The Secret Life Read online

  Carelessness is a ‘tell’. For months, Julian thought he was in control of his relationship with his publishers, agent, lawyers and writer, but he was demonstrating every day in a hundred ways that he couldn’t face the book. He’d signed up for it, he was pretending to work on it, but, even before he let the whole thing run out of control, he was dignifying his denial with higher appointments and legal struggles. The book became his evil ‘other’, his nightmare ‘autobiography’, and rather than being haunted by me, his ghost, he decided to convert me into a quietly ineffective follower. In a moment of helpfulness, he asked his mother to send a load of photographs from his childhood. He gave me the disk and completely forgot about it.

  Julian lost the appeal against extradition and promptly lodged a further appeal. It was ordained that he would continue at Ellingham Hall. I’d been in Australia doing some writers’ festivals, and when I got back there was a different atmosphere in Norfolk. I’d always been amazed at how Vaughan Smith and his family had been able to cope with the whole studenty WikiLeaks caravan in their house – the Smiths have young children – with its all-night rituals and almost comically bad table manners. Julian had a way of making himself, in his own eyes, impervious to the small matters that might detain others. If you told him to do the dishes he would say he was trying to free economic slaves in China and had no time to wash up. He stood at the centre of a little amateur empire and any professional incursions, from lawyers, from film-makers, from publishers – all of which he had encouraged – were summarily dismissed. His pride could engulf the room in flames. And if you asked him why he had no experienced people, nobody in their forties or fifties or sixties or seventies working alongside him, authoritative people who might contradict him, he would argue that those people had already been corrupted. I was often the only person over thirty-five near him, apart from himself, of course, and he didn’t see the problem. He didn’t see the cult-leader aspect.

  But there was trouble brewing at the house. It first emerged when he told me that they might move to Jemima Khan’s house in Oxfordshire. He said the situation at Vaughan’s was becoming untenable. Vaughan’s ‘body language’ was terrible and he was clearly turning against them, Julian said. A lot of it appeared to be to do with how much Vaughan was charging him to be there. Julian also said that Vaughan was busy with a documentary that he was supposed to have been making for WikiLeaks. ‘The footage is mine,’ said Julian, ‘and he has now got it into his head that it’s his. He’s still got all sorts of self-value issues to do with not being credited by the BBC when he was a cameraman in Afghanistan, even when he got shot, and it’s all coming out with this.’

  Harry Stopes, my research assistant, pointed out to me how weird it was that Julian kept going on about Vaughan’s obsession with lost credits when he, Julian, was also obsessed with credits and was willing to fight an almost continuous war over them. The hardest fact, however, was that the Smiths had been incredibly kind to Julian. They stood bail for him and gave up their house – Julian said this was mainly to gain publicity for the Frontline Club.

  *

  I interviewed Julian in stolen hours in the middle of the night, in the backs of cars and at my house in Bungay, while Harry gathered childhood material, but we knew we were up against it. Canongate were keen to publish before the summer and had no idea, despite my warnings, how unwilling Julian was. Caroline, his agent, believed he still wanted to produce the book, but I knew he didn’t: I’d seen the lengths to which he would go to get on another topic, and knew he’d rather spend hours Googling himself than have his own say in the pages of his autobiography. I’d come into this fascinated by the ‘self’ aspect of it all, but the person whose name would be on the cover had both too much self and not enough. Still, we staggered on.

  I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it could become a modernist autobiography. But the jokes wouldn’t hold and Julian, despite promising his publishers and me that he’d produce pages, paragraphs, even notes towards his book, produced nothing in the months I was there. Not a single written sentence came from him in all that time. But at the end, from all those exhausting late-night interviews, we assembled a rough draft of seventy thousand words. It wasn’t by any means great, but it had a voice, a reasonable, even-tempered, slightly amused but moral voice, which was as invented as anything I’d ever produced in fiction.

  Yet it hadn’t felt like creating a character in a novel so much as writing a voiceover for a real person who wasn’t quite real. His vanity and the organisation’s need for money couldn’t resist the project, but he never really considered the outcome, that I’d be there, making marks on a page that would in some way represent this process. The issue of control never became real to Julian. He should have felt worried about what he was supplying, but he never did – he had in this, as in everything, a broad illusion of control. Only once did he turn to me and show a glint of understanding. ‘People think you’re helping me write my book,’ he said, ‘but actually I’m helping you write your novel.’

