Much of my training as a writer came while working in topical satire; for five years on Spitting Image, I put imagined dialogue into the mouths of latex celebrities and this seemed like a perfectly acceptable form of creative writing. But strangely, putting lots of famous living people into my new novel felt like I was going one step further, as if I was somehow taking far greater liberties. In a culture increasingly obsessed with fame, it seems surprising that celebrities still rarely feature in modern fiction. While there are thousands of novels revolving around famous places and famous events, authors have been far more cautious about putting real famous people into their stories.
Perhaps we feel that it is sort of cheating? It’s the first rule of fiction that you make stuff up, so should this always include all your characters? Some writers have got round this by creating thinly-disguised impressions. In The Untold Story, Monica Ali’s central character was described by the author as “a fictional princess inspired by Diana”. In The Ghost, Robert Harris created a former prime minister called “Adam Lang” who was so obviously Tony Blair that Harris worried a libel writ might come through the letterbox.
This is surely the most obvious obstacle to hijacking a celebrity’s life and taking it somewhere unexpected; authors worry about the legal ramifications. When my publisher’s lawyers did the legal check on There’s Only Two David Beckhams they said I had to cut one particular celebrity for fear that he might sue. This drastic step would have ruined an entire plot strand and I struggled with a creative solution. In the end, I simply wrote to the star in question, providing him with all the relevant extracts in which he appeared and explaining my dilemma. He said it sounded good fun and gave me his personal permission.
Whether Sepp Blatter, Tony Blair or the eponymous hero of my novel will be at all bothered about what I have them getting up to in a ridiculous football fantasy set in 2022 remains to be seen. In the meantime, here are my top 10 celebrities in fiction …
1. Prince Charles in Patriot Games by Tom Clancy (1987)
In this thriller, Prince Charles, Princess Diana and their infant son William are saved from a kidnap attempt by an Irish terror group, the “Ulster Liberation Army” (which sounds like it doesn’t quite know which side it’s on). This novel presents their rumoured marital difficulties as an invention of the media, although this notion might have been harder to pull off by the time the film came out in 1992, the year that Charles and Diana separated.
2. Colin Firth in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding (1999)
In the bestselling original, Bridget Jones was obsessed with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In the second novel, Bridget actually meets the actor and interviews him for a newspaper article. By the time Colin Firth was starring as “Mark Darcy” in both film adaptations, fiction and reality had overlapped so many times that meta had collided with anti-meta.
3. Richard Burton in Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (2012)
A love story that weaves together 1962 Italy with present-day Hollywood. A glamorous American actor comes to stay at the wonderfully named Hotel Adequate View on the Italian coast in 1962. The young hotel owner becomes enchanted by the starlet – the backdrop to her arrival being the scandalous affair that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had begun on the set of Cleopatra in Rome. The book’s title is based on Louis Menand’s description of Richard Burton in the New Yorker.
4. Tony Blair in Saturday by Ian McEwan (2005)
In a book set on the day when millions marched against Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq, the man himself makes a brief cameo appearance. The neurosurgeon Harry Perowne bumps into the prime minister, who shakes him by the hand and says that he and Cherie have a couple of his paintings hanging in Downing Street. McEwan says this episode is based on his own encounter with Tony Blair, although this social faux pas seems fairly small beer compared to invading Iraq.
5. James Joyce in Any Human Heart by William Boyd (2002)
This is the imagined memoir of a British writer, Logan Mountstuart, whose life spans most of the 20th century. Boyd uses these journals as a way of interrogating the idea of celebrity, particularly literary celebrity, and on his travels he comes across various authors and well-known people, including James Joyce in Paris. He makes the Irish legend laugh and Joyce informs him he will have to steal that joke – something I’ve had more than one celebrity say to me.
6. Jimmy Carter in The Dead Zone by Stephen King (1979)
In this psychological thriller set in the 1970s, Johnny Smith has an accident and as a result can see horrific secrets yet cannot identify the details. He meets Jimmy Carter and tells him he is going to be president, which I suppose is King having a joke about one of the horrific scenarios the hero foresees.
7. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
This is a reimagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe prior to her celebrity. The inspiration for the book wasn’t so much Monroe (whom, Joyce Carol Oates says, “I scarcely knew, and didn’t much admire because I didn’t know”) but a way of observing a lost America via a black and white picture of Norma Jean Baker aged 17. Obviously, this didn’t stop various publishers around the world putting a large picture of Monroe in her prime on the cover.
8. Frank Sinatra in Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
The novel opens at a famous baseball match in 1951, where a ball is hit and goes missing. With the cold war as a starting point, DeLillo tracks the protagonist Nick Shay’s life through the key historical events of the time. DeLillo uses this backdrop to explore the American subconscious in the second half of the 20th century. A few contemporary celebrities make an appearance, including Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Lenny Bruce, though only Sinatra was still alive (just) at the time of publication.
9. Elizabeth Taylor in Crash by JG Ballard (1973)
One of the weirder sexual fetishes is the backdrop for this Ballard novel: people who get aroused by staging and taking part in real-life car crashes – the ultimate erotic fantasy being a crash involving Elizabeth Taylor. This book was also turned into a film of the same name but even David Cronenberg (the film’s director) decided the Elizabeth Taylor subplot was more than cinema audiences might be able to cope with.
10. Scarlett Johansson in The First Thing You See by Grégoire Delacourt (2015)
Johansson doesn’t actually appear in this novel, but that didn’t stop her suing the French author for allegedly making false claims about her. The book centres on a model who looks so much like Johansson that the lead male character believes it is her. Even though it is all fiction and Johansson doesn’t appear in the novel, the French judge found partially in her favour in a case that has worrying implications for authors and satirists everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the case got a great deal of media coverage, with picture editors generally tending to opt for large photos of Scarlett Johansson over the author or the judge.
- There’s Only Two David Beckhams by John O’Farrell is published by Black Swan, priced £7.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £6.39.
