Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

It was towards the end of 2001. There had been a series of false starts and abortive projects – one involved embedding with a troupe of eighties pop bands for the ‘Here and Now’ tour, another on John Noakes, the ex-Blue Peter presenter. Uri Geller briefly came back into the frame, yet again, and the boy band 5ive.

For a while we were having serious conversations about dedicating an hour of network television to a profile of Linsey Dawn McKenzie, a glamour model whose fame was based on the enormous size of her breasts. She was going on a ‘boob cruise’ with a paying clientele of breast appreciators. An AP went out to Essex to recce her. I can’t remember the specifics. But since we didn’t make the programme, I conclude that her breasts just weren’t big enough to generate a full hour-long programme.

By now all my anxieties and doubts about making celebrity profiles had coalesced into a kind of disgust. Having started out as a journalist, a humble trapper and skinner of stories with a certain knowledge of his hunting grounds and how to bag his quarry, I found myself in the position of wandering around the woods with a silver platter, waiting for a roast chicken to fall onto it. Day after day we were joylessly pushing the button on a slot machine, its wheels marked with celebrity names, hoping for a payday.

Not to mention that the whole diary-book-thing, which had seemed such a good idea, had now by its very formlessness taken over my life. In my work I’d always tried to expand the frame of enquiry, capturing more reality and greater authenticity by including those moments at the edges of an encounter that are in some ways the most real. But with the diary it felt as though I’d expanded the frame so wide that it was no longer clear where the edges were. My waking hours resembled a life-support system for a project that required me to have conversations with my celebrity ex-subjects and take notes. Of all the conversations, as ever, the weirdest and most interesting were with Jimmy Savile. But, even with him, I found myself in a place of diminishing returns, never getting closer to making his parts add up.

Then, in amongst these failures and missteps, there came an expression of interest from Max.

When he died in his cell at HMP Littlehey, Cambridgeshire, Max Clifford, the star publicist, was three years into an eight-year sentence for multiple counts of indecent assault. His death was an ignominious end for a man who had once been one of the most powerful people on Fleet Street. His stock in trade had been kiss-and-tell stories. Max would sell the tabloids scoops about nights of passion with celebrities. Rebecca Loos, a personal assistant to the footballer David Beckham, had used his services when she’d alleged that the two of them had been having an affair. The actress Antonia de Sancha had gone to him with her account of being the mistress of the conservative politician David Mellor. Max also worked for celebrity clients who wished to keep their names out of the papers. He would use his influence among editors to spike articles, usually by supplying alternative stories about stage-managed relationships.

Clifford’s scoops sometimes involved colourful headlines of his creation. The most famous, ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’, was a mostly fictional Sun cover story about an unpredictable comedian eating a rodent sandwich while staying with a friend.

Though he would have disliked the comparison, Max Clifford resembled Jimmy Savile in some ways. Like Jimmy, he had a leathery toughness and lied without compunction – for advantage or to amuse himself. Also like Jimmy, he was a dedicated and high-profile charity fundraiser. And he was an undiscovered serial predator who – in 2001 – agreed to spend ten days with me for a documentary profile.

Max’s interest in doing a programme came with a condition: he insisted we meet off camera before filming. Going back to TV Nation and Weird Weekends days, it was my policy not to do this, to preserve some authenticity to the encounter. But by now, with production in the doldrums, I was relaxing some of my old rules.

His offices were on the fifth floor of a building in New Bond Street: open-plan, overlooking the rooftops of the West End. A half-dozen or so mostly female workers sat at desks – ‘Max’s Angels’. On the walls were framed front pages of his greatest hits and photos of Max with some of his celebrity clients.

I arrived with my director – Alicia, from the Eubank film – and an AP, Helen Sage, to find Max in his glassed-off corner office, gabbing on the phone. ‘Have you seen today’s Tatler?’ he was saying. ‘It’s going to be huge.’

He was silver-haired, in his sixties, in a blue short-sleeved shirt that showed his ex-boxer’s arms and chest.

Once off the phone, he explained why the documentary wouldn’t work.

‘You want a big scandal, I know what you want. But these people who come to me with stories, they don’t want their faces shown. They don’t come to me because they want to be on TV. They come for two reasons: because they want to make big money, or they want revenge.’