  The publishers were keen to have a draft of the book ready by 31 March and he took that even less seriously. But I had to take it seriously – we had a contract. I closed the first draft on time and we sat, Harry Stopes and I, in Bungay with the laptop hot and a heap of manuscript marked with indications of where new chapters might come. That night Harry spellchecked it and added stuff and we took it over to Ellingham Hall on a memory stick. This was intended to be the copy that Julian would add to, subtract from and approve. When we arrived, the kitchen was full of WikiLeaks staff, all gathered excitedly around a laptop. They were drinking mojitos and Skyping with an Australian producer who wanted to make a cable show about WikiLeaks’s ‘adventures’ around the world. Before leaving the house in Bungay that afternoon, Julian had become hot under the collar about the idea of the draft being shown to the editors in London. We were driving back that night and it was decided Harry would deliver the draft to Canongate the next day. The American editor, Dan Frank of Knopf, had flown over for the purpose, and the Canongate editor Nick Davies was waiting with him in London. You have to remember this was all very close to the intended date of publication.

  ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to read it at all,’ Julian suddenly said, while the mojito party went on around him.

  ‘They’re the editors,’ I said. ‘They’ve commissioned this thing. And they have to read it.’

  ‘No. They will only prejudice it.’

  ‘That’s their prerogative.’

  ‘No. Give me the phone.’

  Julian then called Nick at Canongate and stood up to walk into the hall. ‘This is not an editorial event,’ he said. ‘As a favour, we’ll let you read the manuscript in its present form.’ He then proceeded to tell Nick that Harry would invigilate during the reading, and would destroy the copies when the reading was over. I told Julian this was a terrible idea. Harry was mortified and said so immediately. But Julian insisted. I appealed to Sarah, saying this was the sort of high-handed stuff that turned allies into enemies. She said nothing. I decided to wait until I heard from Jamie Byng. Julian’s previous suggestion, by the way, was that the editors come to Norfolk and read it in front of him. I nixed that as being a complete insult, and so he came up with the idea that Harry should invigilate. Jamie duly texted me: ‘Is he suggesting that Dan, Nick, me and Harry all read in the same room? Madness. Nick will ensure the manuscripts are shredded. But at this rate I’m thinking we probably just tell Julian a white lie. Or to stop being ridiculous!’

  As we were getting set to leave Ellingham, Julian came up to me beside the Aga and hugged me. ‘Thanks,’ he said. We were still talking about possible titles. Earlier on, I had come up with Disclosure but he said he didn’t like one-word titles. He preferred Ban This Book. (I told him it was too like Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book.) He also liked, bizarrely, Wet Cement. (Don’t ask.) I countered with My Life in Secrets. And Harry felt it could be
called Assange by Assange, before admitting this sounded too much like a perfume. The gang was communally molesting a computer, the producer had gone out into the Australian sunshine to have a fag and the people gathered around the laptop were booing, jealous of the good weather. Julian came to the door with a drink in his hand and waved us into the dark. ‘Andy,’ he cried as I made for the car. ‘Don’t let them push you around.’ He was talking about his publishers, who had collectively paid $2.5 million for his autobiography.

  Jamie’s white lie had taken effect, and all the editors took custody of the manuscript on Friday. They began reading immediately and the texts came soon afterwards. Nick said he and Dan were thrilled and it was just what they’d hoped for. Jamie was excited and I just felt relieved that we hadn’t opened with a disaster. I knew that Julian would have much to alter, and would introduce untold delays – they were now hoping for June – but the book contained the basic material culled from those dozens of hours of infuriating interviews and the thing had moved forward.

  *

  Julian had promised to read the draft over the weekend and the British publishers were coming to see him on Monday morning. I’d agreed to have the meeting at my house in Bungay because Julian was too easily distracted at Ellingham Hall. Jamie and Nick from Canongate arrived early. Julian and Sarah were due at 9.30 a.m. but turned up an hour late. There was endless tea. Julian eventually sat at the table and turned to Jamie. ‘How was Friday?’ Julian asked.

  ‘Friday was good. The weekend was good …’

  I looked at Jamie. ‘He means the reading,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Jamie said. ‘I’m amazed at what’s been achieved. It’s really good and … what did you think?’

  Julian fixed him with a fuck-you stare. ‘I’ve read about a third of it and it’s clear to me it needs a lot of work and won’t be ready for June.’

  There were other statements, preliminary remarks about schedules and timetables, while the realisation sank in that Julian hadn’t bothered to read the manuscript. ‘You haven’t read it?’ Jamie said. ‘We all agreed to read it over the weekend. You had three whole days to read it. It takes eight hours.’

  ‘I had some dangerous things happening around the world,’ Julian said. ‘Matters of life and death I had to take care of. These things have to be prioritised.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but we can’t have a discussion about a book you haven’t read.’

  ‘Well, I’ve read enough to know that it needs a lot of work and this June date is impossible.’

  At a guess, I’d say he had read the first three pages. He’d never wanted June as a publication date and the whole project gave him the willies. That hunch was confirmed by everything he said and everything he didn’t say. Byng suddenly became furious. ‘I’m disappointed. I’m dismayed. Andy worked his arse off to get this manuscript ready and we all travelled up here to discuss it – all having read it over the weekend – and you haven’t even bothered to read it.’

