Beyond Bridget

By Rachel Cooke - The Daily Telegraph, April 7, 2001 

Helen Fielding, the creator of Bridget Jones, has swapped west London for west Hollywood, given up cigarettes if not the Chardonnay and she's no longer a Singleton. So are Bridget Jones's wildest days well and truly over? 

For the past 48 hours, the rain has been coming down over Los Angeles by the bucketful. The city, crouching disconsolately in the gloom, is awash; there are landslides in Malibu, flood warnings in Santa Monica. But, as a small, smiling blonde draws up outside the Mondrian Hotel in her navy BMW, the storm clouds briefly part and the palm trees and billboards below are bathed in brilliant sunshine. It is as if some forward-thinking backstage technician has switched on a judiciously aimed spotlight. That Helen Fielding, I think; she has all the luck.

Fielding hops out of the car, hands her keys to the parking valet and clicks across the hotel's gleaming lobby. She is wearing high-heeled leather boots, a short black skirt and sweater and a very chic red belted macintosh; in her hand is a pair of sunglasses. She looks like a million dollars - which is, it must be said, a mere fraction of what she is worth these days - happy and sexy and lightly tanned. Oooh, goody, as her alter-ego, Bridget Jones, might say.

Of course, for those who remain convinced that Fielding and her fictional creation are one and the same, it is somewhat bewildering that she should have swapped her maisonette in swinging Notting Hill for a house in chi-chi West Hollywood. Poor Bridget's addictions to Chardonnay and Silk Cut made her a national heroine in 33 countries. Here in squeaky-clean LA, however, there is a support group for every addiction. The coffee is decaffeinated, the milk made from organic soya and everyone goes to bed early.

'But it's so gorgeous in the summer,' says Fielding, settling into one of the hotel's bulky white sofas to drink her cappuccino. 'I do like it.' OK, so she gave up smoking at Christmas but she is convinced her resolve will soon fail - and anyway, as she is the first to point out, not even an 11-hour flight to the other side of the world can shake off the ghost of Bridget, whose adventures, you will recall, almost invariably end in disaster. 'I'd had my house here for six weeks when it started to rain. The ceiling fell in and I spent 12 weeks with a huge hole in the roof. It's all fur coat and no knickers, you see. It may look like a glamorous Hollywood home, with a swimming-pool and a cosy fire, but things keep going wrong. The other day, I heard a great big bang. The cooker had exploded.'

Three years ago Fielding began spending time in Los Angeles; it was usually the last stop on her American book tours, so she tended to stay on for a few weeks to rest. She liked the warm weather and the fact that, owing to the eight-hour time difference, people in Britain could telephone her only between certain hours. As a result, she wrote the second Bridget book, The Edge of Reason, in a hotel room in the city - 'I was so late, I literally finished it four weeks before it arrived in the shops'.

And that, she says, is why she never managed to write the script of the long-awaited film of Bridget Jones's Diary. It is finally released next week, is directed by Fielding's friend, Sharon Maguire - on whom Shazzer was based in the novels - and stars the Texan actress Renée Zellweger as the hapless heroine.

While the film was in production, however, several rumours did the rounds regarding Fielding's involvement; according to the gossips, she either couldn't or wouldn't finish the script, and it was left to her old friend (and former boyfriend) Richard Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, to finish. She was also said to be unhappy about the casting of Zellweger as Bridget; depending on to whom you listened, Fielding wanted an unknown actress, or a down-to-earth British star such as Kate Winslet.

Press her now and you get careful, slightly hesitant answers. 'I did work on the script before the production got going, but it was a hard book to adapt because so much goes on inside Bridget's head,' she says, in her teasing Yorkshire whisper. 'Then I was busy writing the second novel, which the publishers were, needless to say, very keen to have. I had to step back. Either you've got to be completely involved or not at all - you can't start complaining about things if you're not there, putting the work in. Besides, Richard and I were always in touch.' She is credited as a writer (along with Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis) and executive producer on the film.

So what does she think of the finished result? 'Oh, I am the worst possible person to ask about it. You see, I know who these people are and where they live. So far, though, people seem to like it. . . fingers crossed.'

And Zellweger? 'Well, she can do the English accent, and she has this great ability to look both very beautiful and very ordinary. . . You've got to remember that I've been talking about Bridget for five years, and for four of those years all anyone has asked me is, "Who do you want to play her?"

