More Fool Me (9 page)

• Buckingham Palace
  
• Windsor Castle
  
• Sandringham House
  
• Clarence House
  
• The House of Lords
  
• The House of Commons
  
• The Ritz
  
• The Savoy
  
• Claridge’s
  
• The Dorchester
  
• The Berkeley
  
• The Connaught
  
• Grosvenor House
  
• White’s Club
  
• Brooks’s Club
  
• Boodle’s Club
  
• The Carlton Club
  
• The United Oxford and Cambridge Club
  
• The East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club
  
• The Naval and Military Club
  
• The Reform Club
  
• The Travellers Club
  
• The Army and Navy Club
  
• The Naval and Military Club
  
• The RAC Club
  
• The RAF Club
  
• The Beefsteak Club
  
• The Garrick Club
  
• The Savile Club
  
• The Arts Club
  
• The Chelsea Arts Club
  
• The Savage Club
  
• Soho House
  
• The Groucho Club
  
• BBC Television Centre
  
• Fortnum & Mason
  
• ITV HQ
  
• The London Studios/LWT
  
• Shepperton Studios
  
• Pinewood Studios
  
• Elstree Studios
  
• 20th Century Fox
  
• Daily Telegraph
  offices
  
• The Times
  offices
  
• Spectator
  offices
  
• Listener
  offices
  
• Tatler
  – Vogue House
  
• Vanity Fair
  – Vogue House
  

I take this opportunity to apologize unreservedly to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble premises above and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished surfaces that could so easily have been added to this list of shame. You may wish to have me struck off, banned, blackballed or in any other way punished for past crimes; surely now is the time to reach for the phone, the police or the club secretary. There is no getting away from it. I am confessing to having broken the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs. I have brought, you might say, gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute.

That was then, this is now, yet some of you will be reading this in horror, not because you are easily shocked, but because
you thought better of me than this
. You might have children who will read of my pathetic exploits and you fear that they will take them as permission or encouragement to imitate the chopping-out of that long line of cocaine that stretched from 1986 to 2001. Oh Stephen,
how could you?
Such weakness, such feeble-mindedness, such self-indulgence. Such an insult to the efficient and admirable brain with which nature graced you and the warm and loving home in which your parents brought you up with such care.

This is where it all gets damnably difficult. We come to choosing between what we might call the addiction approach and the personal responsibility approach. There are those, there will always be those, who simply do not buy this addiction concept. Most especially they repudiate the premise that addiction is a disease, one that grips you as permanently and assuredly as any chronic affliction such as diabetes or asthma. They only see weakness, lack of grit, absence of will-power and feeble, self-justifying excuses. They hear, most especially, figures in the public eye talking of ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’ and they want to puke up. Here are rich, overpaid, over-praised, over-pampered, overindulged ‘celebrities’ who scrabble and snuffle and snort like rootling truffle pigs at the first bump of naughty powder they are offered and then, after years of careless abuse, when their septum finally surrenders, or their mind turns so paranoid on them that they lose their only true friends, they bleat, ‘But I’ve got a disease! I’m an addictive personality! Help!’

I’m painting it as blackly as I can, yet I know some of you will see the foregoing as the correct, or at least as a convincing, analysis. Addicts are looked at with the same wrinkled-nosed disgust that is directed at the morbidly obese waddling through Target and Walmart stores in the Midwest states of America. Those poor clams can at least claim indigence and ignorance as the root cause of their addiction to the high-fructose corn syrup, ice cream and corn dogs that are slowly killing them. Does a rock star, City whizz-kid, actor, journalistic feature writer, best-selling novelist or comedian have the same excuse?

In the opposite corner there is the straightforward reverse of this pitiless verdict. It argues that addiction is indeed a condition, often inherited or congenital, and that the only way to defeat it even if it is not a ‘real’ disease is
to treat it as if it is.

I can quite see how one view speaks to the contempt, envy, resentment, scorn and impatience many in the modern world have for what is so revoltingly called and yet so revoltingly
is
‘celeb culture’. A spoiled minority, to which I find myself belonging willy-nilly,
^*
seem to be encouraged to believe their views on everything from politics, art, religion and society are more valid than that of everyman or -woman. Oh how we oh so modestly and smilingly lord it over the rest of society: unto us is given more than we need by way of freebies, attention and opportunity, while ordinary,
real
people struggle with the daily round, unattended to, unheard, bulldozered or at least elbowed aside by a brutish, shallow culture which values fame even above money.

I have been fairly well known in my own country for a quarter of a century, and beyond, in Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, for perhaps fifteen. My books have been translated into dozens of languages, but mostly I find when wandering in Eastern Europe or South America that I am taken for a strangely morphed compound of Jeremy Clarkson and James May from BBC Television’s
Top Gear
. Something to do with being a tall, fleshy Englishman with odd hair who rings a faint bell in the eye of the average Bulgarian or Bolivian, if bells can be rung in eyes, that is.

I remember a marvellous line of Anthony Burgess’s when he reviewed, in, I think, the
Observer
, William Goldman’s peerless
Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Burgess used the phrase of film stars: ‘those irrelevantly endowed with adventitious photogeneity’. Or it may perhaps have been ‘those adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity’. It so happened that I got to know William Goldman well in the early to mid-1990s when John Cleese, in a breathtaking act of generosity, chartered a boat for about thirty to go up the Nile. All we guests had to do was turn up at the Cleesery in London, and the rest was taken care of: carriage to the airport, flights, laundry, food, sight-seeing, informative evening lectures – everything was looked after for us on the floating Claridge’s that glided up from Cairo to the Aswan Dam.

