The Fry Chronicles (34 page)

There are compensations. You only have to write a play once and then you can sit back and let the money roll in, while the actors have to perform eight times a week for six months to earn their pay packets.

Hugh and I were
writer-performers
– we wrote the material that we performed. I could not decide whether this meant we had the best of both worlds or the worst. To this day I cannot be sure. It is obvious, however, that in terms of employment it doubles one’s opportunities. Whatever I lacked in physical attributes as a natural clown I seemed to make up for in gravitas, to use Hugh’s word. It seemed that people did have faith in my ability to write, although I had produced nothing up until that point except
Latin!
And, with Hugh, the material in
The Cellar Tapes
and the handful of
Alfresco
sketches that had made it through to transmission.

Four things now happened in a succession rapid enough to be called simultaneity and which served to bolster the self-esteem that the
Alfresco
experience was doing so much to undermine.

In the late summer of 1982 I was sent to meet a woman called Jilly Gutteridge and a man called Don Boyd. Boyd had produced Alan Clarke’s cinema version of
Scum
(the original 1977 BBC television production had been Mary Whitehoused off the screen) as well as Derek Jarman’s
Tempest
and Julien Temple’s
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
and he now planned to direct his first major feature film, which was to be called
Gossip
. He imagined a British compendium of
The Sweet Smell of Success
and
La Dolce Vita
infused with the spirit and manner of Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
. This was to be a film that would capture a new and horrible side to Thatcher’s Britain: the recently confident, arrogant, vulgar Sloaney world in which night-club narcissists, trust-fund trash and philistine druggie aristos cavorted with recently cherished icons of finance, fashion and celebrity. It was a soulless, squalid, valueless and trashy milieu that believed itself to be the stylish social summit at whose dazzling peaks the lower world gazed with breathless envy and admiration.

A script had been written by the brothers Michael and Stephen Tolkin. Although their screenplay had been set in Britain, Don felt that, as Americans, they had not quite captured the world of London ‘society’ such as it was in the early eighties and he was after someone who could rewrite it in an authentic English voice. Jilly Gutteridge, who was to be location manager and assistant producer, was instantly affectionate and charmingly enthusiastic about my talents, and I walked away from the meeting having been given the job of rewriting the script for the princely sum of £1,000. I had three weeks in which to do it. The part of the lead character, a
beau monde
gossip columnist, was to be played by Anne Louise Lambert. Anthony Higgins, who had starred opposite her in Peter Greenaway’s
The Draughtsman’s Contract
, would be the man with whom she falls in love and who would rescue her from the unworthy world she inhabits. Simon Callow and Gary Oldman were also cast. It was to be Oldman’s first film appearance.

I rewrote in a fever of excitement, and Don seemed pleased with my efforts. His preparations were well advanced for what I soon learnt was known as the ‘principal photography’. In the meanwhile, he suggested, I might enjoy a meeting with Michael Tolkin, who just happened to be in town. As one of the original writers he had read my anglicizing rewrites with great interest and might even have one or two valuable suggestions …

I assented to this idea, and Tolkin and I met in an Italian restaurant called the Villa Puccini which was just yards from the Draycott Place flat.

‘The Villa Puccini,’ said Kim. ‘Named, one must suppose, after the famous composer Villa-Lobos.’

The lunch was not destined to be the feast of reason and the flow of soul of which P. G. Wodehouse and Alexander Pope wrote so fondly. Tolkin was very disapproving of what I had done to his beloved story. He was outraged at my excision of a synagogue scene.

‘The focal point of the narrative. The pivot about which the entire movie revolves. The centrepiece. The keystone. The emotional heart. The whole picture is meaningless without that scene. There
is
no picture without it. You couldn’t
see
that?’

I tried as best I could to explain why I had felt it was wrong and unconvincing.

‘And as for your
ending
…’

I suspect he may have been right about my ending. As far as I recall I had Claire, the heroine, escape into the arms of a Cambridge don, which was neither very Fellini nor very Evelyn Waugh and in its own way was probably as sentimental as the synagogue scene. Nonetheless I attempted to defend it.

‘It is obvious,’ said Tolkin, ‘that we have nothing in common and no basis for further discussion.’ He left the restaurant before the
primi piatti
arrived. He has since had a highly successful writing career with credits that include
The Player
,
Deep Impact
and
Nine
. Maybe he was right. Maybe I had ruined
Gossip
with my cynical British resistance to the possibilities of emotional change and with my inept ending. In any event the film never got made. The story of its disaster is complicated but, I am happy to say, has nothing to do with my screenplay, good or bad as that may have been.

It seems that Don Boyd had been hoodwinked by two plausible characters who claimed to represent something they called the Martini Foundation. Rich with funds accrued from the sale of the vermouth business, this foundation wanted to branch out into film financing. The two promised that $20 million would be made available to Don for a whole slate of feature films. In the meantime he could finance
Gossip
by raising money against ‘certificates of deposit’ that were lodged in a bank in the Netherlands. For their investment the Martini people would receive 50 per cent of the profits and a £600,000 upfront fee.

