More Fool Me (16 page)

I am not comfortable writing about the dead, or upsetting the public’s preconceived view of them, but I noticed in the Broadcasting House studio the Saturday following my coke experiment that there was a little flake of white in Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless’s nostril and the occasional telltale snuffle. At the George, the pub round the corner from Broadcasting House we all flocked to after a recording, I managed to get SWSRN aside and shyly asked if he could recommend a dealer.

‘Oh my dear,’ SWSRN said, putting his hand on my leg and shooting an almost pitying smile at my naïveté, ‘you couldn’t do better than ask Mitch.’ This particular Mitch was well known to me, and it was a surprise that such a brilliantly educated and literate person dealt in a highly illegal Class A substance. Never having bought it before, I was in paroxysms of fear when I called her up and asked if she might have some ‘COFFEE’ for me and that if I popped round maybe a couple of jars of ‘COFFEE’ would be possible? Mitch giggled that this would be fine and that it was ‘SIXTY PENCE A JAR’ and very high quality. These codes used by dealers and users alike can be absurd. Jezzer is a common one, as a reference to Jeremy Clarkson, who I’m sure has never snorted except derisively, but the title of whose programme,
Top Gear
, suggests precisely what the client was seeking of the seller, material of the least-cut highest quality: absolute top gear …

So for my first drug deal, I called up Mitch from a phone-box to confirm the time, found a cash machine, took out £240, which was a matter of two credit cards in those days, and, after rapping lightly on Mitch’s door (convinced there were police snipers on every rooftop), found myself shortly in possession of four grams of my very own supply of coke, in four tightly, neatly folded wraps. A part of me wants to show you what a wrap looks like, using an origami-style diagram with dotted lines, but I really do not think that necessary or desirable. The point of a wrap was that any square of reasonable-quality paper could contain the powder without there being any chance of it spilling from the corners. Some dealers, in an almost foolhardy manner you might think, had their signature wrap paper. Lottery tickets, for example, or squares cut from specialist magazines.

Mitch had, and has, a very successful broadcasting career, and I think in those days she and her boyfriend were having trouble making ends meet, and this little business on the side helped keep the wolf from the door. I always had too much respect for them to use them as regular dealers; it seemed like an insult. Soon enough they had introduced me to Nando, who worked in the Petticoat Lane market, a corner pub nearby being our regular meeting and dealing place. Nando introduced me to Midge, who passed me on to Nonny, until I had quite the network, and I don’t think a day could go by without my being sure of a supply of a wrap or two in my pocket. Nonny was a great girl, and she had the best supply. The B-quality Charlie for her ‘ordinary’ customers and A-Charlie for actors, comics, musicians, loyal regulars, Eurotrash, wild childs (children seems wrong in that context), supermodels and aristos.

I didn’t take coke because I was depressed or under pressure. I didn’t take it because I was unhappy (at least I don’t think so). I took it because I really, really
liked
it. Most of my friends screwed their face up at the thought of it, or at most had one or two lines at weekends. Over the years they began, I think, I
know
, to worry about me. But I had drug friends, very well-known artists and musicians and actors with whom I would regularly hang out and play snooker, smoking, drinking and snorting day after day after day. Amongst this crowd there was always a friend wilder by far than me, one who could pull two or three all-nighters in a row and then go filming on the third day bright as a button. I cannot tell you how much better that made me feel about my own growing dependency.

Underneath it all, I still valued my work above everything. Hugh and I had started
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
for the BBC, and it would no more occur to me to write, rehearse or perform in front of the cameras with coke up my nose and in my bloodstream than it would for me to drink all day and bumble into the studio tanked up. Coke was ‘pudding’, it was the reward that meant I could grant myself an extra three or four hours at a members’ club somewhere, discreetly (but frankly back in those days, not so very discreetly) powdering my nose.

Snooker and poker played a large part: there was no appetite for food, but a gigantic one for alcohol. Cocaine, in sharp contradistinction to MDMA and cannabis, seems to increase one’s threshold for pure liquor more than anything I’ve known.

