More Fool Me (13 page)

Every story Ken tells about Briers (whose career direction he helped transform astoundingly to the extent of casting him, very successfully, as King Lear) I have heard many times before, yet I am reduced to an asthma attack strong enough to need a gulp or two on the inhaler I laugh so much and so uncontrollably. Branagh is always referred to as an exemplum of the self-regarding thespian lovie, or luvvie, or however you choose to spell it. This is rather unfortunate for me, since the Oxford English Dictionary cites
my
employment of the word (as it is commonly understood in reference to the acting trade) as the first known publicly printed usage. As a matter of fact, if he belongs to any class or subspecies of actor at all, I would say that Kenneth is blokey rather than luvvie. He is also – and for some reason people find this hard to believe – amongst the five funniest people I have ever met. We’ll meet him again later in this unpredictably juggled narrative too.

I am sitting next to the legendary Frank Finlay, who barks out the occasional laugh. I cannot say that he was entirely friendly to me when I breathlessly took my seat at the last minute, but then he is a devout Roman Catholic and perhaps he has heard of the debate in which I argued alongside Christopher Hitchens against the proposition that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. The number of people since who have accused me of being ‘anti-Catholic’ depresses and upsets me. Perhaps someone reported to him that I had rudely insulted the Mother of Churches and had harsh words for the pontiff (at that time Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, RC Ret’d).

I leave the event speedily to avoid being stuck with too many people. I am sure there is no one there whose company I am specifically avoiding, but I want to come back to this: the computer screen. My mind is still spinning, but I seem to need to share my afternoon with you, the uncomplaining reader.

The Richard Briers afternoon was typical in some ways of the kind of event that actors attend. Gossip and tales of thespian tradecraft and unspeakable theatrical disasters are told, retold and mistold. Academics, spies, doctors and lawyers are no different, give or take the dictates of their professional ethics. My life is so fragmented that I live the life of an actor and then the next day another life entirely. It may be the life of a writer or that of a sort of television presenter and host; I dine with classical musicians, with restaurateurs, playmates from the old drug days, plain downright socialites, chefs, fellow cricket lovers and new-found friends from the world of online networking. Unlike an envied and admirable few, I separate my friends and almost never dare mingle one group with another. When I do, it is usually a social disaster, like mixing drinks. I love good beer and I love good wine, but you cannot drink both on the same evening without suffering. I love the friends with whom I play or once daily played snooker and tooted quantities of high-grade pulverized Andean flake; I love the friends with whom I dine at preposterously expensive restaurants; I love the friends with whom I’m film-making or mincing on the stage. I love and value them all equally and don’t think of them as stratified or in tiers, one group in some way higher or more important than the rest, but the thought of introducing them to each other makes me shiver and shudder with cringing embarrassment.

So today I walked away from the theatre, stopped off at a passing supermarket to buy some ice, turkey breast and tomatoes – an entirely random raid – and found myself, after I had escaped the usual struggle with the automated checkout (unexpected item in the bagging area
again
), trotting along the street in the company of the sartorially point-device Peter Bowles and the ever gentlemanly Moray
^*
Watson
^†
. For a hundred yards I was an actor, as I tattled and swapped anecdotes with them before peeling off and making my way home and finding myself here. Still high on my own erratic and mercurial endorphins, I sit myself before you and think about what to write next.

We shall pick up the thread and theme of this chapter.

I mentioned in my list of shame that amongst the places I had taken cocaine was the House of Commons, and this is true. I was sitting in a low, satisfyingly old and comfortable leather armchair after a pleasant, but not too pleasant – it is a club after all – lunch with a Member – we needn’t drag his name into it – and expressed a wish, as we swirled our brandies happily around, to betake myself for a young piddle. The MP pointed me to a door at the corner of the room and told me to take the second right in the corridor which would present itself. I swaggeringly entered until I saw to my alarm that this was a urinal only lavatory. And only one urinal at that. No single stall with a door. The shit, as William Morris predicted so accurately all those years ago in his utopian novel
News from Nowhere
, must be confined to the Chamber, I thought. So, heart beating like an engine, with the slightly trembling devil-may-care desperation of the true druggy, I wiped dry of condensation the rear section of the top of the urinal with the back of my tie, chopped a line there, drew out my straw and was just bringing it up to my nose when a merry, florid, well-lunched parliamentarian who would never see seventy again came in, humming happily.

