Max: The facts

Max Clifford is the king of infotainment. As the taboids grow ever more desperate for lurid stories, up comes Max with another little triumph - from Derek Hatton to the brilliant careers of Antonia de Sancha and Simone Hyams. It's all harmless good fun, he insists. He's just an old softie at heart. And after all, it's the truth that really matters

MAX CLIFFORD, the public relations consultant with a sleek, silver-grey hairdo and a professional hairstylist's brush in his briefcase, was having a sandwich lunch in his New Bond Street office: curried chicken and coleslaw (extra filling) on white bread, with a mug of super- strong tea. 'Max and me,' his young assistant Claire commented, 'we have our tea like gravy.' The television was flickering silently out in the lobby. The phone was jangling. Work was stacking up.

He had just finished a telephone interview with Radio 5 about the ethics of public relations. ('Mike, Mike. You wanna believe what people say about me? Fine. Okay. But I know what I'm really about.') He was expecting a visit from his latest client, Simone Hyams, the 21-year-old Grange Hill veteran, who has recently won tabloid notoriety by confessing to her 'steamy sex fling' with the film director, Michael Winner. He was checking up on the progress of a story he is helping to develop, 'about the demise of Hitler'. ('Here, sweetheart, look at these photos . . . What do you mean, 'Is that Hitler?' Well, of course it . . . Nah, actually, nah, I can't tell you. This is top secret, this story. It's gonna change history.')

He was also negotiating with Bruce, a fat entrepreneur in pinstripes, about the promotion plans for 'Gnome Wars', an exciting Yuletide project involving Hyams and another of Clifford's clients, Antonia de Sancha. ('Bruce, tell Zoe about it. It's basically a Christmas situation, isn't it? A real wonderland for the kiddies in a big building on Regent Street with special effects by the guy who did Star Wars. Antonia's gonna play a wicked witch who kidnaps Santa Claus and Simone's gonna be the good fairy. Fabulous.')

And he was finding time to give me notes on his personal style. 'Yeah, I like clothes, sweetheart. The tie's Kurt Geiger. Most of my suits I get from Herbie Frogg down the road - they do me wonderful deals - but this one, it's from Dickins & Jones in Epsom . . . '

Then the phone rang.

'It's Stewart from the Sun,' Claire shouted through the wall. 'All right, sweetheart,' Clifford shouted back, 'I'll take it.' While we waited for him to finish the call, Bruce told me about his new snack bar called Celebrity Sandwiches. 'You come in and you can get say, a Michelle Pfeiffer bap or a Robert de Niro roll. It's a lot of fun . . .'

'Yeah, right Stew - thanks for marking my card,' Clifford was barking. 'I'll get back to you.' He put the phone down and sighed theatrically. 'Never a dull moment in this business.' The Sun had found out about a police caution Simone Hyams received for a minor drugs offence last year. 'Is this going to affect Gnome Wars, Bruce?' Clifford asked.

'Well,' Bruce said, 'it's not good. She is meant to be a fairy. I mean, we're skating a thin line with the family and kids thing anyway. Up till now, I think everyone understands the Michael Winner business is all harmless fun, but this . . . Having said that though, Max, Simone is a lovely girl. I think maybe the line could be, 'These things happen, but it won't happen again.' '

'Yeah, yeah - well, we'll see. Madam's coming in in a bit and I'll sort it out with her then,' Clifford said. 'By the way, I spoke to a couple of guys last night about the record idea, and they're red-hot keen on the whole thing.' He turned to me and smiled. 'Basically, I'm planning to put a group together called the Killer Bimbos with Antonia and Simone. They'll do a record and all the profits will go to the Royal Marsden hospital. Neither of them can sing of course - ha ha. But that's a little problem. I don't think for one second that either of them will want to do it, but it appeals to me as an idea, so if I can persuade them, I will.'

He took a bite of curried chicken and coleslaw. 'I was thinking,' he said, 'they could do an updated version of 'Everyone's A Winner'.'

