THERE is a portrait of Sir David Frost as a relatively young man hanging in the reception area outside his Kensington office. Frost would have been in his 30s when he sat for the artist John Bratby some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. By then he was already a veteran of television, after a decade of hosting one popular show after another – That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report, The Frost Programme – and his ubiquity probably appealed to Bratby, a so-called “kitchen sink” realist, best known for his pictures of everyday people and common household items (including kitchen sinks).
In the painting, Frost seems more object than subject, his familiar face, suit, and cross-legged pose rendered mild, or even dull, by contrast to the bright surrounding colours. Which might say as much about the man and his life as the photographs on display elsewhere in the room, of Frost with Putin, Frost with Mandela, Frost walking and talking between Blair and Clinton on what looks like the White House lawn.
“The pleasure it gives, interviewing fascinating and powerful people,” Frost will tell me later, “is simply the wonderment of thinking how lucky I am to be having a conversation with someone whom everyone would love to meet. And getting paid for it.” This is, in fact, his humble answer to the question I was saving for last: Does Sir David Frost believe that the greatness of others has somehow rubbed off on him? It is obvious from the start that I will never get Frost the way Frost got Richard Nixon. He is older now than Nixon was when they met for a sequence of increasingly momentous broadcast interviews in March and April of 1977, during which Frost slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly, brought the former US president as close as he would ever come to contrition for his role in the Watergate scandal. Frost himself is surely not as tricky an interviewee, and at the age of 68 – he’ll be 69 next month – appears a little hard of hearing, a bit infirm around the hands.
But there is no telling how much he has learned about how not to give oneself away. He invites me to call him David (no “sir”), and to sit down beside him on the lounge suite in his office, which is stacked with books and papers and more photos of Frost with world leaders. I ask if decades of experience have made him more inclined to let interviewers get what they want – “the truth”, as he puts it in his latest book, Frost/Nixon, a first-hand account of the events recently fictionalised in Peter Morgan’s play of the same name – or more practiced at denying them. “I guess both is true really,” says Frost. “As an interviewer, you ought to be more skilled in doing a graceful dance around a question if you want to, but then on the other hand you are conscious that if you were doing the interviewing, you would want something more interesting. I do find that being interviewed is a great sharpener-upper for the next time I’m on the other side. I’m not sure if I become the poacher or the gamekeeper in that analogy. I remember once … ” He goes on to tell a story about a Birmingham radio journalist who asked him questions from a prepared list without listening to his answers, and didn’t even notice when Frost claimed to have married “the Pope’s second wife”.
Many of Frost’s responses begin or end in a similar way this afternoon, with an “I remember”, followed by a diverting but not especially revealing anecdote. We are nominally here to talk about The Frost Report Is Back – a special one-off retrospective on that short-lived yet undeniably influential sketch show, to be screened by the BBC on Easter Monday – but he spends almost as long on the subject of the “very good parties” thrown after both original series of The Frost Report were broadcast (live) in 1966 and 1967. “The first was at Battersea Funfair, the second was at White City, where we had a kind of mock Olympics … ” Perhaps it’s only natural for an old raconteur to hold forth like this, but it might also be tactical. Either way, Frost is infinitely more likely to joke about the Pope’s wives than discuss either of his own. (John Paul II, incidentally, was one of the few major players in modern history to die before consenting to be interviewed by David Frost. Fidel Castro may also soon escape him forever, but typically, Frost maintains that “the game isn’t over yet”.)
For over 25 years, he has been married to Lady Carina Fitzalon-Howard, daughter of the 17th Duke of Norfolk, mother of his three grown sons, and co-host of his famously glamorous summer garden parties at their house in Chelsea. She suffered a near-fatal overdose in 2003, while Frost was away interviewing George W Bush, which he does not talk about except to say it was an accident. Before they met, he was briefly and unhappily married to Peter Sellers’s widow Lynne Frederick, who later committed suicide. And before that, he was twice effectively jilted at the altar, first by the model Karen Graham, then by the actress Diahann Carroll – inevitable consequences, Frost has said, of the “charmed life” he believed he was living at the time, when he was also making highly-rated programmes in America and Australia, and had “a girl in every airport”. He refuses to consider this his prime. “I don’t spend much time on nostalgia,” he says.