‘Sorry!’ I said, in a rather muffled way, my shoulders shielding my shameful line. ‘Thing is, silly I know. But I’m a little pee-shy. If there’s someone waiting it just won’t come.’

‘Quite understand,’ the man said cheerfully, backing out. ‘You wait till you get to my age. Damned prostate won’t let you get a drop out unless you curse and cajole it. Carry on.’

I took my courage in one hand and my straw in the other and with a sort of coughing House of Commons ‘hear, hear!’ roar, sucked in the line and straightened up. The old buster lurking outside was still tunefully and now tactfully humming. I swept away what little residue there was with my index finger, gummed it, contrived to achieve a genuine desultory wee and noticed in shame that I had left rather a puddle for this man’s feet. I dived for the taps and the towels and made my escape back to the Smoking Room, as I seem to remember it was called in those days. It is probably known as the Herbal Tea Salon now.

TRUSS, TWEED AND INTOXICATION

I may have mentioned before in book, blog or broadsheet that, as I grew to fame, I became more and more astonished at how even apparently observant and intelligent journalists would either tell blind lies, fail to notice the obvious or deviously ignore what was before them because it didn’t fit with an image that they or their editor wished to project.

One sunny morning I was assigned to be ‘profiled’ by Lynne Truss, formerly my literary editor on the
Listener
magazine and soon to achieve fame in all English-speaking territories and beyond on account of her
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
, a declaration of war on what for linguists and those who love language are the ever-dancing, ever-dazzling, ever-changing particles, diacriticals, apostrophes and mutations that allow language to live, breathe, thrive and evolve. But that’s another story. Lynne and I were to meet at the then very fashionable L’Escargot restaurant in Greek Street, run by Nick Lander. Lander’s wife, Jancis Robinson, Master of Wine, caused L’Escargot to be, unless I am wildly mistaken, the first British restaurant whose wine menus were listed varietally.
^*
You’re very bored now, and I can see why. I am getting there.

So I arrive, and the delightfully frisky and beaming four-foot-nine-inch figure of Elina Salvoni, the maîtresse d’, is there to welcome me. Lynne is already at the table. Now, a month or so earlier I had decided that it was about time to transform myself. I do this from time to time, rather like Doctor Who, only not like him at all. I had reinvented myself from nerdy bookworm to thief and convict, from thief and convict back to nerdy bookworm, from nerdy bookworm to tra-la-la acting and writing performer, from tra-la-la acting and writing performer to nerdy first-adopting computer user, and so on. And within those transmogrifications were so many more. My most recent mutation was from ponderous, tweedy, pipe-smoking paragon of pomposity resembling nothing so much as a Latin teacher at a school which was just going to be closed down in a blaze of scandal to leather-jacketed, jeans-wearing, trail-bike-riding, aftershave-slapping dude who knew which bands were going to be the Next Big Thing and could wear shades indoors without looking a prick. I know what you’re thinking: every fibre of your being must be screaming that this must not be so, but for a year or so that is in truth how I was.

The fact is (I’m sure I shouldn’t be so forward as to call it Fry’s Law), such drastic and dramatic outward differences cut no ice at all. Any more than cosmetic surgery would have turned Heinrich Himmler into a pleasant companion for a spring walking tour of butterfly-filled alpine meadows.

Anyway, at the L’Escargot restaurant, I checked in my ‘skid-lid’, as we crazy two-wheeler sons of bitches called them, and joined Ms Truss at her table. We chatted amiably, old colleagues. I had a book to sell; perhaps it was my first novel,
The Liar
, I can’t remember. She seemed very enthusiastic, the lunch and the Sémillon were well above par. Princess Diana shyly swept up to the first-floor dining room; security men dotted discreetly about downstairs and upstairs tables, rendered conspicuous by their inconspicuousness. That was fashionable London in the 1980s for you. I had another appointment, and my Yamaha beast was growling for release in Soho Square, so I escaped the confining truss of Lynne and roared away, thinking little of the encounter.