MAX CLIFFORD has been in the public relations business for 30 years. He started out in the EMI press office in 1962. (His first account was the Beatles, who had just released Love Me Do.) Three years later, he set up Max Clifford Associates. Since then, Clifford's understanding of what a public relations agent is supposed to do and the stratagems he can use to do it, have undergone a radical change. As has the entire PR industry. Gone are the days when a press agent could hope to keep himself and his clients afloat by arranging the occasional photo call or putting out the odd fun fact. ('There's nothing Sandie likes more than a good old sing-song in the bath]') All PRs see their work today as being 'pro-active' and 'creative'. With Clifford, however, 'creative' carries the full weight of its fictive connotation.

What Clifford is best known for is the cheesy tabloid story of dubious veracity. He does do a lot of other, rather more respectable, promotions work, but it's the shlocky end of the business that is his forte. He occupies a place in the market that has been opened up in recent years by the growing temerity of tabloid journalism. As the status of reliable fact has slowly and steadily become subordinate to the more piquant pleasures of the 'good story', and the appetite for lurid 'infotainment' has grown ever more unruly, Clifford has spotted his niche and stooped to the challenge.

In 1986, when the comedian Freddie Starr wanted to suppress a nasty allegation that a disgruntled biographer was threatening to publicise, Clifford persuaded him to see it another way. Maybe, he suggested, this horrible aspersion could be good publicity. He got Starr to hold off for a bit and made no attempt to suppress it. The result was the by now legendary Sun headline, 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER', and it turned the tour that Starr was about to begin into an overnight sell-out. Another 12 dates were added to his itinerary and extra ticket sales were estimated at pounds 1m.

When Derek Hatton retired from politics in the late Eighties, it was Clifford who was given the job of reinventing him as a racy boy-about- town. He set about this in various ways. He got Hatton on such programmes as Style File, arbitrating on whether people's lifestyles were naff or not; he took him to film premieres and nightclubs; most important of all, he had him photographed in Stringfellows with a posh young woman called Katie Baring and, heigh ho, the story printed in the papers was that this 'unlikely couple' were having an affair. Hatton, who now makes a living from public appearances and after-dinner speaking engagements, remembers the time he spent in Clifford's care as a slightly bewildering experience. 'I wanted to change my image from being wholly political to something a bit less hard, more social,' he says, 'and Max was recommended to me as someone good at helping to, shall we say, amend images. When I was photographed with Katie Baring, the story that was printed was that we'd been having this fantastic affair and had gone on all these exotic holidays together. But I didn't know the girl at all, and some of the places we were supposed to have been to, I couldn't even spell.' Clifford says he didn't actually tell the press; he just had a confidential word in a photographer's ear.

He is happy in this twilight world of semi- truths. In fact, he takes some pride in his ingenuity and imagination. 'When I used to play football,' he says, 'I always played mid-field - in the creative role. I wanted to be Johnny Haynes . . . do you know much about football, sweetheart? I was good at making opportunities - splitting the defence with a pass, allowing someone else to score a goal. In recent years I've sat back and realised there's probably some connection between that and the work I do. It's all very inventive - setting up situations so that someone else can get the accolade and score the goal.'

The blitheness with which he plies his trade is born of a profoundly cynical attitude towards the British media. If the newspapers are corrupt and full of inaccuracies anyway, what's the big deal, he figures, about a few more? 'Sweetheart, it wouldn't change if I stopped doing what I'm doing. The press is the way it is, warts and imperfections, so you turn it to your advantage - make the best of it. I'm quite happy to play the role I do.' In any case,

he sees his contributions as life-enhancing good fun.

A lot of what he serves up, he says, is a decoy for true stories of a much more damaging nature. 'You give them a good story - something harmless - but what they don't know is what's going on behind all that.' Rather than

simply acquiring and selling scandals, he says, he spends at least half of his working hours suppressing scandals - usually with no other motive than compassion for his fellow man.

THIS IS the point at which his spiel began to take on a slightly surreal quality. 'What,' I said, 'you mean you go out of your way to keep certain stories quiet, just because you're a nice guy?' He showed me a poster for the Margaret Hayle Foundation, a children's charity that he works for. He pointed to the pictures of celebrities posing with children. Many of these stars, he explained, had done things for the charity in return for his help in hushing up their scandals. 'That is the only payment I ask.'

I expressed some surprise that his business could boast an annual turnover of pounds 150,000 if he spent half the time working for nothing. He shrugged: 'It's the way I'm made,' he said.