This led into an inventory of his life and a cascade of unverifiable gossip, all of it off-the-record: an anecdote about a Westlife stag party and something else about Prince Edward. He kept mentioning names and then giving a little smile as if to say, ‘Oh, I could tell you things,’ and turning his lips as though secrets were wriggling to get out.

‘In 1962, EMI sent me to look after an unknown band,’ he said. ‘They were called The Beatles.’ And: ‘Let me tell you, Paul Daniels and Jimmy Savile are egomaniacs. Max Clifford is not an egomaniac. He’s got an ego but he’s not an egomaniac.’ And several times this exchange: Me: ‘Do you think so?’ Max: ‘I don’t think, I know!’

I was aware that in seeing him prior to filming I was already setting a dangerous precedent, signing up to his rules of on- and off-the-record. I knew that part of his technique for getting people on side was this kind of journalistic double bookkeeping – the truth versus the version we are agreeing to share – and that it created an unhelpful complicity. And so, as much as I was tempted to trade gossip, I held back and tried to say as little as possible. At the end of the meeting, Max said, ‘Remember, you can make me look like a prat in the editing room but I can make you look like a prat after it goes out.’

In the lift on the way down, Helen said, ‘He gave us the same exact spiel last time we saw him.’

We began filming a few days later – with the usual tour-and-chat, though of his office not his home. Max, in crisp blue shirt and rimless spectacles, gave off a measured sense of indifference bordering on uninterest as he touted himself as a rainmaker for his clients, a fixer and packager of rising talent. I asked if, in theory, Max might represent me.

‘Well, if you could afford us,’ he said with a suggestion of impatience. ‘We start at ten thousand pounds a month. Secondly, as to whether we would represent you, initially it would depend on the chemistry between you and I. If you didn’t like me, I didn’t like you, it doesn’t get started.’

The idea of me as a prospective client whose career Max could help – and also a potential enemy whom Max could hurt – seemed a fruitful theme for filming and we continued the conversation on a taxi ride down to Rochester, Kent, where a client of Max’s, nine-year-old singer Declan Galbraith, was performing at a pub. (For some reason Max insisted on calling him ‘Decland’, as though he was a place.) In the back of the taxi, I teased Max about whether he might take his revenge on me if he didn’t like the finished documentary.

‘Oh, if you took liberties, then you’ve started a fight,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘Then I’d fight back,’ he said. ‘If that day ever happens then you’ll find out soon enough.’

Over the next few weeks, I prodded away at this idea as filming proceeded with a day here, a day there. Though known for kiss-and-tell, most of Max’s work involved a random and less tantalizing assortment of people and products: an R&B outfit called Damage; the strip club Spearmint Rhino; a man who who’d been molested by Jonathan King; a new kind of smoke alarm that screwed into light sockets. Of Max’s stable, most interesting by far was an A&R man and creator of novelty records who was just then breaking into television as a talent-show judge – Simon Cowell.

‘Simon is obviously looking – as most people are that are suddenly getting a lot of media attention – to try to control it as much as possible,’ Max said.

Still, there was something baffling about Simon’s retaining Max’s services. He was, presumably, already wealthy from his music career. His profile was high, and it was also the case that there were enough weird stories about Simon already in the papers to make you wonder what exactly Max was managing to hold back.

Hoping to flesh out the Max–Simon relationship, we arranged to film a charity event at Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey at which we knew Simon would be appearing. And by coincidence the day before, a tabloid called The Sport ran a story about an alleged night of passion between Simon and a glamour model called Alicia Douvall. The article included the detail that Simon had folded his socks before the lovemaking. It was confusing – the question of whether it was a story planted by Max or one that slipped by him – and faintly ridiculous, when you thought about it, that there might not be much difference between the two scenarios.

The hospital was throbbing with the pheromones of excited children from local schools, with Max off to one side, somewhat incognito, though in control – less a ringmaster and more like a maître d’ at a crowded restaurant. Declan, the child singer, was there with his mum. When Simon arrived – shortish, broad-shouldered, in a jumper somehow too revealing around the neck – he signed autographs, looking as though he wasn’t quite sure why he was there.

