After the episode we were filming wrapped, there was a party for the cast and crew and she came over to talk to me. It took a few seconds for me to grasp who this very, very beautiful woman was. I had never seen her out of her costume.
Helen is short, around five six, but looks taller because she always wears heels. She has curly blond hair and piercing cobalt-blue eyes. Her mouth is big and sexy and when she smiles at you it feels like you’ve won something. Her giggle is so deep and throaty, so downright filthy, that when I made her laugh it felt sexual. Really, I’m not kidding about this; I had never been so physically attracted to a human in my entire life, and since I’d already had a beer or twelve I told her so. She dismissed my attentions as Celtic charm, but she gave me her phone number before she left.
Soon afterward, Harry and I went on tour once more, roistering around the smaller theaters and student unions of England and Wales, so it was a while before Helen and I met again, but I called her often from the road and we talked for hours. I found out all about her.
Her full name was Helen Atkinson-Wood. She was eight years older than me and was an actress from Cheshire, in the north of England. She was from a wealthy family—her father owned a textile mill—and she had gone to an all-girls school where she had been very horsey and bossy and popular and then went on to study fine arts at Oxford. She adored her two brothers, Chris and Pete, and went home often to spend time with her parents. She never took drugs but liked to drink good wine with dinner and would take a glass of sherry with the vicar after church if he insisted. Helen owned the apartment she lived in, located in the wildly fashionable borough of Islington, north-central London. She made me laugh more than anyone I had ever met, and her conversation was peppered with thrilling, clever, and uproarious innuendo.
In short, she was way out of my league.
The tour that Harry and I were on was scheduled for a two-week run at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival, where we’d be appearing at the Assembly Room, a much more prestigious venue than I had been in the year before. One day when I was drinking in the Artists Bar, a hangout for the performers and their friends, Helen came in wearing some kind of flamingo-colored summer dress. I saw her standing in the doorway, she was backlit by the cold Edinburgh sun, and for a moment I literally lost the ability to breathe. As soon as I recovered, I called her over, and though we hugged a little too long for a friendly greeting, it wasn’t long enough for me. I could have stayed there all day.
She had another impossibly glamorous creature named Sue with her, the two English ladies having decided on the spur of the moment to come to the city for one day of culture. Helen and I talked for as long as we could but eventually I had to go onstage and she had to go for her return train to London. We’d be seeing each other the following week, though, at the wedding of Jimmy Mulville and Denise O’Donoghue, slated to be a terribly grand affair at the Chelsea Barracks in London.
I still hadn’t bothered to learn to drive, and I would have felt conspicuous riding on public transport in full Highland dress—kilt, sporran, sgian dubh (the ceremonial dagger worn with the kilt)—so I took a taxi from my tiny rented North London flat to Chelsea.
I had promised to wear the complete rig because Denise asked me to. She and Jimmy had been so kind to me, even letting me crash in their spare room until I found a place of my own. It seemed the least I could do was give her the total Brigadoon if she wanted it.
I don’t know if the bride and groom had a good time at their wedding, but Helen and I had a blast. We danced and danced and danced, and she didn’t seem to notice when I snuck off to the lavatories to do lines of coke with the boys. Of course I drank and drank and drank, too, but the coke, together with the dancing, kept me appearing sober enough to be allowed to go home with Helen at the end of that wonderful evening.
I have heard women talking about having to take the “ride of shame” the morning after, when you travel home on the subway in what you wore the night before and everyone knows what you have been up to. I know exactly what they mean. I didn’t have enough money (coke is expensive) for a taxi home from Helen’s the following day, so in my Highland battle dress I had to cross London on the underground, not a little conspicuously.
I was hungover and embarrassed and shaky and profoundly in love for the first time in my life.
26
The Aspirations of a Phony Englishman
I can’t explain Helen and me. How do you explain love? We were just in it, that’s all. Soon after the wedding, she asked me to move in with her and I did, although I kept the little flat across town for the first few months just in case she kicked me out.
We stayed together for five years, and by the time it was over, she had, with my blessing, changed my life beyond recognition. I wanted her to, and I was and still am happy and grateful that she did.
She insisted I learn to drive and made me get a license as well as a car. Right away she told me that she didn’t want to have a boyfriend who was a lush. So for a while when I was around her, quite a lot since we lived together, I didn’t get drunk.
She changed the way I ate, introduced me to fresh fruit and, saints preserve us, muesli. We slept during the nighttime and got up in the morning—this was a staggering concept for someone who hadn’t lived like this since his early years of high school. We went to movies and the theater and restaurants and had friends whom we hadn’t met in bars! We even took vacations to the Seychelles and Barcelona and Sri Lanka and France. In short, Helen was a grown-up, and in order to be with her I had to at least try to be one myself. She taught me how to live, and while doing so, she was the sexiest, funniest person I’d ever met. She also smelled great.
