The following article is from Writers' Forum:

	There is no greater pleasure for a writer than standing in a bookshop gazing at copies of your book lined up on the shelf, a pleasure that loses some of its lustre when your name isn't on the cover. You flick through the pages, recalling with nostalgia those sentences that kept you up at night; going from back to front, as we do, you finally come to your credit, discreetly in 12pt, tacked on to a "with" or an "as told to," and below the luminary whose life the work is celebrating. It's still very nice, but here's my first piece of advice for the new ghost-writer: try to negotiate your name on to the cover. Nobody sets out to be a ghost-writer but it can add both a fruitful and fascinating dimension to one's career. I had gone from reporting the labyrinthine politics and criminal activities around the Thanet coast as a junior reporter to an oddly similar engagement in Athens during the time of the Colonels. My phone was tapped. I was followed, at least once that I know of, and after writing a story about the communist provocateur Gunther Grass, I was told to pack my portable and leave Greece "within 24 hours," a colourful non-entry visa sealed in my passport as a souvenir. It was mid-winter. Snow was forecast for London and, itching for more adventure, I headed west to Los Angeles. I imagined I'd write film scripts and learn to surf, the waves back then, not the internet. I didn't get round to either although, fortune favouring the foolhardy, I found myself within days of arriving at a party with the Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters, the King of Nepal and Carol White, whose face I knew from Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow and numerous other films. It was the first time I'd come face to face with a celebrity and, contrary to popular belief, this was one leading lady who was pleased to be recognised. It was a stroke of luck that Carol was looking for a writer to work with her on her "autobiography" and, being a fellow Londoner, the encounter seemed blessed by serendipity. The fact that Carol was flat broke and needed someone to start work without actually paying them didn't dampen my enthusiasm. I wrote a couple of chapters, a friend of Carol's introduced us to the agent Jeffrey Simmons and within a few weeks, we had a deal. Carol was living in a complex of about thirty apartments that shared a small pool. While we sat each afternoon in sun loungers below a wilting palm with our spiral note books and a rum and coke, men in brown overalls would be clattering their way through the courtyard with Carol's things, the furniture, television and video, two oil paintings of Hawaiian sunsets and a waterbed that dripped all the way to the removal truck parked outside on the Santa Monica Boulevard. Everything had been rented and everything over the coming months disappeared except the telephone, lifeline of the movie star. I received an advance from New English Library while we were preparing the manuscript, but it was hardly enough to pay my rent and I made ends meet tarring roofs in the San Fernando Valley with Mike Arnold, Mr Carol White III. I managed to do the job without getting the black stuff on the uppers of my white trainers, bringing me a measure of fame amongst the English community as an eccentric and infamy, I imagine, when the first rain storms washed over San Fernando and our freshly-blacked roofs let the rain in. Seven months later, Carol Comes Home was complete and Carol, as if yielding to the premise of her book's title, was back in London starring in Nell Dunn's play Steaming at the Comedy Theatre. By the time the book came out, Carol had gone back to Hollywood and I stood around Foyle's in Charing Cross Road willing customers to pick up the book, flick through the pages and make some laudatory comment. No one ever did, although there was one notice in The Times where the reviewer had bothered to read the minuscule co-author's credit and praised it as an "impressively frank and articulate account." The reviewer went on to say the writer had "filled in the gaps in Carol's memory caused by her drug-taking." I am not sure how he knew this but he was uncannily accurate. The memory is selective as well as fragile. With Carol, I had to phone her old friends and lovers, tell them I was writing a book, and ask them to raid their memory banks. I would put these recollections to Carol and she would duly retell the tale with her own spin. Another problem just as lethal as forgetfulness is the false-memory, dreams and fantasies coming to us with fresh details that make past events funnier, more exotic, more worthy of the written word. Each of us are the sum of our doubts and errors, as well as our certainties. A faulty account can be as telling as one bogged down in an exacting truth and, in the end, we are all the hero of our own tale. The next book I worked on was A Jobbing Actor for John Le Mesurier, who had been a popular figure around Ramsgate at that time. John was anything but self-important and with more work being offered to him than he was able to take on, plans for his autobiography were not auto-generated, but arranged by agents of the literary and theatrical variety. John was composing his story on an old Olivetti but was rarely satisfied with what he had done. He would visit my flat after his lunch at the local with sheets of typescript folded in an envelope with a fistful of damp tenners. We always spoke of my job retyping but covertly it was understood that I would rehash what John had written. John Le Mesurier was a very funny man and told very funny stories. The trouble is, the dinner party anecdote that for years has left listeners falling face first into their soup bowls doesn't always work in print. The ghost-writer must be an interpreter, a decoder. He must find the subject's voice and translate these reminiscences for a different medium: the written word. In this way, the ghost exercises a quiet dominion over the manuscript in much the same way as his spectral counterpart haunts a Victorian rectory. You have to know what is going to be gripping, funny and moving to your readers and, perhaps more important, if the script doesn't work, the editor is going to be screaming for your blood, not the star's. Carol White and John Le Mesurier were both English. My next collaborator was an Italian aristocrat, and a far greater