Then he began telling me fantastic stories about the various scandals he has averted over the years. One, several years back, involved an aspiring actor who threatened to spill the beans about his affair with Denholm Elliot. 'I said to him, 'Sell your story and you'll make a couple of thousand pounds. Fine, okay. But supposing if, instead, I introduced you to some major producers and directors and get you started?' And that's just what I did. Denholm Elliot never knew I'd done that.'

Another scandal - much the most catalysmic - concerned a very senior politician and his ex-mistress - a woman in the catering business. She had supposedly come to Clifford, concerned that the tabloids had acquired photographic evidence of her affair with the politician. She was planning to pre- empt the papers with her own public confession. But again, Clifford persuaded her to keep quiet. 'I gave her incentives. I introduced her to people she'd always wanted to meet, arranged for her to visit places she'd always wanted to go. In the meantime, I tracked down the photographs and I've managed to get them disposed of.'

Wonderful though these stories were, they carried with them a distinct whiff of Walter Mittyism. At one point, he was telling me about how he broke the Pamela Bordes story only in order to distract attention from a far more important and harmful scandal. I asked about the precise mechanism of such a trade- off. No, no, he said, it was much too secret and complex for him to explain. 'It's contacts, sweetheart. I can't say more than that. It's like trying to explain how a game of chess went. I made the News of the World aware of Pamela and while they were working on that, it gave me an opportunity to clear up the other matter, so that by the time the journalists got back to it, I had it tidied up. Okay, fine. I call it directing the traffic.'

The trouble is that according to Paul Connew, deputy editor of the News of the World, Clifford wasn't actually responsible for breaking the Bordes story. 'He did have a client who was one of the sources for the story,' Connew says, 'but he certainly did not originate the story or mastermind its publication.' A certain interpretive paranoia sets in. I find it impossible to know what Clifford's stories mean about him. Or even whether he believes them himself. The only time I'm convinced he's playing straight is when he talks about his capacious heart. He has a sentimental streak as wide as a mile - especially about himself.

'I'd never get into political PR sweetheart, because then it gets serious. I try not to hurt anyone, or be destructive, I really do, and I mean, if people believe that Freddie Starr ate a hamster, it's not going to do much harm. But if you try and build someone as a wonderful political leader and you know they're really a

self-centred, conniving whatever - which mostly in my experience, politicans are - well then it's serious. '

IT WAS AT about this point in our conversation that Simone Hyams arrived, fresh from a television chat show. 'Hallo sweetheart,' Clifford said, 'Saw you on the telly. Great, yeah - you came across well. Very natural. Now I've got some things to sort out with you . . .' I left the room, while he tackled her on the subject of the police caution. After she left, looking rather depressed about the new setback, I asked Clifford about the work he had done with her and Antonia de Sancha. Didn't it contradict his claim about trying not to be hurtful or destructive? Surely their stories had been the cause of palpable misery? And wasn't dragging down a political image, as he had helped to do with David Mellor, just as 'serious' a business as building one up?

Clifford resists guilt. He doesn't believe that he and de Sancha contributed much to Mellor's downfall. 'I suppose Antonia was part of why he went in the end, but it was only one part. It was the way he conducted himself afterwards and obviously the business with Mona whatsername (Bauwens) that brought it about.' The unhappiness caused at a domestic level, to Judith Mellor and Michael Winner's girlfriend, Jenny Seagrove, isn't keeping him awake at nights either. 'Jenny Seagrove?' he said. 'My attitude to her is, unless she's deaf, dumb and blind and totally dense, she knows what he's like, what he gets up to. She accepts it, so fine, okay.'

He is anxious to dispel any notion that he specialises in kiss and tell. 'I don't do kiss and tells or bimbos,' he says. 'The story about Simone and Winner didn't come from her originally. She found out that a so-called friend of hers had gone to the papers. So she was responding to a situation that was going to happen anyway. It was the same with Antonia - she never said a bloody word, but she was betrayed by friends. If Antonia had just come to me and said, 'I want to break this story about my affair', I would have said, 'I want nothing to do with you', as I have done with other girls on a multitude of occasions. Fine. Okay.'

But if ignominy really was foisted upon de Sancha and Hyams, as Clifford claims, would it not have been better for them to lie low rather than racing about, milking their celebrity?

