The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  I assented to this idea, and Tolkin and I met in an Italian restaurant called the Villa Puccini which was just yards from the Draycott Place flat.

  'The Villa Puccini,' said Kim. 'Named, one must suppose, after the famous composer Villa-Lobos.'

  The lunch was not destined to be the feast of reason and the flow of soul of which P. G. Wodehouse and Alexander Pope wrote so fondly. Tolkin was very disapproving of what I had done to his beloved story. He was outraged at my excision of a synagogue scene.

  'The focal point of the narrative. The pivot about which the entire movie revolves. The centrepiece. The keystone. The emotional heart. The whole picture is meaningless without that scene. There is no picture without it. You couldn't see that?'

  I tried as best I could to explain why I had felt it was wrong and unconvincing.

  'And as for your ending ...'

  I suspect he may have been right about my ending. As far as I recall I had Claire, the heroine, escape into the arms of a Cambridge don, which was neither very Fellini nor very Evelyn Waugh and in its own way was probably as sentimental as the synagogue scene. Nonetheless I attempted to defend it.

  'It is obvious,' said Tolkin, 'that we have nothing in common and no basis for further discussion.' He left the restaurant before the primi piatti arrived. He has since had a highly successful writing career with credits that include The Player, Deep Impact and Nine. Maybe he was right. Maybe I had ruined Gossip with my cynical British resistance to the possibilities of emotional change and with my inept ending. In any event the film never got made. The story of its disaster is complicated but, I am happy to say, has nothing to do with my screenplay, good or bad as that may have been.

  It seems that Don Boyd had been hoodwinked by two plausible characters who claimed to represent something they called the Martini Foundation. Rich with funds accrued from the sale of the vermouth business, this foundation wanted to branch out into film financing. The two promised that $20 million would be made available to Don for a whole slate of feature films. In the meantime he could finance Gossip by raising money against 'certificates of deposit' that were lodged in a bank in the Netherlands. For their investment the Martini people would receive 50 per cent of the profits and a PS600,000 upfront fee.

  Don set to work on the construction of a huge Andrew McAlpine-designed night-club set in Twickenham Studios, and filming began some time in late October, using money that had been advanced by a third party against the arrival of these certificates of deposit. Hugh Laurie, John Sessions and others had also been cast, and about a fifth of the whole movie had been committed to celluloid by the time the terrible truth emerged that there were no certificates of deposit, that those two plausible figures with their Mayfair flat and Cannes yacht had no connection with Martini Rosso or its money and that Don had been ruthlessly swindled. They imagined, one supposes, that they would get their PS600,000 finder's fee and skedaddle. Fortunately the whole house of cards collapsed before they could profit from their deception, but it was small consolation. The film collapsed. The technical unions and the acting union Equity demanded blood. Many of the crew and cast salaries, and many of the production costs had not yet been met (the Tolkins and I had been scrupulously paid as it happens) and all was ruin, recrimination and wrath. The upshot was that poor Don, one of the kindest and best of men, was effectively blacklisted and prevented from participating in film production for three years. Even that didn't end it, for once Don managed to start up again the unions insisted he continue to pay over what negligible producing fees he did earn. By 1992 he was financially wiped out. If he had declared himself bankrupt the moment disaster had struck he might have saved his house and possessions. In fact he sold most of what he had to repay debts because he believed that to be the honourable course.

  Don Boyd was ill-treated, cold-shouldered and bad-mouthed by many in the British film industry who blamed him for being either foolishly naive, or worse, being somehow implicated in the smoky business of the fraudulent Martini Foundation. Many wiser and better heads than his had advised him that the financing deal was sound and that he was right to proceed. It was a catastrophic error to go into production without a sight of these 'certificates of deposit', but so talented, idealistic and passionately committed a film-maker did not deserve the opprobrium and pariah status he was accorded for so many years. It was certainly a hell of a way for me to be dunked, a year after leaving university, into the murky waters of the film business.

