We had the studio beautifully set up, cyclorama in smooth backdrop, fully lit for a formal half-hour interview with him … when Charles Haughey was led into a studio and found one of the matching black leather thrones occupied by me, he seemed to assume that this was as planned.
I did a kitchen-sink interview: everything got thrown, including Col Gadafy’s carpet [a gift] and Terry Keane. (It should be remembered that this was at least 50 years ago, when the Keane love affair was widely rumoured, but not known for sure, even to Seán, the son who later succeeded Haughey in his constituency.)
At the end of the interview, Haughey [Fianna Fáil leader and repeatedly taoiseach] was good and mad. After I thanked him, the cameras continued to record because that was how I had briefed the camera operators, and so they captured him leaning across, grasping me by the knee and telling me I was a rude bitch. It was said half-furiously, half-appreciatively.
The tape was rewound, a pot of weak tea brought, and assessment begun. Haughey was initially defensive, resentfully – and wrongly – predicting what criticisms I would make. Once he copped on that assessment wasn’t the same as criticism, he became fascinated by it, curious about what distinguished the written from the spoken word and intrigued by the need to be singular and specific, rather than general and conceptual.
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We probably got only seven minutes into the recording, because even when you interview somebody for 40 minutes, as I had in this case, everything you need is to be found in the first minutes. The reason we would play a recording from start to finish is because the density of concentration on the first minute or two is beyond most people, although it wasn’t beyond Haughey. He questioned everything, making occasional notes. He was engaged, insightful, observant and funny, using his own videotape as a case study through which to explore the dynamic of TV interviews generally.
And he kept revising. Reminding himself that conceptual language wouldn’t work on TV, which was hard for him to move into performance because he thought and spoke exclusively in conceptual language. But he grasped that forcing viewers to imagine something by describing it to them helped it into their short-term memory and then into long-term memory. It was one of the most engrossing times I’ve ever had with any kind of participant on a training course.
Inevitably, a good mind presented with tangible evidence in such a situation has to either dig in, double down or move. Haughey moved, reluctantly but not slowly, from a view of TV interviewers as enemies motivated by spite, personal ambition and “Sticky” (Workers’ Party) affiliation to a view of them as seeking to provide something vitally interesting and memorable for their viewers; a position which allows an interviewee to contribute positively, rather than go on the run, verbally. Time passed without us noticing, until Tom [Savage, Prone’s husband, and colleague in media training company Carr Communications] came in.
“Mr Haughey,” he said, “you may be willing to continue and Tess may be willing to continue with you. But there’s a point at which learning stops – and that point happened about a half an hour ago.”
Haughey asked me whether I would look at the rest of it and send my notes, along with the tape, to Kinsealy. I nodded and off he went, in high good humour …
… At seven o’clock the following morning, I was on my own in the office, Tom having dropped me off on his way to Morning Ireland, when the office phone rang. The caller was Haughey. He wanted to say thank you for a most valuable session and to go over some of the points arising. In the middle of the conversation, he said he had been advised to have eyelid surgery. He said it, didn’t state where the advice had originated from, and left it for me to address. I thought about him and his hooded eyes, and the immediate visual comparison between him and the Fine Gael or Labour Party members with whom he might share a studio.
“If you have that surgery, it’s going to make a difference – for the better?" I said.
“Oh, yes. But. People are going to talk about it. Media will ask about it and write and talk about it. Your eyelids will be the equivalent of Maggie Thatcher’s lowered voice. It’s you who’ll decide whether the gain outweighs the losses.”
He barked something to the effect that he had no interest in image management and that he now knew that what he had to do was be interesting on television. It was the start of a pattern. Haughey would ask for help – it might be in preparation for a TV or radio programme or a print interview. He was rare in his understanding that print interviewers needed as much valuable material presented to them as did broadcasters. He would rehearse, watch the playback, make notes of some of the assessment points made to him, and then do the programme.
Invariably, he would telephone first thing the following morning to thank me and discuss – with ruthless self-assessment – precisely what he had managed to achieve and where he had failed. Not only was he generous – always recalling the detail of the remembered advice and how it had worked – but he took responsibility when things didn’t work. That happened once in a leaders’ debate, and once in an ard fheis.
