Every bit of free time we could squeeze from the dreary daily routine of boarding school, Tom and I would hurry off down the corridors to the school library – a permanently unpopulated, panelled room with floor to ceiling shelves of unread books, looking out over terraces to the valley beyond – to write another chapter of Stumpy’s autobiography … Even then I should probably have been taking more fresh air and physical exercise.
The glamour model versus the ‘arbiters of taste’
‘I’ve had a call,’ the agent said, ‘from the managers of a model called Jordan. She’s looking for a ghostwriter for an autobiography.’
‘Who?’
It was the beginning of the twenty-first century and unless you were a regular reader of The Sun newspaper, you did not necessarily know who Jordan was or what her story might be.
‘She’s famous for having had her breasts enlarged. Her management are asking publishers for a million pound advance. Do you think it would be worth meeting her?’
‘She sounds like an interesting character.’
The agent was Andrew Lownie, one of the most distinguished independents in the business. He was one of the agents who responded to my ad in The Bookseller and we had worked together very successfully on a number of projects, all very different to this one. He agreed to set up a meeting and rang back a few hours later.
‘They want to have the meeting at her lawyer’s offices: Mishcon de Reya.’
‘Mishcon de Reya! Seriously?’
This was one of the biggest-hitting law firms in London. They had acted for the Princess of Wales in her divorce. This Jordan girl was not messing about. Lord alone knew how much a firm like this would be charging for their services.
The meeting room was surprisingly full when we arrived and I couldn’t help wondering how many of the shiny male managers and lawyers around the shiny conference table were charging by the hour.
Jordan, in the sort of skimpy dress a ‘saucy French maid’ might wear in a farce, had brought a friend with her and seemed totally relaxed in the surroundings despite the fact that she can’t have been much more than 25 years old. The two of them chatted and giggled like they were in Starbucks while the men attempted to talk business. Every so often, however, Jordan would interject with a question which completely cut through all the bullshit, and hold the eyes of whomever she was talking to with a disarming – and slightly alarming – intensity. I wasn’t completely convinced that she had enough of a story for a whole book, but I was completely convinced she would be fun to work with. She too said she would be interested.
After the meeting I made a few phone calls around publishers and other agents that I knew, just casually asking if they had heard of Jordan and whether they thought there was anything in it. With each phone call I found out more. It seemed that Jordan’s management team had already been to virtually every agent and publisher in the business, leading the conversation with the announcement that they were looking for a million pound advance.
I wasn’t surprised that this request was being greeted with derision by the industry but what did shock me was the level of disdain with which they all seemed to dismiss the would-be author herself, simply because of her profession and because of the audience to whom they thought she appealed. Publishers who would happily buy biographies of courtesans, actresses and prostitutes of the past, seeing them as colourful players in the pageant of history, did not like the idea of dealing with a living, breathing woman who promoted herself to the masses as a sex object. To be frank, they didn’t want to let her across their thresholds, let alone into the hushed and rarefied environs of their editorial departments. According to John Carey in his excellent book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, Rudyard Kipling observed that ‘the masses must pass into history before they become suitable for intellectual contemplation’. Snobbery, it seems, is a constant, if mutating, presence in the literary world.
For a few months everything went quiet and Andrew Lownie lost interest in the project. I believe Jordan changed her management company and someone within Mishcon de Reya reached out to Maggie Hanbury, another distinguished literary agent, who for a while was under the impression that she was being asked to represent a Middle Eastern country. Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up Jordan worked her steely charm again and the two women found that they understood one another. Sadly for me, Hanbury decided that Jordan would be more comfortable talking to a female ghost and I fell out of the picture. I remained, however, fascinated with what was to unfurl over the following years.
Even with her new literary ally, Jordan was still not able to win over the arbiters of taste within the big publishing houses. One independent publisher, a former tabloid editor called John Blake, however, understood what he was being offered and thought that, with the addition of plenty of pictures, it would be a deal worth doing. He offered her an advance of £10,000, a hundred times less than her representatives had originally been asking for. Showing a flash of the business sense that would soon make her a multi-millionaire, Jordan instructed her agent to accept the offer.
Two things then happened, which changed everything. John Blake came up with the idea of writing Being Jordan from the perspective of the real Katie Price, and Katie herself was invited to fly down to the Australian jungle and appear in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, where she caught the imagination of the British public, particularly the women, and conducted a very public romance with Peter Andre. A pop singer whose star had previously been waning, he became her first husband and father to two of her children. The target audience was no longer limited to male readers of The Sun because millions of women were now intrigued and wanted to know more and, as everyone in publishing knows, women are the ones who buy the most books, by a very large margin.
Being Jordan reputedly sold a million copies in hardback and editors in one of the major publishing houses who had previously refused to allow Jordan through their doors, were forced to offer Katie Price a seven figure sum to come to them with Rebecca Farnworth, her chosen ghostwriter. Cross with John Blake for signing up a rival model and for refusing to match this offer, Katie changed publishers and produced a stream of books in a variety of genres, most of which became colossal bestsellers, making no secret of the fact that she did not ‘do her own typing’. At the time of writing this she and Rebecca are still a team, with Lord knows how many titles under their belts.
Secrets and confidentiality agreements
The ever-cheerful soap star peered suspiciously at the freshly delivered cover of her forthcoming autobiography.
‘Why hasn’t it got your name on it?’ she enquired.
‘Because I’m invisible,’ I reminded her. ‘It says so in my contract.’
‘Does it?’ It was obviously the first she had heard of any such stipulation. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘The publisher thinks it’s better.’
‘Why?’
‘They think the fans will prefer to believe that you wrote it yourself. They want them to picture you sitting down at your escritoire at the end of a hard day’s filming and pouring your heart out onto the page.’
‘Sitting at my what?’
‘Your writing desk.’
She emitted a tobacco-throated croak of mirth. ‘I don’t think anyone’s that thick, are they?’
‘It’s standard practice. The publisher just thinks it’s better.’
‘I’m