More Fool Me

by Stephen Fry

Now this section isn’t a diary (diary entries lie up ahead, waiting for you) but I do feel I have to insert here, by way of flavour, the unexpected nature of today, this day of my writing this sentence. A not untypical day in my life except for one rare but wild circumstance. In this interruption itself, as throughout the book, there will be plenty of unexpected excursions, which I hope will not annoy.

  I awoke early this morning, still tingling. Last night I experienced one of the strongest manic episodes of my life. It had been stealing up on me for some days, but last night I felt almost possessed. I texted everyone I knew furiously, knowing that safety with cyclothymia (my particular variation of Bipolar Disorder) lies in the support of friends and family. They can tell from one’s voice how over-sharp the edge of hysteria might be and talk one down or insist upon one accepting help. Hypomania (I know, one would have thought it should be called hypermania) often presents with a euphoric need to be in touch with people and a garrulity and excitable chattering manner that can make one barely comprehensible. It is, I am told, much harder to live with someone manic than someone depressed. The worst state for a family member, spouse or companion to deal with is the transitional mood that develops as one cycles between the two. I realized last night that this was what I had been going through the previous week, when I had felt angry and prickly about everything. I was energetic but in what you might call a negative manner.

  But last night I was so charged, flying so high, feeling so positive and convinced of my worth that I suddenly understood historical figures like Joan of Arc and the wild prophetic ravings of Howard Beale, the radiant seer of broadcasting played so memorably by Peter Finch in his posthumous Oscar-winning last hurrah in Network. I’m sure you remember the scene where, raincoat over pyjamas, he comes dripping and possessed into the network building to take up his position in the newsroom as anchorman and, live on air, stands with arms outstretched exhorting all his viewers to go to their windows and shout, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!’ God knows what drivel I might have come out with had I been in front of a camera last night.

  If I didn’t have a tiny core of sanity inside me I quite seriously would have believed myself imbued with some great spirit. Only those who have endured, or perhaps enjoyed, hypomania will understand quite what I mean. I am still today rattling away at top speed, though I dare say I will come back to revise this passage when I’ve either floated down (as I earnestly hope) or crashed to earth (as I worriedly fear).*

  The nature of depression, mania’s sinister twin, is that it is opposite in every regard. The one gives you hope and a vainglorious, grandiose belief in the future; the other convinces you of life’s entire and eternal futility. The one gives an urge to communicate by text, letter, phone call, Twitter and personal visit. The other casts one alone into a darkened room, refusing visitors and rolling away to turn one’s back on those poor concerned ones who love you and want to speak to you. Two poles.

  So, I repeat. Yesterday was as high a day as can be. As a matter of fact I went to see my team, Norwich City, suffer a catastrophic and wholly undeserved defeat at Craven Cottage, the home ground of Fulham Football Club. How we will avoid the drop from Premiership to Championship I don’t know.† But that is entirely another matter, and one that holds no interest for you. I mention it only because being in the directors’ box in the company of Delia Smith and fellow board members and club staff allowed me to squawk and scream and jabber and joke and yell and yodel without it seeming the least odd. By the time I got home, undefeated even by the terrible loss of the match, I found myself in a state of unparalleled OCD busy-ness.

  You will have the pleasure of learning more about my strange mind later as we go, but for the remainder of yesterday evening I polished shoes, tidied cupboards, reorganized stationery, cleared clutter and cooked a supper which took about half an hour to plate up, so fantastically symmetrical and exquisitely layered were its ingredients.

  When I had finished this Adrian Monkish meal I began to feel my hands shaking, the blood singing in my head and a pressure pushing down on my chest. I was alone that evening so I set about sending long, long texts to those I knew best. I told them that I was manic, but that I was safe and had no feeling that I was going to do something mad, embarrassing or unsafe. Finally, I took the decision to text my psychiatrist, who was just returning from Marseilles, and he texted back with a suggested tweak to my medication and instructions to call him tomorrow, Sunday, by which time he would be home.