Two weeks later the issue of the magazine Lynne had been writing for came out. The first words of her copy?

‘Tweedy Stephen Fry …’

I had sat in front of her, radiating Guerlain
Eau de Verveine
, a goatskin US Airforce Golden Bear bomber jacket creaking and gleaming about my person before I took it off and hung it on the chair to reveal the pure white, captionless T-shirt beneath, a pack of Marlboro Red tucked, Brando-styley, into the sleeve. My legs were sheathed in Levi 501s and my feet shod in acid-resistant, heavy-duty Doc Marten working boots, the footjoy of choice for any Soho media fashionista (not a word yet in currency then) or fashionisto (not a word yet in currency now). The front upper of the left boot was already worn from gear-changing my hog, and the first word she can come up with is
tweedy
? Well, who am I to tell her that she is wrong? Webster was much possessed by death. He saw the skull beneath the skin. Or so claimed T. S. Eliot. Maybe Truss saw the tweed beneath the leather jacket and boots. Where others have cartilage and sinew, I have corduroy and cavalry twill, it seemed, and always will. We see in people what we want to see, and nothing can change that.

The first rule of being a rebel is that you can’t
make
yourself a rebel. It is an action not an identity, a process not a title. You
rebel
. When I was a distressed, confused, manic, disruptive and disrupted schoolboy, rebellion did not come as a choice.

It is extraordinary how some single concentrated occasions seem to combine so many features of your life in one dreadful moment so as to stand as symbolic of your entire character and destiny at that point in time.

There came one such critical culmination of all that I was in the summer of 1989. I found myself in a restaurant in Soho’s Dean Street, an establishment long since passed into memory. It was called Burt’s, I think in honour of Burt Shevelove, the little-remembered (by most) lyricist and librettist –
No, No, Nanette
and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, those kinds of works. We had booked the whole of Burt’s to give Kenneth Branagh some kind of stag party, for this was a Saturday night, and he was to wed Emma Thompson on Sunday at Cliveden, the country house hotel that once belonged to the Astor family and gave its name to a ‘set’ of supposedly appeasement and Germanophile aristocrats and politicians that flourished in the 1930s.
^*

All week Hugh, Rowan and my fellow Blackadderists had been rehearsing the final episode of
Blackadder Goes Forth
, so by the time we got down to Soho from Television Centre and the tech rehearsal we were rather tired. I had ridden in on my rearing, snarling trail-bike, which I parked dead opposite the restaurant in Bourchier Street, commonly known as piss alley. I worry to this day whether the lane’s official name should be pronounced as spelled, ‘Boor-she-A’, or weirdly to rhyme with ‘voucher’. The trouble is, I don’t suppose there is anyone alive who can tell me the answer. I only fret over this question because a) I am a verbal nerd who does get in a tizzy about such things and b) I once judged a reading competition at Harrow School which was called the Lady Bourchier Reading Prize and was most definitely pronounced to rhyme with Sloucher and Croucher, solicitors at law and notaries public. I awarded one of the schoolboys, who went by the exotic name of Benedict Cumberbatch, second prize.
Second
. I cannot remember the name of the boy who won first, but I hope he will suddenly burst on to the acting scene, blow Benedict out of the water and finally vindicate my judgement. Something tells me that the contingency is a remote one, and I shall continue to look upon myself as the fisherman who let the big one go.

Whichever and however I parked my Yamaha, conveniently facing the entrance to Burt’s restaurant, where Kenneth Branagh and friends were celebrating his last night as a bachelor.

I fully intended to be a good boy that night, for the following day we would be recording that last episode of the series
Blackadder Goes Forth
. I drank no more than a few vodka and tonics, my favoured drink back then, before turning to give Ken his obligatory farewell hug.

‘Here,’ said Ken, ‘have this.’ He passed me a large glass half full of whisky.