A Curious Career by Lynn Barber

Author:Lynn Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

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He died on 16 December 2011 – having lived a few months longer than his doctors predicted. The obituaries were wonderful, full of real love as well as appreciation. Ian McEwan’s description of their last days together at his cancer clinic in Houston was particularly moving – Hitch insisting on being helped (with all his drips) to his desk and writing an essay on G.K. Chesterton he had promised.

But the BBC Today programme struck a sour note when it described him as ‘a journalist, an atheist and an alcoholic’. Hitch used to get furious if people called him an alcoholic and I remember this was an issue when I first interviewed him for the Observer. I saw him, over lunch, drink three or four whiskies and at least one bottle of wine but he insisted that he had never missed a deadline, never slurred his speech, never at any point been incapable and therefore could not be an alcoholic. Kingsley Amis used to make the same argument, equally unconvincingly. But of course the definition of an alcoholic is infinitely flexible – Californians consider anyone who drinks more than one glass of wine an alcoholic. I remember once interviewing the actress Ali MacGraw who talked at length about how she’d been in rehab and was now a ‘recovering alcoholic’ and had turned her life around. How much were you drinking at your peak? I asked. ‘One evening I drank a whole bottle of red wine!’ she confessed wide-eyed. It was all I could do not to guffaw.

The most jarring reaction to Hitch’s death came from my younger daughter. I was raving on about how brilliant and witty he was and what a loss to journalism, and asked if she’d ever read any of his articles. She said no – but she thought he was brilliant on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!. Hitch on I’m a Celeb? It was one of those moments when the earth tilts on its axis. It took quite a lot of hard interrogation to establish that she meant the actor Christopher Biggins, and I wondered, not for the first time, how I could have so failed to educate my daughters.

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