  I slept well last night despite such an extraordinary and quite unexpected swing of the internal weather-vane. This morning I worked on a passage of this book, words tumbling furiously from me. I do hope, by the way, that this doesn’t show. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, as Congreve wrote. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure, as I have learned. Sorely. Write in haste, revise at leisure, as experience has also taught me. ‘I can write drunk, but must revise sober,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have told his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

  At two-thirty in the afternoon I slipped into a good shirt, knotted the silk salmon-pink and cucumber-green Garrick Club tie around my neck, selected some unassuming trousers and a pleasing jacket and trotted over to the Criterion Theatre, that little Thomas Verity jewel-box right by Eros* on Piccadilly Circus. The bar next to the theatre (the Cri, as it used to be known in its late-Victorian, early-Edwardian heyday, the age and locus of Wodehouse’s Hon. Galahad Threepwood and his nemesis, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe) is where Doctor Watson met up with his old dresser from Barts Hospital, ‘young Stamford’, who was to go on that very afternoon to introduce him to Sherlock Holmes. So for me, despite the hordes of Chupa Chups-coloured tourists who clamber up to be photographed as they mime sucking the aluminium figure’s elegantly veiled little dick while fingering his pert botty,† carelessly breaking the bowstring as they do so, despite their moronic, thoughtless littering of the surrounding area and despite at night drunks pissing into the trough at the base of the bronze fountain, despite all this, Piccadilly Circus – ‘the hub of the Empire’, as they used to call it – is sacred turf to me. Sacred paving, I should say.

  I have the honour of being the chairman of the Criterion Theatre. It involves little more than a board meeting every now and then, but it is such a beautiful playhouse, and it does give me a little kick to see my name in the back of the programme, lost in the tiny print somewhere amongst the producers, investors and other board members. Our proprietor is the munificent Sally Greene, whose bountiful patronage (should that have been proprietress and matronage?) has also breathed life into the Old Vic and the great Soho jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s.

  So, I arrive at the theatre and descend to the stalls (the Criterion is one of the rare theatres where everything is underground: bars, dressing rooms, stage and auditorium) for an afternoon celebrating the life of the actor Richard Briers, who died some months ago. He was a fellow Garrickian, hence the choice of tie. Everyone who worked with him and is still breathing seems to be here. Pennies Wilton and Keith, Peters Egan and Bowles, Dickie’s wife Annie, of course, his daughters and grandchildren and the great Sir Kenneth Branagh, a man as busy, if not busier, than I am, and whom I rarely get to see these days. Before the event begins I stand gabbling away with him, for once matching him in verbal pace and energy. I tell him of my current mental state. Like so many he responds with understanding and experience, recommending, of all things, meditation. The Kenneth Branagh I knew in the days of the film Peter’s Friends would have sprayed out his tea derisively at the idea of meditation and embarked upon a hilarious, vituperative and brilliant extemporized monologue exposing the idiocy of staring at nothing and chanting, ‘Om mani padme hum.’ This is one of the many things I enjoy about ageing: I discover that I am so much less likely to find things twatty, pretentious and scorn-inducing, and I must assume KB feels the same.

  Just as the houselights dim I approach the stalls seats from the wrong end and have to scuttle all the way round. I am rewarded with a h
ard glare from Penelope Keith, who is well known for … well. It is not my place to say.

  She reads, however, the verse that Sir Henry Irving wrote as a farewell on his final stage appearance – a plea for the public to be charitable to lesser-known actors – very well. Everyone in fact is on top form as they summon up memories of a man who charmed all who knew him and swore more regularly and fantastically than anyone I ever met. Never having met myself, who would count as the one exception, I might boldly claim. Although the best swear I ever heard came from a close friend of both mine and Ken’s, an actor who, forgetting his lines on a film set, reprimanded himself with the savage cry of ‘Cunting Auschwitz!’ Being Jewish, he could get away with it, I suppose. Just. But it’s a curse one needs to keep for a serious moment of distress or fury, one can’t but feel. For this person, forgetting his lines while filming was as serious and infuriating as anything could ever be. I am afraid I am more dilettante about such occasional lapses.

