Daring (44 page)

“My dear, I have had kings and princes and little bitty emirs in my tub,” she asserted in her high-pitched rani voice.

I decided it was worth it to get the straight skinny on the prime minister from a woman who knew her inside and out. Sinking into the water, I allowed myself to be poached. As the current began needling my ankles, then calves, and tingled up the sides of my body, I found the sensation mildly pleasant. I imagined Thatcher allowing herself a rare hour of relaxation, although there was nothing sybaritic about the electrical tub. It was the equivalent of plugging in one's phone charger overnight. Indeed, Madame Véronique warned me to go home and go to bed and not to drink or eat for the next twelve hours. I found the result of mild electrocution was a supercharge of energy and a slight halogen glow. It lasted for at least a month.

I felt I could learn more from the rani. I had to call Tina and ask if
Vanity Fair
would stake me for a second session; she agreed. The next time, Madame Véronique became more loquacious. “Mrs. Thatcher is a very, very feminine woman,” she told me. “We are strong but not
hard
. Some men run from us.” But not strong men, she indicated. I kept prodding and was staggered when she revealed that one of her strong male clients was “Mr. Gorbachev,” leader of the Soviet Union. Definitely a referral by Thatcher.

THATCHER HAD BEEN
the very first Western leader to pluck a little-known provincial Communist Party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, out of the pack of those vying to replace the dying chairman of the Soviet Union. Back in 1984 she had invited Gorbachev to England and ordered a full-dress reception for him as if he were already general secretary. Their weekend at Checquers was so intimate, waiters had to remove their dinner plates, untouched, then stay late to refill their brandy glasses. “Maggie” had already given her heart to “Ronnie,” as she called the American president. But her Russian caller challenged the Great Communicator at his own game—leadership through personal chemistry.

This was how Gorbachev won her over, as Thatcher herself described to me in our interview: “President Reagan and I have always been close, but right from the beginning I found it easy to discuss and debate with President Gorbachev in a very animated way. Neither of us giving an inch.” The Russian leader questioned her on how Britain let go of its colonies and exchanged the empire for a commonwealth. He was looking for a formula to shed the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as a way of rescuing his desperate economy. When he insisted to his English hostess that Russians were really Europeans, Thatcher snapped back: they would never be accepted by Europe as long as his Eastern bloc was still barricaded behind the Iron Curtain. “It's archaic,” she railed.

A month after their marathon debate, Gorbachev began to spell out his vision for unyoking the outer Soviet empire. It was a watershed. Thatcher saw the first sign of change in Soviet expansionism. It was this startling shift that prompted her to put her seal of approval on the new leader.

“I like Mr. Gorbachev,” she announced to a stunned capitalist world in 1984. “We can do business together.”

The prime minister's transformation into a seasoned coquette had coincided with her momentous trip to Moscow in 1987. That was when the relationship with Gorbachev became surprisingly intense. In preparing for her trip, she changed her look entirely. From tidy suits with tortured dressmaker details and floppy bows, Thatcher had the chief designer of Aquascutum lower her décolleté and hike up her skirts to show more of her fine legs.

Thatcher described for me how she felt stepping off the plane in Moscow. “I was more nervous than I've ever been.” The thirteen-hour tête-à-tête between the Iron Lady of capitalism and the Iron-Toothed Man of communism was unprecedented, the longest time Thatcher had spent with any head of state. Their meeting was described by observers with voluptuous adjectives—“vigorous,” “deep,” “passionate.” Mrs. Thatcher emerged, tossing her head back with an uncharacteristic cascade of laughter.

During their talks, Gorbachev confided his frustration over his first two meetings with President Reagan, Thatcher told me. The Russian leader exploded, “He doesn't know policy!” Thatcher could sympathize. She said she enjoyed hearing Reagan's Hollywood stories, but given his lazy work habits, she despaired of discussing “privatization” with him, a term she had invented. Instead of reading his briefing books to prepare for the 1983 summit in Williamsburg, Reagan had watched
The Sound of Music
on TV.

