The Fry Chronicles (41 page)

‘Yes, I think so. You send me a fax which is the next clue. Then I wait by the machine on Saturday afternoon …’

‘Evening, night. It will be afternoon in Connecticut, but in London it will be like nine, ten, maybe eleven o’clock. You’re not going out at all?’

‘No, no.’

‘Because it is
crucial
that you are in all the time and that
you are right by the fax machine so you can hear it when it goes off.’

‘Absolutely. I’ll be there. So, just to make sure I’ve got this right. Saturday night I wait by the fax machine. When I get a fax asking me for a clue, I send to your fax number in Connecticut whatever it is that you will have faxed me earlier?’

‘Right. Isn’t it great? It will be the first-ever fax treasure hunt. But you
have
to be by the phone all Saturday night. You will be?’

‘I’ll be there. I’ll be there.’

‘OK. I’ll give you my fax number. It should appear on the top of the fax anyway, but I’ll give it to you. And I’ll need your fax number.’

We exchanged numbers.

‘Thank you, Stephen.’

‘No, thank
you
, Stephen.’

Between that call and Saturday evening he called four or five times to check that I had not changed my plans and was still happy to sit by the fax machine and await developments. On Saturday afternoon at about four I received a fax from him. It was an impenetrable diagram with some sort of code written alongside it.

I faxed back a note to say that I had received his clue and would fax it as soon as I received a request from his treasure-hunt contestants.

I sat with a book, ears flapping, for the next five hours. I had not put out of my mind the possibility that Sondheim might yet ask me to work with him on his next musical, but the thought that he only wanted me for my technological toys could not be entirely dismissed.

Some time before ten o’clock the fax machine rang. I put down the book. It was
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand, I remember quite distinctly, which was hypnotically dreadful. I stared at the fax machine as it answered the call. Its shrill cry was cut off. The caller had hung up. I imagined a garden in New England and a group of capering Sondheim friends.

‘How odd! It made a kind of awful chirruping sound.’

‘Oh! Oh! Oh! I know what that is. It’s a fax machine!’

‘A what-all?’

‘
You
know. For sending documents? Stephen’s got one in his den, I’m sure I’ve seen it there. Let’s go to it. My, such larks!’

I counted off the minutes as the gang made their way (in my imagination at least) to Stephen’s den, whose mantelpiece was crowded with Tony Awards. On the very piano on which he had composed ‘Send in the Clowns’ I saw in my mind’s eye signed photographs in silver-gilt frames of Lenny Bernstein, Ethel Merman, Oscar Hammerstein and Noël Coward.

Just as I was wondering if I might have misjudged the scenario, my fax machine screeched into life again. This time a handshake was made across the ocean and a fax chugged out. I ripped it off and there on the curling thermal paper was scrawled ‘Hi! Do you have something for us?’

I duly fitted into the machine the fax Sondheim had sent me earlier, dialled the number and pressed ‘Transmit’.

A cheerful ‘Thanks!’ was returned a few minutes later.

I had no idea how many teams there might be playing and realized that, for all his neurotic calling to ensure my vigilant presence for the evening, Stephen had not told me whether or not this would be a one-time deal.

I woke up at three with
Atlas Shrugged
on my lap and the fax machine free of further intercourse.

A week later a case of Haut-Batailley claret arrived with a note of thanks from Stephen Sondheim.

Not a hint of a call to collaboration. I still await his summons.

By the time Alan Coren became the
Listener
’s editor, fax machines had become a signature ubiquity of the age, and there was nothing strange about my delivering copy to him that way without visiting the offices in Marylebone High Street from one month to the next. My next struggle, some seven or eight years later, would be to get newspapers and broadcasting companies to sign up to log on to the internet and furnish themselves with email addresses, but that is a whole other story for a whole other book for a whole other readership.

Perhaps the most stylish and beguiling figure in the London magazine world in those days was the caricaturist, editor and boulevardier about town Mark Boxer. Under the pen name Marc he had illustrated the front covers of
A
Dance to the Music of Time
, all twelve volumes of which I had lined up along a bookshelf, next to the Simon Raven
Alms for Oblivion
sequence (which I much preferred, and still do). In the sixties Boxer had supervised the launch and life of Britain’s first colour supplement magazine for
The Sunday Times
and now he edited the
Tatler
. One day in the mid to late eighties I got a letter from him, asking me to call his office.

‘Ah yes. Stephen Fry. How do you do? Let me take you out to lunch. Langan’s tomorrow?’

I had heard of Langan’s Brasserie but had never been. Founded by Peter Langan, Richard Shepherd and the actor Michael Caine, it had acquired a reputation as one of the most glamorous and eccentric restaurants in London. The glamour was provided by the art collection, the Patrick Procktor menu design and the daily presence of film stars, aristocrats and millionaires; the eccentricity came in the form of Peter Langan. This pioneering restaurateur, an alcoholic Irishman of uncertain temper, was notorious for insulting customers to whom he might take unpredictable dislikes, tearing up the bills of those who dared to complain, stubbing cigarettes out in their salads and ordering them to leave. A bottle of Krug in one hand and a cigar or cigarette in the other, he would lurch from table to table, beaming and barking, grinning and growling, hugging and shoving. The food was good but not great, the atmosphere magical, and the experience, when Peter was around, unforgettable. Don Boyd told me that his wife, Hilary, had once found a slug in her salad. As Peter lurched hiccupping past the table, Don had stopped him and pointed out the unwanted gastropod in his wife’s greenery.

Peter bowed forward from the waist to examine the plate.