  A remembrance of a much-loved man without a dud moment, although it is KB who, family aside, wins the afternoon by several lengths. Celebrations, memorials, funerals and charitable evenings are not competitive, you are thinking. To an actor, let me assure you, every single opportunity to open your mouth and perform to an audience alongside other actors is always a fierce and biting adversarial combat, and do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

  Every story Ken tells about Briers (whose career direction he helped transform astoundingly to the extent of casting him, very successfully, as King Lear) I have heard many times before, yet I am reduced to an asthma attack strong enough to need a gulp or two on the inhaler I laugh so much and so uncontrollably. Branagh is always referred to as an exemplum of the self-regarding thespian lovie, or luvvie, or however you choose to spell it. This is rather unfortunate for me, since the Oxford English Dictionary cites my employment of the word (as it is commonly understood in reference to the acting trade) as the first known publicly printed usage. As a matter of fact, if he belongs to any class or subspecies of actor at all, I would say that Kenneth is blokey rather than luvvie. He is also – and for some reason people find this hard to believe – amongst the five funniest people I have ever met. We’ll meet him again later in this unpredictably juggled narrative too.

  I am sitting next to the legendary Frank Finlay, who barks out the occasional laugh. I cannot say that he was entirely friendly to me when I breathlessly took my seat at the last minute, but then he is a devout Roman Catholic and perhaps he has heard of the debate in which I argued alongside Christopher Hitchens against the proposition that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. The number of people since who have accused me of being ‘anti-Catholic’ depresses and upsets me. Perhaps someone reported to him that I had rudely insulted the Mother of Churches and had harsh words for the pontiff (at that time Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, RC Ret’d).

  I leave the event speedily to avoid being stuck with too many people. I am sure there is no one there whose company I am specifically avoiding, but I want to come back to this: the computer screen. My mind is still spinning, but I seem to need to share my afternoon with you, the uncomplaining reader.

  The Richard Briers afternoon was typical in some ways of the kind of event that actors attend. Gossip and tales of thespian tradecraft and unspeakable theatrical disasters are told, retold and mistold. Academics, spies, doctors and lawyers are no different, give or take the dictates of their professional ethics. My life is so fragmented that I live the life of an actor and then the next day another life entirely. It may be the life of a writer or that of a sort of television presenter and host; I dine with classical musicians, with restaurateurs, playmates from the old drug days, plain downright socialites, chefs, fellow cricket lovers and new-found friends from the world of online networking. Unlike an envied and admirable few, I separate my friends and almost never dare mingle one group with another. When I do, it is usually a social disaster, like mixing drinks. I love good beer and I love good wine, but you cannot drink both on the same evening without suffering. I love the friends with whom I play or once daily played snooker and tooted quantities of high-grade pulverized Andean flake; I love the friends with whom I dine at preposterously expensive restaurants; I love the friends with whom I’m film-making or mincing on the stage. I love and value them all equally and don’t think of them as stratified or in tiers, one group in some way higher or more important than the rest, but the thought of introducing them to each other makes me shiver and shudder with cringing embarrassment.

  So today I walked away from the theatre, stopped off at a passing supermarket to buy some ice, turkey breast and tomatoes – an entirely random raid – and found myself, after I had escaped the usual struggle with the automated checkout (unexpected item in the bagging area again), trotting along the street in the company of the sartorially point-device Peter Bowles and the ever gentlemanly Moray* Watson†. For a hundred yards I was an actor, as I tattled and swapped anecdotes with them before peeling off and making my way home and finding myself here. Still high on my own erratic and mercurial endorphins, I sit myself before you and think about what to write next.

  We shall pick up the thread and theme of this chapter.

  I mentioned in my list of shame that amongst the places I had taken cocaine was the House of Commons, and this is true. I was sitting in a low, satisfyingly old and comfortable leather armchair after a pleasant, but not too pleasant – it is a club after all – lunch with a Member – we needn’t drag his name into it – and expressed a wish, as we swirled our brandies happily around, to betake myself for a young piddle. The MP pointed me to a door at the corner of the room and told me to take the second right in the corridor which would present itself. I swaggeringly entered until I saw to my alarm that this was a urinal only lavatory. And only one urinal at that. No single stall with a door. The shit, as William Morris predicted so accurately all those years ago in his utopian novel News from Nowhere, must be confined to the Chamber, I thought. So, heart beating like an engine, with the slightly trembling devil-may-care desperation of the true druggy, I wiped dry of condensation the rear section of the top of the urinal with the back of my tie, chopped a line there, drew out my straw and was just bringing it up to my nose when a merry, florid, well-lunched parliamentarian who would never see seventy again came in, humming happily.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said, in a rather muffled way, my shoulders shielding my shameful line. ‘Thing is, silly I know. But I’m a little pee-shy. If there’s someone waiting it just won’t come.’