Helen had done Ibsen and Shakespeare and Chekhov at very classy and impressive joints from Stratford to the West End. She played crazy Mrs. Miggins on U.K. television’s most popular comedy show, Blackadder, alongside Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry.
Helen was a serious actress who believed in preparation and rehearsal, and thought that I could use a bit of both. She told me that although I undoubtedly had some kind of innate talent as a performer, I had some real work to do.
I listened to her. I worked harder on the act, I began writing material, both for myself and, through my ever-eager agent, Rachel Swann, for other, more successful, comedians. Because of Helen I got a lot better at my job. I looked better, too—she made me go swimming with her every morning at the public pool.
The only people I knew in London were the newlyweds Jimmy and Den, while Helen knew everybody. Her actor buddies were familiar to me and easy to be with, but sometimes I had a terrible feeling of inferiority when we had dinner with her older (and, actually, her closer) friends.
They were alumni of Oxford and Cambridge who “came up to London” after university and tended to stick together. Helen’s gang of ineffably talented souls included Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, Douglas Adams, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Rowan Atkinson, Emma Thompson, Angus Deaton (Helen’s ex—I distrusted him until I actually met him), and Geoffrey Perkins, who would eventually become controller of the BBC. All of these individuals were hugely influential in British comedy, and I felt tremendously uncomfortable around them, assuming that they looked down on me for not attending a swanky school or being from the “right” family, but I see now that that was hogwash. If anyone was unfairly prejudiced it was me—I had a chip on my shoulder because of my background. I didn’t want anybody’s fucking help or influence. I was better than them because I was, I don’t know, Scottish, or angry, or something. Also, I didn’t know how to behave around these rather brilliant people who treated me with tact and charm and sympathy, not because they feared me, which is what I told myself at the time, but because they loved Helen and knew she loved me.
These people came from the privileged English middle and upper classes, they were the very people I’d grown up believing were the enemy, yet here I was among them, even living with one of them. And they had no problem with it. I was the one in confl
ict.
Loving Helen split me in two. It was agony. If I drank I’d lose her; if I didn’t I’d lose my mind. The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to contain my drinking. I would look for jobs that took me away from her so that she couldn’t see me get fucked up. I toured Australia with an all-girl Jewish singing group called the Hot Bagels, and of course ended up having an affair with the Everything Bagel. More accursed secrets. More shame brought on by behavior instigated by alcohol, which only fueled the need for more alcohol, and on and on and fucking on.
I made a film for Channel Four at the bull-running festival in Pamplona, Spain, and stayed drunk for a week. One night I struck up a conversation with some American film-crew members in town shooting second-unit footage for a Billy Crystal movie that was to be called City Slickers. I told them I wanted to go to Hollywood and be in the film business and they said forget it. They told me they already had enough assholes like me.
Once again I toured the U.K. with Harry Enfield, but this time it wasn’t as a double bill. As “Loadsamoney,” the character he and Paul had come up with—a vulgar nouveau riche London plasterer—Harry had become a huge star. On this tour, Harry got top billing, Paul and Charlie played secondary roles in his skits, and I was the opening act.
I was grateful for the work, but also bitter and resentful, even though Harry, Paul, and Charlie were always gentlemen and not one ever once gave me cause to feel like that. I just felt like that anyway.
We spent two months on the road, this time in a real luxury coach with not just a bathroom and real beds but with a TV, on which we watched the movie Spinal Tap every day. We were living the dream—big hotels, big theaters, big partying, big money, big fun—but underneath all that partying I was just another miserable drunk.
I got shitfaced every single night; sometimes I couldn’t even remember being onstage, but somehow I did okay in front of the audience. On tour, pretty much everybody was living like an alcoholic, anyway, so for a while it seemed I was just part of the team.
Eventually I got a stand-up special of my own for Channel Four that would be filmed at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre and produced by Rowan Atkinson’s company. I wrote a little wraparound story for the show, containing flashbacks to my fictional family life, and sent the script to the legendary Peter Cook, offering him the part of my character’s father. To my astonishment, Peter invited me to come discuss the project with him at his house in Hampstead.
I was extremely nervous when I arrived there for an eleven a.m. meeting one Monday because Peter Cook has always been a comedy god to me, and to countless others. The idea of meeting and perhaps even working with him was almost beyond belief, but I managed to ring the doorbell intercom, and after a moment a very familiar, if somewhat sleepy, voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Peter. It’s Craig Ferguson. I’ve come to talk about the Channel Four thing.”
“Ah yes, Craig,” he said, perking up a bit. “Come on in. I’ve got a little breakfast for us, it’s in the fridge, in the kitchen, just on the right. I’m upstairs, I’ll be down in a trice.”
The door buzzed and I pushed it open.
The kitchen was indeed on the right. The fridge was empty except for two large cans of Strongbow hard cider. I yelled up the staircase.
“Peter, I can’t see anything. There’s only two cans of Strongbow here.”
“I repeat. Breakfast is in the fridge,” he yelled back.