'I wasn't in charge of the casting, so whatever answer I gave was going to be quite political. I used to make jokes about having seen the perfect girl in the gym; she was reading a magazine as she sat on an exercise bike, making no effort whatsoever to pedal. It was a way of deflecting the discussion so we could talk about something else.'

Fielding's rise to fame and fortune on the back of Bridget Jones's Diary, one of the publishing sensations of the past 10 years, has been swift and remarkable, and she still has the look of a girl who has to pinch herself at least seven times a day. In the mid-Nineties, when she was working as a freelance journalist, she was asked to write a column about her life as a single girl for the Independent (the column moved to the The Telegraph in 1997). Originally Fielding thought the idea far too exposing - she is not the kind of woman who is prepared to dish up every detail of her private life - but liked the idea of earning some extra money. So she invented Bridget Jones.

'I used to ask, "How's that column coming along?"' says her mother, Nellie Fielding. 'And she would say, "Oh, Mum, it's nothing. They'll drop it in a few weeks." So we were all a bit surprised when Bridget Jones went on to be the book that made her name.'

Fielding had already published one fairly unsuccessful novel, Cause Celeb, in 1994, and was under contract to deliver another. 'I was writing a book about cultural divides in the Caribbean,' she says. 'It really was quite dull. Then, a few months after I started writing the column, my editor asked me how the novel was going, so I told her. She said, "Why don't you turn Bridget into a book?" And I thought, well, great, that gets me off the hook. I certainly never thought anyone would read it.'

But read it they did. Women everywhere fell for Bridget, a thirtysomething media type with a disastrous love life, a desperate desire for slim thighs and a passionate loathing of Smug Marrieds. They loved her obsessions - buying Scratchcards and dialling 1471 - and they relished the new, celebratory term for the modern spinster: the Singleton.

The book, which has now sold 1.75 million copies in Britain alone, reigned supreme at the top of the world's bestseller charts long after publication - even in hard-to-crack America - and she soon sold the film rights. 'She's the biggest female English language writer since, well. . . I don't know when,' says Peter Straus, who is editor-in-chief at Picador and commissioned the book. 'Only two Americans, John Grisham and Thomas Harris, sell better. She generates a huge profit for this company.'

Suddenly, Fielding found she had rather a lot of money sitting in the bank. 'For a long time after Bridget Jones began selling, I didn't know quite what to do,' she says. 'I'd never been poor exactly, but I'd never had any money, either. Then, all of a sudden, I didn't have to worry about the future any more. Unfortunately, I had no sense of scale. I suppose I thought that if I went on a spending spree it might somehow run out. So, to start with, I kept my life exactly the same: same car, same friends, same routine. I bought my house in Los Angeles a year ago, and that was the first thing I did that made a real difference to my life. I still wake up every morning and think, "Oh, my God!"' When she first went to Los Angeles, she knew only a couple of people in the city, although admittedly one of these was the man who is now her boyfriend, Kevin Curran. An American whom she met on a book tour, he writes for The Simpsons. Yes, Fielding is no longer a Singleton. She will not say whether they live together but he is, she confides, 'lovely, very funny and sweet'.

Since arriving, however, she has gathered a new group of friends; a leading light is Helena Bonham Carter, living on Fielding's street while she films the remake of Planet of the Apes. 'I do miss my girlfriends in London. It takes quite a long time to find nice new friends, especially at a more advanced age.' (Fielding has now turned 40, a birthday she celebrated on a beach with a bonfire and a bottle of wine.)

What she really loves about Los Angeles, though, is the outdoor life.

'I like walking, riding and, just like Bridget, mini-breaking. It's mini-break heaven here; you've got the desert and the mountains. But also everyone is trying to make it, so you don't have that feeling you get in London of being very aware of people's backgrounds. It's very transient, and that gives it a real energy.' Ironically, perhaps, the Hollywood Hills also afford Fielding a much greater sense of privacy than she had in post-Bridget London. There are real celebrities here, after all - 'It's like being on safari,' says Fielding. 'I saw Robert Downey Jr the other day' - so no one is particularly interested in what she gets up to. Does this mean life in London was becoming oppressive?

'Well, it would be pretty churlish to complain about being successful,' she says. 'I had quite a struggle to get going as a journalist, so it was lovely to have people returning my calls. But Bridget has been sold to so many countries; there are a lot of people wanting answers all the time. And if you are a writer, you need a bit of peace and quiet to work. It's a bit like running a business and that's something I'm not very well equipped to do. So I have learnt to put a fence up around myself.'