I learned later that the prime minister and the general secretary had once become locked in conversation at a Kremlin banquet. They ignored the ballroom full of guests, pecked at their food, arms touching, with eyes only for each other. On their night out at the Bolshoi they held up the second act of
Swan Lake
while they debated methods of grain silage. When they finally reentered their box, Thatcher, resplendent in black lace, rudely inserted herself between Mikhail and his wife, Raisa. Highly displeased, Raisa muscled her way into their discussion of Western nuclear policy.

THATCHER HAD THE SAME
kind of affinity with the other superpower leader. Both she and Reagan were out-of-fashion conservatives when they first became friends. Some predicted that historians would cast them as the leaders who together gave capitalism back its confidence. White House insiders confirmed that she flirted with Reagan, to their mutual advantage. He taught her about teleprompters and gave her clearance to use a base on Ascension Island for staging strikes on the Falklands. She lent him her bases to launch the bombing of Libya. Thatcher had no compunction about giving her Ronnie a dressing-down. Nevertheless, the Reagan-Thatcher axis was, in the words of her biographer, Hugo Young, “the most enduring personal alliance in the Western world throughout the 1980s.”

Ultimately, the results of her debates with Gorbachev about nuclear disarmament were world changing. Thatcher finally gave her blessing to the new peace formula that he and Reagan devised to replace MAD—mutual assured destruction—which marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Thatcher wound up our interview at 10 Downing by returning to her view of dissent as a socialist-communist conspiracy. It was “them,” the counterculture radicals, who used intimidation to prevent free speech and shut down universities, she insisted. When I raised the liberal argument, she lifted her arms skyward with a war cry: “That is why you've got to stand up for what you believe in, and thank goodness there are some people who
always
will.”

“But look at you now—you have survived all of these attacks,” I said, expecting we could end on a positive note.

“I HAVE TO FIGHT EVERY DAY, STILL,” came the thundering reply.

My final question elicited a surprising reply. Who did she see as her historical counterpart? “You go back to the person who really had to fight for what he believed in and—I couldn't begin to compare myself with him—it was Abraham Lincoln.”

WHEN MY STORY APPEARED
in
Vanity Fair
in June 1989, “The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher,” it stimulated a lot of talk and talk-show fodder. But the response in England was literally electric. “THE ION LADY” blared the
Daily Mail
's front page. Rivals as well as the opposition taunted the PM during Question Time over her watery vibrations.

Following on the success of the Thatcher piece, Tina Brown asked me if I would like to go to Russia and write the first character portrait of a Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. I was intrigued. Gorbachev was all over the news in 1989 as Westerners tried to decipher whether his startling reforms would really change the one-party Communist state. But Gorbachev refused interviews with print journalists.

The more I thought about reporting on the convulsions in the Soviet Union, the more fired up I got. The real draw was studying a formerly rock-solid Communist boss whose persona had already been “transformed” two or three times, according to my sources at the CIA. As Gorbachev tried to lead his “revolution from the top down,” he would surely go through another mind-bending change.

On my first trip in the summer of 1989, I discovered that nothing could be done in the Soviet Union without a “connection,” meaning a fixer. For starters, there were no phone books. Every call had to be preceded by an introduction. Using my wretched Berlitz Russian, I hired one of the new mercenary entrepreneurs as my translator. Young Sergei appeared, miraculously, with just the part I needed to make my portable printer work on Russian current. I was in good hands.

One evening I entertained some writer friends for dinner, including the novelist Anatoly Pristavkin. When his English-speaking wife, Marina, began to translate for her husband, Sergei butted in aggressively.

“I will translate,” he demanded with a rap of fingers on the table.

The next time I had dinner with the Pristavkins, it was alone.

“Gail, you must know something,” they said. “Sergei is KGB.”

“What gave you the clue?” I asked, astonished.

Marina explained in a typically Russian way. “His fat face, his perfect English, his sudden appearance in your life with everything you need—why?” I explained that an American woman associated with our embassy recommended him. Marina's eyebrows shot up. “You must think this way—in probabilities. One out of every three Soviets is connected to the KGB. So why not Sergei?”

