More Fool Me

by Stephen Fry

  THURSDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 1993

  Just a plain old writing day. Hugh round at the usual hour and then a lot of chat, hysterical laughter and trying to get sketches out.

  In the evening went off to the Groucho and played poker. Won a heap, snorted a heap. Also present Rory McGrath, Griff, Keith Allen. All the usual suspects. Bed at three. Twice damned villain. Watched the recordings of the Labour Party broadcast which had gone out at nine and ten. Seemed okay in my haze.

  FRIDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 1993

  Hugh and I did a spot of work before zipping over to Holland Park for lunch with David Liddiment at the new Joe Allen/Orso restaurant, Orsino’s. Liddiment is the man who’s replaced Jim Moir* as head of Light Entertainment at the BBC. Tall, thin, glasses, Mancunian accent: seemed wildly unfriendly at very first glance. Turned out to be shyness, rather a decent sort really. Good that we touched base with him, I think. Decent grub.

  Back home for me, and off to the dubbing studio for Hugh. More work on his Cellnet commersh. At seven-thirty I walked over to the Paris studios to record a couple of Just a Minutes. Think they went alright. I was against Peter Jones and Paul Merton. The first one had Pete McCarthy† as a guest, the second had Jan Ravens.‡ Jan excelled at her silly voices and impressions. Merton and Jones were splendid as ever. I my usual self, I suppose. In any case I won both games, for what little that is worth.

  Then I had to walk very fast indeed to Le Caprice, for dinner with the Cleeses, Marilyn Lownes,* the Lauries and Bill Goldman. I had said I would be through recording by about eight thirty: it was actually 9.45 by the time I got there. Still, everyone on good form and enjoying the chance to use me as a friendly butt. Bill Goldman, as ever, spilling over with rich advice on how to proceed with the film business. I wish I had his huevos. Chucked it in at about twelve-ish. Ended on a sour note, though. There was a cluster of paparazzi outside the restaurant, Hugh did the sensible thing and zoomed out through the kitchens. I went ahead on my own and left John C. to do the same.

  SATURDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 1993

  Stayed in cheerfully most of the day, emerging at seven to cab it to Hammersmith. Ben (Elton) on at the Apollo. Saw him backstage first: Phil McIntyre† very sweetly had arranged a free bar backstage. Lots of dahlings present. Em and Ken, Hugh, Ade and Jenny, Bob Mortimer, Rik Mayall … all sorts. Ben on stunning form. Christ, those arseholes in the press who go on about him as if he is the quintessence of modern PC evil … they haven’t the faintest idea, they really haven’t. If it weren’t enough that he is the gentlest, kindest poppet in the world, he is also so much funnier and cleverer than they realize.

  The party afterwards was just absurd. Too much voddie for the undersigned. And a whole deal too much of the old Bolivian marching powder too. X at one point, wanted a line, so I chopped him one in the loo. Y fully on the stuff too. I left at two and the joint was still jumping.

  SUNDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 1993

  Sunday papers and coffee. Norman Fowler is ‘consulting his lawyers’ after the Labour Party Broadcast had suggested that he had gone from privatizing National Freight to being on the board of the new company. ‘They never mentioned that nine years passed between the two acts,’ he (perhaps rather justifiably) complained. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I feel a bit sorry about this as he’s one of the few of that generation of Thatcher’s cabinet I really admire. The AIDS epidemic landed in his lap when he was Health Secretary and, since retiring, he has continued to work and proselytize in the sector when he has no reason to other than moral decency.

  To the Cleese’s for Alyce Faye’s son’s wedding. A lot of the Nile holiday crowd were there. Peter Cook, Bill Goldman, Ian and Mo Johnstone, Tomasz Starzewski etc. etc. Wedding went all right, rather chilly in the garden grotto. Good food and wine and, afterwards I made a small speech, as requested by Alyce Faye. Then a few rounds of Perudo with Peter C., Tomasz, Martin and Brian King. I skipped at three-ish, having arranged that Bill Goldman would come round at eight to examine my computer.