I said hello. I’d never met him before though the production team had had some dealings with him when we’d been considering a project with the boy band, 5ive. I took an immediate liking to him: he was friendly and down-to-earth. I would meet him several more times and he’d always be pleasant, in a way I assumed was sincere, though who can ever be sure? (At one of our last encounters, I would ask Simon why he no longer wore his clothes so tight, and he’d say, ‘I saw you on TV the other day and I thought you looked absolutely brilliant and I wanted to adopt more of your look.’ Which was laying it on a bit thick – I suspected he might be doing some Jedi-level social-influence-through-flattery trick.)

On this occasion, though, at the hospital, there wasn’t much-chit chat before I whipped out the copy of The Sport I’d brought with me and read out the cover line: ‘Page Three Babe Sex With Pop Idol Judge in Full and Explicit Detail’.

‘Bye!’ Simon said, and laughed.

‘Simon has been a busy boy for the last twenty years,’ Max said. ‘And now he’s become a celebrity his past is catching up with him.’

‘I haven’t seen that actually,’ Simon said, gesturing at the paper.

He read it, then laughed. ‘Unbelievable!’

‘Did you have sexual relations with her?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah, I did,’ Simon said. ‘Once.’

Max, the highly paid media handler, then went into turn-the-tables mode. By this time my Hamiltons programme had gone out, with its scene of Christine cuddling me, and he seized on this for ammunition.

‘Ask him about Christine Hamilton,’ he said. ‘Christine was the special one.’

Simon asked Max if he’d consider me as a client. ‘If he came to you and said “Keep me out of the papers,” would you take him on?’

‘I asked that,’ I said. ‘He said, “It depends on the chemistry.” ’

‘Chemistry was your expression,’ Max said incorrectly. ‘I said “If I like him”.’

A little later, the boy band Westlife arrived. Professional amid the mayhem, they stepped out of a minivan like investigators at a crime scene. The excitement of the children reached fever pitch and, along with Max, we made our escape.

The Royal Marsden visit was also notable for being the first occasion on which the Max Clifford prankster mode made an appearance. Alicia and I had been travelling back in Max’s car when a call came in on the speakerphone from a friend of Max’s at the hospital. They made small talk about the visit. Then Max said, ‘What was interesting – you know Alicia was up there filming Louis?’

‘Yes?’

‘She was telling me he was shagging Christine Hamilton.’

The friend on the phone was confused.

‘You’re joking!’ she said.

‘Yeah! Unbelievable! You can see why there was that chemistry between them! She said that he likes older women.’

‘Not that old surely?’

‘Yeah, hopefully they never film the Queen Mother! The things you do for your art!’

I jumped in at this point, alerting the woman on the phone that she was being pranked and that I had never (as I hope I hardly have to say) had sexual relations with Christine Hamilton, and there followed an awkward moment of realization.

‘Oh, Max, you’re such a bastard,’ she said. ‘I feel really ill now.’ But it seemed a revealing exchange – the way Max’s humour relied on power and withheld information, a joyless kind of practical joking that seemed more about the pleasure he took in discomfort than anything comic.

‘Why were you doing that joke about me sleeping me with Christine?’ I asked when we were back in Max’s office. ‘That’s just silly, isn’t it?’

‘Depends if you enjoyed it or not,’ Max said.

‘You want information on me, don’t you?’

‘To tell the truth, not at all. For what?’

‘So I don’t stitch you up?’

‘No. If you do that, then so what?’

‘That hurts even more,’ I said, as a joke.

‘The pluses still outweigh the minuses,’ Max went on. ‘It’s a bit like being bitten by a gnat, isn’t it. Not nice at the time but it’s gone. Too many good things out there.’

I had been a little worried, before filming, about Max’s dealings with me: what kind of relationship we would develop. For all their foibles, most of my other profilees – Paul Daniels, Chris Eubank – had a certain show-business charisma. Max was cut from different cloth. His manner was reminiscent of a nightclub bouncer who hasn’t found your name on the list. It said, Nothing personal. You’re just not very important. He told me several times he felt apart from the world of celebrities. ‘I’m not interested in the tittle-tattle and the gossip.’ Given that he name-dropped constantly and took an overweening pleasure in the exchange of secret information (which was, after all, his business), this was hard to credit. At the very least, he saw fame and status as a currency that he could use to get what he wanted. I suspected it was more than that though – that it represented a professional and emotional sustenance.

