Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  Version 9

  A Cumbrian word hoozer has been noted, meaning something uncommonly large. Same derivation as ‘huge’, I suppose. Verdict? Feeble. What’s so huge about Indiana or the people of it? I’m getting bored with this now.

  Version 10

  It derives from a Hindustani word huzur, a term of address to anyone of rank or superiority. Verdict? Pure bottywash from start to finish. Hindustanis influencing Indiana in the 1830s? About as likely as a Bulgarian word for ‘lawnmower’ deriving from the Welsh for ‘fondle’. Get a grip.

  Version 11

  From husker, as in corn husker. Verdict? Mm. Yes, all very well, but they are pronounced so differently: words don’t take that kind of a pronunciation journey in so short a time. Nebraska is called the Corn Husker State after all, not the Corn Hoosier State.

  So. There you have it. A complete mystery.

  Elkhart

  Indiana’s biggest city is the capital, Indianapolis. The second-largest, Gary, like much of the northern part of Indiana, is overshadowed by the vastness of the Chicago metropolitan area. My destination is a smaller town still, which lies just about halfway between Detroit, MI and Chicago, IL.

  Elkhart’s greatest distinction is that it is the RV Capital of the World. RV stands for Recreational Vehicle–in other words the mobile homes (MH) that Americans are besotted with, expensively fitted with jacuzzis, microwaves and satellite TV. More than caravans, these customised behemoths are the ultimate expression of America’s love affair with the road trip. Film stars use them as dressing rooms and places in which to hang out off-set, where they are known as trailers or Winnebagos, but for the America that is hooked on the ‘RV lifestyle’ they are motor homes and campers. All around the Elkhart area there are RV companies and the subsidiary industries that support them. And, this being America, you can of course visit the town’s unique RV/MH Hall of Fame and Museum.

  Elkhart’s finest.

  More hosier than Hoosier.

  Elkhart strikes me as being just about a perfect example of the American small town. Large enough to offer ice rinks, colleges, a performing arts centre and its own newspaper, The Truth (I wonder if they know that’s the same as the Soviet Pravda?), it is not so big as to be strip-malled into bland anonymity.

  My appointment is with the fire chief, Mike, a ripely mustachioed figure who combines natural leadership with a wry sense of humour. He lets me ride up front in his huge truck. I feel like a little boy whose Christmases have all come at once. He even lets me sound the siren.

  Dressed in the fire-fighting kit of a brown heat-resistant suit and a helmet, I already look like ten types of twat, but worse is to come.

  Mike decides I am ready to try a real exercise in the crew’s training tower where a fire has been started. The enemy, of course, is smoke more than flame and breathing apparatus is laid on my back and goggles and a mask attached to my face to make me look even more ridiculous. But appearance is of little significance when you are forced into a room where the smoke and gas is so noxious that you could lose consciousness in a minute.

  Into such a room I go, with nothing but a thermal camera and a walkie-talkie to protect me.

  Up the stairs to where the fire is raging. Hell’s teeth. I cannot see a thing. I bump into crew members who move me gently aside, like grooms patiently pushing a horse away. Instinctively I crouch and begin to crawl along the floor. I know that the breathing apparatus will help me, but I cannot help coming close to hyperventilation: this world is so hellish and so impossible to interpret that panic seems like the best option. I feel a great source of heat and point the thermal camera in the direction of its source. The screen whites out.

  Voices say things into the walkie-talkie that I cannot understand. People clap me on the shoulder and make elaborate gestures with their arms. I nod vigorously as if to show that I understand and to communicate that they are not to worry about me.

  Slowly, I back out towards the stairs, turn and tumble down. Once outside it takes me five minutes of fumbling panic to get the goggles and mask off.

  I made it! I survived the hell of a fire.

  Ten minutes later the rest of the crew come down, laughing and chatting.

  ‘So,’ says Mike, a little puzzled, ‘you didn’t want to stay and help put out the fire?’