  Church and Chekhov

  A few months after the Gossip imbroglio a theatrical producer called Richard Jackson called me up and invited me to his offices in Knightsbridge. He had seen Latin! in Edinburgh and had a desire to produce it at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with a very young Nicholas Broadhurst directing. I made it clear that my commitments to Alfresco meant that I would be unable to play the role of Dominic, the part I had written for myself, but this did not seem to put Jackson off. I was immensely gratified by this. You might think my actor's self-esteem might be dented to hear a producer take so blithely the news that I was not available, but actually my writer's self-esteem was immensely boosted by the idea that a professional man of the theatre believed the play to be strong enough to merit a life without me.

  Many months earlier I had had a conversation with a television director called Geoffrey Sax, who was keen to make a small-screen version of Latin! I underwent the nervous excitement of a phone conversation with the great Michael Hordern, who had expressed an interest in the part of Herbert Brookshaw and who listened kindly and calmly to my incoherent plans for the adaptation. Nothing came of this, although I was to see Geoffrey Sax eight years later, when he directed an episode of The New Statesman in which I made a guest appearance, and again almost twenty years after that, when he directed me in a small role in the film Stormbreaker. Few people in one's life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.

  Nicholas and Richard were confident that they could mount Latin! with ease, but the role of Dominic turned out to be more difficult to cast than they had anticipated. While I was up in Manchester for Alfresco Series Two they auditioned dozens and dozens of young actors, none of whom they felt to be quite right. At a meeting in Richard's office I nervously made a suggestion.

  'Look, I know how pathetic this sounds. But there's someone I was at university with. He's a really good actor and very funny.'

  'Oh yes?'

  Richard and Nicholas were polite, but there are few phrases more certain to send a chill down the spine of a producer than 'There's this friend of mine ... he's awfully good ...'

  I carried on. 'He's left Cambridge now and he's at the Guildhall School; actually he enrolled at the music school. To be an opera singer. But I heard that he's just switched over to the drama department.'

  'Oh yes?'

  'Well, as I say, I know it's ... but he really is very good ...'

  'Oh yes?'

  A week later Richard called up.

  'I have to confess we are at our wits' end. What was the name of this friend of yours at RADA?'

  'The Guildhall, not RADA, and he's called Simon Beale.'

  'Well, I won't deny it. We're desperate. Nicholas will see him.'

  Two days later Nicholas called up ecstatically. 'My God, he's brilliant. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.'

  I knew he would be. Ever since I had shared a stage with his arse-scratching Sir Politic Would-Be in Volpone I had known Simon was the real thing.

  A snag was foreseen. Would the Guildhall actually let him play the part? He was a student following a specific course, and aside from the performances, which cut enough into his day (this was to be a lunchtime performance at the Lyric), there were the rehearsals to be considered too. Newly appointed as director of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was the actor and founder member of the Royal Shakes
peare Company Tony Church, and his permission to release Simon was sought.

  The answer he gave was magnificent in its preciosity and absurd actorly self-importance.

  'I can see that this is an engagement that Simon is keen to accept,' he said. 'It is an excellent role for him and, aside from anything else, it guarantees his provisional Equity ticket ...' In those days the acquisition of an Equity card was absolutely essential for any actor. The world of drama presented that exquisitely cruel Catch-22 bind common to all closed shops: only Equity members could get an acting job, and you could not become an Equity member unless you had an acting job. Hugh and I had secured our cards because we had a Granada TV contract and because as writer-performers we could show that no existing Equity member would be able satisfactorily to take our places. Tony Church was recognizing, therefore, the excellence of the opportunity that Simon Beale was being offered. 'Yes,' he said. 'I will not stand in his way. However ...'

  Nicholas and Richard (I was not present) blanched nervously.

  'However,' continued Church, 'for the period that he will be away rehearsing and performing he will exactly miss out on the three weeks in which we will be covering Chekhovian characterization and performance. So I am duty bound, I am duty bound to warn Simon that if he goes ahead with this play it will leave one heck of a hole in his Chekhov technique.'

