More Fool Me (17 page)

Upon settlement of aforesaid bills and levies, all Members are reminded that Soho is a neighbourhood containing many residents. Show dignity, consideration and kindness by leaving The Club quietly and with as little brouhaha as may be contrived.

The Club is a club. A place of sociability in which to relax and be affable and friendly. Respect the views of your fellow Members and ensure that your Guests do the same. Let amiability and charm be your watchwords.

It seemed to me from the late 1980s through the naughty 1990s and into the opening years of the twenty-first century inconceivable that there was anyone in London
not
doing coke. Every time I saw somebody in a restaurant rising from their table and moving towards the gents or the ladies I assumed they were off for an energizing sniff. It didn’t stop me writing or performing or pursuing any other occupation that required hard work and concentration. It was only, as I have said, the reward for that hard work, the pudding or savoury that I had earned and that would give me five or six hours of convivial social immersion.

My usual port of call was the Groucho Club, from 1985 onwards the watering-hole of choice for almost all in publishing, music, comedy, drama and the arts in general. That section of society that the hero of my 1994 novel
The Hippopotamus
, Ted Wallace, cholerically called the mediahadeen
^*
and was later scornfully to be assigned the sneering ascription ‘the chattering classes’ from another class of chatterers that chattered in other watering-holes.

As well as writing the official club rules (above) I also coined one evening in the late eighties the ‘Groucho Rule’, which states that any remark, apophthegm, epigram, aphorism or observation, be it never so wise, well intentioned, profound or true, is instantly rendered ridiculous and nonsensical by the addition of the phrase ‘he said last night in the Groucho Club’.

Thus: ‘Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,’ remarked Karl Marx in the Groucho Club last night.

Or: ‘For evil to flourish, all it takes is for the good man to do nothing,’ pointed out Edmund Burke in the Groucho Club brasserie late last night.

And so on. The Athenæum it is not and nor does it pretend to be.

Tony Mackintosh (of the Norfolk chocolate family which gave the world the Caramac and Quality Street amongst other memorable masterpieces) was a noted figure in the world of London hospitality, running for many years 192, a popular Notting Hill restaurant whose first chef, Alistair Little, was
the
premier metropolitan skillet-wielder of the mid-1980s. Mackintosh was also in charge of the Zanzibar, a very pleasant drinkery in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden. It was here that I learned to queue up for the single gentlemen’s lavatory. Its seat had long disappeared, and there was no cistern lid. I assume this was an attempt by Tony to deter drug-taking. Although he was one of London’s foremost and most fashionable restaurateurs (there is no
n
in ‘restaurateur’ despite the number of times you hear ‘restauranteur’) he resembled a kindly old-fashioned schoolaster (there is of course no
m
in ‘schoolmaster’, a little known fact), and to this day I am not sure that he knew what went on in his establishments. He was certainly present the night Keith Allen went crazy. Well, that is a preposterous thing to say. The night when Keith Allen went
crazier
, I should have written. The wild Welsh whirlwind stood on the bar and hurled glassware at the mirror behind the bottles and optics. He was effectively Zanzibarred for the rest of that club’s life, for it was only a few months later that the Groucho was born from its shards and ashes.

Originally the idea of publishers Carmen Callil, Caroline Michel and überagent Ed Victor, the club was conceived as a place where authors and their editors could meet for a mid-morning breakfast and talk in comfy chairs without the formal dignity of an old-fashioned West End club or the passing human traffic and distraction of a hotel lobby or dining room. This was the era of croissants, orange juice and newly enthralling Italian coffees. I cannot think of those days without the memory of buttery pastry flakes and marmalade. The evenings, however … the evenings were very, very different. More of them in a moment.

Tony, always a benign but hazily distant figure, had, as much more hands-on fellow managers, a radiant being called Mary Lou Sturridge, sister of Charles, the precocious director of Granada’s barnstorming
Brideshead Revisited
, and Liam Carson, who was to become a very close friend. Mary Lou, Liam and their various colleagues, notably Gordana, a Serbian of magnificent charm and a voice like a factory foghorn, kept order and created the ambience of the club, which was an instant and stunning success. Indeed, such was the nature of the success that those who were not members made no secret of how much they despised the place and how posturing, pretentious and ‘up themselves’ the members were. As a matter of fact the only people I have ever seen behave revoltingly and unacceptably at the Groucho Club have been members’ guests, who can become (or certainly could in those early, heady days) overheated by alcohol and the presence of well-known faces. Members and the staff know how to comport themselves in the club.

