her marriage) asserts itself.

The heating device, she says, is a practical one used by farmers to prevent ponds icing over so that cattle might have drinking water in winter. And she didn't, as you wouldn't, want to wake up to a frozen swan lake.

She was initially upset when Caroline was reported missing, but, she reflects, "you know, you don't really love a swan. You can't get near it. They're very, very nasty animals you know -- they come at you."

Taylor Bradford herself comes from a reasonably comfortable Leeds background: her dad was an ex-Navy; her mum a former children's nurse and nanny.

They, like Taylor Bradford herself, were determined that she get ahead in life. The Yorkshire Evening Post where she began as a typist -- by the age of 18 she was the Women's Page editor -- was not quite what they had in mind for the only child who was supposed to go on to university.

They were delighted, she relates to an equally delighted audience at the lunch, when she proved such an inept typist on her first day that, worried about the quantities of wasted company letterhead, she heaved a groaning wastepaper basket to the ladies' loos and attempted to set fire to it.

Like most story-tellers, she's incensed when she lets the tales out into the world -- "I was a journalist half my life and I was accurate, I never misquoted anybody" and they become twisted versions of the truth.

She's lucky though, she says, that the English tabloids have never written anything "particularly bitchy." But, still, she remembers a story which included the information that her father had a wooden leg.

"I said to Bob, I really must write to this newspaper and tell that it wasn't a wooden leg; it was aluminium. He said: 'Who cares?'

"I do!" she shrieks good-naturedly.

And she blames Bob for the piece which appeared claiming she had 2000 pairs of shoes.

"He made this joke to the journalist. He said Barbara loves shoes. In fact, I think she's got as many as Imelda.

"So I hit him over the head."

She's a good if, by her own admission, long-winded yarn teller in print as well as in chat.

A Woman of Substance arrived at her publishers in manuscript form in two shopping bags. Her editor inquired hopefully about the possibility that the she was providing two copies.

It was eventually cut down to a still door-stopping 868 pages from a tome whose 1529 adjective-laden pages weighed in at 8kg.

Like all BTB's best-sellers, A Woman of Substance (and it's impossible to get away from it: it's become a byline for BTB herself and she still has readers sidle up at readings who say, conspiratorially, "who is Emma Harte, really? You can tell me.") features women who "have great honour, or integrity, whichever way you want to put it."

Their success, she thinks, is because the women she writes about are those she would like to know herself.

"I never have a protagonist who's a bitch. There might be difficult women in the book, but never the main character."

No feminists either: "Don't you think that's a bit of an antiquated word these days? I do."

Her characters, she insists, are "doers and movers. They're the women who went out in covered wagons or the women who came from England to New Zealand.

"Women are marvellous; where would we be without them?
"It's about time, I think, we had a woman President in the States."

BTB for Pres? Why not?

She's got the star-spangled fingers -- and she can sell fiction to millions.


--Interview by Michele Hewitson, Weekend TimeOut, 07/11/98. Barbara Taylor Bradford's latest book is A Sudden Change of Heart, HarperCollins, $39.95.