I have tried to make this book as balanced as possible, by which I mean
true.
I am not going to squirt out a great list of famous names with whom I have shared lines – that simply is not my business. I don’t want this book to be a snivelling apology, nor a boastful ‘Coke, fuck-yeah!’ So I have to be honest and say that the first ten years of my coke dependency seemed to cause me no trouble whatsoever. Sometimes, very rarely, I had to postpone or cancel an early-morning appointment, but generally speaking I lived a high-functioning life. As my prosperity rose my ability to acquire higher-quality cocaine increased commensurately (hence Nonny), and that cannot have hurt either. Better purity meant less diarrhoea, nasal bleeding and nausea.

Was the presence of coke in the system noticeable to others? There is an old Greek saying: ‘It is easier to hide two elephants under your arm than one pathic.’ You may need to stop and do a little poking around and looking up to parse that, but what it is essentially saying is that if you walked through the Athenian marketplace with the boy you were sleeping with – your pathic or catamite – it was more conspicuous and obvious to all than walking with a pair of elephants. Much the same with coke, certainly with a chronic habit. Tooth grinding, the telltale running nose, the chattering, the lack of appetite. Much as I hate to disagree with Professor Freud, one line leads to another and another, certainly not to ‘aversion’. Most coke users will acknowledge one particular rule of the stuff. There is either not enough or there is too much. Not enough, and you start to ring dealers at three in the morning. They will be far from best pleased. Too much, and you fill yourself up with it and won’t be able to sleep till noon or later.

Another stroke of good fortune, which is something to do with my ambition or my constitution or some mixture of them both, is that I have always known when to stop, especially if I am working the next day. I am nearly always the first to leave the party, murmuring excuses about a film call the next morning or whatever it may be.

I was once standing at the bar of the Groucho Club with the painter Francis Bacon, the art dealer James Birch and those two inseparable art works in themselves, Gilbert and George. Everyone was in a very jolly mood when Bacon ordered a bottle.

‘Oh, not for me,’ I said, ‘I’m up pretty early tomorrow morning.’

‘Oh, don’t be a cunt,’ said a Gilbert or a George. ‘Drink with us, ducky.’

‘I’m really sorry …’ I insisted.

Francis tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Ah, you’re like me, you’ve got a little man.’

‘Well actually, I’m single,’ I said.

‘No, no, no,’ he prodded the side of his temple. ‘A little man in here. A little man who tells you when to stop and go home. Oh, the people I knew. So talented, but no little man to stop them. Minton, John Deakin, Dan Farson … no little men, you see? I understand. Off you go.’

I was profoundly touched (and flattered of course) by this fellow-feeling and thought myself lucky to have this little man and that such a legend as Bacon recognized it in me. For all I know, he thought I was a total arsehole and made the whole story up just to get rid of me. But it is certainly true that Francis himself would go on outrageous binges, drinking and drinking like a man who wanted to die and then
his
little man would intervene and say, ‘No, Francis. Time for the studio.’ And back he would go to work for another four or five weeks, producing some of the greatest paintings of his time. So far as I know, he was never much interested in drugs.

There is, however, a wonderful story that has done the rounds enough for me to believe it to be true. Skip if you know it. Lionel Bart, the endearing but woefully hapless songwriter and creator of the musical
Oliver!
, came round to dinner with Bacon and his boyfriend, John Edwards, some time during the late 1970s. They couldn’t help noticing that every now and then Bart would disappear under the dining-room table, and a snorting, snuffling noise would ensue, accompanied by the unmistakeable rustle of a plastic bag. Bart would get up, apologize and then carry on with the merry conversation.

An hour or so later he left, with many hugs and thank yous. Francis and John (no staff, fantastically rich as Francis already was by then) started to clear the table.

‘Oh, what’s this?’ said Bacon, who had found under Bart’s seat a bag of white powder.

‘Heavens, Francis, you’re such an innocent. That’s cocaine.’

‘Ooh, ooh! What shall we do with it?’

‘I know,’ said John with a flash of inspiration. ‘We’ll go to Tramp.’