Helen Fielding was born in Morley, West Yorkshire. Her father was a mill manager, her mother stayed at home and brought up the couple's four children. Helen attended an all-girls direct grant school in Wakefield, then went to Oxford to read English. There, she began writing a calorie-obsessed diary (the manuscript of which later helped inspire the style of Bridget Jones) and met Curtis - he fell for her when she appeared as Marlene Dietrich in a college play - and another close friend, comedian Rowan Atkinson. After university, she joined the BBC, making documentaries for Comic Relief in Africa. She eventually left to work in newspapers because, she says, she is no good at bossing other people around. Pre-Bridget, she had a small pad in Primrose Hill, north London; post Bridget, she bought an airy, high-ceilinged place in Notting Hill, all pale walls and wooden floors - a home she still owns.

She has an older sister who is a piano teacher, and two younger brothers; one is a British Airways pilot, the other works for a drug company. They are a close family - and not the slightest bit interested in whether or not she has a swanky house or a swimming-pool. 'They all have a good sense of humour,' she says. 'The running gag is that I have become very grand. My brothers tease me a lot, especially the one who's a pilot. I once turned up at the airport check-in desk and was told there was a special notice by my name. I got all excited, thinking he had arranged an upgrade. Then the woman said, "Do you want a wheelchair?" What the note actually said was "Elderly writer, please assist".'

But has she become grand? Her mother, another Singleton (Fielding's father died in a car crash 17 years ago) who lives in Holmfirth, insists she is as unassuming and easygoing as ever. 'She hasn't changed at all; she never will. She's just great fun. But yes, her brothers do tease her. Richard will call her and say, "Hello, ugly." '

Having worked in television herself, Fielding is all too aware of the fact that people can become monsters at the merest sniff of fame. For this reason, she says, she was determined not to let her friends think she had changed. She is careful about giving out her telephone number and dislikes having her photograph taken, but that seems to be the extent of her prima donna activities. Neither is she about to splash out huge sums on designer frocks. 'Oh, I'm terrible,' she says. 'So Yorkshire. I am still horrified by the thought of spending a lot of money, although it is lovely to do glam occasionally - even if you are only going to the Four Seasons for a drink. And it's nice to treat your family. When my mum came out, we went round behaving like a pair of lucky bitches.'

So has she become an LA-style high-maintenance woman? 'Not really. There are girls here who have no bottoms, huge artificial tits and wear copious amounts of lip liner; they're gentle creatures who shop and go to exercise classes. But they really are a race apart. I have been to a couple of spas, though. At one, the woman next to me took her sunglasses off and - I swear - one of her eyes was about an inch higher than the other.'

The big question is, what happens to Bridget now? There are some who say she has become a burden - Sherlock Holmes to Fielding's Conan Doyle. Is she tempted to do away with her hopeless heroine so she can get on with doing something completely different?

'If you mean do I have Booker Prize fantasies, the answer is yes, obviously. I am as shallow as a puddle. I've been reading lots of classics like Madame Bovary and The Grapes of Wrath, and I'd like to do something on a broader scale. I did want to write about LA but, so far, the next book seems be about Yorkshire. I would never say never as far as Bridget goes - if a situation came up for her that would be funny, I might write it.'

In the meantime, she has recently written a slim volume, entitled Bridget Jones's Guide to Life, in aid of Comic Relief; it is full of handy Bridget-style hints on how to keep house (shove your clothes under the bed if someone important is coming round).

She has also been on a screenwriting course. Whether she ever will write a movie script remains to be seen but it has at least helped her realise the importance of conflict and antagonism in a story. 'For Bridget, I pinched my plots from Jane Austen, so it will be quite a challenge to make up my own.'

Swimming-pools aside, the major legacy of Bridget, she says, is that people really have stopped asking her when she is going to get married.

'I think that's fantastic. For me and for other women. The idea that women should have to justify being single is absolutely outrageous.' So does she feel, in spite of being happily attached, that she must keep faith with all the other Singletons out there? 'No, but I hope whether attached or married or whatever that I'd never be smug about it. You should never rub your own status in - you never know what's around the corner. As I've got older, I've become better at dealing with the ups and downs. But I'm still a terrible self-improver; I long to be more spiritual. The other day I even bought some crystals. I started feeling ridiculous before I even arrived home.'

The neuroses that bind Fielding to her most brilliant creation are, it seems, still merrily ticking away - irrespective of her swollen bank balance and glowing love life. Bridget will be back: just you wait and see.