Glamorama Ding Dong

It should've been a marriage made in literary heaven. The enfant terrible of British fiction interviewing his American counterpart for GQ, with as much free everything as they wanted.

"Irvine Welsh is a pig," says an obviously hung-over Bret Easton Ellis. "It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience and I didn't enjoy myself at all. I didn't find it charming. Irvine was just too drunk to deal with. Not to be a stuck-up prude or anything cos I drink quite a bit myself, but I don't enjoy having dinner with somebody who can't string a sentence together and is very physical with you.

"What happened last night," he continues, "is that we were supposed to do a photo shoot before I went off to read at Trinity College. Irvine had gone to the pub at four (to meet, it transpires, our very own Olaf Tyaransen) which was fine cos we could do it during the meal. Anyway, we came back, and he was loaded in an aggressive put-you-in-a-headlock sort of a way, singing old Irish songs. He kept telling me how much he loved me, and how much he admired my work, and you have to kind of go with them and their whole drunken rant. If you don't, it'll destroy their mood and you don't know where it'll end up if that happens. He was shouting so much that we nearly got thrown out of the Clarence Hotel restaurant, which is maybe what he wanted. I just can't be with that kind of drunk.

"Listen, I admire him. I think he's a fine writer and probably a really nice person, but last night was intolerable and I had to leave him. I found it ugly. My Dad was an alcoholic and there's nothing even remotely romantic about it."

If that confirms your suspicions of him being a whiny, self-obsessed Yank, think again. He may look like one of the designer-labelled WASPs that populate his books, but the 34-year-old is actually an absolute charmer who says "please", "thank you" and "I'm going to rip out your eyes and stick your balls in the sockets."

I threw in that line from American Psycho to remind you that as far as many of his fellow countrymen are concerned, he's the sickest motherfucker to ever plug in a word processor.

"The suit and tie definitely disarm people. A degenerate in ripped jeans and a t-shirt they can handle, but a degenerate who's better dressed than they are, boy, that really freaks 'em out!" he laughs mischievously. "It struck me recently, though, that they've kind of become my work clothes. I was too lazy to get dressed up yesterday and did a whole load of interviews wearing sweat-pants and a baseball cap and felt way more comfortable. I could be wrong but I got the impression a couple of the journalists felt a bit short-changed. Y'know, they were expecting the yuppie bastard from hell and there I was looking like a New York cab driver on their day off."

Ellis is full value for money today, dressed as he is in a dark blue number which has more than a touch of the hotshot young senators about it. As he says, though, they're his work clothes. Talking to him over a recuperative cup of coffee—"My head feels like it's got Marilyn Manson playing in it"—it becomes evident that the Californian is nowhere near as cocksure and confident as his prose. Indeed, he admits to the taking of anti-anxiety medication, and flinches when I quote a chatroom critique of American Psycho which suggests that, "There are better ways to take care of Bret Easton Ellis than just censoring him. I would prefer to see him skinned alive, a rat put up his rectum, and his genitals cut off and fried in a frying pan in front of not only a live audience but a video camera, as well. These videos can be sold as art and free expression."

"I bet you all the money you want that the person who wrote that wasn't a hick conservative, but a moronic liberal from some place like San Francisco," he spits. "There are so many worse books being published by—what do you guys call them?—tossers, that are dull and boring and get hailed as masterpieces because the right asses are being kissed. I swear to God, I don't know why I'm constantly hammered by the American press. It's just nuts."

Talking of which, Ellis has spent the eight years since American Psycho's publication dodging a spectacular array of nuts, fruitcakes and Irvine Welshes...

"Yeah, I've been stalked to the point where, on a couple of occasions, I've had to take out restraining orders. There's a particularly freaky guy who turned up a couple of times on my American tour, and got someone he knew to come to my reading the other day in Manchester. Letters and internet postings are one thing, but when they form a trans-Atlantic alliance with other nuts, I start worrying."