The conversation so far has suggested otherwise, and the longer it continues, the more Frost demonstrates a flippant sort of ambivalence to his personal and professional history. Ask how he has changed over the years, and he’ll say that he still hates garlic, but now writes this on dinner party invitations in the space provided for noting special dietary requirements. Ask about his favourite of the interviews he’s done – Nixon? The Beatles? The exiled Shah of Iran? – and he’ll tell you what he tells everybody: “I always say ‘the next one’. Because it’s true. That’s what I focus on.” Ask why, exactly, The Frost Report Is Back, and the short answer is that it’s still “very very funny”.
The new show will loosely coincide with the 40th anniversary of the original sketches winning the Golden Rose of Montreaux, and a season of BBC programmes about TV entertainers of the 1960s, but Frost believes no other reason is needed to repeat them. “They’re amazingly timeless,” says Frost. “If anything, the writing is more skilful than sketches today. And so much came out of them, in terms of the family tree of comedy. The Two Ronnies [Corbett and Barker] had never worked together before The Frost Report. Neither had John Cleese and Graham Chapman. [The show featured all five English members of what would become the Monty Python team.] Tim Brooke-Taylor went on to The Goodies. And [chief writer] Tony Jay of course, did Yes, Minister.”
The Frost Report Is Back contains commentary from some of those names. Barry Cryer, who wrote for the original programme, describes it as a “sort of This Is Your Life, David Frost”, and Frost himself as “a practising catalyst”. “David has always been brilliant at bringing people together and getting the best out of them,” says Cryer, when contacted for the purposes of this article. “I owe him a lot.” Actress Sheila Steafel was one of the very few women to appear on The Frost Report. Unlike some in her profession, she never “fancied” Frost at the time.
“Although, let’s be honest, he never fancied me either,” she says. “We were never really friends, he was more of a co-worker.” Steafel makes more or less the same point as Cryer, but differently, and tellingly: “He was wonderful at manipulating people, and hoovering up their good ideas.” Does she mean that he inspired them, or robbed them? “I suspect that there was an element of both, which is what you might expect from someone as ambitious and intelligent as David.”
Frost is fond of mentioning his modest beginnings, often by way of contrasting them to the rarer atmospheres in which he has since found himself. In his new book about the Nixon interviews, he writes of wanting “to pinch myself that a Methodist minister’s son from Beccles, Suffolk, was really laying down conditions … for the former leader of the western world”. His production company is named Paradine after his father, the Reverend WJ Paradine Frost, who was tolerant of his irreligious lifestyle choices, and more casual, less denominational belief in God.
“Yeah,” he says, to the question of whether he prays, shrugging in a way that Tony Blair conspicuously did not when asked, on live TV, if he and George W Bush had done so together. “I always have.” Most of Paradine’s actual productions, however, have been named after the son. The David Frost Show. David Frost Presents. The David Frost Revue. When the BBC cancelled Breakfast With Frost in 2005 – the corporation appears keener to invest in his past than his present or future – he adapted by signing a contract with Al Jazeera’s English-language channel for a live talk show called Frost All Over The World, on which he now enjoys “full editorial control” and the freedom to pursue interviews with such powerful figures as Condoleezza Rice.
(And speaking of “figures”, Frost tells me Rice’s is “fabulous”, drawing my attention to her legs in a photo taken during that broadcast.) The Frost Report was the first of such titles, and its return provides occasion to wonder how much credit he can and does take for it. Frost calls himself nothing more or less than “the originator” of that show.
Others have called him far worse, most memorably Peter Cook, who declared Frost “the bubonic plagarist”, after they both graduated from Cambridge University, and its renowned Footlights Dramatic Club, to find themselves on the comedy circuit doing roughly the same impersonation of prime minister Harold MacMillan. Alan Bennett worked with Cook on the scripts for That Was The Week That Was – thereby helping to make Frost, as host, a TV star at the age of 23 – and said at Cook’s memorial service that his biggest regret in life was “saving David Frost from drowning in 1963”. The man himself has long since laughed all of this off. While The Frost Report is now regarded as groundbreaking satire, and Frost sometimes referred to as “the godfather of satire”, he seems to lack the gift for hostility that defines a true satirist, in the Swiftian sense of the word.
