Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Read online

  I jump in the car and head toward Geneva. It was here that Bond picked up a passenger, a pretty Englishwoman called Tilly: “Their eyes met and exchanged a flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals.” I’ve got a passenger, too—a photographer called Duncan. Our eyes meet and he belches. “Sorry,” he says.

  This stretch—through the Loire Valley toward the breathtaking, misty foothills of the Jura Mountains—was Bond’s favorite: “In May, with the fruit trees burning white and the soft wide river still big with the winter rains, the valley was green and young and dressed for love.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I say breathlessly to Duncan, “but the Aston Martin has got a connection for plugging in my iPod!” There’s a ping from my iPhone. “An e-mail!” I think.

  “Duncan,” I say, “could you possibly read me the e-mail that’s just come through? So what do you reckon, podcast-wise? Mark Kermode’s film reviews or . . . ?”

  “Calm down,” snaps Duncan unexpectedly. “You’re overstimulated.” He glares harshly at me. “You’re never going to understand what it’s like to be Bond driving through France if you’re this overstimulated.”

  “All right, all right,” I say.

  Duncan is annoyed with me. I guess we’ve got cabin fever, having been cooped up together in this Aston Martin for hours. Still, his tone shocks me. I feel as if I’ve been slapped in the face.

  Ironically, Bond actually was slapped in the face by Tilly, his passenger, after he gave her one master/slave eye flurry too many: “The open palm cracked across his face. Bond put up a hand and rubbed his cheek. If only pretty girls were always angry they would be beautiful.” I don’t agree with Bond about this. I don’t find angry women beautiful. I find them stressful and upsetting.

  “Turn off the iPhone!” Duncan snaps. “Turn off your e-mails. Just experience the car and the road. Just experience it!”

  “OK, whatever,” I say. I do.

  “See how nice it is to get rid of all that stimulation and just experience the car,” Duncan says after a while. “You can go faster. The car only comes into its own when you actually accelerate.”

  “So you’re saying that to truly enjoy the car, I have to break the law?” I say. But I understand Duncan’s frustration. I’m an annoyingly cautious driver. The speedometer of this Aston Martin goes up to 220 mph, and I haven’t once exceeded 70 mph.

  “OK, I’ll overtake that lorry. But just this once.” I gingerly touch the accelerator. “Oh my God!” I yell.

  I’m suddenly going 100 mph and the car is so smooth it feels like 30. I’ve never seen a lorry vanish so quickly in my rearview mirror. I feel like Han Solo in hyperdrive, or Jeremy Clarkson. It feels fantastic. No wonder the rich and boorish love themselves.

  We stop to picnic, as Bond did, in the Jura Mountains; Bond “attacked the foothills as if he were competing in the Alpine trails,” and so do I—and we make it to Geneva by nightfall. As I pull up outside the fantastically opulent Hotel des Bergues, a rich-looking guest comes over to admire the car.

  “I’ve driven this all the way from London,” I say.

  “I can see why you’d want to,” he replies. “My father bought me one of these when I was seventeen, and I bought myself a Porsche at the same time, and I really preferred this to the Porsche.”

  “Your father bought you an Aston Martin when you were seventeen?” I shriek, astonished. “You must be unbelievably rich!” He takes a slightly nervous step backward. I’m clearly less of a kindred spirit than he’d initially assumed. “Plus,” I say, “isn’t it irresponsible to give a teenager a really fast car? You might have crashed.”

  “I did crash,” he says, impatiently, “but that isn’t the point. The point is that, compared with the Porsche . . .” He pauses. “Anyway, have a nice night.”

  “And you!” I say. I think about adding, “I’m really constipated because I’ve been driving and eating too much,” but I decide not to, because that would be too much information with which to burden a stranger. Instead, I head to the toilets, where they’re piping choral music into the cubicles. As everything Bond ate comes flooding out, the piped choral music turns into a choir of heavenly voices, filling the cubicle with their magnificence.

  Now that, I think, is a fancy hotel.