Don set to work on the construction of a huge Andrew McAlpine-designed night-club set in Twickenham Studios, and filming began some time in late October, using money that had been advanced by a third party against the arrival of these certificates of deposit. Hugh Laurie, John Sessions and others had also been cast, and about a fifth of the whole movie had been committed to celluloid by the time the terrible truth emerged that there were no certificates of deposit, that those two plausible figures with their Mayfair flat and Cannes yacht had no connection with Martini Rosso or its money and that Don had been ruthlessly swindled. They imagined, one supposes, that they would get their £600,000 finder’s fee and skedaddle. Fortunately the whole house of cards collapsed before they could profit from their deception, but it was small consolation. The film collapsed. The technical unions and the acting union Equity demanded blood. Many of the crew and cast salaries, and many of the production costs had not yet been met (the Tolkins and I
had
been scrupulously paid as it happens) and all was ruin, recrimination and wrath. The upshot was that poor Don, one of the kindest and best of men, was effectively blacklisted and prevented from participating in film production for three years. Even that didn’t end it, for once Don managed to start up again the unions insisted he continue to pay over what negligible producing fees he did earn. By 1992 he was financially wiped out. If he had declared himself bankrupt the moment disaster had struck he might have saved his house and possessions. In fact he sold most of what he had to repay debts because he believed that to be the honourable course.

Don Boyd was ill-treated, cold-shouldered and bad-mouthed by many in the British film industry who blamed him for being either foolishly naive, or worse, being somehow implicated in the smoky business of the fraudulent Martini Foundation. Many wiser and better heads than his had advised him that the financing deal was sound and that he was right to proceed. It was a catastrophic error to go into production without a sight of these ‘certificates of deposit’, but so talented, idealistic and passionately committed a film-maker did not deserve the opprobrium and pariah status he was accorded for so
many years. It was certainly a hell of a way for me to be dunked, a year after leaving university, into the murky waters of the film business.

A few months after the
Gossip
imbroglio a theatrical producer called Richard Jackson called me up and invited me to his offices in Knightsbridge. He had seen
Latin!
in Edinburgh and had a desire to produce it at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with a very young Nicholas Broadhurst directing. I made it clear that my commitments to
Alfresco
meant that I would be unable to play the role of Dominic, the part I had written for myself, but this did not seem to put Jackson off. I was immensely gratified by this. You might think my actor’s self-esteem might be dented to hear a producer take so blithely the news that I was not available, but actually my
writer’s
self-esteem was immensely boosted by the idea that a professional man of the theatre believed the play to be strong enough to merit a life without me.

Many months earlier I had had a conversation with a television director called Geoffrey Sax, who was keen to make a small-screen version of
Latin!
I underwent the nervous excitement of a phone conversation with the great Michael Hordern, who had expressed an interest in the part of Herbert Brookshaw and who listened kindly and calmly to my incoherent plans for the adaptation. Nothing came of this, although I was to see Geoffrey Sax eight years later, when he directed an episode of
The New Statesman
in which I made a guest appearance, and again almost twenty years
after that, when he directed me in a small role in the film
Stormbreaker
. Few people in one’s life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.

Nicholas and Richard were confident that they could mount
Latin!
with ease, but the role of Dominic turned out to be more difficult to cast than they had anticipated. While I was up in Manchester for
Alfresco
Series Two they auditioned dozens and dozens of young actors, none of whom they felt to be quite right. At a meeting in Richard’s office I nervously made a suggestion.

‘Look, I know how pathetic this sounds. But there’s someone I was at university with. He’s a really good actor and very funny.’

‘Oh yes?’

Richard and Nicholas were polite, but there are few phrases more certain to send a chill down the spine of a producer than ‘There’s this friend of mine … he’s awfully good …’

I carried on. ‘He’s left Cambridge now and he’s at the Guildhall School; actually he enrolled at the music school. To be an opera singer. But I heard that he’s just switched over to the drama department.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well, as I say, I know it’s … but he really is very good …’

‘Oh yes?’

A week later Richard called up.

‘I have to confess we are at our wits’ end. What was the name of this friend of yours at RADA?’

‘The Guildhall, not RADA, and he’s called Simon Beale.’

‘Well, I won’t deny it. We’re desperate. Nicholas will see him.’

Two days later Nicholas called up ecstatically. ‘My God, he’s brilliant. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.’

I knew he would be. Ever since I had shared a stage with his arse-scratching Sir Politic Would-Be in
Volpone
I had known Simon was the real thing.

A snag was foreseen. Would the Guildhall actually let him play the part? He was a student following a specific course, and aside from the performances, which cut enough into his day (this was to be a lunchtime performance at the Lyric), there were the rehearsals to be considered too. Newly appointed as director of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was the actor and founder member of the Royal Shakespeare Company Tony Church, and his permission to release Simon was sought.

The answer he gave was magnificent in its preciosity and absurd actorly self-importance.

‘I can see that this is an engagement that Simon is keen to accept,’ he said. ‘It is an excellent role for him and, aside from anything else, it guarantees his provisional Equity ticket …’ In those days the acquisition of an Equity card was absolutely essential for any actor. The world of drama presented that exquisitely cruel Catch-22 bind common to all closed shops: only Equity members could get an acting job, and you could not become an Equity member unless you had an acting job. Hugh and I had secured our cards because we had a Granada TV contract and because as writer–performers we could show that no existing Equity member would be able satisfactorily to take our places.
Tony Church was recognizing, therefore, the excellence of the opportunity that Simon Beale was being offered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will not stand in his way.
However
…’