EmailI sent an email round my colleagues saying, 'Remind me why I'm supposed to hate AA Gill' and my laptop practically levitated with the response. My problem is I admire him, but you're not supposed to say that at The Observer - Nick Cohen reports you to the commissars if you do, and Euan Ferguson bites your ankles. We are all supposed to stick pins in our AA Gill dolls and repeat the mantra: 'Please let this be the week that AA Gill starts to go off, oh Lord, that The Sunday Times might wither and die and the power of Murdoch be no more in the land.'
You'd think he would go off, writing the sheer quantity he does - two weekly reviews (restaurants and TV) for The Sunday Times, plus longer articles for its magazine and GQ - but it's been seven years now and still no sign. Just to rub our noses in it, he also writes novels and is on to number three, having published Sap Rising and Starcrossed. Most people would have abandoned novel-writing after getting the reviews he got ('Frightful pile of garbage' - New Statesman ; 'Hideously and unamusingly obscene' - Evening Standard ), but he points out that the second novel got less-terrible reviews than the first, so if he carries on improving at this rate, the third should attract plaudits such as 'readable' or 'good in parts'.
My colleagues' reasons for hating him basically boil down to these: 1. His novels, obviously. 2. His salary - believed to be more than £200,000 - obviously. 3. His smugness - especially his frequent self-congratulatory references to his girlfriend, Nicola Formby, 'the Blonde'. 4. His enthusiasm for the glitterati. 5. His friendship with Jeremy Clarkson. 6. His suits. Oddly enough, it's the suits - made for him by Doug Haywood and lined with women's silk scarves - that seem to enrage male journalists more than anything, even his salary. Here is a typical rant from Michael Bywater:
'He is a ponce. Suits with Hermès headscarves cut up for linings. Really. He thinks he is handsome and has a profile like what's-his-name in Gormenghast and indeed he may be handsome but he is not sexy. I have asked everyone and they say, "No, of course he is not sexy, sweetie pie, calm down," which I think proves my point.
'He and Nicola Formby are a Power Couple, which we hate, don't we? He is a ponce - oh, hang on, I already said that - but it bears repetition, and anyway he has a little man who comes in once a week to hang his coats up and do his shoes, who he calls "my valet". He has a sort of stoat-like cunning which I envy and resent. 'But the real reason we should attack him is that he is impressed by celebrity and believes people like Henry Bent-Cockleburst and Joan Collins, etc are impressive.
'So what? Well so this: Gill is almost unequalled in his powers of vituperative description and has a magical eye for the telling detail which condemns the whole, but he wastes it on faux-snobbery - or (I suspect) faux-faux-snobbery: easy targets, people who don't deserve to be sliced to pieces, instead of using his remarkable satiric gift for real satiric purpose.'
Phew. But actually Bywater preceded all this by saying: 'Adrian? I like him a lot. He's loyal, witty, generous, clever, curious and a genuine original.' So you see the problem. We journos all want to hate AA Gill because he's paid more than us, but then we are awed by his talent and, moreover, forced to concede that he's quite a nice bloke. I shall strain every sinew to make him sound loathsome, but it's going to be hard work.
Certainly his flat in South Kensington is easy to loathe. There is a portrait of Stalin over his desk, ho ho, and a yucky screensaver photo of him and Nicola kissing under palm fronds. Then there are all the 'amusing' objets - piles of stuffed monkeys' heads on the mantelpiece, Tanzanian pregnancy masks on the walls - as though he has read a description of Redmond O'Hanlon's house and said to an interior decorator, 'I want something like that, but of course much smarter, and not all smelly and moth-eaten like Redmond's.' But then I am disarmed because he is so touchingly proud of the place - it is the first flat he has ever owned. And he says he spends all day in this room, so he wanted something interesting that wouldn't turn into hotel decor.
