A-listers in every walk of life, from movie stars to political leaders, billionaires to sports stars, are nearly always easy to get on with. It is the people who stand between them and the rest of the world who sometimes make life arduous.
The ferocious doctor’s receptionist has become a cliché, but there is a reason why such people are hired and vested with power; it is so that their bosses never have to fall out with anyone, never have to seem impatient or obstructive because their Rottweilers do all that for them. The bigger the star, the more ferocious the Rottweilers that stand between them and the rest of us.
If you have been hired by a big star to be their manager/agent/lawyer/publicist, then you have to make sure that you are seen to be doing something for your salary. In some cases that ‘something’ can be arranging unnecessary meetings, writing unnecessarily long letters, drawing up unnecessarily complex contracts and generally making everything take twice as long as it should.
In an ideal world a great film star would decide that she wanted to write a book and needed a ghost. She would ask someone to provide her with a few names and then either she would ring herself for a chat or she would ask her people to set up a meeting. If things went well then the lawyers could be asked to draw up a contract.
What actually happened in one case is symptomatic of the whole business. Someone junior from the star’s management team rang to enquire as to whether, in principle, I would be free to write a book for someone ‘very important’ who couldn’t be named. When I answered in the affirmative a long confidentiality agreement was drawn up before I could be told who she was. A meeting was then arranged, but not with her. Before that I had to be vetted to ensure that it was safe to allow me into her presence. On the day the people who were supposed to be at the meeting were held up at another more important one, and when they did arrive they were unable to give the matter enough time to make a decision. Another meeting was arranged and the same thing happened. Eventually they decided I could be introduced to the star.
Another meeting was arranged at the hotel she was staying at while passing through Paris on a press junket to promote a film. Getting there on time I found I had to meet first with someone from the management company, her personal assistant, a lawyer and a publicist, and a parallel team from the film company.
Eventually I was shown into a room that the star would soon be passing through on her way from one appointment to another. I was not the only one waiting in the room. There was also a journalist who had been promised an interview, a hairdresser, a make-up artist and a team from one of the couture houses who had some frocks for her to try on in preparation for a premiere later that night. She would not be actually watching the film, merely walking up the red carpet for the benefit of the assembled media cameras and then walking straight through the cinema to be let out of a back door, where a car would be waiting to whisk her away, which was just as well since some of the dresses did not look like their elaborate folds would respond well to being crammed into a cinema seat for a couple of hours.
When the lady herself eventually swept in several hours later, surrounded by a number of other people with earpieces and clipboards, the grooming squad fell into place around her, working on her hair and her face and showing her dresses as she listened to the people with clipboards, one of whom brought me forward for an introduction.
If she had ever known that she was going to be writing a book, she had forgotten, but that did not dent her charm or her politeness. She chatted for as long as she could before she had to try on a dress and it was suggested that I should wait in another room in order to continue the conversation later. By the time they remembered that I was in the other room our star had swept off to the premiere.
From that short exchange, however, she had decided that it would be fine to go ahead with the project, but that required me to be passed back into the hands of the managers and lawyers so that everything could be finalised. Over the following months I spent more hours in meetings and on phone calls with assistants than I would have needed to write the entire book if I had just been engaged for the job on day one. The star herself, however, was a joy from start to finish but the book, being micro-managed as it was by everyone who had a public relations stake in the lady’s career and image, was never going to catch the imagination of the book-reading public. It sold to fans in the same way that a poster of the star might sell and no doubt it did exactly the brand reinforcement job that they required.