More Fool Me (21 page)

After he had gone, I watched Penn, an enormous man, crouching on the floor, rolling about, beating the planks of the stage, sobbing, stuffing his fist into his mouth and moaning up to the fly-tower: ‘Why did I
do
that? What came
over
me? What power do they have? I betrayed my country!’

During the course of the early 1990s, I got to know Sir Martin Gilliat quite well. An extraordinary man. If you didn’t know him yourself I assure you you would have loved him. He was of a type that no longer exists and whose very background and manner would now, I suppose, be looked down upon very snootily. Ludgrove House, Eton and forty years Equerry and Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘All Sir Martin’s geese are swans,’ was a popular saying in royal circles. Which, being interpreted, means that everyone was alike in splendour to him, low, high, of whatever background, breeding, race or gender. I never met a man of such natural charm, kindness and vivacity. He had had a ‘good war’, of which, naturally, he never spoke. He escaped the Nazis several times but was always recaptured. At last, like all serial escapers, he was sent to Colditz, the Eton of prison camps. I was told that he had never slept since. Not properly. Apparently doctors examined him until he got tired of it
^*
and sent them packing. This made him ideal for the Queen Mother. She would dine festively, play amusing games and then go to bed round about one or two in the morning. He would sit up writing letters until she came down. They would walk the dogs together in the park. Ideal companions.

There is a story told in Hugo Vickers’s biography of Queen Elizabeth, as she was known in the Household. She liked pranks at parties. One evening after dinner at the Castle of Mey, her favourite residence, right up in the very north of Scotland in Caithness, she and the ladies, having retired to leave the men to their port, decided it would be a lark if they all hid behind the curtains to surprise the men when they came out after their port and cigars.

Sir Martin led the men out and said in his very loud voice, ‘Thank God for that, they’ve all fucked off to bed.’

I got to know him because he was an inveterate punter in the West End stage, what is known as an angel. He hit the motherlode with
Me and My Girl
and was forever grateful. He invited Rowan Atkinson (who also knew him) and me to Buck’s, his club, for lunch. Over the gulls’ eggs and asparagus he confessed that there was an ulterior motive for his invitation.

‘Marvellous to have you chaps to luncheon of course, but I have to ask you. Do you know the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn?’

We both regretfully disavowed ever having had that pleasure.

‘No? Well. She was a lady-in-waiting of Queen Elizabeth’s for many years. It is her eightieth birthday in July, and we, which is to say Queen Elizabeth, are going to throw her a birthday party at Claridge’s, and I thought perhaps you might provide a little light relief? We have a band, but comedy is always popular.’

Rowan and I digested this and exchanged speaking glances. The year before he and I had descended on the Middle East, a swoop known in Rowanese as a bank raid. Rowan and I performed in his amusingly entitled
One Man Show
in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Oman, brightening the lives of expat oil executives with high-quality, high-priced comedic entertainment. So we did have a show.

Rowan expressed our reservations perfectly.

‘Well now,’ he said. ‘We do indeed have material, b-but if most of the audience is the same age as the Duchess and the Queen Mo … Queen Elizabeth, then some of it might seem a bit …’

‘A bit fast? A bit racy?’ boomed Sir Martin, his resonant voice echoing off every surface of the dining room and rattling the glassware. ‘Oh I wouldn’t worry about that. The royal family loves the lavatory. I mean obviously not yer fucks or yer cunts.’

‘Well quite,’ said Rowan, swallowing and looking down at his plate. ‘No indeed.’

Sir Martin, as a loyal servant, was not one prone to gossip but he could not help telling me this story of his employer. One morning in the upstairs drawing room of Clarence House she said to him, ‘Martin, I think our television is on the blink. Do you think we might need a new one?’

‘I shall have a look, ma’am.’

Sure enough the television – this was many years ago – was suffering from that annoying rolling horizontal bar affliction that was the bane of many an ageing cathode ray tube.

‘Ma’am, I shall be straight on the telephone to those nice people at Harrods, and while you’re at luncheon they will install a new one.’

‘Lovely, Martin. You’re an angel.’

This was, of course, before the days of the not-so-cold war between the royal households and Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods.

After her luncheon the Queen Mother – Queen Elizabeth, I beg her pardon – tottered upstairs to watch the three o’clock from Chepstow or whatever it may have been, and there was Sir Martin, standing proudly by a brand-new, very large television set.

‘Oh, how grand!’ said Queen Elizabeth.

‘Yes indeed, ma’am, and I’ll tell you something rather special.’

‘Oh do, do!’

‘You might notice that it has no buttons for changing the channels.’

‘Oh no,’ she squealed, ‘they’ve forgotten the buttons. How dreadful!’

‘Ah, but no, ma’am. Do you see that grey box next to your gin and Dubonnet on the side table there?’

‘Oh, now whatever can that be?’

‘Well that is what they call a “remote control”, ma’am. If you’ll allow me … I press the button marked 1, so, and up comes BBC 1. I press button 2 and up comes BBC 2. And then button 3 for ITV. You see?’

‘Oh, how clever!’ Queen Elizabeth beamed approvingly and then added, ‘I still think it’s easier to ring.’