While no longer the carefully-constructed enigma he was when he started, Ellis remains a writer of whom much is written but little of real substance is known. The potted biog goes as follows:

Born in Los Angeles in 1964, he's brother to two sisters aged 30 and 31. Mainly pleased when he got packed off to private school—"It was better than watching my Dad drink"—he secured himself a place at Bennington College in Vermont where, still short of his 18th birthday, he wrote his first novel, Less Than Zero. Having already bedded classmates of both sexes, he developed a penchant for two boy, one girl threesomes. Towards the end of his last year at Bennington he suffered a breakdown which he promptly bounced back from to complete his second book, Rules Of Attraction. 1988 found Ellis embarking on what he calls "The Relationship", an eight-year affair with someone in politics which he chose to end but still mourns. The '90s have also seen him having to deal with the fallout from American Psycho, a thankfully short-lived heroin habit and the Teletubbies—who he really can't stand.

"Though it lacks the forced gaiety of Barney The Purple Dinosaur," he observed recently, "Teletubbies seems like a wicked satirist's idea of a horrible children's programme watched in a future concocted by Huxley, Orwell or Gibson."

"I never realised Tinky-Winky was gay, though, until Jerry Falwell pointed it out," Ellis says, referring to the TV evangelist's extraordinary outburst. "If I had, it would've made the show a lot more interesting for me. As it is, I received almost as much hate mail for my 'Teletubbies Are Evil' rant as I did American Psycho. People really love those little fellas!"

With BBC Children's Television unlikely to declare a Teletubby fatwa on him, his biggest crimes to date remain those involving Patrick Bateman and his stylish approach to serial killing.

"In retrospect the controversy over American Psycho has a narrative that makes sense, though at the time it totally confused me. There's an arc to the story—assistants at Simon & Schuster refusing to work on the book, leaks to the press, unfavourable articles months before publication, the top brass cancelling the book, the National Organisation of Women boycotting the book, death threats—that now seems very clear and delineated. Less Than Zero was controversial, I suppose, just because of how young I was, coupled with what was at the time graphic subject matter. I've never searched for controversy—it's not something I'm interested in generating while I'm working on a book. Though I have to admit that the controversy surrounding my work has probably in some way given me a broader readership. The fallout, however, is that I think there are people who take me a lot less seriously because of all the screaming about my work—screaming that tends to blur what my actual intentions as a writer are."

Having greatly moderated his drug intake, Ellis' idea of a cracking night out is, "Meeting up with a group of close friends in my favourite Manhattan hostelry which, funnily enough, is called the Temple Bar. We'll have a couple of drinks in this very bourgeois setting, and then move on to a restaurant which could be $20 or $200 a head. From there we'll go to a lounge for a couple more drinks, and then it's off to bed for a good night's sleep, usually alone.

"Whatever about recreational drugs, you certainly can't do them on a book tour," he continues. "As scrupulously clean as I've been over the past six weeks, I've got clumps of hair falling out every time I take a shower, my gums are bleeding and the skin's peeling off my face.

"Which isn't to say that I've become anti-drugs. The last time I did Ecstasy in the summer of 1996 it was fantastic, and if it wasn't for some very vigilant PR people I'd have taken some of the stuff that was offered to me at the Glamorama book party."

Does he subscribe to the philosophy that to write meaningfully about modern drugs, you have to sample them?

"Not at all. There's no way anyone's going to get me to knowingly take Ketamine, and I wasn't even a little bit tempted when a guy in London asked if I wanted a V&E—that's Viagra and Ecstasy taken in whatever order you feel is conducive to a fun night out.

"I did Ecstasy a lot in Bennington during the '80s when it wasn't illegal and came as a powder that you eat. Then, during the Less Than Zero book tour, I managed to overdose on it. My publishers in London had gotten me two tickets to go and see Starlight Express which, being a dumb American, I didn't realise was complete rubbish. I went with a guy who, again unknown to me, was a literary groupie and to liven things up at half-time he said, 'Hey, let's do a little Ecstasy.' He took out this huge tablet which I was meant to take a nibble from, but never having seen it in that form before, swallowed whole. Ten minutes later I had to grab hold of the roller ring that all of the skaters were going around on, and haul myself into the lobby. I honestly thought I was going to die, and since then have been very careful about what I take."

