More Fool Me (24 page)

Starched white napery, crystal glassware and silver cutlery gleam in the candlelight. Two low bowls of perfect peonies on the table, vases of roses and exquisite flowers I cannot identify distributed about the room. On occasional tables occasional nuts, olives and cornichons. Fortunately this is the age before the uneatable Bombay Mix or palate-destroying pretzel assortment. A bottle of champagne in a silver bucket shifts slightly in the ice. I pour a solacing vodka and tonic, light a cigarette and pretend to myself that I am not a little nervous. When out on my walk I withdrew enough cash to tip Ernesto, Alfonso, Gilberto, Alonso and Pierre as lavishly as might be appropriate.

I have arranged with Alonso that as soon as the first guest has arrived he will come in to serve cocktails and the fizz. If he has not been alerted by reception I will press the bell by the fireplace.

A thought strikes me: perhaps the front desk won’t know who John Mills is! It would be dreadful if so august a figure should slip anonymously in without being treated with the respect he deserves. I call down.

‘Good evening, Mr Fry.’

This was a time when I still got a little disconcerted by the hotel staff being able instantly to identify me as soon as I called.

‘Hello, yes it’s me. Stephen here in 512. I just wanted to say that I’m having a dinner party, and the thing is, the guests of honour are Sir John and Lady Mills, and I hope you will –’

‘… Oh, sir, we know Sir John very well indeed. Rest assured we shall welcome him most enthusiastically. Most enthusiastically!’

Hugh, Jo, Ken and Emma arrived together. We were still young enough to be excited by such a preposterously grown-up business as holding a dinner party in a place like the Savoy.

Alonso made cocktails and stood discreetly by the drinks trolley as we giggled and shrieked.

The buzzer sounded, and we all straightened up and put on serious but welcoming faces.

I opened the door, and there stood Sir John and Mary. He stepped in and looked blinking about him.

‘Oh … oh! It’s …’

I noticed with alarm that he had started to weep.

‘Sir John, is everything all right?’

He took my arm and squeezed it tight. ‘This is
Noël’s
suite!’

He let go and walked about. ‘Every first night, this was the suite Noël took. Oh gracious!’

It was a perfect evening. Johnny and Ken quickly made friends. Anecdotes rained down, and many beans were spilled. The front desk had already made a great fuss of Johnny and Mary, lining up to greet him at the famous porte-cochère as soon as his splendid old Rolls-Royce had arrived with his faithful driver, factotum and friend John Novelli at the wheel.

It was the beginning of a long friendship between John, the Mills family and me. Not long enough as far as Johnny was concerned of course; he died in 2005 at the age of ninety-three, and Lady Mary, who had lost herself to dementia many years earlier, joined him in death later that year.

Their sixty-four-year marriage was an extraordinary achievement. I bumped into Johnny in 1996 in an artist’s green room at the Sitges Film Festival. He peered up at me.
^*

‘Oh, Stephen. Do you know something? This is the first time Mary and I have spent a night apart since we were married.’

Astonishing. I once asked him what the secret of so strong a marriage might be.

‘Oh, it’s very simple,’ he said. ‘We behave like naughty teenagers who’ve only just met. I’ll give you an example. We were at a very grand dinner a couple of years ago, and I scribbled a note saying, “Cor, I don’t half fancy you. Are you doing anything afterwards? We could go to my place for some naughty fun …”, something like that. I summoned a waiter. “You see that ravishing blonde at the table over there?” I said, pointing towards Mary. “I wonder if you’d be good enough to hand her this note?” I was then rather horrified to realize – my sight was just going at this stage, you have to understand – that he was handing the note to Princess Diana. She opened it, read it and with her eyes followed the waiter’s pointing hand back to me, squirming in my seat. She smiled, waved and blew a kiss. Oh dear, I did feel a fool.’

Two events gave me especial delight during my years of friendship with Johnny. One was the good fortune I had in spotting that Christie’s were selling an old dressing gown of Noël Coward’s. I won the auction and gave it to Johnny on his eightieth birthday. He remembered Coward wearing it, and owning it gave him a remarkable amount of pleasure, which in turn, of course, gave me a remarkable amount of pleasure.

