The Fry Chronicles (54 page)

‘Go Kowloonside and ask for Chou Lai’s.’

On the quay at Kowloon he was pointed to a junk that was just leaving. He leapt aboard.

‘Chou Lai’s?’ he asked. Everyone on board nodded.

After half an hour’s chugging through choppy waters he was dropped off on an island. Nothing. He thought he had been (almost literally) shanghaied. After what seemed an eternity another junk phutted its way to the jetty.

‘Chou Lai?’ called the skipper, and once more my friend hopped aboard.

An hour followed in which he ploughed deeper through the South China Sea, beginning to fear for his life. At last he was deposited on yet another island, but this time there was at least a restaurant, strung with lights and vibrating with music. Chou Lai himself came forward, a bonhomous fellow with an eyepatch that completed the superbly Condradian feel of my friend’s adventure.

‘Hello, very welcome. Tell me, you American?’

‘No, I’m English as a matter of fact.’

‘English! Ah! You know P B-J?’

One wonders how many perplexed English customers had been asked that question without having the slightest idea who or what a ‘P B-J’ might be. My friend did know but doubted Chou Lai could possibly mean the same one. It turned out he certainly did.

‘Yeah! Pe’er Be’ett-Joes!’

My friend had a free dinner and a ride back to Kowloon in Chou Lai’s private launch.

There you have Peter Bennett-Jones: with his long lean frame, a line in crumpled linen suits and a ripely old-fashioned
‘dear old boy’ manner, he looks and sounds the part of a superannuated colonial district commissioner from the pages of Somerset Maugham, yet is younger than Mick Jagger and as sharp, clever and powerful a force in London’s media world as you could find.

I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to miss the evening at the Zanzibar when Keith Allen, one of the pioneers of alternative comedy and a man I was to come to know well, stood up on the bar and began to throw bottles back and forth, destroying much of the stock as well as most of the mirrors and fittings. Keith did get arrested and on his return from a short stretch found himself permanently banned, or Zanzibarred as I preferred to put it. The owner, Tony Macintosh, was good-natured enough not to exclude him from his new establishment, the Groucho, which he and Mary-Lou Sturridge were on the point of opening in Soho.

My years of hurling myself headlong into the world of Soho Bohemia were still ahead of me, but I was beginning to look at figures like Keith Allen with a kind of admiration tinged with fear. They seemed to own the London in which I still felt like a shy visitor, a London which was beginning to vibrate with enormous energy. I was afraid to enter the fashionable nightclubs like the Titanic and the Limelight; after all, they seemed to be about nothing but dancing and getting drunk, neither of which I was very interested in, and even the Zanzibar was not a place I would ever dream of visiting except in a group, but a demon in me whispered that it was wrong for me to be nothing but a machine for churning out words. ‘You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry…’ as Clint breathes to himself in
Dirty Harry
.

Who was I at this time? I still found that people were bothered by my front, my ease, my apparent – oh, I don’t know – effortlessness, invulnerability, lack of need? Something in me riled … no not riled, sometimes riled perhaps, but mostly intrigued or baffled … something in me intrigued or baffled, triggered a mixture of exasperation and curiosity.

How could somebody be so muffled up against the cruel winds of the world, so armed against the missiles of fate, so complete? Be
great
to see them drunk. See their guard down. Find out what makes them tick.

I really do believe that there are those who would like and trust me better if they saw me weeping into a whisky, making a fool of myself, getting aggressive, maudlin and drunkenly out of control. I have never found those states in others anything other than tiring, awkward, embarrassing and fantastically dull, but I am quite sure that people would cherish a view of me in that condition at least once in a while. As it happens I am almost never out of control no matter how much I drink. My limbs may well lose coordination, but they have so little to begin with that it is hard to tell the difference. But I certainly never become aggressive or violent or weepy. This is clearly a fault.