Ecstasy is just one of the Class As that gets shovelled down people's throats in Glamorama, Ellis' new novel which, due to the death of his father and the break up of "The Relationship", took a marathon eight years to complete. Narrated by a thoroughly unpleasant "It boy" called Victor Ward, it manages to namecheck everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Dweezil Zappa as it sinks its fangs into the New York celebrity circuit. There's also a Bond-esque interlude as, en route to London, Ward gets caught up in a spot of hijacking. Although written at the same breakneck speed, it's a far more complex affair than its predecessors.

"Well, to put it bluntly, it has a plot, or at least an identifiable narrative that my other novels don't have," he volunteers. "With the first three books, narrative wasn't something I thought about or was particularly interested in. As a satirist I was more interested in milieu and behaviour and skewering the times I lived in and identifying certain attitudes that I thought were prevalent in society. And though I'm still interested in all those things, I've started to realise that lives have a narrative shape to them that when you're younger, and haven't had that much experience, you don't see."

Needless to say, most of the American critics hate it, with the New York Times particularly scathing about its "horrible dialogue".

"The morons that I have to deal with back home," Ellis sighs. "To illustrate just how horrible it was, the Times critic quoted all these lines of dialogue which were actually lyrics from the pop songs Victor Ward throws out. This woman, who's one of the most respected literary people in the States, thought it was me who'd written, 'Baby, when you were young you said, "Live and let live". You know you did, you know you did'. Another example she gave was, 'Take your passion, make it happen'. How do you fucking contend with that?"

The musical references aren't only lyrical, with Blur, Happy Mondays, the Pet Shop Boys and Menswear all making it on to the Glamorama soundtrack. Is he really au fait with Johnny Dean's mob or does he have an 18-year-old Anglophile researcher working for him?

"I'm not sure I could hum you one of their songs but, yeah, I know who Menswear are and, no, I don't pay a student to go through the NME for me! I can't understand anyone not being interested in popular culture. The first thing I do when I'm in London is switch on your version of MTV. I've been fascinated with Robbie Williams, who I'd never heard of before but is obviously huge here. Judging by his 'Millennium' video, he's the kind of guy who'd be hanging out with the kids in Glamorama. Minimal talent, huge celebrity.

"The best thing I've come across this trip is The Divine Comedy. That 'National Express' song and video of theirs are so good, I'm going to have to buy their albums."

Not wanting to put any unnecessary strain on Mr. Ellis' Platinum Am-Ex Card, we've informed Neil Hannon's people of his interest and, well, let's just say he can return to Manhattan confident in the knowledge that there'll be a jiffy bag waiting for him. He's already told us what he thinks of one of their contributors—"Really, dinner with Irvine was the worst"—but is he in favour of the GQ-led importation of "lad culture" into the States?

"I don't know if you realise this but the version we get of GQ is way tamer than yours. You couldn't have a cover like the one they have in the UK this month.

"Where Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven are concerned, pictures of blood-splattered women in the bath are a no-no. GQ is huge in the States but that's because they've got lots of celebrity profiles and stunningly shot fashion spreads. There's none of the debauched humour that you get in British men's magazines, which is odd given how successful things like South Park have been.

"Am I a South Park fan? Well, let's just say that I wish Kenny had been around for Patrick Bateman to kill. It's a great show and in terms of my all-time favourites, second only to The Simpsons which is pure genius. Bart Simpson is way more subversive than Marilyn Manson will ever be."

While adamant that he never had an REO Speedwagon/Foreigner phase, Ellis admits to getting lumps in strange places when he hears the likes of "Can't Fight This Feeling" and "Cold As Ice".

"Getting nostalgic for records that you were indifferent to has got to be a mid-life crisis thing," he reasons. "Looking back at it, soft rock is one of the strangest concepts ever. Take a midget with a high voice, shoehorn them into a pair of spandex trousers and start counting the royalties. What's really scary is that there were worse than REO Speedwagon. Do you remember Air Supply? The foulest deed ever done by the American people was making 'I'm All Out Of Love' number one."

Ellis will want to avoid the Pacific Rim, then, where the airbrushed Aussies are mysteriously still stadium-sized.

"Revenge would be sweet all around if we got Irvine Welsh to fly over to interview them," he chuckles menacingly. "Actually, it's just struck me that GQ paying the author of Trainspotting to slobber over you in a restaurant that's owned by Bono, is as Glamorama as it gets. We'll definitely have to work that into the film!"