until you know how it was made, and all the better for not being the amended version I had seen in Adrian’s room which had a facetious speech bubble drawn in felt-tip coming out of its mouth saying ‘I can see your bow thruster!!’ Scientists’ humour. I pop round to Frankie’s, blow the picture up, borrow the office printer and make a good hard copy the size of a small poster. I also contact Millie to make a date to see her so she can brief me on the spiritual angle of her character from which she now wishes to be viewed. I suddenly realize that mine is to become the art of the side-scan biographer, expected to conjure up a different portrait by viewing her from a different slant and tinkeringwith light and shadow. She agrees to see me later in the week when she has ‘prepared her thoughts’. Mine are already prepared , but I prepare them still further with a few hours’ research in the London Library.
*
Inevitably, my session with Millie Cleat turns out to be an anticlimax . She really hasn’t anything much to add after all. She is absolutely typical of virtually all my clients, few of whom know what they want, most of whom give me the authorized version of their story, and all of whom think I have got the facts completely wrong when they read the final draft. It is true that in Millie’s case I did rely on her husband Clifford for some background stuff, especially as regards her introduction to sailing. Not having been born yesterday I even took the trouble to find an old boy who had given her lessons back in her Ruislip Lido days. Now Millie wants me to write that her parents used to take her on holiday to Salcombe, where she began to mess about in boats from the age of three. I’ve no doubt it’s all baloney, and tell her frankly that we don’t have the time to track down some octogenarian Devonian skipper who might remember her and give a plausible Cap’n Birdseye performance. I shall incorporate this wholly uncorroborated claim as part of the gospel according to Cleat. No skin off my nose, after all. I’ve long since given up hoping I shall never knowingly have to lie in print.
As for her alleged new spiritual side, Millie’s not much help in documenting this, either. What it looks like to me is that some time over the last year she has been taken up by a clique of worshippers who see in her everything she sees in herself, and then some. I get an impression of grizzled ladies with cabin cruisers and small, irritable dogs who spend a lot of time in chandlers’ shops looking at galley stoves and stout clothing. With them are younger ladies, busily shedding ill-advised marriages and struggling for self-expression. Swathed in pashminas, they bring a New Age soulfulness to the gin- and-gaspers ethos of their older companions. All of them adore Millie Cleat. They think she is a total heroine because she has scorned the elements, triumphed over anno domini, shaken a fist at losing an arm, risen above family life and forged an intimate private relationship with the ocean such that something of the divinity of nature has rubbed off on her. I now suspect Millie has become quite dependent on these admirers to bolster her view of herself. It’s one of the great pitfalls of celebrity : terrific for the ego but dealing a death-blow to both intelligence and a sense of humour. I gather there is an authoress whom similar fawners have convinced she is practically a reincarnation of Shakespeare. Poor Millie may be becoming equally delusional.
Admittedly this theory is my own invention, based simply on trying to read between the lines she spouts with a faraway look in those sun-bleached eyes of hers. We are sitting in her new Hilton suite – this time with a view over nothing more sensitive than the rooftops of Mayfair. I notice her telescope has vanished and with it her Horatia Nelson persona. Today she is rather plain and earnest, rambling on without coming up with any new information. She merely repeats
*
Inevitably, my session with Millie Cleat turns out to be an anticlimax . She really hasn’t anything much to add after all. She is absolutely typical of virtually all my clients, few of whom know what they want, most of whom give me the authorized version of their story, and all of whom think I have got the facts completely wrong when they read the final draft. It is true that in Millie’s case I did rely on her husband Clifford for some background stuff, especially as regards her introduction to sailing. Not having been born yesterday I even took the trouble to find an old boy who had given her lessons back in her Ruislip Lido days. Now Millie wants me to write that her parents used to take her on holiday to Salcombe, where she began to mess about in boats from the age of three. I’ve no doubt it’s all baloney, and tell her frankly that we don’t have the time to track down some octogenarian Devonian skipper who might remember her and give a plausible Cap’n Birdseye performance. I shall incorporate this wholly uncorroborated claim as part of the gospel according to Cleat. No skin off my nose, after all. I’ve long since given up hoping I shall never knowingly have to lie in print.
As for her alleged new spiritual side, Millie’s not much help in documenting this, either. What it looks like to me is that some time over the last year she has been taken up by a clique of worshippers who see in her everything she sees in herself, and then some. I get an impression of grizzled ladies with cabin cruisers and small, irritable dogs who spend a lot of time in chandlers’ shops looking at galley stoves and stout clothing. With them are younger ladies, busily shedding ill-advised marriages and struggling for self-expression. Swathed in pashminas, they bring a New Age soulfulness to the gin- and-gaspers ethos of their older companions. All of them adore Millie Cleat. They think she is a total heroine because she has scorned the elements, triumphed over anno domini, shaken a fist at losing an arm, risen above family life and forged an intimate private relationship with the ocean such that something of the divinity of nature has rubbed off on her. I now suspect Millie has become quite dependent on these admirers to bolster her view of herself. It’s one of the great pitfalls of celebrity : terrific for the ego but dealing a death-blow to both intelligence and a sense of humour. I gather there is an authoress whom similar fawners have convinced she is practically a reincarnation of Shakespeare. Poor Millie may be becoming equally delusional.
Admittedly this theory is my own invention, based simply on trying to read between the lines she spouts with a faraway look in those sun-bleached eyes of hers. We are sitting in her new Hilton suite – this time with a view over nothing more sensitive than the rooftops of Mayfair. I notice her telescope has vanished and with it her Horatia Nelson persona. Today she is rather plain and earnest, rambling on without coming up with any new information. She merely repeats
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