At least, I hoped, my driver was okay. Oleg was a great fixer. His parents were highly cultured members of the Moscow intelligentsia, but Oleg had the sunken-cheeked, wolfish look of many young Soviets. He was utterly amoral. Shortly after I returned home from that extended stay in the Soviet Union, I learned that my every move and contact had indeed been reported to the KGB. From what they learned about me, I deduced that the informer was not Sergei, my translator. It was Oleg.

The day before my next trip, I was waiting on tenterhooks for my visa. Suddenly a fax came in from Moscow! I dived for the machine, expecting it to be from the inner sanctum of the Kremlin.

“You bring me another Sharp Wizard. I know your arrival time. I meet you at airport. OLEG.”

Amazing. People didn't have phones. But a twenty-six-year-old black marketer could fax me his extortion order for a computer worth $350. On my next trip, I managed to evade Oleg at the airport. He was outraged. When I didn't respond to his phone calls, he chased me down the street. He finally had the audacity to lure the wife of a top diplomat out of the U.S. Embassy compound. On the street, the young thug raged at her about my having shortchanged him and threatened that the Americans wouldn't get away with this. It was a stunning display of the power of the new Russian “mafia” born in the vacuum between state power and dollar power.

I was getting nowhere in finding a fixer. Just then, Clay called to tell me to jump on a plane. We were invited to a dinner in New York by Mort Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of
U.S. News and World Report
, who could introduce me to a real Russian poo-bah. Nikolai Shishlin was a consultant to the Central Committee, the ruling body of the Soviet Communist Party. I made my case for the importance of a character portrait of Gorbachev. Shishlin was in favor: “Perhaps in six months or a year I can talk him into such an approach.”

“Wonderful!” I pretended, whereupon Shishlin peered over his thick glasses with a sardonic smile and added: “If nothing happens.”

What happened, of course, was the collapse of the Soviet Union's Iron Curtain, culminating in November 1989 in the teardown of the Berlin Wall and the hurtling exodus of East Germans out of Communist confinement. I developed the habit of rising well before six every morning to phone Moscow before the measly thirty-eight trunk lines that serviced the entire country overloaded for the day. There were no answering machines, no secretaries, just the hit-or-miss chance one might catch the fixer at his office. When I would be just about to scream, the voice of this quintessential apparatchik would suddenly answer.

“Da.”

“Nikolai?”

“That's me.” Sound of a whipped dog.

Shishlin would never say no. Always “Just now it is not possible.” Or “Call me back at four.” With a promise from Shishlin that I might go to Gorbachev's home village, I flew to Russia in September. Nobody knew anything about my “permission” from the top. Over and over again, I was able to talk my way through barriers and interview his teachers, friends, his first girlfriend, and on up to the party apparatchiks who were dying to learn something personal about the top dog. Soviets appreciated a foreign writer who wasn't afraid of flouting the rules.

To go to Privolnoye, Gorbachev's village, was a journey back in time to Chekhov's Russia. In the country people, one could see the blows of history in their twisted bodies and pained eyes. In the eight precious hours allotted to me in Gorbachev's village, what impressed me the most was how young Misha had survived. He was born into the first year of a Stalin-made famine that killed thirty thousand people. If the Gorbachev family of free farmers had not swung over early to the Communist government's side, earning the scant privileges of local officialdom, they would not have been able to keep the baby Misha alive.

Tina Brown was bold enough to put my first Gorbachev story on the cover of the February 1990 issue: “Red Star: The Man Who Changed the World.” For readers of
Vanity Fair
to see the face of a bearish old man was a startling departure from the usual come-hither Hollywood starlet, but Tina was thrilled. “That was a real breakthrough for us; nobody ever wrote a thing about Russian leaders' private lives.” The story got tremendous buzz.

I asked Shishlin if President Gorbachev had read my piece in
Vanity Fair
and if he had any reaction. He said, “I think he rather enjoyed it.”