Not Me

While we’re here, allow me to let you in a little on my life with the British tabloids. Round about the same time, I also appeared in the Daily Mirror with this headline:

Except as you may notice, I’m not a pervert policeman. Well. I’m not a policeman.

This was someone else called David Baddiel. I couldn’t discover from the main news reports what form of extreme pornography he’d been found guilty of having. Eventually, I did find the info, in the Jewish Chronicle:

A special constable was given a conditional discharge on Wednesday after being found guilty of having photos of women performing sex acts with a horse.

David Baddiel, 33, from Hendon, who runs a tyre-fitting service, was convicted of …

If one was to consider the semiotics here, I’d say the reason the JC printed this information about the horse, and no other news outlet did, was because this David Baddiel is Jewish, natch, and so they were keen to make it clear the porn that this particular Jew was found in possession of was horse, rather than child. If we extend that analytical touch to the way this story was reported in general – indeed, to the fact of it being reported at all – I think we can ask the question: why would the Daily Mirror be mentioning the name of this particular pervert policeman in the headline? Assuming – which is unlikely – that a special constable possessing horse porn would in normal circumstances make the Mirror, the headline would simply be ‘Pervert Policeman Found Guilty of Possessing Extreme Pornography’. The addition of ‘Called David Baddiel’ is there for one reason and one reason alone, which is to make people think it’s me.

The Mirror are helped in their objective here by the idiosyncrasy of my name. There are other people called David Baddiel, but none of them are well known, and thus only one person is brought to mind. A sweeter – but still awkward – moment resulted from the same issue when I was taking Dolly for a walk when she was about three. At this point in her life, she called me Daddy, as you might expect, but had heard people call me David, which confused her a little, and occasionally she would call me that. On this day, we were in the park and suddenly she needed to go to the toilet. I managed to find one and did that awkward thing of holding her while weaving through the men standing in there towards the cubicle. I got her in, sat her on the seat, pulled her pants down – and that was the moment she chose to say, far too loudly, ‘David Baddiel!’

And I could feel all the men outside stop pissing, and clearly think: That’s weird, I had assumed he was her father …

But the base reason why I don’t always sit well with fame is because I really have only one motto in life, and it is: the truth is always complex. And the truth about people – about who I am, about who you are – is the most complex of all. But fame doesn’t allow for that. Fame allows only for a very narrow focus of personality. Because to be famous, you have to be narrativized – you have to be part of a story, and we don’t have time for complex stories. It must be simplified, it must essentially be a panto, with villains, heroes, maidens and clowns. Which means fame is always going to be a type of mistaken identity.

With fame, you are mainly defined by however you are viewed at the beginning. In my novel The Death of Eli Gold, the titular character, who is a famous American writer, says at one point, ‘Fame is like starlight …’ By which he doesn’t mean it’s beautiful and glittering: he means that, like the light of stars, what you see when you look at a famous person tends to be from long ago – from when you first made up your mind about them. Or to quote a real great American writer, John Updike, ‘Fame is a mask that eats into your face.’ By which he means: fame has no plasticity – it cannot change and move with time and circumstance, like personality, like a real face, does. Whoever the culture has decided you are, that sets on you, like plaster of Paris, and whatever you say, to try and prove that you are someone else, just remains muffled beneath it.

In my case that mask was set early on: at its worst, somewhere in between a shouty lad and a racist stereotype of an arrogant Jew. Here is an example of fame making my face into that mask. In 2011, I went to see Peter Gabriel at the Hammersmith Apollo. It was orchestral arrangements of his songs, so you had to listen hard and stay quiet, which I did. But the next week this article appeared in The Times diary section:

One thing to note here is the phrase ‘self-absorbed North London drone’. This was before I wrote Jews Don’t Count, but one of the things that may have led up to that book was noticing the creeping, insidious way the British press discreetly like to tell their readers that someone in the public eye is Jewish. The primary code for Jew in the press is probably this North London, particularly its application as an adjective. I first noticed it, I think, when Lord Levy was Tony Blair’s envoy to the Middle East and would continually be referred to as ‘North London businessman’ Lord Levy or ‘self-made North London millionaire’ Lord Levy, or ‘NW3 person good with money likes herring’ Lord Levy.

Anyway, I read this bit in The Times diary section and was flabbergasted. I rang the guy I went to the concert with and said: ‘What happened? Did I black out and forget all this?’ And he said, ‘No, you whispered about three things during the entire gig.’ So I phoned The Times and they said, ‘Definitely, it’s true. In fact, we left stuff out to make it seem not so bad. You were completely drunk and when you were asked to be quiet by a woman, you told her to fuck off, three security men were called, you offered them out for a fight …’ I mean, really, it’s not sounding very me, is it? Although if you want to know how persuasive and assumed-to-be-true stuff in print is, Ivor told me he’d read it and thought it was true, until I told him what The Times had said about me offering out the security men – then he knew it wasn’t.

The guy I went with, by the way – I have to tell you this for the story, it’s not just name-dropping – was Richard Curtis. The man who set up Comic Relief, the most morally unquestionable – least likely to lie – person in the world. That is important for you to know, because he wrote to The Times on my behalf. Actually, he went so far as to say: ‘It’s very unlikely David would have said “he’d bought his ticket and could do what he damn well liked with it” as he hadn’t – I had.’

The Times weren’t interested. They said, no, we have witnesses. You behaved like a terrible person. It was making me go mad. In desperation I emailed Peter Gabriel. It felt pathetic to email my teenage idol about something so absurd, but this is what fame – understood as a persona that apparently is you but that you don’t recognize – can drive you to. And he said, ‘I’m very surprised you were there watching a clapped-out old rock star, in fact.’

No, he didn’t. That is a lie. It is what we in the trade refer to as a call-back. This is what he said:

Right. That’s it, I thought. From the hero’s mouth. I phoned The Times again and amazingly the diary editor still didn’t believe me. He started saying, Well, if it wasn’t you, who was it? And while I was on the phone, this second email, from Peter Gabriel’s road manager, came through:

IT WAS IAN BROUDIE! IAN BROUDIE, OF THE LIGHTNING SEEDS.

I mean, I’m not denying I look like him. That picture is cropped. Here’s the original …

… and clearly the photographer has put me and him on either side of Frank for the sake of symmetry.

Ian, by the way, is from Liverpool. So that self-satisfied north London drone all the witnesses reported hearing – it’s very north of London, isn’t it? But then again, he is Jewish.

After all this, The Times finally admitted they got it wrong and printed an apology. This apology:

‘A longstanding Peter Gabriel fan and always an entirely conscientious audience member …’ Hmm. The Times are taking the piss here, aren’t they? I knew this, even though they ran the wording of this apology past me first. They said, in a somewhat passive aggressive way, we’ve written it like this, because we don’t want to seem too serious about it. And I, wanting to play along and not seem pompous, said, yes, OK. But I shouldn’t have done. I should have said, well, for a very long time, you were fucking serious about not printing an apology, so print a proper apology.

My point is: fame is a mask that eats into the face: the person who fame has made of me, in this case it actually was me – a loud-mouthed shouty lad/arrogant Jew – is not me. And the person in The Times’ diary column was actually not me. But how hard was it to prove that it was not me.

By the way: after this happened, I phoned Ian – who is a lovely man, extremely well-behaved and nice, most of the time – and he said, ‘Oh God, yes, on that night I got a bit out of it and had a row with some people in front of me and yeah, it’s me.’

And then he said:

‘Don’t tell anyone.’

Sorry, Ian.