The second event took place on a freezing winter’s day in the grand old house Luton Hoo, former seat of the Marquesses of Bute and latterly the diamond magnate Julius Wernher, much of whose famous Fabergé collection was stolen from the house in a daring motorcycle raid. I was using it (some time after this burglary) as a location for scenes for the film
Bright Young Things
, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel,
Vile Bodies.
I tentatively asked Johnny one day whether he would consider playing the part of Old Gentleman at a Ball. He immediately consented. I explained that what I wanted him to do in his scene was to spot Miles, a fey young man played by Michael Sheen, apparently taking a pinch of snuff from a small silver box. Miles would offer the old gentleman a pinch of this ‘snuff’, which was peculiarly white for milled tobacco, and then resignedly allow him to take more and more in odd moments when we returned to them as the ball progressed. Johnny was very excited to be playing his first drug scene so late in his life and took it, as he did all his work, very seriously. Though just about stone blind and in a large chilly house, he asked for nothing extra. We had made up a small interior tent for him, however, which we furnished with a day bed and five-barred electric heater.

A few years later Johnny lay dying in a new house in Denham Village (The Gables I think it was called), up the road from Hills House, where they had spent so many years. I went to visit him. He had a chest infection and couldn’t really speak, but I sat and held his hand. I had brought with me an iPod, on which I had uploaded as many Noël Coward numbers as I could find. He was dressed, as he liked to be, in a velvet jacket, his KBE and CBE medals proudly attached to his chest. I put the iPod down by his side and gently pushed the earbuds in. As I heard Coward’s voice crooning ‘I’ll See You Again’, I saw his mouth form a smile and tears leak from the corners of his eyes.

Back at the Savoy Hotel a few days after the Mills–Branagh dinner party I am waiting at six in the morning for my car to take me to Wrotham Park for the day’s filming on
Peter’s Friends.
I find myself chatting to Arturo, one of the linkmen.

‘You a fan of Frank Sinatra, Mr Fry?’

‘Am I? You bet I am.’

‘Ah, well. He’s coming to stay with us today.’

‘You’re kidding!’

On the ride up to Hertfordshire I rehearsed what I’d say if I bumped into the great man. Ol’ Blue Eyes. The Chairman of the Board. The Voice.

The filming, as it does, went on and on and on and on and on. It must have been past midnight before I drew up again at the Savoy. Arturo opened the door for me.

‘That was a long day, Mr Fry.’

‘Looks like it was for you too.’

‘Just started my shift, sir. Now, why don’t you follow me? Something I’d like you to see.’

Baffled and faintly irked – all I could think of was bed – I trailed after Arturo along the passageway that led, and still does, to the American Bar. We went down the steps, and Arturo pointed towards a man sitting in a pool of light, head bowed over a crystal lowball glass, backlit cigarette smoke ribboning up. A living album cover.

‘Mr Sinatra, I’d like you to meet Mr Fry, a long-term guest.’

The man looked up and there he was. He pointed to the chair opposite him.

‘Siddown, kid.’

‘Kid’. Francis Albert Sinatra had called me ‘kid’. It reminded me of the moment in Richard Lester’s
The Three Musketeers
when Spike Milligan says in a stunned, reverent voice, after Charlton Heston has grasped his wrist and whispered him into conspiracy against his wife (Raquel Welch), ‘The Cardinal has taken me by the hand and called me friend!’

I think I had about three minutes alone with Frank before the room was filled with old friends and I found myself pushed to the edge of the party. But it was enough, and I wound my way back to 512 as one in a holy dream.

A few days later I saw Arturo on duty again. I pumped him by the hand and pushed a fiver on him.

‘As long as I live I will never forget that moment, Arturo. What a favour you did me. I can never thank you enough.’

‘It was my pleasure, Mr Fry.’

‘Is he still here?’

‘Left this morning. Quite funny actually.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well, just before he got into his car for the airport he gave me a roll of cash. Great thick roll it was. “Thanks for a terrific stay, Arturo,” he says. “Well, thank you very much, Mr Sinatra. Always a pleasure for us to have you at the Savoy.” “Tell me,” he says, “is that the biggest tip you’ve ever had?” I look down at the money. Huge roll of twenties and fifties it was. “Well, as a matter of fact, sir, no it isn’t,” I says. He looks most put out. Most put out. “Well tell me,” he says, “who gave you a bigger one?” “You did, sir, last time you stayed,” I says. He got into the car, laughing his head off.’