The leaders’ debate was with Dr [Garret] FitzGerald. Haughey was hyper-aware that the early moments of any TV appearance were dominated by viewer reaction to the participants’ appearance, and he was in no doubt that Garret the Good presented a scattered, absent-minded professor appearance rooted in good temper, whereas Haughey himself, not least because of the heavily hooded slate-coloured eyes, gave an impression of menace. Few people who didn’t already like him related warmly to him as a result of a TV appearance.
In the dry run for the leaders’ debate, Haughey was stunningly impressive in his grasp of every aspect of government policy, which wasn’t a great surprise, since it was widely believed that he didn’t trust any of his ministers to do the job without daily interventions from him, so he was necessarily up to speed in each department’s doings. However, the recording showed him to be so impatient that he wasn’t waiting for the end of questions. I told him that if he didn’t listen – and listen analytically – he was going to come unstuck.
“If you answer a question that hasn’t been asked, you’re going to look like you’re evading the question that has been asked,” I said.
He went down to RTÉ, and I went home to watch the programme. Halfway through, FitzGerald found a document in one of his pockets (his difficulty locating the bit of paper was classic Garret, great television and visibly irritating to Haughey) and made an accusation. Confusion ensued, with Haughey snapping at the wrong end of the stick. Furious, I stopped watching and went to bed. About an hour later, the phone rang and after a few minutes, my husband appeared at the bedroom door.
“That was Mr Haughey,” he said. “He said to tell you he’s sorry. That you’d warned him about not listening. And to thank you for your help.” The second time he could – indeed, should – have blamed the helper was when I rewrote an ard fheis speech for him. Dr Martin Mansergh wrote the bulk of this and, indeed, all of Haughey’s speeches, but gracefully submitted his prose to be translated into language more amenable to broadcast requirements.
I shortened sentences, crafted emotional “builds” and cut away more than a third of the original. The deletions created a small war among the advisers who came to watch Haughey rehearsing the autocued script. That bit about China had to be put back in. Bord na Móna couldn’t be left out. The grassroots would want to hear the section that had been removed from page six. Haughey listened silently to all the comments and then nodded at me: speak.
“If you give yourself the space to deliver it well, you’re guaranteed nine points of applause,” I said. “Adding the time for that applause to the length of what you’ve just delivered will simply make the speech 10 minutes too long.”
He made one small gesture, and that was the end of it: the cuts stayed cut. The only problem was that I had underestimated the impact of the speech. It got 13, not nine, sustained natural bouts of applause, which ran it into the RTÉ news bulletin. Or would have, if RTÉ hadn’t cut it off just as he was reaching the peroration.
At home, I watched, with a sinking heart, the Nine O’Clock News graphics swimming across the screen. Fianna Fáil would be livid. (They were.) They would attack RTÉ. (They did.) They would also, and rightly, blame me. (Not so much, mainly because, since most of them did not know that Haughey prepared with me, they didn’t make the correct blame-laying connection. PJ Mara filled in that gap.)
Fifteen minutes into the news bulletin, our home phone rang. Tom indicated that he would take it if I wished, but I braced myself and took the call from Haughey. I apologised immediately. He dismissed any need for apology, said he was proud of the speech and had wanted to ring me quickly to thank me for my work on it. I put the phone down, weak with relief, knowing that the entire Fianna Fáil party in a full-blown rage would be easier to cope with than its leader in a similar state, and, anyway, once the word went out that Haughey was not furious, all would be well. Except, of course, for RTÉ, but Fianna Fáil fighting with RTÉ after a Haughey appearance of any kind was standard.
As time went on, our relationship with Haughey divided along clear lines. If he wanted to be prepped for a TV programme or helped with a speech, I was called. If he wanted to discuss policy or simply have an amusing chat over a cup of tea, Tom was chosen. Partly because he liked the way Tom analysed issues; partly because he knew Tom wasn’t afraid of him.
Haughey surrounded himself with people who were afraid of him, but loved the company of those who were not. That included politicians such as Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and Fianna Fáil staff including Fionnuala O’Kelly, who headed his press office. But above all, it encompassed civil servants and external advisers who stood up to him because they knew their stuff and weren’t intimidated by him. Hence, he liked Tom.
I was a coward, more comfortable dealing with the man in letters characterised by what Gaybo called my “mannered subservience”. I preferred letters because of the ambivalence caused by my enjoying every training contact with him, while at the same time regarding him as a fraud.
I’m Glad You Asked Me That: The Political Years by Terry Prone is published by Red Stripe Press on October 21st
