In 2010 I rang David Tang and asked him to write a piece on interior design. We had not met. His response was forthright and surprising: “No. Interior design is crap,” he bellowed down the phone. “‘OK, so write that,” I bellowed back.
We had lunch at his set in Albany off Piccadilly and decided on an interior design Agony Uncle column.
But the column’s subject matter kept drifting away from interior design to generalised name-dropping and anecdotes. Some readers loved it. Others hated it. Some FT staffers thought it funny. Others thought it unspeakable. Magic: a Marmite column!
One of the agonies of the column from the FT’s perspective was, sometimes, late delivery. David’s excuses, delivered in righteous tones, were in a class of their own:
“Tomorrow morning at 9GMT. It’s ancestral grave sweeping holiday today. I will be haunted if I work.”
“Kate Moss is making me have tattoos.”
“The Queen says you are making me work too hard.”
“I’m touring with The Stones.”
“I’m organising a fashion show on the Great Wall of China.”
“I’m shooting in Liechtenstein/at Blenheim/Balmoral.”
Threatening to cut his FT pay, the traditional recourse of editors to recalcitrant columnists had no effect. However much he declared that he was not rich (David’s claim that he travelled economy was based on the fact that private jets, borrowed or otherwise, have only one class), he had a range of businesses and also seemed to do pretty well at gambling.
“You know you are talking to someone who have [sic] lost two entire fortunes on the roulette and won 350 thousand grand on it last week, being a bit vulgar!” he emailed a couple of years ago. He probably meant £350,000 rather than £350,000,000, but even so . . .
The columns were worth waiting for. The jokes were both terrible and brilliant, (“ ‘Herro’ ”, I once said entering a room full of English boys. One of them stood up and said: ‘Eton actually!’ ”) but his copy took up a lot of the FT lawyer’s time and included a remarkable variety of factual inaccuracies. David regarded the FT’s concern with getting the facts right as eccentric and bourgeois.
When asked to be more careful he replied: “Careful? Since when has the progress of Man been ever resulted from that insular approach of safety?” When the FT HR team emailed David with an invitation (order) to attend FTHQ for health and safety instruction he replied: “I would rather have a red hot poker up my arse.”
Political correctness was as low on David’s list of priorities as health and safety which meant that chunks of his columns had to be scrapped, regularly. This usually led to a forthright exchange of views. I would then attempt to sack him. And vice versa.
Even his non-controversial columns had their problems. For instance:
Me: “What does ‘Come-in Banana’ mean? Nobody here has heard of it.”
DT: “OMG: you lot are really lowbrow! Carmina Burana the great coral [sic] work by carl orff (old spice ad!). Hence all the puns! Cor blimey einstein!”
Communication with David was sometimes baffling:
Me: “Would you be able to do a video series along the lines of ‘David Tang’s weird and wonderful world’?”
DT: “ ‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.”
We never made the video series and, given David’s social and travel schedules, it would have been a struggle.
He entertained constantly and generously but was a stickler when it came to timekeeping. When guests stayed 15 minutes beyond the specified time at his Rules for Modern Life book launch at Annabel’s last year, David bellowed to the assembled dukes, politicians and glitterati: “F*** off. The party’s over.”
David had dizzying travel arrangements, pinging between Hong Kong, Cuba, New York, Nice, Caracas, Shanghai, all while emailing jokes, gossip, pictures (DT with Mick Jagger/a motorbike lavatory in Taiwan/on the Getty yacht/Theresa May’s cleavage) and news about his latest conquests from royalty to showbiz to plutocrats. He was irrepressible until, in 2014, he came up with his most extreme “late copy” excuse yet: “I have just had a 10-hour op.”
That was the first I knew that he had liver cancer. I now know that he had been in pain for some time. He never complained. Instead he told me:
“I have been reading Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Liver’! Did you know he wrote one? Marvellous.”
With great difficulty, and with FT editor Lionel Barber’s help, I persuaded David to have a four-week rest from writing columns. He complained bitterly about his enforced holiday. Over the next few years he was in and out of hospital but hid the fact from me so that he could go on writing his column.
Three weeks ago, after David had told me he had been informed that he did not have long to live, I went to see him at the Royal Marsden hospital in London. We had agreed to write his obituary together. The original plan had been to write it in mid-September but, suddenly, the date had come forward. His voice was croaky, weak, terrible. I asked him to stop talking but he insisted: “It’s my physio. I have to speak.”
I said he should forget any thought of writing columns or appearing at the FT Weekend Festival on September 2. He did not make it but, at the time, David was defiant: “I will appear at the Festival even if I have to get there in this bed.”
“Anyway, look,” he said, pulling an iPad from the bedclothes. “This is the guest list for my party at the Dorchester on September 6. I want intimacy except I’ve booked the London Symphony Orchestra and Hélène Grimaud to play for one and three quarter hours. There will be no special hugging or saying goodbye. If you see me again fine. If not, fine.”
It is not fine.
Jane Owen is the editor of House & Home and deputy editor of FT Weekend
Illustration by James Ferguson
Letter in response to this article:
Tang’s act of kindness will always be remembered / From Rog Thomas
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