The Fry Chronicles (56 page)

When finally the curtain came down for the ending she stood and opened her mouth.

‘The choreo …’

Richard’s voice drowned her out. ‘Damn. Well, those house lights are a disaster. And the doors and the exit signs. But there’s nothing we can do about that in time for the first preview. Just nothing. It would take a miracle.’

Terry uttered a harsh bark. ‘Nothing? Ha! That’s what
you
think! There’s
plenty
we can do. Bill Marriott is a personal friend. I don’t care if I have to wake him up, he’ll goddamn sort this out. Someone get me to a phone
right now
!’

Off she went, steaming and puffing like the iron-clad destroyer she was. Orders were issued and issues ordered, Bill Marriott was jerked from his European slumbers and in
under an hour electricians were being elevated to the ceiling on scissor-lifts and men in white overalls were removing door springs at the back of the house. In her commanding glory, Terry had forgotten all about the choreography.

I shook Richard by the hand. ‘Masterly,’ I said. ‘If I had a hat, I’d take it off to you.’

By the first preview the atmosphere of the show began to be restored. The doors were now, of course, whisper quiet, the exit signs glowed gently and the house lights were warm and sweetly controllable. I had moved out of the Wyndham and was staying in a most glorious apartment on 59th Street, Central Park South, with a matchless view of the park and Fifth Avenue. It belonged to Douglas Adams, who, with typical generosity, had told me to make free of it. I held a nervous party there the evening of the first night. My parents had flown over, as had Hugh. My Great-Aunt Dita, who had escaped the Nazis in Salzburg and come over to America in the 1940s, was a formidable and terrifying presence. She offered Hugh one of her untipped Pall Mall cigarettes.

‘That’s very kind,’ said Hugh, taking out a full-strength, but filtered, Marlboro Red, ‘I prefer these.’

‘You some kind of health nut?’ said my Aunt, thrusting her pack towards him. ‘Take.’ Hugh, being the polite fellow he is, took one.

One hour before
Me and My Girl
’s Broadway opening. Between my cousin Danny and his grandmother, Great-Aunt Dita.

Neither Mike Ockrent nor I could face being in the auditorium with the first-night audience. The knowledge that Frank Rich had already been and written his review and that it would be out in just a few hours was almost more than we could bear. We paced up and down in the foyer, consuming gin and tonic after gin and tonic, becoming more and more hysterical with panic, terror and a sense
of the absurdity of this whole venture. Our pacing routes would converge, and we kept bumping into each other, which caused us to burst into fresh fits of manic laughter.

‘We are at the first night of our own Broadway show,’ Mike kept saying, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘It can’t be true. Someone is going to wake me up.’

I repeated those lines from
The Producers
that everybody quotes at first nights.

And so on.

Years later, Mike would collaborate with Mel Brooks on
The Producers
’ reinvention as a stage musical, only to be struck down with incurable leukaemia before he had the chance to see it open as the biggest Broadway hit of its day.

During the second half, just after the audience had gone back in from the interval, Ralph Rosen, the company’s general manager, waddled in his amiable flat-footed way across the lobby to whisper to us the news that a friend of a friend had a friend whose friend was dating a friend at the
New York Times
and that their friend had seen an advance copy of the Frank Rich review and that it was good. It was more than good. It was a rave. Ralph solemnly shook our hands. He was the most quiet-spoken, honourable and matter-of-fact person I had met in America. If he said a thing was so, then it was so and not otherwise.

By the time we all assembled upstairs for the party
Richard had a copy in his hands and a wetness in his eyes once more.

At the Antoinette Perry Awards later that year
Me and My Girl
was nominated for thirteen Tonys. We failed to pick up ten of them, my category included, but Robert and Maryann each won for best performance in a musical and, perhaps most pleasingly of all, Gillian Gregory won for best choreography. I don’t know if to this day she is aware how adeptly Richard saved her from being pointlessly and unjustifiably fired.

I got back to England still shaken by my good fortune.
Me and My Girl
was running in the West End and on Broadway, there were productions in Tokyo, Budapest, Australia, Mexico – I have forgotten the other territories. The show would run on Broadway for the next three and a half years and in the West End for another six. In the meantime there was
Fry and Laurie
to look forward to, another
Blackadder
and … and … who knew what else? It seemed that I was an insider, a showbusiness somebody.

In August 1987 I was at home in Norfolk congratulating myself on having given up smoking for ten days. Hugh, Kim and other friends came up to help me celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and within ten minutes of their arrival I was back on the cigarettes.

My roaring twenties were over, and next month Hugh and I would start work on our BBC pilot, which we planned to call
A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
My bank balance was good and getting ever better. I had cars, certainty and a slowly growing name. I was the luckiest person I knew.

Never one to take stock or make inventories I do recall standing in the garden of the Norfolk house watching the sun set and feeling that I had finally arrived. I do not believe
that I actually crowed over the remains of my miserable past self, but I came perhaps as close to exultation as a person can.

When someone exults, Fate’s cruel lips curl into a smile.

Back in London some weeks later an actor friend asked me if I fancied a line. I did not even know what he meant but I said that I certainly would like one, because he had asked in a way that made ‘a line’ sound intriguing and wicked and fun. I thought perhaps he was going to tell me a quite appalling joke or pick-up line. Instead, he took a packet of folded paper from his pocket, dug out some white powder and chopped it up into two lines on the surface of a smoked-glass coffee table. He asked me if I had a ten-pound note. I produced one, and he rolled it up tight and put it to one nostril. He sniffed up half of his line, applied the rolled-up ten-pound note to the other nostril and sniffed up the other half. I came forward, took the tube, knelt down and did the same, reproducing his actions as carefully as I could. The powder stung my nostrils enough to produce a few tears in my eyes. I went back to my chair, and we sat and talked for a while. After twenty or thirty minutes we did the same thing again. And then a third time. By now I was buzzing and garrulous and wide awake and happy.

I did not know it but this was to mark the beginning of a new act of my life. The tragedy and farce of that drama are the material for another book.

In the meantime, thank you for your company.

Experimenting with a new pair of glasses in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Norfolk.

Some of the characters who feature in this book have been kind enough to read it and correct lapses in my memory. I am especially grateful to Kim and Ben and the Nice Mr Gardhouse, but my gratitude reaches out to many others. It is very hard to know whether people will be more offended by inclusion or exclusion from these pages. Full as the book is, it would have been twice the length if I could have given space to everyone who was important in my younger life.

I thank Don Boyd for leading me to the kind and helpful Philip Wickham of the University of Exeter’s Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, which houses a Don Boyd archive where invaluable
Gossip
material was made available to me.

To Anthony Goff, my agent, to Jo Crocker, my tireless and loving assister, to Christian Hodell and to Louise Moore at Penguin go the warmest and most affectionate and grateful thanks too, but I reserve my deepest acknowledgements for the dedicatee of this book, the colleague without whom I would never have been in a position to write it and without whose friendship my life would have been unimaginably poorer.