The Fry Chronicles (8 page)

I remember that Paul Smith shirt. My birthday.

*

I am in a quiet residential Notting Hill street in 2006, filming for a documentary on manic depression. The director, Ross Wilson, positions the camera at one end of a long, straight pavement. I walk to the other end, turn round and wait for his cue. All I have to do is walk towards the camera. No acting or speech required. It is one of dozens and dozens of such shots that are filmed all the time in documentaries. Something to fill the screen for a voiced piece of commentary to be laid on later: ‘And so I decided that a visit to the Royal College of Psychiatry might prove useful …’ – that sort of thing.

Ross waves for action, and I start the walk. From out of one of the houses shuffles an old man in a dressing-gown, blocking the shot. I stop and return to my mark. This is always happening when we film in the street, and we are very used to it. Well, not old men in dressing-gowns particularly so much as members of the public, or civilians, as some people in the film and TV business call them, or, wince-inducingly these days, ‘muggles’. TV documentary is not major movie-making, where you have policemen and assistant directors to help marshal the citizenry. In such situations we wait patiently and grin inanely. The man in the dressing-gown slowly and painfully approaches, and I see that it is Simon Gray. His hair is almost white, and his face is sunken in. He looks dreadfully ill and much older than his seventy years.

‘Hello, Simon.’

‘Oh. Hello.’

We have only spoken to each other once since the terrible trauma of 1995 in which I had walked out of his play
Cell Mates
and fled to Europe. As it happens, the documentary I am filming this very day seeks to find out,
amongst other things, what had propelled me to that flight.

‘So. What are you doing?’ Simon asks.

‘Oh. Filming.’ I indicate the camera behind him. I think it wise not to mention that the events of 1995 are central to the film.

He slowly turns, looks at it and then comes round again to me. ‘Ah. Well. There we are, aren’t we? A comedy of some kind I suppose. Well then.’ Never has comedy been made to sound so low, vulgar and pitiful. Simon had never forgiven me for leaving
Cell Mates
. Initial worry and concern for my well-being at the moment of my leaving had rapidly been replaced by resentment, fury and contempt. All of which was very understandable. The show should have gone on.

I see him just once more. It is July 2008, and I am in a box at Lord’s cricket ground, watching Pietersen and Bell put on nearly 300 runs for the fourth wicket against South Africa. The next-door box is filled with distinguished playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Ronald Harwood, David Hare, Harold Pinter and, sitting quietly in a corner, Simon Gray. Playwrights and cricket have always gone together. Samuel Beckett remains, I believe I am right in saying, the only Nobel Laureate to have had an entry in the cricketer’s almanac,
Wisden
.

At tea, the nubiferously chain-smoking pair of Tom Stoppard and Ronnie Harwood visit our rather showbizzy box. David Frost is the host and he wonders aloud if there might be a collective noun for a group of playwrights. Stoppard suggests the word ‘snarl’. The particular snarl of playwrights assembled next door has collected a pair of Oscars, a dozen BAFTAs and Olivier Awards, a CH, three
CBEs, two knighthoods and a Nobel Prize for Literature. I am happy talking to Stoppard and Harwood, both of whom are as engaging, charming and friendly as Pinter and Gray are obstreperous, cantankerous and unstable. Pinter’s capacity for explosive hostility and liverish offence at the tiniest imagined slight is legendary and, while he has never displayed any animosity towards me, I have always been very wary of speaking to him for more than a few minutes at a time, just in case.

At the close of play I make my way out of the box and walk straight into Simon, whom I have not seen since that afternoon in Notting Hill.

‘Hello, Simon!’ I say. ‘Gosh, you look well.’

Which, compared to two years ago, he does.

‘Do I?’ he says. ‘Well, that’s terminal cancer for you. As a matter of fact I’m dying. That was my last cricket match. Well. There we are. Goodbye.’

He died three weeks later. Whether the prostate cancer that killed him was in any way related to his smoking I have no idea. I suspect that his alcoholism and sixty-five a day were not the cause of his death. At any rate Simon Gray did die and was justly mourned as one of the most individual, intelligent and comically desperate voices of his time. I was not invited to the funeral.

Rewind to 2006. I had decided, I am not quite sure why, that it was time for me to stop smoking. Actually, I think I
do
know why. I had managed finally to give up the big thing, the thing we will turn to at some other time, and it annoyed me that I found it so hard to do the same with cigarettes. If I could abandon the systematic and heavy use of a Class A forbidden substance, surely I
could fight off nicotine addiction with the merest snap of the fingers?

On the shelf by my desk in my London house there stood a strange object. Designed and built by the Dunhill company, it seemed to be an old-fashioned BBC radio microphone. Disassemble and reassemble it in the manner of Scaramanga and his Golden Gun, however, and it became a pipe. This fine trophy had been presented to me a few years previously when I was named Pipe Smoker of the Year. On account of this I now felt a slight twinge of guilt at the thought of quitting. I picked the award up and, like a child with a Transformer toy, twisted, snapped, prised and pushed it into its alternative shape.

It so fell out that my installation in 2003 was to be the last of these funny little Pipe Smoker of the Year ceremonies. The award was ruled by the health authorities to be a form of tobacco advertising by the back door and from that year on was mercilessly proscribed. In its heyday it had celebrated the great icons of the age, most of them a touch suburban and cardiganny perhaps, but, from Harold Wilson to Eric Morecambe, by way of Tony Benn and Fred Trueman, they had represented something rather splendid that has since gone out of British life. Neither smart, nor sophisticated, nor stylish, they were the kind of people you picture devoting their Sundays either to grappling with the garden hose and waxing the Wolseley or to brisk fell-walking, a canvas haversack on their backs and long woolly socks up to their knees.