One afternoon comes back very clearly to me. We were shading ourselves in the shadow of an ancient pylon in Luxor while our tour guide spoke of hieroglyphs and higher things. I asked Bill a few questions that I had been too shy to previously. He was hero enough for having written
Adventures in the Screen Trade
and earlier
The Season
, a still perfectly relevant and never less than insanely readable summation of one year in the life of Broadway. But Goldman was the screenwriter who wrote
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
,
All the President’s Men
,
Marathon Man
and
The Princess Bride
and was, even then, chewing over whether he would accept the offer from Rob Reiner and Castle Rock to adapt Stephen King’s
Misery.

Unforgivably gauche as it seems, I found my mouth forming the shy sentence: ‘So, er, what’s Robert Redford really like?’

‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘tell me what you would be like if for twenty-five years you had never heard the word “no”.’

Which is as good an answer as could be given. It is far from necessary and sufficient not to have heard the word ‘no’ for decades to become a brat, or spoiled or impossible to deal with, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the more painful characteristics of those who are called stars.

It’s rather like the argument used to defend those brought up in poverty and abuse, however. It fails to explain those many who, under the same intolerable, horrific circumstances, do
not
become members of gangs or crack-smoking thugs who could remorselessly beat an old man to death for asking them to keep the noise down. There are those who have endured childhoods we can’t even imagine who go on to university and lives of fulfilment, kindness and familial bliss. Similarly there are long-established stars, Tom Hanks to pull a random name out of the Starry Sorting Hat, who are as kind, self-deprecating, professional, unspoiled and modest as it is possible to be.

So we return to drugs. How can I explain the extraordinary waste of time and money that went into my fifteen-year habit? Tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours, sniffing, snorting and tooting away time that could have been employed in writing, performing, thinking, exercising,
living
. I can’t begin to explain it, but I can at least attempt to describe it.

The Early Days

The first effect of cocaine is of … nothing. You don’t get the huge, whoomping, rushing high that is said to be the reward of heroin or of crystal meth and crack. I haven’t tried any of those because I am a squeamish wimp. Perhaps this denies me any credit as a true addict. Friends like Sebastian Horsley and Russell Brand, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and all those rock stars of the 1970s who were unafraid to put a flame under a spoon, suck the juice into a syringe, tighten a tie round their biceps with their teeth, pump their fists and tap with two fingers until they found an available vein, whether it be, once the more available ones had hardened into uselessness, a vein in their eyeball or their penis, then plunge the plunger, they were surely the true addicts. I got the word ‘squeamish’ from an article I read by Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriting phenomenon who gave the world
A Few Good Men
,
The West Wing
,
The Social Network
and
The Newsroom
. He was taking a break in rehearsals with Philip Seymour Hoffman and, as an ex-coke fiend, was saying to him that he’d always been too squeamish to inject himself, otherwise he supposed he’d have been a junkie. ‘Stay squeamish,’ was Hoffman’s (typically) curt reply. It wasn’t too long after that that he himself was dead. Twenty-three years ‘clean’ and then one back-slide and it was all over. It’s rather like nuclear weaponry: you can never say it is safe because it has only been safe
up until now
; it needs to be safe for all time: one moment of not being safe, and the whole game is up.

So, back now in London in 1986 for my first experience of taking coke. I nervously watch my friend take out a folded wrap of paper, open it and shake out a heap of granular white powder on to a metal tray on the table beside him. He takes out a credit card and with its edge chops gently until the powder is as fine grained as he can make it. He uses the edge to sweep this pile into five equal lines, rolls up a ten-pound note, bends down, applies the end of the tube to one nostril and the other end to the first line and with a sharp snort sucks in half of it. He takes the remaining half of his line up the other nostril and then passes me the rolled-up tube.

With as much nonchalance as I can muster I reproduce his actions. My hand is trembling a little, and I am more than a little anxious not to imitate Woody Allen’s notorious sneeze in
Annie Hall
. My bent nose has gifted me a deviated septum, which means that it is uncommon for both nostrils to be in full working order at the same time. I force as much suction as I can on my line with the weak left nostril and nothing moves. Embarrassed, I take the whole line up my clear right nostril with one huge snort. The powder hits the back of my throat and my eyes sting a little. The other three, also neophytes at this ceremony, take their turns.

I sit back, expecting hallucinations, a trance, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy … 
something.

Our host, as is his right, licks his forefinger and sweeps up the residue of powder, pushing it round his gums.

‘Er …’ says one of our number braver than me, ‘what are we supposed to feel?’

‘You get a bit of a buzz’ – the expert claps his hands together and exhales loudly – ‘and you feel just … good. That’s what’s so great about coke. It’s kind of subtle?’

Up until this time the only illegal drug I had ever tried had been dope, which I had been rather ashamed of strongly disliking. Cannabis, even the milder versions of grass and resin available back then before the age of skunk and buds, was certainly not subtle, neither in effect nor in after-effect. In 1982 I had once vomited all over, around, above and below the lavatory of a friend’s house only a few months after coming back from our Footlights tour of Australia. I can’t remember any discernible pleasure at any stage and had more or less foresworn the weed. Most people have a drug that suits them, whether it is nicotine (not much of a behavioural modifier), coffee, cannabis, alcohol, ketamine, crystal meth, crack, opium, heroin, speed, MDMA/Ecstasy. I had decided early on that cannabis was not for me, but I hadn’t for one second considered replacing it with another one.