This article is from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. Why not subscribe to receive the entire magazine? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10.
The best time to tour Charley’s flat – a sparsely furnished apartment in Camden Town – is in the second week of December, when a sudden deluge of greeting cards flies over the mantelpiece.
Certainly, guests who don’t know their host well are often amazed at the range of top-class salutations. For example, here’s Bono’s best wishes “for a very merry Christmas” and Sting’s hope that “we can meet up to talk sometime in the new year,” not to mention a card signed by half a dozen members The occupation Pirates of the Caribbean 5.
How does Charlie do it?
How does Charlie do it? In fact, her connection to the world of international celebrity began almost 20 years ago, when she drank for a cup of coffee with Nicolas Cage on a west London film set on a day job. Mr Cage proved unexpectedly accommodating both in terms of his domestic life and his extended stay in Britain. That evening Charley went back to her maid in Romford, wrote a more or less accurate account of their conversation and sent it to London’s Evening Standard, whose showbiz page published it three days later with the headline ‘Cage Gives Us the Facts: Why cheeky Nick loves London.”
Unexpectedly, this gamble worked. Even before Charley’s previous employers
enforced the confidentiality clause in her contract, the Standard sent her to interview a member of a boy band who was accused by the RSPCA of allegedly abusing his dachshund. That was also well received (“My Dog Walk of Shame, by Toplads Jason”).
Charley made sure she had arrived
There were other duties too: drinking afternoon tea at Fortnum’s with an underage member of the royal family and escorting Sporty Spice to the gym. At 28, blonde, petite and with a newly acquired taste for expensive leather jackets, Charley reassured herself that she had arrived.
But where exactly? Two decades later, Charley has every right to believe it’s her turn
at the top of her job. Her commissions come from American glossy magazines and high-end consumer magazines, and are carried out not in London cafes but in Manhattan hotel suites and on private Mediterranean beaches.
Tom Cruise, Cate Blanchett and Ben Affleck have each submitted to their somewhat routine questioning. I also did it gratefully, because, like almost everyone
admits Charley — at once respectful, blunt, and genuinely concerned — is exactly the kind of conversationalist a movie star with a failed third marriage he must defend from a disapproving public wants on his side.
On the other hand, being a celebrity interviewer also has disadvantages. These include hectic schedules, an endlessly disrupted social life, and a faint awareness that one is never quite treated as an equal. And yet, Charley occasionally recalls how many people have a Christmas card wishing them “Happy Holidays from Bobby D” that could only have come from Robert de Niro. Things could have been much worse.