“We actually tried to avoid that word when we did That Was The Week That Was,” he says, “because it had such a penumbra of meanings around it. We preferred to use ‘irreverence’. And The Frost Report was saying important things about education and wealth creation and and the class system, but perhaps it wasn’t truly political satire in its most savage form. Most of the people on programme were part-time satirists, if you like. We were sincere, but we didn’t feel we had to expose the rottenness of society 24 hours a day, or destroy the entire edifice.”
Frost has never voted. Much is made of this in the stage drama Frost/Nixon, which introduces what he calls “the Frost character” (played by Michael Sheen in the original 2006 production at London’s Donmar Warehouse, and in Ron Howard’s forthcoming film version) as “a man with no political convictions”. “That makes it sound like I am completely uninterested. The reverse is true. I am passionately interested. I just don’t vote.” Frost owns the rights to his Nixon interviews, but ceded them to playwright Peter Morgan, along with full editorial control of the material. He admires the result, but says that “some of the fictionalisations I could do without”.
“I think it’s a brilliant portrait of Nixon, but not so relevant to me. The stuff about both of us being little men with big chips on our shoulders, both of us feeling that ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ are, would get us in the end, it doesn’t strike a chord with me. I don’t recognise it. I told Peter these things, and he would just sort of sigh patiently and say ‘David, it’s a play, not a documentary’.”
To hear Frost tell it, he does have political convictions, but it has never been in his professional interest to make them public. “Yes. I have always thought of myself as independent. The first election I was old enough to participate in was 1964 [the age of majority was then 21, and Frost turned 24 that year], but That Was The Week That Was had started in 1962, so I already knew I was going to spend my life at least referring to politics in interviews, or satire, or both, and I didn’t want anyone to be able to label me one way or another.”
This independence allowed him to make his name on liberal-minded television shows – Frost fondly remembers Edward Heath saying That Was The Week That Was represented “the moment when the rot set in … the end of deference” – while becoming comfortable within the conservative establishment those programmes poked fun at. He made millions, and became friends with Prince Charles, as well as Charles’s late wife, who was godmother to his youngest son George. He received his knighthood from John Major in the early 1990s. Edward Heath, he notes, “developed a wonderful sense of humour late in life”, which Frost ascribes to the fall of Margaret Thatcher (and Thatcher, for her part, described Frost as “a giant in his field”). But as far as he can tell, he remains the same man he ever was.
“At least that’s what people tell me,” he says. “‘David, you haven’t changed.’ Maybe they’re just being polite, and they say that to everyone. But through the years I have always felt like a reformer. Some of my views have matured, or faded, with time. Abortion, for example is a more complicated decision than I thought when I was young. On other things, like the death penalty, I have always held the same position. [He opposes it, and goes into some detail as to why.] And I still feel very strongly that television should be lifting the audience up.”
Sir David Frost has looked into the eyes of the most powerful people in the world, and seen the best in them. Even Nixon, and George W Bush, whom he says may not be the man his father was – Frost describes George Snr as “one of the most impressive and decent men I’ve ever met” – but has also got a “very good sense of humour”. Many of these interviewees have since died violently.
John Lennon, Indira Ghandi, Yitzak Rabin, Benazir Bhutto … I wonder what he gained from his short time with them, besides money, and fame, and a reputation. What insights of his own does he offer? How would he answer the question he once put to Robert Kennedy (and to Richard Nixon, for that matter) during the US presidential campaign of 1968, not long before Kennedy was assassinated: At root, what would you say that people are on Earth for? Frost hesitiates.
“I think … I would say … I would quote Robert Kennedy. ‘We are here to make a contribution to those less blessed’.” And has he made such a contribution? Frost shrugs again, and points up through the skylight of Paradine Productions. “That’s for someone else to say.”
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