Peter came downstairs in an alarmingly short terrycloth robe and we proceeded to have breakfast. He was a beautiful and gregarious man, very generous about comedy and his own life, and a hysterical, deeply interesting conversationalist.
We talked a little about the project, and after he agreed to do it, we then blabbed on for hours about the comedy scene, past and present. He was aware of the Bing Hitler stuff and knew many of the guys I had been working with. He was fascinated by comics in general and stayed very current on who was doing what. We talked some about my life, and a lot more about his, which was fascinating. He talked very warmly about his old partner, Dudley Moore, who had gone on to a huge film career in America with Ten and the Arthur movies. He clearly adored Dudley but felt that his success in America had failed to make him happy.
During our conversation, Peter told me about an incident that occurred very early on in his career. He had received a telephone call from the office of Prince Charles, which was amazing because everyone knew Peter was no fan of the monarchy. The conversation, he said, went like this:
EQUERRY: Hello, Mr. Cook. I am Sir Rodney Bumblington-Trousers and I am the equerry to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.
PETER: Oh. Congratulations.
EQUERRY: Er…thank you. His Royal Highness is a great admirer of your work and was wondering if you would be free to have dinner with him on the seventeenth.
PETER: Oh. Well. Let me see. Would that be the seventeenth of March or the seventeenth of April.
EQUERRY: The seventeenth of March, Mr. Cook.
At that point Peter picked up a telephone directory and rustled it next to the phone.
PETER: Hold on. Just consulting the old diary. Won’t be a minute.
More rustling.
PETER: Oh, dear. I’m sorry. I have consulted my schedule and I find I am watching television that evening. Do give His Highness my apologies.
I don’t know if Peter’s story was true or not, and I don’t care. I loved that man.
So Peter and I worked together on the comedy special, and I don’t think any human being has made me laugh so much before or since. We did some drinking together, too, but Peter was trying to be careful, the booze really had a hold of him. I was, needless to say, having the same trouble.
No one can live a double life forever, and mine was falling apart at the seams. My love for Helen, or, more accurately, the power that it held against the rising tide of my alcoholism, was beginning to wane.
In the early years together I rarely got drunk in front of Helen, but whenever either of us was out of town I’d pour booze down my neck like a man possessed, which I suppose in a way I was.
Now, though, I was getting drunk all the time. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; I simply couldn’t stop. I was out of control, and whenever I needed to make a good impression at a party, a dinner, or while performing—I’d get so bombed I’d fuck it up.
I was cast in The Rocky Horror Show in the West End, playing the role of Brad Majors. It was a year’s commitment and I thought it would have a stabilizing influence on my life, but the opposite was true. Whenever Helen was away—and, as a working actress, this was not a rare occurrence—I could be found at the notorious Groucho Club, London’s plush but seedy mecca for dipsomaniac showbiz types, immersing myself in whatever debaucheries presented themselves.
I was arrested for a DUI one night while driving in a boozy, coked-up haze from the Groucho to pick up Helen at Heathrow Airport. She’d been working in Africa for the British Comic Relief Charity and arrived home exhausted, and somehow had to figure out what had happened (though by this time she knew it would be safe to assume I’d gotten drunk and screwed up) and get herself and her luggage home.
Meanwhile, I was in jail and her car was impounded. (My own rattly old bus was in the shop for a change.)
I still wonder what was in it for Helen all that time. Why did she put up with me? I suppose she knew that I loved her as much as I was then capable of loving anyone. And, inexplicably, she loved me. Thank heavens at least she had the sense not to marry me.
We had tried our best to make a life together. As soon as I was earning enough money to inspire the bank to give us a mortgage, we bought the most adorable house in a tiny Suffolk village named Dunwich—its population then jumping from twenty-three to twenty-five when we moved in. There, in the desolate beauty of the East Anglian coast, we hid from everything. We decorated the place and bought a washing machine and a fridge, I chopped firewood out in the garden, Helen made jam, and for a while it was heaven
. Then inevitably it all came crashing down.
One Monday morning I set off for London to do a little business. Helen dropped me at the station; it was a two-hour train ride, and I told her I’d be back around four in the afternoon.
I got there in time for whatever bullshit meeting I had scheduled and then went to the Groucho. I had a beer with someone, and that led to a beer with someone else, which led to a line of coke with someone, which led to a conversation with a girl. The upshot was I didn’t make it back home until Thursday. I was too busy tearing around London with my cokehead compadres, passing out on people’s floors or hotel rooms. I know it’s crazy, I can’t really explain it either, but this is what happens when I drink alcohol.
I was a very sorry soldier when I walked the long country lanes back to the house in Dunwich three days late. I expected rage and grim ultimatums from Helen but found instead that she had packed her bags—indeed most of her stuff was already gone—and was very sad. We went into the little kitchen with its view of the North Sea. She made me some tea and sat in my lap. We held on to each other as tightly as we could. We cried and cried and cried. I haven’t come apart like that at any other time in my life, and it was very rough on her, too, but when she had enough breath she told me what we both knew was coming.
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