  He was a fine man, Tony Church, and one endowed with an excellent sense of humour, so it is to be hoped he would not have minded my repeating this. The idea, the idea that any actor would somehow be left deficient by missing out on three weeks of drama-school Chekhov teaching is so preposterous, so frankly insane that one simply does not know where to begin. If ever I am asked by aspiring young actors or their parents whether or not they should go to drama school, the memory of Tony Church and his fear for Simon's Chekhov technique almost makes me tell them on no account to go anywhere near such useless palaces of self-regarding folly and delusion. Of course, I do not offer any advice at all other than suggesting that budding actors should follow their hearts and other such sententious and harmless ullage, but one does wonder, one really does.

  Simon Beale, under his Equity name of Simon Russell Beale, has become almost universally recognized as the finest stage actor of his generation. For many, the greatest of his theatrical achievements have been his interpretations of - yes, of course - characters in the plays of Chekhov. His stunning performances in The Seagull at the RSC, Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse (for which he won an Olivier Award) and The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic and in New York have earned unanimous praise. I wonder if any of his Guildhall contemporaries, the ones lucky enough to have stayed in school for those vital lessons in technique, have enjoyed comparable success with Chekhov?

  The production of Latin! was, in its own small way, accounted a success. Simon was brilliant, and a glowing review from the great Harold Hobson made me very happy indeed.

  Cockney Capers

  The weekend after Latin! completed its little run I stayed at Richard Armitage's house in Essex. The house was called Stebbing Park and it was a fine old mansion set in many acres of gently rolling countryside. The village of Stebbing is close to Dunmow in an area of Essex that belies the county's unfortunate and unjustified reputation.

  Stebbing Park came into its own every summer when Richard held a festival of cricket. David Frost, one of his first clients, would keep wicket, Russell Harty would lie on the boundary ropes and admire the thews of Michael Praed and other handsome young actors, Andrew Lloyd Webber would arrive by helicopter, the controllers of BBC1 and BBC2 would cluster in corners with Bill Cotton and the Director General. It seemed as if Richard could attract every important figure from British screen and stage. Rowan Atkinson, Emma Thompson, Hugh, Tony Slattery, Tilda Swinton, Howard Goodall and I came every year, as did dozens of other Noel Gay clients, Richard Stilgoe, Chris Barrie, Hinge and Bracket, Dollar, the Cambridge Buskers, Jan Leeming, Manuel and the Music of the Mountains, the King's Singers, Geoff Love - it was a most eccentric mixture.

  On this occasion, however, it was just me, Richard and Lorraine Hamilton, the sweet, shy young woman with whom he shared his life and who worked as his assistant. We had Richard's chef-butler, Ken, all to ourselves.

  After an excellent dinner on Friday night, as Ken poured coffee in the drawing-room, Richard, greatly to my surprise, started to talk about his father. Reginald Armitage was the son of a pomfret-cake manufacturer in south Yorkshire. He had been educated at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, the Royal College of Music and Christ's College, Cambridge. His musicianship won him the place, at an early age, as music director and organist at St Anne's church, Soho. The ragtime, jazz and swing that permeated that part of London must have got into Reginald's blood, for he soon found he had an extraordinary facility with light, bouncy, catchy tunes in the modern manner. To avoid upsetting his worthy Yorkshire parents and the church authorities who employed him, he composed his songs under the pseudonym Noel Gay. An unfortunate name to our ears, but in the late twenties and thirties it suggested that happy, merry world of bright sunbursts that one sees in the surviving suburban front-door frames and wireless-set designs of the period. If there is a song that expresses that image perfectly it is his own 'The Sun Has Got His Hat On'.