'No, not at all,' he says. 'It's true, it will be very difficult for either of them to work in this country as actresses for a while. But that would be true whether they spoke out or not, because once a story breaks, all the agents and producers will assume it's come from them anyway. They've got to live, so they might as well make hay while the sun shines, basically.'

It's still hard to believe that Hyams wouldn't have been better off just shutting up, rather than posing on the front page of the Sun in pink and black underwear. ('Well it was Janet Reger,' Clifford says. 'And she got well-paid. It's a question of facing up to realities.')

De Sancha, who also did raunchy shots for the Sun, as well as appearing on late-night television shows, having 'toe-job' pedicures, takes a similarly pragmatic line. 'The objective was to turn the situation - not a pleasant situation - to my advantage,' she said on the phone from France, where she has been on holiday for the past month. 'Why not make money out of doing chat shows or whatever? I don't consider myself a victim. I know I sound like a tough nut, but even when I made my first statement about the affair, people still thought I was responsible for breaking the story. So be it . . . I just thought, to hell with it - do it, Antonia, do it. You can either sit back - in which case you'll still be hounded, or you can just jump in at the deep end . . . I've done some things that have been reasonably tacky. A couple of the pictures I did for the tabloids - but at the same time, it's quite amusing - it's fun, and people can take what they want from it . . ' What, I asked, did she make of Clifford's idea that she and Simone Hyams form a band called Killer Bimbos?

'What?' de Sancha said. 'I don't know what you're talking about. Who's Simone?' I said she had better ask Clifford.

AFTER A couple of hours of hanging out in his office, Clifford and I took a taxi to Fulham, where another of Clifford's clients, the tennis player Pat Cash, lives. They were meeting some people from Carlton Television about Cash co- hosting a new weekly magazine programme. In the cab, Clifford told me what his definition of 'tacky' was. 'Tacky is cheap and nasty. For example, one of the papers asked Simone to pose with a Spitting Image puppet of Michael Winner. That's tacky.' More tacky than the Janet Reger photographs? 'Oh yeah,' he said. A little later on, he added pensively, 'Tacky is people who throw coins from the terraces at football matches.'

In Fulham it was rapidly established that Pat Cash's tennis commitments were going to clash with the Carlton's people's production schedule. Cash put another idea to them. What about a show on rock'n'roll cuisine? It would be like, what is your favourite rock or pop star's favourite dish? And one week, maybe, Cash would be in Yoko Ono's kitchen cooking lentils and, like, the next week, he'd be buying hot dogs with Keith Richards] The Carlton people were enthusiastic. Clifford looked a bit bored, but after the television duo left, he said it was a good meeting.

Then a car arrived from the BBC. Max was appearing on the re-vamped Wogan show, Terry Wogan's Friday Night. He said we couldn't tell them I was a journalist, or else they'd make a big fuss. 'Don't worry - we'll just say you're a friend, an assistant or whatever.'

In the hospitality room, everyone assumed I was Clifford's girlie and the women researchers smiled faint, grim smiles whenever they walked past. 'Bloody hell,' one of the Wogan crew said to Max, 'What was that picture of Simone Hyams on the front of the Sun? She looked really fat and horrible.'

Clifford said that he should have seen how many people wrote in asking for a poster of that picture. He kept on acting jolly - shouting things like 'What you looking so worried about sweetheart?' at the shy girl behind the bar, but you could tell he was nervous. And almost everybody in the room was being a bit snooty towards him. Tony Slattery, Terry Wogan's co-host, didn't even say hello.

The show was a disaster. Edwina Currie called Clifford a parasite on society and he became upset. 'You don't know what you're talking about]' he kept shouting. Someone watching him on a television in the hospitality room said he needed a good PR. After the show, he tried to continue his argument with Edwina Currie, but she told him to go away. 'You're talking out of your arse]' he said. 'I don't give a fuck.' she replied, 'Go away. You're a turd, you're a little turd.'

'It's a good job,' he said to her, 'that you're a woman.' And then we left.

In the car, he struggled slowly back to chirpiness. 'To people like that woman,' he said, 'it's just a game. But the truth matters. It may sound funny coming from me. But it really does.'

Back in the hospitality room, the Wogan researchers were already on the phone to the tabloids.-

(Photograph omitted)