  This he duly did. He’s just bought a Mac and wanted to know how they worked. Not what you would call technophile, Bill, but he gasped and wowed appropriately when shown what a Mac can do. We then trotted off to Le Caprice again for dinz. I still have to rub my eyes and pinch myself to believe that I know the man who wrote Butch Cassidy and Marathon Man and who inspired me so much with Adventures in the Screen Trade.

  MONDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 1993

  A day working with Hugh, rather thrown off course by Emma Thompson arriving at twelve to have her script rescued. She had been writing her screenplay of Sense and Sensibility on a Mac, using Final Draft. Somehow it had all got corrupted. They saved it all, but lost the formatting and so on. I managed to get it all back in shape for her, but the defragging and so on took a very, very long time.

  She is rather keen for Hugh to play Colonel Brandon and equally keen, so far as I can see, for me to play no one at all. Heigh ho, quite right, no doubt.

  Off to Chris Beetles gallery at six. They were holding some kind of party and sale of illustrations on behalf of the NSPCC. All the usual suspects present, Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Lord Archer, Frank Thornton* (all right, he’s not really a usual suspect) and many others. Stayed for a while, signing T-shirts before the Terrys persuaded me out for a bite to eat. We decided on Groucho’s.

  Got very blasted on a lot of wine. The Terrys left and then I stayed behind, getting even drunker with Griff and Helen Mirren. Home at one.

  TUESDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 1993

  An exciting day. I knew it would be my first evening in for ages. Galleys of The Hippo arrived. I hate the type-face they have chosen. What can I do? It’s a Palatino, the most annoying feature being really irritating ‘inverted commas’ not curly like ‘these’, but naffly straight and horrid. In fact the type-face I’m using here is much better. Theirs is stark and clunky and just plain foul. Bollocks.

  Hugh and I didn’t manage to write much: we watched the Budget instead and started reading Emma’s screenplay, which I had printed out for Hugh at her request. She’s actually done a smashing job. It really reads well: I was in floods of tears, absolutely loving it. Such a great story, of course. Hugh would be excellent as Brandon. But top marks to Emma, really brilliant work. The cunt of it is that she’s right, there is absolutely nothing in it for me. Boo hoo. It could make Hugh a star, which he thoroughly deserves,* but yours truly is going to be a bit of a stay-at-home naffness, while Hugh jets off to Hollywood as Mr Big. I have always known that this will happen, but what will come hard will be everyone’s sympathy for me …

  Bed reasonably early and totally sober.

  End of month, daisy, time for a print out.

  And there, for good or ill, that passage of the diary comes to an abrupt end. At least it doesn’t, but I seem to have lost the rest of it for the time being. Perhaps it is best to have offered you that excerpt and leave the rest to be published, when extricated from corrupted hard drives and no longer readable Zip and Jaz drives and floppy disks, after my death. No need then to protect the identities or habits of those I have protected here.

  I have to be honest and say that reading the preceding pages gave me quite a turn. I have felt rather like someone groping forwards barefoot in an unlit attic, forever treading on unexpected lego bricks. Only twenty-one years have passed, but I feel as though I am peering into a wholly different world. I had no idea I was quite so busy, quite so debauched, quite so energetic, quite so irremediably foolish. To live that life and each day so studiously to record it is something I do not even recall doing. I cannot even be certain who I was then. If I went back into the Groucho Club of 1993 and watched myself playing a game of snooker and disappearing every ten minutes to the gents, I am not sure I’d be able to hold back from massacring myself. How I managed to do so much working and so much playing without keeling over stone dead I cannot imagine. Believe me when I say, if you are younger than me, that you will not make it if you think you can imitate my wicked, wicked ways. Hold fast to the be
lief that I am a genetic freak who survived and that you are not. Do not test this assertion. Verb sap. as my old Latin master used to tell me – not that I listened. Verbum sapienti sat est – a word to the wise will do.