challenge. Afdera was the daughter of the great explorer Baron Raimondo Franchetti and one of the wives of Henry Fonda. I was taken by the same agent, Jeffrey Simmons, to Afdera's flat in Sloane Square to be inspected and was almost rejected out of hand for being too young. Afdera had a swarm of Italians in tight suits with her as advisers. They glanced through Carol Comes Home and A Jobbing Actor, straightened the knots in their silk ties, and finally decided it might be fun to work with someone "immature," which I understand has a slightly different connotation in Italian. The committee would be with Madame Fonda every step on the long journey through her life, reading each chapter as I was writing it and reporting back to her, which caused no end of difficulties. They would love it or hate it, always an extreme, always expressed with hyperbole and, if nothing else, I learned why Italy has had 57 Prime Ministers since the last war. The book had been commissioned by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and word spread that Afdera was telling all, a tale of sex and politics that would touch upon such sensitive issues as her father being assassinated while an envoy to Mussolini on the orders of Churchill, to her affair with John Kennedy during the very week he entered the White House. Afdera knew everyone, movie stars, the literati, Europe's aristocracy and half the House of Lords. Virtually every day someone would arrive to take us out to lunch, sometimes to make sure they were remembered and written about, but more often to make sure Afdera and her ghost were being discreet. That's the thing with the aristocracy, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you don't flaunt it. Never Before Noon was launched with a party at the Italian Embassy and a few polite notices in the London press before coming out with rather more razzmatazz in the United States. We had dozens of reviews (mainly nice ones) healthy sales and Diana Vreeland, the Editor of Vogue, wrote "...I have had the most wonderful 'visit' with you because all your charming details of spirit are in this book." The Italian critics were still at war, but Diana Vreeland, at least, thought the ghost had done his job. Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me, my new book written with Carlos Lozano, is filled with the intrigues of art and sexual politics, the assassinations being of character rather than body and soul, but just as deadly. Carlos is a Colombian actor who arrived in Paris in 1969 and met Salvador Dali at a tea party. Dali secured work for him as a dancer in the musical Hair and the two men remained intimate until the painter's death twenty years later. The book is different from the others in as much as it is two biographies in one, Carlos Lozano's own incredible journey from the humble barrios of his childhood to a respected place as an international art dealer, but equally vital is Carlos's unique overview of the life and work of Dali. Most of the people who surrounded the painter wanted something: a deal, a sketch, an introduction. Carlos, wanting nothing and asking for nothing, was drawn into Dali's inner circle and gained a far deeper understanding of the man than the traditional biographer would ever be able to reach. I met Carlos at his art gallery in Spain and the plan for us to work together took a long time to evolve. By the time we sat down to start work, we were friends more than just partners. He spoke openly, with the colourful imagery of those astonishing South American writers, M�rquez, Llosa and Isabel Allende, the two stories interweaving in a surreal pattern that forced me to find fresh ways to present these two very different lives. The challenge, the struggle even, liberated my own writing and allowed me to find a new level of originality. That, I came to see, is the skill the ghost must acquire, to find the voice of your subject, while containing it within your own style. And you must develop a style or, to quote Truman Capote's comment on Jack Kerouac, you'll merely be typing, not writing. It was, I would like to think, the strength of the manuscript that empowered me in my negotiations with Razor Books, the publisher. When I stand in the bookshops on 5 June and flick through Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me, the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano, my name on the cover will make the pleasure complete. © Clifford Thurlow		Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me was republished as The Sex Life of Salvador Dali in paperback and with two new chapters in 2004. Available from Tethered Camel        "...an extraordinary account, faithfully transcribed by Clifford Thurlow, of one boy's encounter with Salvador Dalí..." John Walsh, The Independent "...the (confessional) voice of an eye-witness to the Salvador Dalí myth – and to all the orgiastic gossip of the past..." Vanessa Thorpe, The Observer "Sex, in all its permutations, dominates the book, which might be very dull were in not for Thurlow's skilful pace and editing." Susannah Herbert, The Daily Telegraph "British biographer Clifford Thurlow unveils the Dali myth...in this explicit discussion of Dali's sexual proclivities. Witty, thought-provoking...and incredibly beautiful." Dalya Alberge. The Times "Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me – the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano...is a sensational read. And for once, that word is not misused....The beginning will drop into every tutor's lap as one to rival the opening of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess...If you want to be a superghost you would do well to analyse this enjoyable and well-crafted book. Charles Howard, Writers' Forum "Dozens of hilarious and unforgettable scenes are described in this sensuous tale...far more than a simple biography, these memoirs read like a major novel..." El País "...in truth unique and at times extraordinary...this book is more than just a curiosity, it is something very special indeed..." Luis Antonio de Villena, El Mundo "At last we have the full story of Salvador Dali and his 'secret life' thanks to this absorbing memoir by Carlos Lozano and the British writer Clifford Thurlow. At turns wicked, amusing and oddly moving, you will not be able to put this book down." Josep Playa Maset, La Vanguardia

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