But soon I am twitching with suspicion at the sight of his bookshelves - enviable floor-to-ceiling bookcases with proper sliding library ladders - why does he have all these books when he's supposed to be dyslexic? Is he really dyslexic, or just a bit bad at spelling? He presses a key on his computer to reveal the work in progress and I am properly silenced. I must have interviewed several dozen people who describe themselves as dyslexic (sometimes I think being dyslexic is the prime requirement for being famous), but I have never actually seen the scale of the problem before. Adrian's spelling is so bizarre the computer spellcheck is useless because it can't guess what word he is aiming for. So he writes everything in his own weird English on the computer, then dictates it to the copytakers at Wapping, or reads it into a tape recorder. He says this process has its advantages: he can tell when a sentence is clunky or when a joke falls flat. 'I have a complete blank for all grammar - and it's been my saving grace. All I've ever done is listen to people talking and talk a lot myself - and I think the closer all writing is to talk, the better it is.' I agree - but still, to be a professional writer with this degree of handicap is equivalent to, say, an amputee swimming the Channel. Obviously it's possible - but bloody hard work.
And perhaps because it was so difficult for him to become a writer, he is still bursting with delight and pride at having made it. He still dashes to the station on Saturday nights to buy The Sunday Times before anyone else does, and he keeps a wary eye out for up-and-coming new writers who might eventually supplant him. But he believes he has one great advantage over most of his would-be rivals: he is young as a columnist but old as a person. He is 45, with far more 'life experience' than the sort of smoothie-chops who slither straight from Oxbridge to a job at The Telegraph. For most of his twenties he was an alcoholic and only became a 'born-again person' when he dried out at 30.
Why he became a drunk is a bit of a mystery - he claims he had a very happy childhood, and that his parents were liberal and supportive. His father, Michael Gill, was a famous television director (he directed Civilisation); his mother an actress. He remembers their home as being very glamorous, full of artists and actors having great conversations and sleeping on the floor. He was dimly aware that his parents were having affairs - it was the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice era - but that didn't worry him, though he remembers feeling relieved when they finally divorced.
Because he was dyslexic - always top in IQ tests, bottom in exams - and also had a bad stammer, his parents sent him to a 'progressive' co-ed boarding school, St Christopher's, Letchworth. 'It was a boarding school for loonies, basically. [Michael Winner also went there.] For the first two terms I was pretty miserable - it was really a benchmark for being unhappy, actually. Then I had a few good years when I made good friends and lost my stammer.' But he still always felt inadequate at home. 'I was just aware that I wasn't that great. Nobody was telling me that I should be more gilded than I was, but I knew it anyway.' He says so often, so insistently, that his parents were not to blame for his subsequent alcoholism that it feels like something he has had to learn, probably in AA. But he told an interviewer in 1996 that his father's success was 'a terrible weight. I spent 10 years getting drunk and doing whatever drugs were going.'
Even at school, he would walk one-and-a-half miles over fields to the nearest pub. But when he left school, the year before A levels, he really started drinking. 'I thought, great - this is me. This is something I can do really well. I had never found anything I could do really well before. I could drink absolutely anyone under the table. And from the age of 19, there wasn't a day I didn't drink.' He also took drugs, mainly speed and acid but sometimes heroin, and claims that his first job after school was dealing speed. Then he went to art school, the Slade. He had assumed from the age of two that he would be a great artist and he spent four years at art school and six years signing on, trying to paint, until one day he realised he wasn't any good. He had plenty of technical tricks but no vision. And anyway by that time he was shaking too much to hold a brush.
'I was drinking all day, every day - to the point where I got alcoholic gastritis, which is throwing up all the time, and burst all the blood vessels in my eyes. I was four stone heavier, because I drank beer as well as whisky - sick, sweaty; you sweat all the time, you sweat urea. I also had delirium tremens, where you have to take your first drink by putting a scarf round your arm and over the back of your neck [he demonstrates] so you can pull the glass up, otherwise you smash your teeth. And drinking through a straw, Benylin and vodka - that's great, let me tell you, if you want a recipe for this article. But the delirium is worse than the tremens - it's as if you're dreaming all the time and you see things that look as real as that sofa there. I had spiders the size of soup plates. So you live an incredibly complicated fantasy life - this ongoing, rather syrupy Steven Spielberg movie runs constantly in your head, with you as the wronged but ultimately triumphant hero. And I would pray - really pray - for a fatal illness. I wanted to have cancer, because cancer would make sense of it all. I had no excuse for being a junkie and a drunk. I came from a happy, supportive, endlessly liberal family who loved me. But if I had cancer I would have an excuse and, more than that, there would be an end, an end to the self-loathing, the monumental huge rucksack of self-hatred which you have to drink on. And the fear - a lot of being drunk is to do with being frightened all the time.'