  Ah. Yes. The triumph of my staying in the inferno for three minutes without screaming or knocking over any firemen is suddenly diminished. In all the excitement I have forgotten that I was there to help do some real fire-fighting. That was, after all, the point. The idea of being in that hell and working, thinking, cooperating and communicating…incredible.

  At this moment I decide that a) firemen are remarkable and b) I will never ask to accompany them on their work again.

  We return to the fire-station and Mike tells me about 9/11. He saw, like the rest of us, the planes hit the towers and the towers collapse. That evening he and half his crew were in their trucks on their way to New York City. They hadn’t been sent for; they just knew that they were wanted. He stayed there, at Ground Zero, for over a month. God knows what kind of horrors he witnessed. I did not feel I could press him.

  ‘So…you didn’t want to stay and help put out the fire?’

  He points out with a mirthless grin that another disaster, Hurricane Katrina, whose ravages I saw back in Louisiana, did nothing but good for Elkhart. All that rehousing created an unprecedentedly huge and urgent demand for RVs.

  I allow him to sit in the taxi, which is a treat begged for by many dignified and superficially cool and hard to impress Americans, before waving him goodbye.

  ILLINOIS

  ‘I am assured that here I will find the most glamorous objects in Chicago, perhaps, in the whole wide world.’

  North Lynch Avenue in Chicago’s dowdy and unremarkable Jefferson Park is far from glamorous and yet I am assured that here I will find the most glamorous objects in Chicago. In all America. The most glamorous objects, perhaps, in the whole wide world.

  Oscar

  On a bitterly cold morning I find this neighbourhood entirely without appeal and begin to wish I had not bothered to come. I am standing outside the door of a low, aesthetically null building, the wind and snow whipping my face with cruel, icy flails. After a muffled knock that is the most my bemittened hands can manage, the door opens. A wave of warm air wafts about me, bearing the alluring scents of kielbasa sausage, stove enamel, glue and swarf: a seductive aroma that says ‘workshop’, ‘precision’, ‘skilled routine’, ‘cosy warmth’ and ‘breakfast’ in equal and beguiling helpings.

  I am here to help make an Oscar. A genuine Academy Award. For I have entered the factory of R.S. Owens, where the most famous statuette in the world has been made for the last quarter-century.

  I am given an apron and gloves while the various stages are demonstrated before I am allowed to take a turn on my own. The basis of the Oscar is Britannia Metal, or Britannium, a Sheffield pewter alloy compounded of tin, copper and antimony. Antimony is highly toxic, of course. So Oscars are poisonous. A splendid murder mystery suggests itself–The Actress who Shaved off Parts of her Oscar and Fed Them to her Agent…

  The rough figure, once it has emerged from its mould, is buffed on a buffing wheel (my hand keeps slipping) and then taken through to be dipped in copper and nickel. Within a surprisingly short time I do the final dunk, into a tank of pure gold, and there it is. My own Oscar. At this moment I am as close to an official Academy Award as I am ever likely to be.

  Of course Owens makes hundreds and hundreds of other awards too, acrylic, perspex, plastic, copper, silver and bejewelled, but the Oscar is the one that everybody knows.

  I wonder where mine is now. On a Coen brother mantelpiece, in Javier Bardem’s lavatory, on a shelf in Daniel Day Lewis’s bathroom? I shall probably never know.

  Just so long as they don’t lick it…

  Buddy Guy

  There is time to stop for a genuine Chicago hot-dog at the Wiener Circle, one of the m
ost appealingly impolite fooderies I have ever visited. Their Vienna beef franks are served up with heaping handfuls of onions, gherkins and rudeness, or ‘sass’ as the local listings paper calls it. This kind of food is worth living in Chicago for. I dare say the dogs are made of the worst kind of meat (‘eyelids and assholes’ a fellow diner suggests, chomping happily) but they work.

  I am on my way to visit Buddy Guy, one of the last of the great bluesmen. He has his own club, Legends, where I will hang out this evening, but first he takes me on a tour of the South Side, the tough, mostly African-American neighbourhood where this native Louisianan made his bones as a young guitarist and singer of the blues.