  And this is where my Bond journey ends. Bond gets captured and tortured in Geneva. I go to my room and flick channels, hoping for the purposes of veracity to find a movie in which people get tortured, Saw or My Little Eye, say. But I can’t. Instead, I fall into a deep and elegant sleep.

  I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It

  In February 2010, the broadcaster Ray Gosling was arrested on suspicion of murder, having confessed on his BBC East Midlands TV show Inside Out to the mercy killing of his lover, Tony, sixteen years earlier. The papers were filled with supportive articles from right-to-die advocates and also from Gosling fans, who’d followed the work of this great pioneering TV journalist over his fifty-year career.

  But then, on September 14, Gosling was convicted at Nottingham magistrates’ court of wasting police time. He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d been in France, reporting on a football match, the day Tony died. He was given a ninety-day suspended sentence after the prosecution told the court that his false confession had cost £45,000 and 1,800 hours of police time.

  I’ve been a Ray Gosling fan since I was eighteen, when my college lecturer told me to seek him out. There was a place for people like me in the media, my lecturer said, and it was a place that had been carved out by Ray Gosling. By people like me, he meant people from the provinces who were a bit awkward, and had strange vocal inflections, but might be able to see the world in a fresh, non-Oxbridge way.

  I watched Two Town Mad, Gosling’s brilliant, influential 1963 paean to everyday life in Leicester and Nottingham. In it, you see the young Ray, with movie-star good looks, enthusing about Leicester’s new drive-in bank and multistory car park over a sound track of swinging jazz. He made regional, working-class ordinariness—things his contemporaries deemed too inconsequential to chronicle—seem exciting and cool and worthy of lyricism.

  The day after the verdict, I decide to call him. It was such a mystery. What had made him invent the mercy-killing story? Did he think nobody would bother checking? What was his motive?

  I tell him about my college lecturer and my subsequent years of fandom. “Since the conviction, my body has been bruised with people hugging me in the street and holding my hand, people loving me and cuddling me,” he replies. “The main thing they say is, ‘Oh, Ray, you silly bugger.’ And you know what? There’s not been one single word of criticism.”

  We arrange to meet in Manchester. At Stoke, I see him get on the train and wander into my carriage. “Ray!” I call. “I’m the person you’re meeting in Manchester! What a coincidence!”

  He sits down next to me, smiles. Then the train pulls away and he launches into a captivating commentary about everything we can see from the window: the color of some cows, the City of Manchester Stadium, various follies and statues. “This is the tunnel at Prestbury. It’s the richest village in England. It’s where all the grand footballers and executives live. The vicar died playing golf on the golf course. . . .” And so on.

  “The BBC has been the great love affair of my life,” he says as we get off the train at Manchester Piccadilly. “Fifty years. And now they’ve blocked me.” He pauses. “Well, if there’s no more broadcasting, there’s no more broadcasting.”

  Then, as we catch the bus to Moston, North Manchester, a flash of anger: “The BBC is run by a load of guys who have never made a program in their lives, never told a story in their lives, never cried in their lives, never told a lie in their lives. . . .”

  His point is that all nonfiction broadcasters walk a line. And he has a point. Journalism is storytelling. We wait around for the best bits—the most engaging, extreme, colorful moments—and we stitch them together, ignoring the boring stuff, turning real life into a narra
tive. Even so, there’s shaping a story and there’s making things up.

  On the bus, Ray starts telling me about his early childhood, about how his grandmother used to routinely embroider the truth. He was, he says, born into a working-class backstreet family in Northampton in 1939. “My grandmother, my father’s mother, used to keep a flower shop. When I was on my own, she’d beckon me over. ‘Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we’re partly Jewish.’ But she forgot the story sometimes, a bit like some of the stories I’ve told in my life and you’ve told in your life too. She would beckon me aside and say, ‘Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we’re partly Gypsy.’” He laughs. “It wasn’t enough for her to be English from Northampton. She had to always pretend to have that extra little bit!” (A friend of Ray’s tells me later that even this story is a bit of an untruth: He wasn’t born into a working-class backstreet family at all—he was quite middle class. But he empathizes with the working class so powerfully that he’s reinvented himself.)