At last, when he was 30 and already yellow with hepatitis, he agreed to go to a drying-out clinic. He took his last drink - Moët et Chandon - on the train to Clouds, on 1 April 1984. 'I was quite close to dying. I was on the edge of cirrhosis. I had the highest liver count of anyone there. I was on a 24-hour watch with a nurse because you can die - in fact, I watched someone die - from alcoholic withdrawal. You have fits, and they were very worried that that might happen to me.'
He was in the clinic for six weeks and came out sober. He has not touched alcohol since. 'But the important thing is, I was 30 when I stopped, and you're given this incredible clean sheet and that is a fabulous gift.' Of course, he didn't immediately leap from being AA Gill the drunk to AA Gill the successful writer. There were several years of just enjoying being sober, free of the fear. These were his cooking years, when he worked in restaurants (his younger brother, Nicholas, was a chef) and taught a cookery course in Scotland. But in his mid-thirties he discovered that he could write, and he wrote art reviews for little magazines. And in 1990 he married a venture capitalist, Amber Rudd, and had two children, Flora, now eight, and Hector, now six.
Then someone asked him to write a piece for Tatler on what it was like being in a detox clinic. He wrote it under the pseudonym Blair Baillie for the September 1991 Tatler and Jane Procter, the then-editor, recalls: 'It was a brutally honest description. It combined the most compelling imagery with an exquisite use of English. At the risk of sounding overdramatic, I remember sitting in my office sobbing as I read it.' She asked to meet this Blair Baillie and suggested he should do interviews (thank God he didn't) - but, instead, he opted to do a cookery column with his own illustrations. He was shocked when an editor told him that he was a funny writer - he wanted to be Bernard Levin - but he accepted his fate. In 1993 he was poached by The Sunday Times, where he quickly established himself as their shiniest star. He said if he told me his salary, he would have to kill me, but the best guesstimates put it at over £200,000. He has given his editor some hairy moments, being reported to the Racial Equality and Press Complaints Commissions about his frequent attacks on the Welsh and last year's 'Hunforgiven' about the Germans. He was also once physically attacked by Robert Kilroy-Silk, to whom he'd given a 'firm but fair' TV review. But he is completely fearless. His mother and Nicola sometimes tell him to be careful. 'But I think you absolutely can't, because the moment you start thinking that there might be consequences, you've stopped doing your job and you may as well just rewrite PR handouts.' Hear hear.
He writes all day, every day, fuelled by cigarettes and coffee; he doesn't even pause to eat till the evening. But, unfortunately, what he most enjoys writing is novels - he believes that 'Journalism is success, writing books is achievement.' Yet even his friends are stumped to find anything good to say about his novels. Why does he bother? The money must be negligible compared to his salary. He bangs on about the sense of achievement, and the pleasure of creating characters - 'It's just the most fun I have writing' - but I suspect he writes novels because the Tatler crowd he moves in considers it OK to be a novelist and not OK to be a journalist. But he is far too intelligent to make any such admission to me.
His novels are characterised by poor structure, hysterical over-writing and truly terrible sex scenes. These are terrible, first, because there are so many of them - especially in Sap Rising, where he can't stop babbling on like a schoolboy, saying every rude word he knows - and second, because they are often so disgusting. He has a sort of Hogarthian relish for revolting couplings - there is one with a dog in Sap Rising, and an unspeakable scene in Starcrossed where the hero has to have sex with an ugly woman, which seems to be Gill's idea of a fate worse than death. There is something compulsive, almost unhinged, about his sex writing, as if he actually can't stop himself. And indeed he told me that writing for a Sunday newspaper, with no opportunity to write about sex, 'I built up this sort of well of unwritten sex. I would play endless jokes with the subs, trying to get rude bits in - I invented a restaurant called the Pork Trombone - but they always took it out.' His Style editor, Jeremy Langmead, confirms that 'he's always trying to slip filthy words into his copy'.
There is something so off-key about his descriptions of women, and his fixation with genitalia, that I can't be the first person to think he's a closet bisexual. Actually he says everyone thinks it, has done all his life, probably because of his 'feyness', or his camp way of speaking. He doesn't mind - on the contrary, he was 'really chuffed' recently when a gay magazine nominated him as one of the 50 sexiest men in the world. He has a gay friend who tells him, 'You're a gay trapped in a straight body,' but, in fact, he says, his entire homosexual experience amounts to 'a little mutual masturbation' at school and it certainly didn't convert him.