  ‘Quite understand,’ the man said cheerfully, backing out. ‘You wait till you get to my age. Damned prostate won’t let you get a drop out unless you curse and cajole it. Carry on.’

  I took my courage in one hand and my straw in the other and with a sort of coughing House of Commons ‘hear, hear!’ roar, sucked in the line and straightened up. The old buster lurking outside was still tunefully and now tactfully humming. I swept away what little residue there was with my index finger, gummed it, contrived to achieve a genuine desultory wee and noticed in shame that I had left rather a puddle for this man’s feet. I dived for the taps and the towels and made my escape back to the Smoking Room, as I seem to remember it was called in those days. It is probably known as the Herbal Tea Salon now.

  TRUSS, TWEED AND INTOXICATION

  I may have mentioned before in book, blog or broadsheet that, as I grew to fame, I became more and more astonished at how even apparently observant and intelligent journalists would either tell blind lies, fail to notice the obvious or deviously ignore what was before them because it didn’t fit with an image that they or their editor wished to project.

  One sunny morning I was assigned to be ‘profiled’ by Lynne Truss, formerly my literary editor on the Listener magazine and soon to achieve fame in all English-speaking territories and beyond on account of her Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a declaration of war on what for linguists and those who love language are the ever-dancing, ever-dazzlin
g, ever-changing particles, diacriticals, apostrophes and mutations that allow language to live, breathe, thrive and evolve. But that’s another story. Lynne and I were to meet at the then very fashionable L’Escargot restaurant in Greek Street, run by Nick Lander. Lander’s wife, Jancis Robinson, Master of Wine, caused L’Escargot to be, unless I am wildly mistaken, the first British restaurant whose wine menus were listed varietally.* You’re very bored now, and I can see why. I am getting there.

  So I arrive, and the delightfully frisky and beaming four-foot-nine-inch figure of Elina Salvoni, the maîtresse d’, is there to welcome me. Lynne is already at the table. Now, a month or so earlier I had decided that it was about time to transform myself. I do this from time to time, rather like Doctor Who, only not like him at all. I had reinvented myself from nerdy bookworm to thief and convict, from thief and convict back to nerdy bookworm, from nerdy bookworm to tra-la-la acting and writing performer, from tra-la-la acting and writing performer to nerdy first-adopting computer user, and so on. And within those transmogrifications were so many more. My most recent mutation was from ponderous, tweedy, pipe-smoking paragon of pomposity resembling nothing so much as a Latin teacher at a school which was just going to be closed down in a blaze of scandal to leather-jacketed, jeans-wearing, trail-bike-riding, aftershave-slapping dude who knew which bands were going to be the Next Big Thing and could wear shades indoors without looking a prick. I know what you’re thinking: every fibre of your being must be screaming that this must not be so, but for a year or so that is in truth how I was.

  The fact is (I’m sure I shouldn’t be so forward as to call it Fry’s Law), such drastic and dramatic outward differences cut no ice at all. Any more than cosmetic surgery would have turned Heinrich Himmler into a pleasant companion for a spring walking tour of butterfly-filled alpine meadows.

  Anyway, at the L’Escargot restaurant, I checked in my ‘skid-lid’, as we crazy two-wheeler sons of bitches called them, and joined Ms Truss at her table. We chatted amiably, old colleagues. I had a book to sell; perhaps it was my first novel, The Liar, I can’t remember. She seemed very enthusiastic, the lunch and the Sémillon were well above par. Princess Diana shyly swept up to the first-floor dining room; security men dotted discreetly about downstairs and upstairs tables, rendered conspicuous by their inconspicuousness. That was fashionable London in the 1980s for you. I had another appointment, and my Yamaha beast was growling for release in Soho Square, so I escaped the confining truss of Lynne and roared away, thinking little of the encounter.