Tramp was a well-known nightclub in Jermyn Street run by the excellent Johnny Gold. It is almost always mistakenly called Tramps, with which Johnny would put up with sighing resignation. In the 1970s it hosted the wedding receptions of Liza Minnelli and Peter Sellers,
^*
it was the chosen watering-hole of sporting naughty boys like George Best, James Hunt and Vitas Gerulaitis, all kinds of models (before they were ever prefixed as super), various cashmere-cardiganned European playboys and film actors from both sides of the Atlantic. Nothing like as smart as Annabel’s, but enduring and not without its own character and likeability. It is still going, but without the enlivening presence of Johnny Gold.

The pair arrived at the door to be met by a large doorman who had no more idea of who Francis Bacon was than Francis Bacon knew who Kenny Dalglish might have been.

‘Sorry, mate, we’re full. Queue over there,’ he told Edwards.

Daringly, Edwards – who had an idea about club doormen that was more or less infallible in those days – let the man see a glimpse of the bag of white powder.

‘Would you like a …?’ he said.

‘Just a sec, gents … follow me.’

The doorman beckoned to a second-in-command and pulled Edwards and Bacon into a little alcove next to the door. John tentatively proffered the bag, and the doorman took a healthy scoopful, which he transferred into a little bag he had ready in his waistcoat pocket. He next led them to an occupied table, which he swiftly de-occupied with a growl of ‘reserved’ and a sweep of his well-muscled arm.

‘Juanito, the best champagne for my friends …’

Well, thought Bacon and Edwards. This is the life and no mistake.

A bucket of Dom Pérignon arrived and was poured out into glasses by the fawning and chattily verbose Juanito. All the while, John and Francis were impatiently planning their discreet visit to the gentlemen’s lavatories, which they had noticed were being visited with great frequency by a steady line, as it were, of glamorous, well-known faces.

They had hardly taken one sip of the Dom Pérignon before the bouncer was clattering back down the stairs.

‘You two, out! Out this fucking minute. If I ever see your fucking faces again, I’ll fucking beat the living crap out of you. Got it, you fucking fuckers?’

Disconsolately they taxied their way back home, wondering what could have gone wrong.

‘Did you notice,’ said Francis, ‘that his nostril was
frothing
slightly? And rather pinkly, as if blood had been drawn? Is that usual?’

They put the matter out of their minds, had some drinks – alcohol being a drug they well understood – and went to bed.

The next morning Lionel Bart called to thank them for the dinner party.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘did I leave my bag of denture fixative powder behind? Can’t find it anywhere.’

THE GROUCHO

Play by the Rules: The Groucho Club Rules

Upon arrival at The Club, Members shall approach the Reception desk to sign and print their names in the signing-in book – this Ancient Ceremony being a necessary preliminary to entry into all the Club Rooms.

The use within The Club of Mobile, Cellular, Portable or Microwave-controlled Telecommunication Instruments is an anathema, a curse, a horror, a dread and deep unpleasantness and shall be prohibited in all locations, save the Reception area and the Soho Bar, until 5 p.m. Please be alert to the acknowledged misery of Ring Tones and silence all such mechanisms before entry into the Club Rooms.

The ingestion into the bloodstream of powders, pastilles, potions, herbs, compounds, pills, tablets, capsules, tonics, cordials, tinctures, inhalations, or mixtures that have been scheduled by Her Majesty’s Government to be illegal Substances of whatever class is firmly prohibited by Club Rules, whether they be internalized orally, rectally, intravenously, intranasally or by any means whatsoever. So let it be known.

A Member may invite into The Club up to four (4) Guests at any one time, for whose behaviour and respect of the rules the Member is responsible. Be it understood that a Guest will not be allowed into the Bar save that they be accompanied by a Member.

The wearing of String Vests is fully unacceptable and wholly proscribed by Club Rules. There is enough distress in the world already.

To step out into Dean Street owing money to The Club leaves a stain on a Member’s character that cannot be pleasing to them. For this reason all bills and monies owing to The Club should be settled in full before a Member may leave The Club.