Andrew Crofts - Confessions of a Ghostwriter

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © Andrew Crofts 2014

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Andrew Crofts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007575404

Ebook Edition © SEP 2014 ISBN: 9780007575411

Version: 2014-07-23

To my wife, Susan, who I love with all my heart.

Title Page Confessions of a Ghostwriter BY ANDREW CROFTS

Copyright The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014 Copyright © Andrew Crofts 2014 Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014 Andrew Crofts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. FIRST EDITION A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007575404 Ebook Edition © SEP 2014 ISBN: 9780007575411 Version: 2014-07-23

Dedication To my wife, Susan, who I love with all my heart.

Introduction

An eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room

A million books in an African warehouse

Discovering ghostwriting

The story of Stumpy

The glamour model versus the ‘arbiters of taste’

Secrets and confidentiality agreements

Glimpses of hell

That splinter of ice

Suddenly you’re history

Abused children find a voice

Sacked by a glove puppet

A debt to Dale Carnegie

The first questions a ghostwriter should ask

‘You need to come to Haiti …’

Tyrants and other interesting monsters

Lunching with Imelda Marcos

Afternoon tea with Mrs Mubarak

Filthy lucre

Big Brother is watching and listening

A real-life Shades of Grey

A gift for a billionaire

Rich men’s toys

The soporific brothel

An opportunist hack

A book goes global

Revenge can be bitter

The Princess speaks

Confessions of my infidelity

How can anyone write four books a year?

Waking up in the orphanage

Under armed guard in Lahore

The tentative handling of firearms

The faulty memories of rock gods

Soldiers’ tales

Win a ghost of your own

Selling your story to a magazine

Calls from out of the blue

I am an addict

Evangelists of technology

‘Mr Harris would like to quote you …’

A confession of conceit

Guilt and self-doubt

The awesome power of a tear on daytime television

Christina Foyle, queen of all she surveyed

A new breed of stars

The reality of reality television stars

A genuine talent

A real media circus

Culture clashes and other bad marriages

Clubs for gentlemen and players

A Year in Provence unleashes an avalanche

Jim Martin’s island

A Russian in hiding

Education at Madame Jojo’s

From the lips of an Iraqi child

I love supermarket bookshelves

Confessions from the British Library

‘You may just have to get a job …’

The forgotten rules of grammar

A forgotten weekend in academia

A little lone wolf

The greatest living playwright

The selling power of celebrities

The soap star who came to stay

Not everyone can be Hamlet

Discovering Jay Gatsby

‘The Principessa is throwing a party …’

A black BMW behind King’s Cross

Tales of courtesans and mistresses

Deathbed delivery

The mid-book blues

Addiction to charts

Tales from below stairs

A confession of cowardice

Writing in two voices at once

Just a single copy

Family secrets

One for the bank vaults

On behalf of my client

A movie star and her entourage

A hit-man comes to lunch

Writers as parasites

Ordinary people who do extraordinary things

Leaving London

Soft times

A pain in Baguio

Whoring myself again

The suppression of the ego

The Pope’s secret mistress

A writer’s pit

Who moved my nuts?

‘Everyone says it would make a great movie’

The strange delusions of world leaders

Authors regain a little self-control

Standing on the past

The creation of Steffi McBride

A gathering of ghosts

Meeting the daughter of God

My father’s departure by tractor

And still I know nothing

Acknowledgements

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About the Publisher

‘Ghostwriter for Hire’

I placed the small ad in The Bookseller , a publishing trade magazine, simply adding my phone number, and over the following years those three words took me all over the globe.

They allowed me to meet people I would otherwise never have known existed and who would reveal to me the secrets of their worlds. I travelled from palaces to brothels, lush jungles to mean city streets and got behind the closed doors of both corporate boardrooms and the homes of dysfunctional families.

Hiding behind the title of ghostwriter I could converse with kings and billionaires as easily as whores and the homeless; go backstage with rock stars and actors and descend into the bowels of the earth with miners and engineers. I could stick my nose into everyone else’s business and ask all the impertinent questions I wanted to. At the same time I could also live the pleasant life of a writer, my days unencumbered by hours of crowded commuting or unnecessary meetings in bleakly lit offices with people who were of no interest.