Back then I could see that outsiders looking in on the Stephen Fry they encountered saw a man who had drawn life’s winning lottery ticket. I did not seem to have it in me to project the vulnerability, fear, insecurity, doubt, inadequacy, puzzlement and inability to cope that I so very often felt.

The signs were writ large for those with the wit to read. The cars alone screamed so much, surely? An Aston Martin, a Jaguar XJ12, a Wolseley 15/50, an Austin Healey 100/6 in concourse condition, an Austin Westminster, an MG Magnette, an MGB roadster …

People saw me riding around in these woody, leathery chariots and thought them the automobile equivalent of the tweed jacket and cavalry twills in which I still dressed myself. ‘Good old Stephen. He’s from another world, really. Quintessentially English. Old-fashioned values. Cricket, crosswords, classic cars, clubland. Bless.’ Or they thought, ‘Pompous, smug Oxbridge twat in his young fogey brogues and snobby cars. What a git.’ And I thought, ‘What a fraud. Half-Jewish poof who doesn’t really know what he’s doing or who he is but is still the same sly, skulking, sweet-scoffing teenager he ever was, never quite fitting in. Destroyed by love, incapable of being loved, unworthy of being loved.’

Till the day I die people will always prefer to see me as strong, comfortable and English, like a good leather club chair. I have learned long ago not to fight it. Besides, and this is more than a question of good manners (although actually good manners are reason enough), why should anyone bleat on about what they feel inside all the time? It isn’t dignified, it isn’t interesting and it isn’t attractive.

Any armchair psychologist can see that someone with my history of teenage
Sturm
and adolescent
Drang
(the needy sugar addiction, alienation, wild moods, unhappy sensualism, blighted romance, thieving, expulsions, fraud and imprisonment
^†
) who is suddenly given a new lease of life and the chance to work and make a preposterous amount of money, might well respond as I did and make a series of silly and self-conscious attempts at display, to prove to himself and to the family whose life he made such a misery that he was now
someone
. Someone who
belonged
.
Look, I have cars and credits cards and club memberships and a country house. I know the name of the head waiter at Le Caprice. I am stitched into England like Connollized leather into the seat of an Aston.

If asked, I would have told you that I was happy. I was happy. I was content, certainly, which is to happy what Pavillon Rouge is to Château Margaux, I suppose, but which will have to do for most of us.

Saturday Live
was adjudged a hit, and perhaps as a result of our appearances on it Hugh and I were summoned once more to Jim Moir’s office to see if we couldn’t waggle our cocks in the air and get someone to kneel and suck, or ‘put a show together’, as other, lesser comedy executives might have put it.

After the BBC’s lack of interest in
The Crystal Cube
, we were leery about high-concept programmes and determined that we should have a shot at committing to screen what we knew best, sketch comedy.

‘Excellent,’ said Richard Armitage. ‘You can do that next year. But first Stephen …’ He rubbed his hands together, and his eyes gleamed. ‘Broadway.’

Mike Ockrent and I flew to New York together in clipper class, PanAm’s equivalent of business, where you could eat and drink and smoke until your eyes, liver and lungs bubbled. We had a few days, and our job was to dazzle Richard’s potential financiers and co-producers. Robert Lindsay was already there. This was my first-ever trip to
the United States, and I had to keep hugging myself. I had often fantasized about America as a child and felt that, when I got there, I should find that I already knew it and love it all the more for that.

I shan’t distress you too much with my thoughts about the Manhattan skyline. If you haven’t visited New York City yourself, you have seen it in film and television and you know that there are a lot of very, very tall buildings crowded together on a relatively small island. You will know there are long tunnels and rattly bridges. There is a central oblong park, wide avenues that run arrow-straight down from one end to the other, rhythmically intersected by numbered streets. You will know that the avenues also have numbers, except when they are called Madison, Park, Lexington, Amsterdam or West End. You will know there is just one exception, one daring diagonal thoroughfare that carves its way down from the top-left corner of the island, ignoring the symmetry of the grid, creating squares, circuses and slivered scalenes of open space as it slices its way south-west – Verdi Square, Dante Park, Columbus Circle, Madison Square, Herald Square, Union Square. You will know that this outlaw diagonal is called Broadway. You will know too that where Broadway meets 42nd Street at Times Square, the heart of New York theatre beats and has done so for a hundred years.