‘And next time he stays you’ll get an even better tip,’ I said.

‘Ooh, the thought never crossed my mind,’ said Arturo.

Dear Diary

By 1993
Peter’s Friends
had come out,
Fry and Laurie
had had a second series, and I had written my first novel,
The Liar
, and a collection of journalism, essays and other scraps called
Paperweight.

I am an irregular diarist, but the months leading up to the completion of my second (and favourite) novel,
The Hippopotamus
, and the delivery to my flat of its galley proofs were well covered by me. I offer them to you because I think they recapture better than my memory ever can the hectic, intensely busy and fractured nature of my life back then. That it was leading to a catastrophic explosion I did not realize. Perhaps it will be apparent to you as you read. I have remained loyal to the intentions laid out in the first entry and have not altered or added, except for the sake of respect for those who would rather be kept out or have their identities masked. From time to time footnotes have been added for the sake of clarity.

MONDAY, 23 AUGUST 1993 – LONDON

I’m going to be 36 tomorrow: three dozen, a quarter of a gross. A very factorable number, but otherwise nothing special. Nonetheless it seems a good time to restart my diary. (
First resolution
: no going back and altering this chronicle. No reading back, no emendations, no retrospective editorials. It must come out of me absolutely in one. Otherwise, what’s the point?) Ha! ‘Oh, what’s the point?’ … the last words in Kenneth Williams’s diary, just published and just skimmed through by me. I’m mentioned once in the index, a reference to an appearance on a
Wogan
that KW guest-presented. ‘Stephen Fry OK’, that’s my reference. An epitaph. Listening to Strauss’s Alpine Symph. while writing this. It’s on Radio 3 as a prom. Rather wonderful version by some Russian conductor I’ve not heard of.
^*
Introduced in traditionally hushed tones by James Naughtie. Naughty James sat next to me at the John Birt Cup Final lunch earlier in the year. Nice chap.

Lazy day today. Very lazy: like all the days I’ve spent recently. Having such a reputation for hard work is satisfactory and bolsters my
amour propre
but it is
such
a lie. Spent most of the day polishing off the seating-plan for tomorrow’s birthday dinner. How can it take that long? Well, I’ve decided to do anagrams for the guests’ names. Here’s a list, with explanations:

• Henry F. Pest – Me
  
• Lacey Easy-Fleece – Alyce Faye Cleese (wife of John Cleese, Okie psychotherapist)
  
• Irma Shirk – Kim Harris (darling friend from Cambridge)
  
• Lady Orlash – Sarah Lloyd (wife of John)
  
• Mercie H. Twat – Matthew Rice (sweetie designer and splendour)
  
• Sonia Wanktorn – Rowan Atkinson
  
• Katie Labial-Scar – Alastair Blackie (friend of Kim, agent, and my gardener)
  
• Martie Badgermew – Emma Bridgewater (wife of Matthew Rice, designs crockery)
  
• Jones Leech – John Cleese
  
• Maria Sillwash – Sarah Williams (producer, currently back with Nick Symons)
  
• Harold Clit-Shine – Christian Hodell (assistant of Lorraine)
  
• Julie Oar – Jo Laurie (wife of J. H. C. Laurie)
  
• Coke Toper – Peter Cook
  
• Reg Gowns – Greg Snow (friend from Cambridge)
  
• Slim Noble – Simon Bell (Oxonian layabout and charmer)
  
• Nik Cool – Lin Cook (wife of Peter)
  
• Dolly John – John Lloyd (producer of
  Blackadder
  etc.)
  
• Mario Nolan–Hitler – Lorraine Hamilton (my agent)
  
• Miss Nancy L. Soho – Nicholas Symons (old Cambridge chum producer of
  Bit of F&L
  )
  
• Antonius Stanker – Sunetra Atkinson (wife of Rowan)
  
• Eli Cider – Eric Idle
  
• Uriah H. Glue – Hugh Laurie