Andrew Crofts - Confessions of a Ghostwriter

I wasn’t surprised that this request was being greeted with derision by the industry but what did shock me was the level of disdain with which they all seemed to dismiss the would-be author herself, simply because of her profession and because of the audience to whom they thought she appealed. Publishers who would happily buy biographies of courtesans, actresses and prostitutes of the past, seeing them as colourful players in the pageant of history, did not like the idea of dealing with a living, breathing woman who promoted herself to the masses as a sex object. To be frank, they didn’t want to let her across their thresholds, let alone into the hushed and rarefied environs of their editorial departments. According to John Carey in his excellent book, The Intellectuals and the Masses , Rudyard Kipling observed that ‘the masses must pass into history before they become suitable for intellectual contemplation’. Snobbery, it seems, is a constant, if mutating, presence in the literary world.

For a few months everything went quiet and Andrew Lownie lost interest in the project. I believe Jordan changed her management company and someone within Mishcon de Reya reached out to Maggie Hanbury, another distinguished literary agent, who for a while was under the impression that she was being asked to represent a Middle Eastern country. Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up Jordan worked her steely charm again and the two women found that they understood one another. Sadly for me, Hanbury decided that Jordan would be more comfortable talking to a female ghost and I fell out of the picture. I remained, however, fascinated with what was to unfurl over the following years.

Even with her new literary ally, Jordan was still not able to win over the arbiters of taste within the big publishing houses. One independent publisher, a former tabloid editor called John Blake, however, understood what he was being offered and thought that, with the addition of plenty of pictures, it would be a deal worth doing. He offered her an advance of £10,000, a hundred times less than her representatives had originally been asking for. Showing a flash of the business sense that would soon make her a multi-millionaire, Jordan instructed her agent to accept the offer.

Two things then happened, which changed everything. John Blake came up with the idea of writing Being Jordan from the perspective of the real Katie Price, and Katie herself was invited to fly down to the Australian jungle and appear in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here , where she caught the imagination of the British public, particularly the women, and conducted a very public romance with Peter Andre. A pop singer whose star had previously been waning, he became her first husband and father to two of her children. The target audience was no longer limited to male readers of The Sun because millions of women were now intrigued and wanted to know more and, as everyone in publishing knows, women are the ones who buy the most books, by a very large margin.

Being Jordan reputedly sold a million copies in hardback and editors in one of the major publishing houses who had previously refused to allow Jordan through their doors, were forced to offer Katie Price a seven figure sum to come to them with Rebecca Farnworth, her chosen ghostwriter. Cross with John Blake for signing up a rival model and for refusing to match this offer, Katie changed publishers and produced a stream of books in a variety of genres, most of which became colossal bestsellers, making no secret of the fact that she did not ‘do her own typing’. At the time of writing this she and Rebecca are still a team, with Lord knows how many titles under their belts.

The ever-cheerful soap star peered suspiciously at the freshly delivered cover of her forthcoming autobiography.

‘Why hasn’t it got your name on it?’ she enquired.

‘Because I’m invisible,’ I reminded her. ‘It says so in my contract.’

‘Does it?’ It was obviously the first she had heard of any such stipulation. ‘Why’s that then?’

‘The publisher thinks it’s better.’

‘Why?’

‘They think the fans will prefer to believe that you wrote it yourself. They want them to picture you sitting down at your escritoire at the end of a hard day’s filming and pouring your heart out onto the page.’

‘Sitting at my what?’

‘Your writing desk.’

She emitted a tobacco-throated croak of mirth. ‘I don’t think anyone’s that thick, are they?’

‘It’s standard practice. The publisher just thinks it’s better.’

‘I’m not sure about that. I don’t want people to think that I’m pretending I can write a book. That’ll make me look like a right knob.’

Such frankness is always endearing in an author. Most, in my experience, are quite happy to confess that they have had help with ‘doing the typing’, as Katie Price would say; it is usually the lawyers and the publishers who insist on contracts that threaten the ghost with hanging, drawing and quartering if they even tell their pet spaniel that their clients didn’t write their own books. The paid advisers are equally fond of confidentiality agreements that forbid you from ever telling anyone anything that you might have found out that doesn’t actually make it into the published book. If the client removes all their clothes during a recording session or confides that they intend to top themselves, mum’s the word.

Things have become less draconian with the passing years and with the public’s growing awareness that most people will find it hard to dash off a book if they are also doing another full-time job like starring in a soap opera, playing in a professional football team or running a country. As a result there are now some books where the ghost is openly acknowledged on the cover or the flyleaf and is free to talk to everyone including the media about their involvement in the project, and others where quite the opposite is true. Likewise there are some author/ghost relationships where a level of trust exists without the necessity of a written confidentiality contract, and a ghost would guard their author’s secrets as fiercely as they would guard those of their friends and family. Those are the best ones. It is the state that all good ghosts should aspire to.

Living, as I do, in one of the safest and most prosperous islands in the world, and being part of a comfortable and loving family, it is easy to forget or to remain ignorant of the depths of hellishness that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man, and frequently does. The collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc at the end of the eighties released a hurricane of shocking and fascinating human interest stories, carried back to the West by people who needed the help of ghostwriters to tell them.

When Romanian President, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was toppled from power and executed in 1989 his country was released from a quarter of a century of oppression. What horrified the outside world the most, however, was what was discovered inside the walls of the ‘orphanages for the irrecuperable’ which littered the country. Thousands of children who had been deemed to be of no use to Romania, or who had been ‘inconvenient’ births, were found locked up in these asylums, tied up in cots, starved, abused, driven insane and beaten until they eventually gave up living. This was what medieval Bedlams must have looked like. Western cameras went in and recorded scenes the like of which we had not seen in Europe since the liberation of the concentration camps after the Second World War.

After the collapse of Yugoslavia stories of war crimes and ethnic cleansing emerged daily as different factions and nationalities struggled to fill the power vacuum, committing any atrocities they deemed necessary. Soldiers, doctors, diplomats and charity workers all came out of the area with tales of unbelievable barbarity and many of them also needed ghostwriters to help them put into words horrors that had left them speechless.