by Stephen Fry
Underneath it all, I still valued my work above everything. Hugh and I had started A Bit of Fry and Laurie for the BBC, and it would no more occur to me to write, rehearse or perform in front of the cameras with coke up my nose and in my bloodstream than it would for me to drink all day and bumble into the studio tanked up. Coke was ‘pudding’, it was the reward that meant I could grant myself an extra three or four hours at a members’ club somewhere, discreetly (but frankly back in those days, not so very discreetly) powdering my nose.
Snooker and poker played a large part: there was no appetite for food, but a gigantic one for alcohol. Cocaine, in sharp contradistinction to MDMA and cannabis, seems to increase one’s threshold for pure liquor more than anything I’ve known.
I have tried to make this book as balanced as possible, by which I mean true. I am not going to squirt out a great list of famous names with whom I have shared lines – that simply is not my business. I don’t want this book to be a snivelling apology, nor a boastful ‘Coke, fuck-yeah!’ So I have to be honest and say that the first ten years of my coke dependency seemed to cause me no trouble whatsoever. Sometimes, very rarely, I had to postpone or cancel an early-morning appointment, but generally speaking I lived a high-functioning life. As my prosperity rose my ability to acquire higher-quality cocaine increased commensurately (hence Nonny), and that cannot have hurt either. Better purity meant less diarrhoea, nasal bleeding and nausea.
Was the presence of coke in the system noticeable to others? There is an old Greek saying: ‘It is easier to hide two elephants under your arm than one pathic.’ You may need to stop and do a little poking around and looking up to parse that, but what it is essentially saying is that if you walked through the Athenian marketplace with the boy you were sleeping with – your pathic or catamite – it was more conspicuous and obvious to all than walking with a pair of elephants. Much the same with coke, certainly with a chronic habit. Tooth grinding, the telltale running nose, the chattering, the lack of appetite. Much as I hate to disagree with Professor Freud, one line leads to another and another, certainly not to ‘aversion’. Most coke users will acknowledge one particular rule of the stuff. There is either not enough or there is too much. Not enough, and you start to ring dealers at three in the morning. They will be far from best pleased. Too much, and you fill yourself up with it and won’t be able to sleep till noon or later.
Another stroke of good fortune, which is something to do with my ambition or my constitution or some mixture of them both, is that I have always known when to stop, especially if I am working the next day. I am nearly always the first to leave the party, murmuring excuses about a film call the next morning or whatever it may be.
I was once standing at the bar of the Groucho Club with the painter Francis Bacon, the art dealer James Birch and those two inseparable art works in themselves, Gilbert and George. Everyone was in a very jolly mood when Bacon ordered a bottle.
‘Oh, not for me,’ I said, ‘I’m up pretty early tomorrow morning.’
‘Oh, don’t be a cunt,’ said a Gilbert or a George. ‘Drink with us, ducky.’
‘I’m really sorry …’ I insisted.
Francis tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Ah, you’re like me, you’ve got a little man.’
‘Well actually, I’m single,’ I said.
‘No, no, no,’ he prodded the side of his temple. ‘A little man in here. A little man who tells you when to stop and go home. Oh, the people I knew. So talented, but no little man to stop them. Minton, John Deakin, Dan Farson … no little men, you see? I understand. Off you go.’
I was profoundly touched (and flattered of course) by this fellow-feeling and thought myself lucky to have this little man and that such a legend as Bacon recognized it in me. For all I know, he thought I was a total arsehole and made the whole story up just to get rid of me. But it is certainly true that Francis himself would go on outrageous binges, drinking and drinking like a man who wanted to die and then his little man would intervene and say, ‘No, Francis. Time for the studio.’ And back he would go to work for another four or five weeks, producing some of the greatest paintings of his time. So far as I know, he was never much interested in drugs.
There is, however, a wonderful story that has done the rounds enough for me to believe it to be true. Skip if you know it. Lionel Bart, the endearing but woefully hapless songwriter and creator of the musical Oliver!, came round to dinner with Bacon and his boyfriend, John Edwards, some time during the late 1970s. They couldn’t help noticing that every now and then Bart would disappear under the dining-room table, and a snorting, snuffling noise would ensue, accompanied by the unmistakeable rustle of a plastic bag. Bart would get up, apologize and then carry on with the merry conversation.
An hour or so later he left, with many hugs and thank yous. Francis and John (no staff, fantastically rich as Francis already was by then) started to clear the table.