  I have a very clear black-and-white memory of Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood, being sycophantically interviewed on a BBC Sunday-night programme.

  ‘Your Grace, you are considered, I believe, by those who know you to be very wise.’

  ‘Am I? Am I? Oh my goodness. I wonder if that is true.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you can tell us what you think wisdom is?’

  ‘Wisdom? Wisdom? Well now. I think perhaps wisdom is the ability to cope, don’t you?’

  I have never heard a better definition of wisdom since. Certainly wisdom is nothing to do with knowledge or intellectual force. There are brilliant minds who can’t sit the right way on a lavatory, and wholly uneducated people whose fortitude and humour in coping with lives that we would find unendurable shames us all.

  The opposite of wisdom is generally considered to be folly, not a word much in use today. There are different kinds of fool of course. I fooled for a living in comedy shows on television, stage and radio. I became something of a licensed fool in palaces and private houses. I was a fool to my body – most especially to my brain and the linings of my nostrils, almost daring them to wave the white flag of surrender.

  I often lie awake now, not for the old reason, not because my bloodstream is filled with that noxious, insinuating and wickedly compulsive stimulant, but because my mind is churning around and around wondering how as a young man I could ever have got myself into such a state. Where might my life have led me if I had not all but thrown away the prime of it as I partied like one determined to test its limits?

  I do not remember that an unconscious whispered command to self-destruct drove me on, but looking back across the decades, reading the diary for the first time in twenty years, shaking my head in wonder at the reckless, impulsive, stupid, vain, arrogant and narcissistic headlong rush into oblivion that I seemed determined upon, I have to believe that a death wish was some part of the story.

  And what possible excuse could I have to throw away the abundance of good fortune that at the time I could not believe I had lucked into and which today I still find unbelievable? Maybe that is where the answer lies.

  It is such gimcrack armchair psychology that it may make you groan in dismay, but it is possible that I did not think myself worthy of that incredible luck and did all I could to dispose of it. Which takes me back to the world of my first book of memoirs, Moab is My Washpot, where I describe what I must hope and trust is a common feeling amongst many children: that of being watched and judged. When our race was young all humans felt it and called it God. Now, most of us call it conscience, guilt, shame, self-disgust, low self-esteem, moral awareness … there are plenty of words and phrases that dance around the rim of that boiling psychic volcano.

  This very shame might paradoxically explain my bravado, in the way that the defenders of a crass, brash boor might explain that their friend acts in the way he does because he is ‘so terribly shy’. It wasn’t difficult for me to come out as gay, or later to be open about being afflicted with a mental condition that has led to attempts at suicide. I continue to this day unthinkingly to blurt out things which will get me slammed in the tabloids and cause embarrassment to my friends and family. A part of me truly believes that honesty is, as schoolteachers used to say, ‘the best policy’ in every way. It saves being ‘found out’, but it also – if this doesn’t sound too self-regarding and sanctimonious – helps those who are in less of a position to feel comfortable about who they are or the situation they find themselves in. Without diverting ourselves about the nature of altruism and whether it really exists, I know that I write more or less the books that I wish I could have read when I was – oh, between fourteen and thirty I suppose.

  Memoir, the act of literary remembering, for me seems to take the form of a kind of dialogue with my former self. What are you doing? Why are you behaving like that? Who do you think you are fooling? Stop it! Don’t do that! Look out!

  Books, too, can take the form of a dialogue. I flatter myself, vainly perhaps, that I have been having a dialogue with you. You might think this madness. I am delivering a monologue and you are either paying attention or wearily zipping through the paragraphs until you reach the end. But truly I do hear what I consider to be the voice of the reader, your voice. Yes, yours. Hundreds of thousands of you, wincing, pursing your lips, laughing here, hissing there, nodding, tutting, comparing your life to mine with as much objective honesty as you can. The chances are that you have not been as lucky with the material things in life as I have, but the chances are (and you may find this hard to believe, but I beg that you would) that you are happier, more adjusted and simply a better person.