I walked around the theatre district, rubbernecking the neon, bowing to the statue of George M. Cohan (‘Give my regards to Broadway’ it says on the plinth, and to this day I get a lump in my throat every time I see that – more out of veneration for James Cagney’s impersonation of him than out of love or knowledge of Cohan himself), seating myself in the Carnegie Deli to write postcards, subjecting
myself to the overwhelming rudeness of the waiters and trying to make sense of a Ruben Special. Everything in New York is
exactly
what you expect and yet it still astonishes you. Had I come to Manhattan and found that the avenues were winding and bendy, the buildings low and squat and the people slow, drawling and kindly and that there was no trace of that fabled charge of energy that you drew from the very pavements as you walked on them, then I would have had cause to blink and shake my head in wonder. As it is, the town was precisely what I knew it would be, what legend, fable, literature and Tin Pan Alley had long reported it to be, down to the clouds of steam blooming from the manholes, the boatlike wallow of the huge chequer cabs as they bounced and flipped their tyres on the great iron sheets that seemed to have been casually slung by a giant on to the surface of the street and the strange smoky whiff at every street corner that turned out, on inquiry, to be the smell of new-baked pretzel. Just what I had always known. Yet every five steps I took I could not but stop and grin and gasp and stretch my eyes at the theatre of it all, the noise and rudeness and vitality. Affirmation of what we absolutely expect comes as more of a shock than disaffirmation.

Richard’s possible colleagues for the Broadway production were two Americans, James Nederlander, who seemed to own half the theatres in America, and Terry Allen Kramer, who seemed to own half the real estate in Manhattan. They were serious and hard-boiled business people. They had it in their heads that the British couldn’t choreograph, and when an American producer has an idea in their head, nothing can shift it, not Mr Muscle, not TNT, not electric-shock treatment.

Jimmy Nederlander was convinced he knew the secret of a good musical.

‘It’s gotta have heart,’ he told me over lunch at the Côte Basque on 55th Street, with Terry, Mike and Robert. ‘I saw your show in London and I said to my wife, “Honey, this show has got fucking heart. It’s got fucking heart, we should do it.” She agreed.’

‘It’s gotta have proper choreography too,’ growled Terry.

Terry Allen Kramer liked to say that, while she wasn’t the richest woman in America, she certainly paid more tax than any woman in America. She had at one time owned majority shares in Columbia Pictures as well as having large quantities of oil money and property, including the block on which the Côte Basque, made famous by Truman Capote, stood.

When I had arrived there for the lunch appointment I had found myself almost paralysed by the snootiness of the waiters. New York is an infinitely ritzier and more class-bound city than London. White-gloved, liveried and top-lofty elevator attendants, doormen, chauffeurs and
maîtres d’
can make life hell for those without social confidence. Adrift on an alien shore, all the ease I had amassed over the years that allowed me to meet a headwaiter’s eye squarely at the Ritz or Le Caprice now deserted me. Abroad is bloody, as George VI liked to say. Abroad, no matter how high you have climbed the ladders at home, forces you to slide down the snakes and start again.

‘Yessssss?’ hissed the waiter who floated up to me as I had glanced with overdone nonchalance around the dining-room, the very effort of projecting a casual proprietorial air betraying all the illness at ease and inferiority I was feeling.

‘Oh, um, well. I’m meeting some people for lunch, I’m afraid I’m a little early … should I … er … sorry.’

‘Name?’

‘Stephen Fry. Sorry.’

‘Let me see … I find no reservation under that name.’

‘Oh. Sorry! No, that’s
my
name, sorry.’

‘Uh! And in what name is the reservation?’

‘I think probably in the name of Kramer. Sorry. Do you have a table in the name of Terry Allen Kramer?’