Some critics must be faster readers than me. The latest volume of Stephen Fry’s memoirs has been out for well over a week, but I have only just finished it. Boy is it a big book, taking us through the late 1980s and early 1990s, which will no doubt have been dubbed Fry’s cocaine years. As has been well-documented, the book lists all the famous places Fry snorted nose candy. Curiously there is no old school index, but presumably Kindle readers can do a search to find the juiciest bits.
Elsewhere the book drops names like they are going out of style. Prince Charles and Princess Diana visit Fry’s Norfolk gaff on New Year’s Day and Di whispers to Fry that she wants to get home in time to watch Spitting Image, which her in-laws hate. As far as I can recall Fry doesn’t take tea with Nelson Mandela, but he does hang out with a pretty diverse range of celebs, from Johnny Mills to Blur’s Alex James. He virtually seems to live in the Groucho – he once vomited out of the upstairs window after, or maybe during a heavy session, but luckily nobody was below at the time.
There are some surprises alongside the catalogue of familiar achievements. I didn’t realise Fry wrote bits of speeches for the Labour Party. There’s a lovely if hard-to-credit anecdote about being invited to dinner with Tony Blair – the invite says “informal”, which Fry correctly takes to mean a suit but not a tuxedo. Blair turns up in chinos and denim. Surely Blair, just as well brought up as Fry, would know all about etiquette too?
And of course Fry can tell a yarn. He has fantastic recall for quotes, events and little details. He doesn’t go too much into the nuts of bolts of how he can afford this lifestyle, but the diary pages that read like a list of lucrative voice-over gigs may offer a clue. I also seem to recall that he made a pile of dosh at a very early age from adapting Me & My Girl (the musical, not the old sitcom) for the stage.
As one would expect Fry does attempt a splash of self-analysis. He admits that his face looks smug in repose and there is nothing he can do about it. But then he has much to be smug about. Even when he is not lobbing his own wad around he lives the life of Riley – why haven’t I ever been asked to look after someone's suite in the Savoy for a month?
What one doesn’t really get though, is a satisfying explanation for his contradictory behaviour. He talks about being chronically shy, yet is constantly meeting new people and forming new friendships. Not the actions of an introvert, one would have thought. I guess the devil’s dandruff might have helped him to become such a gadfly and his bipolar diagnosis - not discussed at any length here – might explain the contrasts in his personality.
This is, of course, a well-written book. But it is also a very big book, which it didn’t need to be. The opening eighty pages or so are a recap of his life so far, while a hefty chunk at the end is Palin-style diary entries with intermittent added footnotes. But the thing about Fry is that he is a larger-than-life figure, making huge sums of money, dining with the Great and the Good, hoovering up marathon lines of marching powder back in the day. He could hardly deliver a piddly paperback could he?
Buy More Fool Me here.