He has always had girlfriends, even in his drinking years, and was briefly married in his twenties to Cressida Connolly, and then to Amber Rudd in his thirties. That second marriage seemed to be happy and he was and is besotted with his two children - but he walked out on them in 1995 for Nicola Formby, 'the Blonde'. At the time, she was a model and girl-about-town, mainly known for having gone out with Viscount Linley. They met when Nicola went to consult Adrian about starting a restaurant - she had done a cookery course at La Varenne and is by all accounts a brilliant cook - and she was dazzled by his knowledge. He was presumably dazzled by her beauty - he once wrote a nauseating article in which he described her as 'drop-dead, table-banging, foot-stomping, forehead-corrugating, eyeball-inflating, hubba-hubba, wolf-whistling sensational' and it was at that point that many of my colleagues took against him. I winced for his ex-wife when I read that piece - but apparently she bears him no ill will; on the contrary, she has told friends that Adrian is a far better ex-husband than he ever was husband.
He is always advertising 'the Blonde' in his columns, drooling over her beauty, hinting at their fantastic sex life. According to Nicholas Coleridge, they make love twice a day. But when I checked this with Nicola she said, quick as a flash, 'Only once a day with me!' I would have thought it was fairly irritating to be known as the Blonde, but she says, no, she likes it - in fact she writes a column called 'Blonde Date' in Tatler. She is officially editor at large for Tatler, and style editor of The Telegraph magazine. She is an extremely nice, polite girl, who seems to have quite a cool head on her shoulders. When I asked if she hoped to marry Adrian one day, she said she never particularly wanted to be married, and didn't fancy being 'the third Mrs Gill'. What about children? 'I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.' Adrian says he would love to have more children and hopes that Nicola will want them, too. 'It would be a terrible shame, I think, for her not to have children, and if she does have children I sincerely hope that they're mine.'
But when I asked Adrian what she was like - apart from being beautiful - he gave what sounded more like a job reference. 'She's immensely organised. She's got a fantastically good eye for detail. I mean, she'll sit in a restaurant and say, "Have you noticed that you never see courgettes on menus any more?" And a lot of that is the essence of what I write anyway - so we tend to do stories together, and she's very good for travelling with.' (Nicola says he's a nightmare to travel with because he wants to be at the airport hours early. But once they arrive, he's fine.)
Marcelle d'Argy Smith, the former editor of Cosmopolitan, who is probably their closest joint friend, describes them as 'two terribly successful, attractive alpha people having the most wonderful time - and they're both extraordinarily nice and generous, very kind'. But they are both very, very work-oriented - and almost everything they do is work. They dine out six nights a week so he can keep an eye on restaurants, and on the seventh night they stay in and watch television, so he can write his television review. He loathes dinner parties, but will go to almost any drinks party - 'It's true I absolutely would go to the opening of a fridge' - and yet he admits he is very bad at parties, always a wallflower, and of course always sober. I must say, whenever I've seen him and Nicola at parties they don't seem to be having much fun. But he explains, 'Usually, for one or other of us, it's work. If I read something in someone else's copy and I don't know what they're talking about, I just get this sudden froideur [presumably he means panic] about what am I not noticing. But then I worry that I might start taking it seriously, that I might start caring about not getting the right invitation. It hasn't happened yet, touch wood.'
But he says Nicola is always complaining that they don't have any friends, just endless acquaintances, and, 'I worry that in the end I see the same 200 or 300 people over and over again, and I would hate to think that that actually ended up being what my social life was. There are lots of people I think of as being old, dear friends, but I maybe only speak to them once or twice a year, because they constantly go to the back of the queue, behind all the things which are to do with work, with deadlines. I'm continually saddened when I look through my address book, at how patchy it is, at how many people drop off the edge of my life.'
One person who has shockingly dropped off the edge of his life is his younger brother Nick, his only sibling. Not knowing, I asked a casual question about whether he was still working as a chef and Adrian's eyes filled with tears. 'I don't know. My brother sort of disappeared, just over a year ago. He wasn't working. He's divorced, got three children. He came to see me and said, "I'm having a miserable time. I'm going to disappear for a bit." I think there comes a point for some people where you look at the totality of your life and say, "This is not what I want. There's not anything worth salvaging. So I'll go off and start again." In a sense, I had that forced on me, and Nick never did. And he's just gone and done it. I'm sure he'll turn up - but it will be when he wants to. It must be everybody's right to do that - to just chuck in the hand and say, "Deal me a whole new set of cards." I mean, on one level I think he's very courageous. On another level - I miss him a lot. I miss him terribly. I love him, Nick.'
