Journalist and incisive interviewer who could coax and charm even the most reluctant of subjects
It is hard to pinpoint quite what made Sally Vincent such a great interviewer. Nevertheless, even the most media-shy of subjects would succumb. An interview with Ralph Steadman blossomed into an enduring friendship. An interview with George Clooney somehow prompted him to nick the restaurant's cutlery and hide it in her handbag. An interview with Benicio del Toro became an epic drinking bender. A potentially prickly interview with Martin Amis, just at the time when his huge advance for The Information, and reputedly gigantic dental bill, had made him something of a press hate-figure, became warm, open and expansive, not least because Sally was able to reveal that she remembered him as a little boy, when she had been friendly with his mother, Hilly Kilmarnock. Amis, in turn, remembered Sally. Of course.
Sally, who has died aged 77, was a journalist of great talent, and a woman of formidable intellect, toughness and glamour. She was born in Chelsea, London. Her father, Albert Webb, was a detective inspector at Scotland Yard. Her mother was related to the actor Dame Ellen Terry. Sally was a girl who in those days no one knew quite what to do with. Effortlessly bright, she went to the Grey Coat Hospital school for girls, competed for London in athletics and was an accomplished singer.
Nevertheless, back then, it was rare for girls to go to university, even ambitious girls such as Sally. As a teenager she started working for a local newspaper in Wembley, where she found that preconceived ideas about subjects suitable for coverage by women were no less prescriptive than they had been at school.
But the world was changing, and London was starting to swing. With the launch of Nova magazine, in 1965, Sally got her break. It aimed to be a "new kind of magazine for a new kind of woman" and she became both a regular contributor and a regular also at the media watering hole the Coach and Horses, where she held court alongside her friend the writer Jeffrey Bernard. She was a "face" on the scene, and it was quite a face. Sally was extremely beautiful – tall, slender, with impossibly sculpted cheekbones and great, brown penetrating eyes. A large painting of herself, seated, in an ochre glow, hung in the hallway of her Islington home, a glorious testament to her sharp, distinctive loveliness.
Marrying and quickly divorcing an advertising copywriter, Michael Vincent, in the 1960s, Sally embarked on an affair with the radical psychiatrist RD Laing. He persuaded her to take part in one of his rebirthing workshops, concluding despairingly that Sally appeared to be one of the few people who was perfectly capable of rebirthing herself.
As Nova declined amid financial difficulties, Sally joined the staff of the Daily Mirror. There, ideas about the sort of subjects women should cover were still pretty fixed, and she did a beauty column for the paper, then a cookery column – she was a great cook.
The cookery column was eventually taken over by Delia Smith, as Sally began winning her battle to write less gender-specific pieces, having been hired at the Daily Express – then in its pomp, by Denis Hackett, a former editor of Nova. She was witty and mordant, qualities displayed in many articles for Punch magazine.
Yet, even by 1992, when I first met Sally, the national press was still strongly male-dominated. Having been appointed the first female editor of the Weekend Guardian, I was keen to increase the scant number of female bylines, and contacted Sally, who was then working for the Sunday Times. A promise of the pick of interview subjects, and total freedom to write pieces as long as she wanted, from whatever angle she saw fit, and with no changes to her copy without permission, managed to do the trick. It was a pretty good deal, since Sally's copy was always perfect anyway.
Quite why Sally was such a searching interlocutor, I don't fully understand. I only know that she was. Partly, it was simply that she was intimidated by no one. Partly, it was just hard work. Sally would always turn up ultra-fully prepared, her research exhaustive, her analysis of the available clues forensic. I like to think there was perhaps a genetic element. Her father, after all, had coaxed a full confession from a notorious serial killer of the 1940s, John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer, who was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in 1949.
Above all though, Sally was simply a natural as a writer, her minute observation and ability to ask the right question easily matched by her way with a phrase. Derek Jacobi was, on first sight, "as inscrutable as a parked Skoda". Nigella Lawson seemed preternaturally perfect until Sally had the inspired idea of asking to inspect the inside of her handbag. "Now there's a proper disgrace. Not only is it a slutty mess of used tissues, tinchy purselets and Biros and lippies and bits of biscuit, but there are cigarettes, loose, scruffy fags, all stained and bent and mungy in there."
Nearly a decade on, I'm all the more certain that that's as deep a delve into Lawson's private existence as was ever necessary or kind. Sally's piece remains an object lesson in How To Interview.
• Sally Vincent, journalist, born 22 April 1937; died 26 December 2013
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