  Noel Gay the composer became a gigantic success. At one point he had four musicals running in the West End simultaneously, a feat only Andrew Lloyd Webber has matched. His most famous tune, 'The Lambeth Walk', remains the only song ever written about in a Times leader. It also, Richard told me, earned Noel Gay an entry in the legendary black book of names of those who would be first up against the wall in the event of a Nazi invasion. Hitler did not take kindly, it was said, to a piece of newsreel that was very popular in British wartime cinemas which looped footage of the Fuhrer saluting a goose-stepping cadre of Stormtroopers to the sound of 'The Lambeth Walk'.

  I had known very little of this and was touched that Richard thought I would be interested in the exploits of his famous father.

  'Of course, his greatest success,' said Richard, 'was the musical in which "The Lambeth Walk" featured, Me and My Girl.'

  'Right,' I said, thinking in a rather puzzled way of the Gene Kelly/Judy Garland standard, 'The bells are ringing, for me and my gal ...' - surely that was an American song?

  'Not to be confused, of course,' said Richard, 'with the Edgar Leslie number "For Me and My Gal".'

  'No indeed. Of course not,' I said, shocked at the idea that anyone might do such a thing.

  'Me and My Girl,' said Richard, 'was the most successful British musical of its day. It has only just been overtaken by Cats.'

  Richard had one of those endearing habits, very common to agents, producers and magnates generally, of describing everything and everyone he knew as being more or less the most important, successful and respected example of its kind anywhere, ever: 'certainly the most significant choreographer of his generation'; 'the top wine-merchant in Britain'; 'indisputably the most admired chef in all Asia' - that sort of thing. It is especially impossible for people like Richard not to have the best doctor in London, the finest dentist in Europe and, favourite of all and endlessly trotted out whenever someone betrays the slightest dorsal twinge, 'the best back man in the world'. I was already wise to this trait in Richard so could not be quite sure how much of what he said about Me and My Girl was true and how much a mixture of this signature hyperbole and understandable filial pride. For, in truth, I had not heard of the musical, nor its title song. I knew 'The Lambeth Walk', naturally; it is one of the most famous tunes ever, an Ohrwurm, as they say in Germany, an ear worm that once heard burrows its way into your brain and becomes impossible to dislodge. Actually I had always thought it a folk song, based on some ancient tune that had been handed down through the generations. It certainly never occurred to me that it might have been composed in the 1930s by a church organist.

  Noel Gay had sent his son Richard to Eton, from where he had followed his father's pr
ogress to Cambridge. In 1950 the young Richard Armitage founded Noel Gay Artists, a talent agency that was designed to enhance his father's Noel Gay song publishing and production business by supplying singers to perform Noel Gay material. After six or seven years, as the 'satire boom' got under way, Richard found himself spreading into the new world of graduate comedy and took to trawling Cambridge each year for young comedy blades. He soon had David Frost on his books, then John Cleese and others. In the late seventies, in a wild, anarchic burst of originality, he looked westwards and from Oxford he took on Rowan Atkinson and Howard Goodall. By 1981 he was back at Cambridge and had scooped up Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Paul Shearer, Tony Slattery and me.

  Now in his mid-fifties, Richard found himself more and more often, he told me, looking back to the beginning of it all. This was all very interesting, and I was touched that someone usually so gruff, old-fashioned and unforthcoming about personal matters should favour me with the true story behind his father and the founding of Noel Gay Artists. I alternately nodded and shook my head in a manner that I hoped demonstrated how sensible I was of the honour he had accorded me and then started to make subtle yawn-stifling gestures designed to indicate that I was ready for bath, bed and book.

  'So this brings me,' said Richard, choosing to ignore these signs, 'to my proposition.'

  'Proposition?'

  Richard's hand scrabbled at the flaps of his old leather briefcase. 'Take this.'

  He handed me a thick foolscap typescript. Foolscap, for those under forty, was the English stationery paper size that preceded the now ubiquitous European A4 standard.

  I examined the sheaf. Rust marks from the binders stained the cover page, but the double-underlined title was plain enough. 'Oh,' I said, 'Me and My Girl! Is this the original script?'