  Over the past weeks I have travelled up the Mississippi–through the Delta and up here to the Lakes. This is how Buddy travelled, when he was a boy, how Louis Armstrong travelled and it is how jazz and the blues themselves travelled.

  Buddy is relaxed in the back of the cab as he shows me the haunts of his youth, and he is relaxed on stage as he sips from a brandy glass and jokes with his fans. In his seventies, he dresses as snappily as ever and flirts charmingly with girls young enough to be his granddaughters.

  Blues legend, Buddy Guy.

  Chicago: beauty and greatness.

  Skyscrapers

  Music is not the only cultural product that Chicago has exported around the world: I will come to that dread bitch, comedy, in a moment, but first it is worth remarking on Chicago’s pre-eminence as a centre of great architecture. Most people who have visited both would agree that the quality of Chicago’s skyscrapers is every bit as good, if not better, than New York City’s. Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are just the best-known architects to have lived and worked in Illinois; they and their reputations attracted hundreds of others. From its completion in 1973 until the erection of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest building in the world was the Sears Tower in Chicago’s Loop, the historic heart of downtown. The view from the Sears Tower Sky Deck at night shows that Chicago is still a heartstoppingly beautiful city, one of the greatest in the world.

  That Bitch, Comedy

  Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner, Paul Mazursky, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Peter Boyle, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, John Candy, Bill Murray, George Wendt, Shelley Long, Jim Belushi, Dan Castellaneta, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Kevin Dorff, Tina Fey…the list of Chicago Second City alumni is extraordinarily impressive. It is here in Chicago that the traditions of improvisational sketch comedy have reached their pitch of refinement and influence. TV comedies like Saturday Night Live and Hollywood have all consistently been fed by those who have trained here.

  My acting partner looks dubious as I try to excuse myself from improv.

  * * *

  ILLINOIS

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  IL

  Nickname:

  Land of Lincoln, The Prairie State

  Capital:

  Springfield

  Flower:

  Illinois Native Violet

  Tree:

  White Oak

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Snack food:

  Popcorn

  Motto:

  State sovereignty, national union

  Well-known residents and natives: Abraham Lincoln (16th President), Ulysses S. Grant (18th President), Ronald Reagan (40th President), Richard J. Daley, Adlai Stevenson, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Richard M. Daley, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Eliot Ness, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, David Foster Wallace, John Deere, Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Mies van de Rohe, Walt Disney, Gregg Toland, Michael Mann, Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Jack Benny, Burl Ives, Rock Hudson, Dick van Dyke, Gene Hackman, Richard Pryor, George Wendt, Vince Vaughn, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley, Herbie Hancock, Alison Krauss, Kanye West, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Hefner, Cindy Crawford.

  * * *

  Absolutely not my thing. I may have started my life in comedy, but this kind of improvising is as alien and embarrassing to me as the prospect of ballet or powerlifting in public. It brings me out in hives just to think about it. And so what happens when I go and pay the Chicago Second City a visit? They, charming, fluffy, gleaming-toothed and sweet-natured every last one of them, insist on my joining in as they rehearse. Worse than that, I am slated to participate this evening on stage. In front of an audience.

  Hell’s teeth, arse and damnation. Never again. Not if my best friend’s life depended on it. I can remember almost nothing of the deep torment of the performance, which passed in an agony of embarrassment and horror. Audience members shouted things out and we had to respond to them. The troupe was all very kind afterwards and claimed that the show had gone well, but frankly I have never dived into a vodka and tonic with such reckless abandon in all my life. I thought I would never emerge.

  What a way to say goodbye to one of my favourite places in the world, Chicago, IL.

  WISCONSIN

  ‘But will the sucker go on the tit?’

  What a lot of top-class comedy seems to have come out of Wisconsin. Jackie Mason, Gene Wilder and Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker, who gave us the Airplane! and Naked Gun movies. Maybe it’s the weather.