Living the Life

Over the decades I have been asked to deliver lectures, disquisitions and addresses on numerous subjects and for the most part I manage to excuse myself. Just occasionally, however, a subject is so appealing or a cause so close to my heart and my diary so surprisingly and unwontedly amenable that I find myself under an obligation to disgorge as requested. I offer you the opening of a lecture I gave in the Royal Geographical Society’s lecture theatre some years ago: the first Spectator Lecture, or Speccie Leccie, as I called it. I have scavenged from it and present the exordium so as to make coherent some of my thoughts about America, a country I was becoming more and more fond of and anxious to visit more and more often.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Good lord. Well, well. Here we are. Gathered together in the very lecture theatre where Henry Morton Stanley once told an enraptured world of his momentous meeting with Dr Livingstone. Charles Darwin was a member and gave talks in this same hall. Sir Richard Burton lectured here, and John Hanning Speke … spoke. Shackleton and Hillary displayed their intimate frostbite scars to a spellbound RGS audience. Explorers, adventurers and navigators have been coming here for the best part of 180 years to tell of their discoveries. If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land. Actually, now that I think of it, one reason for me to be fond of the subject was the circumstance that in my prep-school geography room there were piles and piles of shiny yellow
National Geographic
magazines available for skimming through. These, with their glossy advertisements for Chesterfield cigarettes, Cadillac sedans and Dimple whisky, gave me my first view outside television of what America might be like. But there was another reason religiously to scan the magazines …

National Geographic
, before it became best known for an imbecilic and embarrassing suite of digital TV channels, was – thanks to its anthropological coverage in a pre-internet, pre-Channel 4, pre-top shelf age – the only place where a curious boy could look at full colour pictures of naked people. For that alone it deserves the thanks of generations. One did get the false impression that many peoples of the world had protuberances shaped exactly like a gourd, but never mind.

National Geographic
made films too, and at my school these would be run through an old Bell & Howell projector by the geography masters to keep us quiet and to give them time to beetle off and pursue their amorous liaisons with matron or the whisky bottle, depending on which teacher it was. ‘Fry, you’re in charge,’ they would never say on their way out. But what strange films they left us to watch. I seem to recall that the subjects were usually logging in Oregon, the life cycle of the beaver or the excitements to be found in the National Parks of Montana and Wyoming. Very blue skies, lots of spruce, larch and pine, and plenty of plaid shirtings. The unreliable speed of that hot and dusty old Bell & Howell rendered the soundtrack and its music flat then sharp then flat again in rolling waves of discord, but it was the commentators that gave me raptures with their magisterially rich and rolling American rhetoric. What a peculiar way with language they had, employing poetical tricks that had been out of date a hundred years earlier. My favourite was the ‘be-’ game. If a word usually began with the prefix ‘be-’ it was taken off. Thus ‘beneath’ became ‘neath’ and so on. But the ‘be’ of ‘beneath’ wasn’t simply thrown away. No, no. It was
recycled
by adding it to words it had no business being anywhere near. Which would result in preposterous declamatory orotundities of this nature: ‘Neath the bedappled verdure of the mighty sequoia sinks the bewestering sun,’ and so forth. And what is the proper name for
this
rhetorical trope, also much deployed? It would start with the usual ‘be-’ nonsense: ‘Neath becoppered skies bewends …’ but then this: ‘the silver ribbon of time that
is
the Colorado River’. The weird and senseless maze of metonym and metaphor that
was
National Geographic Speak in all its besplendour was a great influence on me, for where others had rock and roll music, I had language …

And so I bewended and bewittered like the large slab of humanity that
was
Stephen Fry. Despite my passion for all things American and my obsession with its language, literature, history and culture, I didn’t visit the country until I was well into my twenties. I had adapted and rewritten the book of the British musical
Me and My Girl
as alluded to
passim
, and it was decided that a Broadway production might be worth attempting. With Mike Ockrent, the director, and Robert Lindsay, the star, I took a PanAm flight from London to JFK. I had never been so excited in my life. My first view of the Manhattan skyline was like Dante’s first view of Beatrice, Cortez’s of the Pacific and, I dare say, Simon Cowell’s of Susan Boyle. I fell for New York quite as much as Wodehouse, W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde and my other literary heroes had before me. But we were only there for rehearsals. The musical was to try out and open in Los Angeles, California. My first visit, and I was to live for a while in both Manhattan and Beverly Hills. My cup ran over like a blocked gutter.

In Broadway’s theatre district there is a famous eatery called the Carnegie Deli. It features in Woody Allen’s
Broadway Danny Rose
, you may remember. It was on my first full day in America that I went in there and ordered a pastrami sandwich. Big deal, you may say. Oh yes. Big deal. Huge deal. For those who have not had the pleasure, a proper New York deli pastrami sandwich is about the size and thickness of a rugby ball. Two thin layers of rye bread and in between slice after slice after slice of warm, fatty, delicious pastrami. On the side is served a pickle or so. Hold that image. Me facing off with a vast pastrami sandwich. Right. We now scuttle to LA. I blew all my per diems on a single weekend in the Bel Air Hotel, luxury on a scale I had never even imagined, let alone contemplated. Robert Redford winked at me from across the breakfast room. I nearly trod on a dog belonging to Shirley MacLaine. My over-running cup ran over even more till it was more like the Trevi Fountain than any sort of cup I know.

Then back to New York. I am happy to say the opening night of
Me and My Girl
was everything one could have hoped for. The
New York Times
raved; we were a hit. I won a Drama Desk award and a Tony nomination; Robert Lindsay went on to win a Tony and a hatful of other trophies for his brilliant performance. There and then I promised myself that one day I would live in New York, this city from whose sidewalks you drew electricity like a tube train from its tracks. At the time I had been staying in an apartment belonging to my friend Douglas Adams. On the flight back I garrulously chattered away to an American lady sitting next to me about how I loved America and was planning to live in New York.