Diary

I have long thought there is no analogy quite so perfect for the process of writing a book as childbirth. There is the initial stage when it’s little more than a fond idea, until you sell it to the publisher. The months of research as the deadline marches inexorably nearer, the periodic panic during that process that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all, then the labour — 12 hours a day at your computer, seven days a week for three months — OK, a little longer than the average baby takes, but you get the drift.

Global publishing is a confusing business. Because my book on Princess Diana is being  published simultaneously in America, England and Germany (the French, in their languid way, are doing it in September, après la rentrée), the challenge to the author is to be Zelig. One nice surprise is that the Germans are mad for Diana — Die Biographie. My esteemed German publisher, Droemer Knaur, brought me to Berlin two weeks before publication, ensconced me in a room in the Hotel Adlon, and marched the publications in and out as if I was Julia Roberts on a Hollywood junket. Is it the typefaces and the polysyllables that make the cornucopia of German newspapers look so brainy and upmarket?

A concert, ‘Raise the Roof’, at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, was held last month. We raised almost £30,000 with a musical evening and readings by Diana Rigg, Anthony Andrews, Edward Fox and John Standing. Edward read a piece about Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. He was a great benefactor of the poor in St James’s and not only was Shaftesbury Avenue named after him, but the statue with its one foot pointing down the street of theatres, known to most of  us as Eros, is in fact of the Earl. His successor who suffered the incongruous murder in the South of France, supposedly at the hands of his wife, would surely have horrified his forebear, who did so much good work in Piccadilly Circus.

I don’t keep a diary any more, having decided that my past efforts contained too much that was either libellous or trite. However, leafing through a collection of oldies this week I noted one pertinent item, namely that when the National Insurance scheme was launched in July 1948, Bevan’s vision was greeted with mixed feelings by doctors and sections of the public, especially those he had designated as vermin. A sum of 4s 11d was docked from wage packets, of which only 81/2d went to the Health Service. In nine months, costs had already spiralled an extra £50 million from the original estimate of £176 million, prompting the BMA to predict national ruin. So what’s changed?

This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good film. Charlie Russell is my grandson. *** One day last week I opened something called a Flower and Angel Festival at St Pancras parish church near Euston.

Stalin and the Rothschilds is one of the more bizarre connections that I discovered while writing a book on the dictator’s early life.  Stalin worked for the Rothschilds;  he burnt down their refinery and ordered the assassination of their managing director — yet later they helped fund Lenin and Stalin. There were always rumours, but my discovery of a long-forgotten memoir in the archives of Tbilisi now reveals the true story. In December 1901 Stalin, aged 23, arrived in the Black Sea oil port Batumi, which was dominated by the Rothschild and Nobel dynasties. One day Stalin came home late boasting, ‘Guess why I got up so early this morning? Today I got a job with the Rothschilds!’ Then he almost crooned, ‘I’m working for the Rothschilds!

I’m full of hurrahs, huzzahs, yippee-ki-yays and general end-of-term jubilation now that this gruelling 30-week US tour of Legends has finally ended. I’m full of hurrahs, huzzahs, yippee-ki-yays and general end-of-term jubilation now that this gruelling 30-week US tour of Legends has finally ended. To say it’s been tough is an understatement: 25 cities in 30 weeks, eight shows in six days each week, the days off spent travelling on dodgy airlines and checking into naff hotels (not to mention the gratuitous spitefulness of some critics) have contributed to a great ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ attitude by just about all of our cast and crew. My colleagues Joe Farrell and Will Holman stood in the wings every night as I took my bow (to standing Os!

The telephone rang at 7.45 a.m. It was a journalist I know. She sounded tense. ‘Gyles,’ she said, ‘do you want to come out?’ ‘It’s a bit early, isn’t it, darling?’ I replied. ‘I mean, “come out”,’ she said with emphasis, adding, with a little laugh, ‘Everyone knows you’re gay.’ ‘Do they?’ I asked. ‘Am I?’ ‘Oh, come on,’ she persisted, ‘Frankie Howerd made a pass at you once, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you knew Ted Heath?’ ‘Er ... yes.’ ‘Well?’ she said. I put the phone down. What is this bizarre obsession we have with the sexual orientation of others?

In thick of whistlestop tour of the US to promote Notting Hell, so the dateline above this diary should read ‘New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver, L.A, San Francisco’ which would be a first — for me, anyway. In the taxi to the airport, I compare schedules with the novelist and leggy beauty Santa Montefiore (also touring some cities with me promoting her book The Gypsy Madonna, on our Great British Blondes roadshow. I love it!). I leaf through the bumf and then decide it hasn’t been put together by my fab team at Touchstone Fireside of Simon and Schuster without a map (NY–Dallas–DC??), but by a sadist. There are 5 a.m. starts on no less than five days.

The smoking ban approaches with terrifying speed. I fear that all my righteous indignation, my libertarian instinct, is merely the frightened whimper of an addict whose last crutch is being kicked away by the men in grey suits. When I drank — and I drank a lot — I couldn’t imagine a life for myself in which I wasn’t drinking. When I eventually stopped, nearly four years ago, the reality of life without debts to bars, being slapped by women I was sure I’d never met, and a perpetual hangover was so pleasant that I wondered why I hadn’t stopped sooner. I want to stop smoking so should be grateful to a government that is making a decision for me. I can’t, however, imagine myself not smoking. If I didn’t smoke, what would I do? Jog?