‘It’s going to be hard to get quiet time together,’ the client said. ‘I’ve got a private jet and I go back and forth to New York a lot. That would be a good opportunity to talk without interruption.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed, always happy to meet a client wherever they would be most comfortable – particularly if it involved being pampered for a few hours in a private jet.
He was not the first wealthy client to make that suggestion and I doubted he would be the last. Some suggest taking a few days at spas, resorts or in country houses that they don’t usually get much use from. Others like to do their talking on the decks and in the cabins of their yachts, even if we never travel more than a few miles off the Riviera coast and come ashore for dinner every evening.
Rich men love their toys and in most cases they also love to share them. If they are hiring a ghostwriter they already have an eye on how posterity will view them, and they want their scribe to see them at their best. On a commission in Hong Kong I couldn’t understand why my client was being so cagey about inviting me to his house, always arranging our meetings in his office with its sweeping views out across the harbour. When the invitation finally arrived, on my last day in the city, his wife showed me their newly installed ornamental fish pond (a bit like the Trevi fountain in Rome only in white marble with gold decorations), and explained that her husband had not wanted me to see the house until the fountains and waterfalls were all working perfectly.
The mega-rich grow accustomed to perfection. Their days are kept peaceful and well oiled by immaculately discreet butlers, cooks and drivers. Their jets and limousines are more comfortably upholstered than most people’s living rooms. They travel through life on a cloud of unruffled luxury and they see any interruption to that perfection as a failing. Many of them seem to be suffering from a variety of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which requires that they are cocooned at all times in a world of total order and cleanliness.
When I am getting to know them I try to get them to make all the decisions about where we should meet and what we should do together. Just as Nick Carraway entered the party-world of Jay Gatsby in order to tell his story and Charles Ryder became immersed in the aristocratic world of Brideshead, I want to sit in the rooms they use the most, eat what they eat, drink what they drink, go to the restaurants where they are known and comfortable. As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ Or in other words, ‘until you walk a mile in his shoes’.
More than once a client has become impatient with my reluctance to express any preference as to where or what we should eat. They want to be generous and to supply whatever my needs might be – the Jay Gatsby syndrome again – when all I want is to get beneath their skins and see the world through their eyes and taste it through their food choices. If that means many hours trapped on private jets and yachts or in the luscious bowels of the Dorchester – so be it.