But as a documentary subject for me, Max had the saving grace of being thick-skinned, and his bullying and love of secrecy and control meant that, despite his mistrustfulness, we settled into a back-and-forth of sparring that was quite enjoyable. He liked to tease but even his jokes – like the Christine Hamilton prank – weren’t simply attempts to be funny but also a chance to exercise power. He made occasional ironic remarks but these were delivered so mirthlessly that he came across like a police officer who’s taken a course in sarcasm as a suspect-control strategy.

And so, conscious that it was a way to keep the programme moving, I continued to maintain a certain level of tension in our interactions, aware it might go too far – that Max might take against me or try to take revenge – but not worrying about it too much, until it happened.

One afternoon we visited Max at home, a large detached house in a gated community in the Surrey commuter belt. The neighbourhood was prosperous and lifeless, reminiscent of high-toned American suburbia. We were hosted by Liz, Max’s wife of thirty-four years – a woman as genteel as the model-home furnishings that filled the enormous house: pastel colours, plates with puppies on them, porcelain figures, a statue of a spaniel, and a real spaniel called Oliver. Liz seemed to be filming on sufferance and there was a muted atmosphere as she announced her lack of interest in tabloids and show business. ‘It’s a load of old rubbish, isn’t it?’ she said, and sipped her tea.

Through our weeks of filming, Max had been continuing to share off-the-record information with my director Alicia – principally about the way in which he’d been orchestrating a fake relationship for Simon Cowell involving a dancer from the strip club Spearmint Rhino. It was a classic bit of Max cross-promotion: celebrity client dating a stripper from a business Max represented. But being told about it off camera placed me in exactly the sort of compromised position I’d been hoping to avoid. Instead of documenting his PR efforts, we were becoming adjuncts of it. In his kitchen, during filming, I raised the issue.

‘You told Alicia that they hadn’t had sex,’ I said.

‘Oh, well, I was protecting her innocence.’

‘Why can you tell Alicia off camera but you can’t tell me on camera?’

‘Well, as I explained to you when we first started to do this, there’s an awful lot of things that you can’t be privy to.’

I pressed further on the question of Max’s machinations and it was striking, looking at the scene afterwards, that his shoulder began twitching up and down as though his repressed irritation was causing a physical reaction.

‘You’re quite defensive,’ I said.

‘No, I just say it as I see it, that’s all,’ Max said. ‘But let’s put it this way. I don’t intend to make it easy for you.’

‘To do what?’

‘To come out with the things I don’t want you to come out with.’

Afterwards we went to a Chinese restaurant – Alicia, me, the Cliffords, and the impressionist Bobby Davro and his wife. Max teased Davro about a tic or a twitch he’d developed which he said had put paid to Davro’s TV career. I wasn’t sure whether it was banter between friends or an insensitive joke or maybe both. Then the subject of alleged showbiz miscreants came up.

‘Michael Barrymore’ll top himself in a few years, and good riddance,’ Max said. ‘He’s a sick animal and that’s what you do with sick animals.’

The waiter, who was Chinese, spoke heavily accented English. Several times Max asked him if they served ‘hairy muff’ for dessert, to the man’s understandable incomprehension. We were filming and I sensed he was attempting to share ‘the lighter side of Max Clifford’ with the viewing public.

After the meal, Max drove us back to his house, pointing out his neighbours. ‘Mick Hucknall lives there, Geoff Hurst lives there. The Beatles used to live here . . . That’s my tennis club. Cliff Richard’s also a member.’

If there was a poisoning of my relationship with Max, it probably dates from the conversation in the kitchen. A day or so later, having been summoned to film a scene with Simon Cowell and his lap-dancing ‘girlfriend’ at Spearmint Rhino, in which they would be photographed together for the newspapers, I was surprised when dancers kept draping themselves around me. Photographers snapped away as I squirmed. Then a full-page story appeared in the Mirror: ‘GOT THEROUX: 3AM Girls turn tables on TV inquisitor . . . and he’s lost for words.’

