It is always best for ghosts to talk to their clients on the client’s home territory. Whether that means a palace in Africa or a brothel in Bangkok, a château in the Dordogne or a stilted hut in the Malaysian jungle, it needs to be somewhere where they feel completely comfortable and safe enough to open their hearts and spill their secrets. They need, in other words, to feel able to ‘be themselves’.
Sometimes fate intervenes. I had one client, for instance, who was forced to spend several hours a week in hospital on a kidney dialysis machine and managed to persuade the nursing staff on the ward that it would be a good use of her time if I and my tape machine sat at her bedside during those long tedious hours. It did, in fact, help to focus my mind on one of the main themes of the story, the effect that her health problems had had on her chances of fulfilling her dreams.
Sometimes it is not possible for the client to provide the venue, possibly because there would be no privacy at their home or because the writing of the book is a secret they are keeping from their family. Then neutral venues need to be found, places which offer the same safe environments plus plumbing and refreshments on demand. Hotels are often the best option. Bedrooms are good if it seems appropriate or meeting rooms if they are not too sterile. Often, however, it is the lobbies, lounges and restaurants that offer the best opportunities to sit in relative comfort, ordering cakes or alcohol when required, ignored by the floating population around you, most of whom are too busy with their own lives to bother listening in to the conversations of others.
If the client belongs to a club, that can serve in the same way. The grand gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall make their grand members feel as safe as if they were in their own homes, surrounded by fleets of servants. Celebrities, particularly the younger ones, prefer the newer, flashier clubs, which tends to mean more interruptions as phones buzz and acquaintances come and go, kissing cheeks and exchanging snippets of news. Often in those situations there is also a minder/manager/publicity body in attendance, which is good if it makes the celebrity feel more comfortable and protected, bad if it makes them wary about baring their souls. These people are often paid to steer their clients away from saying anything that might be damaging to their image or might lead to a court case. It is almost impossible to make these guard dogs feel secure and their constant jumpiness often infects the clients, making them less willing to show their true selves, making them stick to the company line, making them talk as blandly as they would in a half hour magazine interview.
Modern recording devices make it far easier to hear what the storytellers are saying in loud, crowded places. Sometimes it is even clearer on the machine than it is face to face. It wasn’t always so. In the days of cassette tapes I did an interview over lunch in the roar of the Savoy Grill and could hear nothing over the background noise, either during the lunch or afterwards in my office. Luckily, there were other opportunities to ask the same questions again later because the client had drunk so much claret at the lunch he was unable to remember anything we had spoken about.