Gill obviously believes that the heart has its reasons. He made an equally abrupt departure when he left his wife and two small children for Nicola and has never regretted it - he says he is a great believer in 'positive divorce'. And yet he claims to be a Christian, which doesn't normally entail belief in positive divorce. 'Well, then the alternative is that I'm a great believer in really miserable marriages. That doesn't seem to be particularly Christian either!' he snaps. He says the great advantage of being a low-church Protestant, which he is, is that you don't have to get your religion through priests or pastors, because 'everyone has a direct line to God'. He spends time in churches, though not usually during services, and says that in his drinking years he used to cry a lot in the back of churches.
None of his friends seem to know that he's a Christian. Jeremy Clarkson was quite amazed when I told him: 'Adrian? Christian? What - as in milk of human kindness, goodwill to all men? He's having you on.' His Style editor, Jeremy Langmead, was equally dismissive - 'I've never met someone so un-Christian - I thought the only person he worshipped was himself.'
I find it very hard to square the beliefs expressed in his novels and his columns with Christianity, or indeed with any moral overview. Starcrossed in particular is almost Thatcherite in its contempt for 'losers' (and I wonder what his brother Nicholas made of it). Its message seems to be that rich, beautiful, famous people are actually better than poor, ugly, unsuccessful ones - better as in more deserving of space on the planet. It may be that because he despises himself for being poor and unsuccessful in his drinking years, he assumes that everyone who is poor and unsuccessful merely needs to get a grip and sign into Clouds. Although that's not fair either - he once wrote a very moving piece about poverty in the Sudan. Part of the trouble with AA Gill is that he can argue almost any case so eloquently you can't really tell which case he believes in. My more earnest colleagues complain that he 'always goes for the soft targets', but given that he's writing for a magazine called Style, you wouldn't seriously expect him to offer a critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, there is a sort of a missing middle in his writing - he swings between gushing sentimentality and withering contempt with no rational argument in between. And his fiercest contempt is usually directed at people who commit the crime of being ugly - reverence for beauty is the one consistent value in his oeuvre.
Perhaps that is why he spends all the hours at Doug Haywood's, faffing over his execrable suits. Nicola says it's harmless: 'He loves clothes, and I think that's great. He goes off and sits with Doug Haywood and twinks and twanks about whether the stitching should go here, and the lining should be like this - that's his kind of game of golf in the afternoon. I don't think he's obsessively vain, but he likes the business of looking well turned out.'
I asked Adrian if he wished he were more handsome, and a strange, puzzled frown darkened his brow, so I quickly amended the question to more devastatlingly handsome, which seemed to go down better. 'I'm no more secure in my appearance than I think anyone else is. I'm 45, I'm going bald, I stoop, I've got terrible teeth. I don't really worry about those things, but I'm aware of them. I happened to fall in love with someone who is very beautiful and I think it's totally captivating, beauty. I can take any amount of it - I never walk into a room and think, ho hum, more beautiful girls. What I really despise is the people who say it's only skin deep, it means nothing.' But it makes for a perilous future, surely - he and Nicola can't always be hot, can't always be beautiful, can't always be successful (though perhaps I'm indulging in a little wish fulfilment here). He admits that he worries sometimes about what happens to old columnists - he knows he can't go on forever. But, he explains, 'It comes back again to what I was saying about getting this clean sheet. The person I am now is the person that, at 29, I would have wanted to be. Somehow I did turn into someone that, in another life, I would have hated and envied. I was at a dinner party once with a whole lot of bankers and lawyers, and someone said, "Where do you want to be in 10 years' time?" And every single person round the table had a life plan, a goal, and it finally got to me and I said, "Please God, I can be doing exactly what I'm doing now. If I can write a book a year, and get paid a really absurd amount of money to eat in restaurants and watch television, and to be read but not to be famous - I couldn't really better that."' Dontcha hate him?
• Starcrossed by AA Gill is published by Black Swan in May, price £6.99