It had been a set-up, Max’s warning shot across the bows, but it was surprisingly irksome – in particular, the substance of the article, which was that I could dish it out but couldn’t take it. Probably the most irritating part was that there was some truth to the story: he had dished it out, and I’d found it uncomfortable. But it was, at least, good material for the documentary. And in fact thereafter there was an almost daily drip of items about me in the gossip pages – placed by Max and designed to pique and irritate me. Thanks to the success of the Hamiltons programme, interest in my irrelevant doings was then at its apex. I was turning down most publicity requests, attempting to keep a low profile. Meanwhile, Max was inviting press along to our every outing.

Matters came to a head when, by prior arrangement, we filmed Max doing his grocery shop at a Sainsbury’s, only to find that there was a small gauntlet of reporters and photographers waiting for us outside, including a Guardian journalist, Simon Hattenstone, who’d approached me the previous week about following me around for a print profile. I had turned him down, so it was utterly confusing to see him there. I retreated to a quiet spot to conference with Alicia, at which point she heard on the radio mike Max and Simon talking about us.

‘You think we should level with him?’ Simon was saying.

‘No! I’ll never hear the bloody last of it if you tell him!’ Max replied.

‘Because I wanted to do a follow-round with him, but he wouldn’t want that—’

‘I know. That’s why I said come down. He’s paranoid about everything.’

‘Why did you let him do it?’ Simon said, meaning the documentary.

‘Why not?’

I went back in, camera rolling, finding them in the banal environs of the fruit-and-veg aisle. My heart was beating fast. I’d been lied to, and it felt strangely personal.

‘I wish you’d level with me,’ I said, and then to Simon, ‘I know you’re here because I’m here, and you shouldn’t have to lie about that.’

‘Nobody’s lying to you, Louis,’ Max said, giving me a gentle pat. ‘You mustn’t get paranoid about these things. Just relax.’

To Simon again I said, ‘Is that the whole truth?’ It seemed to irk Max that I was talking to Simon instead of him, and I suspect he’d twigged by now that he’d been caught out by his wireless mike.

‘Talk to each other, then!’ he said, agitated. ‘If you’re going to be silly about it then you can all fuck off!’

With that, he ambled off, wheeling his trolley. Then, realizing he was still wearing his radio mike, he turned and came back and stripped it off, fiddling in his pockets to find the transmitter.

‘That’s it. Thanks very much,’ he said and stalked off a second time.

The scene of Max stomping off became our ending to the film, but it wasn’t the end of my dealings with Max. As with all our celebrity subjects, we had an awkward pre-transmission screening in his offices, Max fidgeting in his chair, fiddling with his pencil and not laughing while the little coterie of his female staffers pressed at the interior window to try and see what was on screen.

At the end he said, ‘You know and I know what you did. Fine. I can handle myself. I’m old enough and ugly enough to deal with it. But let’s not pretend it’s something else.’

‘We have a hundred per cent track record with all our contributors,’ I said, attempting to gaslight him into thinking it was basically a positive portrayal. ‘We’ve not had one person who didn’t like his film.’

‘Well, good,’ Max said. ‘You must be very happy. You’ve done what you’ve done. You didn’t have to do it but so be it. You’ve made an enemy and I will come back at you. Might not be today, or tomorrow, but one day when you’re not expecting it, I’ll repay you with interest for that programme and it won’t be nice.’

When Louis Met Max turned out to be the last of the celebrity profiles I made, and for years I was grateful that I’d gone out with a documentary that had some toughness to it. Having been lost in the woods of some light-entertainment netherworld, it felt as though I had – for one last outing – got the eye of the tiger back: returned to the ring and gone toe to toe with a Fleet Street heavyweight, winning on points with a flukey twelfth-round knock-out.

In the years afterwards, I would sometimes muse on his threats against me. He made some barbed comments in a ghosted autobiography – claiming an ex-wife had been in touch with him, which I doubt. Occasionally I’d joke, in talks I gave, about his animus against me and living life with a sword of Damocles dangling over my head.

But what I didn’t realize, until years later when it came out, was how many secrets he still had.