I cannot deny that for me such a place was something like an oasis. The better known I became, the more difficult I found it to go into a pub. This has become more and more the case over the years. Whenever I do, the chances are that someone will come up and offer to buy me a drink. This is charming and kind but places me in an unwinnable bind. If I refuse the drink I am considered top-lofty, lah-di-dah and hoity-toity; if I accept it I have been functionally purchased for half an hour. You can’t take someone’s drink and then make your way to the other side of the saloon and ignore them. It is often pleasant to speak to strangers, but there are times when one wants to spend time with one’s friends, uninterfered with. So pubs, unless I am in my home county of Norfolk, where there seems to be an inbuilt understanding that people should be able to come and go unmolested, famous or not,
^*
are off limits to me.

It is unfortunate, then, that the well-known are excoriated for not being ‘real’ enough to go to ordinary places like pubs, whatever ‘real’ might be taken to mean. I do shop in supermarkets and high streets and often, absurdly, people say to me – sometimes almost in the most put-out fashion – ‘What are
you
doing
here
?’, to which I am tempted to reply, as I push my trolley along the aisle, ‘Playing badminton / sitting my History A level exam / performing a tracheotomy on Jeremy Vine … What are
you
doing?’

I have mentioned before in blog or perhaps in interview that fame is wonderful, a picnic. Instant tables in fashionable restaurants that others have to wait weeks to book for, tickets to premieres, sporting occasions and gatherings of genuine interest and excitement and the opportunity to meet heroes in all walks of life. But, as at any picnic, there are wasps. Sometimes the wasps are no more than a nuisance and sometimes they cause you to pack up and run indoors yelping. It was Fellini in
La Dolce Vita
who called his ‘society’ photographer Paparazzo, a word that suggested to him an annoying buzzing insect. The Italian for wasp,
vespa
, was already taken of course …

Certainly paparazzi can be a nuisance, especially if you are with someone who is not in the public eye and would rather not have their features printed in a newspaper accompanied by speculation as to their identity. Then, of course, everyone is a paparazzo today, for everyone has a camera, one of higher and higher quality as year succeeds year.

To this day there are often amateur paparazzi every night waiting outside the Groucho Club, the Ivy Club, the Chiltern Firehouse, Annabel’s, Hertford Street and sundry other ‘haunts of the rich and famous’. They only need one photograph of a celebrity vomiting, or trying to punch a colleague, or snogging the wrong man or woman, and they have paid their rent for the week.

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE GROUCHO CLUB

So, back to the Groucho. I will take you through a day. It is in fact an amalgam of many days, but it may suffice to give you a flavour of the club’s high-water mark, or scum-line if that is your point of view.

Let us say it is a sunny autumn afternoon in the early 1990s. I have had a late-morning meeting about a new book with my publisher, Sue Freestone, in the bar area of the Groucho and am due to lunch with my agent, Lorraine Hamilton, who tells me, over the navarin of lamb, that a producer called Marc Samuelson would like a meeting to sound me out about the possibility of playing Oscar Wilde in a new film.

Buoyed and excited by the very thought of such an idea, I take my post-luncheon brandy to the bar. A pair of adorably cute boys are sitting there, rhythmically drumming the bar-rail with their feet and looking nervously about them. I estimate that they are in their mid-twenties.

I have always felt that the Groucho should be a club within the most sociable meaning of the act and that open friendliness ought to be a very part of its nature. People should be made to feel welcome and at home, not snubbed or avoided. Which is not to say that they should be interrupted or have their conversations crashed. It seems to me that these two young men are certainly in need of a solacing word or two.

‘Hello,’ I say, slipping on to a stool next to them.

They nod and smile.

‘You look as if you are a little bewildered?’

