A Tan for All Seasons

Every time I think maybe I need to find a new career, I have a day that makes me remember why I do what I do. (And makes me remember that yes, I do love what I do – I just don’t always like where, as in publication, I do it.)

Today I interviewed Julio Iglesias – Joe Church, as my father always insisted on referring to him when my mother played his music in the car. I’d read about 50 interviews with him in preparation, and I was half-dreading a leering Lothario with a permatan – all the female reporters made reference to his attempts at flirtation and his outrageous comments about sex. I could take it personally that he didn’t do that with me, but I think it’s that he hasn’t given an interview in years and his life has changed since the days that he did. He’s been with the same woman for more than 15 years, and he has four kids under the age of ten. The permatan is still there, but that seems to be the only vestige of his old life.

Julio is hardly cool, but still I felt lucky to be having this experience – the Marbella sun shining down as Julio drove me in a golf cart through his acres of plum, almond, and fig trees that seem to stretch all the way to Africa. I spoke slowly in Spanish to his kids and later, sipped a great Bordeaux from Julio’s legendary wine cellars while we ate Serrano ham and Manchego cheese served by a butler. When my notebook was closed, he spoke with surprising intelligence and spirit about politics, customs, and poverty in Asia and Africa – his wry comment about celebrities being shown extreme poverty from air conditioned cars belying his knowledge of the situation.

Later, as I took a quick walk down toward the rocky beach by my hotel, I thought wistfully about the gulf between the story I’d love to write and the one that will actually appear in print. For as long as I’ve been a journalist, of course there’s always been a gulf between the perfect, evocative story I aspire to when I sit down to write, and the words that actually come out. But the divide at my current employer is particularly difficult and dispiriting to contemplate, because it’s the divide between the story I saw and the one that fits in a glib 600 words, with as many references to young Hollywood A-listers as possible. Put it this way: He spoke philosophically about why he’s been afraid to sing in English – a man who’s compared to Elvis and Sinatra in terms of record sales, nervous about releasing an album -- and why he’s ditched many of his excesses. It was an interesting way to spend a Wednesday in June, but in my employers’ eyes, unfortunately, it is going to be deemed boring.