  He went to Leicester University but dropped out, he says, because he didn’t like his fellow students’ assiduousness. They were after stable careers. He wanted a more adventurous life. He became a teddy boy and a delinquent. “I could take you to pubs,” he says, “I’m not bragging, and I’m not going to tell the Greater Manchester Police, but I could tell you, I burned that down . . .”

  “What?” I say. “You burned pubs down?”

  “I’m a wild boy,” Ray says. “I’m going to carry on being a wild boy until they shoot me down in the street.”

  “What were you doing burning down pubs?” I ask.

  He gives me a look to say, “Change the subject.”

  He started managing bands and drifted into broadcasting, first at Granada, then at the BBC. “Year after year after year I was earning fifty thousand pounds and absolutely loving it. Radio, telly.” He pauses. “So lucky.”

  His first rough patch came in the mid-’90s when he started drinking too much. The period coincided with programs such as Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends coming into vogue and Ray’s brand of poetic realism falling out of favor with commissioning editors.

  “Did you notice the appetite for ordinariness slipping away?” I ask.

  At this, I see a glimpse of the more difficult, erratic Ray. “‘The appetite for ordinariness’?” he yells. “You’re talking to me! My appetite for ordinariness has never gone away. I fucking love my people and they love me back. What do you mean?”

  “I think you misunderstand me,” I say.

  “I bloody well do misunderstand you,” he roars. “My appetite for ordinariness has never gone away. And my boyfriend will come round in a bit, and he’s as ordinary as me.”

  “I’m not saying your appetite . . .”

  “Try your sentence again.”

  “Did you notice the appetite for ordinariness among commissioning editors slipping away?”

  “Yes, of course,” he says, not missing a beat, as if the yelling had never happened. “Once you get that many channels, forget it. You can’t afford it. The kind of little niches I was able to get into? It’s gone. And there’s no way of bringing that back.”

  “They started to put crazy people on the television instead,” I say.

  “Yeah, they did. Crazies.”

  He declared bankruptcy and moved into sheltered accommodation. Then, just as it looked as if his career was finished, BBC East Midlands came along and offered him a regular fifteen-minute slot on Inside Out, which he did brilliantly right up until February 15, 2010, when he falsely confessed to killing Tony.

  We arrive in Moston, where he’s arranged to see his boyfriend, Mark, and a friend, Keith, in a pub called the Railway. We get to talking about Tony. Ray says they met decades ago in a bar in Salford. “It was an amazing, passionate love affair. He was a courier, working Heathrow to New York. He came back from JFK one day and we went to bed. I said, ‘I want to fuck you.’ And he said, ‘I can’t, Ray. I think I’ve got AIDS.’ And he’d got AIDS. It was the early days of AIDS. And I was with him through lots of troubles. We found a way to have some sort of sex life.” Ray says they had a pact because Tony was dying and in terrible pain. That part of the story was true. “I loved him. He loved me. I would have done it.” But he didn’t do it.

  Sixteen years after Tony died, Ray was looking for subjects for Inside Out. They’d already done cafés, statues, gnomes, and the seaside. Ray thought: death. “We went to a coffin manufacturer in Nottinghamshire who makes customized coffins. If you’ve been a skier, he’ll make a coffin the shape of skis. I talked to people who had mercy-killed their loved ones. . . . I heard all these stories. . . .”

  And at some point—while they were filming in the graveyard that Ray will one day be buried in—he got it into his head to tell the camera he’d done the same.

  “Why did you say it?” I ask.

  “It was a genuine feeling, after listening to these interviewees, mainly from Leicester. . . .”

  “Like a surfeit of empathy?” I ask.

  “My heart was bigger than my head,” he says. “And in my muddled mind, I thought maybe I did do it.” He pauses. “We were at my own graveside. Darren, my cameraman, said he wanted to take some pictures of autumn leaves falling. I said, ‘Darren, put your tripod down. I’m going to walk toward you.’ I looked into the camera. It was a winter’s evening, four p.m. I was at my own graveside. I looked into that camera. And I just said it.”