‘Oh, what’s this?’ said Bacon, who had found under Bart’s seat a bag of white powder.
‘Heavens, Francis, you’re such an innocent. That’s cocaine.’
‘Ooh, ooh! What shall we do with it?’
‘I know,’ said John with a flash of inspiration. ‘We’ll go to Tramp.’
Tramp was a well-known nightclub in Jermyn Street run by the excellent Johnny Gold. It is almost always mistakenly called Tramps, with which Johnny would put up with sighing resignation. In the 1970s it hosted the wedding receptions of Liza Minnelli and Peter Sellers,* it was the chosen watering-hole of sporting naughty boys like George Best, James Hunt and Vitas Gerulaitis, all kinds of models (before they were ever prefixed as super), various cashmere-cardiganned European playboys and film actors from both sides of the Atlantic. Nothing like as smart as Annabel’s, but enduring and not without its own character and likeability. It is still going, but without the enlivening presence of Johnny Gold.
The pair arrived at the door to be met by a large doorman who had no more idea of who Francis Bacon was than Francis Bacon knew who Kenny Dalglish might have been.
‘Sorry, mate, we’re full. Queue over there,’ he told Edwards.
Daringly, Edwards – who had an idea about club doormen that was more or less infallible in those days – let the man see a glimpse of the bag of white powder.
‘Would you like a …?’ he said.
‘Just a sec, gents … follow me.’
The doorman beckoned to a second-in-command and pulled Edwards and Bacon into a little alcove next to the door. John tentatively proffered the bag, and the doorman took a healthy scoopful, which he transferred into a little bag he had ready in his waistcoat pocket. He next led them to an occupied table, which he swiftly de-occupied with a growl of ‘reserved’ and a sweep of his well-muscled arm.
‘Juanito, the best champagne for my friends …’
Well, thought Bacon and Edwards. This is the life and no mistake.
A bucket of Dom Pérignon arrived and was poured out into glasses by the fawning and chattily verbose Juanito. All the while, John and Francis were impatiently planning their discreet visit to the gentlemen’s lavatories, which they had noticed were being visited with great frequency by a steady line, as it were, of glamorous, well-known faces.
They had hardly taken one sip of the Dom Pérignon before the bouncer was clattering back down the stairs.
‘You two, out! Out this fucking minute. If I ever see your fucking faces again, I’ll fucking beat the living crap out of you. Got it, you fucking fuckers?’
Disconsolately they taxied their way back home, wondering what could have gone wrong.
‘Did you notice,’ said Francis, ‘that his nostril was frothing slightly? And rather pinkly, as if blood had been drawn? Is that usual?’
They put the matter out of their minds, had some drinks – alcohol being a drug they well understood – and went to bed.
The next morning Lionel Bart called to thank them for the dinner party.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘did I leave my bag o
f denture fixative powder behind? Can’t find it anywhere.’
THE GROUCHO
Play by the Rules: The Groucho Club Rules
Upon arrival at The Club, Members shall approach the Reception desk to sign and print their names in the signing-in book – this Ancient Ceremony being a necessary preliminary to entry into all the Club Rooms.
The use within The Club of Mobile, Cellular, Portable or Microwave-controlled Telecommunication Instruments is an anathema, a curse, a horror, a dread and deep unpleasantness and shall be prohibited in all locations, save the Reception area and the Soho Bar, until 5 p.m. Please be alert to the acknowledged misery of Ring Tones and silence all such mechanisms before entry into the Club Rooms.
The ingestion into the bloodstream of powders, pastilles, potions, herbs, compounds, pills, tablets, capsules, tonics, cordials, tinctures, inhalations, or mixtures that have been scheduled by Her Majesty’s Government to be illegal Substances of whatever class is firmly prohibited by Club Rules, whether they be internalized orally, rectally, intravenously, intranasally or by any means whatsoever. So let it be known.
A Member may invite into The Club up to four (4) Guests at any one time, for whose behaviour and respect of the rules the Member is responsible. Be it understood that a Guest will not be allowed into the Bar save that they be accompanied by a Member.
The wearing of String Vests is fully unacceptable and wholly proscribed by Club Rules. There is enough distress in the world already.
To step out into Dean Street owing money to The Club leaves a stain on a Member’s character that cannot be pleasing to them. For this reason all bills and monies owing to The Club should be settled in full before a Member may leave The Club.
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.