  I wake up in my bed-and-breakfast hotel room in Westby and despite the comfort of the bedclothes something in me just knows that it is shatteringly cold outside. And it is. A thermometer tacked onto a post of the porch reads -25º. Bear in mind that America talks Fahrenheit, where freezing is +32º. So we are 57º below freezing, or -31ºC. Cold enough, frankly. They have had 88 inches of snow already this winter in Westby and there is more on the way.

  When I get outside my body is so shocked I can only laugh. Or I think I am laughing. Actually, I realise, it is my lungs choking on the freezing water vapour that I am inhaling. They have never ingested anything so cold in all their fifty years on the planet. It is so cold that the snow is freezing. So cold and so dry that if you throw a cup of scaldingly hot water into the air, the water will not freeze, it will actually disappear, be sucked instantly into the vapour-starved atmosphere.

  Westby is in the centre of Vernon County, Wisconsin, a place of rolling hills and rich farmland worked by scattered Amish communities and the descendants of the large numbers of Norwegians who settled here in the nineteenth century. Viking paraphernalia and Scandinavian names are in evidence everywhere. Only hardy Norsemen can survive these dreadful temperatures.

  One of Wisconsin’s major products is cheese. You will notice that as well as calling itself The Badger State, Wisconsin considers herself ‘America’s Dairyland’.

  You should trust by now that I love, respect, venerate and adore most things American. The people, the places, the institutions and the landscapes. So much here is of abiding value, charm, beauty and quality.

  But not the cheese.

  America doesn’t get cheese.

  They put up with the most hideous orange melted gunk, weird vestigial descendants of Munster and Cheddar, and with a processed liquid substance which is closer to a polymer than a foodstuff and which you can squirt from a bottle and, I promise you I’m not making this up, spray from a can. Cheese, in the real sense of the word, along with proper bread, can only be found in special places in America, usually cities with a student and artist population.

  In Wisconsin they gather their cheese into a ball, cover it in breadcrumbs and deep-fry it. That is how little they regard their premier export.

  There are however, tiny pockets of cheese literacy and cheese standards where ‘artisanal’ affineurs are producing cheese that one would use for more than the grouting of bathroom tiles. If my taxi will start and once started, will negotiate the icy, snow-packed roads, I shall visit one such farm.

  Mirabile dictu, the taxi does start, at the merest twitch of the key she springs into life. Her suspension and steering are not set up for ic
e, however, and I have to be immensely careful as we climb the hills to my destination. It is an unimaginably beautiful drive, nonetheless: on a crystal-clear day, along snow-sculpted lanes, passing trees so overladen with snow that I am fearful the vibrations from my taxi will cause them to dump their loads on me as I pass.

  I arrive at last at the most perfect farm I have ever visited. From the main barn I hear the sound of a thousand newborn lambs bleating for milk.

  Brenda Jensen, who runs this farm with her husband Dean, puts me to work straight away. Attaching electric suckers to the teats of ewes is not as easy as you might think. It would be easier to pierce Mike Tyson’s nipples against his will. The ewes are desperate to be milked and their full thick-veined udders swing in front of me as they line up in the milking shed. I am distressed at their distress.

  * * *

  WISCONSIN

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  WI

  Nickname:

  Badger State, America’s Dairyland

  Capital:

  Madison

  Flower:

  Wood Violet

  Tree:

  Sugar Maple

  Bird:

  Robin

  Dance:

  Polka

  Motto:

  Forward

  Well-known residents and natives: Golda Meir, Joseph McCarthy, William Rehnquist, King Gillette, George ‘Pen’ Parker, Edna Ferber, Georgia O’Keefe, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Thornton Wilder, Jim Lovell, Harry Houdini, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alfred Lunt, Fredric March, Don Ameche, Pat O’Brien, Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy, Carole Landis, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Gene Wilder, Willem Dafoe, Gena Rowlands, Mark Ruffalo, Jackie Mason, Chris Farley, Tyne Daly, Tony ‘Mr Monk’ Shalhoub, Eric ‘CSI’ Szmanda.