Dunhill and the event’s organizers went to great trouble to make me my special pipe, mix me my own blend of tobacco and embrace me as one of their own. Now there I was just three years later, planning to leave the fold. It seemed like a
betrayal. As a matter of fact, I rarely smoked a pipe in public anyway. For the most part I was a Marlboro man. Not full-on Marlboro Reds, nor anaemic Marlboro Lights, but Mummy Bear Marlboro Mediums – for the compromiser in life. Middle aged, middle brow, middle class, middle rank, middle tar – that’s me. I reserved the old briar pipes for winter months and lonely hours at the writing desk. Although there had been just one recent occasion when I did go out into the world with a pipe …

I was being profiled in the
Independent
newspaper in the summer of 2003, I cannot remember the purpose; perhaps it was to coincide with the first series of the television programme
QI
. For no good reason I turned up at the appointed place with a pipe in my pocket. At some stage I must have run out of cigarettes and started in on it. A week later, to accompany the interview, there appeared a picture of me on the cover of the newspaper with the pipe jutting out of my face at an angle, a thick cloud of smoke artfully half concealing my smug features. Sadly my features know no other way of arranging themselves except smugly. Why had I taken the pipe along and why had I smoked it in the presence of a photographer? Looking back, I now wonder if at some entirely subconscious level I had recognized that a pipe would suit the rather professorial side to my character that
QI
emphasized and maybe that is why I had pocketed it when setting out to meet the journalist. What is interesting, or at least revealing, about the nature of twenty-first-century celebrity, is that it was only a few days after the publication of that interview that a letter arrived from the British Pipesmokers’ Council advising me that I had been elected that year’s Pipe Smoker of the Year. This charming absurdity came so hard on the heels
of the article that it was bound to give me the feeling that, if it had chanced to be a bonobo who had been featured on the front page of the
Independent
smoking a pipe that week, then the accolade would surely have gone to it … desperate is, I suppose, the word to describe the worshipful company of pipe smokers and tobacco blenders. And given the forthcoming demise of the award, perhaps their desperation had good cause.

Now there I sat, three years later, fiddling with my prize pipe and contemplating a betrayal of the smoking cause. ‘Betrayal’ and ‘cause’ are perhaps hysterical and self-important words to use, but smoking to me
was
a cause; it had always symbolized in my mind something enormous. I have mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but the fact is that almost all my heroes were not just figures who happened to smoke, but more than that, active, proud and positive smokers. They didn’t just smoke in the world, they smoked
at
the world. Oscar Wilde was one of the pioneers of the cigarette. When he met Victor Hugo, the
cher maître
’s major obsession was as much with Wilde’s abundant supply of fresh, high-quality cigarettes as with his equally abundant supply of fresh, high-quality epigrams. Wilde’s first episode of real notoriety came when he took to the stage to make his bow after the triumphant first night of
Lady Windermere’s Fan
with a cigarette between his fingers – a casual detail that enraged many present and was considered worthy enough to mention in just about every press report and in the letters and diaries of those who had been present.

‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. ‘It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ It took me a long time, as with so many of Wilde’s remarks, to understand
that this was actually much more profound an insight than it at first glance appeared. The point is that a pleasure which leaves you satisfied stops being a pleasure the moment it has been enjoyed. You are now sated, there is nothing more to be got from it. Sex and food are pleasures of this kind. What follows? A touch of afterglow if you are that sort of person, but mostly guilt, flatulence and self-disgust. You don’t want any more of that kind of pleasure for some time to come. As for behaviour modifiers like alcohol and narcotics, one may want more and more, but they alter mood and manner, and the crash and the hangover that come after can be deeply unpleasant and lowering to the spirits. But a cigarette … a cigarette delivers the keen joy, the hug of gratification, and then – nothing more than the desire to experience it all over again. And so on. No moment of feeling engorged, full, unworthy and sick, nor hangover or mood crash. A cigarette is perfect because, like a highly evolved virus, it attaches itself to the brain of the user such that its only purpose is to induce them to have another. There is a reward for that in the form of pleasure, but the reward is too short-lived to be called satisfaction.

I had then Holmes and Wilde on my side. I had Wodehouse and Churchill, Bogart and Bette Davis, Noël Coward and Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray and Harold Pinter. And ranged against us? Bourgeois nose-wrinklers, sour health-mongers, Hitler, Goebbels and Bernard Shaw, cranks, puritans and interfering prigs. Smoking was a banner of bohemianism, a sign of the rejection of middle-class prudery and respectability, and I was a whale on that, despite being in my heart of hearts as middle class, unadventurous and respectable as anyone I knew. One has, after all, no one to convince in these matters but oneself.
If I was to ally myself with outsiders, artists, radicals and revolutionaries then it was natural that I would smoke and smoke proudly. I know. Pathetic, isn’t it?

I have said nothing of death here. Nothing of the ravages to the complexion, throat, heart and lungs that cigarettes wreak. What Oscar did not know is that the most superb quality of all possessed by these beguiling little cylinders of joy is the
gradualness
of their toxicity, the imperceptibly nuanced encroachments of their poison. Their very benignity (after the clammy dizziness, reeling and nausea induced in virgin smokers to which I have already alluded), the excruciating slowness and delicacy with which they set about their business of killing, the irresistibly tempting credit period they offer that promises so seemingly unbridgeable a distance between present pleasure and future payment … such slow, unremitting and diabolical subtlety delivers what a true sadist and connoisseur of pain would surely consider the highest pitch of the exquisite.