‘Well,’ says one of them, who had charming mousy hair, ‘it’s the Groucho Club. You hear things …’

‘Goodness,’ say I. ‘What sort of things?’

‘That it’s a bit, you know …’ says the other, who has perfectly black hair and the deepest brown eyes, ‘not for the likes of us.’

‘Oh now, pish,’ I reply. ‘You look like just the kind of young bright people that the Groucho would most welcome. Tell me, what do you do?’

‘We’re musicians,’ says the mousy-haired one with just a hint of endearing mockney.

‘Ah, well then. You’re
exactly
the kind of members the club needs. I’ll make sure your candidacies are fast-tracked. Don’t you move a muscle. I’ll be right back.’

I nip to the front desk and ask – Lily would it have been? – to give me a couple of membership forms. I return, brandishing them.

‘Let’s fill these in then,’ I say. ‘Hm. “Profession?” … Musicians. “Address?” … I’ll leave you to fill those in, along with telephone numbers. “Proposer?” … I’ll sign that. “Seconder?” …’ I scan the bar area. ‘Tim!’ I call to an old friend and Groucho regular. ‘Come and second these two splendid fellows. They’re called … sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your names …’

‘Alex,’ says the one with the black hair and brown, brown eyes.

‘Damon,’ says the one with the mousy hair and, now that I look more closely, wonderfully blue, blue eyes.

‘And they’re musicians!’ I tell Tim.

Tim takes the form and signs.

‘Are you currently in work, or do you have a band or something?’ I inquire of the pair.

‘Stephen,’ says Tim, ‘this is Damon Albarn and Alex James. They are Blur.’

This is not very helpful to me.

‘
Park Life
?’

‘It’s OK,’ says the dark-haired one called Alex, extending his hand to be shaken. ‘Big fan.’

Hands are shaken, and drinks ordered all round. I leave the filled-in proposal forms with the front desk and bump into Khaki Joe, another dealer. Currency notes are discreetly swapped for small, tight wraps. I am now, as Americans say, loaded for bear. Ready for a full-on Groucho evening.

The afternoon takes shape. Damon has to leave, but meanwhile Keith Allen has arrived. Keith has entered in bonhomous mood. He already knows Alex James. In fact they are to go on and have a long and productive friendship. Aside from anything else, they give the world Fat Les and the hit single ‘Vindaloo’, for which the world will always be dizzy with gratitude.

Pages could be written about the strange and extraordinary Keith Allen: throughout the late 1980s (following his Zanzibarring) through the 1990s and up until the mid-2000s he was to be found in the Groucho Club most days and nights. He could be bruisingly rude. ‘Some people are crap, some people are brilliant,’ he once told a well-known TV comic loudly. ‘You are mediocre, which is worse. So much fucking worse.’ It’s very hard to recover from this kind of assault. I sat with the poor recipient of this onslaught for two hours, trying to convince him that vitriol from Keith Allen was as healing balm from a seraph, a compliment of the highest order. Keith was an early figure in the alternative comedy world, and anyone who came after him or perhaps Malcolm Hardee
^*
was a sell-out in his eyes. For months in the Zanzibar and then the Groucho I tried to avoid him. One day he had come up with a drink, sat down and told me that I was great. This was most discomfiting. He had told almost everyone I liked and admired that they were complete wankers and that their work was shit and derivative. How should I take a compliment from this terror? Naturally, wuss that I am, I absorbed it gratefully, and we became friends, albeit warily on my side. Griff Rhys Jones, a man of exemplary forcefulness and courage, once confided in me that Keith scared him half to death. Long Groucho poker evenings drew them closer together. Griff is a non-drinker and good boy (unless you count poker as a vice), so Keith’s acceptance of him could be counted as highly complimentary.

Why would one want to be liked or accepted by someone so loutish, rude, uncontrollable and horrific, you might wonder? Charisma, I suppose. Famed for his amatory adventures and now for the success of his children (Alfie the Greyjoy in
Game of Thrones
, and Lily the singer-songwriter), he has a quality of playfulness and boldness that naturally more cautious and bourgeois figures like myself cannot but be drawn to. And whatever your instincts may tell you, I can assure you that he is a very loyal and generous friend to those in need.