  If there’s one thing that most irks my most loyal and regular readers it is the spectacle of me beating myself up in public. I try to fight it, but it is part of who I am. I am still a fool, but I have greater faith in the healing force of time. It is possible that age brings wisdom. The spectacle of many of our politicians and other citizens of middle age and beyond gives one leave to doubt that hope.

  There is a fine legend concerning King Solomon, the wisest of all the Kings of Israel. You may know the story in another way. It hardly matters. It is a good story and worth remembering.

  King Solomon was being visited by a great Persian king. During their conversation the Persian king said, ‘You have much wealth and power and wisdom here, Solomon. I wonder if you have heard of the magical golden ring?’

  ‘Of which ring?’

  ‘They say that if you are happy it will make you sad, but if you are sad it will make you happy.’

  Solomon thought for a second before clapping his hands for an attendant. He whispered into the attendant’s ear. The attendant disappeared with a bow and the king clapped his hands again and called for dates and sherbets.

  After the dates and sherbets had been consumed it was not long before the attendant had returned, bringing with him a goldsmith in a leather apron. The goldsmith bowed before both the kings and passed to Solomon a golden ring.

  Solomon turned to his visitor. ‘I have the ring that will make you happy if you are sad and sad if you are happy.’

  ‘But that is not possible!’ cried his guest. ‘The ring is a legend. It is not something you can command to have made in the twinkling of an eye.’

  ‘Read it,’ said Solomon.

  The visiting king took the ring, still warm from the forge, and read upon it the words: ‘This too shall pass.’

  If days be good, they shall pass, which is a lowering thought. If they be bad, they shall pass, which is cheering. I suppose it is enough to know this and cling on to it for some small comfort when confronted by the irredeemable and senseless folly of the world; to be a little like Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche who was ‘born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad’.

  But I know enough of myself and the instability that seems to be my birthright to be sure that I have not yet learned this lesson.

  More fool me.

  Postarse

  Since there is no preface there must be a postarse. I have many people to thank. Literary parturition can be as messy and bloody a business as the obstetric kind. This book would not have been possible without all those who expend so much thought and energy clearing the thicket of my engagements and commitments in order to give me enough time to write. They include but are not limited to my writing agent Anthony Goff and my dramatic agent Christian Hodell. Most especially, of course, I owe everything to the book’s dedicatee, my patient, efficient, kind and wonderful Personal Assister, Jo.

  Everyone at Penguin Books has been sublimely professional, useful, wise, understanding and fun: above all my epically perfect editor Louise Moore and her stellar team: Hana Osman, Katya Shipster, Kimberley Atkins, Beatrix McIntyre, Roy Mc
Millan and so many others. Once again David Johnson has taken on the task of organizing the author tour events, cinema streamings and those other oddities that constitute a book launch in the twenty-first century. His skill and experience have made that sluttish side of selling so much more enjoyable than it would otherwise have been.

  Thanks to everyone mentioned in this book: some of you have read the manuscript and kindly corrected my memory, others have used the Search facility to jump from one mention of their name to the next and then ‘signed off’.

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

  Chelsea. Oh dear.

  Chelsea – seems a waste of time to take trouble over tying a bow tie but neglecting to shave properly …

  Kim Harris, Chelsea.

  Kim in Draycott Place, taken by self (I solved that Rubik’s Cube too, but months after my father cracked it).

  Kim Harris in our Chelsea flat.

  My beloved parents …

  My Personal AsSister doing what she does better than anyone.

  In 1986, I spotted a house for sale in classic west Norfolk brick. Reader, I bought it.

  From P. G. Wodehouse.

  Chelsea: Pipes are hard work. P. G. Wodehouse signed photograph evident. As is Rubik’s Calendar, which is just showing off.

  Chelsea flat, at work on something. You can just see the signed photograph of P. G. Wodehouse on the left.

  Rowan’s inexplicable ability to find something more interesting than me.