  ‘I appreciate all the work Andy is doing,’ Julian said, ‘but I can’t rush into print with something so important. There are legal issues to do with this and my enemies are poised …’

  I was neither hurt nor surprised. Julian’s default position is to assert himself under fire. He had signed up for a book he didn’t really want to publish because – as he alleged to me a few weeks earlier – Mark Stephens had suggested it might help cover costs. Now he was forced to take the book seriously for the first time. At some level, it was a kind of ethical disaster for him. He had jogged along with the project and even got to enjoy the process – he loved having an audience, a pupil, an analyst and, at times, a father – but now the thing had become real and he was totally shocked. Jamie asked him point-blank if he wanted the book to happen.

  ‘I do want it to happen,’ Julian said, ‘but on my terms. I never agreed to this June publication date.’

  Under pressure, Julian agreed that we would sit down with the book from Monday 11 April. He said he would have read it through twice by then, once to get the style of it and a second time to make amendments. He said he would clear whatever time was necessary.

  The following Monday was High Noon at the breakfast table in Bungay. Julian was back to his old self, castigating his publishers, but singing at a higher pitch now, saying the art of autobiography was hateful. Men who reveal their private lives in books are ‘weak’, he said. People who write about their family are ‘prostitutes’. And so it went on for hour after excellent hour. ‘I really like the writing and everything,’ he said, ‘but it’s too apologetic. There are too many qualifiers.’ And again: ‘I can see something you can’t see, which is that my opponents will use this material to undermine me. They will dive on this stuff to say I’m weak.’

  ‘No they won’t,’ I said. ‘They’ll see that you know yourself. You can’t write an autobiography that merely attempts to second-guess your opponents.’

  I felt quite sorry for Julian. And I continued to feel sorry for him. He was in a horrible predicament. He had signed up to a project that his basic psychology would not allow. In the smart and admirable way of emotional defence, he dressed his objections in rhetoric and principles, but the reality was much sadder, and much more alarming for him. He didn’t know who to be. His remarks, as always, were ostentatiously conceived and recklessly stated. He didn’t know what to believe. ‘These books are used by your enemies to show you in a certain light,’ he said. ‘I would never say my stepfather was an alcoholic …’

  ‘But you did say it, Julian. All of the material in these chapters is suggested by what you actually said. You said it to me in dozens of interviews over many late nights. I have them all on tape.’

  ‘I was tired.’

  ‘But you weren’t tired when you allowed them to be transcribed. You weren’t tired when you sought an agent to make this deal and signed the contracts. You spoke personally throughout, and never once suggested you didn’t want that material used.’

  ‘I didn’t manage things properly.’

  ‘No, you’ve changed your mind. That’s fine. Not fine, but that’s the way it is. But you can’t say you were tired.’

  ‘I was tired. And I was busy.’

  ‘Julian. You signed on to write an autobiography and you chose a writer to help you do it. You might consider what you are doing by now saying you didn’t want the material you gave to be used in a narrative.’

  ‘But private writing is cheap.’

  ‘So be it. Don’t publish it.’

  ‘All these books where men spill their guts and write about their intimate lives …’

  ‘That’s the story you told. You spoke these words freely into a recorder. You spoke about Brett’s drink problem. You spoke endlessly about the cult leader who followed you and your mother …’

  ‘But I didn’t want it in the book.’

  ‘Okay. Then it should be removed.’

  I could have raised several flags on top of each of his sentences. They showed he was at home. But at home to Julian means he is fully inhabiting his paranoia and fully suspicious about people and things he thinks are out to get him. In some fundamental way he could never have someone write an email for him, let alone a book. As somebody once wrote of somebody else, he is the sort of person who is always swimming towards the life raft. I threw him a line. ‘What do you want from this book?’

  ‘Facts. Some feelings. But it should be a manifesto. It can have some reflections from childhood and whatever, but the book should be a manifesto of my ideas. It should be like moral essays. And it should have like a plot. Not with personal stuff but a sense of transition.’

  ‘And what is this plot of your life that you’d like to relate?’

  ‘I’m not at all interested in a book that is personal. I’ve always known this.’

  ‘So now you’re talking about a book of ideas?’

  He just stared at me, as if he were a child who had lost his homework and I were an admonishing teacher.
r />   ‘Need more manifesto.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But you have to write that. A manifesto comes from belief. It can’t be second-guessed or ghostwritten.’

  ‘I agree. I’m going to sit down and do that. I want to get my ideas about justice and power into it. It’s like those writings political leaders often did in prison.’

  ‘That’s fine. It’s your book. But you have to tell the publishers very clearly that what you’re writing is not an autobiography.’

  ‘It’s got some personal elements.’