‘Why thank you,’ he said, taking up the pulsing, living slug between thumb and forefinger. ‘Thank you very
much indeed, my darling.’ He dropped it into his glass of Krug, drained it down and burped. ‘Like a nice juicy snail, only without the nuisance of a shell. Fucking delicious.’

I arrived early, as I always do for appointments, and was led upstairs. Mark arrived exactly on time.

‘Hope you don’t mind it up here,’ he said. ‘It’s quieter. In case Peter’s about. Do you know him?’

I confessed that I did not.

‘Keep it that way,’ said Mark.

Boxer was an attractive-looking man aged, I suppose, about fifty, but youthful in a twinkly, almost elfin way. He was married to the newsreader and co-founder of TV-AM, Anna Ford. Over the first two courses Mark was charming, funny and inconsequential, as if the reason for his invitation to lunch was entirely social. He kept me in raptures with stories of his time at Cambridge.

‘It was quite the thing then to present oneself as homosexual. I used to wear fantastically tight white trousers and tell the rugby players that they were the creamiest darlings in the world. It was actually very odd
not
to behave like that. Amongst my set at least. No one batted an eyelid if you came on as gay. And of course it made the girls simply throw themselves at you. Did you know that I am the only person aside from Shelley to be sent down from one of the universities for atheism?’

‘No! Really?’

‘Well, not quite. I was editor of
Granta
and I published a poem by somebody or other that the university authorities said was blasphemous. They demanded I, as editor, be sent down, but E. M. Forster and Noel Annan and others simply leapt to my defence, so they changed it to a rustication, which they meanly set for May Week
so that I would miss the May Ball, but of course they overlooked the fact that balls go on way past midnight. So on the stroke of twelve I returned to King’s in my white tie and tails and was chaired around from marquee to marquee like a conquering hero. It was too marvellous.’

It was hard to believe that this man was the same age as my father. He had the gift, if gift it is, of making me feel more than usually bourgeois, ordinary and unexciting.

‘So,
à nos moutons
,’ he said as the cheese arrived. ‘
Tatler
. I know you have written for us once before. Wonderful piece, by the way. Is it really true?’

He was referring to a feature to which I had contributed earlier in the year and which we will come to later. I blushed fiercely as I always did when that article was mentioned.

‘Yes. Quite true.’

‘Heavens. Anyway. The magazine … Do you read it, by any chance?’

‘Sometimes … I mean, I don’t positively
not
read it, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought one. Except the month my piece came out, that is.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Here’s next month’s number. The covers are wonderful these days. We have Michael Roberts as our art director. He’s too splendid for words.’

I took his proffered copy of the magazine and flipped through the pages.

‘It’s all fine,’ said Mark. ‘Nothing wrong. It’s just that there’s something … something
missing
.’

‘Well whatever it is,’ I said, ‘it isn’t advertisements.’

‘Ha! No, we’re doing very well, really. But I need someone to come in every month to … to
smell
the issue before it goes to print.’

‘To smell it?’

‘Mm … you know. To look at the sum total of articles and spreads and to think about how they can all come together. To work on the text of the cover and the spinelines …’

‘Spinelines?’

‘The copy written on the spine.’

‘Of course. Spinelines, yes.’

‘I need someone who isn’t in on the everyday production of the magazine to take that look. To smell it all and to …’

A thought struck me. ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that you want someone to do the puns?’

He slapped the table. ‘I
knew
you’d understand!’

Since Tina Brown’s pioneering reign at the
Tatler
’s helm the magazine had become notorious, amongst other things, for its punning headlines, sub-headlines and – as I now knew them to be called – spinelines.

‘That’s settled, then. You’re Officer Commanding Puns.’ He drained his coffee with clear satisfaction. ‘Oh, another thing I thought of on the way here. We get sent all kinds of books. For the most part insufferably dull fly-fishing manuals and the memoirs of forgettable duchesses, but sometimes more interesting titles might come our way. We don’t have a book reviewer. Why don’t I get all the books we’re sent couriered over to you in a batch once a week and you can …’

‘Smell them?’

‘That’s it. Smell them and then write a column in which you can review them or simply comment on the kinds of books that are being published these days. A zeitgeisty, smelly sort of thing. How does that appeal?’

I said that a zeitgeisty, smelly sort of thing appealed greatly.

‘Fine. Why don’t you pop back to Hanover Square with me, and I’ll introduce you around?’

‘Will I have to come into the office a lot?’

‘Just from time to time to have a …’

‘A smell?’

‘To have a smell, exactly.’

The first issue for which I acted as Smellfinder General was June’s. ‘June Know Where You’re Going’ was the date pun. Michael Roberts’s cover of a model in a frock of the deepest crimson found itself accompanied by the headline RED DRESS THE BALANCE. An article on aristocratic Catholic families was subtitled: ‘The Smart Sect’. Time has thankfully erased from my memory the other hideous verbal contortions of which I was guilty, but I came up with more than a dozen for each edition with which I was involved.

Books began to arrive by the box-load. Rather than review under my own name I gave myself a made-up byline:

Only it wasn’t so loving an eye at all. Hiding in cowardly fashion under this
nom de guerre
I was beastly unkind to
someone called Baron de Massy, a nephew of Prince Rainier who had written an autobiography crammed with arse-paralysingly snobbish Monegasque drivel about Ferraris, polo-players and coke-snorting tennis champions. ‘Here is that marriage of style and content we look for in great writing,’ I, or rather Williver, wrote. ‘A shatteringly vulgar and worthless life captured in shatteringly vulgar and worthless prose.’