  I killed someone, once. Not in this region, not in the East Midlands, but not so far away. He was a young chap. He’d been my lover. And he got AIDS. And in a hospital one hot afternoon, doctors said, “There’s nothing we can do.” I said to the doctor, “Leave me. Just for a bit.” And he went away. And I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. Doctor came back, I said, “He’s gone.” “Ah.” Nothing more was ever said.

  “One take,” Ray says. “One take. Took forty seconds.”

  “You said it in such an arresting way,” I say. “It really stops you in your tracks.”

  “It does,” Ray says.

  “Maybe if you’d been a worse broadcaster and you’d just mumbled it out . . .” I say.

  “Nobody would have paid any attention.”

  “You’re a victim of your own broadcasting skills,” I say.

  “I am,” he says. “My own storytelling powers.”

  He could have stopped the broadcast. He had opportunities. “They ran the final cut through for me. We watched in silence. My editor said, ‘Ray?’ And I looked at her and said, ‘Let it run.’”

  He could have stopped it even after that. “The BBC warned me of the dangers. I understood. I’d had dangers before. I’m used to dangers.” He smiles. Still, he told the BBC, “Let it run.”

  By then, he says, he’d convinced himself that he had actually smothered Tony. The program was scheduled to air the night of Monday, February 15.

  “On the Monday morning the phone rang, and it was BBC Breakfast—White City, London. They said, ‘Can you come on the Breakfast show to talk about death tomorrow?’ I got on the train to London and thought nothing of it. And then they showed the clip. And I thought, ‘Oh fuck!’”

  The “Oh fuck” was, he says, his realization that the BBC had “set me up.” He believes BBC East Midlands had understood the power of the clip and given it to White City in the knowledge that it would generate massive publicity, even if that meant a prison sentence for their star presenter.

  “The BBC used me,” he says. Had BBC East Midlands not told White City, nobody would ever have known about the confession. “It was a little local television piece in my own country, with my own people, who are very fond of me and have been so good to me. I have an intimate relationship with my people, a close, intimate relationship. They are absolutely gorgeous and bright and witty and strong and wonderful and they love you, and so you count your lucky stars. I fell in love with a bunch of beautiful, lovely, strong, brave people.”

  “I
do think you possibly have excessive trust in the people of the East Midlands if you think none of them would spill the beans about a televised murder confession outside the region,” I say.

  “I didn’t think of things as clever as that.” He stares at me. “Come on! Shut up. Stop interrupting me.”

  “You can’t really blame the BBC,” I say. “You’re the architect of your own misfortune. If nonfiction people walk a line between truth and storytelling, you really fell off the line.”

  “Go on, go on,” Ray says sharply. “I’ve been in the magistrates’ court. I’ve heard what the judges say. You’re all entitled to your opinions.”

  I open my mouth to ask another question. “No, shut up, Jon,” he says.

  He pauses. “All right. I repeated the confession. Mea culpa mea culpa mea culpa . . .”

  When he says he “repeated the confession,” he’s talking about his day at White City. He did indeed repeat it—several times, in fact—first on BBC Breakfast and then in interviews all over the world. “They marched me from studio to studio to studio. Buenos días, Madrid. Bonjour, Paris. Hello, New York. Hello, L.A.”

  That night, his landlady phoned and said, “Ray, you didn’t do it! You were in France. Don’t you remember?”

  At that, he says, the spell was broken. And then, a few days later, Ray was arrested on suspicion of murder.

  On his first night in the cell, he says, they let him have a notebook, which he filled up right away with “different stories, memories, reminiscences,” covering the floor with piles of papers.

  Although he’d told everyone he wouldn’t reveal the identity of his dead lover, “even under torture,” he gave them Tony’s name on day two, having been warned by his lawyer that if he didn’t, he could be placed on remand for two years. Even though the police quickly proved he’d been in France at the time of Tony’s death, they began investigating the possibility that he might be a serial smotherer of boyfriends. “They trawled through my love life, from Brighton to Plymouth to Blackpool to Bristol.” He pauses. “No wonder I wasted eighteen hundred hours of police time.”